The Last Supper (25 page)

Marcinkus entered the junior seminary at the age of 13 and was ordained priest in 1947, the same year that Roberto Calvi joined the Banco Ambrosiano. A promising student, he had been sent to Rome to study canon law at the Gregorian
university, specializing in matrimonial aspects of church law. He got his first lucky break in 1952 when he was invited to carry out holiday relief work in the English section of the Vatican secretariat of state. The top man was Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, later to become Pope Paul VI, and Marcinkus caught his eye for his diligence, loyalty and efficiency – it would prove a useful connection.

Marcinkus’s career proceeded with a two-year stint as secretary to the papal nuncio in Bolivia, again an opportunity to show his organizational powers. The young American priest came up with the idea for a kind of lend-lease programme to supply the impoverished parishes of Latin America with priests drawn from their wealthier equivalents in the United States or Britain. The imported priests would show their colleagues how to operate a parish: ‘help them to get a certain stature as priests instead of just being the lowest of the low.’ Next stop: Canada, where Marcinkus continued in his role as the Vatican’s diplomatic representative, relishing the opportunity to get involved in pastoral work as well.

He returned to the secretariat of state in Rome in 1959 and his career advanced again when Montini was elected pope in 1963. Marcinkus cemented his relationship with the new pontiff by interpreting for him and giving him private English lessons. He interpreted for the pope at meetings with US President Lyndon Johnson and the Catholic novelist Graham Greene. Marcinkus also became friendly with the pope’s powerful secretary, Monsignor Pasquale Macchi, who had worked for Montini in Milan and shared an interest in modern art with Roberto Calvi.

Where Marcinkus really came into his own was in the organization of the pope’s foreign travel. Methodical, blunt and endowed with a good memory, he would travel ahead of the papal party to ensure the logistical arrangements were in order. His robust physique proved itself useful during Paul VI’s historic visit to the Holy Land in 1964, enabling him to
shield the frail and diminutive pontiff and prevent him from being crushed by the crowd at Jerusalem’s Mandelbaum Gate. ‘Naturally, I
wasn’t
the pope’s security guard, because we always took four or five Vatican security men,’ he told the British author John Cornwell. ‘But when there was a real crush around the Holy Father maybe I became a little more... spontaneous, I guess, and because of my size and so forth I could clear a way for him.’ Paul VI rewarded his service by appointing him secretary of the IOR in 1968 and making him a bishop the following year. Two years later, aged only 48, he took over from the 87-year-old Cardinal Alberto Di Jorio as chairman of the Vatican bank.

For all his administrative abilities, Marcinkus had no banking experience whatever when he was first appointed to the IOR. ‘As for financial experience . . . Well, let’s say I counted the Sunday collection and never got it wrong,’ he joked to John Cornwell.
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The gap was filled by a three-day course at Continental Illinois Bank in Chicago, another couple of days at Chase Manhattan in New York and some brief work-observation at a trust business, a stockbroker and another small bank in the United States. It was enough, Marcinkus would maintain later, because the IOR had its own technical experts and his role was simply to set policy.

Marcinkus talked frankly about his relationship with Sindona and Calvi in previously unpublished parts of his 1988 interview, playing down the extent of his connection to the two men and offering sometimes confused and contradictory explanations for the financial scandals in which he had mired his bank. Michele Sindona expressed scant respect for Marcinkus’s abilities when interviewed by the author Nick Tosches. He told his biographer how the IOR helped Italian banks to export lire illegally
in nero.
‘I know these things very well because the IOR acted in this capacity for clients of my Banca Privata and Banca Unione,’ Sindona said. He claimed he had advised Marcinkus to suspend the illegal money transfers after the Italian parliament
made it a criminal, rather than a civil, offence. ‘I told him that if representatives of the Vatican were ever dragged into the courts as accomplices in black money crimes – something the Italian government would dearly love – the prestige of the IOR, and of the papacy itself, would never recover. But Marcinkus believed himself to be beyond the reach of the law. He continued to pursue the profits that he flaunted to the pope as proof of his competence and worth and that he hoped would bring him the scarlet
berretta
[of a cardinal].’
⁸

In the 1988 interview Marcinkus claimed he had met Sindona only about a dozen times in his life, ‘sometimes for a minute, sometimes at a baptism, once or twice at lunch, at a reception or a ceremony. He dropped in here [at the IOR] once or twice. The whole 12 times might have been six hours. I never had a dealing with him. The ones that were dealing with him were APSA. They sold him the shares for [Società Generale] Immobiliare and so on. So when they said Immobiliare is sold to Sindona by the Vatican, immediately they said it was me. I had nothing to do with it. Sindona himself said he never had dealings with me.’

The assertion that he never had any dealings with Sindona squares rather loosely with the facts. Marcinkus inherited a relationship with the Sicilian financier on joining the IOR and helping Sindona’s clients export money illegally is not quite the same thing as not dealing with him. Marcinkus was a partner with Calvi and Sindona in the Cisalpine Overseas Bank in Nassau. In 1964 his predecessors had sold Sindona a majority stake in Finabank in Geneva, remaining as Sindona’s partner with a 29 per cent stake. In 1968 the IOR became a partner in another Sindona bank, when the dynamic Sicilian bought a controlling stake in the Banca Unione, in which the IOR had a minority stake. The Vatican bank’s technical expert, its managing director Luigi Mennini, sat on the Banca Unione’s board, as well as on that of two other Sindona banks, Banca Privata Finanziaria and Finabank.

Marcinkus’s next comment in the 1988 interview is therefore a bit of a non-sequitur to his assertion that he never had dealings with Sindona. ‘So when Sindona left, the next natural candidate for it [a relationship with the Vatican bank] was Ambrosiano, who had dealings with us. But these dealings, these [letters-of-patronage] companies and stuff, I’ve never even heard of them. Whether a number of them might have been given to us as a guarantee for a loan, the stocks and that sort of thing, but that’s all.’

Marcinkus was clearly aware of the fact that Sindona was a man who bent the rules, but the idea does not seem to have perturbed him. ‘When Sindona went to the States I said: You know, if you operate there as you do in Italy you’ll end up in jail. They have different rules, different regulations.’ He also appears to have had few illusions about Calvi’s probity. ‘Money that he put in his pocket or gave away? I’m sure there must have been some, that’s the Italian system.’ It was not a reason for not doing business with him, however. ‘When he was in jail I asked somebody very high up, I said: What’s going on? He said: Nah, in Italy if you’re not caught you’re not worth it.’

Marcinkus’s verdict on the two disgraced financiers, whose ruin had severely damaged the reputation of the Vatican as well, was mild: ‘I think both of them maybe got carried away with their own importance. If there is anything that I would criticize, it would be that.’ It was much the same judgement as Sindona had passed on him.

Marcinkus was adamant that the Vatican should never have agreed to make its $240 million ‘goodwill payment’ to the creditors of the Banco Ambrosiano, a decision he opposed from the very beginning. ‘I said: we worked like dogs to build up our own capital in here, in case anything happened, and now you’re just wiping it out. My whole goal on this thing was to help you guys, building up this stuff so that we can help you with your problems, pension funds and everything, which
all went out the window.’ The admission that the payment was being made ‘for moral considerations’ had been a major blunder, he said. ‘What do you mean moral considerations? There are no moral considerations. If there are moral considerations we must be guilty, and we’re not guilty. Because of that payment the stigma’s there.’ Marcinkus argued that the matter should simply have been put in the hands of lawyers, leaving them to negotiate a hard-headed business settlement, but without any acknowledgement – however tenuous – of blame. ‘They could have gotten away with it if they wanted to,’ he said.

Asked whether he felt he had anything to be ashamed of concerning his management of the IOR, he replied: ‘If you didn’t do anything, you’ve nothing to be ashamed of. I might be ashamed of one thing: maybe I trusted Calvi too much. It wasn’t hard to do because Calvi had a tremendous reputation. He was well respected in the banking community. He’d got that bank up from just an ordinary bank to a very important bank. And maybe as a human being, in my limited relationship with him, I felt he was a decent fellow.’ The relationship had been purely on a business level, he said, adding, somewhat perplexingly: ‘I never did one bit of business with Calvi, but my office did . . . Maybe there we were too trustful. But everything else led us to do that: tremendous recommendations from
Milano
, from the church up there, from people around here [in the Vatican]. He had a great rapport with government officials. So if there was anything, it was maybe that I should have known the man personally a lot better.’

Personal relations with Calvi had been superficial, he insisted. He had met Calvi’s wife and family on a couple of occasions when he was in the Bahamas to attend board meetings of the Nassau bank, but nothing more. Social conversation had rarely gone beyond how Calvi passed the time at his weekend cottage. He didn’t know where Calvi lived and had never set foot in the Banco Ambrosiano.

Marcinkus was, again, less than convincing when he embarked on an explanation of what he knew as a director of the Cisalpine Bank and how he had been induced to sign the letters of patronage for Calvi’s mysterious Panamanian companies: the error that lay at the heart of the IOR’s compensation payment. Marcinkus said the auditors and administrators of the BAOL (formerly Cisalpine) had assured him that all the loans leaving the Nassau bank were sufficiently guaranteed. The administrators informed the board of the bank’s activities after the fact rather than seeking the directors’ approval in advance, he said. ‘There’s a difference between the board of directors and the administration. The administration isn’t going to bring up all the questions, the problems they might have. Well, I suppose they should, but we never saw them. There was a girl who was vice-president of the outfit. I used to ask all the time. I said: Tell me, how’s the bank going? She says: Wonderful. I said: Everything in perfect shape? She said: Perfect shape. Audit? Perfect. I have to tell you something: If I knew, I’d be partially responsible. I never knew.’

Marcinkus explained his decision to sign the letters of patronage for Calvi’s Panamanian companies: ‘Here’s a fellow who comes out of jail and he says: I’m having trouble, I’ve got to get this thing all set up and I can’t get around to different places, so would you kind of oversee these things. In the letter, as a condition, he said: I ask you as a third person to take control of these companies. Then he said they’re not yours, they never have been yours. And I said no other efforts would be made for indebtedness. Everything has to be done to decrease indebtedness. No operations could be made except in that particular thing [decreasing debt] and in one year and a half it’s got to be all settled and we’re out. It’s like a trustee. The letters didn’t give any guarantees or anything like that. They were just statements of fact: We know what your indebtedness is, that’s all.’

The Panamanian companies had not been set up in the Vatican’s name, Marcinkus insisted. There was no evidence that the IOR had authorized their creation or directed their activities. If Calvi had really been operating on the Vatican’s behalf he could have saved himself and his bank by simply producing the proof. ‘If all these accusations are true . . . he was handling for me, why did Calvi have to commit suicide or be murdered? All he had to do was to come with a piece of paper and say: I want my money.’

In the wide-ranging interview Marcinkus denied taking bribes from Calvi, denied being a freemason – there was no masonic lodge in the Vatican and membership of one was still a mortal sin for a Catholic – and denied all knowledge of the funding of Solidarity. Calvi had never talked to him about Solidarity, he said. ‘Our conversations as a rule were talking about generic things. As I said to you before, I never sat down and talked specifics with him in any sense. He never mentioned Solidarity to me at all. If he gave something to Solidarity, OK, but I don’t know anything about it. Somebody said he gave 6 million bucks to me as well. I’d like to know where it is. I never saw it. I’ve never seen from him, personally, one lira.’ He had received the normal emoluments to cover his costs as a BAOL director, he said, but nothing more. ‘He’d say: If you ever need anything, let me know. I said: Don’t worry about it. Never asked. I know others were receiving, but I haven’t, never once.’

He had begun doing business with the Banco Ambrosiano when the Milan bank was on the up and up and it had always repaid the loans it received from the IOR. He had not chosen to do business with Calvi because he was rewarded with higher than normal interest rates, as some had suggested. He could understand Calvi telling his employees that the Vatican was behind his operation, and their believing him, but it simply wasn’t true. All in all, there was nothing to be ashamed of in the relationship. ‘There was no reason for us to question his
honesty, his integrity. The relationship that we had with the banks were things that all banks do,’ he said.

Roberto Calvi’s son Carlo confirmed Marcinkus’s description of the limited social relations that had existed between the archbishop and his father, but he disputed his minimalist account of the business ties. ‘Marcinkus was a guest of my family on three occasions in the Bahamas, but we saw him in Nassau at other board meetings. He would stay one night at our house. We’d have a meal, and we talked,’ Calvi said. The banking relationship with his father was not as bland and normal as Marcinkus sought to imply, however. ‘There were too many operations, they were too anomalous and they took place over too long a period of time. I don’t have a reason to blame Marcinkus for anything in particular, but he was involved in bad corporate practice over a long period. Even in the best case, the parallel correspondence relating to the letters-of-patronage companies is a deliberate joint attempt to mislead. They conspired together to mislead third parties.’ Carlo Calvi said the IOR controlled numerous offshore companies in the Swiss city of Lugano and had received information about their activities and returned it to the Banca del Gottardo, in some cases even backdating documents. The IOR had indeed been paid more than the normal market percentages by his father, he told me. ‘It’s worse if he says the percentages were not high. Then why was he doing it? You were conducting an enormous number of operations that would appear to a normal person as very anomalous. What Marcinkus says makes no sense.’
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