The Last Supper (15 page)

Michele Sindona’s actions in the course of 1979 were crucial for his own personal destiny, but they were also indirectly important for the history of Italy. On the night of 11 July, the month before Sindona’s ‘kidnap’, a gunman shot dead the liquidator of Sindona’s Banca Privata Italiana as he returned to his home in Milan at around midnight. Giorgio Ambrosoli had proved unreceptive to pleas that he accept the rescue package Sindona was trying to promote and had been subjected to a campaign of threats and intimidation. An American mobster, William Joseph Arico, later admitted responsibility, saying Sindona had promised him $50,000 if he carried out the hit. By 1984 Sindona was serving a sentence for fraudulent bankruptcy in Otisville prison in the United States. Towards the end of that year he was extradited to Italy and transferred to Voghera prison, south-west of Milan. On 18 March 1986 a Milan court sentenced Sindona to life imprisonment for Ambrosoli’s murder. Two days later the Sicilian financier drank a cup of coffee laced with cyanide, draining the deep cup to the bottom
despite the strong smell of almonds it gave off and despite the fact that the poison burnt the inside of his mouth and throat. Sindona called his guards – he was the only male prisoner incarcerated in Voghera women’s prison – shouting: ‘They have poisoned me!’ It took him two days to die.

More significant for Italy were the actions and admissions of Joseph Miceli Crimi, a Sicilian-American doctor and freemason who in 1979 had helped Sindona organize his fake kidnapping; Crimi actually shot Sindona in the thigh with a small-calibre pistol to try and increase the authenticity of the performance. A plastic surgeon who spent part of the year in New York, Crimi had worked for almost a decade as a doctor at police headquarters in Palermo. His Sicilian co-conspirators suspected him of being a CIA spy. But more significant than his role in the kidnap charade was an admission he made afterwards to the Milan prosecutors, curious to discover why he had travelled 600 miles to visit the Tuscan town of Arezzo (ostensibly to see his dentist) during Sindona’s stay in Sicily. He finally conceded that he had gone to Arezzo to meet Licio Gelli, his ‘masonic brother and a close friend of Michele Sindona’. That admission would lead directly to police raids on Gelli’s premises in March 1981 and the discovery of the P2 membership list, diverting the course of Italy’s modern history.

Sindona’s death and blackmail activities were the subject of curious documents presented in evidence at the Bologna bomb trial in 1984 by Francesco Pazienza, Roberto Calvi’s aide and assistant to Gen. Giuseppe Santovito, the head of Italian military intelligence. A handwritten two-page document titled ‘Andreotti Operation O.S.S.A.’ outlined a ‘supersecret’ operation Pazienza had undertaken for Santovito towards the end of 1980. O.S.S.A. stood for ‘Honoured Society Sindona Andreotti’, Pazienza explained. ‘There was a fear that Sindona might start to talk about his relations with Andreotti because he felt abandoned by Andreotti.’ Pazienza flew to New York
and received assurances from an unnamed interlocutor that Sindona had been ‘convinced’ to remain quiet.

In another document titled ‘How Sindona Will Be Eliminated’, Pazienza speculated about the fate awaiting Sindona on his transfer to an Italian jail. The document bears the stamp of Sindona’s American lawyer and the date 27 September 1984, prior to Sindona’s extradition from America. Pazienza suggested that if Sindona was put in a normal prison he would be murdered by his fellow inmates, but if it was a maximum-security prison and he was kept in isolation – as he was – he would be given a poisoned cup of coffee by one of the two branches of the Italian secret services. ‘If Sindona were to die in a “clean” and sudden manner it means that the Americans have entered the game,’ he wrote. Only they were capable of killing people with sophisticated poisons that left no trace. ‘The Italians don’t know . . . anything more than arsenic or cyanide.’ Those potentially interested in Sindona’s elimination were Andreotti, the Vatican and the Americans, he claimed. ‘Andreotti: It’s unnecessary to give the reasons. . . . The Vatican: It would eliminate “the other one who knows”. Calvi, in fact, is the other “other”. The Americans: Sindona certainly didn’t go to Sicily in 1979 of his own free will and initiative.’ Sindona’s son Nino had confided to him, Pazienza claimed, that ‘his father didn’t go to Sicily for pleasure but on behalf of elements in the Carter administration.’

A third handwritten document – ‘More on the Possible Elimination of Sindona’ – says the death of Sindona could make Licio Gelli either stronger or more vulnerable. In it, Pazienza alleges that Gelli had acquired part of Sindona’s sensitive material in 1979. ‘The elimination of Sindona would make Gelli the only possible blackmailer of Roman high society on the Sindona – Vatican – DC – Andreotti affairs. We shall see,’ Pazienza concluded the prescient document, it too bearing the stamp: ‘Received 27 September 1984.’

The CIA appears to have taken a close interest in Sindona’s affairs during the last years of his life, putting one of its Italian agents in contact with him to monitor his behaviour in prison. A regular correspondent and occasional prison visitor was a man called Carlo Rocchi. Rocchi told the Milan magistrate Guido Salvini that he had worked for a number of American intelligence services, including the CIA from 1978 to 1985. His intelligence gathering on potential Piazza Fontana bombing witnesses had brought him into the sights of Milan investigators. By a curious coincidence, Rocchi was a partner in a Milan private detective agency with a former policeman who provided Italian military intelligence officers with the crucial tip-off that enabled them to secure the arrest of Flavio Carboni in Switzerland following Calvi’s death.

Rocchi told the prosecutor investigating Sindona’s death that he had first met the financier in the United States in around 1975, striking up a superficial friendship with him. He made contact with him again in 1984, on the instructions of his controller, to try and gather information from Sindona on the activities of the New York crime families and, in particular, their money-laundering techniques. Sindona, in prison in Otisville, declined to cooperate, citing concerns for the safety of his family.

Contacts between the two resumed when Sindona was transferred to Voghera. Sindona wrote to Rocchi inviting him to visit him in jail and making a number of requests, one of which was for an affidavit from the State Department ‘declaring that he was a reliable person and that President [Ronald] Reagan was prepared to grant him a pardon’. Rocchi’s interest intensified as Sindona indicated that he was once again ready to go on the blackmail warpath. In a letter to Rocchi dated 5 February 1986, Sindona informed him that he was not interested in the topics they had previously discussed when he was in prison in the United States. ‘Instead I want to talk about scandalous matters that constitute grave moral and
penal irregularities, about which I have remained silent until now to maintain the habit of professional reserve to which I have always wished to be faithful,’ Sindona wrote. He had now decided to change his position ‘and make known the true reasons for the unjust accusations and the sentences that have been imposed on me.’

Rocchi was ready to intercept any such confessions, writing to Sindona on 18 March 1986, after witnessing the financier’s conviction for Ambrosoli’s murder, encouraging him to react. ‘Let the great battle against you-know-who begin and let me have all the necessary documents,’ he wrote. ‘Take care not to forget anything, neither the national aspects nor the USA ones.’ Rocchi explained later to the investigating magistrate that he had wanted to take advantage of Sindona’s vulnerable psychological state to discover whether he really did possess valuable information and documents. Naturally he was particularly fascinated by ‘the part concerning events that might interest the American authorities’. If Sindona wanted to blackmail the CIA he was certainly talking to the right person. Rocchi visited him three times during his detention at Voghera and was one of the last visitors to see him alive.
⁸

It is not implausible that the blackmail material that made Sindona powerful, but ultimately failed him in his hour of need, should also have passed through the hands of Roberto Calvi, Sindona’s successor in his money-laundering activities and Gelli’s close associate. An anonymous document sent to the Italian embassy in Madrid in 1985 for onward transmission to Giovanni Falcone, the leading anti-mafia prosecutor in Palermo, offers an intriguing account of the nature and fate of these ‘sensitive materials’. A chronology, typewritten in capital letters, it begins by mentioning accounts and companies allegedly associated with Sindona’s secret funding of the Christian Democrat party. The entry for 14.7.74 reads: ‘Michele Sindona hands over the list [of] 538 Italian clients [of] Finabank to Licio Gelli, who makes photocopies of the list and
of other documents then prepares three packages marked with codenames. Package 1 Bonnieprince. Package 2 Rosenkrauz [sic]. Package 3 Caronte [Charon, the mythological ferryman of the river Styx]. Bonnieprince to Roberto Calvi.’ The entry for 4.10.74 adds the theme of arms trading to the ‘sensitive material’. ‘Gelli telephones Sindona and warns they are about to arrest him. Sindona flees to Bangkok, Formosa [Taiwan], New York, then goes to Jamaica with Laura Turnez and gives her documents on arms traffic via H. Arsan, the Magyar Bank Nemzeti, the Moscow Narodny Bank and Tradinvest, Nassau. Turnez takes the documents to Gelli in Argentina.’

The document goes on to describe how Sindona stole money from the bank of his P2 associate Umberto Ortolani, Bafisud, and trafficked in stolen diamonds. ‘13.9.79 Sindona meets P....ienza F.’, an apparent reference to Pazienza. ‘21.6.80 Roberto Calvi refuses to hand over to Pazienza the Bonnieprince package given him by Gelli in 1974. 7.82 Calvi leaves Rome with briefcase containing Bonnieprince package with the Finabank list, two diaries and documents on payments to political parties. 17.7.82 Calvi telephones Roberto Memmo [a businessman and alleged P2 member] and says he has Ortolani under his thumb and is ready to go to a London lawyer. Memmo warns Ortolani. 18.6.82 Calvi eliminated in London. 19.6.82 Calvi’s briefcase taken to Edinburgh by a woman and embarked on a private plane. 20.6.82 Calvi’s bag delivered to Ortolani’s son.’

The date of Calvi’s flight from Rome, and his alleged phone call to Roberto Memmo, seem to be typing errors giving July rather than June. But beyond that, it seems far-fetched to suggest that Ortolani could organize a murder in the space of a day. The author may have been an attentive newspaper reader with a fertile imagination, but his choice of ingredients was plausible. The arms trafficker Henri Arsan undoubtedly comes into the Calvi story, as does the ENI subsidiary Tradinvest, in Nassau. The Italian embassy in Madrid passed
the document on under the label
Riservatissimo
[Highly confidential]. Judge Falcone’s view of it is unknown; he was killed by a mafia bomb in 1992.

‘Even a coup can be an encrypted message destined for those capable of understanding the code, a blackmail note to be deciphered, a threat of embarrassing revelations.’ So wrote the author Vincenzo Vasile in a comment on Michele Sindona’s mysterious 1979 visit to Sicily.
¹
Sindona himself appeared to confirm this interpretation when questioned about the escapade by a Palermo judge in November 1984. The banker told the judge that he had given advice on money laundering to the US President’s Commission on Organized Crime prior to his extradition to Italy. His past financial experience, he explained, had enabled him to learn that certain organizations of industrialized countries, for ideological reasons, protected groups from Palermo that were involved in drug trafficking. The CIA, Sindona appeared to be hinting, had been in league with Sicilian drug smugglers. An evocation of that kind of complicity may have been the true purpose behind Sindona’s self-kidnap operation.

Sindona’s cryptic suggestion was spelled out explicitly by another operator from the shadowy world of the intelligence services who claimed to be privy to some of its most sensitive secrets. His allegations link the CIA specifically to the Gambino crime family, the organization that oversaw Sindona’s Sicilian adventure, and appear to be based on first-hand knowledge. A paunchy, balding, bespectacled real estate manager from Lake Oswego, Oregon, Richard Brenneke made an unlikely
and, to many, unconvincing source. His claim to have participated in secret negotiations to delay the release of US embassy hostages in Teheran and so favour the 1980 election of the Republican President Ronald Reagan made him immediately controversial. His knowledge of and apparent participation in arms deals with Iran give a certain plausibility to otherwise seemingly far-fetched claims, and a court in Portland, Oregon, cleared him of lying about these controversial issues. Congressional investigators, however, remained sceptical.

Some of Brenneke’s most startling claims came in evidence to a joint investigation of the US Congress and the office of the Arkansas State Attorney General in which he described his dual role as a contract pilot and money launderer for the CIA. Brenneke said he had flown weapons from Mena airport in the southern US state of Arkansas to Panama, a staging post on their journey to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, between 1984 and 1986. On return flights, he said, he had carried cocaine and marijuana for delivery to representatives of the Gambino crime family and its then head, John Gotti. The deposition was made in Little Rock, Arkansas, on 21 June 1991 in the presence of Congressman William Alexander Jr. and Chad Farris, chief deputy attorney general for the State of Arkansas. Brenneke identified one of the recipients of the drug shipments as a Gotti lieutenant and director of security at Kennedy international airport in New York. He said the Gotti organization had paid the CIA around $50 million for the drugs. He confirmed that the CIA was in the business of bringing drugs into the United States and that there was a close alliance between the agency and Gotti’s organization.

Brenneke told the investigators he had begun laundering drug money for the New York crime families on the CIA’s instructions in 1969, salting away the money ‘in nice safe places’ such as Swiss banks. To do this he had created a network of offshore companies and bank accounts that spanned the globe and that was active at a time that increasing
quantities of hard drugs were flowing into the United States from Central America and Sicily under the watchful eye of Cosa Nostra. Sindona and Calvi’s financial institutions played a similar role in the laundering of that drug money, according to the testimony of numerous mafia
pentiti,
and it seems likely that the two networks intersected. The ultimate masters of both were the same and their purpose, combating communism, was shared.