I was at work when I heard the news.

It was January two thousand and eight.

I had a miscalled from an old friend from Rannon Christe.

She was out of the Legion by then and we hadn't spoken in a while.

When I called her back, she told me Mazille had died the day before.

They were organizing a big event.

She even warned me to be prepared because rumors were he was getting canonized.

At least that was what people inside the Legion were thinking.

Mazille died in Jacksonville, Florida.

He was eighty seven years old.

The report said it was from natural causes, a quiet death in bed, Colleagues by his side, maybe his daughter Narmita, just twenty one, holding his hand.

I couldn't stop thinking about it.

This was a man accused of abusing children for more than half a century, boys who had trusted him, even his own children, And after all of it, he left this world without a trial, without even facing the people he had destroyed.

He died with many still calling him a saint, a congregation of thousands mourning him.

But for some of us, that day didn't bring closure.

It just ripped the wounds open all over again.

And for Mozille's oldest son, forra Wul Gonzalez.

It was the day the silence finally broke.

I was arriving to my house and my brother Omar was walking.

He was going out.

He said, hey, roll stop and I said what something happened?

I said what what happened?

He said or that he died?

And I said what and he said, yes, he died, okay, And we stayed quiet.

The feelings were mixed pain, relief, confusion.

But what I will remember most are the tears rolling down his face before he even realized his father, his abuser, the man he could never question while he was alive, was finally gone.

My name is Elena Sada and this is sacred scandal.

The Many Secrets of Marcel Marseille, Episode eight, The Quiet End.

That night, after the news, Raoul closed the door to his room.

The house was quiet, The phone calls had stopped, His mother and his brothers had gone to bed.

It was just him now, the silence and the weight of his secret he had carried since he was seven years old.

Twenty years later, the man who had hunted him was gone, and for the first time, Raoul was able to stand up to him, speaking the words he had swallowed for years.

That night, I said, that's the time that I'm going to talk with you.

That's the only way I could confront him after he died, and I said, why do you do it?

Okay, I couldn't tell you in person, but I know that you can hear me and tell me why did you do that?

The abuses?

Raoul would lie awake, staring at the ceiling, having long conversations with the ghost, talking to his father as if he were still there.

As he replaced everything in his mind, Raoul fell the emptiness of it.

There had been no reparations, not for him, not for his brother, not for any of his victims.

Maciel was gone, and with him the chance for justice.

So you have to start working, to start repairing all the damage that you have made.

And then another memory surfaced.

I promise his father had made.

He always told me that his balloon tat that his will is to give us six million dollars.

And he didn't tell me one time.

He always told me that.

Maziel always told Raoul the same story that one day, when he was gone, there would be money six million dollars set aside in a trust in Switzerland, and not for Raoul, his brothers and his mom.

But when Raoul went looking, the money had disappeared.

He thought that maybe it was just another life from his father.

Maybe the six million had never existed at all, maybe it all had gone to the Legion, or was spent on the lavish trips Masielle took in his final years.

And then the Legion finally gave him a copy of the trust.

The money did exist, but had been withdrawn by Norma Vanus to be given to her daughter, Normita.

Normida was the one always at Mazille's side, the one who received the attention and privileges her half brothers never did.

Maziel made sure she attended the best schools the Legion had in Madrine and Mexico.

He even introduced her in reunions of Concerradas in Rome, not as her daughter, of course, but as a benefactor.

I couldn't believe it when I first heard about his daughter.

What shocked me even more was how quickly the Legion explained it away.

They said it was normal, that she had come from a beautiful love story, that even San Agustin had a son of Normida's childhood, Very little is known.

Her mother, Norma Vanos, first met masiel in a Capulco.

She was still underage when the relationship began.

Norma Normita never made any public statements, but a Spanish newspaper managed to track them down in Madrid years after Masielle's death.

They lived in an upscale apartment building with properties valued at around two million euros.

The mother said she hadn't really known who Marsielle was until the very end, and she also suggested that her daughter had suffered abuse from him, that the drama of that childhood had never really left her.

If that is true, then Normita wasn't simply the daughter who seemed to have everything.

She may also have been another victim, another life damaged by Masille's secrets, but whether that was the case we may never truly know.

After that, both mother and daughter disappeurred completely from public view.

All that remains are a handful of photographs, family snapshots at opilion gatherings, Normita smiling quietly besides her father.

Meanwhile, what we do know is that Raoula and his brothers grew up with far less.

Raoul and Armita were just children growing up side by side, but their paths could not have been more different.

Raoul was left on his own, caring the trauma of the abuse, the betrayal of a father who lied to him for years, lied about being a priest, about having another family, about a will that never existed.

One disappointment after another, the only thing Raoul had left from his father was anger and a need for reparations for himself and for the rest of the victims.

First, we're looking for justice.

Is legitimate that victims of sexual abuse have to look for a retribution.

When Raoul began ask him for compensation, what the legion said was that he only wanted to get money, but that was never the point.

What he wanted was justice.

But when the abuser died, justice died with him.

So the only thing that could make things right was reparations from the institution that had protected Masille's perversions all his life.

Raoul started reaching out to priests who knew the truth of who he was, but none of them gave him an answer, so he wrote a letter meant for the Pope, where he introduced himself as the legitimate son of Masielle.

He stated that since the trial was no longer possible, the least the Church could offer was financial compensation.

All the crimes had to be repaired.

Like when you go and committed a crime, you kill a person, you have to go to jail and you have to pay.

It's the same way.

The thing here is that Church has his own rules, and that's not fair.

No answer came.

Every letter to the Legion was ignored, Every petition to the Vatican vanished into silence.

By then, more victims were stepping forward.

Mazielle was gone, but the damage was still alive and it was spreading.

Raoul began to calculate what fair reparations might look like.

His figures startled even the journalists who interviewed him.

Twenty million dollars.

I know what you're thinking, twenty million dollars is a lot of money, but Raoul had done the math.

With all the schools, the properties, and the endless flow of the nations, twenty million could change for the Legion.

In fact, the real problem was that no one had ever been able to pin down how much they had.

Even the most seasoned reporters tried to pull apart the Legion's finances and kept hitting a wall.

After the break, we'll hear from one of those journalists who followed the Legion's money trail and learned just how deep it went.

We'll be right.

Back, Almost so imperiodista interestalent investigators as onto the corruption as the comment in Tolo nivels.

Raoul Almost is an award winning investigative journalist known for uncovering networks of corruption and organized crime.

He's also the author of The Financial Empire of the Legionaries of Christ, one of the detailed investigations into their fortune and the secrecy that protected it.

Almost was chasing other stories when he happened to cross paths with the legionary priest who had been Masile's secretary in Rome, and as they talked, the priests shared details that left Almost stunt.

Up to then, legion had never really been his focus as a reporter, but at that moment he knew this was a story.

One of the first things Almost learned about the Legionaries of Christ was how others referred to them.

The manera colloquial selia, mavalos, millionarios Cristoo.

The millionaires of Christ.

Joseph prepensulci masiel nosvieli cal exit.

It didn't take long for Almost realize something very simple if Mazielle hadn't been a priest, he could have just been a successful businessman, and in a way he actually was, because that's how he ran the Legion more like a corporation than a church.

This started early on in the forties when the Legion just began.

Mazielle set up a real estate business called Fuentes Protentes.

The whole point was to buy property, and that land that's where the Legion built its fancy schools in Mexico City.

Was Collegi combres Cooly And now what those.

Schools and universities weren't for everyone.

They were only for Mexico's elite.

Families paid a high monthly fee, and the Legion collected thousands of dollars every month, and it didn't stop there.

On top of tuition, families were asked to donate.

One of the most common causes was a project called Manuamiga helping Hand.

The Legions said those donations made it possible for under privileged children to get a free education.

But when almost investigated, he found something very different.

Familia like a studio and this is a squillas Estevan of Legado Sagarcotas Itoavia Meara Mazoso saw Kemucholos professoris a professors Losian communa labor sociale.

The school wasn't free at all, the appearance of those less privileged kids still had to pay fees, and many of those teachers worked without a salary, convinced it was charity that they were serving an honorable cause.

We as conserradas, also worked for free, convinced we were serving a higher cost every person.

We collected from bake sales to big donations while supposed to support our health care and our daily needs, but it didn't.

It went straight to the Legion.

Every day was fundraising for us, and any excuse for fundraising was valid.

As Roberta Grasa remembers, You know Roberta from early episodes.

She's my cousin and journalist who has spent years studying high control groups like me.

She grew up inside the Legion and has many memories of that world.

The constant fundraising was one of them.

They raised funds for Marsiell's you know, birthday.

They raised funds for the next gymnasium at my school.

I don't know if I already told you this, but at my school, they raised money for a gym, to build a gym and a pool.

By the way, that pool for Roberta's school that never happened.

Roberta remembers another moment years later, when she just had a baby.

I couldn't really give them that much, but I offered, you know, I could work for you, I could do whatever you want.

I could volunteer.

And I just saw the priest's face turned.

Sour and churl.

You know.

It was like, ugh, not this again.

I don't need your you know, your personhood that I don't care about that, I want your money.

It was so clear and so disgusting, and I was like, oh my god, what am I doing here?

That was a moment she started slipping away from the Legion, but half of her family stayed in the fault, including Roberta's brother Luis Garza, who would go on to become the Legion's second in command.

So up to this point, we know religion had its properties, the tuition from its elite schools, and then non stop fundraising.

But when even that wasn't enough, Maciel went further.

He directly solicited money from the very wealthiest honors, and he would say things like, oh, the Pope has you know John Paul the second, he he has entrusted me with a very important and secretive matter in the Eastern countries, the Russian countries, to free themselves from the yoke of communism.

And he would get to check or he would get the transfer at an account that was not religions.

Why wasn't it diligions, Oh, because it's for this very important project for the Pope.

And where did all that money go?

Not to the Pope's secret mission.

Clearly that went, you know, to maintain his mistress, as his children, and his sexual tourism that he did every couple of times.

So if you start doing the math where Raoul and almost and many reporters did the numbers get huge.

It added up to hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Some estimates put it at three hundred million, others closer to six almost puts it in a way that's hard to forget.

The Legion brought in so much money it could have bang brailed the Vatican itself.

But with that kind of fortune out in the open, they had to find somewhere to hide it.

After the break, we followed the money into the shadows we're back with Raoul Almost, the journalists who wrote The Financial Empire of the Legionaries of Christ.

Much of what you're about to hear comes from his reporting in that book.

As he began his investigation.

One of the first things almost uncovered where companies registered under Massill's own name, not in Mexico, but in a very different country.

Las Primersquillo localise for Los ange Cendas don the maziell is loke Broi Mazielle at Parisia como fiermante de tres de las and prices Establishas and Panama.

Panama, a country known for its beaches, the canal that connects two oceans, and for something else.

It's offshore companies.

For decades, Panama has been a global hub of banking, secrecy and tax havens.

There are other havens places like Bahamas, Luxembourg, Jersey in the UK, and even Denaware, and the legion had set up companies in all of them.

But here's the question.

Why would a religious ordered like the Legion, an institution already exempt from paying taxes, needed tax heaven.

They used these financial structures to be exempt from taxes from the things that they could not be exempt but more specifically to hide the money.

Now that doesn't mean these accounts were illegal.

It just means that the Legion had access to an incredible amount of money that was not supervised, that was not fiscalized, that you didn't really know where it was going on, how it was used.

We don't even know how much money the Legion was moving through these off short companies.

No one does.

The numbers are getting say, I.

Think it was in twenty twenty one the National Catholic Reporter mentioned that they were moving as much as two hundred ninety five million dollars through those trusts of short trust and subsidiaries.

And then there were the so called investments on paper.

The Legion poured millions into projects that looked noble.

One of them was a retirement home for elderly priests.

It was supposed to be a sanctuary for aging clarity.

They only have one retirement home that we know of, and it's in Cancuna, and it's a very nice house, but it's a humble house.

It hosts a couple of you know, ten twelve priests, I don't know how many, but it's small.

It definitely does not need millions and millions in funding.

But most of those properties weren't even in the Legion's name.

They were registered on their other people outside the Legion barred identities.

Jogerta remembers one visit in particular, when her brother Louis you know him, the legions former CFO showed up asking their siblings to sign papers for a new trust.

On paper, it was meant to hold funds for the retirement of priests.

It was a noble cause.

And I we already say, oh, that's fantastic, and he asked them to sign for it, to build it under their name, and I wondered at that time, why is this happened?

I mean, why would you ask my brothers and sisters to do that if it's such a legitimate endeavor.

And of course the money that that trust fun was departoma papers exposed that trust amount of money and it was millions and millions and millions of dollars.

That humble retirement home in Cancun.

Investigators later found that that project hid another one of Marcille's schemes, another way to shuffle money.

Around topeescadimas Manneharan's momento constructor.

As I said, Cargo La labor.

Therification, Tanto, the La Institutionkativas come inclusive the Princess.

The construction company building most of the Legion's schools, and even projects for outside businesses also belonged to the Legion.

In other words, the money was going out the front door and then walking right back in through the back.

The Legion ran it.

All sports clubs, we have centers, a medical device company, a supplemental business.

They even opened a tourist resort in the Holy Land, on land gifted by the Vatican itself.

And if that wasn't enough, they went ahead and created their own financial institution.

And this they own a postal the hobiness see for impulsar loto gamento, the creditors.

Senora's the condition of Milda.

The sectoris popularists.

It wasn't exactly a bank in the traditional sense.

It was more like a landing operation.

One were people who struggled to get credit anywhere else could.

Come and barren money perkwando los participants in estate and Ativa and para queso era ready to abily versific Carci and peso a transform marse and on institution and financier.

What started as charity turned into a business.

The operation grew diversified and eventually morphed into a full flashed financial institution what today is known as Bangko Compartamos, known for charging very high interest rates on its loans.

The Legion strategy was simple, make money, hide money, spread it around, and then, like the savvy businessman, Masielle was invested.

Abia Impersions and Actions, then press As the Armies, then press as the anti Conceptivus, then press Us and Sumamento, con companies and pornographia.

They invested in almost everything you can think of, from KFC to AT and T, energy, oil mining, telecom, soft, drinks, entertainment, and not just that, they also putting money into companies tied to alcohol, tobacco, gambling, breath control, and even pornography.

Total Lokeroviano or the Stava mal aos Evan lumbertian anestos pondos in bersionestass all over the world.

The Legion preached that these things were since off limits for the faithful, and yet behind the curtain they were pouring their followers' money straight into the very industries they condemned.

And that double life didn't end with Masiele's death.

The structure he built outlived him.

See yes in Aberta's parents Loke cambiero ferro, los caracas pero el mismo mechanismosine replicando see los mismos vicios incluso Lamentablo mine Jodia Casta a los rdros Thesa's conductor, sexualists, Elicitas de Maciel sir replicaren Era on a le jon de mitas Masiel.

Even after their leader's downfall, the Legion never truly reformed.

They only changed the faces at the top, but the same had stayed, the secrecy, the money games, even the abuses, as almost all those.

The Legion became a group of imitators of Monsieur.

So the same as the Castle of Cassideron.

Then, and he wasn't exaggerating.

There weren't just a few incidents.

There were dozens of priests accused, protected by silence, chilled by the same machinery that once guarded Mossiel.

Behind every cover up, more victims, hundreds of them.

Massiel may be gone, but his shadow still lingers, because the crimes didn't stop, They just went deeper underground.

That's next on Sircus Scandal, The many secrets of Marcel Massil Sacres Scandal The Many Secrets of Marcel Masill is a production of A half podcast in partnership with Iheartmichael Dula Podcast Network, and is hosted by me Elena Sada, written by Menissa Hendrix and Alvalo saz Pedes, Produced by alvaaloces Pedes and Robert Tagarza.

Research and reporting by Robert Tagarza, edited by Jasmine Rometo with the help of Carmen Gratol, fact checking by Annapla Tovar, the vocal coach for me Elena Sada is in a Tabia.

Executive producers at a Half Podcast are Carmen Graterol, Isaac Lee, and j h KR mixing on sound design by Patrick and Jones, original music by Darko and I Am based on Patrick Hart's original composition.

Executive reduce users that I heard are Leo Gomez and Arlene Santana.

Alexis Cardoza also serves as producer.

Circars Scandal was created by Melanie Bartley and Paula Varos