The Last Supper (34 page)

Involvement in sensitive strategic aspects of the oil business would not be in the least out of character for Hans Kunz; or for MacDonald, for that matter. One of the keys to Kunz’s fortune was his involvement in the suborning of Libyan officials, an activity which enabled the Russian-born American entrepreneur Armand Hammer to win vital oil concessions from the monarchist government of King Idris, the foundation of the success of his Occidental Petroleum Corporation. Kunz was able to help Hammer procure the Libyan oil concessions through the influential contacts of a business partner, Kemal Zeinal Zade, a Soviet-born citizen of Iran who was half Azerbaijani and half Chechen and had made the useful connections while studying and working in London. Kunz’s role in the affair is described in detail by the writer Edward Jay Epstein in his book
The Secret History of Armand Hammer.
Epstein describes him as he was in the 1960s when the delicate negotiations were going on: ‘Kunz was a large man in his early forties with a bulldoglike head and a massive jutting jaw. Even with his glasses, his poor eyesight caused him to tilt his head and peer almost menacingly. He spoke English with a heavy guttural accent.’ Kunz had lived in Cairo as a young man and made valuable connections among the Arab sheiks, connections that enabled him to become a facilitator for western oil companies prospecting for oil and building pipelines in the Middle East. ‘He catered meals for their crews and also provided their employees with visas, import permits, and whatever else they needed from recalcitrant government officials,’ Epstein wrote.
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Working for Hammer would have been a particular challenge, adding the complexity of a figure who bestrode the cold war divide to the already abundant complexities of Middle Eastern politics. Hammer broke the monopoly of the Seven Sisters in Libya by the generosity of his bribe: $2.8 million in
cash to his corrupt partners on the day the concessions were awarded and an overriding royalty of 3 per cent of the value of the oil. The money for the ‘commission’ was channelled through a joint account belonging to Kunz and Zade at the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) in Zurich, according to Epstein. When Occidental officials baulked at making such a large payment Hammer showed them the contract, a document so secret it had to be kept in his safe-deposit box at the City National Bank in Los Angeles and of which no copies could be made. The first payment went through on 5 April 1967 and Epstein estimated that the conspirators would eventually pocket approximately $90 million.

Some of the alleged details of Kunz’s agreement with Armand Hammer emerged in 1988 as a result of litigation between the two men in US District Court for the District of Columbia. In his complaint for breach of contract, Kunz pointed out that he and a partner had signed the first oil concession ever granted by Libya in 1955. Oxy-Libya had entered into an agreement with Kunz on 25 July 1965 ‘by which Kunz agreed to provide information and data garnered by him, as well as to lend the standing and credibility necessary for Occidental to obtain concessions for the commercial production of oil in Libya’, Kunz’s complaint states. Occidental had agreed to pay a 4.1665 per cent royalty on all of the oil produced from two Libyan concessions to Kunz, the document claims, and had paid a total of $23 million between 1968 and 1986.

When Colonel Muammar Qaddafi staged his coup in August 1969 he created a challenge and an opportunity for Hammer. The challenge was the threatened nationalization of the country’s oil resources, the opportunity an excuse to cut off the bribe to the corrupt officials of the monarchist regime who had won him his concessions in the first place. According to Epstein, Hammer continued to divert the royalties into the Kunz and Zade account at the UBS to create a massive slush fund at his own disposal, while duping Occidental financial
officers into believing the commission was still being paid to its original recipients. Part of it was eventually used to support some of Hammer’s favourite charities, including the Armand Hammer United World College of the American West, inaugurated by Britain’s Prince Charles. Handling funds of this type would have put Kunz at a crossroads where clandestine politics met international strategic interests in the twentieth century’s version of the Great Game. That a man of this experience should have taken such a major role in the logistics of Calvi’s last journey is therefore of the greatest significance.

Kunz was not only instrumental in chartering Calvi’s flight to London and booking his flat at Chelsea Cloisters but he also arranged a private flight to London on the evening after Calvi’s death, believed to have been used to collect some of the banker’s most precious documents, and he personally flew to Edinburgh in the same private Learjet 55 to fetch Carboni on 20 June. On the day Calvi and Vittor flew to London, Carboni and the Kleinszig girls flew from Zurich to Amsterdam by private plane. All the flights other than Calvi’s – where Kunz had insisted the service should be provided by a company from outside Switzerland – were booked from the Geneva company Aeroleasing SA by Kunz himself. This was the company, used on occasion by both Calvi and Marcinkus, that was chosen by Colonel Oliver North for his secret shuttle diplomacy with Iran during the Iran–Contra affair and in which the Swiss businessman Peter Notz reportedly had a stake. Daniel Brandt, an Aeroleasing dispatcher at the time, confirmed North’s use of the company. Notz, one of the company’s founders, had sold his stake in Aeroleasing by then, he said. ‘I remember meeting North in our offices once,’ Brandt told me during a break at the Rome murder trial.
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An Italian secret service document adds further fragments of Kunz’s biography of particular relevance to the Calvi story. It is headed ‘Kunz–Gelli’: ‘Three men ate together at the beginning of May 1982 at the Cheval Blanc de Vandeuvre restaurant in the vicinity of Geneva, one of the best in the city. The reserved
table was in a corner of the main room. One of the three was Licio Gelli, who was sitting with his back to the room, the other, on his right, was Hans Kunz, the third, on his left, has not been identified. All three men spoke Italian.’

City Police investigators appear to have shown a curious lack of curiosity about Kunz’s role in organizing Calvi’s last movements. At the second London inquest, which opened almost exactly a year after Calvi’s death, the Calvi family lawyer, George Carman QC, put it to Detective Chief Superintendent Barry Tarbun that it would be natural to want to question Kunz, who had not been called as a witness. ‘Not really, sir,’ was Tarbun’s surprising reply. Carman highlighted Kunz’s contacts with the Calvi family, his involvement in the travel arrangements and his close telephone contact with Carboni to suggest he ought to have been interviewed. The commander of the police investigation replied grudgingly that if he had been easily accessible – he was believed to be in the United States at the time – he would perhaps have interviewed him: ‘Yes. As a witness; not as a suspect.’ ‘Witnesses sometimes turn into suspects, don’t they?’ Carman responded. ‘They do indeed.’ ‘Sometimes people start life as witnesses and end up as defendants?’ ‘Sometimes, yes,’ Tarbun conceded. Efforts to call Kunz to give evidence at the Rome murder trial were also ineffectual, Prosecutor Tescaroli complaining of a foot-dragging response to requests for assistance from his colleagues in the Swiss judiciary.

The pilot of the Citation One executive jet – call sign GB.FAR – which flew Calvi and Vittor to London recalled the journey for City Police in a statement delivered on 28 June 1982. ‘The second passenger I would say was in his mid 50s, about 5ft 5in to 5ft 7in tall, chubby build. He had greyish hair, balding. I am not sure whether or not he had a moustache. Although he was wearing a suit,’ Reginald Graham Mulligan told the police. More important than his physical description of Calvi was his description of Calvi’s luggage. Calvi and Vittor had between
them only two items of luggage: ‘A suitcase and a holdall, both apparently matching and of good quality. I believe they were a light check design.’ These were the items that would be found in room 881 of Chelsea Cloisters after Calvi’s death. The famous black briefcase was nowhere to be seen when Calvi arrived in London, if Mulligan’s memory served him well just two weeks after the event.

Roberto Calvi and Silvano Vittor arrived at Gatwick airport in the early evening of Tuesday 15 June. It is still not entirely clear to what extent the decision was Calvi’s or imposed upon him by Carboni and Kunz, whom he was intending to see in London, and how exactly he spent the remaining three days of his life. Our knowledge of these events is still largely based on the incomplete and unreliable account of those who travelled with him, although a few new witnesses have come forward to fill in some of the gaps.

Carboni had told Calvi and Vittor there would be a car waiting to meet them at Gatwick, but they were unable to find it. Calvi was immediately nervous. ‘Silvano, we’re in trouble here. We’re right in the wolf’s mouth, where lots of bankers who recognize me are likely to pass.’ Vittor suggested they wait a bit to see if the minicab arrived. ‘We won’t wait for anything. Let’s take a taxi and get out of here,’ Calvi replied.
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Calvi was furious when they arrived at Chelsea Cloisters and checked into their small flat on the eighth floor. He would soon be on the phone to Carboni to complain, summoning the Sardinian to London to sort out the problem and find him the kind of accommodation that would enable him to receive bankers of his own standing in dignified surroundings. ‘Calvi complained about the quality of Chelsea Cloisters. It was a brothel frequented by a louche clientele,’ Vittor told me. The red-brick and concrete building was one of the largest
in Europe when it was completed in 1938 with the intention of providing reasonably priced accommodation for the employees of London’s large department stores. For anyone intending to make Calvi disappear it had an inestimable advantage: entrances on all four sides of the building through which people were free to come and go without identifying themselves.

Marguerite Lilley, the letting manager at Chelsea Cloisters, told City Police 12 days after Calvi’s death that the flat had been booked by a Mr MacDonald who telephoned from Geneva on 15 June, the day of Calvi’s arrival. The booking was in the name of Silvano Vittor, whose name had been recorded as Bietor, and was for a period of 22 days. ‘Later that day Mr MacDonald telephoned again and said that Mr Robert Clarke from Wood, Nash and Winters would be paying the rent,’ Lilley told police. It was presumably MacDonald’s office that called as MacDonald himself was ostensibly on his way to Tunisia at this point.

As Calvi was settling into his squalid quarters in Chelsea, Carboni was embarking on a pleasure trip to Amsterdam with the two Kleinszig sisters. The flight, as all the other key movements of his group, was provided by Aeroleasing and booked by Hans Kunz. Before leaving the Hotel Baur au Lac in Zurich, Carboni made a total of 17 phone calls; one was to Kunz’s home, one to the London Airtaxi Centre, which provided Calvi’s flight to London, one to MacDonald’s service company in Geneva, Challencode SA, two to Mazzotta’s home in Rome, two to the Vatican, one to Rome police headquarters and one to a number in the United States.

Early on the morning of Wednesday 16 June Calvi’s deputy, Roberto Rosone, visited the Vatican to see if he could persuade the IOR to help shore up the tottering Banco Ambrosiano as it staggered into the terminal phase of its financial crisis. The heads of the Banco Ambrosiano’s foreign department had assured him that the IOR stood behind the indebtedness of
the Ambrosiano’s offshore network and the Ambrosiano had the IOR’s letters of patronage to prove it. Rosone described the occasion in dramatic testimony to the Rome murder trial, where he appeared walking with a stick, pale, breathless and clearly in the poorest of health. ‘I went to the IOR a few days before Calvi’s death, given that I didn’t know what the hell to do except to go and see the people who had guaranteed the debt,’ he told the court.

Accompanied by two senior Ambrosiano group officials, Rosone was received by Luigi Mennini and the Vatican bank’s chief accountant, Pellegrino De Strobel. Marcinkus was abroad again, this time accompanying the pope on a visit to Switzerland. Rosone called on the bank to honour its commitment to Calvi and the offshore companies but was told for the first time of the existence of Calvi’s letters of indemnity, absolving the IOR of all responsibility for the heavily indebted companies. ‘I became as angry as a buffalo,’ Rosone recalled. ‘I told them this was a criminal conspiracy. They had committed fraud. The letters were from the IOR and they were a guarantee. All that was missing was the signature of Jesus Christ.’ Rosone insisted that Calvi’s letters of indemnity were invalid, as they had been signed by Calvi as the chairman of BAOL without the authorization of the bank’s administrative organs. The IOR officials listened to him in silence, Mennini looking pale. The letters of indemnity were not immediately produced for him to view, as they didn’t have copies of them in the office. ‘It was the proof that a fraud had been perpetrated,’ he said of Calvi’s counter-letters, raising his voice in breathless indignation. The IOR rejected a suggestion it should raise a $1 billion syndicated loan to help rescue the Banco Ambrosiano’s offshore companies, proposing instead that it would begin repaying the debts to the Ambrosiano that it did recognize, but without interest. ‘It was as if the ceiling had fallen on our heads. You go in to the Vatican and they say it was all a joke. You don’t understand a thing at that point.’
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If Calvi couldn’t come up with a miracle in London his bank and his career were finished.

Something that looked like a miracle to Calvi may have appeared that day in the podgy form of a middle-aged Venezuelan financier named Alberto Jaimes Berti. Jaimes had managed the funds of the Venezuelan Catholic church, ending up embroiled in a financial scandal and litigation with the Venezuelan bishops. He had done business in Europe as well as Latin America and claimed to have contacts in the Vatican bank, as well as a superficial connection with Calvi himself dating from the 1970s. He was just the kind of person therefore whom Calvi might have turned to in these desperate last hours.