The Last Supper (44 page)

Whatever the outcome of the Rome murder trial, it is clear that Calvi’s story unfolded in a context of bribery, secrecy, blackmail and bluster. And there can be little doubt that the single most sensitive activity he undertook was the financing of the clandestine cold war operations of western secret services. Who exactly in the Vatican was responsible and what Pope John Paul II knew is still not clear. The man who could have done most to explain, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, died before he could give evidence, and in any case it seems likely he would have declined to come to court. Marcinkus was quietly removed years after the scandal, believed to have cost the Vatican losses of around $500 million.
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The IOR was finally reformed in the latter part of John Paul’s pontificate, with authority passing for the first time to competent laymen and a
more prudent and transparent management gradually nursing the institution back to financial health. Whether the lesson of the Marcinkus public relations disaster has really been taken to heart is less clear. The name of the IOR has continued to crop up in the context of Italian and international financial scandals. In the 1990s senior church officials would lend the name and prestige of the Holy See – exploited so comprehensively by Calvi – as cover for one of the biggest insurance frauds in American history. And in the summer of 2006 a leading member of Opus Dei, the Italian financier Gianmario Roveraro, would be murdered and hacked to pieces by a business partner.

For Roman Catholics the moral failings of their religious leaders are discomfiting, but they are nothing new in the history of the church. Christ, after all, came to save sinners and left a church made of sinners behind him. As for the secular sinners, the story seems to be one of mediocrity and incompetence, of people promoted beyond their abilities and muddling through on a cushion of nepotism. In the end, some of the most serious-minded and determined actors in the story turned out to be the professional criminals, people who operate in an environment that is particularly unforgiving of failure, as Roberto Calvi learned to his cost.

Calvi may have had reason to fear for his life because of his role on the international political scene, but there were also reasons for disquiet relating to the Banco Ambrosiano’s involvement in domestic Italian politics and the control of the Italian press. The political strategy in which he became involved was the political strategy of the P2 masonic lodge, spelled out clearly in a theoretical document drawn up for Licio Gelli in the mid 1970s, called the ‘Plan for Democratic Revival’. The government was not to be overthrown by force but the democratic state infiltrated and controlled from within. In substance, P2 would simply buy up the three key instruments of democratic control: the political parties, the press
and the trade unions. ‘The availability of sums of not more than 30 or 40 billion lire [£20–£25 million] should be enough for well-chosen men of good faith to conquer the key positions necessary for their control,’ the document said. Another document, a ‘Memorandum on the Political Situation in Italy’, suggested that 10 billion lire would buy outright control of the Christian Democrat party, the dominant partner in coalition governments since the war. Such operations did not come cheap, so banks could play an important role.

Many of the notions expressed in the ‘Plan for Democratic Revival’ were perfectly respectable conservative political ideas, and many would later be put into practice in the professional and political career of an ambitious young man who would join the lodge in 1978. His name was Silvio Berlusconi and Gelli’s ‘Plan’ was in some ways the blueprint of his career.

The press was a particular focus of Gelli’s attention. The ‘Plan’ called for the co-opting of two or three elements from every major daily or weekly newspaper. Once ‘acquired’, the journalists would be given the task of supporting selected politicians who formed part of Gelli’s cabal. In a second phase, P2 intended to buy control of a campaigning weekly magazine, coordinate the local press through a centralized news agency, coordinate local cable TVs through the same agency, and dissolve the state broadcaster RAI-TV in the name of broadcast freedom. Control of the local press and cable TV was seen as an important way of controlling ‘average public opinion in the heart of the country’.

Gelli began putting his plan into action by secretly acquiring control of Italy’s best-selling and most influential newspaper, the
Corriere della Sera.
The newspaper had previously been bought by the Rizzoli family, which had made its fortune with a successful printing business, with money loaned by the Montedison chemicals group. When the Montedison debt passed to the Banco Ambrosiano in 1977 the
Corriere
entered the P2 fold and an alleged P2 member, Franco Di Bella,
was appointed as editor. P2 made subtle use of the Rizzoli Publishing Group, using it to buy local newspapers around Italy in line with Gelli’s plan, influencing staff appointments and the editorial line at the
Corriere della Sera
, while the paper’s operating losses dug an ever deeper hole in the Banco Ambrosiano accounts. Keeping the operation secret involved complex financial engineering, with the IOR and Rothschild’s Bank helping to screen the true owners. Secret Gelli documents seized from his home referred to a controlling stake that belonged to ‘the Institution’, though it was not clear whether the Institution was P2, the Vatican or some other international entity. Those involved in the financial operations rewarded themselves handsomely, Gelli, Ortolani and the newspaper’s director general Bruno Tassan Din at one point pocketing $30 million each as a ‘commission’.

Ownership of Italy’s most prestigious newspaper was a vital consideration at that stage of the Cold War, though it wasn’t always easy for the owners to impose their will on an independent-minded staff. P2 was nevertheless able to influence what went into the newspaper and what was kept out. The
Corriere
frequently criticized the weaknesses and inefficiencies of the democratic state. This was not a difficult task, but a line that may have been inspired by less-than-democratic military officers awaiting developments in the wings – it supported the deployment of Euromissiles, a hot strategic topic at the time, and even gave its backing to a military coup in Turkey. Coverage of Latin America had to be particularly sensitively handled. When a
Corriere della Sera
correspondent was told by the Argentinian Nobel Peace Prizewinner Adolfo Perez Esquivel that one of the financiers of Latin America’s right-wing death squads was Umberto Ortolani’s Bafisud, the newspaper sat on the story for a while before censoring the troublesome reference to one of Rizzoli’s backers. Silvio Berlusconi, in contrast, had no difficulty in getting published, writing a series of analytical business articles for the P2-controlled paper.

Naturally the newspaper sprang to Calvi’s defence when he was arrested for currency violations in 1981. ‘We were strongly urged to provide massive support for Calvi, attacking the Milan magistrates and criticizing their conduct,’ Tassan Din admitted later. Christian Democrat and Socialist politicians, who also had reason to be grateful to Calvi, echoed the campaign, denouncing the politicization of justice and the threat to the stock market.

Ownership of the
Corriere della Sera
was a serious drain on the Banco Ambrosiano’s resources but finding a buyer who would be acceptable to the main political parties was not easy. Calvi found himself in a bind: Treasury Minister Beniamino Andreatta, an independent-minded Christian Democrat, was pressuring him to disinvest from the newspaper, 40 per cent of which was held by the Ambrosiano’s holding company, La Centrale. Banks were not supposed to control newspapers, so Andreatta had revoked La Centrale’s voting rights in Rizzoli, making it even more difficult for Calvi to sell his stake.

Secret service reports from the time give an indication of who might have been interested in buying. One undated report says Argentinian Admiral Emilio Massera had met a Rizzoli representative in Madrid on 15 September 1982 to discuss the possible purchase of a 10 per cent stake in the publishing group. ‘The transaction would pass through Bafisud Bank in Montevideo on behalf of Lima Golf [Licio Gelli] and Uniform Oscar [Umberto Ortolani].’ Another report, dated 2 July 1982, reads: ‘Tassan Din, before Calvi died, had secretly reached agreement with the latter to sell shares (10.2 percent) to Berlusconi, who would be helped financially in the operation by Calvi himself.’ A report from the same source dated on the previous day said Calvi’s death was being attributed to Gelli by people ‘close to the Tassan Din clan’. It described Berlusconi as being linked to the Christian Democrats and in possession of the necessary funds to make the Rizzoli purchase.

Calvi considered the delicate matter of control over the press, and his knowledge of its secret mechanisms, to constitute one of the potential threats to his life. ‘He spoke to us in a vague way about a US project to finance the media. He considered it very dangerous,’ Carlo Calvi told me when I visited him in Canada. ‘Once in a restaurant in Zurich he told us there was a project carried on by Ortolani with the purpose of influencing Italian politics and the media. It involved political payments by state and non-state oil interests. It was an incumbent danger for him and he was mad at us for not taking it seriously. He presented it as a grave danger.’ Carlo Calvi said he saw the Rizzoli operation as part of this US-sponsored plan to control the Italian media. ‘I tend to see it as an offspring of Gladio. It has its origins in US projects to control the press,’ he told me.
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Relations with the Italian political parties were equally delicate for Calvi. He couldn’t dispose of the
Corriere della Sera
, for example, in a way that might upset the national political equilibrium. The Rizzoli group itself was constantly paying politicians and political fixers to try and resolve its problems. Several hundred million lire were paid to Claudio Martelli – a regular guest on board the Rizzoli company jet – because it was important for the company to establish good relations with the new Socialist party leadership, according to the testimony of Angelo Rizzoli and Bruno Tassan Din.
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Roberto Rosone, Calvi’s deputy, described to the Rome murder trial how jealous Calvi was of his relationship with the political parties. The Banco Ambrosiano advanced money to some of the major parties against reimbursements they were due from the state, but the parties, and the newspapers associated with them, took in the state’s money and failed to pay off the debts. ‘I looked at the loans that had already been made to the political parties. When I saw the payments made to the PCI [Italian Communist party] I thought: it’s just as well we’re a priests’ bank!’ Rosone told the court. The PCI,
in fact, was the party with the second largest exposure to the Banco Ambrosiano when the bank went bust. The party itself owed 10.5 billion lire and the Ambrosiano’s liquidators were surprised to discover that the bank was the majority shareholder in the Rome evening newspaper
Paese Sera
, which supported the PCI. The Socialist party (PSI) was easily the bank’s largest political debtor, owing the Ambrosiano 13.6 billion lire in June 1982. Calvi wanted the political payments under his direct control because he knew he was in constant need of political protection. There were no particular political criteria to Calvi’s largesse, Rosone said. ‘Calvi was prepared to give money to everyone, provided they were prepared to help him, knowing the pig’s ear he had made of things. He never showed any particular political orientation,’ he told the Rome court.
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Paying off all sides in the end would prove a dangerous policy, and would not save him from disaster.

Among the Gelli Plan’s socio-economic provisions was: ‘New town planning legislation favouring satellite cities.’ Silvio Berlusconi began his career as a property developer, laying the foundations of his wealth through the construction of Milan’s modernistic satellite cities, Milano 2 and Milano 3. His involvement in property development brought him into contact with the enterprising Sardinian property developer Flavio Carboni.

Berlusconi would apply the guidelines of the Gelli ‘Plan’ in his approach to politics too, establishing his Forza Italia party in just the way Gelli recommended: ‘The primary objective and indispensable premise of the operation is the creation of a club (of Rotarian type for the heterogeneity of its membership) where operators from business, finance, the liberal professions, civil servants and magistrates are represented at the highest level, as well as selected politicians, numbering no more than 30 or 40.’ Berlusconi’s party, founded in 1994, was
made up largely of professional people, with a few ‘professional politicians’ drawn from the ranks of the disintegrating Socialist and Christian Democrat parties.

Berlusconi’s luxurious Villa Certosa on Sardinia’s northern Costa Smeralda has often been the focus of the international media, especially when high-profile guests such as Britain’s Tony Blair or Russian President Vladimir Putin were visiting. Reports on these gatherings rarely mentioned a curious but embarrassing fact: the villa used to belong to Carboni, Berlusconi’s former business partner. Carboni didn’t actually sell the villa and its extensive beachside grounds directly to Berlusconi. As ever in debt, Carboni had hocked the property to two creditors, who had sold it on to Berlusconi without consulting him. Carboni had been forced to sue Berlusconi to try and extract a figure closer to the real value of the property, but being in urgent need of money had settled for an extra 800 million lire.

Carboni had been introduced to Berlusconi in March 1981 by Romano Comincioli, a childhood friend of the Milanese entrepreneur. Using his local knowledge and political connections, Carboni could identify promising plots of land and get their zoning changed, from agricultural to residential, vastly increasing their value virtually overnight. It was the kind of talent Berlusconi appreciated; he had used it to good effect himself in his developments outside Milan. It could be put to good use to create an Olbia 2, a rich man’s holiday complex on the Sardinian coast near the northern city of Olbia, with villas, mooring space for boats and a golf course. Within a year Berlusconi would have sunk 21 billion lire into the project and they would have acquired some 1,000 hectares of building land. Carboni had useful friends on the island: he was close to several leading local Christian Democrats and to Armando Corona, president of the regional government, an influential member of the Republican party and later to be elected Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy. But sometimes friendship
is not enough. Carboni and Berlusconi agreed on 7 billion lire of political costs, Carboni’s assistant Emilio Pellicani later told the parliamentary P2 Commission. ‘That was the political cost of the operation.’
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Despite their initial enthusiasm the project soon ran into difficulties. Berlusconi found Carboni unreliable as well as insolvent, and Carboni began to suspect that Berlusconi did not intend to honour their initial agreement on dividing the enterprise. Furthermore, Berlusconi was suffering the negative consequences of the P2 scandal combined with a downturn in the housing market and a need to concentrate his financial resources on a new scheme: commercial television. For a while at least, there would be a parting of the ways.