God's Banker (37 page)

Last, but not least, there was the Vatican itself. Its denial that it received any money from Calvi or his bank had to be weighed against the consideration that there would seem little reason other than that of profit, for the IOR to have worked with Calvi so unquestioningly and so long. The Vianini transaction alone would suggest it benefited, quite apart from whether Ambrosiano helped finance Solidarity— which the Vatican strongly denied. A great deal remained unclear, many months after the disaster; but all in all, it was not so difficult to imagine how over a period of ten years and in such a variety of fashions, so much money could have been squandered; the precise purpose of its going obscured by a tracery of front companies and nominees.

In any case, much of the $1,287 million quite clearly was beyond recovery, without a change of heart on the part of the IOR. The calculation of Leemans on that last desperate day in the Vatican, that the realizable value of the assets which secured the debts in Panama was $250 million or so, was hasty but probably not very wide of the mark.

The most valuable of them all by far was the 51 per cent holding in Banca del Gottardo, whose gradual disengagement from Calvi's affairs from 1980 left it little damaged by the downfall of Ambrosiano two years later. Several potential buyers were showing cautious interest in early 1983, although the risk that Gottardo might find itself at the wrong end of a lawsuit over the missing money was plainly a deterrent. Some of the other shareholdings moreover, like Vianini and even TV Sorrisi e Canzoni might fetch useful prices; but the total would probably not differ much from Leemans' guess in June 1982, when the game was about to be lost.

Early on a
cold, damp Saturday in mid-November, the physical remains of Roberto Calvi were laid to rest at last. The ceremony in the little parish church of Drezzo was simple. Journalists and photo­graphers outnumbered the mourners. From his family there was his daughter Anna, closest in many ways of all to him, his two brothers and his aged mother. A wreath of red roses had come from his wife and son in Washington. The old Banco Ambrosiano, to which, for better or worse, Calvi had given his life, sent nobody. Just a few loyal ex-colleagues were there in a personal capacity. His driver Tito Tesauri went; so did Costanzo Zugaro from the representative office in Rome, who had first known him as a promising young cavalryman leaving for Russia more than 40 years earlier.

Locked and silent on the hillside stood the modest villa, the weekend refuge where he had played host to the powerful. Its gates were now sealed by order of the magistrates, who had confiscated all Calvi's assets in Italy.

By 9.30 a.m. Calvi had been buried in Drezzo's tiny cemetery, and the cortege was on its way back to Milan in the rain. In the
Corriere
next day just four of those little obituary notices appeared to mark his final going. One was from his wife and family, lamenting the "count­less injustices" inflicted upon Calvi in the final years of his existence. Even after death, it read, "there is no peace or comfort, only resignation".

As 1982 gave way to 1983, and 1983 to 1984, that sadhearted and bemused reflection proved exact. The Ambrosiano affair and its varied ramifications seldom left the headlines of the Italian, indeed the world's, press. But all the while a sense of resignation grew, that the truth about how Calvi met his death in London, or about the whereabouts of hundreds of millions of dollars, would not be exactly established.

Not that there was any lack of endeavour to do so. Carboni, Pellicani, Vittor and others connected with the last days in London were at different times detained, questioned and arrested. In Rome, the parliamentary commission examining the P-2 scandal conducted its own parallel, if cumbersome, enquiries.

Carboni did consent in the autumn of 1982 to be extradited back to Italy, but only to answer the comparatively minor charges of abetting Calvi in his illegal flight abroad, and of being party to the bankruptcy of Ambrosiano. For the Swiss magistrates had quickly found out all about those $14 million extracted from Calvi's bank in Nassau the previous February. Their Italian counterparts meanwhile were dis­covering much else about the dealings of Carboni.

Gradually a most unattractive picture was emerging from about a dozen separate investigations up and down the country. Carboni, his name unknown until Calvi's death, was one who appeared to mix political influence-peddling with common crime, ventures in the press with involvement in an illegal cocaine traffic and right-wing terror­ism. With little doubt, Carboni was a crossroads of wrongdoing of many kinds, and the Italian authorities sought his extradition for other offences also.

Most serious of all was the charge that Carboni—and thus by implication Calvi himself—had inspired the attack in Milan on Roberto Rosone, deputy chairman of Ambrosiano, which had been carried out the previous April by Danilo Abbruciati, the underworld acquaintance of Carboni.

Nor did it seem entirely a coincidence that Carboni had been a friend of Giuseppe Pisanu, the junior Treasury minister who had read out in Parliament the astoundingly innocuous answer about Banco Andino on June 8, when the final collapse of Ambrosiano was only nine days off. In January Pisanu was forced to resign, insisting that it was pure accident that it fell to him to reply. Then there were odd tales of dinner parties given by Carboni for the likes of Ciriaco De Mita, the new Christian Democrat leader, Armando Corona, grand­master of Italian freemasonry, as well as Carlo Caracciolo, proprietor of
La Repubblica,
the Rome paper long among Calvi's severest critics. Truly Carboni was a man for many seasons.

From Switzerland meanwhile, news had come quickly of an even bigger prize. Staff at a Geneva bank were instantly suspicious of the tall dark-haired man with glasses who appeared at the counter one mid-September day in 1982, seeking to withdraw no less than $55 million from an account connected with the Ambrosiano affair. They made time, politely telling the somewhat impatient gentleman to return in the afternoon. In the meantime they alerted the police. When he came back he was challenged and found to be travelling on a false passport. Quickly his real identity was established. It was none other than that most venerable of grandmasters, Licio Gelli himself, sought for eighteen months and facing accusations ranging from espionage to fraud and common extortion.

Italy, once again, demanded his extradition, but at first the chances of success seemed slender. Gelli engaged some of the most expensive lawyers in Europe on his behalf. From the comfort of the modern, supposedly escape-proof, prison of Champ Dollon on the edge of Geneva, he proclaimed himself a victim of political persecution and intimated that he was writing his memoirs.

But as the summer of 1983 wore on, Gelli's defences were patiently broken down. A court hearing was set for the middle of August in Lausanne, at which—it was universally assumed—the request of the Italian authorities would finally be granted. The prospect was tan­gible that decisive light might be thrown not just on the disaster of Banco Ambrosiano, but on other dark episodes of recent Italian history also.

It was not to be. On a hot summer night between August 9 and 10, Gelli escaped from Champ Dollon, taking his secrets with him. His cell was left in disarray, with smears of blood on the floor, as if to indicate that he had been forcibly abducted. In fact he vanished with the complicity of a prison guard, bribed for just 20,000 Swiss Francs— and evidently of others as well. A van carried him at dawn across the border into France. Gelli travelled southwards to Monte Carlo and thence, with little doubt, to the well-tried refuge of Latin America.

Yet again, Gelli had shown how the ordinary constraints of law did not apply to him. Just who else had had a hand in his flight could not be said with certainty. But a few months later a mightily embarrassed Swiss Government made diplomatic complaint to Rome about the unfettered activities of the Italian secret service upon its territory; a pointer perhaps that an organisation once so heavily infiltrated by the P-2 had once again served the grandmaster of the lodge in his moment of need.

Gelli, none the less, was most unlikely ever to return to face Italian magistrates or an Italian court—to the profound relief, it could safely be observed, of many of power and influence within the country. His case, as did that of his old friend Michele Sindona, merely proved a rule of modern Italy: that somehow potentially embarrassing defen­dants never managed to be called to justice at home.

In March 1983, the formal trial relating to the bankruptcy of Sindona had begun, eight and a half years after the collapse of Banca Privata Italiana and his own escape to the United States. But negotia­tions were proceeding between Rome and Washington for the inmate of Otisville to be temporarily "borrowed" by the court in Milan. The trial was accordingly adjourned. A year later the negotiations were still in progress, with no indication of when they might be successfully completed.

Long before that, however, the machinery had been set in motion, which one day would lead to a trial covering the fraudulent bank­ruptcy of Ambrosiano itself. The most important defendant, of course, was long since dead. But in the winter of 1982 the magistrates in Milan confiscated the passports of those who seemed most closely implicated in the calamity, including Rosone, Leoni, Botta, Costa and Mennini. Almost 30 others had also been initially notified that they might be facing criminal proceedings. In the meantime personal assets of board members of the old Ambrosiano were placed pro­visionally under official seizure.

Subsequently, Rosone, Leoni and a few more would be arrested— but not before the former deputy chairman of Ambrosiano had secured picaresque revenge on his foes in the judiciary. He was, he had established, entitled to severance pay of 470 million lire for his three decades and more of service at the old bank; his property might have been confiscated, but Rosone was determined to get his due. Payment, he insisted, should be in cash. A date was agreed in early November 1982 for Rosone to collect the money from the head­quarters of what was now Nuovo Banco Ambrosiano, in 100,000 lire denomination banknotes.

Naturally the magistrates had been told too. On the appointed day, police were waiting outside the main entrance of the bank to intercept Rosone and appropriate his spoils. Rosone, however, was too quick for them. He slipped out of a side door, drove off, and lost his pursuers at a red light. By all accounts, the money was not recovered. Thus did yet more assets of the old Ambrosiano of Roberto Calvi vanish into thin air.

Rosone was to return to the Ambrosiano story a little later, but in somewhat more sinister circumstances.

On the second floor of the block where he lived at Via Olofredi, in Milan, directly above his own flat, there operated an obscure import- export agency called Stibam. On November 24, 1982 police arrested Stibam's proprietor, a 70-year-old Syrian called Henri Arsan, on the grounds that his seemingly innocuous company was in fact engaged in illegal arms and drugs trafficking, of enormous proportions, between Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean. The coincidence that Stibam's offices were next to Rosone's home, and that the building was owned by Ambrosiano itself, appeared to suggest another possible explana­tion of that mysterious shooting of April 27, when Rosone was wounded in the legs.

Matters soon became even more complicated. Other Italian magis­trates claimed to have uncovered a link between Stibam's dealings and the supposed Bulgarian conspiracy against the Pope. The con­nection was the person of Bekir Celenk, a Turkish businessman resident in Sofia, held to have been involved in both episodes. It was another odd coincidence, in a story full of them.

Yet again that kaleidoscope of theories could be agitated; and the pieces were if anything more numerous than when Calvi died. They included Banco Ambrosiano and hundreds of millions of missing dollars, international arms trading, and the so-called "Bulgarian connection", with the shadow of the Soviet Union in the background. In early 1983 evidence was unearthed of an apparent attempt by the Bulgarian secret services to assassinate Lech Walesa, leader of Solidarity, when he was in Rome to visit the Pope in January 1981. Some would recall the claims of Calvi to have given large sums to the independent Polish trade union. With a pinch of imagination, Banco Ambrosiano and its Vatican connection could again be seen as part of the secret struggle between East and West.

Such considerations, however, are beyond the scope of this book. Nor, despite the wealth of hints, pointers and coincidences, did the year and a half after his death produce any irrefutable evidence that Calvi—consciously or unconsciously—was a player in such a struggle. A similar uncertainty would continue to surround the way in which he died.

The second inquest into the death of Roberto Calvi opened at the City of London Coroner's court on June 13. From the outset it was clear that it would be a far more painstaking affair than its predeces­sor. Most of the main witnesses to that strange last journey to London were heard. Two, however, were missing. Flavio Carboni, by now in prison on very serious charges in Italy, did not attend; nor did Hans Kunz, the Swiss businessman who arranged the flight from Innsbruck, and the booking at Chelsea Cloisters.