Police arrested two members of France’s parachute regiment outside the home of Marie-Hélène Dini, a business coach and secretary-general of the European Mentoring and Coaching Council France, in July 2020.
Under questioning, the soldiers said they believed the French state had tasked them with eliminating Dini, claiming she worked for Israel’s Mossad spy agency.
Investigators traced the real instruction to Jean-Luc Bagur, the 69-year-old vénérable maître of the Athanor Masonic Lodge in the Paris suburb of Puteaux, who was Dini’s direct professional rival in the business coaching world.
Bagur had allegedly instructed Frédéric Vaglio, a fellow lodge member and entrepreneur, to arrange Dini’s killing for a fee of 70,000 euros.
Twenty-Two in the Dock
Six years later, on 30 March 2026, twenty-two defendants walked into Paris’s cour d’assises charged with murder, attempted murder, aggravated assault and criminal conspiracy, all on behalf of a mafia network operating through the former Athanor lodge.
The accused included four military personnel from France’s Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, two police officers, a retired agent of the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieure, a security guard, several business executives, a doctor and an engineer.
Thirteen defendants risk possible life sentences, chief among them Bagur, Vaglio and Daniel Beaulieu, a 72-year-old former DGSI operative who allegedly ran the network’s hit squad infrastructure.
Beaulieu’s lieutenant, Sébastien Leroy, admitted in police custody to carrying out the majority of the Athanor network’s assaults, robberies and murders, including the 2018 killing of racing driver Laurent Pasquali, whose body investigators found in a forest.
Freemasonry’s Long Secular Arc
The Athanor affair surprises precisely because of what French Freemasonry has traditionally stood for. The Grand Orient de France, founded in 1728, is the oldest Masonic obedience in continental Europe, its foundational values drawn from Enlightenment secularism, civic equality and rational governance.
The Grand Orient distinguished itself further from Anglo-American Freemasonry by dropping the requirement for belief in a Supreme Being in the 19th century, openly welcoming atheists and agnostics and treating its lodges as reformist workshops on education policy, civil law and labour rights.
French lodges actively shaped the Republic’s institutional architecture from the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man through to the laïcité laws of 1905. After the Second World War, French Freemasonry retreated from political life toward philosophical and spiritual reflection, its membership having fallen by two-thirds under Nazi occupation, leaving its public influence considerably diminished.
A Small Lodge, a Private Criminal Capture
The Athanor lodge was a small, obscure body of roughly twenty members, far removed from the grand institutional histories of the Grand Orient or the Grande Loge de France.
What the investigation produced was a portrait of private criminal capture: a handful of individuals who used the lodge’s secrecy, its culture of brotherhood and its access to state networks as a vehicle for personal enrichment and score-settling.
The organisation drew members from France’s professional and security establishment, and the fraternal bonds of the lodge provided the trust infrastructure for what prosecutors describe as a mafia operating in plain sight of the state.
Crimes escalated from petty revenge, including arson against a car to suppress evidence of financial fraud, to homicide and contract killing, with the lodge’s oath of fraternal silence serving in practice as operational cover for organised crime.
Secrecy as a Structural Vulnerability
The Athanor affair poses a question French institutions prefer to leave unasked: what happens to structures built on secrecy if bad actors value that secrecy for self-interest rather than principle?
Jean-William Vézinet, lawyer for targeted business coach Dini, captured the collective horror of the case: “What my client found terrifying is the fact that the key figures in this case — police officers, former DGSI agents and freemasons — are precisely the people who are supposed to act for the good of society.”
The presence of active-duty DGSE officers alongside retired intelligence operatives and serving police in the same dock raises a structural alarm about the permeability of France’s security apparatus to private criminal use. Daniel Beaulieu’s apparent self-harm in custody, which left him disabled and with what his lawyer described as “impaired concentration,” adds a tragic opacity to an affair the trial will spend months untangling.
A Institution’s Name, a Few Men’s Crimes
French Freemasonry as an institution warrants clear separation from the Athanor affair in any public accounting. The Grand Orient de France enumerates among its stated principles social solidarity, secularism, citizenship and environmental responsibility, maintaining hundreds of lodges across France and internationally that operate within the law.
The Athanor lodge was a tiny, self-contained group, where a few individuals recruited a murder-for-hire network through private contacts and state connections, with Masonic membership providing cover rather than ideological cause.
What France watches now is a republic putting its own networks on trial, a recognition that the overlap between state power and private secrecy produces real victims: a murdered racing driver, an ambushed businesswoman, and a trade unionist whose life narrowly survived the arrangement.
The trial’s real accounting, whatever the cour d’assises delivers in the months ahead, will rest on whether France can address the structural permeability between sworn secrecy, intelligence work and private interest inside a republic that has long housed all three under the same social canopy.
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