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To: Enigma who wrote (18683)	9/13/1998 9:44:00 AM
From: goldsnow	Respond to of 116897

Who is buying Gold? Italian police find gold bars in Gelli's flower pots 08:54 a.m. Sep 13, 1998 Eastern ROME, Sept 13 (Reuters) - Police confiscated 150 gold bars worth three billion lire ($1.7 million) hidden in flower pots at the Tuscan villa of Licio Gelli, Italy's number one white-collar fugitive. Officials said at the weekend gold weighing 165 kg (630 lb) had been found in the pots lining several terraces of Gelli's mansion in the town of Arezzo, police said. The former grandmaster of Italy's outlawed P2 masonic lodge, Gelli was arrested in the French Riviera resort of Cannes on Thursday four months after he had escaped from Italian justice. Italy has requested his extradition. He was transferred to a hospital prison in Nice, where officials said he attempted suicide after suffering a mild heart attack following his capture. Gelli smashed his spectacles and tried to cut his wrists with the broken glass, but hospital orderlies intervened to prevent the 79-year-old from harming himself, they said. The fugitive was sentenced to 12 years in jail for fraud linked to the 1982 collapse of Banco Ambrosiano and had failed to show up at a police station in Arezzo in May while on parole awaiting appeal rulings. On Thursday, undercover police followed Gelli's wife as she drove from her house in Monaco across the French border to Cannes, authorities said. Gelli, who had grown a long beard, was arrested as he met her outside his apartment. Police said they had tracked down the gold to Gelli's villa after examining documents found in his Cannes apartment. He may have owned them since the end of World War Two, they said. The ingots are not the first hidden treasure police have attributed to Gelli. In 1993, a judge ordered authorities to seize assets worth some $10 million dollars. Arrest and escape are nothing new to Gelli. He fled to Switzerland in 1981 after the P-2 lodge was uncovered. He was arrested there a year later but escaped from a Geneva prison in 1983 after apparently bribing a guard. He gave himself up in 1987 and was extradited to Italy to face charges of fraudulent bankruptcy connected to the collapse of Ambrosiano. Banco Ambrosiano, Italy's largest private bank at the time, crashed with around $1 billion in debts, making it the country's biggest post-war banking failure. Gelli also has a separate three-year sentence pending after a final appeal in a long-running trial into the alleged workings of P2, the murky so-called Propaganda Due masonic lodge. P2 came to light in 1981 during an inquiry into banker Roberto Calvi, a lodge member who was found hanged under Blackfriars Bridge in London the following year, shortly before the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano. The lodge was found to have around 1,000 prominent members including politicians, businessmen and military officers. Investigations into P2 activities have repeatedly delved into unproved allegations that the lodge conspired with right-wing extremists and the Mafia to destabilise the government through bombings and violence. Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.