The Last Supper (39 page)

Other theories link the Agca case to the Ambrosiano, but in a completely different interpretative scenario. One, outlined in SISMI reports that were presented in evidence at the Calvi murder trial, draws a connection between the right-wing Grey Wolves organization in Turkey, to which Agca belonged, and the right-wing Italian extremist Stefano Delle Chiaie. An undated report on ‘The Agca Case’ quotes Francesco Pazienza as accusing the United States government of protecting Stefano Delle Chiaie and of hiding vital information about the plot to kill Pope John Paul II. It links Delle Chiaie to Abdullah Catli, a leader of the Grey Wolves and alleged accomplice of Agca in the attack, underlining the ideological affinities between Delle Chiaie and Catli. The two men were linked by fierce anti-communism and hatred of the Roman Catholic church, as well as by their alleged involvement in illegal arms and drug trafficking. Delle Chiaie had participated in the so-called ‘cocaine coup’ in Bolivia in July 1980, the report said. ‘Joachim Fiebelkorn . . . currently in prison in West Germany, has told the German police that Delle Chiaie acted as intermediary between the Bolivian cocaine colonels and the Sicilian heroin bosses.’ The Turkish crime bosses of the Grey Wolves were involved in the same activities, trafficking in arms and drugs with a Bulgarian state-controlled import-export firm called Kintex. ‘The Turkish godfathers who ran the traffic in arms and drugs through Bulgaria were involved – through a series of contacts with the Syrian businessman Henri Arsan – in contraband operations touching Milan, Zurich, London and New York,’ the report said. Such business activities may well have brought both Delle Chiaie and the Turkish crime lords into contact with some of the mafia bosses suspected of killing Calvi.

Henri Arsan, the arms trafficker mentioned in the secret service report, provides yet another link between the attack
on the pope and the Banco Ambrosiano. The Syrian smuggler, who had become an informant of the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in 1973 and who also worked for the CIA – if Angelo Izzo is to be believed – was arrested in November 1982 on suspicion of illegal arms and drug-dealing by a young prosecutor from the northern town of Trento, Carlo Palermo. An alleged accomplice in his organization was Bekir Celenk, a member of the Turkish Grey Wolves and another suspect in Agca’s plot to shoot the pope. Arsan was accused of importing large quantities of morphine base from Turkey, which he delivered to the Sicilian mafia to be refined into heroin. On the arms front, he was accused of using false end-user certificates to arm both sides in the Iran–Iraq war.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Arsan’s business was his address. The Syrian, who died of a heart attack in Milan’s San Vittore prison one year after his arrest, was the owner of a Liechtenstein company called Stibam International Transport, with offices in London, Frankfurt, Buenos Aires, Madrid and New York. Its principal office, however, was at Via Oldofredi no. 2 in Milan, a five-room apartment rented from the Banco Ambrosiano and situated directly above the private home of the bank’s deputy chairman, Roberto Rosone. Rosone said he had no dealings with the Stibam people and was clearly not keen to discuss the subject when I questioned him about it during a visit to his home. The Ambrosiano not only provided Arsan with his Milan business address but also helped to finance and process some of his arms exports. Banco Ambrosiano billing information, for example, shows Stibam sent a consignment of 3,500 Beretta handguns and related munitions worth a total of 203 million lire to Qatar in 1977. The recipient was a Mr Hassan El Katib and the invoice bears an export authorization number and the stamp of the Banco Ambrosiano dated 4.2.77.

As well as the ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ connections to the attack on the pope, a third hypothesis emerged in the course
of the investigation that suggested the pope might have been the victim of a ‘Vatican’ connection, the attack being commissioned by senior church figures as part of an internal Vatican power struggle.

Another mysterious event, the kidnapping of the daughter of a Vatican employee, gave new life to the ‘internal’ theory and renewed suspicions that the Vatican was not cooperating fully with Italian investigators. Emanuela Orlandi, the 16-year-old daughter of a Vatican messenger and herself a citizen of the Vatican City State, disappeared without trace on the evening of 22 June 1983 after attending a flute lesson in a building belonging to the Vatican at Piazza Sant’Apollinare no. 49 in the centre of Rome. Emanuela’s father, Ercole Orlandi, had a lowly job in the Vatican, but the family lived in a flat underneath that of Angelo Gugel, a close personal collaborator of Pope John Paul II, who had a daughter of the same age. At around that time Gugel’s daughter, Raffaella, had had the impression she was being followed; it is possible Emanuela’s kidnappers had seized the wrong girl. Two weeks later an organization calling itself the ‘Turkes Anti-Christian Turkish Liberation Front’ claimed responsibility for the kidnap and offered to exchange the girl for Agca. The group’s name contained a reference to Colonel Alpaslan Turkes, the founder of the right-wing National Action party, which had in its turn formed a paramilitary youth group . . . known as the Grey Wolves. The ‘Turkes’ group never produced persuasive evidence that it had Emanuela in its custody.

Italian investigators found the Vatican authorities uncooperative, gaining the impression that the Holy See was pursuing secret negotiations that it was not prepared to share with Italian colleagues. Vincenzo Parisi, the deputy head of the domestic intelligence service SISDE, felt the Orlandi case had become the subject of a sophisticated disinformation campaign in which the Vatican itself was involved. The investigators began to suspect that the Turkes messages and the
negotiations for the release of Agca were simply play-acting, efforts to distract attention from what was really at stake. But what was that? ‘In the Vatican the prevailing opinion is that the people responsible for the kidnap belong to the world of common crime, and that the proposal for an exchange with Agca is just an excuse to extort considerable sums of money [from the Vatican] in exchange for the release of the girl, and to throw the investigators off the track,’
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the ANSA news agency reported. One possibility was that the money being demanded was money that a criminal organization believed belonged to it by right: the money entrusted to Roberto Calvi and Paul Marcinkus by Cosa Nostra perhaps?

Some observers have noted the remarkable resemblance between an identikit made by police of a young man seen talking to Emanuela after her music lesson and Ernesto ‘Renatino’ De Pedis, a leading member of the Magliana Band. After a fruitful life in the Rome underworld, De Pedis was gunned down in a narrow street full of antiques shops off the central Campo dei Fiori square on 2 February 1990. His violent death and previous career in crime did not prevent him from receiving an extremely rare honour – normally reserved for popes, cardinals and bishops: burial in the crypt of a prestigious Roman church. By the strangest of coincidences the church was that of Sant’Apollinare, an eighteenth-century basilica adjoining the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music whence Emanuela Orlandi had disappeared eight years earlier.

De Pedis had made plenty of money from the Magliana’s criminal activities, particularly loan-sharking and illegal gambling, so could afford to be generous when it came to good works. His funeral was celebrated by Monsignor Piero Vergari, who cited De Pedis’s generosity towards the poor of the basilica as well as to priests and seminarians, when writing to Cardinal Ugo Poletti to seek approval for his burial in the crypt. Poletti agreed, and De Pedis’s body was removed from its initial resting place in the Verano cemetery and installed in
some pomp beneath the church of Sant’Apollinare. Photos of the crypt show a white marble tomb with the name ‘Renatino’ picked out in gold and sapphires on the side. A photo of De Pedis in a silver frame rests on top of the tomb, flanked by a small terracotta angel. The church and adjoining building were bought by Opus Dei two years after De Pedis’s burial. The new management, though bearing no responsibility for the questionable decision to grant him eternal hospitality, is not keen on allowing visitors into the crypt, officially off-limits because of problems of ‘damp’.

The identikit is not the only element linking De Pedis to the disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi. An anonymous caller told the current affairs television programme
Chi l’ha visto?
(Who has seen them?) in 2005: ‘Do you want to resolve the Emanuela Orlandi case? Then look inside the tomb of De Pedis...’ Antonio Mancini, De Pedis’s former colleague in crime, has also accused him of responsibility for the kidnap. He told an interviewer from the same TV programme that the kidnap was carried out by members of the Magliana Band from the Testaccio quarter of Rome, acting on the orders of Renato De Pedis.

The
Banda della Magliana
played an important role in another violent episode that directly affected the life of the Banco Ambrosiano and which gives a clear idea of the climate in which the bank operated during Calvi’s last years. That episode too was located in Via Oldofredi, scene of the Stibam offices, of a branch of the Banco Ambrosiano and of Roberto Rosone’s private residence. It was the morning of 27 April 1982, only two months before Calvi’s death, and Rosone was on his way to the office. He had just left his home and was walking to his chauffeur-driven car. ‘I saw a handsome-looking man in a camel overcoat. You see things, but you don’t understand,’ Rosone told me. The man walked up to him and suddenly
shot him at close range in the thigh. ‘The gun misfired. He recocked it and the bullet hit me in the leg, narrowly missing my testicles, which I was very attached to at the time.’
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The man ran to a waiting motorbike and was escaping with an accomplice when an Ambrosiano security guard returned fire, hitting him in the head. The camel-coated gentleman left sprawling in the street turned out to be Danilo Abbruciati, a senior boss of the Magliana Band. Inside a matchbox on his body was a telephone number for Ernesto Diotallevi, Carboni’s associate and a fellow defendant in the Calvi murder trial.

Calvi visited Rosone in hospital, looking grey in the face and in a state of extreme agitation: ‘
Mamma mia
, what is happening to us? Everyone is going mad.’ Calvi himself might have been responsible, Rosone reflected, seeking to punish his deputy’s disloyalty after Rosone suggested the chairman should be replaced because of his embarrassing arrest on the currency charges. But Pazienza and Carboni could have had a motive too, since Rosone was opposing Calvi’s plans to shower them with unsecured loans. Carboni and Diotallevi were convicted by a Milan court of commissioning the attack but subsequently acquitted on appeal. The Sardinian businessman had passed on $530,000 of Ambrosiano money to Diotallevi on 4 May 1982, just a week after the shooting. It was simply the repayment of a debt, he explained, and the judges of the Court of Cassation believed him.

Neither British nor Italian justice has fared particularly well when it came to dealing with the Calvi case. Having jumped to the conclusion that Mr Calvini had committed suicide, the British police were loath to question their initial assumptions, and a serious investigation into the foreign background to the hypothetical murder of a foreign banker may not have been considered the best use of Britain’s public resources. Magistrates in Italy too, initially seem to have been happy to accept the suicide verdict as an excuse to do little. On both sides there seems to have been a sense that the Calvi affair was a Pandora’s box, that powerful interests were involved and that it was much better to sit on the lid.

This at least was the initial impression of Robert Clarke, the London lawyer who had helped confirm Calvi’s travel arrangements. Clarke recalled his shock when he received a call on 20 June 1982 from Lovat MacDonald’s office in Geneva asking him to read the Sunday newspapers and then call them back. There was the news: ‘God’s banker found hanged’ and reports explaining how police didn’t know how Calvi had got into the country or where he had been staying. Clarke called the police on Monday morning to offer the information in his possession: how Calvi had arrived in the country and where he had been staying. He spoke to Detective Inspector John White of the City Police, who told him he was too busy to see him until the next day, and later postponed
their appointment to Wednesday. ‘I was amazed. There was a man found hanging off a bridge with umpteen millions and they didn’t really want to know,’
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he told me.

On finally meeting White, Clarke mentioned what he had heard from Kunz about Calvi wanting to make a $35 million deposit, but again White didn’t seem to be interested. ‘Oh, that’s telephone numbers to me, sir,’ the investigator replied. The lawyer asked whether an autopsy had been done to see if there were traces of drugs in the body. ‘He gave me a very curious look and he said: “Well, sir, we’ve taken all the bits and pieces away.” He didn’t seem to be very excited about events. It was considered suicide and that was that,’ Clarke said. ‘I formed a distinct impression there was a ring around the whole operation.’
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A distinct lack of enthusiasm was what struck police sergeant Francesco Rosato when he travelled to London in the early hours of Saturday 19 June to act as interpreter for a delegation of senior police officers and the Rome public prosecutor. The group was in London from 3 a.m. to 8 a.m., during which time they visited Snow Hill police station, examined Calvi’s body at the morgue and paid a fleeting visit to Blackfriars Bridge. ‘The English police asked us why we had got up in the middle of the night for something that was of no importance for them,’ Rosato told the Rome murder trial. He returned to London the following Monday to collaborate with his English colleagues on the first phase of the investigation, but found that little was happening. ‘My presence was never welcome and collaboration was non-existent,’ he told the court. ‘The English police had only investigated the details of the journey and of Calvi’s accommodation. I reported back that there was absolutely no collaboration and that no inquiries were being made. They told me that further inquiries would be made in three weeks’ time, after the examination by the coroner.’ The key early phase of the investigation was slipping by in virtual inactivity. ‘They always said the same thing: there’s nothing
to be done until after the coroner’s examination. After a few days I was invited to go back to Italy, because my presence was totally useless.’
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