{"id":7086,"date":"2004-07-04T23:31:00","date_gmt":"2004-07-04T23:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/07\/another_region_of_legal_land.html"},"modified":"2004-07-04T23:31:00","modified_gmt":"2004-07-04T23:31:00","slug":"another_region_of_legal_land","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/07\/another_region_of_legal_land.html","title":{"rendered":"Another region of Legal Land"},"content":{"rendered":"

Filing suit against the Vatican Bank<\/a><\/p>\n

re the Frankel case<\/p>\n

The scam that threw these unlikely antagonists together began in 1998 when Frankel formed a bogus Catholic charity, the St. Francis of Assisi Foundation, with $55 million.<\/p>\n

The Vatican got $5 million of the seed money, according to court documents. Colagiovanni agreed to oversee St. Francis and vouch for it with investors.<\/p>\n

Frankel would control the remainder of St. Francis funds. He used the money to buy financially desperate insurance companies, then spent policyholders’ money on drugs, diamonds, sex clubs, vacations, cars, call girls and Concorde tickets, prosecutors said.<\/p>\n

The Vatican became involved with Frankel after he had been banned by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from doing deals with brokers and investment advisers. The 1992 ban forced Frankel on a quest for new partners with prestige and deep pockets.<\/p>\n

By 1998, Frankel had an entree to the Vatican: Bolan. A fervent Catholic and Roy Cohn’s ex-law partner, Bolan, now 79, had raised millions for Vatican charities and Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign.<\/p>\n

Frankel paid Bolan more than $75,000 in legal fees, court documents show. In return, Bolan introduced Frankel to influential priests like Jacobs and the Vatican equivalent of Fed chairman Alan Greenspan – economic affairs prefect Bishop Francesco Salerno. Bolan’s attorney, Maurice Nessen, did not return calls for this story.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Filing suit against the Vatican Bank re the Frankel case The scam that threw these unlikely antagonists together began in 1998 when Frankel formed a bogus Catholic charity, the St. Francis of Assisi Foundation, with $55 million. The Vatican got $5 million of the seed money, according to court documents. Colagiovanni agreed to oversee St.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nAnother region of Legal Land - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/07\/another_region_of_legal_land.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Another region of Legal Land - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Filing suit against the Vatican Bank re the Frankel case The scam that threw these unlikely antagonists together began in 1998 when Frankel formed a bogus Catholic charity, the St. Francis of Assisi Foundation, with $55 million. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7086"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7086\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}