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The faxes generated from Follieri Group in New York that landed on Giovanni Carrù’s desk in the Congregation for the Clergy did not go unnoticed among other priests in the office. Gossip is the mother’s milk of bureaucracy. For Andrea and Raffaello, the information on American church properties that Carrù sent was worth the investment.

The Follieri Group website listed Raffaello as chairman-CEO and his father, Pasquale, as president. A native of Foggia, in the southern region of Puglia, Pasquale Follieri had done real estate work in Italy. His bio said he was a lawyer for two Italian banks; an expert in arbitration; a member of “the Court of Cassation” (comparable to the United States Supreme Court); an experienced journalist and a newspaper editor—but no mention of his conviction “in an Italian court [for] misappropriating more than $300,000 from a failed resort company whose assets he had been charged with overseeing,” as the Wall Street Journal would report. He appealed the conviction.5

Born in 1978 in Foggia, Raffaello had gone north, to Rome, to study at university. He lived for a time with the actress Isabella Orsini. Pasquale was having legal problems when his son dropped out of college. Raffaello founded Beauty Planet, a cosmetic supplies business with “the prestige hair and body care line Shatoosh.” The Follieri Group website said he sold the company in 2002 and joined a “London-based holding company” for oil trading and diamond mines. No mention that Beauty Planet lost money or the London company tanked.6

Raffaello made his first trip to New York at nineteen. Back in Italy, he hungered for Manhattan, to make his name in the city of cities. He met Andrea Sodano at a party in Rome. He barely had pocket change when he returned to New York in 2003, but Raffaello was fueled by rockets of ambition. Pasquale helped him establish the company. Andrea Sodano played surrogate for “the Vatican” in pitching potential investors and clients. The plan was to buy church properties below market value and develop them for lucrative resales.

When Raffaello and Andrea pulled into Washington, D.C., for the American bishops’ autumn 2005 convention, a beaming Cardinal Francis George of Chicago greeted them in the lobby of the Capitol Hill Hyatt Regency. George’s radiant delight made an impression on Joe Feuerherd, the Washington correspondent for National Catholic Reporter. Feuerherd took note of Cardinal Sodano’s nephew. Slight of build, bespectacled, about five foot ten, with salt-and-pepper hair, Andrea had a patina of worldly experience that stood out in high relief from Follieri’s effusive, youthful charm.

As it happened, Joe Feuerherd had worked in the affordable housing field earlier in his career; he knew how lenders and public agencies come together on big-ticket projects to secure funding. Many bishops have staff to manage their dioceses’ real estate holdings; some help develop housing for the elderly and low-income, sometimes under church auspices. The Conference for Catholic Facility Management is a professional association in its own right. As Follieri headed off to a Hyatt hospitality suite to welcome bishops, priests, and lay staffers, Feuerherd wondered how he got his money. Andrea Sodano, with a flip of the cell phone, had digital photographs to show of Uncle Angelo in the Vatican.7 “When Raffaello wants to meet with the bishop, they put the touch on from the Vatican and they get the meeting,” a church source told Feuerherd. “They’re about as connected as it gets.”

The Follieri Group’s website announced “contracts for the acquisition of over $100 million of church property in three U.S. cities.” Follieri’s business director wrote to a religious order:

Our intention is to purchase properties from dioceses and religious organizations, to renovate them, and if necessary, convert them to new uses, such as housing (lower, middle and upper income, depending on the area) and commercial use …

Because of the Follieri family’s deep commitment to the Catholic church and