Vatican Bank Involved in Mafia's On-Line Washing Money

DATELINE: ROME, October 3

Italian Police Tuesday arrested 21 people in a Sicilian Mafia on-line banking
scam with connections in major foreign banks including the Vatican bank of
Institute for Religious Works (IOR).

The man behind the operation was identified as Antonio Orlando, 48, a former
owner of a financial company with links to a Mafia clan based in the southern
Italian city of Palermo's Noce district.

Orlando and others succeeded in penetrating the computers of several banks
and siphoning off some 264 billion lire (about 115 million U.S. dollars), police
said.

The money was first sent to the Emilia Romagna, Italy's northern region and
then channeled abroad where the gang had contacts in major foreign banks
including IOR.

Police were able to break up the racket thanks to an undercover agent posing
as a bank employee, who managed to gain the trust of the gang.

Among those under investigation are four employees of the Bank of Sicilia,
Sicily's biggest bank, and two employees of Italy's largest phone company
Telecom Italia.

Just before the gang was arrested, it was planning to net some 2 trillion
lire (about 900 million U.S. dollars) from the Bank of Sicilia, police said.

The head of the parliamentary anti-Mafia commission, Giuseppe Lumia, said
Tuesday's bust showed how dangerous Mafia had become in using the Internet for
illegal operations.

It is not the first time IOR has been implicated in major criminal cases,
though it has always insisted it was an unwitting victim.

At the turn of the 1980s, the Vatican bank, led at the time by American-born
Msgr. Paul Marcinkus, was a key player in the nation 's biggest post-war banking
scandal, revolving around the forced bankruptcy in 1982 of Milan's Banco
Ambrosiano.