Albert Vincent Carone is one of those people who spent his life dancing between raindrops and turning invisible wherever a shadow lingered. He existed and also didn’t exist. Al Carone - unlike his near namesake, Al Capone – truly was a paradox wrapped in a mystery concealed behind an enigma.
Carone was a detective in the New York Police Department, but this didn’t stop him from becoming a “made” man in the Genovese crime family. He knew all the leading Mafiosa of his day, including Vito Genovese, Sam Giancana, Santos Trafficante, Joe Colombo and Pauley Castellano amongst others. To Carone’s daughter, Dee, they were all known as “Uncle.” When she got married, her father arranged two different reception rooms to separate the “mob” guests, from the NYPD guests. But this was more window-dressing than anything else. One of Carone’s principal functions in the NYPD was to act as the “bagman” in protecting shipments of CIA drugs to the various Mafia families.
Carone died in 1990 under mysterious circumstances. This followed a period of great personal disenchantment with his life following a secretive mission to Mexico in 1985 when a large number of innocent women and children died unnecessarily. His death was horrific, reports Mike Ruppert, editor of “From The Wilderness” newsletter, who has investigated Carone’s life story and written a special report on it (see acknowledgements).
Meanwhile, another “Uncle” was Bill Casey, the former Director of the CIA during the Reagan administration. Casey had been with the OSS during WW11. During the “seventies” he became Chairman of the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) that regulates the US investment industry. During his tenor in that role, Casey used Carone as a “cut-out” to pass sensitive insider information to mob Capo, Pauley Castellano, says his daughter, Dee.
Carone was also a full Colonel in the US Army where he had operated in the Army’s Counter Intelligence Corp (CIC). Unsurprisingly, in view of his close friendship with Bill Casey, he was also a covert operative for the CIA. But that wasn’t half of it. Carone was also a Grand Knight of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM) – which historically has been the military arm of the Vatican and is regarded as separate “state” with full powers of statehood including issuing its own diplomatic passports.
In more recent decades SMOM has acted as a funding conduit, a black market gold channel and money-laundry for the CIA, amongst others – and is known to act as the Vatican’s intelligence arm. It was, for example, alleged to be involved in the disappearance of Russia’s gold reserves – over 2000 metric tonnes - that vanished during 1991, around the time that Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev was ousted from office.
Malta knighthoods are awarded to many leading individuals who are part of the military and intelligence community. The CIA’s Bill Casey, for example, was Knight of Malta. Former NATO General (and later US Secretary of State) Alexander Haig is also a Malta Knight. Another is General Vernon Walters, the former Deputy Director of the CIA under DCI George Bush and later appointed a roving Ambassador during the Reagan administration. The legendary head of the OSS – the WW11 precursor of the CIA – was “Wild” Bill Donovan, who was made a Knight along with his wartime compatriot and later CIA chief of counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton. And John McCone, another prominent member of the US “spook” agency was also distinguished with a Malta knighthood. The list goes on. Most interesting was Reinhard Gehlen the former Nazi intelligence expert recruited by the US in 1945-46 to head the “Gehlen Org” – a secret German-based intelligence arm of the United States that was composed of former SS & Gestapo agents – many of whom, including Klaus Barbie, were wanted Nazi war criminals. The foregoing names amount to a listing of some of the most powerful and influential members of the western intelligence community over the last five decades.
One Vatican group that has extremely close ties to the Knights of Malta is the ultra right wing Opus Dei. This is an immensely powerful faction in the Vatican today, whose public “do good” activities eclipse a plethora of the darkest political and financial machinations known to man. It will not come as a surprise, perhaps, that Carone was closely associated with Opus Dei and, in particular, a covert operation that had its origin back in 1944. This was Operation Amadeus. (more...)
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