Masonic Hit Squads Part I: The Athanor Affair (E376)

Summary

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QAA Podcast Episode 376 – Masonic Hit Squads Part I: The Athanor Affair (June 10, 2026)

Main Theme & Purpose

This episode launches a two-part exploration of a real-life, ongoing criminal trial in France involving a clandestine network of Freemasons, ex-intelligence operatives, and business elites who ran a murder-for-hire and espionage ring known as the Athanor Affair. The hosts dig into the origins, structure, and slow public unraveling of the “Masonic Hit Squad,” focusing on how a supposedly secret fraternity devolved into contract killings, beatings, and criminal conspiracy—culminating in a landmark trial. The hosts combine reporting, history, and their signature dark humor to illuminate a story that feels half Coen brothers, half John le Carré, but is entirely true.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Introduction: Ominous Rituals and Shocking Discovery

• Freemason Oath (00:03): Jake opens with a verbatim, grim excerpt from the Masonic oath, setting the tone.
• Discovery of a Body (01:26 – 02:43): Brad narrates the 2019 accidental discovery of a human skull by a mushroom hunter in a secluded French forest. The remains are later identified as a famous French race car driver, Laurent Pasquale, missing since 2018.

The “Athanor Affair” Comes to Light

• Failed Assassination Op in Paris (02:44 – 04:46): In 2020, two men are found in a stolen car, armed and prepared to kill a woman. They claim to be French secret service on a sanctioned hit, but in reality, were hired by rogue Freemasons.
• Real Life Conspiracy (04:46 – 06:30): Brad frames the case as a genuine, testified criminal conspiracy: “A secret society acting as the hidden hand of government and finance, infiltrating intelligence agencies, doing corporate espionage and even assassinations.” (Brad, 05:24)

Masonic Background: Freemasonry in France

• French Freemasonry Structure (07:21 – 10:31): Brad gives a concise history of Freemasonry’s split in France between liberal (Grand Orient) and traditionalist (GLNF) lodges, essential for understanding the social circles behind the crimes.
  • The GLNF (dogmatic, all-male, supreme being required) is central to the story, particularly the “Athanor Lodge,” a secretive and elite cell.
  • Notable dramatis personae: Alain Juillet, founder of a powerful Masonic alliance, former spy and corporate exec, now a conspiracy media fixture.

The Athanor Lodge: The Criminal Trinity

The Three Ruffians (12:51 – 17:04)

• Daniel Beaulieu: Retired domestic intelligence chief; career infiltrator of leftist groups, ran two parallel families, and is a suspected orchestrator of violence.
  • Background: “I felt like I was my mother’s guardian... Sometimes he would lock her in her room for 10 days. When she came out, she was all blue, but she said she was fine.” (Beaulieu, as quoted by Jake, 14:37)
• Frédéric Vaglio: Journalist turned private spy, fell under Beaulieu’s spell.
  • “Vaglio called Beaulieu his master, Yoda.” (Brad, 15:20)
• Jean-Luc Bagour: Finance guy, gun fan, and the lodge’s “muscle” manager. Ordered arsons and beatings as “economic intelligence.”
  • “They billed the arson as €10,000 of economic intelligence.” (Brad, 18:28)
• Sebastien Leroy: Non-Mason, obsessed with spy films, handled violent work but was kept “unclean” and outside the brotherhood.

Escalation: From Corporate Espionage to Murder

• First Jobs: Surveillance & Beatings (17:04 – 18:38): Surveillance and intimidation for political, business, and personal motives; a councilor is beaten for investigating corruption.
• Corporate Thuggery: Retaliatory house arson commissioned against rivals.

The Murder of Laurent Pasquale (19:02 – 23:16)

• Victim: Laurent Pasquale, race car champion, party animal, deep in debt, owes hundreds of thousands to creditors, including Alain and Nancy Marek, a wealthy couple.
• Motive: Jealousy (Nancy was allegedly infatuated), massive debt.
• Hit Operation:
  • The Lodge bribes French police for addresses (21:22 – 21:42, for only €150 each).
  • Execution: In 2018, Pasquale is shot in his garage and the body is shoddily dumped in a forest (burned and buried only 40 cm deep), an act linked to the Masonic trio.
  • Aftermath: The mother reports him missing, but the case goes cold until the forest discovery unravels the criminal enterprise.

Business as Usual: Hired Killings as a Menu (24:21 – 25:42)

• Beatings and “Packages” for Sale: The lodge becomes “violence-for-hire,” servicing aggrieved businesspeople:
  • Example: A plastics factory boss pays for the murder of union leader Hassan Tuzani, who only learns there was a contract on his life after police intervention.

Attempted Assassination & Plots Against Marie Aline Denis (25:50 – 32:08)

• Rival Coach Targeted: Marie Aline Denis, business unionizer, becomes a target for threatening Bagour’s racket.
  • First a physical attack (27:15), then a murder contract (€70,000, complete with a VAT invoice!).
• Botched Hit: Would-be shooters, two soldiers (Bourdin & Hainault), caught by police after acting suspiciously in a heatwave, only foiled because Denis was running late.
  • They used real intelligence service jargon: “Mission homo,” (state-sanctioned homicide slang).

The Investigation, Trial, and Fallout (32:08 – 43:59)

• Trial (33:01 – 38:54): 22 defendants, including cops, spies, and business execs, some facing life in prison.
  • Testimony exposes state spies moonlighting for Masons, blatant evidence trails.
  • Defenses rely on “acting on authority,” suggesting deep institutional rot.
  • “All guilty, no one responsible. Bagour blames Vaglio. Vaglio blames Bagour and Beaulieu. Beaulieu blames Vaglio and Leroy. Leroy blames everyone. And Pham, the forger, insists he knew nothing.” (Julian, 40:36)
• Marie Aline Denis Testimony:
  • “I learned that my life was worth only €70,000, along with an invoice to claim back the sales tax. A life clearly isn’t worth much.” (Denis, 38:45)
  • “A tsunami, an atomic bomb... I truly felt my career just stopped dead.” (Denis, 39:04)
  • “If I’m standing here today... it’s because I’ve shown courage. And I’m expecting this courage from the other side too... I want people to courageously acknowledge the actions they’ve committed.” (Denis, 39:23)
• Exposing the System: Intelligence officials stonewall the trial; only a former domestic agent admits that “off-books” lethal ops are real. Press draws parallel to past notorious scandals (e.g., Chevalin Massacre, 2012) when unusual ammunition is found linked to the ringleader.

Notable Quotes & Moments

• “A secret society acting as the hidden hand of government and finance, infiltrating intelligence agencies, doing corporate espionage and even assassinations…a real life conspiracy.” (Brad, 05:24)
• “Manipulation is freely consented submission.” (Beaulieu, 39:57)
• “All guilty, no one responsible.” (Julian, 40:36)
• “A lodge is a closed environment in which the brothers are supposed to maintain order and harmony. There still has to be external control to verify that...” (Alain Juillet, 40:56)
• “Every ingredient is genuinely there — a real Masonic lodge, real X spies, real contract killings…” (Brad, 42:21)
• “Some things cost a standard edition, some things cost a gold edition, some the ultimate edition. It’s this darn economy.” (Jake, 22:06)
• “She’s since sold off half her stake in the company for around 3.5 million euros and has opened a bakery and a tea room in Lyon. That’s what she gets for ordering the hit on someone.” (Brad, 35:13)

Timeline: Important Segments (Selected Timestamps)

• Freemason Oath/Episode Intro: 00:03–01:26
• The Mushroom Hunter/Discovery: 01:26–02:43
• Breakdown of Failed Paris Hit: 02:44–04:46
• Outline of Real Masonic Conspiracy: 04:46–06:30
• History/Structure of French Masonry: 07:21–11:51
• Introduction to “The Three Ruffians”: 12:51–17:04
• Laurent Pasquale’s Murder: 19:02–23:16
• Assassination Attempts on Union Leader & Denis: 24:21–32:08
• Courtroom Drama/Testimonies: 33:01–41:17
• Marie Aline Denis’s Charges to the Court: 38:45–39:46
• Closing Connections, Conspiracies, and Open Questions: 42:17–43:59
• Preview of Part II / Morgan Affair Teaser: 44:53–47:03

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Episode Tone

The dynamic alternates between gallows humor, exasperated disbelief, and incisive historical context—shifting easily from mocking the MacGyver-like incompetence of the hitmen to genuine outrage at the abuses of power and sympathy for victims. The hosts frequently lampoon the cockiness and blunders of the conspirators (“set his passcode to 007,” 32:08), while Julian and Jake riff with pop culture references (“Elden Ring edition,” 21:42).

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Memorable Moments

• The DIY Gun Silencer (03:43): “A homemade silencer fashioned out of a children’s applesauce pouch.” (Jake, 03:43)
• Financial Bribery Comparisons (21:42): “They’re basically getting a collector’s edition of Elden Ring.” (Jake, 21:42)
• Bumbling Hitmen: The would-be assassins’ elaborate lies, inept operations, and the fact that they narrowly missed their targets by chance.
• Institutional Denialism: The intelligence services’ stonewalling in court, contrasted with damning evidence from former insiders.

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Conclusion & Teaser for Next Episode

The episode ends with reflections on the case’s bizarre but genuine conspiratorial elements—real secret societies, real spies, real murder—and its implications for both the far-right and conspiracy communities in France (“Real life Q drop!”). The hosts frame it not as isolated madness but a classic outcome of unchecked power in secret organizations.

Brad and Travis tease Part II, which will turn to the infamous William Morgan Affair in the U.S.—a foundational event in anti-Masonic conspiracy lore.

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Additional References

• Athanor Lodge = Alchemical “furnace” reference, symbolic of metaphorical self-transformation—which in this story becomes ironic, as the lodge devolves into criminality.
• Propaganda Due (P2) cited as a much larger scale prior example of Masonic conspiracy in Europe.
• The Chevalin Killings (43:40): A notorious massacre now possibly linked to the Masonic ring owing to rare ammunition found.

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For Listeners New and Old

This episode is a dense, often astonishing account of “conspiracy in action”—replete with state infiltration, business corruption, and literal cloak-and-dagger operations—told with a blend of grim amusement and acute research. Even experienced conspiracy-watchers will learn something new about the French variant of these eternal secretive stories.

Next week: A deep dive into the American parallel—the Morgan Affair—and the origins of the modern anti-Masonic panic.

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Transcript

[Jake Rakatansky]

I most solemnly and sincerely promise and swear with a firm and steadfast resolution without the least equivocation, binding myself under no less penalty than that of having my throat cut across, my tongue torn out by its roots and buried in the rough sands of the sea at low water mark where the tide ebbs and flows twice in 24 hours should I ever knowingly or willingly violate this, my solemn oath and obligation as an entered Apprentice Mason. Excerpt from the Oath of a First Degree Mason. If you're hearing this, well done. You found a way to connect to the Internet. Welcome to the qaa podcast. Episode 376 Masonic Hit Squads Part 1 the Athanor Affair as always, we are your hosts.

[Brad Abrahams]

Jake Rakatansky, Julian Field, Brad Abrahams in Travis View It's September 1, 2019. We're in a deep wood in the Libradois Forez Nature park in south central France. The late summer sun is burning off the mist from the wet forest floor. A man in his early 60s, history doesn't record his name, ambles through the greenery, humming something off tune to himself. His gaze expertly scans the ground in front of him. It's mushroom season and he's on the hunt.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Nice.

[Brad Abrahams]

All of a sudden, he stops short. Something has broken the familiar patterns beneath him. It's a rounded off white object protruding from the brush and soil. He digs around it just enough to pull it loose. He gasps at the realization of what his hands are holding. It's a skull. A human skull. That's when he notices other bones jutting out from the soil, scraps of clothing and a fragment of a leather belt. He rushes back to the car park, somehow managing not to take a tumble, and calls the police. The first analysis concludes the remains belonged to an adult male, but it'd be another year before they'd be matched with a name. He was a man who'd been famous on nearly every racing circuit in Europe and a French GT champion. He'd vanished from a Paris suburb back in 2018, but it'd be several more years before we'd learn what his remains were doing 500 km south in this remote forest.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Damn.

[Brad Abrahams]

Flash forward to a morning in late July 2020 in a busy suburb of southeast Paris where a young father had just dropped off his toddler at daycare. On the walk back, he a black Renault Clio parallel parked against the curb. This father, definitely more observant than I, notices something off with this scene. He slows down to get a better look, but smartly doesn't stop entirely Inside the car, he sees two men. They have their hoods up with heavy gloves on. This makes no sense as it's the middle of a heat wave, nearly 35 centigrade or 95 Fahrenheit. The driver is wearing an earpiece, and weirdly, they're both pretending to be asleep. Worried they might be planning an attack on his son's daycare, he phones the police. They tell him it doesn't sound like an emergency and hang up on him. But he refuses to let this go. He sees an anti crime squad car around the corner. He flags them down and leads the plainclothes cops by foot to the clio. There they tap the glass, rousing the sleeping inhabitants, and perform a search. This is what they the car license

[Jake Rakatansky]

plate is fake, held on with tape. The car stolen. 2 French army issue switchblade knives, a hammer, earplugs, a loaded revolver in a pink bag, and on the gun, a homemade silencer fashioned out of a children's applesauce pouch.

[Brad Abrahams]

What?

[Travis View]

What kind of a Guyver nonsense is this?

[Jake Rakatansky]

You have to be so high level to be able to craft that kind of silencer. Usually they make you do it out of like discarded water bottles and stuff and like old rags, but like, to be able to find applesauce, that's such a rare drop anyways. And then to be able to go ahead and craft the silencer with the duct tape and everything else that you have to pick up is crazy.

[Julian Field]

Yeah, this is like a point and click solution. It's like, apply the applesauce to the gun. Now you have a silencer.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Yeah, they didn't. They had to look up a guy. They had to look up a walkthrough before.

[Julian Field]

They're like, it just doesn't make sense. There's no way to progress.

[Brad Abrahams]

Oh, wait. The cops cuff the men and throw them in the back of a police van. Nervously, the duo immediately start talking. They claim they're on the job and that they're with France's foreign intelligence service, the DGSE. That's the equivalent of our CIA or Britain's MI6. They were there to assassinate a woman, supposedly on official government orders. In reality, they'd been hired by Freemasons from a lodge gone rogue. This scene is improbably connected with the previous that forest 500 kilometers away. Together, they're woven into a tapestry so dense, so unbelievable, that I've spent the last month trying to wrap my head around it and how best to bring it to you all. But I've persisted because this Triggered that unique intoxicating pleasure of stumbling upon a real life conspiracy. We're playing with a full deck here. A secret society acting as the hidden hand of government and finance, infiltrating intelligence agencies, doing corporate espionage and even assassinations. You might be thinking Brad's too pilled. But this is all sworn testimony in a French courtroom unfolding as we speak. 22 defendants are appearing before the Paris special Assize court, the heavyweight court France reserves for terrorism and organized crime. Thirteen of the defendants are facing life in prison. There's a confirmed body count of one. But the accused disagree about how many more there really are. Upwards of 10. As I said, this is a beast of a story to tell. The reporting is all in some foreign alien language. There's a cast of two dozen, a tangle of Alphabet agencies and a lot of hearsay. I think it'll help to get a little movie brained about it, which I think Jake's gonna like always. Yeah. To me it's part Coen brothers burn after reading a little Breaking Bad, a little Sopranos and then a side of Uncut gems. So I want you to like, kind of picture that as we go along here and some of the characters within

[Julian Field]

those films gently picking out the Breaking Bad. Ah yes, much better.

[Brad Abrahams]

Yes.

[Jake Rakatansky]

The real picky. The picky eater of the group.

[Julian Field]

Yeah, that's right.

[Brad Abrahams]

Honestly, I've never actually seen Breaking Bad. I just know. I know the basics.

[Julian Field]

Oh yeah, I'm sure you do.

[Brad Abrahams]

So a disclaimer. You know, I grew up in Canada and I was forced to. I was forced against my will to take French classes until I was about 15. Yeah. But I embarrassingly remember very little. I think the reason why I hated it so much is our teachers hated teaching it too. They were all anglophones that were just like forced to teach it to us. So in turn, you know, nothing stuck. So I'm just preemptively asking everyone or telling everyone not to come at me for mispronunciations. But Julian has agreed to correct me on the most egregious ones.

[Julian Field]

Sure.

[Brad Abrahams]

And last flag. So notice the part one in the episode title. So next week Travis is going to take us back to an even older Masonic murder. But equally as incredible as this one. Burn your ego. How does a Masonic lodge turn to murder? To attempt to answer this, we have to go back to the basics of. Of what a Masonic lodge is. Especially in the context of France, because like with everything, the French do it differently. Modern Freemasonry as we know it was formed in Britain. The date usually given is June 24th, 1717, when four London lodges met in a dingy tavern and formed the first Grand Lodge. France got it soon after in the 1720s and never let go, where it's continued to be suffused into the very fabric of the French Republic. The structure is simple. The working unit is the lodge, each with 20 to 60 people meeting on a set calendar. Lodges belong to an Obedience or a Grand Lodge, which charters them and collects dues. There are three core entered apprentice, fellow, craft and Master Mason, and then a set of higher systems built on top. The big one is the ancient and accepted Scottish Rite, 33 degrees which the conspiracists love and the level relevant to our story from the start. A fissure formed down the middle of French Freemasonry. The first houses the more liberal or adogmatic obediences. They tolerate atheists, they let politics and religion be argued inside temple grounds and several even admit women. The giant here is the Grand Orient of France, with 50,000 members across 1300 lodges. This is the big progressive tent. There's also the Grand Lodge of France with about 33,000 members, mostly working in the higher degree Scottish Rite. The second half are the Dogmatic and Traditionalist Obediences. They require a belief in a supreme Being, what they call the Grand Architect of the Universe. They admit men only, they ban politics and religion inside the Temple, and they desperately covet recognition from the United Grand Lodge of England, which is the body that referees who counts as quote unquote real Masons. The main dogmatic Obedience is the National Grand Lodge of France, or GLNF, founded in 1913, which has around 43,000 members so far. This is the dogmatic Grand Lodge at the heart of our story. And it was born out of a civil war. This Masonic Gettysburg hit in 2011 when the Grandmaster Francois de Fanny was accused of extreme crime, corruption, unbefitting of a leader. There were murky finances, real estate, shell games and the forcing of the entire order to pledge loyalty to Nicolas Sarkozy back when he was a candidate breaking the no politics rule. So that's like thousand people. Yeah, that were forced to vote for him. In September 2011, the United Grand Lodge of England suspended all relations. And by June 2012, lodges in Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, Germany, Luxembourg and 30 other nations pulled their recognition. A couple thousand of them broke away to found a new traditionalist obedience. They called this tight ass org, the Grand Lodge of the French Masonic alliance, or glamf. Its founder is a caricature of a secret society Grandmaster. His name is Alain Juillet. Born in 1942, he was Stanford educated, a paratrooper colonel in France's Cold War intelligence service and a corporate executive at Pernod Ricard Spirits and Marks and Spencer.

[Julian Field]

Oh my God. A demon.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Oh my God.

[Brad Abrahams]

He became director of intelligence at the GGSE, that France's CIA from 2002 to 2003, and soon after, France's senior official for economic intelligence under Chirac and Sarkozy. He since drifted into Russian state media and conspiracy friendly outlets ranted about the LGBT lobby and become a national embarrassment.

[Jake Rakatansky]

One too many parachute jumps, I think, for this gentleman.

[Julian Field]

No, this is actually all really par for the course for guys like this.

[Brad Abrahams]

Within the glamf is the lodge at the center of these assassinations. It sits in Putou, a wealthy community just west of Paris, next to an area called La Defense, which is a glass and steel business district transplanted into the suburbs. The temple itself was discreetly tucked away into the courtyard of a chic apartment building behind an unassuming door. Inside were about 20 brothers, all high ranking, 33 degree Masons of the Scottish Rite. The name of their lodge was Athanor, named after the alchemist's slow burning furnace, the vessel where base metal was transmuted over long patient heat into the philosopher's stone. In Masonic symbolism, the Athanor is the inner furnace where the initiate is refined into the metaphorical philosophical gold, meaning the refuse of their ego is burned away and they are purified. Ironic, considering what's to come shows the worst excesses of ego and indulgence.

[Jake Rakatansky]

It's so crazy to imagine all of this stuff going on and these guys are dressed like Klu Klux Klan members. You know, because I learned the hard way when I briefly. I think I've told this story on the pod before. Julian, you're our resident Jake. Redundant story, so let me know if

[Julian Field]

I have this one I already know has shown up twice.

[Jake Rakatansky]

If not this one, the fraternity pledging KKK robe. Surprise.

[Julian Field]

That's right.

[Jake Rakatansky]

All right, folks, you're going to have to listen to past episodes if you want to hear that story.

[Julian Field]

I'm going to get blamed just for being asked if you've said it before. Unfair.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Unfair. You know what? Don't. If you're mad at Julian about stopping a story for a third, possibly fourth time on a podcast, don't be. Because as upset as you are, there's somebody out there who's listened to these stories three or four times and they're just like, not a fucking Gandham. I $5. I made five fucking dollars. I gotta hear about this guy's fraternity. We know, we know. And his hands were on fire. It smelled weird. Yeah, I get it.

[Brad Abrahams]

The three ruffians. The trial may be happening now, but the rot that started this affair goes back almost two decades. In 2009, three despicable men found each other inside the Athanor Lodge. And everything began to fester. From that day on. The lodge is run by an elected head called the Worshipful Master. And over the years, that title passed between two of these three men. Now, there are a lot of names in this app, and I don't expect you to remember them all. It doesn't help that some of them sound really similar, too. But you must remember these three. The first is the most serious of the bunch. Daniel Beaulieu. Now 72 years old, he's a retired commander from France's domestic intelligence service. Essentially the spying side of their FBI. His career specialty was infiltrating the far left. When he retired in 2009, he set up a small economic intelligence consultancy. The polite term for corporate spying. He also fathered two completely parallel families for 20 years, which I've also heard is very French. With neither wife aware of the other.

[Julian Field]

Yeah, we had a whole ass president that this happened to. Me, too.

[Brad Abrahams]

He had business interests in the Republic of Congo. Not shady at all. Which were likely linked to an attempted assassination of a general, an exiled Congolese opposition figure, who was shot in the streets of Paris in 2015. Could you guys describe what Daniel Beaulieu looks like here?

[Julian Field]

He literally just looks like a PE teacher. That's the.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Julian Field]

You don't need to hear anything else.

[Brad Abrahams]

Yeah. Yes, it does. Yeah. And he's also kind of wearing a tracksuit in this.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Yeah, he's not just any PT teacher. He's your PT teacher.

[Brad Abrahams]

Beaulieu's backstory is its own kind of horror. He's believed to have been born from his mother's rape at one of his father's drunken parties.

[Julian Field]

Jesus.

[Brad Abrahams]

She would later die after being assaulted by a squatter next door. He described his role as a child.

[Jake Rakatansky]

I felt like I was my mother's guardian. Sometimes she would hide under my bed, thinking dad wouldn't find her. But he would. Sometimes he would lock her in her room for 10 days. When she came out, she was all blue, but she said she was fine.

[Travis View]

So.

[Brad Abrahams]

Yeah, that's Bilieu's origin story. Pretty disturbing.

[Julian Field]

Yeah.

[Jake Rakatansky]

He's so no good.

[Brad Abrahams]

Frederic Vaglio is next, age 53. He started out As a reporter at a regional newspaper, moved into corporate communications at Peugeot, then, oddly, set up his own private intelligence firm. He lives west of Paris and gets his kicks by firing a Kalashnikov into the forest at the edge of his property. Meeting Beaulieu in The Lodge in 2009 changed him forever. He completely fell for the world of real spycraft, or at least the story Beaulieu told about it. Vaglio called Beaulieu his master, Yoda. And here's a drawing of him from the court case from. If anyone can take that.

[Julian Field]

Okay, this is. What if the PE teacher lost all his hair? Actually, it's a bit more like a math teacher. A little squatter. A little more.

[Travis View]

I was gonna say the same thing. It looks like a math teacher on the verge of retirement, like his last one or two years. He's absolutely sick of this. He's dreaming where he doesn't have to talk to these kids anymore.

[Julian Field]

Yeah, definitely.

[Jake Rakatansky]

To me, this looks like the kind of guy who's like, helping you prepare for your bar mitzvah.

[Brad Abrahams]

Last is Jean Luc Bagour, 69 years old. He's the money guy. He founded a scummy corporate coaching school called Link Up Coaching, collects guns, and held the worshipful master's chair during the main events of this episode. He had a reputation in the biz for playing rough, and we'll soon see just how rough. And so, to round out the trio, someone describe what Jean Luc Bagor looks like.

[Julian Field]

Okay, so here we've got Vic from the Wire, but French, very bald. And you can tell he's probably hit a few people in the face.

[Brad Abrahams]

Oh, yeah. The French have a particular word for these types of barbouse. It means shadowy intelligence operatives. The kind a government quietly uses for dirty work and then denies somewhere between a real spy and a hired thug.

[Julian Field]

They love to set these kinds of guys out on the left, by the way. Every single time it's like, yeah, we're gonna set out like our semi criminals to infiltrate your shit.

[Jake Rakatansky]

This last guy, Baghoor, his eyes are barely open. I mean, this guy can only can see. He's basically got enough vision for one thing, and that's leftists.

[Brad Abrahams]

So remember these names. Beaulieu, the real ex spy, Vaglio, the wannabe spy, and Begure, the money man. So, Beaulieu, Vaglio Bagoor. Bolieu. Vaglio, Bagor. Easy, right?

[Julian Field]

Are you all right?

[Brad Abrahams]

Yes.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Gesundheit.

[Brad Abrahams]

This thing of us. Wow. When these three men found each other in the lodge, they formed a criminal brotherhood, where each one enabled the other escalating year by year into something monstrous. It started with surveillance around 2013 in the Paris suburb of Saint Maur.

[Julian Field]

I've lived there.

[Brad Abrahams]

Oh, you have? Wow. Okay. Vaglio's private security firm sold the town Hall a €10,000 security audit. In reality, it was a spying package targeting a local politician, all commissioned by the sitting mayor. To get the goods, the Masons paid an officer from France's FBI €1,000 to hand over personal photos and info. This is the moment the Lodge started recruiting state spies to moonlight in a Masonic side hustle. It quickly turned physical when a local councilor in the same suburb kept digging into the corruption scandal. Two hooded men beat him in his own garden, telling him, you've got to stop, and photographed him bleeding as proof of completion.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Oh, my God.

[Brad Abrahams]

Yeah. Brother Bagur had his own side gigs, too. After a bitter falling out with a former business partner, he paid to have the man's sister punished. With a crew torching her car. The fire ended up burning her whole house down.

[Julian Field]

Oh.

[Brad Abrahams]

The Lodge billed the arson as €10,000 of economic intelligence. So they.

[Julian Field]

Oh, my God.

[Brad Abrahams]

Yes. Yeah.

[Julian Field]

They're running everything through the actual organization.

[Brad Abrahams]

Yes.

[Julian Field]

That's incredible.

[Brad Abrahams]

To handle this increasingly rough stuff, the network needed a reliable bludgeon. And they found him in a man named Sebastien Leroy. Unlike the three brothers, he was never a Mason. They purposefully kept the lowly and unclean muscle out of the Brotherhood. Leroy had worked as a private bodyguard since 2011, and by his own lawyer's description, was obsessed with the world of secret agents, as well as the Matrix and martial arts.

[Julian Field]

Oh, this is such a type of guy, you wouldn't believe it.

[Brad Abrahams]

He met Beaulieu near a military academy in central Paris. And from that day forward, he believed completely that Beaulieu was still an active intelligence officer, a man who could bring him into the secret world of statecraft. Remember the racing champion from the top of the episode, the Remains, the mushroom hunter stumbled onto. His name was Laurent Pasqually, a French GT champion who had won national titles and even run the 24 hours of Le Mans. He was known as the life of the party and lived ridiculously beyond his means. By the end, he owed about €440,000 to a string of creditors, with the press nicknaming him the Roquencourt of the car world. So, after a famous French con man.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Awesome.

[Brad Abrahams]

And. And, yeah, here he is.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Dude, this guy just wanted to drive.

[Julian Field]

Big forehead, likes to party, likes to drive.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Yeah, he just wanted to fucking race. And he was willing to do. He knew that he was going to die doing this, so he didn't care how he got there.

[Brad Abrahams]

And are these the type of cars they race? This just looks like a little Civic hatchback.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Yeah, a little hatchback. Oh, boy. They've got some Z. You got the right engine in them.

[Brad Abrahams]

All right.

[Julian Field]

It's a rally car.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Yeah.

[Brad Abrahams]

Among the people he owed were Alain and Nancy Marek. Alain is a biologist who built the first IVF clinic in his corner of France, making him a multimillionaire. Nancy's an engineer, and the two of them were motorsport enthusiasts. Back in 2011, the year Pasquale took a French GT title, they'd lent him somewhere between 100,000 and €200,000. He never paid it back and he kept dodging them along with everyone else.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Well, hell, yeah. This guy can drive. You know, anytime you approach him, he's hopping in the car, he's drifting, he's got. He's driving in the wrong way of. It's like me trying to get away from the cops in gta.

[Brad Abrahams]

Exactly like that. The fact they lent him this money in the first place was odd, but it was revealed that Nancy had become romantically obsessed with Pasquale, and Alain soon got pathologically jealous of him. So. So in 2016, the Marecs brought their Pasquale problem to Vaglio, who courted them in the most ostentatious way imaginable. He ran a Top Gun event at a French air base, complete with the French equivalent of the Blue Angels, and put the Marex up in a fighter jet. They were sold and paid Baglio, a lump sum to, in their words, scare Pasquale into paying. Wait a minute.

[Jake Rakatansky]

They put him into a fighter jet and sent him up into the sky? And they were like, we're going to do a couple loop de loops?

[Brad Abrahams]

Pretty much. But first, the Masonic mafia had to find him. So they bribed an officer in France's FBI to illegally pull Pasquale's home address out of the police's main records database and classified intelligence files. The bribe was surprisingly low, only 2 to €300 split between two cops. So they're each getting, like, 150 bucks.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Oh, my God. They're basically getting, like, a collector. A collector's edition of Elden Ring.

[Brad Abrahams]

This, to me, is also, like, what. What separates France from America. I feel like in America, they wouldn't do this for less than, like, 10 grand, you know?

[Jake Rakatansky]

Yeah.

[Julian Field]

Jake just compared it to the collector's edition of Elden Ring, which is now how he measures all Financial endeavors. That's the unit. That's the financial unit for him now.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Yeah. I mean, look, some things cost a standard release, some things cost the gold edition, and some things cost the ultimate edition. You know, it's just. It's this. It's this darn economy.

[Julian Field]

I know. In this economy you don't even get, like a little plastic figurine or something.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Yeah. In this economy, you don't even get a little booklet that comes with the.

[Julian Field]

No map for your wall.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Yeah, no map for your wall, sir. You will remain lost.

[Brad Abrahams]

The Masonic trio then fed their muscle, Sebastien Leroy, a cover story that Pascuale was part of a Corsican nationalist network and needed to be put down by the state. Address in hand, the operation commenced on the night of November 28, 2018. Pasquale left his mother's apartment where he lived while in hiding in the Paris suburb of Le Ballois, and walked down into the building's underground parking garage. There, a struggle ensued, and he was shot once through the heart, likely by Leroy. Leroy then loaded the body into a van rented through a shell company and drove 520km south overnight to that remote forest. From the cold open. He partially burned the body and then buried it only 40 centimeters. So just one foot into the earth.

[Travis View]

Not a professional. This is like. I mean, ye. Yeah, it's like. What, he didn't bring, like, a good enough shovel? He's like. He didn't have any clear plan of how to actually dispose and hide the body.

[Brad Abrahams]

Just burn him. Yeah, burn him a little bit and then barely bury him.

[Julian Field]

This is how you underestimate the actual guy who has to go do the triggering. It's like, you can't have him be a total fucking moron.

[Brad Abrahams]

Right after the killing, Baglio met Billieu at a Paris intersection to tell him the mission was accomplished. With a slight smile, Beaulieu said, by

[Jake Rakatansky]

the way, they went a little too far. They killed them.

[Brad Abrahams]

Beaulieu showed him a photo on a USB stick. A body in the forest, shot with a flash, curled in a fetal position with a black bag over his head. Beside it, a few lines of text.

[Jake Rakatansky]

He gets out of the elevator. He's on the phone. Boom, boom. It's over. Mission accomplished.

[Travis View]

Why are you making a record of your crime?

[Jake Rakatansky]

Boom, boom.

[Travis View]

Photographic record.

[Julian Field]

He's having so much fun, too. He's so proud of himself.

[Brad Abrahams]

Yeah.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Boom, boom. I murdered him. I murdered him. It was me who did it. At this time and place, Eton.

[Brad Abrahams]

Pascualeu's mother reported him missing soon after, but the case Went cold. Until that call a year later by the mushroom hunter who'd found the skull. The body was identified in July. But with no known killer, the case went cold all over again. By the end of 2019, the lodge had transformed to a violence for hire business. A service that a frustrated employer could order off a menu. One known instance of this started at a family run plastics factory called Apnel in an area of France known as Plastics Valley, which I can smell, yeah. The plant was owned by Muriel Brunnemale and her husband, a luxury car collector. You see, they had an employee problem, a thorn in their side of pure capitalist excellence. He was a mechanic named Hassan Tuzani, a delegate for one of France's big labor unions.

[Julian Field]

Oh yeah, these guys killing another Arab, that's gonna definitely be right up their alley.

[Brad Abrahams]

He was also a yellow vest protester, and as of December 2019, a newly elected member of the company's works council. That election seemed to have been the last straw. Vaglio paid the plant a visit. The Brune malaise told we've got a

[Marie Aline Denis]

guy who won't stop screwing with us and we can't fire him. Sometimes I'd really like to smash his face.

[Brad Abrahams]

In a contract on Tuzani's life, around €75,000 went to Vaglio and our Masonic brothers. He only found out there'd been a price on his head. When the police told him a year later, he said to reporters, I lost sleep for months.

[Julian Field]

Every time I heard a noise, I'd grab my axe.

[Brad Abrahams]

He's been on long term sick leave ever since Mission Homo.

[Julian Field]

This is so incredible. Yeah, I can't believe that that's not you being homophobic or something.

[Brad Abrahams]

The job that was to bring this Masonic hit network down grew out of something comically petty. A squabble between two life coaches. It brings us back to the second scene of our cold open. The father who was suspicious of that black Renault Cleo. The woman at the center of it is Marie Aline Denis. She spent 15 years in the finance world, then built her own coaching school in a Paris suburb. Here's her headshot.

[Julian Field]

Just guess. A nice looking middle aged woman.

[Brad Abrahams]

Yeah, she's got, you know, beautiful gray hair, nice smile.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Nothing to poke fun of here, just a regular lady.

[Julian Field]

Time to kill her.

[Brad Abrahams]

In 2019, she founded a professional union for coaches and made herself its first president. Like any good European bureaucrat, she wanted the business to be regulated with real diplomas, standards and accreditation. This put her squarely in the path of Jean Luc Bagour, the gun collecting Coaching school boss from our trio. He saw her reforms as a threat to price him out of his own coaching racket. He called her and said, I've heard

[Travis View]

you're engaging in unfair competition. I'm telling you this, it's not a big deal. I get along well with everyone except those I'm in litigation with.

[Brad Abrahams]

Bagura's first move was a beating. He recruited Leroy to do it in

[Travis View]

what he dubbed Operation Rough up the Old Lady.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Come on.

[Travis View]

This is the point of the code names for these operations is to hide your intent.

[Brad Abrahams]

Yes, yes. And of course, it's all, like, documented in, like, text messages. In October of that year, just as Denis was stepping out of her home, two men came up behind her and beat her to the ground. As she screamed, they said, if you

[Julian Field]

scream again, we'll kill you. If you call the cops, we'll be back.

[Brad Abrahams]

They ran off with her laptop and her purse. Denis filed away as a random mugging. When it was instead a warning, her unionization plans went on, and the order changed from a scare to a kill. In June 2020, Bagure called a lunar meeting, a phrase lifted from the Masonic ritual calendar. From there, the job ran the chain. Bagoor handed it to Vaglio, and Vaglio handed it to Bolieu to organize the hit for around €70,000 with a receipt for value added tax to be reclaimed.

[Julian Field]

There we go. Now we're doing. Wow, small town French.

[Brad Abrahams]

Yep. Leroy was pulled back in and started to search for fresh muscle. This time, the Masonic brothers told him that Denis was a Mossad agent and a grave threat to national security. The muscle came from a real French spy base, and the man who supplied it was named Yannick Pham, a domestic intelligence officer moonlighting as a document forger for the Foreign Service.

[Jake Rakatansky]

He called himself the greatest forger in the history of the police.

[Brad Abrahams]

And will one of you describe a Yannick fam in his apartment?

[Julian Field]

He's just a younger guy who wants to show off his arm muscles. Balding. He's doing a handstand in one of the pictures. He's got incredibly tasteless, like, zebra patterned furniture with zebras, then also on the wall. It's just insane.

[Jake Rakatansky]

I had, like, a real piece of shit Israeli boss once, and I worked in, like, marketing. And this guy looks exactly like him and has the energy to, like. He would do handstands like this in the office just to, like, show off that he could do it.

[Brad Abrahams]

The press would later dub him the MacGyver of the secret Services. But his elite action group that he sold to Clients was actually an unhoused geriatric man, a slum superintendent and an IT guy. Pham taught a class on spotting fake papers at the Foreign Service's special Operations training base. And it was there that he met the two soldiers he felt were perfect fodder for the hit. They were Pierre Bourdin and Carl Hainault, both corporals working as gate guards at the base. And they were, to put it kindly, not the elite. Bourdin liked to tell his comrades that he'd sold a 11 kilogram gemstone to the emirs at the Carlton, robbed a cocaine convoy on the highway and ran a pedophile hunting vigilante group over telegram. Bourdin's own commanding officer had written him

[Travis View]

up as not very bright, pretentious and a pathological liar.

[Brad Abrahams]

And the base's operations director told police

[Julian Field]

the idea eventually was actually to get rid of him.

[Brad Abrahams]

So here's Bourdin below.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Brad, he looks like he could be your cousin. Or brother maybe.

[Brad Abrahams]

What the fuck, Jake? He doesn't look anything.

[Julian Field]

He looks like a soccer player.

[Jake Rakatansky]

What the fuck, Jake?

[Brad Abrahams]

He doesn't look anything like me. Come on.

[Jake Rakatansky]

I think just white. White guy with brown hair.

[Brad Abrahams]

Alright, wow.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Guilty.

[Julian Field]

What is going on?

[Brad Abrahams]

And no. It was the competent half, well regarded, marked for promotion and convinced that the secrecy of the job proved it was real. He called himself part of the Bataclan generation, having enlisted right after the 2015 terror attacks in Paris. So it should be clear that those two men waiting in the black Cleo with their hoods up and gloves on in a heat wave were Bourdin and Hainault. And the woman they were awaiting to kill was Marie Aline Denis. The only reason she's alive today is because she happened to be running late that morning. They expected her at a quarter to eight, but she didn't step outside until half past. By then the plainclothes cops were already tapping on their window. When the pair were hauled in, they insisted they were on official business. With their codenames being Dagomar and Adelard, they said they were running a mission Homo intelligence slang, with homo being short for homicide, the in house term for a state sanctioned killing. So there you go, Julian.

[Julian Field]

Uh huh.

[Travis View]

I have to say, not quite as cool as a state station killing slang of wetwork. I always like that one. That's cool. Very sinister.

[Julian Field]

Oh, that's cool. Travis, you want to do some wet work? Well, sorry you're going on a mission, homo.

[Jake Rakatansky]

It's crazy to think that like when, like when the mission like doesn't go like as planned, that they come back to the office and they're like, no homo.

[Julian Field]

Aw. Wow.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Sorry.

[Julian Field]

That is.

[Brad Abrahams]

Wow. Jake had that queued up. So this was an act. Former president Francois Hollande openly admitted to ordering. Which is why the lie worked. In fact, the invented story seemed so plausible that police took apart Denis apartment, her car and her scooter, hunting for sensitive documents that they were never going to find. The unraveling happened quickly. The two soldiers immediately talked and the chain unspooled upwards Le Roi to Beaulieu to Vaglio to Begueur and into the lodge itself. Le Roi broke down quickly too, estimating there were between 10 to 20 assassinations in total, including the death of a Chinese ambassador in Israel.

[Jake Rakatansky]

What?

[Brad Abrahams]

Fucking insane. Yeah. Beaulieu had been the only careful one, the closest to a real professional in the group. He never spoke on his phone, only met out in the open and set his passcode to 007. That was his phone unlock code? Yeah. Oh, Christ.

[Julian Field]

These idiots.

[Brad Abrahams]

When he finally confessed, investigators pressed him on how many people the network had killed. His answer was that the dead could be counted on the fingers of one hand, as opposed to 10 to 20.

[Jake Rakatansky]

He's like, we only killed two people instead of 25.

[Brad Abrahams]

It was during this questioning that the Pasquale killing was definitively tied to the Masonic network. And it was now, with police closing in, that Vaglio quietly called off the still pending contract on Toussaint, the union mechanic at the plastics factory. So that guy just narrowly missed getting murdered.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Wow, that's crazy.

[Brad Abrahams]

The dam broke publicly on February 3, 2020, when Le Parisienne put this on the front page.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Victim of the Freemason killers.

[Brad Abrahams]

The next day, the head of the Glamf Obedience dissolved the Athanor Lodge and put out a stern statement insisting the order demanded absolute respect for every law of the republic. It was cold. It was cold blooded. Starting last March, after almost six years, the whole affair landed in a courtroom. Not just any courtroom. The special Assize court in Paris. What France reserves for terrorism and organized crime. There's no jury, only a panel of hardened professional magistrates. The file had been codenamed Legends after the spycraft for a fake identity. And the docket had swollen to 22 defendants charged with one definitive murder, two attempted assassinations, a string of beatings and a criminal conspiracy that ran for eight years. Thirteen were facing life in prison.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Damn. This is crazy. Very similar to the GS9 charges that Rowdy Rebel and Bobby Shmurda were slapped with.

[Brad Abrahams]

Mm. Mm. The defendants were a Strange cross section of French life. Four military men, three men from the police and intelligence intelligence services, a half dozen business executives, a private security agent, a fertility doctor, an engineer, a gunsmith, an economist, an apartment caretaker and a life coach.

[Julian Field]

Nice.

[Brad Abrahams]

Most had never been in trouble with the law before or had never been caught for it. The woman running the show was Judge Caroline Viguier, and the defendants were all the worse for it. This is the same magistrate who in 2021, handed former President Nicolas Sarkozy the maximum sentence for illegally financing his campaign. She weaponizes her patients, wearing the defendants down with quiet, relentless questioning, circling back again and again with lines.

[Marie Aline Denis]

The court would like to be sure it understands this, and this point is important. I'll come back to it over and

[Brad Abrahams]

over until each successive accused was drained of all their defenses. The trial opened with the confessions. First came Muriel Brunmillet, the plastics factory boss who ordered the hit on her own unionized mechanic. Her story was that she'd been burned out by the race for growth and the endless demands of her clients, and she'd fallen into a spiral. She said she was crushed by remorse and shame. Muriel was the only one of the 22 sitting in that courtroom as a free person. She's since sold off half her stake in the company for around 3.5 million euros and has opened a bakery and a tea room in Lyon. That's what she gets for ordering the hit on someone crazy.

[Jake Rakatansky]

She's like, I apologize. I've chosen to live the quiet life running my shop.

[Brad Abrahams]

Then came Vaglio, the protege who'd fallen in love with the spy world because of Beaulieu. He confessed.

[Julian Field]

Beaulieu was like a mentor to me. Because of him, I became a criminal.

[Brad Abrahams]

He said he'd learned to use the flaws in people to tighten the noose around him. He continued the self awareness with I'd do anything.

[Julian Field]

I'd accept anything. It's unforgivable and unspeakable. I was a fool.

[Brad Abrahams]

Pressed on whether he'd manipulated those beneath him, he lost it.

[Julian Field]

Everything is immoral. You want me to tell you I'm a bastard? I didn't manipulate anyone.

[Brad Abrahams]

Next was Bourdin, the gate guard who thought he was a secret agent, the one whose superiors called him not very bright, pretentious and a pathological liar. He told the court that getting into the foreign service had been the Holy Grail of his life. But in reality, all he did was watch security camera feeds all day. Because he failed the officer exam, he wanted more than that. Asked point blank whether he Lied, he said.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Of course, like everyone. But you can lie without being a liar.

[Julian Field]

Damn smart.

[Brad Abrahams]

Though he pleaded not guilty for planning to assassinate Denis, a former cellmate undercut him, saying he'd bragged about being a hitman. His trigger man, Henaud, the competent half of the pair, had a more sophisticated defense. He argued that inside a real intelligence service, nobody sees the whole picture. It's all compartmentalization. So he'd had every reason to believe the homicide operation was authorized. All these intelligence officers leaned on the principle of acting on the orders of a legitimate authority. The idea in French law that obeying a lawful command from a superior can wipe out any criminal responsibility. And so, for a week, the spy agency itself went on trial, which is unprecedented. 15 serving in former offices of the Foreign Intelligence Service. So their CIA filed through the witness box, all with their likeness and voice anonymized. And this is an artistic rendering of how it looked.

[Julian Field]

So everyone's just like black smudges and ghost like apparitions?

[Brad Abrahams]

Yeah, it looks pretty eerie. They were all a unified wall, refusing to hand the court a single employment contract or operational document for any of the accused agents. They said they also bore no institutional responsibility whatsoever, and that off the books killings simply do not exist. The most senior man to be questioned was Bernard Amie, who had run the entire Foreign Intelligence Service until the year before. He testified, saying, only the Pope is infallible.

[Julian Field]

Ah, makes you think.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Yeah, nice.

[Julian Field]

And of course they would say that there's no state sanctioned killings where really like. The guys who had direct experience with it knew very well this is a thing, and they can lie and pretend it's that.

[Brad Abrahams]

So he insisted he'd learned of the whole affair at the same moment of the public and rejected the possibility of an unsanctioned hit on French soil. It just didn't happen, sure, until a former domestic intelligence agent took to the stand and repeatedly stated that yes, the Foreign Service could and does run lethal operations on home soil, contradicting the brass so directly that the prosecutor had to step in and ask him to clarify what he was saying multiple times.

[Julian Field]

Could you please clarify that you want to be killed?

[Brad Abrahams]

Later in May, the victim took the stand and brought some humanity back into the whole ghoulish affair. Marie Helene Denis laid out two years of wreckage. A racing heart, fainting spells, ruined sleep, a fear of leaving her home. She scoffed at the COVID story that had nearly gotten her killed, that she was a Mossad agent. She recalled how investigators had grilled her for hours about supposed Israeli intelligence ties when she'd never set foot in Israel in her entire life. When the dollar amount put on her head was revealed, she said, I learned

[Marie Aline Denis]

that my life was worth only €70,000, along with an invoice to claim back the sales tax. A life clearly isn't worth much.

[Brad Abrahams]

She told the court she'd since been diagnosed with cancer, sold her coaching company and watched her unionization efforts slowly disappear. She later described it in an interview.

[Marie Aline Denis]

A tsunami, an atomic bomb that went off in my life. I was in the middle of my professional rise and I truly felt my career just stopped dead. It took me months and years to recover from it, if you include the cancer. And honestly, I'm still not fully recovered from it.

[Brad Abrahams]

She went on to directly challenge the accused men.

[Marie Aline Denis]

I think that for the past five years, if I'm standing here today, still working and living an almost normal life, it's because I've shown courage. And I'm expecting this courage from the other side too. Not, no, it wasn't me, it was the other guy. It's not my fault. I was manipulated. I want people to courageously acknowledge the actions they've committed.

[Brad Abrahams]

And of course, they did not. The real spy, Beaulieu, with the 007 phone lock code, went before Judge Vigue soon after, on May 11. She pressed him on his responsibility for the men he'd handled and unleashed.

[Jake Rakatansky]

He answered coldly, Manipulation is freely consented submission.

[Brad Abrahams]

Isn't that so fucked up?

[Julian Field]

Oh God, yeah.

[Brad Abrahams]

But the careful old spy was not the figure he'd once been. He attempted suicide and detention and came back to the courtroom in a wheelchair with apparent cognitive issues. When Baguir took to the stand, he described deciding on that €70,000 number for Denis's death. Viguier interrupted him.

[Marie Aline Denis]

Is that the price of a human life?

[Brad Abrahams]

Baguur replied, it's cold.

[Travis View]

It's cold blooded. It's what I agreed to pay.

[Brad Abrahams]

He pleaded that he'd been under the influence of his lodge brother, Beaulieu. All of the defenses followed that same pattern, and the outlet media part laid it out.

[Julian Field]

All guilty, no one responsible. Bagueur blames Vaglio. Vaglio blames Bagour and Beaulieu. Beaulieu blames Vaglio and Leroi. Leroy blames everyone. And Pham, the forger, insists he knew nothing.

[Brad Abrahams]

That left only the lodge to answer for itself. Alainjuyet, that spy turned founder of the Parent Obedience, who now works with rt, chose to concede.

[Jake Rakatansky]

When a lodge or a group of lodges drifts, it means the rules of the Obedience and the controls put in place to prevent it didn't work. A lodge is a closed environment in which the brothers are supposed to maintain order and harmony. There still has to be external control to verify that, because this form of independence can only function within interdependence.

[Brad Abrahams]

But Marie Alintigni will have the last word in this chapter. In a TV interview, after talking about the panic button installed by her bed, how suspicious she's become of anyone approaching her in the street, and her general exhaustion and cognitive decline, there's a glimmer of hope.

[Marie Aline Denis]

I've never gotten over my ptsd, and now it's obviously flaring up for months as the trial nears. It's very difficult six years later to face all this again, to relieve the same ordeal twice. But I'm not that scared. I figure if they want to find me, they'll find me instead. Every single day that passes, I tell myself it's an extra gift because none of this should have ever happened. And when it's a quiet day, I tell myself it's a beautiful day.

[Brad Abrahams]

The verdict for all accused is expected on July 17, 2026. So just about a month from now, the all seeing Eye. I want to end this episode out with what we do best here at the Conspiracies. Charlie Hebdo's own headline about the affair

[Travis View]

read the Masonic plot handed to the far right on a plate.

[Brad Abrahams]

Like the Epstein fact, the case is too perfect for the conspiracy minded and understandably so. For once, every ingredient is genuinely there in one a real Masonic lodge, real X spies, real false flag Israeli cover story and real contract killings. Most of the theories are empty calories, like commentary by Alexandre Dugan and Alain Soral about Luciferian Freemasonry, Masonic ritual, child abuse and that Freemasonry secretly runs the French state. Some anti Zionist channels recycle the killer's own cover story as if Denis really had been a Mossad agent while pro Israel channels flipped it the other way. But one piece of it is a genuine unresolved conspiratorial curiosity. When police searched the wannabe James Bond Beaulieu's home in February 2021, they found a stash of ultra rare 7.65mm Luger ammunition. These were the exact unusual cartridges used in one of the most infamous unsolved massacres in French modern day the Chevalin killings. For those that are unfamiliar, it went down in September 2012 in the French Alps. A gunman ambushed a British Iraqi engineer named Saad Al Hili. His wife and his mother in law in their car and also shot dead a French cyclist who happened to pedal past in the most inopportune moment. Al Hili's two young daughters somehow survived. One was pistol whipped and left for dead. The other hid for eight hours under her mother's body in the backseat of the car. 25 rounds in total were fired. The murder weapon was a collector's item, Swiss pistol made back in the 1930s with only around 940 ever made. So 100-year-old pistol. It has never been found and the case has never been solved. And the ammunition exactly matched what was in Bullier's home. So they've reopened the case basically to try and see if he.

[Jake Rakatansky]

No way.

[Brad Abrahams]

Yeah, yeah.

[Julian Field]

So once again, Bollieu killing an Arab, like it's all they know how to do, the these fucking French secret service guys.

[Brad Abrahams]

So to conclude, as bonkers and implausible as this whole affair is, I can't say any of it is surprising. Secret societies have always attracted a certain type of guy already in positions of power and influence and insulated them even further. So I think, you know, just a matter of time and the right sort of dark triad personalities before they end up murdering an obstacle that gets in their way. And this has all happened before at a scale that makes Athanor feel embarrassingly little league. If you want, just look up Propaganda due or the P2 story, which I'm sure like a lot of listeners are familiar with, which is just far too deep to tack on to this already gargantuan ep. Have you guys done an episode on P2? No. Oh wow. It's a deep one. But Travis, do you want to tease what's coming in Part two next week?

[Travis View]

Yeah. Yeah. Some listeners might remember that in September of last year I took a trip to New York State in order to do some research for an idea for a book that's been rattling my head for a while. And part of this trip involved me trying to dig into the story of the Morgan Affair, the story of a man named William Morgan who was kidnapped in a whiske away by freemasons in that area because they knew he was writing a book that threatened to expose their secrets of particularly their higher degrees. And it's so interesting. I've always wondered why it's not a better known story. I discovered it's not even that well known, even in Batavia, which is the sort of the central place where these events happened. I think it's because it is bizarre and convoluted and at the time it was the subject of like this massive propaganda war. Like, people started up specialty newspapers specifically to argue against the sort of narratives about Morgan's kidnapping and to sort of defend the idea that Morgan's kidnapping did end in a murder. And, you know, I went to the place where Morgan was arrested in Batavia. I went to the final known place where he was imprisoned. And, yeah, I think I have some, like, a new perspective, a new kind of, like, new, actually new information about this, despite the fact that this port has been researched and documented and written about for 200 years. And I think it is a bizarre story. And I really hope that this will do something to make this tale of American history a little bit better understood and known.

[Brad Abrahams]

Nice. So we get basically a sneak preview of your book project.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Brad Abrahams]

Nice.

[Jake Rakatansky]

That's so exciting. I love that story. I think it's also a really good example, a very early example of American politics sort of mixing with conspiracies and, you know, secret societies. And there's a lot of kind of foundational, sort of conspiracy principles that sort of pop up during that period of history. So it's. I'm excited to dive deeper into that.

[Brad Abrahams]

Yeah. And, you know, I'll be keeping up to date on this athanor affair, too. Over the next month, if any, like, bombshells get dropped, I'll update everyone.

[Jake Rakatansky]

We love an ongoing, like, QAA episode. Usually our shit is so cold and ancient. It's just. It's just dry.

[Brad Abrahams]

It's just.

[Jake Rakatansky]

It's so cold, it's been left out on the counter. But this is hot. This is a meal.

[Brad Abrahams]

It's also just. It's so apparent that Americans do not care about anything that is happening outside of America, especially in another language. Like, there's almost zero coverage of this in American media, which is like sort of a plus for doing an episode on it, but also just disappointing.

[Julian Field]

Yeah, it's so true. What a good story.

[Brad Abrahams]

Yeah. So thanks. Thanks, everyone.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Great stuff, Brad, as always.

[Julian Field]

Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAA podcast. You can go to patreon.comqaa and subscribe for five bucks a month to get the whole second premium episode we do for every regular one, plus access to. To our entire archive of premium episodes.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Brad, where can people find more of your work if they're looking for it?

[Brad Abrahams]

Yeah, they can follow me on Instagram. I'm Brad, or just Brad. Wtf? And on X, which I'm using less and less and less, I'm LoveAndSaucers. And our documentary Gimme Truth is going to have Its US Premiere in a few months. Yeah, likely in Austin, Texas. So I know we have some fans out here, so I'll give some more info as it comes.

[Jake Rakatansky]

I would love to come to that. That sounds like a good reason to come to Austin again.

[Brad Abrahams]

Yeah.

[Jake Rakatansky]

And Julian, you and Gabris have been working like Mad Men. I saw you guys just dropped another episode of Superstructure. Tell everybody a little bit about that.

[Julian Field]

That's right. We've got 10 episodes up now of my solo project with John Gabris, which is an ongoing podcast, some people think thought it might be a miniseries and then realized, wait a second, this thing seems like it's gonna keep on going and going and it sure will. So go and check us [e-mail] our latest two episodes are on the Weather Underground and the second one is on the Black Liberation army and the Republic of New Africa. So that's a two parter. Really interesting stuff. And a time where guerrilla warfare was a domestic issue here in the United States. United States. Which seems far fetched for, for us, you know, born in the 80s and beyond. But anyways, yeah, you can go check that [e-mail] like I said. And then if you want to follow us on Instagram, Superstructure podcast and then on Blue Sky, Superstructure Pod. So go and check it out, folks.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Follow them. Listen, if you're on Instagram, if you're on these social media apps and you're following Superstructure, go over and also follow cursemedia.net. we've got a little Instagram, we got a little Instagram account going. We're, we're trying to be more, trying to be a little bit more. That's what we're doing.

[Julian Field]

They're trying to be, we're trying to

[Jake Rakatansky]

be, trying to be. And less. Less on more.

[Julian Field]

But yeah, that's Also the website cursed media.net where you can get access to all of our miniseries. That's a ongoing miniseries network that we run and lots of good shows are out on that. And there's a new one coming in not so long. That's going to be exciting to reveal.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Yes, yes. The qaa. The, the qaa people, we are, we are not slowing down. We, we, we like making, we like making content for you. That's the number four. That's the letter U. And it's not going to stop, folks. And so I appreciate, I appreciate you all bearing with us during these troubling times. And what the hell?

[Julian Field]

And, and what is he on about? Guy in his early 40s. I am not slowing down.

[Jake Rakatansky]

Yeah. And until. Yeah, who am I talking to here? The audience or myself? Until next week, dear listener, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.

[Brad Abrahams]

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[Conspiracy Theorist Caller]

You 22 people have gone on trial in France on charges of murder. And of course, again, you know that not all 22 people are going to be found guilty. Somebody might be found guilty, but I doubt it's gonna be one of the Freemasons. It'll probably end up being the doctor or one of the executives, but. And we certainly know it won't be the intel agents and it certainly won't be the police, but it'll likely be the. The corporate goons. And of course, they probably won't end up in jail anyway because they're likely Freemasons as well, But. And the judge again, is 100 going to be a Freemason because that's how the court system works. And this even goes back to the teachings again of the Synagogue of Satan, how they will control the courts, they will control you. This is in the Talmud, the controlling of the court systems. How no Goim will ever win, that's us against these specific people. And again, you might say, well, Freemasons aren't members of the Synagogue of Satan. Well, the. They teach and study the Kabbalah, okay? These are all members of the same club, okay? These are all people who worship Lucifer.