Exchange Stabilization Fund

One of my favorite money laundering stories is told by Christopher Simpson, in his marvelous book Blowback, regarding one of the first Exchange Stabilization Fund slush fund operations after WWII. The ESF is a fund run by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for the Secretary of the Treasury.  According to Simpson, this first operation, run from offices of Allen and John Foster Dulles at Sullivan & Cromwell in New York, used monies seized by the Nazis from Jewish victims and then seized from the Nazis by the Allies (and not returned to the victims), to rig the Italian elections for the conservatives at the request of the Vatican.