God's Banker (13 page)

Hardly a day went by without Suprafin buying where others were
selling. And, of course, not only was the share price being supported,
but Ambrosiano—or whoever truly owned Suprafin—was quite
illegally strengthening control of the bank itself.

Initially most of the shares thus bought made the comparatively
short journey to Liechtenstein. One of the first recipients, for exam­ple, was an
anstalt
in Vaduz called Ulricor, set up by an obliging
lawyer there in March 1974, with a capital of just 20,000 Swiss francs.

Seven months later it was buying 170,000 shares in Ambrosiano or 1.7
per cent of the total—in keeping with its suitably innocuous declared
purpose of "taking shareholdings on behalf of itself or others in
industrial and commercial enterprises". Ulricor was to remain faith­ful right up to the end. In June 1982 it ranked as the eighth largest
single shareholder, with 1.2 per cent, or 590,000 shares of the much
enlarged capital of Ambrosiano. The original buying was carried out
upon instructions from the Banca del Gottardo (in other words from
Calvi); between 1974 and 1976 two of its administrators, with power
of attorney, were Fernando Garzoni and Francesco Bolgiani, chair­man and general manager respectively of Banca del Gottardo. And
Ulricor, it was generally assumed, was technically owned by the IOR,
the Vatican bank.

The Ulricor pattern was to become familiar. In 1974, three more
strange-sounding names from Vaduz—Sapi, Rekofinanz and Sektorinvest—became prominent in the register of Banco Ambrosiano
shareholders. Shortly afterwards two more, called Finkurs and
Sansinvest, popped up. The next year Liechtenstein was sup­plemented by the more distant and even safer shelter of Panama,
where registered companies did not even have to provide accounts.
The first Panamanian shareholders were two insubstantial creatures
called La Fidele and Finprogram. In October 1977 another four
companies coalesced to join them in the steamy heat of Central
America, bearing the fetching names of Orfeo, Lantana, Cascadilla
and Marbella. The quartet was set up simultaneously to take delivery
of 1,020,000 Ambrosiano shares, equal to 5.1 per cent of its capital.
All were subsidiaries of Manic S. A. in Luxembourg.

In all, the diligent Suprafin had expedited abroad no less than 15.4
per cent of Banco Ambrosiano; a proportion which, given the
fragmented structure of the capital of Calvi's bank, amounted to
control. The recipients, as we have seen, were shell companies,
consisting of little more than an entry in a lawyer's books; but all of
them were in one way or another managed by Calvi and his bank,
whatever the confusing changes of name they might sometimes later
undergo. The buying orders placed with Suprafin had come first from
Banca del Gottardo and then from Cisalpine Overseas, Ambro-
siano's subsidiary in Nassau. The head of Lantana, which like its
three Panamanian sisters had a token capital of $10,000, was Pierre
Siegenthaler, President of Cisalpine and also by now the honorary
consul
of
Italy
in the Bahamas.
*

In 1978, as will
shortly be explained, the
Bank
of
Italy's inspectors
guessed at, but unfortunately could
not prove the
gathering
fraud.
For Suprafin's
purchase of Ambrosiano shares had cost 37 billion
lire,
or some $60
million at the then exchange rate. This outlay
would
follow the
Pacchetti deal as the second—
and
easily the
most impor­tant—cause
of final calamity.

Obscuring
everything was the collaboration, witting
or unwitting,
of the Vatican Bank,
which extended well beyond
the IOR's
probable
ownership
of
Ulricor. For as
early as
November
1974
the Banca
del
Gottardo
had set up in the name of the
IOR yet
another
Panamanian
company. It
was called the United Trading
Corporation, and would,
like Manic
in Luxembourg, be
no
small cog in the
machinery
of
financial deception Calvi was so skilfully constructing.

With
little delay, United Trading Corporation
was
busy estab­lishing various nominee subsidiaries, including two in Liechtenstein
called
Imparfin
and Teclefin.
When
the Bonomis (and
Anli) with­drew
from Suprafin, these two little companies stepped in to replace
them.
So
it was that the
IOR
came to possess the company which had
purchased on the Milan stock market effective mastery of
Banco
Ambrosiano. Formal acknowledgement came in a letter, dated
Janu­
ary 20 1975, which the Vatican bank sent to Calvi, stating in carefully
chosen words that Suprafin "was of its pertinence"; in simpler terms,
that the
IOR
owned it. The Vatican bank merely requested Ambro­siano to manage Suprafin on its behalf, and supply periodic reports of
its
activities. Whether those reports were sent is not known. Indeed,
the letter itself subsequently became something of a puzzle. Some
would take it at face value; but other students of the intrigue offered a
different theory—that the letter, whatever the date it bore, was in fact
written and provided early in
1978,
just before the inspectors of the
Bank
of
Italy
exposed the function of Suprafin, as Calvi surely knew
they
would.

In Italy
it is not necessarily illegal for a company to acquire shares
in
itself; but the maximum permitted level of purchases must be
published in its annual report and approved by shareholders.
Hence

*L'Espresso, September 6, 1981.

the need for the IOR to be interposed, if Calvi was to preserve his
scheme; and thence the possibility that the letter was made available
long after its purported date.

The central bank in 1978 would not conceal its suspicion that in
practice Suprafin to all intents and purposes belonged to Banco
Ambrosiano itself. But of course its officials had no power to visit and
question Marcinkus, Mennini and de Stroebel, safe in a foreign
country in the heart of Rome. For the time being Calvi's financial
fortress was impregnable. He was by then looking to his political
defences too.

There are few more depressing aspects of the career of Roberto Calvi
than his relations with Italy's politicians. From 1975 onwards, both
directly and indirectly, his bank dispensed money across the political
spectrum. The beneficiaries included the Christian Democrats, the
Socialists and even the Communists. By the end, in June 1982, the
Communists would owe Ambrosiano 11 billion lire—not to mention
more than 20 billion lire borrowed by the Rome newspaper
Paese
Sera,
strongly sympathetic to the party, and indirectly owned by it.

In all, it has been calculated,* Ambrosiano would lend the parties
some 88 billion lire to purchase their good will. As Calvi's predica­ment worsened later, he would invest more and more time, as well as
money, in his attempts to cultivate their support. But despite in­creasingly frequent visits to Rome, his understanding of the politi­cians was limited to a grasp of their financial appetites. Taciturn and
never entirely sure of himself outside the ambit of the bank, Calvi was
rarely at ease with them socially, unable entirely to master the subtle
and shifting alliances, the gossip, the assurances lightly given but
often unfulfilled.

But that still lay in the future. In the mid-1970s, Calvi seemed to
have found the ideal bridge between his own diffidence and centres of
power in Rome, in the person of Licio Gelli. Calvi, needless to say,
never had a press officer as such.
I contatti con quelli la, me li tiene
quello li.
"This one here, he looks after dealings with that lot," he
would confide. Thanks to Sindona, among other reasons, Gelli must
have known many of Calvi's less reputable secrets; but the arrangement

*Mondo Economico,
September 29,1982.

 was mutually beneficial from the outset. In return for his
brokerage of political alliances and protection, helped by a steady
flow of sensitive information from well-placed collaborators, Gelli
gained first access to, and then partial dominion over, a powerful
private banking group. Gelli and the P-2, moreover, constituted the
initial bond between Ambrosiano and Rizzoli, the largest and most
important publishing house in Italy.

In its heyday the P-2 was constructed around a tripod. Two of the
legs were Gelli/Ortolani and Calvi/Banco Ambrosiano. The third was
Rizzoli and its most coveted asset the
Corriere delta Sera,
the
Milanese newspaper with the richest tradition of any in Italy, and
unrivalled sales of some 500,000 copies. At its height, Rizzoli was
printing one in four of all the newspapers read daily up and down the
country. Ultimately, association with Ambrosiano would lead it
along a path to the brink of bankruptcy. But for a long while the
combination of money, newspapers, and political leverage seemed
irresistible.

Despite the wretched
likeness of their endings, the Rizzoli story
has a romantic quality which that of Calvi lacks entirely. Angelo
Rizzoli, the founder of a dynasty he boasted would be eternal, built
up his publishing fortune from the humblest of origins. Brought up in
an orphanage, at the age of nineteen he was running a tiny printing
press, turning out labels for crates of fruit. By the 1960s he was the
most powerful publisher in Italy, a legacy which passed first to his son
Andrea, and then to his grandson Angelo junior. To the end of his
life, the old man never forgot the lessons of his youth: "My children
have had the misfortune to be born rich," he would tell friends. But
even in his most sober musings Angelo Rizzoli cannot have imagined
that a fortune worth over $100 million could be largely destroyed by
his heirs in the space of just a decade.

The fatal step was one which was supposed to seal the Rizzolis'
success—the acquisition of the venerable
Corriere
in 1974. Founded a
century before, the paper was presently owned by the Crespi family,
the oil magnate Angelo Moratti, and the Agnellis, masters of the Fiat
car company, and the leading industrial family of Italy. "A dream
held by three generations of my family has come true," proclaimed
the young Angelo on July 17, 1974, the day Rizzoli took over after
paying 44 billion lire for the privilege. The size of the mistake was
soon plain.

The Rizzolis, of course, were neither the first nor the last industrial­ists in Italy or elsewhere to have been beguiled by the prospect of
owning a newspaper. But the
Corriere
soon revealed itself as a
particularly bad buy. That first year of 1974, it lost 12 billion lire, and
the Rizzoli company did not possess the management expertise to
push through the changes required. Within a year the deficit, and the
cost of financing the borrowings for buying the
Corriere
in the first
place had driven the young Angelo and his finance director of
eighteen months, Bruno Tassan Din, to do the rounds of the banks
asking for money.

The two made a curious pair: Angelo Rizzoli, corpulent and slow
speaking, was the brooding heir; part playboy, part over-conscious of
the responsibility his birth had thrust upon him. Tassan Din on the
other hand, with his thick mane of grey hair and aquiline features,
had arrived at Rizzoli with the reputation of a financial magician. His
quick tongue was matched by a natural cunning. Later he was to be
portrayed as the malign, scheming adventurer who brought Rizzoli to
disaster; sometimes he would be described as being Rasputin to the
uncertain, ingenuous Tsar Angelo.

In the summer of 1975 they both received an unpleasant surprise:
the big State banks would not lend them money. Suspicion gradually
turned into certainty as to the reason: that the
Corriere
of the day was
showing rather too little respect for the Christian Democrats and the
Socialists, the two dominant parties of the establishment, and politi­cal patrons of the public sector banks. Providence, however, was to
place a saviour to hand, in the person of Umberto Ortolani.

If the unctuously intimidating Gelli was Calvi's bridge to the P-2,
Umberto Ortolani was to perform that function for Rizzoli. Angelo's
father, Andrea, had used Ortolani as a consultant for his business
ventures in South America, where the latter already had interests of
his own in the local right-wing press. Andrea Rizzoli put Ortolani in
touch with his son and Tassan Din, and through him the two met Licio
Gelli. Gelli's own banking contacts within the rapidly expanding P-2
did the rest.

Money, previously so hard to find, now miraculously arrived, both
from Banco Ambrosiano, and from other banks of whom senior
executives were later shown to be involved with the P-2. Thus began
the three-way relationship between Calvi, Rizzoli and the P-2 which
was to run through the rest of Calvi's life. "Ambrosiano was a tap for
us," Tassan Din recalled, when it was all over, years later. But the
partnership between bank and publisher rapidly surpassed that of
ordinary lender and borrower. With the backing of Ambrosiano,
Rizzoli launched itself into a headlong expansion, as if growth alone
could burst the skin of financial difficulties.

Tassan Din was authorized to purchase an insurance company,
Savoia, and then two small banks. One of them, Banca Mercantile of
Florence, was later sold to Ambrosiano after a bewildering string of
transactions in which the IOR again would figure as a passive partner.

In March 1976 Calvi, by then chairman of Ambrosiano, co-opted
Andrea Rizzoli on to his bank's board. The appointment was recogni­tion not so much of the close banking relationship between them, as
of the fact that—unknown to the other board members—Rizzoli had
temporarily become the largest shareholder of Ambrosiano. In re­turn for his financial largesse, Calvi was using the Rizzoli name to
conceal the true ownership of a block of Ambrosiano shares, held
before by a Swiss front company called Locafid. Locafid, in turn, was
run by his own Banca del Gottardo.j Rizzoli's involvement was
short-lived, for the shares quickly disappeared into the fastness of
Panama. But once again the "fiduciary" technique was at work; and
Rizzoli, so heavily indebted to Ambrosiano, was an ideal candidate
for the role.

But the real attraction of the publishers lay elsewhere. In Italy,
perhaps more than anywhere, ownership of a newspaper was an
essential part of the struggle between the competing interest groups
and factions. From its columns, friends could be favoured and rivals
denigrated
;
the owner himself would be presented in the best possible
light. Subtle or less subtle hints might be dropped, incomprehensible
for the general reader, but crystal clear for those to whom the
message was addressed.

Visible ownership was, of course, hardly to Calvi's taste. Far better
to exert influence from the wings of the stage, through provision of
the funds which Rizzoli so badly needed. But that he relished such a
role behind the publishing group and the
Corriere
, can hardly be
doubted.

In the mid-1970s control of a newspaper was a subtle status symbol.
It would place him on equivalent footing to the Agnellis who ran
La
Stampa
of Turin, second only to the
Corriere
in terms of sales, or
Montedison which had brought
II Messaggero
in Rome.
La Nazione
in
Florence, and
II Resto del Carlino
in Bologna were owned by Attilio
Monti, an oil magnate. Years before a far more potent oil industrialist

*See shareholding list of 1973, Appendix.

 Enrico Mattei of ENI, even launched his own paper,
II Giorno,
in Milan.

Calvi was thus in excellent company, and in any case his fame was beginning to spread. In 1974 Giovanni Leone, the then President of the Republic, made him a
Cavaliere del Lavoro,
a distant equivalent of a British knighthood, for his services to the economy. Calvi, however, would rarely use the title.

Even Giovanni Agnelli, then President of Confindustria, the Ital­ian employers association as well as chairman of Fiat, expressed a curiosity to meet this new leader of Milanese finance. A dinner was duly arranged; it was a quintessentially Italian occasion, discreet and non-committal, at which these two representatives of such different traditions, the cosmopolitan, patrician industrialist and the shy and devious Catholic banker, could size each other up. The evening would later be described as "hallucinating".

Aimless small talk was punctuated by frequent silences. Calvi only talked easily about his experiences in Russia. Oddly, he and Agnelli were near contemporaries who had served in the Soviet campaign at much the same time. But the two had little else in common. At last the dinner ended, after which Agnelli remarked of Calvi with effortless dismissal: "But how can anyone go through their life looking at the point of their shoes?"

As always, Calvi was not of the real establishment. He gave huge sums to the Bocconi university, to the prestigious Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, and wanted to become a director of the Cini Foun­dation, the eminent cultural body in Venice. He would pay the mem­bership fee for the club; but then would not cross its threshold. The encounter with Agnelli was an illustration of how in the presence of the truly well-born and well-connected, he could be dazzled and discomforted. Even within the orbit of Ambrosiano itself, he was not immune to such considerations. Years earlier he had asked Alessandro Cordero di Montezemolo, bearer of one of Italy's most aristocra­tic family names, to be chief executive of La Centrale. The experience was short-lived, as di Montezemolo rapidly disagreed with Calvi. "I'm not going to go around blindfolded," he is said to have empha­sized, when Calvi predictably tried to circumscribe his freedom of action.

Di Montezemolo resigned, and today is chairman of a large firm of insurance brokers in New York. Had Calvi been prepared to tolerate a few such robust critics, he would probably not have met the end he did. But it was already too late to change his ways.

Throughout his life Calvi would rarely seek the counsel of an impartial outsider. "When two people know a secret, it's not a secret anymore," was one of his favourite aphorisms. Opposition would be seen as evidence of conspiracy to overthrow him. One of the few who did attempt resistance was Luigi Agostoni, deputy general manager of Ambrosiano and a director until he resigned in October 1975. His departure did cause some people to wonder. But for the rest, the board was subservience itself. In any case it did not seem to matter much then, as Calvi and the P-2 enfolded Rizzoli in their coils.

Most of the remaining independence of the publishing group dis­appeared in the summer of 1977, on the occasion of a capital increase from 5 billion lire to 25.5 billion lire. The provision of new funds was vital, both to keep pace with Rizzoli's expanding debts, and in some measure to offset the harm caused by the Government's delay in permitting an increase in the cover price of newspapers. Ostensibly the entire sum was put up by the family, to leave it in 91 per cent command of the group. The truth was somewhat different.

Rizzoli's true financial position, and the real identity of its owner were to remain mysteries until almost the end of this story, obscured respectively by a string of scarcely intelligible balance sheets and a screen of front companies and trustees. In effect, however, the family had lost control.

The money the Rizzolis used to subscribe to the capital increase was put up by Banco Ambrosiano; it went in good measure belatedly to complete payment for the 33 per cent of the
Corriere
they had acquired from the Agnellis back in 1974. In return, moreover, Calvi insisted that 80 per cent of Rizzoli's capital be lodged with Banco Ambrosiano as security for the loan. Later this majority interest in the publishers appeared to have been passed on by Calvi to the IOR, under one or other of the circuitous transactions they were then elaborating. As a result control of Italy's most important paper for a long spell may—theoretically at least—have been in the hands of the Vatican. The entire arrangement, Tassan Din has since stated, was orchestrated by Ortolani, who naturally would receive a handsome commission for his pains.