In mid-July, after more than three months of hearings and roughly 600 hours of debate, a special Paris assize court wrapped up the long-running “Athanor Affaire" trial, one of the largest criminal trials in French history. Seventeen of the 22 defendants aged 30 through 73 were convicted of crimes tied to members of a former Masonic lodge. What appeared at first to be widely isolated incidents turned out to be part of a shockingly wide-ranging crime cell run by a tiny group of rogue Masonic lodge members who hired others to eliminate, intimidate or murder business rivals, debtors, or just annoying inconveniences.
The most serious charges included aggravated violence, attempted extortion, murder, and attempted murder by an organized gang—which all turned out to have been plotted for wildly trivial reasons. Sentences ranged from six months suspended to 30 years’ imprisonment – heavy time for the actual organizers and the ringleader, lighter or suspended sentences for lesser roles, and five full acquittals (including the accused gunman in the 2018 killing of a race driver named Laurent Pasquali and others). Some sentences came in below the prosecution’s requests, which a few observers called a partial setback for the case.
At the center of the network were four key figures who belonged to Athanor Lodge. Clients paid, the organizers recruited enforcers and hit men (including low-level intelligence agency personnel and others), and in some cases spun elaborate fairy tales that the jobs were part of top secret state work for the DSGE (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, which translates to the Directorate General for External Security, the French intelligence agency analogous to the American CIA). The four principal members were:
- Frédéric Vaglio (ex-journalist and communicator turned economic intelligence investigator), the mastermind of the gang who actually brought in the contracts, was sentenced to 25 years. He had ordered Daniel Beaulieu to arrange the murder of Marie-Hélène Dini, a competitor in Vaglio's consulting business, in 2020.
- Daniel Beaulieu (former interior intelligence/DCRI-DGSI officer) was the chief organizer of the Athanor gang. Before retiring in 2009, he spent most of his career as a police officer in general intelligence (RG), eventually rising to be Deputy Head of Division at the DCRI (Central Directorate of Internal Intelligence, now DGSI). According to press accounts, the judge stated: "The court considered that you were the linchpin without whom nothing would have been possible." He received the toughest sentence at 30 years, and the fact that he had been a former police officer contributed to his harshest term. Throughout their trial, he and Vaglio had blamed each other for their crimes. Beaulieu, 73, is in poor health after attempting suicide last year while awaiting trial in prison, which left him disabled and with "impaired concentration."
- Sébastien Leroy: (Past Venerable Master of the lodge) was "the muscle" involved in the most violent acts, from beating elected officials all the way back to the 2018 murder of a race car driver, Laurent Pasquali (whose body was later found buried). Beaulieu passed Dini's hit contract to Leroy, a private security officer, who recruited two young DGSE guards, Pierre Bourdin and Carl Esnault. The guards believed they were being recruited to carry out authorized homicide operations for French intelligence by pretending it was a secret intelligence mission against a Mossad agent for "national security" reasons. Leroy was sentenced to 27 years in prison, five years more than the prosecution had requested.
- Jean-Luc Bagur: found guilty of complicity in the attempted murder of Dini and sentenced to 16 years. Investigators eventually connected a link in the case to Bagur, 69, who was a rival business consultant to Dini and the Venerable Maitre (Venerable Master, the French equivalent to Worshipful Master) of Athanor Lodge.
These four core members allegedly abused the structure and 'secrecy' of the lodge for what prosecutors called a “PME du crime” — a criminal small business providing paid “services” ranging from intimidation and industrial espionage to assault and murder.
For those in the press and online with a bone to pick against the Freemasons and who want to use this sensational case to smear the whole fraternity: When lurid allegations regarding the lodge were first brought to the attention of the Grand Lodge, it was immediately dissolved and its accused members suspended or expelled. These were individual criminal convictions. The court judged specific people for specific acts. Neither Freemasonry as an institution, the GLAMF, nor every member of the former Athanor lodge was on trial or found guilty. One small group of individuals allegedly abused their lodge connections for private criminal profit. That does not make the Craft, or French Masonry generally, responsible.
The case covered acts mainly from 2018–2022, including:
- The 2018 murder of rally race driver Laurent Pasquali, whose body was later found buried). The alleged assassin was acquitted over lack of concrete evidence; the couple who had purportedly approached the Athanor group to kill Pasquali over a bad debt was also acquitted because the court found they had not provably ordered his killing.
- Failed assassination plots against business coach Marie-Hélène Dini and union activist Hassan Touzani.
- Various assaults, a vehicle arson, theft and espionage-style jobs, and related conspiracy charges.
The activities were revealed after two DGSE-linked men were arrested in 2020 near Dini’s home while preparing her assassination. The core Masonic group preyed on public misconceptions of what Masonry is. What became clear throughout the trial was the way the Athanor lodge group abused Freemasonry's teachings of secrecy as a symbol of honor to convince gullible men that it was a recruiting front for the French espionage services. One of the most alarming aspects of the case was that the legitimate DGSE agency did not immediately get in front of the story and deny that it really was plotting the killing of a female Israeli Mossad agent, especially on French soil. They seemed just as content to keep up the public perception that they were engaging in murderous espionage as the Athanor Lodge group was to promote their own phony image as spooky spy masters.
For regular Freemasons, the takeaway is straightforward and unflattering: a handful of people in one lodge used the fraternal setting and membership contacts as cover and recruitment ground for a for-profit crime ring. French Masonry as a whole was not on trial, but the episode has already fueled the usual “secret society gone rogue” commentary. There were just enough members of Athanor Lodge in the law enforcement, security and intelligence-gathering world to furiously stoke the fires of the "dirty cops in the Freemasons!" media headlines and the conspiracy monger universe.
The lodge itself is gone, the convictions are on the books, and it's only a matter of time before we see the effects on the fraternity and on public perceptions of Masonry.
Athanor Lodge 759 was legitimately chartered by the Grande Loge de l'Alliance Maçonnique Française (the Grand Lodge of the French Masonic Alliance, or GL-AMF), which was created in its present form in 2012. At the time, that grand lodge was largely formed by some 15,000 disgruntled Masons who had split from the Grand Loge National Français (GLNF) over a massive internal power struggle involving then-GLNF Grand Master Stifani. (see HERE for beginnings of that long tale). The GLNF is the French grand lodge overwhelmingly recognized throughout the world as regular, and the 2012 incident was an enormous upheaval at the time. It took years for the dust to settle, and the GLNF was never able to return to its former size.
The GL-AMF today has about 15,400 members in 684 lodges, and a strong argument can be made that they are perfectly regular in origin. In other words, it's not some small-time, bogus grand lodge masquerading as something it isn't. Like all regular, recognized grand lodge obediences, they admit only men, require a belief in God, and work accepted rituals. So, Athanor Lodge started out as a legit lodge of Freemasons. But like the old P2 lodge scandal with gangster/terrorist Licio Gelli in Italy back in the 1980s, it got twisted into someone's private hideout for criminals.
When these stories began to hit the news six years ago, I'm told that GL-AMF Grand Master Fred Picavet suspended the lodge and all of its members, including two of those currently indicted. Online chatter in France is that the lodge's Venerable Maitre, Jean-Luc Bagur, was suspended back in 2020, even before any of these stories came out, for non-payment of dues, and that he went right on running the lodge meetings, ignoring the order. My understanding its that all of the former lodge members accused in the Athanor Affaire case were suspended by the Grand Lodge or the Grand Master and will be subsequently be tried for expulsion now that the verdicts are all in from the court case.
