Paul admitted that it was difficult for Calvi to kill himself at Blackfriars. But it would have been just as tough for someone to murder him and leave no trace evidence or injuries on the body.29 Paul took ten hours to set forth his case. He allowed only a twenty-minute lunch break. It was Friday evening and the jury seemed restless to go home. But the coroner insisted they start deliberations.
The six men and three women reported back in under an hour. They were having trouble reaching a verdict. Dr. Paul instructed them that their decision did not have to be unanimous. Seven of nine jurors would suffice for a verdict.30 After another hour, at 10 p.m., they returned with a majority finding that Calvi had killed himself.31
The Calvi family instantly rejected the finding.32 Clara told an Italian newspaper that her husband was murdered and his death was connected to “ferocious struggles for power in the Vatican.”33 Some questioned whether she was motivated by money in pushing a murder theory since Calvi’s life insurance was voided if he killed himself.34 But the Calvis were not the only ones skeptical about the suicide ruling. Italian investigators who had assisted the British police believed there was foul play.35 And businessmen and government officials who knew Calvi were startled by the finding. “Why bother to go to London to do that,” a senior bank director said. The British and Italian press were unanimous that the British inquest seemed a surprisingly incompetent rush to judgment.36 That verdict would probably have been greeted with even greater derision had it then been public knowledge that only days before his death Calvi had written a personal letter—part confessional, part a plea for help—to Pope John Paul II.37 In the letter, Calvi declared he had been a strategic front man for the Vatican in fighting Marxism from Eastern Europe to South America.38 And he warned that upcoming events would “provoke a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions in which the Church will suffer the gravest damage.”39 He pleaded for an immediate meeting with the Pontiff so that he could explain everything. He also claimed to have “important documents” for the Pope.40
The catastrophe Calvi wrote about might have been the Ambrosiano’s collapse, which took place within weeks of his death.41 Early news reports said the bank had a debt of $1.8 billion, much of it guaranteed by the Istituto per le Opere di Religione (the Institute for Works of Religion, or more simply, the Vatican Bank).42 Investigators soon learned the Vatican Bank was the Ambrosiano’s largest shareholder. Did the Vatican itself play a role in the Ambrosiano’s failure? British tabloids quickly dubbed Calvi “God’s Banker.”43 A veritable conspiracy industry in “Who killed Calvi?” sprang up, complete with TV documentaries, books, and even walking tours of Blackfriars Bridge.
Nine months after the coroner’s verdict, three Italian forensics experts conducted a second autopsy but could not resolve whether the death was suicide or murder.44 The Calvis pushed for a new inquest.45 A British appellate court ordered one almost a year to the date after the original hearing.46
A different coroner, Dr. Arthur Gordon Davies, impaneled another jury of nine. This time there was no crammed single day of testimony and deliberations. Instead, the “what’s-the-rush” pacing translated into a nearly two-week hearing. When the jurors got the case they deliberated for three hours before settling unanimously on an “open verdict,” a British bureaucratic loophole that essentially means “we don’t know.” The original suicide finding was vacated. The case was reclassified unsolved and there was no official cause of death.47
The Calvis then petitioned Italian prosecutors to get a new investigation of the death.48 The family hired U.S.-based Kroll Security Group—a preeminent private investigative company—to conduct a fresh probe.49 Kroll concluded that both British inquests were “incomplete at best and potentially flawed at worst,” as they had glossed over evidence that indicated Calvi might have been drugged and murdered.50 The following year, the Calvis retained two former Scotland Yard forensic scientists to utilize a laser test not available in 1982 to reexamine the clothing. They discovered water staining on Calvi’s suit and unexplained marks on the back of his jacket. It was “almost inconceivable,” they concluded, that Calvi alone had climbed to the spot on the bridge’s scaffolding from which he was hanged.51
In 1998, sixteen years after his death, the Calvi family convinced a Roman judge to order the body exhumed. Pathologists at Milan’s respected Institute of Forensic Medicine conducted a thorough autopsy.52 They cited suspicious circumstantial evidence, including possible bruises on the banker’s wrist and foot. They also identified traces of another person’s DNA on Calvi’s underwear.53 The team offered a complicated explanation of how water stains on the clothing—read against a table of the tides on the fateful night—suggested it was likely murder. But there still was not enough compelling evidence to move the case forward.
Meanwhile, Italian prosecutors had a problem. Too many people were either confessing to killing Calvi or trying to cut deals on their own criminal cases by asserting they knew who had done it. So many claimed to have “the inside story” that after a while an offer to solve the Calvi case became the quickest way for a plea-bargaining defendant to lose credibility.
In 2002, when movers were packing up the Institute of Forensic Medicine in preparation for a cross-town move, they stumbled across some mislaid evidence—Calvi’s tongue, part of his intestines and neck, and some fabric from his suit and shirt—in the back of a cupboard. Three Roman investigating magistrates ordered the evidence be turned over for yet another examination. Scientists applied the latest forensic techniques, some of which had not existed just a couple of years earlier. If Calvi had climbed into place over the bridge’s scaffolding, reenactments demonstrated that he would have had microscopic iron filings under his nails or on his shoes and socks. There were none. And markings on his upper vertebrae indicated two points of strangulation. Calvi was strangled before the cord was placed around his neck.54
The Calvis cited those findings in demanding the criminal investigation move faster. But prosecutors were in no hurry, hoping to avoid any mistakes in a case already marked by many missteps. It took another three years before they had enough evidence to issue murder indictments against five people, including the former chief of the secret Masonic lodge of which Calvi was a member and also Flavio Carboni, who was with Calvi in London over the fateful days in 1982.55
A high security courtroom in Rome’s Rebibbia Prison was built for the sensational televised trial, which got under way on October 6, 2005.56 The murder case was circumstantial. And the motive was a convoluted one involving embezzlement and blackmail. Still, many legal observers expected a guilty verdict. The jury got the trial after twenty months but deliberated only a day and a half. Almost two years to the date of their arrest, the defendants received the verdict: not guilty on all charges.57
“It [the acquittal] has killed Calvi all over again,” a stunned prosecutor told the press.58 In 2010 and 2011 two Italian appellate courts upheld the acquittals.59
• • •
What did Calvi know that was so important that someone killed him and disguised it as an elaborate public suicide? That cannot be answered without pointing a spotlight on the corridors of power and money inside the Vatican. The underlying tale is how for centuries the clerics in Rome, trusted with guarding the spiritual heritage of the Catholic faithful, have fought an internecine war over who controls the enormous profits and far-flung businesses of the world’s biggest religion. Only by examining the Catholic Church’s often contentious and uneasy history with money is it possible to expose the forces behind Calvi’s death. Ultimately, Calvi’s murder is a prequel to understanding the modern-day scandals from St. Peter’s and fully appreciating the challenges faced by Pope Francis in trying to reform an institution in which money has so often been at the center of its most notorious scandals.
2
The Last Pope King
Long before the church became a capitalist holding company in which men like Calvi flourished, the Vatican was a semifeudal secular empire.1 For
more than a thousand years popes were unchallenged monarchs as well as the supreme leaders of the Roman church. Their kingdom was the Papal States. During the Renaissance, Popes were feared rivals to Europe’s most powerful monarchies. And at its height in the eighteenth century the church controlled most of central Italy. Popes believed that God had put them on earth to reign above all other worldly rulers.2
The Popes of the Middle Ages had an entourage of hundreds of Italian clerics and dozens of lay deputies. In time, they became known as the Curia, referring to the court of a Roman emperor. They assisted the Pope in running the church’s spiritual and temporal kingdoms. Those outside the Vatican thought of the Curia simply as the bureaucracy that administered the Papal States. But that simplistic view minimized the Ladon-like network of intrigue and deceit composed largely of celibate single men who lived and worked together at the same time they competed with each other for influence with the Pope.3
The cost of running the church’s kingdom while maintaining the profligate lifestyle of one of Europe’s grandest courts pressured the Vatican always to look for ways to bring in more money.4 Taxes and fees levied on the Papal States paid most of the empire’s basic expenses. The sales of produce from its agriculturally rich northern land as well as rents collected from its properties throughout Europe brought in extra cash. But over time that was not enough to fuel the lavish lifestyles of the Pope and his top clerics. The church found the money it needed in the selling of so-called indulgences, a sixth-century invention whereby the faithful paid for a piece of paper that promised that God would forgo any earthly punishment for the buyer’s sins. The early church’s penances were often severe, including flogging, imprisonment, or even death. Although some indulgences were free, the best ones—promising the most redemption for the gravest sins—were expensive.5 The Vatican set prices according to the severity of the sin and they were initially available only to those who made a pilgrimage to Rome.6
Indulgences helped Urban II in the eleventh century offset the church’s enormous costs in subsidizing the first Crusades. He offered full absolution to anyone who volunteered to fight in “God’s army” and partial forgiveness for simply helping the Crusaders. Successive Popes became ever more creative in liberalizing the scope of indulgences and the ease with which devout Catholics could pay for them. By the early 1400s, Boniface IX—whose decadent spending kept the church under relentless financial pressure—extended indulgences to encompass sacraments, ordinations, and consecrations.7 A few decades later, Pope Paul II waived the need for sinners to make a pilgrimage to Rome. He authorized local bishops to collect the money and dispense the indulgences and also cleared them for sale at pilgrimage sites that had relics of saints.8 Sextus IV had an inspired idea: apply them to souls stuck in Purgatory. Any Catholic could pay so that souls trapped in Purgatory could get on a fast track to Heaven. The assurance that money alone could cut the afterlife in Purgatory was such a powerful inducement that many families sent their life savings to Rome. So much money flooded to Sextus that he was able to build the Sistine Chapel.9 Alexander VI—the Spanish Borgia whose Papacy was marked by nepotism and brutal infighting for power—created an indulgence for simply reciting the Rosary in public. The new sales pitch promised the faithful that a generous contribution multiplied the Rosary’s prayer power.10,I
Each Pontiff understood that tax revenues from the Papal States paid most of the day-to-day bills, while indulgences paid for everything else. The church overlooked the widespread corruption and graft inherent in collecting so much cash and instead grew ever more dependent on indulgences.12 And as they got ever easier to buy and promised more forgiveness, they became wildly popular among ordinary Catholics.13
Indulgences were, however, more than a financial lifeline. They also helped medieval Roman Popes withstand challenges to their secular power. So-called antipopes—usually from other Italian cities—claimed they, rather than the pope elected in Rome, had the political or divine right to rule the Catholic Church.14,II Although some antipopes raised their own armies and had popular backing, they never mustered the moral authority to issue indulgences. Repeated efforts over centuries by pretenders to the Papacy to package and sell forgiveness for sins failed. Few Catholics believed that anyone but the Roman Pope had the direct connection with God to offer a real indulgence.16 And when the Pope’s armies were called upon to sometimes crush an antipope, it was usually the flood of cash from indulgences that paid for the war.
By the reign of Leo X—the last nonpriest elected Pope in 1513—a growing chorus of critics condemned indulgences as a shameless ecclesiastical dependence. Leo, a prince from Florence’s powerful Medici family, was a cardinal since he was thirteen. He was accustomed to an extravagant lifestyle by the time he became Pope at thirty-eight. Leo made the Papal Court the grandest in Europe, commissioning Raphael to decorate the majestic loggias. The Vatican’s servants nearly doubled to seven hundred. Assuming the role of a clerical aristocracy, cardinals were called Princes of the Church.17 Leo had no patience for critics who demanded he curb the sale of indulgences. He tried silencing his detractors by threatening excommunication.18 When that failed, he pressed ahead with a futures market by which diminution was available for sins not yet committed.19 So much cash flooded in that he could build St. Peter’s cathedral.20
Pope-Kings unvaryingly were scions of a handful of powerful Italian families. When one of their sons became Pope, the by-products of a Papacy often included rampant corruption, pervasive nepotism, and unbridled debauchery.21 The cash from indulgences mostly became a bottomless pit.22
The licentious lifestyle of the Papal Court and the widespread abuses in selling indulgences became a rallying cry for Martin Luther and the Reformation.23 Pope Leo responded by excommunicating Luther.24 One of the few benefits from the schism was that since Protestants condemned indulgences, the Holy See remained unopposed when it came to selling forgiveness to believers in Christ.
The steady flow of cash became ever more important as the Vatican suffered from the repercussions of the liberal political and social upheaval that swept Western Europe in the late eighteenth century, climaxing in the 1789 French Revolution. Monarchies friendly to the church were either toppled or greatly weakened. When Napoleon came to power in France in 1796 he demanded the Vatican pay millions a year in tribute to him. When the church could not afford to do so, he dispatched troops to Italy to strip many churches and cathedrals of anything of value and return the plunder to France. Worse, Rome’s real estate income in post-revolution France was extinguished as the nascent republic nationalized many church properties.25 The new National Assembly banned French bishops from sending to Rome any of the money they raised. It was not much better in other countries. In Austria, cash-strapped Emperor Joseph II undercut Papal authority by diverting the Vatican-bound money to his own treasury. Revenue from Britain, Scandinavia, and Germany slowed.26 Even Italy’s Prime Minister—personally approved for the office by Pope Pius VI—imposed a tax on church properties in a bid to stem the country’s financial crisis. Pius VI denounced the new tax as “the work of the devil.”27
The fallout continued as political unrest in Europe spilled over into the first half of the nineteenth century: Papal income fell in a remarkable forty of the century’s first fifty years.28 A few lay advisors worried that the social instability that wreaked havoc with church finances would not pass quickly. They recommended exploring ways by which the church might become less dependent on donations from the faithful. But such suggestions were invariably dismissed. Most ranking clerics believed that modern economic theory was a pernicious and reprehensible component of the liberal secular movement that had infected Europe. The Vatican had consigned to the inviolable Index of Prohibited Books John Stuart Mill’s seminal Principles of Political Economy.29 Pope Benedict XIV, in a much heralded encyclical,Vix Pervenit (On Usury and Other Dishonest Profit), reiterated the long-standing church ban on loaning money with interest. By condemning interest-bearing loans as “illi
cit,” “evil,” and a “sin,” Benedict ended any internal debate.30
The Vatican’s antiquated view about money meant that it did nothing to encourage fiscal growth or industrial development in the Papal States. The economy stagnated, and over decades tax revenues steadily declined.31
By the time Gregory XVI, the son of a lawyer, became Pope in 1831, the situation was so dire that he felt compelled to do something remarkable: he borrowed money from the Rothschilds, Europe’s preeminent Jewish banking dynasty.32 The £400,000 loan ($43,000,000 in 2014) was a lifeline to the church.33 The Rothschilds had a solid reputation when it came to bailing out distressed governments. They had steadied Austria’s finances after the Napoleonic Wars and provided enough money to squash two rebellions in Sicily.34
James de Rothschild, head of the family’s Paris-based headquarters, became the official Papal banker.35 One of his brothers, Carl, who ran the family’s Naples branch, began traveling to Rome to consult with the Pope. Their financial empire prompted a mixture of envy and resentment among church officials. Most traditionalists, who referred to James as the leader of “international Jewry,” were appalled that the church had resorted to “Christ-killers” for financial succor.36 French Poet Alfred de Vigny wrote that “a Jew now reigns over the Pope and Christianity. He pays monarchs and buys nations.”37 German political writer Karl Ludwig Börne—born Loeb Baruch but changed his name upon becoming a Lutheran—thought that Gregory had demeaned the Vatican by giving Carl Rothschild an audience. Börne noted that “a wealthy Jew kisses his [the Pope’s] hand” whereas “a poor Christian kisses the Pope’s feet.” He fanned the distrust among many of the faithful: “The Rothschilds are assuredly nobler than their ancestor Judas Iscariot. He sold Christ for 30 small pieces of silver; the Rothschilds would buy Him, if He were for sale.”38
God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Page 2
