The Annals of Unsolved Crime (11 page)

Marcinkus stonewalled Italian regulators, stating that Calvi was the sole author of the machinations. Italian authorities then issued subpoenas, but they were returned unopened on the basis that the Vatican was not subject to the laws of Italy. Finally, on August 6, 1982, the minister of finance, Beniamino Andreatta, ordered the Banco Ambrosiano liquidated and all its assets turned over to a new consortium of banks. The Vatican’s controlling block of stock in the bank was worthless. The missing $1.2 billion was never recovered.

Why had the Vatican engaged in these massive transactions? “You can’t run the church on Hail Marys alone,” Archbishop Marcinkus told me. As for the details of the transfers, he said the pope had entrusted two lay bankers with this task: Sindona, with whom the Pope had met personally, and Calvi. “They and they alone know,” he concluded. Calvi was dead, but Sindona was in prison in the United States.

I went to see Sindona in Otisville Federal Prison in upstate New York in April 1984. Born in Patti, Sicily, in 1920 and
educated by Jesuit priests, Sindona had become one of the most successful financiers in Europe and the principal financial advisor to the Vatican by the time he was forty-three. Then, in March 1979, he was indicted by a U.S. federal grand jury on charges of fraud proceeding from his 1972 takeover of the Franklin National Bank. Although released on bond, he was required to remain in New York. Sindona instead staged his own kidnapping and fled in disguise to Italy. When arrested three months later, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.

When I met him in the Otisville prison visiting room, the grey-haired financier appeared frail and nervous. After asking me to buy him a vanilla ice cream, we began the one-hour interview. He came right to the point, saying that he had only done what Pope Paul VI had instructed him to do: shift the Vatican’s Italian assets to tax-free offshore havens. When I asked him about the formerly anonymous entities, some of which had been found to have the code-names “Suprafin,” “Zitropo,” and “Manic,” he said that they themselves were merely vehicles to hide the transfers of money. It was, as he described it, purely a money laundering scheme, which he said was “legal” because the Vatican was sovereign. With the help of Calvi, the money had been deposited in dozens of letter-box companies, which then borrowed against them from the Banco Ambrosiano and sent the proceeds to other offshore entities.

If so, why couldn’t the funds be recovered? Sindona answered that the Vatican, again with Calvi’s help, had used these funds to make “questionable investments.” As an example, he cited the Vatican’s attempt to buy control of Rizzoli, which owned Italy’s largest newspaper, the
Corriere della Sera
. “I don’t know how much was lost,” he said; by that time, Sindona said, he was no longer advising the Vatican.

He claimed to know nothing about Calvi’s death, but added, as I was leaving the room, that he might have a similar fate if
he was ever sent back to Italy. It was the last time I saw Sindona. On September 25, 1984, he was extradited to Italy, and on March 18, 1986, he died in a prison in Rome from a dose of cyanide in his coffee, a death ruled a suicide.

IV.

When Calvi was arrested the year before his death in Milan, it was on a questionable technicality about an incident that had occurred a decade earlier. His bank had arranged legal currency transfers in 1971 that were held by a magistrate to violate a retroactive 1976 foreign-exchange law. Along with Calvi, six other former and present executives of the Banco Ambrosiano were arrested. Mass arrests of bankers by magistrates on technical offenses had by the 1980s become common in Italy. Because Calvi spent two months in Lodi prison, on getting out, he was determined to pay whatever was needed to be paid to get political protection against future imprisonment. “It is a question of surviving in a climate that is becoming like a religious war,” he said in a newspaper interview. “It is an atmosphere that favors every sort of barbarism.”

The person who offered Calvi such protection in this “religious war” was Licio Gelli. A mattress-spring manufacturer and poet from Arezzo, Gelli claimed to run a powerful web of influence in the form of a Masonic lodge in Rome called Propagandi Due, or P-2. This secret society, according to a sixty-four-volume investigation by a commission of the Italian Parliament, included forty-three members of Parliament, forty-eight generals, the heads of Italy’s intelligence service, the top magistrates in the judiciary system, the civil servants running various state-owned enterprises (including the energy company ENI), key bank regulators, and leading businessmen.

The report concluded that P-2 was a veritable “state within
a state.” The commission had come to these conclusions largely based on the files of Gelli and his close associates, but most of those named in them denied any such membership in Gelli’s secret lodge. Nor did P-2 ever hold meetings or conduct ordinary Masonic business, as is prescribed by Freemasonry. Whether any of powerful individuals were actually members of P-2 or whether the lists were part of a con game staged by Gelli, as long as people believed it existed, P-2 provided a highly profitable clearing house for businessmen interested in buying influence or protection from government officials. For these transactions, Gelli acted as the go-between, deal-maker, and record-keeper. Gelli extracted a heavy price from Calvi for arranging political protection, which, as it turns out, was never provided.

In accordance with Gelli’s instructions, Calvi transferred $21 million to a South American bank. Calvi later told three magistrates investigating the P-2 lodge that Gelli was funneling the money through intermediaries to top officials of Italy’s Socialist Party, who presumably would intervene with bank regulators on the behalf of the Banco Ambrosiano. There were also much larger diversions that he elected not to tell the magistrates about. In 1982, Juerg Heer, the executive director of the credit section of Zurich’s powerful Rothschild Bank, witnessed some extraordinary transfers from Calvi’s Luxembourg subsidiary to a Gelli-controlled corporate shell in Panama called Bellatrix. According to Heer, these loans, which amounted to $142 million, were temporarily deposited by Bellatrix at the Rothschild Bank, and then were used by Bellatrix to buy shares in Rizzoli at ten times their market value from Gelli and his associates. By this trick, almost 90 percent of the $142 million of the Banco Ambrosiano loan went into the pockets of Gelli and his associates, according to Heer. This diversion became so blatant by the spring of 1982 that the Rothschild Bank director assisting Bellatrix warned Heer, “We have to find a solution or
I will end up in Lake Zurich.” The solution Heer found was to temporarily put the Bellatrix money into two different accounts at the bank. One was called Zirka; the other Reciota. They both supposedly were controlled by an independent fiduciary agent. Nevertheless, the money was released into other numbered accounts controlled by Gelli and then disappeared. All that Calvi’s Luxembourg subsidiary had as collateral was the Rizzoli shares, which were now worth only a small fraction of the money it had loaned. Making matters worse for Calvi, Italian law had been changed in 1982 and now blocked the transfer of these Rizzoli shares to the bank’s Luxembourg subsidiary. So Calvi informed Gelli that the Rizzoli deal had not been consummated and that the $142 million loaned to the Gelli entities still belonged to his bank. According to Calvi’s personal assistant, as late as June 1982, Calvi counted on this diverted money as a “reserve fund,” and part of Calvi’s purpose in secretly slipping out of Italy in 1982 was to get the Bank Rothschild in Zurich to return the Bellatrix money from the numbered accounts. It was a destination he never reached.

The only further instructions Heer received in Zurich came from one of Gelli’s associates shortly after Calvi’s body was identified. According to Heer, he was requested to carry out a “secret operation.” It involved some $5 million in cash packed in a suitcase that was delivered to him at the Rothschild Bank. The money supposedly had come from one of Gelli’s numbered accounts in Geneva. Heer also received, along with the suitcase, one-half of a $100 bill. Following Gelli’s associate’s instructions, he gave the suitcase to two strangers who later arrived at the bank with the matching half of the bill, and who left with the suitcase in an armored limousine.

Less than three months later, on September 13, 1982, Gelli was arrested in Switzerland after making a $55-million withdrawal from the same numbered account in Geneva. The subsequent investigation uncovered records showing that this
money had come from the money Calvi had diverted through Bellatrix, confirming Heer’s account of the Rothschild transactions. (Heer was subsequently sued by the Rothschild Bank for exceeding his authority in arranging these loans, and, as a result, imprisoned for two months.)

Gelli then escaped from the Champ-Dollon Prison outside of Geneva and went to Argentina. In Italy, Gelli was sentenced in absentia to eight years for financing terrorism in Florence, and another fourteen months for money-laundering in San Remo. In 1987, Gelli surrendered in Chile and was sentenced to two months in prison in Switzerland. In February 1988, he was extradited back to Italy, accompanied by two armored cars and one hundred soldiers, to face trial in Bologna for slander. Although an appeals court threw out his conviction for slander, in 1992 he was convicted and sentenced to eighteen years and six months for fraud in connection with the diversion of money from Calvi’s Banco Ambrosiano. Before he could be imprisoned, he fled to France. By the time he was found on the Riviera, he was over eighty, and under Italian law, too old to be imprisoned in Italy. Finally, in 2005, at the age of eighty-six, he was implicated in the murder of Calvi, but acquitted in a subsequent trial.

Behind every great crime, to paraphrase Balzac, there is a multitude of theories in Italy. In the case of the hanging of God’s banker, almost all the theories proceed from a single motive: silencing Calvi. Various theories thus point to all the financial, political, and criminal interests for whom Calvi was laundering money, a list that includes offshore bankers, Gelli’s P-2 lodge, and the Vatican. In almost all of these theories, the Mafia, or some offshoot of it, organizes the actual murder. The umbrella theory, at least in the realm of fiction, can be found in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1990 movie
The Godfather Part III
. It depicts the hanging of a Calvi-like banker under Blackfriars Bridge in London as the work of Mafia killers who carried out
this murder on the orders of the Godfather, who did so as a favor to corrupt figures in the Vatican. In the realm of reality, Italian magistrates advanced a similar theory in court based almost entirely the testimony of “pentiti,” or ex-Mafia turncoats who, despite their oath of silence, agreed to cooperate with government investigations. One such turncoat was Francesco Marino Mannoia, a former member of the Sicilian Mafia who had been involved in heroin trafficking and at least seventeen murders before his conversion to government witness. In July 1991, he claimed to have hearsay information about the Calvi case, saying that he had heard from others that Francesco DiCarlo, another imprisoned Mafia hitman, had killed Calvi on orders from a Mafia boss Giuseppe Calo. For his part, DiCarlo, who was imprisoned in Britain for drug trafficking, denied the allegation. Instead, he told the magistrates that although he had been asked to “punish” the banker for squandering Mafia assets, he had refused the order. Then he offered his own hearsay evidence, saying that he had heard that two mafiosi from Naples had killed Calvi, but both men he mentioned were themselves dead.

The obvious problem with pentiti hearsay evidence is that it cannot be tested by confronting its source. Nor can the pentiti themselves be assumed to be telling the truth, since they have powerful incentives, including their freedom, money, and even vengeance, to invent unverifiable stories that assist high-profile prosecutions. On June 6, 2007, after 20 months of hearing such evidence in a prison in Rome, presiding judge Mario Lucio d’Andria dismissed the charges proceeding from this ex-Mafia testimony on the basis that there was “insufficient evidence” to continue.

My assessment, based on my interviews with some of the principal figures involved in the scandal, is more modest. The most obvious suspects in my view are the people responsible for Calvi’s protection on the night he was killed, Flavio Carboni,
and his associates in London. Carboni, it will be recalled, organized Calvi’s escape, his travel plans, his forged documents, his bodyguard, and his hotel room at the Chelsea Cloisters. He had also accompanied Calvi in the private plane to London and was in constant touch with him by phone. So he had opportunity.

Carboni had also supplied Calvi’s lone bodyguard, Vittor, who left Calvi unprotected that night. At about 5:00 p.m. Carboni phoned Calvi from the London Hilton, where he was staying, and told him to pack his bags since he had arranged for him to move to a flat, which was untrue. According to Vittor, Carboni arrived at the Chelsea Cloisters in a taxi that evening, and met Vittor at the front desk, but didn’t go up to see Calvi, who was waiting for him to move him. Since Calvi was relying on Carboni to hide him, he presumably would have followed whatever instructions Carboni provided, such as getting into a car or even a onto bridge to await a boat. If so, whether or not he used them, Carboni had the means to get Calvi to Blackfriars Bridge without using force.

Carboni also showed what might be construed as consciousness of guilt. Using a pseudonym, he left England by going to Scotland, where he had a chartered jet waiting to fly him to Switzerland. (Vittor, also using a pseudonym, took an early-morning commercial flight to Austria.)

Carboni also had a motive: money. He had in his Swiss bank account in Zurich $11 million that he had gotten from Calvi and which Calvi, if he had lived, might have used for his own purposes. More important, Calvi’s death also provided Carboni with the contents of Calvi’s black attaché case. The last time Vittor saw Calvi, he had the bag, but, after his vanishing, the bag disappeared. The value of its contents became clear only six years later. An Italian police raid on a smuggling suspect turned up copies of two letters apparently sent by registered mail to Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, who then was a high-ranking Vatican official. The letters said that the smuggler had
advanced to Carboni $1 million to get from him incriminating documents written by Calvi. I learned about this remarkable effort to extort money from the Vatican from Judge Almerighi, a self-styled Sherlock Holmes among investigating magistrates, who prided himself on his deductive logic. Since these documents had come from Calvi’s missing black bag, and he was investigating the Calvi affair, they were brought to his attention. When I interviewed Judge Almerighi in Rome, he told me that the Vatican acknowledged to him that a Vatican bishop had written checks for $2 million to Carboni on the Instituto per le Opere di Religione, the Vatican’s bank. The magistrate also uncovered a memo in which a Vatican official discussed paying $40 million to Carboni for other Calvi documents from the black bag. He concluded that these sensitive documents were being used, as he put it to me, “to blackmail the pope.” In tracing the scheme back to June 20, 1982, Almerighi also found a witness who claimed to have seen Carboni give an envelope to a Vatican official the day after Calvi died. If Carboni believed that the Vatican would pay to keep secret the documents Calvi had in his black bag, Calvi might have appeared to be worth a great deal more dead than alive.