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Hi, listeners. Exciting news. Crime House plus and Murder True Crime Stories are celebrating America's 250th by dropping a four part limited series on the crimes that built America. These are the crimes and cases that gave us Miranda rights, sparked criminal profiling, and a murder that built America's missing children movement. Follow Murder True Crime Stories for a new episode every Monday leading up to July 4th. Or or you can listen to all of them right now with Crime House Plus. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of this show's page.
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This is crime house.
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Okay. Think about the most powerful people in the world. The the presidents, the generals, the captains of industry, the men who shaped nations, started revolutions, and built the modern world from the ground up. Now imagine that a surprising number of them belonged to the same secret brotherhood. That they met behind locked doors and swore oaths of loyalty to each other. That they spoke in passwords and recognized one another through secret handshakes. That they rose through hidden ranks, each level unlocking new knowledge, new access, new power. This isn't a conspiracy theory. It's documented history. That's right. I'm talking about the Freemasons. The oldest and largest secret society the world has ever known. Their members have included kings and revolutionaries, founding fathers and fascist conspirators. They've been blamed for the French Revolution, the assassination of JFK, and the hidden symbols on the American dollar bill. A11 different popes have condemned them. Governments have tried to outlaw them. None of that has stopped them. Today there are still millions of members meeting in lodges in nearly every country on Earth. So who are they really and what do they actually want? The answer is more complicated and more disturbing than you might think. From UFO cults and mass suicides to secret CIA experiments, presidential assassinations and murderous doctors, these aren't just theories. They're real stories that blur the line between fact and fiction. I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes. A Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I'll explore the real people at the center of the world's most shocking events and the nefarious organizations. And if you want even more, subscribe to Crime House plus and get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple podcasts, tap try free at the top of the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes show page today. I'm talking about the Freemasons. A secret brotherhood that's been shaping the modern world for 300 years. Years. They swear binding oaths, they perform secret rituals, they protect each other. And they've been doing it longer than the United States has existed. So what are we actually dealing with here? A brotherhood built on charity and shared values? A shadowy network of powerful men protecting each other. Or both at the same time, depending on which lodge you walk into and which century you're in. All that and more coming up.
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To understand the Freemasons, you've got to go back a long time not to some candle lit meeting, but to a muddy construction site in medieval Europe. Because the Freemasons didn't start out as a secret society at all. They started as a guild of stone cutters. In the Middle Ages, structures like Notre Dame in Paris or Salisbury Cathedral in England took generations to complete. They also required a deep knowledge of geometry, physics and engineering. Things that most people in medieval Europe had no clue about. Except for the stonemasons. The men who built these structures were among the most educated, skilled and sought after professionals in the world. That can be hard to picture today. When we think of construction workers, we don't typically think of society's elite. But in medieval Europe, these were the men that kings and popes competed to hire. If you wanted a cathedral that would stand for a thousand years, and many of them still do, you needed a master stonemason. To protect their knowledge and their livelihoods, stonemasons organized themselves into gifts guilds. The guilds decided who got in, set the standards for the work, and passed the techniques down from master to apprentice. Over years of training, over time, members developed their own vocabulary, their own codes of conduct, and their own methods of recognizing fellow craftsmen on the road. This involved special handshakes and passwords that let a mason prove his credentials when he arrived in a new city so no one could find fake their way into the trade. But these weren't just professional networks. They were brotherhoods, complete with rituals, oaths and a strong sense of shared identity. And from the very beginning, something set these gatherings apart. The Lodge wasn't a church. The guilds had no allegiance to any single faith. The only requirement was that a man believe in some higher power. And any God would do. It didn't matter if you were Catholic, Protestant, Jewish or unaffiliated. If you believed in a Creator, you were welcome at the table. No religious debates were allowed inside the lodge. No sermons, no sacraments, no clergy. Men who might have been at each other's throats outside the door were expected to leave their differences behind the moment they walked in. At a time when Catholics and Protestants were still killing each other across Europe, this was genuinely radical. The Lodge was one of the few spaces in the Western world where a man's worth was measured not by his faith or his bloodline, but by his character and his conduct. Of course, there's a glaring issue in all this. Only men could join, and they almost always had to be white. But for the time being, this philosophy would come to define everything. The Freemasons became. And it started right here in the guilds, among working men with chisels in their hands. But by the 1600s, something was changing. The great age of cathedral building was winding down. European society was shifting. There were simply fewer massive stone churches being commissioned, and lodge membership started to decline. To stay afloat, some lodges began accepting what they called speculative members. But these were educated, wealthy, influential men who had nothing to do with cutting stone, but were drawn to the brotherhood. Philosophers, lawyers and aristocrats sat alongside working masons and absorbed the guild's traditions. And over time, the speculative members came to outnumber the operative ones. By the early 1700s, these lodges had become something new entirely part gentleman's club, part philosophical society, part. Part secret fraternity. And on June 24, 1717, four of these transformed lodges gathered at a London tavern called the Goose and Gridiron and took a formal step that would change history. They combined into a single governing body in what they called a Grand Lodge. Think of it like a central headquarters, a governing authority that could set standards, authorize new lodges and speak for Freemasonry as a unified organization. It was the premier grand lod Lodge of England, and it was the birth of Freemasonry as we know it today. With a formal structure in place, the masons built a system of degrees, a ranked hierarchy that members climbed over time. Members started as an entered apprentice, the first and most junior level. If he proved Himself, he advanced to fellow of the craft, and finally he could be raised to the highest level of the basic structure. Master Mason. Each degree came with new ceremonies and new secrets. Passwords and handshakes that identified a brother anywhere in the world. The higher you climbed, the more you knew. And the more you knew, the more tightly bound you were to the brotherhood that trusted you with its secrets. The centerpiece of the Master Mason degree was one of the most dramatic initiation ceremonies ever. It revolved around a story, part legend, part allegory, that Masons called the Hiramic Legend, named for a figure called Hiram Abif. According to Masonic tradition, Hiram Abif was the chief architect of King Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem, the holiest structure in Jewish history. Described in the Bible as the dwelling place of God on earth. He was an incredibly talented master craftsman and more importantly, a man of total integrity. The story goes that when the temple was almost finished, three jealous workers confronted Hyram. One by one, they demanded he tell them the secret words that would unlock the rank and wages of a master builder. He refused, so they attacked him. One of the men killed him. Hyram died, but he never gave up the secret. In the initiation ritual, candidates don't just hear this story. They, they live it. A new initiate is blindfolded and led through a dramatic physical reenactment of Hyram's murder and his symbolic resurrection. This staged death and rebirth mark the Mason's transformation into a fully initiated brother. That kind of ritual forges intense loyalty. And soon that loyalty and the ideas behind it would cross the Atlantic. By the early 1700s, the American colonies were restless. Wealthy landowners and merchants pushed back against British rule. While a new generation of educated men were reading up on ideas about liberty, reason and self governance. The Enlightenment was in full bloom and its ideas were explosive. That's when the Freemasons showed up. The first Masonic lodge in North America was established in Philadelphia around 1730, when, with Benjamin Franklin as one of its founding members. From there, lodges quickly spread up and down the colonial coast. The Enlightenment values at the heart of Freemasonry, reason over tradition, individual dignity over inherited privilege, were exactly the ideas driving the colonial rebellions against the British Crown. The Lodge offered a space where these people could meet privately, speak freely, and build the kind of bonds and that a revolution would require. But Masonry's professed brotherhood had limits. When a free black leader named Prince hall and 14 other black men tried to join Boston's St. John's Lodge in the early 1770s, they were turned away. So hall did what colonial revolutionaries were doing all around him. He found another path. He petitioned the Grand Lodge of England directly got his own charter, and founded African Lodge number one in 1784. It was the start of Prince Hall Freemasonry, a separate black Masonic tradition that still exists today. Most American Grand Lodges wouldn't formally recognize it as legitimate until the 1990s, but inside the white lodges, you'd find a who's who of the American Revolution. Paul Revere, John Hancock, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the man who would become Freemasonry's most celebrated brother, George Washington. Washington was initiated into the Fredericksburg, Virginia Lodge on November 4, 1752. He was just 20 years old. He paid two pounds and three shillings for the privilege, and within the year, he'd risen to the degree of Master Mason. Washington wore his Masonic identity openly for the rest of his life. The Bible he was inaugurated with came from a Masonic Lodge. In 1793, he laid the cornerstone of the United States Capitol in full Masonic regalia. He was dressed in an embroidered apron, a gift from his fellow Mason and Revolutionary War ally, the Marquis de Lafayette. The founding of the United States and the rise of freedom. Freemasonry are so deeply intertwined that some historians argue you simply can't tell one story without the other. But Freemasons growing power wasn't going unnoticed. And not everyone was thrilled. The Freemasons had enemies in Europe long before they had enemies in America. And the most powerful of those was the institution that had ruled European life for over a thousand years, the the Catholic Church. The Church's problem wasn't just theological. Sure, the Mason's refusal to pledge allegiance to any single religion spelled like heresy. But the bigger threat was the Lodges themselves. Private rooms where men of all faiths discussed ideas freely with no priest and no Church looking over their shoulder. In a world where the Church had so much control over what people believed, that kind of unsupervised free thinking was dangerous. In 1738, just 21 years after the Grand Lodge was founded in London, Pope Clement XII issued a formal Church decree condemning Freemasonry. Catholics who joined a Masonic lodge faced automatic excommunication. The Church's position was clear. You could not be a Freemason and a faithful Catholic at the same time. Over the next three centuries, at least 11 popes would double down on that ban. As recently as 1983, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict XVI, signed a formal declaration making the position clear all over again. According to him, Catholics who joined Masonic Lodges were committing a grave sin. From Rome's perspective, the Freemasons weren't just a club, they were a rival institution, one with its own temples, its own rituals, its own mountain moral code and its own claim on a man's deepest loyalties. The Freemasons saw things differently, of course, but the harder the Church pushed, the more the Masons dug in and around the world, that tension fueled something far more dangerous than disapproval. It fueled conspiracy theories.
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Hi listeners, it's Carter Roy, host of Murder True Crime Stories. I wanted to let you know that Crime House plus and Murder True Crime Stories are celebrating America's 250th by dropping a four part limited series on the crimes that built America. These are the crimes and cases that gave us Miranda rights, sparked criminal profiling and a murder that built America's missing children movement. Follow Murder True Crime Stories for a new episode every Monday leading up to July 4th. Or you can binge all of them right now ad free with Crime House Plus. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you're listening on Apple Podcasts tap try free at the top of this show's page.
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By the 1790s, Freemasonry had spread across Europe and the Americas. Kings and noblemen sat alongside merchants and scholars at lodge meetings. Politicians, military officers and philosophers all counted themselves as brothers, and all that concentrated power, held together by secret oaths and private rituals were was starting to scare people. In 1797, a Scottish scientist named John Robison published a book called Proofs of a Conspiracy and it lit the Western world on fire. Robinson argued that the Freemasons hadn't just been present during the French Revolution, they had caused it. His claim centered on a shadowy organization called the Bavarian Illuminati. And here's the thing. The Illuminati were real. To be clear, this wasn't some ancient cabal. The Bavarian Illuminati was founded in 1776 by a German professor named Adam Weishaupt. He was frustrated by the stranglehold the Catholic Church had over European universities and public life. At the time, Bavaria was an independent state in what is now southern Germany. The region was deeply Catholic, deeply conservative, and the people there did not not like the Enlightenment that was sweeping the rest of Europe. But Weishschaupt did so. He built a secret society modeled on Freemasonry. It had its own ranks, oaths and coded communications. And its mission was to spread Enlightenment ideals and chip away at the power of the Church and the monarchy. At its peak, the Illuminati included some of Europe's most prominent intellectuals, including the writer young Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. But it was short lived. By 1785, the Bavarian government had banned the group and scattered its members. By all accounts, the organization had died. But Robison, the scientist who wrote proofs of a conspiracy, didn't buy it. He argued that the Illuminati wasn't over. It had just gone underground and infiltrated Masonic lodges across Europe. He cleared claimed that's how its members had engineered the French revolution. By the 1790s, France was executing aristocrats by the thousands and tearing down both the monarchy and the Church to a horrified conservative Europe. That level of destruction felt like it had to be the product of a coordinated conspiracy. Robison's book became a transatlantic bestseller. Ministers in New England read passages from the pulpit as warnings and even some American leaders took notice, including President John Adams, who had once been a strong admirer of Freemasonry's ideals. Just 10 years earlier, his predecessor, George Washington, had laid the cornerstone of the US Capitol in full Masonic regalia. Now Adams was reading warnings about a Masonic conspiracy and starting to believe them. And the conspiracy theory was alive. The Freemasons and the Illuminati lurking within them were secretly pulling the strings of history. It was mostly a story without evidence. But it stuck. And in 1826, in a small town in upstate New York, the Freemasons would give that story exactly the fuel it needed. It started with a man named William Morgan. He'd moved to Batavia, New York in the early 1820s after leaving a trail of failed businesses and unpaid debts. In several other states. Morgan exaggerated, drank too much, and most people in town wrote him off. At some point he'd claimed he was a member of a Masonic lodge, though some doubted he was ever fully initiated. What was clear was this. Morgan knew things. He'd spent enough time around Masonic lodges to learn their rituals, their secret passwords, their initiations. And when he was passed over for membership in a new local lodge, he decided to use that knowledge. He teamed up with a local newspaper publisher named David C. Miller, who hated the Masons for his own reasons. Their plan was simple. Morgan would write a book exposing the Freemasons secret ceremonies and full detail. And Miller would print it. They planned to call it Illustrations of Masonry. That summer, the conversations about Morgan changed. People in the lodge started talking about him in coded half sentences that nobody ever quite finished. But everyone understood what they meant. Something had to be done about Morgan. First came the harassment. Miller's print shop was set on fire. Morgan was arrested repeatedly on trumped up charges to keep him tied up and unable to write. Then, on the night of September 12, 1826, the Masons stopped trying to slow him down and decided to silence him for good. Morgan had been sitting in a jail cell in Conandegua, New York. Not for anything serious. He'd borrowed a shirt and tie from a local tavern owner and never returned them. A petty debt, a few dollars at most. That night, a group of Masons showed up. They paid his debt, all $2.69 of it, and told the jailer he was free to go. The moment Morgan stepped outside, four men forced him into a waiting carriage. They drove him west through the night. 50 miles, then a hundred, then more. All the way to Fort Niagara on the shores of Lake Ontario, right on the Canadian border. He was held there for days, a handkerchief pulled tight over his face so he couldn't identify his captors. Two Freemasons later testified that as early as September 15, the men holding him at the fort had openly discussed putting Morgan to death. We still don't know if they actually did. Morgan's body was never found. But the generally accepted account is that they rode Morgan to the middle of the Niagara river and threw him overboard. The last word anyone ever heard William Morgan cry out was murder. He was never seen again. Morgan's wife, Lucinda, immediately raised the alarm. She contacted local officials, the press, anyone who would listen. She helped make sure Morgan's story didn't quietly disappear. But pursuing justice turned out to be a lot harder than she expected. Over the next four years, 20 separate grand juries were convened. 54 Freemasons were indicted. 39 went to trial. 10 were convicted, but only for the abduction, not for the murder. Since Morgan's body was never recovered, the sentences ranged from one to 28 months. That leniency wasn't a coincidence. The investigation itself was full of Masons. Eli Bruce, the sheriff of Niagara county, was a Mason and helped carry out the kidnapping himself. Constables who should have been hunting Morgan's abductors were lodge brothers of the accused. Grand jury pools were quietly stacked with Masons and their sympathizers. And in Genesee county, where Morgan was killed, five of the seven jury judges who presided over the trials were Masons themselves. The trials were laughable and the men who probably murdered Morgan got a slap on the wrist. But the story didn't end there. In 1827, 3,000 furious protesters marched to the Masonic Lodge in Batavia and attacked it. An unlikely political revolution had begun. The Morgan affair transformed any anti Masonic feeling from a quiet suspicion into a full blown national movement. Over 100 anti Masonic meetings were held in New York alone in 1827. By 1831, 52 anti Masonic newspapers were publishing in New York State. Masonic membership collapsed, nearly cut in half across the Northeast, with lodges shuddering across the region. And then the movement did something no one had done before in American history. It formed a political party. In 1831, the Anti Masonic party nominated a candidate for president, the first time a third party had ever attempted a national presidential campaign in the United States. Their nominee, William Wirt, won just 8% of the popular vote and only carried Vermont. But the party had had made its point. In a democracy, a secret brotherhood of powerful men who operated outside the law was a threat to the Republic itself. And the movement went even further than that. At its peak, anti Masons elected governors in Pennsylvania and Vermont and sent members to Congress. Among their supporters was Millard Fillmore, who would later become president. Still, Freemasonry survived. It always does. Here's what makes the Freemasons so hard to categorize. Everything I've described so far sounds like exactly what we'd expect from a cult. And in many ways, the Masons do check those boxes. There was total secrecy from outsiders, elaborate initiation rituals that created deep psychological loyalty and a strict hierarchy where advancing unlocked exclusive knowledge. And like the Morgan affair, showed those things could be powerful enough to override a man's basic duty to the law. But here's where things get complicated. The Freemasons were also genuinely doing good in the world. They were building orphanages, founding hospitals and establishing schools. In early America, when the government provided no safety net of any kind, Masonic law lodges were often the only source of charity and mutual aid that many people ever knew. If you were widowed, if your farm failed, if you got sick. In many communities, the Lodge was who showed up. In 1871, the great Masonic scholar Albert pike wrote his landmark work Morals and Dogma. In it he said that Freemasonry was above all a system of moral instruction. A way to make good men better. Maybe both things are true at once. A brotherhood can be genuinely beneficial and genuinely dangerous. A place that does real good and protects the worst from ever getting out. Well, that's exactly what happened next. And it nearly toppled a democracy.
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Evening. Buyer's remorse. Buy a new car. I'll be moving in. Let's get started.
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Sorry, I think there's been a mistake. I bought it from Carvana.
- [29:54]
F
You what?
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G
Yeah, Great price. I even have seven days to love it or return it.
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F
So there's no.
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G
No, no Buyer's remorse. More like. Buyers rejoice.
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F
I guess I'll let myself out. Congratulations. I mean it.
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D
See our seven day return policy at
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Carvana.com meet Licho Jelly. In 1966, he was a wealthy Italian textile manufacturer. In his late 40s he was charming, immaculately dressed and and extraordinarily well connected. In his 20s, he'd volunteered to fight for the fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War. During World War II, he'd worked with the German SS. After the war, the new Italian government put him on a list of known fascists. But that didn't stop him. He remade himself as a businessman, building Ties to Argentine military figures, Italian politicians and shadows, shadowy intelligence circles. Jelly was a man who understood how power worked, who had it, what they wanted and what they'd trade to get it. And that year, the Grandmaster of the Grand Orient of Italy handed Jelly a gift. The keys to a nearly dead Masonic lodge in Rome. The lodge was called propaganda due P2 for short. In 1877, it was founded as a lodge for prominent men who needed discretion. Politicians, military officers, public figures whose Masonic membership might attract unwanted attention. By the time Jelly arrived, P2 was barely alive. A handful of elderly members, almost no regular meetings. That suited Jelly perfectly, because he wasn't looking to join an organization. He was looking to create one. Over the next decade, Jelly used P2 as his vehicle to build something the world had never really seen before. Not a Masonic lodge, but a shadow government. He recruited members outside the normal channels, in hotel rooms, in private apartments, without the standard rituals, without the knowledge of the Grand Orient of Italy that was supposed to oversee the lodge. He was wasn't bringing people into a brotherhood. He was building a private power network. And Masonic secrecy was just his cover. And the members he recruited weren't just businessmen and lawyers. They were the people running Italy. But an operation like that is bound to run into Trouble. And on March 17, 1981, that's exactly what happened. That day, Italian financial police raided the Tuscan villa of Liccio Jelli. In were there investigating an unrelated financial scandal, the collapse of a Sicilian banker's empire. They weren't expecting anything unusual, but hidden in the villa they found a list of 962 names. It included the heads of all three of Italy's intelligence services. The chiefs of the army, navy and air force, senior judges and police commanders, cabinet ministers, prominent newspaper editors, industrialists, dozens of members of Parliament, and one name that would loom especially large in the years to come. A small time television executive who hadn't yet entered politics, but who would go on to become Prime Minister of Italy. Silvio Berlusconi. But the list was only part of what the police found. Later, investigators found a document that made them go cold. A memorandum titled the Piano di Renatita. The Plan for Democratic Rebirth. The plan called for dismantling Italy's entire parliamentary system. That meant suppressing trade unions, concentrating media in the hands of P2 aligned figures, and restructuring the constitution to create a powerful authoritarian executive. It included cost estimates for bribing key individuals and sector by sector strategies for total institutional control. Control. It was a coup. Not a military one, but a slow, methodical takeover of a democracy. And it had been in progress for years. Italian authorities later described P2 as a state within a state, a hidden government operating inside the real one. The fallout came fast. On May 26, 1981, Prime Minister Arnaldo Fani resigned. His own chief of staff and three of his cabinet ministers were on Jelly's list. Other ministers followed. Military commanders scrambled to explain why their names appeared. Parliament launched a three year investigation. In 1984, the commission issued its final report. It concluded that P2 was a secret criminal organization that had operated within and against the state, corrupting Italian democracy from inside for over a decade. And then there was the matter of Gelli himself. He was tied to the deadliest terrorist attack in post war Italy. In 1980, a bomb tore through the crowded waiting room of the Bologna train station, killing 85 people and wounding more than 200. P2 members, including Jelly, were later convicted of obstructing the investigation. And more recent Italian court rulings have gone further, saying Geli and others organized the bombing itself. Geli was also implicated in the financial collapse of a major Vatican affiliated bank called the Banco Ambrosiano. And this one gets dark. The bank's Chairman was a P2 member named Roberto Calvi, known in Italy as God's banker for his deep ties to the Vatican. By 1982, Colby was talking to investigators, trying to untangle himself from Jelly's web. In June of that year, his body was found hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London. At first it was ruled a suicide, but a year later, a second inquest overturned that verdict and said his cause of death was undetermined. Eventually, Italian prosecutors agreed that he was murdered. But no one has ever been convicted. The bank itself collapsed with over a billion dollars in missing funds, leaving creditors, including the Vatican bank, scrambling for answers. The investigation lasted years and included politicians, clergy and organized crime figures across multiple countries. And the man at the center of it all was Leecho Jelly. Jelly was arrested in Switzerland in 1982, then broke out of prison the following year and fled to South America. He was eventually returned to Italy, where he was convicted on multiple charges. He spent his final years under house arrest in the same Tuscan villa where police had found the list. He died there in December 2015 at the age of 90. Six years earlier, in 2010, the politician who chaired the original inquiry, Tina Anselmi, issued a warning. She said, quote, P2 is by no means dead. It still has power. It is working in the institutions. It still has fully operative power centers in South America. It is also still able to condition, at least in part, Italian political life. End quote.
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Hmm.
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Let that sink in. Three decades after the raid, the woman who had spent years documenting P2 still didn't think the organization was dead. The P2 scandal is the single most important reason the Freemason conspiracy theories you hear today have any real weight to them. Because P2 wasn't a theory. It was documented, investigated, prosecuted. It proved that Freemasonry's basic architecture, the secrecy, the oaths, the elite membership, the closing of ranks, could, in the wrong hands, build something genuinely sinister. Now, to be fair to the broader institution, the mainstream Masonic establishment was horrified by P2. The Grand Orient of Italy had already suspended P2's charter in 1976, years before the scandal broke publicly. Once Geli was exposed, every major Masonic body in the world was formally denounced. What he'd done. Most lodges are, and have always been exactly what they say they are. Men gathering to practice charity, discuss philosophy and maintain friendships. The fraternity that helped found America's hospitals, schools and civic institutions is a real part of the Masonic story too. But that brotherhood always had hard limits. Remember Prince? Prince hall, the free black leader that Boston's lodge turned away in the early 1770s? It would take American Freemasonry until 1989 to formally recognize the black Masonic order. He was forced to found several southern states still don't. And women still can't join the mainstream lodges at all. The United Grand Lodge of England, Freemasonry's oldest governing body, remains male only today. And so do most major American grand lodges. So here's what I want you to ask yourself. Is the problem the secrecy? Is it the exclusivity? Or is it just that any private brotherhood, no matter how good its intentions, eventually ends up protecting the wrong people? Drop your answer in the comments wherever you're listening. I'd love to know what you think before we end today. There's a strange epilogue to the William Morgan story. One that tells you something about how deeply the Freemasons shaped American life. After Morgan's disappearance, his book, Illustrations of Masonry, was published anyway. His printing partner, David Miller, made sure of it. It became an instant bestseller, read by hundreds of thousands of people who were hungry to know what went on behind those locked lodge doors. Meanwhile, Morgan's widow, Lucinda, eventually moved west. She remarried a man named George Washington Harris, and the family became early converts to the Mormon movement founded by Joseph Smith. A few years later, while still legally married to Harris, Lucinda reportedly became became one of Joseph Smith's plural wives to Be clear, this account is disputed by many LDS members today. But here's where it gets weird. Smith's rituals borrowed heavily from Masonic initiation. The same rituals her first husband died trying to expose. Was that a coincidence or was it something more? Scholars are still arguing about it, but think about that for a moment. One man tried to expose the Freemasons and was killed for it. His widow went on to marry the founder of one of the largest religious movements in American history, a movement that drew on the very rituals her first husband died trying to reveal. You can't make that up. And it tells you something about the reach of this brotherhood. Freemasonry itself recovered from the Morgan affairs. Today there are somewhere between 2 and 3 million Freemasons worldwide, though membership has dropped a lot from its 20th century peak. They still hold their lodges. They still perform the rituals. They still pass along the passwords and handshakes of the Master Mason degree, the ones Hiram Abiff took to his grave. And somewhere out there, there are people who will tell you the Freemasons are still rare, running the world that they control the banks, the courts, the governments. That the eye on the back of the dollar bill is their quiet announcement to anyone paying attention. Some of that is fantasy. Some of it is paranoia. But some of it, as Lee Cho Jelly showed, is simply what happens when a brotherhood decides its loyalty to itself is bigger than its loyalty to anyone else. In Cult Watch this week, I'm highlighting a group that should feel eerily familiar after everything we've just discussed. It runs on the same principle as the Freemasons. Powerful people bound by secrecy, shaping the world from behind closed doors. It's called the Fellowship, though you might know it better as the Family. It was founded in 1935 by a Norwegian born minister named Abraham Verde. Today it's a Christian organization Based in Washington, D.C. members take a vow of secrecy and journalists who've studied it call it one of the most politically connected and quietly funded ministries in the United States for decades. Their signature event was the National Prayer Breakfast. It's an annual gathering attended by every sitting president since Eisenhower, along with roughly 3,500 dignitaries from over 100 countries. On the surface, it looked like a bipartisan morning of reflection. But journalist Jeff Charlotte, who spent years inside the group and wrote two books about it, described the breakfast as a recruiting tool, a way to draw powerful people into smaller private prayer cells where the real influence happens. President Ronald Reagan once said, quote, quote, I wish I could say more about it, but it's working precisely because it is private. End quote. And it goes deeper than prayer. Members of Congress have lived together in a D.C. townhouse on C Street that the Fellowship organized. The group has built relationships with foreign heads of state. That includes Uganda's president, Yoweri Museveni, who the Fellowship continued to publicly embrace even as his governor and pushed brutal anti gay laws. After years of scrutiny, Congress took control of the prayer breakfast in 2023. But the organization is still active, still holding its own parallel events, still running its network of prayer cells, still cultivating influence in the quietest rooms in Washington. The parallels to what we talked about today are hard to miss. It's a fraternity of powerful people, a culture of secrecy justified by noble intentions, and a structure that makes it almost impossible for anyone outside the group to know what's really going on inside. Sound familiar? Thanks so much for listening. I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is consistent Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes Come back next time. We'll hear another story about the real people at the center of the world's most notorious cults, conspiracies and criminal acts. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. 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