P2 was led by former Mussolini torture goon and self-proclaimed lifelong fascist Licio Gelli. First rising to Masonic power in the '60s, by 1980, Gelli hosted regular meetings of Italy's top generals at his private villa, where he exercised substantial political influence. After the lodge helped Juan Peron return to power in Argentina, a former Italian prime minister witnessed Peron "kneel in front of Gelli." Perhaps more disturbingly, Venerable Master Gelli was even an honored guest at Ronald Reagan's inauguration.

When P2's activities came to light in 1981, it led to the immediate resignation of Italian Prime Minister Arnaldo Forlani and his entire P2-infested cabinet. At least two implicated political figures attempted suicide. Gelli himself hightailed it to Switzerland, but was later extradited and convicted on charges of bank fraud. Oh, and also for helping to cover up the 1980 bombing of a Bologna train station by Italian neo-Nazis, which killed 85 people and wounded hundreds more. Plus they probably ruined game night down at the lodge for at least a decade.

Enter Captain Colin Wallace, British Army psychological warfare specialist. For two entire years, Wallace and crew deliberately placed "black candles and upside-down crucifixes" in some of the most war-torn areas of Belfast, while army press officers leaked stories of black masses and satanic rituals. This was all to play into newfound public fears sparked by the recent release of The Exorcist -- the movie that just keeps on giving.

While it could be said that Wallace played people's superstitions like a master fiddler, the Satanic Panic wasn't even his chef-d'oeuvre. That had to be his suggestion that the nylon underwear of female IRA members was building up static electricity and subsequently causing them to pop off like ginger bottle rockets. The Sunday Mirror swallowed Wallace's BS hook, line, and sinker, and ran possibly the single greatest headline in history: "Danger in Those Frilly Panties."

via Wiki Commons
We didn't think you could get a PhD in trolling, but there you go.

The Labour Party was obviously buried beneath a landslide of Conservative votes.

There was just one problem with the aforementioned letter: It was a forgery leaked by posh MI5 agents. They had no love for the Labour Party, what with their higher taxes, workers' rights, and giving servants a ten-minute head start before hunting them on horseback. According to Foreign Office chief historian Gill Bennett, the letter was almost certainly created by Russian exiles who opposed the Bolsheviks. Now, we may never know who among the Conservatives passed the letter along to The Daily Mail, but one thing is clear: Some things never change, and The Daily Mail is those things' king.

The "Cocaine Coup" kicked off in July, with swastika-wearing neo-fascists racing through the streets, massacring union leaders and other political opponents. After becoming "president," General Luis Garcia Meza surprisingly vowed to honor the overthrown government's promise to crack down on cocaine traffickers ... but only Suarez's competitors, of course.

via Wiki Commons
"White pow(d)er!"

Fortunately, a government of coked-up Nazis turned out to be a step too far, even for 1980s South America (which otherwise had quite a high tolerance for both coke and Nazis). The coup collapsed after mere months. Garcia Meza is still imprisoned to this day, while the onetime King of Cocaine served a mere seven years of his 15-year sentence before being released to find that his finances were looking none too regal. Barbie was eventually extradited and tried on 41 counts of crimes against humanity. And that ... was an incredibly fun sentence to write.

Of course, that meant the white man now had a reason to want that s****y chunk of Oklahoma after all.

In May of 1921, Mollie Burkhart -- an Osage woman married to Ernest Burkhart, a white man -- discovered that her older sister, Anna Brown, had gone missing. Days later, Anna's body was discovered in a ravine, a single gunshot to the back of her head. Next to drop was Mollie's mother, a purported victim of bad whiskey. Then, early one morning in 1923, Mollie heard an explosion and ran to the house of her other sister, Rita Smith, only to find that it had been leveled by a bomb. Rita had died in the explosion, as had any vestige of subtlety.

While Mollie's family may have been the most notably affected, the conspiracy wasn't limited to her. Dozens of Osage (as well as anyone who dared to help them) began dying under similarly mysterious circumstances, right around the time they found oil. When lawyer W.W. Vaughan vowed to help with the case, he was tossed from a moving train, while oilman Barney McBride wound up with a crushed skull and 20 stab wounds after his trip to Washington to plead for an investigation.

In the end, the FBI managed to connect the deaths to local rancher William Hale, the self-proclaimed "King of the Osage Hills" ... and her husband's uncle.

Smithsonian
His final victim: fashion.

Though it became clear that Hale had masterminded a plot to inherit the Osage oil rights by marrying off his weak-willed nephew to Mollie and then whittling her family down one by one, in the end, he was convicted of a single murder: that of Henry Roan. Conveniently, Hale had taken out a hefty life insurance policy right before Roan was shot in the head. Luckily for Mollie, Hale's arrest came in time to prevent her husband Ernest from slowly poisoning her to death.

Maybe "lucky" isn't the right word here ...

When the Japanese-Mafia-Orange-Priest-Jet scandal finally came to light in 1976, it led to the swift arrest of former Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka and the penning of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the U.S. After Kodama ignored public cries to commit ritual seppuku for his sizable role in the affair, Mitsuyasu Maeno -- amateur pilot, strict adherent to the Bushido code, and (no bullshit) softcore porn star -- took matters into his own hands.

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Don't ask where those hands have been.

He fired up his Piper Cherokee and kamikazed it straight into Kodama's sprawling residence ... missing Kodama entirely. Maeno himself was killed in the attack, while Kodama succumbed to a stroke a few months later.

And now, if you'll excuse us, we've got ourselves a "based on true events" screenplay to pitch.

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