In God's Name (51 page)

While these events were unfolding in New York, Sindona’s P2 comrades Calvi and Gelli were continuing business as usual on the other side of the Atlantic. By 1979, Roberto Calvi was seeking protection in all directions: a private army of eight bodyguards; twenty-four-hour guards for Calvi, his family, his Milan, Rome and Drezzo homes; armour-plated Alfa Romeos with bullet-proof tyres. These manifestations of the master thief’s personal fears were costing the shareholders of Ambrosiano over one million dollars a year. No one in Italy, including the President or the Prime Minister, was as well protected. He sought protection from political parties of every shade or colour – the Christian Democrats, the Socialists, the Communists, all were illegally bank-rolled by Calvi. He had the protection of Gelli’s P2 and his Mafia associates, but both of these were two-edged swords which could be used against him.

The illegally purchased shares in Banco Ambrosiano were concealed in Panamanian companies beyond the jurisdiction of the Bank of Italy, but always the fear for Calvi was the possibility that officialdom would discover this aspect of his many criminal activities. First the Nassau branch had been used to bury the illegal transactions. When the Bank of Italy came within an ace of proving what they suspected, Calvi moved the axis of the fraud to Nicaragua. Then in 1979 he moved much of the central activity that governed the fraud even further away, to Peru. On October 11th, 1979 Banco Ambrosiano Andino opened its doors in Lima. Shortly afterwards the majority of the loans that had been extended to the shell Panamanian and Liechtenstein companies were transferred to Peru. These small shell companies, many with a nominal capital of a mere 10,000 dollars, continued to proliferate. Eventually there would be seventeen. The majority were owned by a Luxembourg company aptly named Manic SA which in turn was owned by the Vatican Bank.

If the international banks queueing up over the years to lend Calvi millions upon millions of dollars had carried out even elementary homework, Calvi would have been exposed years before he suffered his ultimate fate. It is true that the Bank of Italy 1978 report on Banco Ambrosiano was highly confidential and not freely available. That was still the position when I obtained it in 1981. If one author can obtain such a report, so presumably can the Midland, Lloyds, National Westminster or any of the other 250 banks scattered throughout the world who were taken in by Calvi, who had stolen
our
money. These
bankers have a much-vaunted reputation for shrewdness and astuteness, yet they believed the doctored accounts Calvi showed them. The statements he made assuring them that the vast loans were to finance Italian exports were accepted. Did no one check? Did no one subsequently monitor? That over 450 million dollars should be loaned by the international banks, not to another bank, but to a mere holding company called Banco Ambrosiano Holdings, based in Luxembourg – a company manifestly unsupported by any central bank – is a savage condemnation of the lending practices of the interbank market. The men who sit on the boards of these lending banks should be made to answer to their shareholders and to all who have accounts with them. It is not pleasant to reflect that some of us in Great Britain undoubtedly financed the purchase of Exocet missiles for Argentina, missiles that were used to kill so many men during the Falklands war. Yet there is no doubt that this evil chain did occur. Calvi diverted millions of dollars to Licio Gelli, who in turn used some of that money to purchase Exocets for Argentina. Investing in the future is fine, but investing to ensure that your own kith and kin have no future is another matter. Doubtless the men who negotiated these huge loans to Calvi would claim that at the time it looked like very good business.

Just how obscene this particular transaction was can only be appreciated when one is aware that this money was diverted to Gelli and Ortolani through a Panamanian company owned by the Vatican.

The company in question, Bellatrix, was controlled by Marcinkus at the Vatican Bank but created by a trinity of P2 members, Gelli, Ortolani and Bruno Tassan Din, managing director and financial strategist to the giant Rizzoli publishing group. These Masons milked the Ambrosiano cow of 184 million dollars. The capital of Bellatrix? Ten thousand dollars. The vast non-returnable loan was secured on paper against a large helping of Rizzoli shares. Rizzoli was jointly owned by P2 and the Vatican. The value placed on the Rizzoli shares far exceeded their real worth.

Astolfine, yet another of the Panamanian companies owned by the Vatican was able, on a capital of 10,000 dollars, to run up debts of 486 million dollars. Its security? A large helping of grossly over-valued Banco Ambrosiano shares.

With business practices of this order capitalism need have no fear that it will be ultimately destroyed by Marxism. All Marxists have to do is to sit back and wait for capitalism to self-destruct automatically.

It is understandable that ENI, one of the biggest conglomerates in the world, should suddenly start lending Calvi money; that this huge
state-owned oil company should suddenly start functioning as a bank and lend to instead of borrow from Banco Ambrosiano Holdings in Luxembourg – the Chairman of ENI, Giorgio Mazzanti, and the head of its financial department, Leonardo di Donna, are both members of P2. To date no P2 members have been discovered in the higher reaches of the many international banks which continuously poured millions of dollars down Calvi’s throat between 1978 and 1980.

When the man in the street in London, Paris, New York, Copenhagen, Tokyo, Ottawa, Sydney and Wellington curses the high rate of his bank charges he should tilt his hat at the ghost of Roberto Calvi and at the ever elusive Licio Gelli and Umberto Ortolani. He should also spare a thought for Vatican City. When we pay our high bank charges we are helping to pick up their tab.

Incontrovertible evidence that the Vatican owns these mysterious Panamanian companies reaches back to 1971, to the time when Calvi and Sindona put Bishop Paul Marcinkus on the board of Calvi’s section in Nassau.

In Milan, during 1979, the magistrate Luca Mucci spasmodically questioned Calvi. Calvi would study his shoes or the floor intently, mutter about his need to preserve banking secrecy, discuss Inter Milan’s chances of winning their next football match and leave an outmanoeuvred judge.

By the end of 1979 the financial exposure of the Vatican-owned front companies that Calvi controlled was in excess of 500 million dollars. Fortunately the intercosmic banking fantasies of Sindona had not yet become a reality. There were still financial situations Calvi could not control. The dollar began to rise against the lira. Ambrosiano’s assets, such as they were, consisted very largely of lira-denominated shares. The game became frenetic. Just to keep up with the fraud required demented juggling, particularly when the running costs included 30 billion lire for buying the Venice newspaper
Il Gazzettino
to keep the Christian Democrats happy, and ‘lending’ the Rome daily
Paese Sera
20 billion lire to keep the Communists content. Everyone had their hands out and it always seemed that the man with the biggest hands was Licio Gelli.

In January 1980 Banco Ambrosiano de America del Sud opened its doors in Buenos Aires. There was practically no banking activity but it was this arm of the Calvi empire which helped finance Argentinian purchases of Exocet missiles. It also provided funds for arms purchases by other South American regimes.

In July 1980 Judge Luca Mucci felt sufficiently impressed by the
investigation that the Guardia di Finanza, the financial police, had carried out in the wake of the Bank of Italy 1978 enquiry, to order Calvi to surrender his passport and to warn the banker that he would be facing criminal charges. It was a small step forward in the name of justice.

It took a smart step backwards when a few months later Calvi obtained his passport back again through the good offices of Gelli. The Grand Master was less inclined to intercede when Massimo Spada, late of the Vatican Bank and currently Chairman of Banca Cattolica del Veneto, was arrested and charged with involvement of a criminal nature in Il Crack Sindona. Next to feel the handcuffs, at least momentarily, was Luigi Mennini, still active in the Vatican Bank, on similar charges.

As the net began to draw tighter around Calvi, despite the valiant efforts of Gelli to corrupt all and sundry, the Milanese banker’s hopes of continuing to plunder relied very largely on Marcinkus. The game was becoming much rougher and without the constant co-operation of the Vatican Bank, concealment of Calvi’s crimes would cease. It had always been so but in the past the pressure on the Vatican had been minimal; now with the arrest of Mennini the pressure intensified. Calvi began to fear that, despite the massive amounts of money he had channelled into the hands of Bishop Paul Marcinkus, the time might be fast approaching when the man across the Tiber might withdraw his active support and leave Calvi alone and highly vulnerable.

Early in 1981 Treasury Minister Beniamino Andreatta, who had been promoted to the post the previous October, concluded that the Vatican should withdraw its support immediately. He had studied the 1978 Bank of Italy report at length and felt compelled to make an attempt to protect the Church. He went to the Vatican and spoke at length to Foreign Minister Cardinal Casaroli. He outlined the entire situation. He urged the Vatican to break all links with Banco Ambrosiano before it was too late. The advice was ignored. Marcinkus would claim later that he had no knowledge of this meeting. In any event, if the devout Catholic Andreatta had been aware of the full facts, he would have known that it was an impossibility for the Vatican to sever the links. It actually owned Banco Ambrosiano. Through the array of Panamanian and Liechtenstein companies, it had acquired control of over 16 per cent of Banco Ambrosiano. With the rest of the shares in the bank so widely scattered among small shareholders, that gave the Vatican a controlling interest.

At noon on March 2nd 1981 the Vatican Press Office released a
document that puzzled many. Issued without explanation, it reminded all Catholics of the Canon Laws covering Freemasons and stressed the fact that the present code ‘forbids Catholics under pain of excommunication from joining Masonic or similar associations’. No one could understand the timing. Roman Catholics had been subjected to automatic excommunication if they became Freemasons since 1738. Why remind them in early March 1981? The answer was not long in coming and indicates that the intelligence-gathering network of the Church is at least as efficient as Licio Gelli’s. The Vatican statement did not explain how all the good Catholics who featured on the membership list of P2 could have their names expunged from the records before the Italian authorities discovered them. For P2 member Calvi, this apparently insurmountable problem was to have disastrous consequences.

When public exposure finally came, it was ironically through Calvi’s association with his protector Licio Gelli. Italian magistrates in 1981 were still attempting to clarify the facts concerning Sindona’s self-arranged kidnap. On March 17th police raided Gelli’s palatial villa in Arezzo and his office at the Gio-Le textile factory. They sought links of Gelli’s involvement in Sindona’s surprise trip to his homeland. What they found was a Pandora’s box of scandal. In Gelli’s safe they discovered a list of the 962 members of P2. They also found dossiers and secret Government reports.

The list of P2 members was a veritable Who’s Who of Italy. The armed forces were heavily represented with over fifty generals and admirals. The Government of the day was there with two Cabinet Ministers, as were industrialists, journalists (including the Editor of
Corriere Della Sera
and several of his senior staff), 36 parliamentarians, pop stars, pundits, and police officers. It was a State within a State. Many have said that Gelli was planning to take over Italy. They are wrong. He
had
taken over Italy. Of the Grand Master himself there was no sign. The arrangements for the police raid had been top secret, which translated meant: only tell trusted police officers and Licio Gelli. He had fled to South America.

The ensuing scandal brought down the Italian Government and gave considerable momentum to the Milan magistrate’s investigation of Calvi. Judge Mucci was replaced by Gerardo d’Ambrosio. It had been over two years since the murder of Judge Emilio Alessandrini; two years of procrastination. Now with a new investigating judge, helped by the compromising documents found in Gelli’s safe, within two months Calvi was arrested and placed in a prison cell in Lodi.

Now was the time for all good friends to come to the aid of the man who had so often helped other parties. In the weeks following Calvi’s arrest, Bettino Craxi, the leader of the Socialist party, and Flaminio Piccoli, the president of the Christian Democrats, got to their feet in Parliament and made pleasant remarks about Calvi and his Bank. The Vatican stayed silent. Demonstrably its entire attention was focused on a far graver situation. Seven days before Calvi’s arrest, Pope John Paul II had his near fatal meeting in St Peter’s Square with Mehmet Ali Agca.

While much of the world prayed that the Pope would survive, Roberto Calvi in his prison cell was totally preoccupied with what seemed to him an infinitely more important problem: his own survival. Through his family he began to press Marcinkus to admit publicly that over the years he had been standing side by side with Calvi in the kitchen as they cooked the books.

After many futile telephone calls, Calvi’s son Carlo finally got through to Marcinkus. He pleaded with the Bishop that the gravity of his father’s position would be greatly reduced if the Vatican Bank admitted its involvement. The deals had been channelled through Calvi’s Banca del Gottardo in Lugano which could not reveal the truth because of the very stringent Swiss banking regulations, but the Vatican Bank was its own master. It could volunteer information. Marcinkus, however, had no intention of publicly accepting responsibility. He told Calvi’s son: ‘If we do, it’s not only the IOR and the Vatican’s image which will suffer. You’ll lose as well, for our problems are your problems too.’