God's Banker (24 page)

On the second day Calvi gave evidence for the first time. Sitting sober-suited in front of the interrogating judges, he spoke quietly, often consulting a pile of documents on his lap. Drawing heavily on the material seized from Gelli's archives in Arezzo, the prosecution brought some astonishing episodes to light. One suggested that Calvi had attempted to shift responsibility for the suspect share dealings on to the frail shoulders of Canesi. Another showed how Anna Bonomi was perhaps a less redoubtable financier than she seemed. In 1976, she had even been forced to pawn jewels to Calvi, in return for an urgently needed loan of 2 billion lire. These, however, proved side­lights. For the judges were making plain their scepticism over Calvi's version of the Credito Varesino and Toro transactions. The politi­cians, on the other hand, were more sympathetic.

First the Socialist's newspaper
Avanti
claimed that the arrest of Calvi was just a facet of the "battle raging on the stock market": in other words that the charges were a mere contrivance, to unsettle further a market, which was by then already falling steeply. In mid-July, indeed, panic selling forced trading to be suspended for three days, the first such interruption since 1917.

Then in the midst of the trial, a legal expert of the party claimed that the judges had been deliberately picked for their bias against Calvi. The magistrates were using arrest warrants "like bludgeons", and their power should be reduced. Finally, even Craxi himself, the party leader, was to complain at the judiciary's "rash and intimidatory" use of its authority.

In a sense events would bear him out. For even the outwardly imperturbable Calvi, now shorn of the P-2, spurned by the Vatican, and harassed by the judges, was about to give way.

On the night of July 2, he summoned three of the most implacable magistrates investigating his dealings with Gelli, Sindona and the lodge, to tell them a strange tale; of how he had been persuaded to provide $21 million to the Banco Financeiro in Montevideo, owned by Ortolani of the P-2. The money, he had been led to understand, would be channelled back to the Socialists in Italy, to enable the party to reduce its embarrassingly high borrowings from Ambrosiano.

The episode remains obscure. Maybe it was a ploy of Ortolani to extort money from Calvi. The Socialists dismissed the incident, maintaining it only showed how magistrates who sympathized with the Communist party in Milan were using a vulnerable Calvi to discredit them—just when the Socialists had taken votes off the
Communists in disturbing quantities at that summer's local elections.

A week later Calvi gave further evidence of how his legendary composure was no more. On the morning of July 9, his lawyer Valerio Mazzola, made a dramatic announcement to the court. His client had attempted to commit suicide the previous night, by swallowing barbiturates and trying to open his wrists. It was, said Mazzola, the desperate gesture of a man "unjustly and unnecessarily" imprisoned, who could no longer reason normally.

Was the suicide attempt genuine? Some maintained that Calvi indeed had tried to take his own life, convinced that a much longer spell in prison awaited him, and that his position was now without hope. But, others asked, was it not rather a despairing ploy? Might not Calvi have staged both "confession" and suicide attempt, to win sympathy and make the most theatrical appeal possible to his political backers for more help? Calvi himself later described his action as one of "lucid desperation".

Whatever the explanation, the trial was close to its end. On July 20, after nine hours of deliberation, Roda Bogetti, the presiding judge, returned with her colleagues to deliver their verdict. It was more severe than even the prosecutors had demanded.

Calvi was deemed "capable of conduct without scruples", and sentenced to four years in jail and a fine of 16 billion lire. Tonello received a three-year term and an 8 million lire fine. Lesser punish­ment was meted out to Giorgio Cappugi, La Centrale's former general manager, and Giuseppe Zanon di Valgiurata, its deputy chairman. Everyone else was acquitted, including Carlo Bonomi and Giorgio Cigliana of Invest, both of whom had been allowed bail more than a month before. Bonomi himself maintained later that they had been arrested and tried only to strengthen the case against Calvi, the real target of the prosecutors.

But Calvi's own prison ordeal was ended. His lawyers lodged immediate appeal against the conviction, and he was set free on bail. Although he was obliged to surrender his passport, Calvi was able, astonishingly, to resume his financial career as if nothing had hap­pened. A week after his release, the board of Banco Ambrosiano unanimously reconfirmed him, amid applause, as chairman of the bank. Fleetingly, divine providence did indeed appear to be protect­ing
II banchiere di Dio.
The truth, however, was very different.

For while Calvi
was enduring his private agony at Lodi, and sitting grimly through the court hearings in Milan, more than one scheme was elaborated to remove him either temporarily or permanently from his post at Ambrosiano. But for a variety of reasons they all failed.

In Rome, the authorities still lacked conclusive proof against him—and without it they dared not move. The political voices raised in Calvi's favour were an unpleasant reminder for the Bank of Italy of the vicious attack on itself only two years earlier. Meanwhile the web that Calvi had spun in his time of unchallenged command of his bank, as subtle and as strong as spider's silk, made him effectively indis­pensable. And of course the Vatican, the only outside shareholder which might have unseated him, found itself trapped in the very same web. These two considerations combined, with the inevitability of real tragedy, to ensure Calvi's survival as chairman of Banco Ambrosiano. The result was that a crisis which in 1981 might just have been containable had, within a year, turned into a banking collapse without equal since the Second World War.

The first move came from the Vatican, dismayed by Calvi's judicial tribulations, and by his links with the most disreputable face of freemasonry. The soundings seem to have begun that spring. The whispered candidate of the Holy See for Calvi's succession was Orazio Bagnasco, a driving Catholic financier aligned with the Chris­tian Democrats. Bagnasco, a collector of paintings of the seventeenth-century school from his native Genoa, had built his fortune on a network of property-based mutual funds, headquartered in Lugano in Switzerland. Lately, moreover, he had bought the CIGA chain of luxury hotels, among them the Gritti Palace and the Danieli in Venice.

If Ambrosiano's Catholic and private traditions were to be main­tained, Bagnasco was one of the very few obvious choices. Indeed, several months later he did become vice chairman and heir apparent at the bank. But the initial attempt was to no avail. First came the attempt on the Pope's life; and then a few weeks later the IOR learnt the full implications of what it had done in connivance with Calvi.

In July 1981, as foreign creditors started to pressure Ambrosiano, it was plain that the IOR connection was its only immediate lifeline. On instructions given by Calvi from prison, Leoni, as head of Ambro­siano's foreign department and chairman of Banco Andino, accom­panied Pellegrino de Stroebel on one of his rare sorties from the offices of the Vatican bank. Their destination was Lugano, and the head office of the Banca del Gottardo.

There, from the files of the bank so intimately concerned with the early framing of Calvi's foreign design, the chief accountant of the IOR had confirmation of what he may or may not have suspected. Manic SA and United Trading Corporation, those two front com­panies set up under the Vatican bank so long before, had spawned their tiny offspring. Between them, these owed Ambrosiano's Latin American affiliates over $900 million. The main asset which secured these huge borrowings was a large block of shares in Banco Ambro­siano itself. Thus the IOR was the technical owner not just of its declared 1.6 per cent, but of at least a further 10.2 per cent of Calvi's bank as well. On paper,
it controlled Ambrosiano,
and to reverse Marcinkus' remark to Calvi's son Carlo, Ambrosiano's problems were the IOR's problems too.

But the Vatican was not alone in its alarm. Inevitably, with Calvi away
in pensione,
those left behind in Milan began to discover more of the rottenness behind the seemingly respectable fagade.

Just who knew how much and when, about the bank's real plight, would be for the Italian courts to decide. But some within the bank were worried enough to cast around for an alternative to Calvi. One of these was Roberto Rosone. Like his chairman, Rosone had spent his entire career at Ambrosiano, but previously mostly on the more tranquil domestic banking side. Rosone was blunt, rough-spoken, of modest culture. For that reason many would laugh at him for his thick provincially-accented Italian, and for his lack of social polish. Others would describe him as someone deliberately promoted by Calvi beyond his natural station as manager of a small-town branch of Ambrosiano, in the belief that he would always be loyal and cause no problem. The fact remains, however, that Rosone mounted the most serious effort from within the bank to have Calvi step aside.

Rosone had been worried by the Rizzoli deal, and disconcerted by the arrogant behaviour of Pazienza, Calvi's self-styled "international consultant", during a visit to Ambrosiano while Calvi himself was in prison. He had also been taken aback by Marcinkus' brusqueness, when he went to the Vatican at that time to warn the IOR that if there was a crisis of confidence, Ambrosiano would have to call in some loans it had made to the Vatican bank.

His idea was to replace Calvi at least temporarily, until the annual shareholders' meeting the following April. The best candidate, Rosone felt, would be the previous chairman Ruggiero Mozzana. Mozzana was 78 years old and in poor health, but eventually agreed to the suggestion. With his direct superior, Carlo Olgiati, Rosone took the plan to Rome and the Bank of Italy. But it was turned down, for reasons not entirely clear. One drawback, obviously was Mozzana's age. But the central bank would afterwards emphasize that it suggested to Calvi to step down in 1981—indeed that it had already studied the idea of placing Ambrosiano in the hands of a Govern­ment appointed commissioner. But, it concluded, it had no choice in the matter once Calvi, proclaiming his indispensability at his bank, and arguing that to go would be tantamount to an admission of guilt, had insisted on staying. Andreatta, the Treasury Minister was of a similar mind to the Bank of Italy; but was fearful that had drastic action been taken, Calvi would have gone to a local tribunal and secured his reinstatement.

Thus it was, to the considerable bewilderment of many, that a convicted illegal exporter of currency who faced a four-year jail sentence, was allowed back to the helm of the largest private banking group in the country. On strictly legal grounds, the Bank of Italy could justify its attitude. Perhaps the magistrates could have ordered Calvi's suspension (as they had done with Sarcinelli at the Bank of Italy itself in 1979!). The central bank could only send in a commis
sioner to take charge of Ambrosiano for one of three reasons; a) if "very serious irregularities" had been committed, b) if it had suffered very serious asset losses, or c) if the Ambrosiano board itself re­quested such a step. Conditions b) and c) did not then obtain, while the Bank of Italy did not
know
enough to justify the first grounds. The question remained: after the report on Ambrosiano in 1978, and now Calvi's conviction, did it not
suspect
enough to move against Ambro­siano?

In the acrimony of aftermath, the main criticism of the Bank of Italy was that it lacked the courage to back its judgement. As someone remarked later: "If you want the ermine and sceptre of high office, you've got to be prepared to use its authority too." But then again, the expressions of sympathy over Calvi's "victimization" from the Socialists and some Christian Democrats could have contained the seeds of a second political attack on the central bank.

As it was, the Bank of Italy had to deny publicly the boast of Calvi to his directors on July 28 that he had its specific blessing to resume as chairman. But the board meeting did sanction some significant changes. Olgiati, the co-author of the attempt from within the bank to replace Calvi, resigned as general manager. He was substituted by Rosone, who was named deputy chairman as well. Leoni became joint general manager, but Botta (nominally at least) took over his responsibilities on the foreign side. And although no word was given, both had resigned earlier from the board of Banco Andino in Lima, the obscure hub of everything. Clearly, those who knew were scared stiff.

August is Italy's traditional holiday month, when the country comes to a halt. It should have been a badly needed break for Calvi after his spell behind bars, and to an extent it was. With his wife, he departed for a few theoretically restful weeks in Sardinia. Pazienza, an appreciated friend after his services to the family while Calvi was in prison, was much in evidence. He visited the Calvis in their villa, and took them out on his launch. He also promoted a fateful encounter between Calvi and an associate from Pazienza's Roman dealings, a Sardinian businessman named Flavio Carboni.