God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

by Gerald Posner

  The police lab pinpointed a lethal dose of cyanide as the cause of death. Investigators later determined that nearly a gram of the poison was in his espresso.69 Many thought his death suspicious, especially legal insiders who knew that prosecutors had secretly offered a significant reduction in Sindona’s life sentence in return for his cooperation on everything from P2 to Calvi to Mafia money laundering. To prevent suicide or foul play, his jailers had monitored him by video around the clock, as well as deploying twelve guards who worked in shifts (three on duty at all times). Sindona’s meals were prepared in a special section of the prison’s kitchen, watched over by a guard, and then delivered in sealed metal containers opened only inside his cell.70 It took eight months for an investigating magistrate to reach a much contested but never disproven conclusion: the jailhouse poisoning was suicide.71,IV

  Even the debate over whether Sindona had been murdered became yesterday’s news by the following February, 1987. Italian magistrates Antonio Pizzi and Renato Bricchetti issued a stunning twenty-six-page arrest warrant for Marcinkus, Mennini, and de Strobel, charging them as accessories to fraudulent bankruptcy related to the Ambrosiano’s collapse five years earlier.73 The warrants were based on evidence discovered in a safe deposit box in Lugano’s Banca del Gottardo. The incriminating papers revealed the extent to which the IOR and the Ambrosiano had operated the ghost companies. The documents convinced prosecutors that the Vatican was far from the unwitting dupe in the Ambrosiano’s demise that it had tried hard to project.74 The magistrates believed the contents of the safe deposit box were enough to prove that the three Vatican officials had “full knowledge” they had helped Calvi divert the Ambrosiano’s funds to worthless foreign shells.

  The arrest warrants dominated the news.75 To the mortification of many inside the Vatican, with the death of Sindona, the press now referred to Marcinkus as “God’s banker.”76 Some tabloids ran pictures of him with the banner: “Wanted: Monsignor Marcinkus.”77 The French edition of Penthouse ran a salacious story sandwiched between racy photos of naked women. Inside the city-state there was tremendous anger that the Italians had gone so far as to issue criminal indictments. The charges against the archbishop, who held dual American and Vatican passports, put a spotlight on whether Italy had a right to pursue church officials it accused of breaking Italian laws. Mennini and de Strobel were both Italian citizens who lived inside the Vatican.78 As for Marcinkus, just a couple of days earlier police had shown up at Rome’s Villa Stritch, outside the walls of the Vatican. The IOR chief kept a small apartment there and had visited only a couple of hours earlier.79

  Since there was no extradition treaty between the countries, the Ministry of Justice cited Article 22 of the Lateran Treaties requiring the Vatican turn over those accused of committing crimes inside Italy.80 Some Justice officials even talked about the remarkable if unlikely scenario of requesting the United States to order the extradition of the American Marcinkus from the Vatican.81 No one in the church wanted to push the limits of its sovereignty by allowing Marcinkus, Mennini, or de Strobel to leave the city-state and risk an arrest. The three were safe only so long as they stayed inside the walls of the Vatican.82 The Italians realized that meant they would only get the men if the Pope said yes.

  The church’s first public response to the indictments was “profound astonishment.”83 Within a few days it adopted an unequivocal position: it had “absolutely no intention” of ever handing over to Italy any cleric or lay official. “A tough reply from the Vatican to the arrest warrants: Marcinkus will never go to Italian prison,” noted Corriere della Sera.84

  Unidentified Vatican officials condemned the warrants as politically motivated by Italy’s socialists to embarrass the church.85 The Vatican contended the prosecutors were powerless, since Article 11 of the Lateran Treaty stated, “Central organs of the Catholic Church are free from every interference on the part of the Italian state.”86 Moreover, the church added that Marcinkus had given “substantial and loyal collaboration” by “producing copious documents and notes” during the five-year probe (although it made no mention that he had refused any interviews or sworn declarations).

  John Paul’s intuition that Italy’s left-of-center coalition would capitalize on the standoff to humiliate the Vatican at every opportunity was right. Police leaked to reporters innovative ways they might arrest the trio. Rome’s hospitals were put on notice to summon the carabinieri if any of the wanted men turned up at an ER. Tourists took pictures of a police car parked at the front of the exclusive Aqua Santa country club, just in case Marcinkus tried sneaking in a round of golf. And a policeman checked in regularly at one of the archbishop’s favorite Roman restaurants, where the owner got a lot of free publicity by keeping a table vacant for his return.

  In the beginning of his self-imposed exile, Marcinkus went daily to a corner of the Vatican gardens and converted it into a makeshift putting green. “And soon one of the Italian cardinals sent him a letter instructing him to ‘stop ruining the grass,’ ” recalls Peter Murphy, the U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission. “There were some of his Italian colleagues who had been waiting a long time to revel in his misfortune.”87

  The media coverage went into overdrive with leaks from more than four hundred pages of “confessions” by Calvi’s former fixer, Francesco Pazienza, now dubbed “Deep Throat” by the Italian media.88 Unsubstantiated stories tied the IOR to everything from millions of dollars spent on phantom consultants to an overpriced Costa Rican farm on which Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinistas trained guerrillas.

  Fourteen cardinals convened an emergency meeting only a few weeks after the news broke. They had no material say over the standoff with Italy’s judiciary. Instead, their task was to find ways to cope with the largest ever Vatican City budget deficit (a $56 million shortfall in 1986, increasing to nearly $80 million in 1987).89 The $244 million payout to the Ambrosiano creditors had not only left the church with few reserves but the controversy had caused a 75 percent plunge in Peter’s Pence.90 Plus, the dollar’s steep slide against the lira meant the church took in even less by the time its American dollar contributions got converted in Italy.91

  “For all its splendor, the Vatican is nearly broke,” noted Fortune in a special investigation published that December.92 A “deep financial squeeze” had resulted from skyrocketing operating expenses and a growing bureaucracy: “The Holy See spent nearly twice as much as its income.”93 In just five years, spending had doubled. Nearly 60 percent of that was labor costs. Pensions were an increasing drain.94 The normally passive Association of Lay Vatican Employees was griping about abysmally low wages and meager benefits. The Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, and its radio station, were hemorrhaging money. One underlying problem highlighted by Fortune was that “financial management is practically an act of faith” since the church relied heavily on contributions for its income.

  The cardinals reported back to John Paul that restoring the Vatican’s tattered image was a priority if there was any chance of encouraging ordinary Catholics to be more generous.95 If that meant making concessions about Marcinkus, the Pope let them know it was off the table.96

  Marcinkus continued frustrating the cardinals since he refused to provide them with the IOR’s basic operating figures. “The institute never publishes its balance sheets,” one anonymous Vatican official told The New York Times. “The cardinals have repeatedly asked to see them, but Marcinkus was able to refuse because he enjoyed the confidence and trust of the Pope. . . . When it [the IOR] paid out $240 million, was that half or three-quarters or what percentage of its capital?”97

  Still, they managed a small breakthrough by Vatican standards. Moving forward from 1987, the Holy See agreed to send out twice-a-year financial statements to the approximately three thousand bishops and heads of religious orders. They were rudimentary and did not include any data from the Vatican Bank. Yet they marked the first time that Rome revealed any of its finances to so many clerics. The cardinals thought that si
nce the statements were dismal, those who received them could use the numbers to rally contributions to help the Pope.98

  The struggle over the degree to which the Vatican Bank would assist the commission of cardinals seemed less pressing at the end of March when Italy made history again in its relations with the church, this time by formally petitioning the Foreign Ministry to request the extradition of the three bank officials.99 A few days later, John Paul made his first public comments about the matter. During a flight to South America for the start of a two-week tour, the Pontiff walked to the rear of the cabin and held an impromptu news conference with the press corps. He said that the church had studied the case with “competent authorities,” taken the matter “seriously,” and had determined that it was wrong for Marcinkus to be “attacked . . . in such an exclusive and brutal manner.”100 The Pope’s strong words left no doubt that he still believed that Marcinkus, Mennini, and de Strobel were the victims of a media witch-hunt.

  As far as the Pope was concerned, Marcinkus was a decent man whose many years of solid work at the IOR had been lost in a deluge of muckraking. There was little doubt that those who worked with him saw a gentler side than the calculating bank chief portrayed in the press. His friends liked to tell how Marcinkus would climb onto scaffolding on scorching summer days to offer water to the construction workers. Or how when Munich’s Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger moved to Rome to take charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Marcinkus surprised him with an entire wardrobe.101 John Paul sometimes liked retelling a story about the time when an assistant had interrupted a meeting between Marcinkus and American Bishop Robert Lynch. Mother Teresa had arrived unexpectedly at the Vatican Bank and wanted to see Marcinkus. The IOR chief looked to Lynch and smiled: “This visit will cost us a minimum of $1 million.” And it almost did. A mattress company wanted to donate twenty thousand mattresses to her Calcutta charity, but she needed money to ship them.102 It was a shame, thought John Paul, that what he judged as Marcinkus’s well-intentioned mistakes had obscured his many good deeds.

  “The Pope was not alone in that view,” recalls Peter Murphy, the American embassy’s number two official at the Vatican during that time. “I, for instance, never thought Marcinkus had made a dime off any of the dealings. The problem was that he had ended up in the wrong job and he did not have the background or ability to cope with some of the sharks with whom he had to swim.” Murphy said that he and many of Marcinkus’s supporters recognized that it was Mennini who had responsibility for the bank’s day-to-day operations. If anyone might be responsible for the IOR’s problems, it was likely its senior lay executive. “Marcinkus was not the type of man,” Murphy said, “to be anything less than loyal and to take full responsibility for everything that happened under him. But there is no doubt that Mennini was very, very clever. He dealt with all the Italian and international banks and knew everyone in business and politics. Marcinkus was too trusting and just never really understood how that world worked.”103,V

  The Pontiff decided to quash the Italian extradition effort with a legal assault challenging Italy’s power to make such a request. The church’s lawyers petitioned the Tribunale della Libertà, a specialized branch of the judiciary that dealt with such issues. In mid-April, the court stunned Vaticanisti by upholding the warrants.105

  Any residual hope that the worst might be over was dashed in early May when Milanese prosecutors issued companion arrest warrants for twenty-five former Ambrosiano officers and board members. Nothing better illustrated the low state of Vatican-Italian relations. In the new round of warrants, the magistrates went out of their way to exempt all the accused from being arrested and enduring the humiliation of a perp walk in front of news photographers. Instead, those who lived in Italy had to check in weekly at a police station, and those abroad had to telephone regularly. Italy noted that the new defendants were “not socially dangerous nor possible fugitives.”106 Yet prosecutors offered no such accommodation for Marcinkus, Mennini, and de Strobel. The Italians insisted they were “dangerous” and should be arrested and jailed pending their trial.107

  The Vatican appealed the adverse ruling to Italy’s court of last resort, the Corte Suprema di Cassazione. The church also submitted the question of whether the arrest warrants were valid to its own courts. In mid-June—to no one’s surprise—the Vatican judiciary rejected the warrants as groundless and concluded that Italy lacked the authority to issue them.108

  Some commentators thought the Vatican was hypocritical by resisting Italian jurisdiction in the Ambrosiano case. “When Ali Agca, a Turk, shot Pope John Paul II in 1981, both the target and the would-be killer were well within Vatican territory,” wrote George Armstrong, the respected Rome correspondent for London’s Guardian. “The Vatican was happy to have him arrested, tried and sentenced in Italy, and under Italian law, and his life sentence will be at the expense of the Italian taxpayer. The Vatican becomes another country only when it chooses to be.”109 Armstrong even put into print a question many were asking privately: “Does the Vatican, or the Holy See, or the Pope, really need a bank of its very own? The Vatican could do its banking anywhere, including in Italy.”

  During a consistory of cardinals that began on June 28, 1988, there was another heated debate over the IOR. Agostino Gambino, the chairman of the three-person committee who had led the negotiations for the $244 million settlement with the Ambrosiano’s creditors, presented a hearty defense of Marcinkus and his tenure. There had been serious blunders, admitted Gambino, but no bad intent. Secretary of State Casaroli thought the mismanagement was so great that the consistory should recommend that the Pope replace his IOR chief.

  The cardinals sided with Gambino.110 The church tapped Monsignor De Bonis to counter some of the terrible press. De Bonis seemed an odd choice since he had been Marcinkus’s shadow on many of the questionable IOR transactions with Calvi and Sindona. And he was himself under investigation in a complex tax fraud.111 Whatever his shortcomings, however, De Bonis made colorful copy. He told La Repubblica that the three indicted IOR officials had been framed, “victims of an obscure and complicated situation in which someone, in bad faith, wanted to put the blame on their shoulders and without their knowledge.” He assured the reporter that the three had no idea what happened to millions of missing Ambrosiano funds. “It did not end up here [the IOR].”112 And when pressed about who might have set them up, he offered that “the real culprits are in another place and far from here.”113

  When De Bonis was asked if Vatican officials had confidence that the Italian courts would resolve the standoff over the arrest warrants, he was unwavering. The church had “complete faith” in Italy’s highest tribunal.114 That seemed prescient a few days later when that court concluded that Italy had no jurisdiction since the three IOR officials were members of a “central entity” of the Vatican. It reversed the lower tribunal’s verdict and invalidated the arrest warrants.115 That unequivocal and unappealable decision left the Ambrosiano prosecutors powerless to pursue the trio.116 Monsignor De Bonis reflected a widely held sentiment inside the Curia: “We’ve finished a nightmare.”117 When a reporter reached Marcinkus for comment, the beleaguered IOR chief said, “I’m happy. My faith in Italian justice has been restored.”118 And he told a conservative Spanish church daily, Ya, that whatever he had done with Calvi had been “a simple error of judgment, but not a crime.”119 Within a week he celebrated by playing a round of golf at the Aqua Santa country club.120,VI

  But the Milanese prosecutors were not yet done. In December, they broadsided the church by filing a brief with Italy’s Constitutional Court contending that the ruling to exclude Vatican officials from their jurisdiction violated constitutional guarantees of equal justice under law. Antonio Pizzi, the chief prosecutor, advanced a clever argument: the concordat provision invoked by the church was unconstitutional since it created a class of people—high-ranking Vatican officials—who were beyond the reach of the law.122 Pizzi noted that Italy had recently enacted a seri
es of statutes that gave prosecutors beefed-up powers to seize illicit narcotics proceeds in Italian banks. But under the high court decision, if that same illegal money was deposited by Mafia bosses into Vatican Bank accounts, although it was physically in the heart of Rome, the dirty cash would be off limits to any forfeiture. As a result of the high court ruling, any criminal racketeering probe would go cold once it reached the door of the IOR. The Vatican Bank could not be served with a search warrant or an order to produce documents. Its phones were not subject to legal wiretaps. Court-ordered mail intercepts were forbidden. None of its employees could be required to testify. It was a loophole so large, argued Pizzi, that it made a mockery of Italian law enforcement.123

  The Constitutional Court took five months before dismissing the prosecutor’s appeal.124 It dodged the central issue of whether the Vatican’s concordat exemption from Italy’s judicial oversight violated the country’s constitution. Instead, it concluded that the Corte Suprema di Cassazione, which had decided the case the previous year, had the final say. Moreover, it noted that the challenge by the Milanese magistrates was too late in the process.