The Cenci Foundation

The Cenci Foundation (CF) was the new name given to the body simply known as The Foundation prior to the late 1940s. At this time, The Foundation (which had been an adjunct of The Third Reich) was reconstituted after Francesco Cenci (then a rising young American playboy and socialite with rumoured Mafia connections) helped to provide the money to re-establish an independent CF following the fall of the Reich. His rise was assisted by the lobbying of his lawyer and cousin, Marco Adagio.

With a typical arrogance, Cenci reflected his controlling interest by renaming the institution after himself. The institution gradually took on work for the CIA (e.g. Project MONARCH as part of MKULTRA), reflecting its reorientation towards a post War recalibration of influence, with Cenci increasingly recognised as a liability by his fellows.

Having experimented with mind control on both his susceptible second wife, Lucrezia, and his iron willed daughter Beatrice, which may have sorely tried the patience of his detractors, and having seen two sons, Cristoforo and Rocco, perish in Vietnam, he was murdered, most likely at the hands of Beatrice. Rumour is that her brother, Giacomo, Lucrezia and Beatrice’s lover, an FBI detective on stakeout of the Cenci palazzo named Orsino, were complicit, but Beatrice killed her father in 1971. Giacomo, newly become an heir, found himself unexpectedly at the head of The Foundation, as it closed ranks to protect him; Lucrezia, alongside her son Bernardo, was spirited away to a safe house by the FBI in a last attempt to salvage witness testimony: Beatrice was railroaded into taking the fall for the consequences and executed in the electric chair, across state lines, in 1974. As this was otherwise interdicted in New York by Governor Rockefeller in 1965, it must have been a result obtained by bribery.

The Church Committee, in its 1975 Senatorial inquiry into abuses by the CIA and FBI, dug into the affairs of the Cenci Foundation, but Giacomo, who had by this time been prevailed upon to rename the outfit simply The Foundation, managed to sidestep all but superficial investigation. There were no additional testimonies, as by this time Lucrezia, never recovered from MONARCH and a youth of addiction, had been institutionalized and taken her own life in 1973, while her son Bernardo was still only a minor and his testimony felt questionable in the absence of his mother. Marco Adagio is known to have been Giacomo’s counsel, and an assiduous user of legal loopholes.

The appellation CF (for ‘Cenci Foundation’) was still commonly in use for cataloguing purposes by The Foundation long after Francesco’s death.