The Last Supper (7 page)

Paoli exuded a strange blend of shrewdness and paranoia when I caught up with him in Trieste in November 2005. He told me he was an inventor whose discoveries were worth millions of euros, and that he had been unjustly persecuted and defrauded by some of the biggest names in Italian business. ‘I have been more defamed and accused than Pol Pot,’ he said. He said that having studied industrial and naval design in Yugoslavia and done his military service in the Italian air force – in an office responsible for communications with NATO headquarters in Brussels – he had gone on to work for an import-export company that traded with countries in Eastern Europe from a base in the north-eastern Italian town of Udine. Without saying so explicitly, much of his tale seemed to lead back to the role of the secret services at the time of the Cold War. The decision to take Calvi out of Italy through
Yugoslavia had been intended to ‘drag the secret services of the East’ into the affair, he said. And he repeated his account of a desperate and frightened Calvi who had realized, once he arrived in London, that he had fallen into a trap. A lengthy conversation over coffee in the elegant Caffè degli Specchi, which looks on to Trieste’s main sea-front square with its Habsburg-style palaces, hardly gave the impression that the chubby, white-haired inventor and police informant would make a convincing witness when called to the stand at the Calvi trial in Rome. The conspiracies to which he had been witness, or victim, were legion and ultimately did little to bolster his credibility, though that may be the outcome that he actually intends.
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Oliviero Drigani, the prosecutor who arrested Paoli in 1983, remains sceptical of his reliability and convinced of the sincerity of Emilio Pellicani, the witness who identified him as the mysterious
biondino.
Now an appeal court judge in Trieste, he recalled with satisfaction the complex investigation into the illegal export of currency by local businessmen that helped to establish his professional reputation and first led him into contact with the Calvi case. ‘In 1980 there was an enormous outflow of currency because of the economic and political situation,’ he told me. Much of it ended up in Switzerland, in the Banco Ambrosiano-controlled Banca del Gottardo in Lugano, some of it smuggled across the border in suitcases and some of it concealed in
anstalts
, secretive fiduciary companies created under the Gottardo’s umbrella. Drigani recalled the intense hostility aroused by his investigation at the time and the anxieties expressed to him by his chief investigator, Captain Rino Stanig of the finance police. He continues to wonder whether Calvi’s visit to Trieste was simply a coincidence or in some way connected to the money-smuggling operations he was then probing. ‘The intriguing aspect of Calvi’s passage through Trieste was the possible connection to the financial inquiries I was conducting at
that time,’ he said, explaining the investigators’ surprise at seeing this top financier appear ‘like a Ronaldo . . . on the amateurs pitch’.
⁵
Though Drigani managed to secure convictions, including that of an important Swiss-Italian lawyer, his inquiry never clarified the role of Roberto Calvi.

There were other good reasons for taking Paoli’s initial information seriously, however, clues that lead in the direction of terrorism and the arms trade, two highly sensitive strategic activities at the time of the Cold War. The finance police report dated 5 July 1983 related the following claim from source ‘Podgora’: ‘In Rome, prior to his flight, Calvi was shown a false arrest warrant to which he had previously been alerted by Gelli. This was allegedly the reason for the banker’s flight.’ There is indeed substance to this claim, a substance that creates a surprising connection to the terrorist bomb that exploded at Bologna railway station in 1980.

Other confidential reports show Paoli had informed his handlers of a plot to assassinate Flavio Carboni following his extradition from Switzerland and incarceration in Lodi prison, south-east of Milan. The plan was for a marksman to shoot Carboni with a high-powered rifle from a bell-tower overlooking the prison. The weapon was to be obtained from an arms dealer who happened to live in the same Austrian town as the Kleinszig sisters. The dealer was alleged to be an expert in the procurement of false end-user certificates for the arms trade, and to be in contact with another arms dealer, Henri Arsan, with ‘an Arab arms trader named Kassogi’, and with the Banco Ambrosiano consultant Francesco Pazienza. Right or wrong about the plot to kill Carboni, the last three names mentioned by Paoli all have right of place in the Calvi story and lead us towards the delicate financial activities that may explain the banker’s murder.

Confused and mistaken though he may have been at times, Paoli’s evidence laid out for investigators from very early on
a number of remarkable true facts about Calvi’s last days, but investigators preferred to look the other way. The delicacy of the case is understandable: Calvi travelled to London with a Sardinian businessman, Carboni, who claimed to work for the secret services, and an Adriatic smuggler, Vittor, whose speciality was clandestine access to an Eastern Bloc country and who doubled as an informant to the finance police. The potential sensitivity of Vittor’s role led the commander of the finance police to write to Tina Anselmi, the president of the parliamentary commission looking into the activities of the P2 masonic lodge, on 9 September 1983, to ‘firmly reject’ the hypothesis ‘that an agent of the finance police had infiltrated the organization and execution of Roberto Calvi’s flight from Italy’. It would be deeply embarrassing for the Italian state to have its representatives so close to the action, particularly in view of its tragic, criminal conclusion under Blackfriars Bridge. Paoli’s evidence also places Sergio Vaccari at the heart of the operation: a man, though ‘Podgora’ may not have known it at the time, whose profile fits that of a CIA informant. Little wonder then that his information caused disquiet in official circles and that little was done to follow up his leads.

Roberto Calvi was ideally suited for membership of a secret society . . . and made its perfect victim too. A man with deep-seated insecurities, from a relatively humble background, it helped that he believed the world was run by conspiracies. Without a powerful patron – a
santo in paradiso –
one could not expect to get anywhere in the shark-infested waters of Italian finance, he was convinced. Of the Italy of the 1970s and 1980s, the period when his career was approaching its apex, with its nepotism and ubiquitous political patronage, he was not wholly wrong.

Roberto Calvi was born in Milan on 13 April 1920. His father, Giacomo Calvi, came from the village of Tremenico in the Valtellina, an Alpine valley running north towards the Swiss border from Lake Como. His mother, Maria Rubini, was born in Venice but her family too hailed originally from Tremenico. Despite the move to Milan, the Calvi family retained the dour, canny, austere qualities of mountain folk. Giacomo Calvi’s successful career at the Banca Commerciale Italiana, Milan’s largest bank, did little to change that.

As a small child Roberto was difficult and trouble-prone, often involved in fights with other children. At school he was a bright student who rounded out his pocket money by doing homework for fellow pupils, his widow Clara recalled many years later. ‘His parents were rather mean. With the money he earned he used to go riding at San Siro [a Milan suburb,
now home to the city’s football stadium]. All his friends were rich.’
¹
Roberto studied at the smart Cesare Beccaria secondary school, mastering Latin and Ancient Greek and showing a flair for modern languages – French and German – too. His natural diffidence was increased by his mother’s insistence that he wear ‘sensible clothes’, which marked him out from his fashionably dressed young contemporaries. In later years she would disapprove of her attractive daughter-in-law’s taste for elegant apparel. Roberto moved on to the prestigious Bocconi university, but dropped out before taking a degree. ‘He wanted to become a lawyer, but his parents signed him up to read business and economics at university. To get his own back he dropped out and volunteered for the army. They couldn’t stop him,’ Clara Calvi recollected.

In 1939, a year before Italy joined the Second World War on the side of Nazi Germany, Calvi enrolled at Pinerolo, a prestigious military academy near Turin where cavalry officers underwent their initial training. He had opted for the Novara lancers, an aristocratic regiment where he would again be rubbing shoulders with the social elite. A fondness for the nobility would remain with him throughout his life and would be responsible for the generous sprinkling of aristocrats on the Banco Ambrosiano board in later years: there were three counts and a marquis under Calvi’s chairmanship.

Calvi was a lifelong conservative but the anti-communism he professed in later years was more of a sop to his powerful sponsors than a fervently held personal belief. At university he had signed up for the student fascist association, lending a hand to support its propaganda activities. ‘We were all fascists then,’ said Clara Calvi. ‘I didn’t take part in the parades because I didn’t like the uniform, or the shoes.’ Roberto Calvi made a more significant contribution to Benito Mussolini’s cause in the autumn of 1941, when he was sent by train to the Russian front. The Russian campaign was a brutal experience but Calvi was proud of the role that he played in it as a young
second lieutenant, helping to maintain morale and discipline so as to bring as many as possible of his soldiers back alive. In later years he would recall the bitter battle against the cold, how he forced his men to keep marching, rather than allow them to freeze to death on horseback, and how he warmed his fingers on a live chicken carried inside his coat. One key to his success was the purchase of some carts from a German sergeant, a transaction in which his good knowledge of the language came in useful and perhaps an early indication of his pragmatism and business sense. One of the carts was kitted out as a mobile kitchen, with hot soup always available for the exhausted troops.

Calvi returned to civilian life in 1943 and, through the intercession of his father, found a job at his father’s bank. Life as a clerk at the Banca Commerciale branch in the southern town of Lecce was hardly exciting for a veteran of the Russian war, but his foot was on the first rung of a ladder that would take him to extraordinary professional heights. His first advancement again came about through his father, after Giacomo Calvi ran into an old school friend in the street. The man was a senior official at another Milanese bank, the Banco Ambrosiano, and agreed to take Roberto on for a three-month trial at the slightly higher rank of
procuratore
(manager). The episode provided further confirmation that who you knew was at least as important as what you knew when trying to get ahead in Italian society. In 1947, Calvi joined the bank to which he would dedicate the rest of his life.

Initially the personal assistant and protégé of Alessandro Canesi, a senior manager who became chairman in 1965, Calvi revealed himself to be a hard-working, intelligent and forward-looking banker and made rapid progress up the Ambrosiano’s hierarchy. Imaginative and a linguist, he was just the kind of person needed to shake things up and introduce some rays of modernity into the stuffy, closeted rooms of the ecclesiastical bank. His performance was finally rewarded when
in November 1975, aged 55, he was appointed chairman. In the second half of the 1970s the Ambrosiano would become Italy’s largest private bank, thanks to an ambitious expansion plan promoted by Calvi.

The Banco Ambrosiano had been founded by a priest, Monsignor Giuseppe Tovini, in 1896 to provide financial services to Roman Catholic institutions and families in the wealthy Lombardy region. Named after St Ambrose, the fourth-century bishop of Milan, the bank’s expressly Catholic character was protected by a statute that required shareholders to submit a baptismal certificate and statement of good conduct from their parish priest before they could vote. Bank employees were also expected to be ‘good Catholics’. The Ambrosiano’s independence was protected by a rule barring any individual from acquiring more than 5 per cent of its shares. The bank’s purpose was to serve ‘moral organizations, pious works, and religious bodies set up for charitable aims’, conducting its activities in accordance with Christian ethical principles; a safer and more prudent institution it would be hard to imagine. Given its nature as a Catholic bank, the Ambrosiano was a natural ally for the archdiocese of Milan, the biggest in Italy, and for the Vatican. Paradoxically, it would be the connection with the latter that would lead Calvi into danger.

Calvi’s climb up the Ambrosiano hierarchy did not bring him greater self-confidence or social assurance, however. Roberto Rosone, who worked with him for many years and was deputy chairman when he was chairman, found him pathologically shy and frustratingly uncommunicative. ‘He was a perfectly normal person, without vices. He lived for power,’ Rosone told me. ‘He was frighteningly introverted. He never looked you in the eye when he spoke. It used to drive me mad; I wanted to hit him over the head with a hammer.’ Rosone recalled an occasion in the 1970s when Calvi became embarrassed while attending to an attractive actress, Loretta Goggi. ‘Calvi called me over. I saw he was red-faced. He asked me to
carry on, said she made him feel uncomfortable. There was only one woman for him, and that was power.’
²

Another former colleague, who asked not to be named, harboured a more positive recollection of collaboration with Calvi. He was capable, forward-looking and open-minded, the source says. ‘People in the bank admired him. He didn’t have charisma but was respected because the bank had grown so much. He foresaw many banking changes that actually took place.’ Interitalia, Italy’s first mutual fund, was Calvi’s brainchild, giving small investors a convenient way to participate in the stock market. According to this source, Calvi had been a pioneer in introducing modern management techniques and the use of computers at the Ambrosiano and its affiliates, hiring British and American consultants to teach marketing techniques. ‘If you think about marketing in 1970, it was like having lessons on how to walk on Mars. No one else in the bank had such an open mind. He was always looking for new ideas on how to improve performance.’