Immaculate Deception

Two years after executing a major sting operation that places Tony Masella, one of Chicago’s most notorious counterfeiters behind bars, U. S. Secret Service agent Wesley Charles receives an urgent call from the DC Bureau. Wes soon discovers that Masella, now released from prison, is part of a slick international Vatican-based counterfeiting ring of pedophile priests. 

The Vatican is using counterfeit money to staunch the flood of lawsuits involving pedophile cases that threaten to bankrupt the Roman Catholic Church worldwide. World-famous couturier “Peppi” Giuseppe Tubiano and his lover, “Father Ira” (Philip Tuma), who is director of the Chicago archdiocese consortium of non-profit foundations, operate a global bank trading and counterfeiting scam, using the counterfeit money to pay off the courts. The Church performs “rituals of forgiveness” for its pedophile priests, retiring or relocating them to distant dioceses where they are free to continue their sexual debauchery.           

Blackmail becomes the flavor of the day when Italian police officer Angela Micele, a smoky-eyed Sophia Loren look-like and her sexy friend, Maria Pelino, who works in the Rome USSS offices as a translator, cook up a plot to seek revenge for Angela’s USSS boyfriend murdered by the Mafia in a bungled attempt to bring down the Italian counterfeiters. Agent Charles, the two women and Maria’s cousin Nicky, a member of the Vatican Swiss Guard, pull off a series of elaborate high tech stunts in the final scene underneath the Sistine Chapel only hours after the new pope has been elected. 

Although this is a fiction work, it is based on factual information. It is common knowledge that the courts are flooded with cases involving Catholic priests practicing pedophilia and sexual abuse. Few people are aware that these cases continue to go unprosecuted while other non-Catholic sex offenders land behind bars with serious charges and long-term sentences. Immaculate Deception begs the question about divine dispensation, papal politics and Catholic controlled courts.