CONSPIRACY CLAIM #26

Leo Lyon Zagami, who has also worked under the name Leo Young as a record producer, radio presenter and club DJ, presents himself online as a former insider of the world’s most secret societies. According to his own claims, he was “a high level member of the Italian Illuminati, a 33rd degree freemason, a true insider and a high-member of the infamous Freemasonic P2 Lodge”, a member of a “Masonic Executive Committee of Monte Carlo”, and even the “prince” being prepared to take over from the P2 leader Licio Gelli. He also claims that the Illuminati are controlled by the Jesuits in the Vatican, an idea answered in Claim #25.

The claim on this page has two parts: that the Illuminati still exist and operate today, and that Mr Zagami is a former member. Both are false.

Do the Illuminati still exist?

No. The Order of the Illuminati was founded in Bavaria in 1776 by a university professor, Adam Weishaupt, and was banned by the Bavarian government in 1785; its papers were seized and published. There is no evidence that it survived. The belief that it carried on in secret was invented in 1797 by two writers looking for someone to blame for the French Revolution, and it has been recycled ever since (see Claim #16 and Claim #23). For the full history of the order, see our page on the Bavarian Illuminati.

It follows that nobody alive today can be a former member of the original Illuminati. Anyone claiming to be one is describing a modern invention, not the eighteenth-century order.

Mr Zagami’s titles, checked

The Masonic research site masonicinfo.com examined his claims in detail, and they fall apart one after another:

• The “Masonic Executive Committee of Monte Carlo”. The whole of Monaco has only one Masonic lodge, Port of Hercules Lodge No. 4626, founded in 1924 under the United Grand Lodge of England and governed from London. The “Comitato Esecutivo Massonico” appears online only alongside Mr Zagami’s own name.
• “A 33rd degree Freemason”. In his own interviews he lists a string of titles, including “Grand inspector general 33 degree” alongside a “90 degree” and a “95 degree”. The 90th and 95th degrees belong to the separate Rite of Memphis-Misraïm (covered elsewhere on this site), not to the governing bodies of regular Freemasonry. The 33rd degree of the Scottish Rite is an honour conferred and recorded by the Supreme Council of each country, and he has never produced a patent for it or said which Supreme Council conferred it.
• “A high member of the P2 lodge” and Licio Gelli’s heir. P2 had its Masonic charter withdrawn in 1976. Gelli kept it going as an illegal, clandestine organisation until 1984, and the Italian parliament dissolved it by law in 1982 (see Claim #07). Yet by Mr Zagami’s own account, he was not initiated into Freemasonry at all until 13 April 1993, in Rome: eleven years after P2 was outlawed and seventeen years after it ceased to be a Masonic lodge.
• “A high level member of the Italian Illuminati”. There is no such body, and he has offered no proof beyond his own statements. His own music biography once described him, with a smiley face, as a “wanna be Illuminati”.

Was he ever a Freemason at all?

Here we want to be accurate rather than simply dismissive, and to show where each fact comes from.

• By his own account, he was initiated on 13 April 1993 in Rome, and later joined “Kirby Lodge 2818”, which he describes as a London lodge connected with the Bank of England, saying: “I was part of it for a period of time.” In the same interview he also names two Italian lodges, Minerva and Garibaldi.
• Kirby Lodge No. 2818 is real. Historical Masonic press records show it was a London lodge under the United Grand Lodge of England, constituted in 1900, which grew out of a lodge of instruction meeting under the warrant of the Bank of England Lodge.
• He did not stay. The Masonic research site masonicinfo.com, which examined documents Mr Zagami himself sent to it, reports that he was a member “for a preciously short time” of a regular lodge under the United Grand Lodge of England, and was expelled “not even two years later, failing to even attend the hearing which was held about his behavior”.
• Afterwards, according to the same source, he associated himself with the so-called “Regular Grand Lodge of England”, a breakaway body which, despite its name, is not recognised by the United Grand Lodge of England and is regarded as irregular.

So the truth is the reverse of the story he tells. By his own dates he could not have been a P2 insider or Licio Gelli’s heir, and he has never shown any evidence of a 33rd-degree patent, a Monte Carlo “executive committee” or an “Italian Illuminati”. What the record does support is a short-lived membership of an ordinary London lodge that ended in expulsion.

Conclusion: The Illuminati were abolished in 1785 and do not exist today, so no one can be a former member. Leo Zagami’s claims to be an Illuminati insider, a 33rd-degree Freemason, a P2 leader and a member of a Monte Carlo “executive committee” are all unsupported, and several are impossible. The one Masonic membership that can be documented, in a London lodge after his own stated initiation in 1993, ended with his expulsion.