Geraldposner

Great question. I cover this in a couple of chapters in the book. There is a case in the 1980s in which Italian prosecutors issued a serious multi-count indictment agains the American Bishop who ran the Vatican Bank, as well as his top two lay directors. The Vatican refused to accept the warrants, claiming it was an infringement of their sovereignty. Italy responded by saying that was a ridiculous defense. What if a priest living in the Vatican committed murder in Italy? He could not stay free from justice by simply going back inside the Vatican? But that is precisely what happened. Those three top Vatican Bankers stayed inside Vatican City. Over a couple of years the case of whether they could be forcibly extradited went to Italy's highest court, and the court sided with Vatican. No one was extradited or spent a day in jail for their role in a giant fraud. The unfortunate short answer to your question, is that they are not accountable in the past.

:-) Any good investigative journalist does the same. It is all about risk tolerance. For instance, I was in Paraguayan rain forest with a a neo-Nazi colonel, spent time with heroin traffickers in the Golden Triangle, and went to Kabul after 9/11. None of that worried me, I was focused on the work. But I don't skateboard because I think I might fall and break a bone and I don't smoke because I am afraid of cancer. Risk tolerance. Go figure.

That I uncovered a classified U.S. intelligence document that raises the likelihood that the financial wizard who founded the Vatican Bank, in the middle of World War was in fact a Nazi spy. Enough of a hook? :-

I think the difference with successful investigative journalists is that we never, ever take 'no' for an answer. That does not mean that we can turn a 'no' into a yes, but it means we will figure out a way to get the information another way. Case in point. The Vatican said no to my request to get into the Secret Archives. How could I then determine whether the Vatican Bank, created in the middle of World War II, did business with the Nazis? I had to get information from national archives, and private company files, in Europe and the U.S. and South America. And I pored over litigation files, and banking documents that were hard to find but ultimately accessible. So, the answer is that a good investigative reporter will take a 'no' as a challenge to still get the information from an alternate route.

I started at Cravath, Swaine and Moore in 1978 before moving to my own firm in 1981. There I began a pro bono lawsuit against Germany and the Mengele family on behalf of a survivor of Mengele's medical experiments at Auschwitz. That suit was not successful, but I had gathered some 25,000 pages of documents about Mengele, many of which were not public. So with a British journalist, John Ware, I turned it into a biography of Mengele for McGraw-Hill. And while in Paraguay I had met some Corsicans who were fugitives from justice in the heroin trade. They regaled me with stories about how the heroin business had been taken over by Chinese Triads. That became my second book. I still am a member of the NY and DC bars but do not actively practice. Check out this article about me in Bitter Lawyer with more details about how I went from lawyer to author, http://www.bitterlawyer.com/gerald-posner-cravath-to-controversy/