Leemans was summoned, to see if some device might be elaborated to stave off disaster. He jotted down on a scrap of paper the assets held in Panama. There were the 5.2 million shares in Banco Ambrosiano, 10.4 per cent of its capital. Then there was 5.5 per cent of La Centrale (held in the name of a couple of Liechtenstein anstalts called Zwillfin and Chatoser), six per cent of Banca del Gottardo, 5,500 shares in Suprafin (the Milan company which began the buying of Ambrosiano shares back in 1974), the two million shares in Vianini, 189,000 shares in Rizzoli, and 300 shares in Ambrosiano Overseas of Nassau. Last but not least, Leemans noted down 520 shares, equivalent to 52 per cent, of Sorrisi e Canzoni TV. That this was a frothy Italian counterpart of the TV Times had not prevented its employment to secure $40 million lent by Ambrosiano Nicaragua to World Wide Trading Corporation of Panama. In all these sundry shareholdings secured exactly $1,287 million worth of debts.
Leemans argued that Ambrosiano had to have at least some of the money there and then, but the two IOR officials again refused, insisting that the debts were not theirs. "But what about the Ambrosiano shares?" Leemans asked. "Sono vostre," "they're yours," came the cold answer, "take them back." But Leemans still retained a fraction of hope and came up with what was to prove the final scheme to save Banco Ambrosiano.
Whether it liked it or not, he insisted, the IOR had to co-operate, or else find itself involved in a colossal scandal. Probably Ambrosiano's valuable Swiss subsidiary, Banca del Gottardo, together with other odds and ends, could be sold for, say, $250 million. That left roughly $1,000 million to be found. Leemans suggested that the IOR raise this sum through an international loan, with a life of six or seven years. This would be used to settle the debts to Ambrosiano's Latin American banks. The IOR would find the money to repay the loan when it fell due by selling the 5.2 million Banco Ambrosiano shares. This meant that Leemans had to find someone to buy ten per cent of Ambrosiano in six or seven years' time at a price of almost $200 per share. True, this was five times more than their highest ever level on the Milan Stock Exchange, but conceivably, with share splits and capital issues, the trick could be pulled off. But the IOR, which after all was involved, had to pay the interest on the $1,000 million loan, and accept the exchange risk.
The meeting broke up. Rosone at last could return to Milan, while Leemans threw himself into the hopeless task. He could think of only one possible buyer for the Ambrosiano shares—Carlo De Benedetti. In the next few hours he went back and forth to De Benedetti at Olivetti's head office, in Ivrea, near Turin. But De Benedetti would only consider taking an option to buy the shares, without committing himself further.
Leemans made a new appointment in the Vatican for 8 am the following morning, June 17. His deadline was noon that day, when Ambrosiano's board was due to meet again in Milan. In all likelihood it would throw in the towel and place the bank in the hands of the Bank of Italy. This time Marcinkus was there, along with Mennini and De Stroebel. His terms were impossible.
The IOR, said Marcinkus, had to have a firm promise to buy the shares; nor could the Vatican bank meet either the interest payments (around $100 to $150 million a year) on the loan, or the exchange risk. "We just don't have that kind of money."
Well then, Leemans replied, "I'll just have to call Milan and tell them to ask for a Bank of Italy commissioner. Everything's going to collapse, and there'll be an almighty scandal."
"I know," said Marcinkus wearily. "I did all this to help a friend, and look where we are." Leemans made one last bitter joke: "When there's that much money involved, it's hard to have any friends." He left the lOR, and phoned Rosone with the grim news. The Bank of Italy would have to be called in.
In Milan, on the fourth floor of Banco Ambrosiano's headquarters, turmoil reigned. Apart from Calvi himself, four other directors did not attend what was to prove the final board meeting of the 86-year life of Ambrosiano. But the panic of those who were there more than made up for any absences; as they argued, exchanged accusations, and frantically called their lawyers for advice. At noon proceedings were finally under way.
First Calvi was by unanimous vote stripped of all his powers at the Bank. Then Rosone proposed that the board be dissolved, and the bank placed in the hands of a commissioner from the central bank, whose inspectors were already in the building anyway.
Then it was the turn of Leoni. He explained to the dumbfounded directors how the Panamanian and Luxembourg companies controlled by the IOR owed the foreign subsidiaries, above all Banco Andino, almost $1,100 million, while the Vatican bank directly owed them $200 million. But the IOR was refusing to help. Ambrosiano in Milan was being pressed to repay loans. It had already directly transferred $380 million to the beleaguered foreign subsidiaries, quite apart from the indirect "back-to-back" operations through intermediaries. But no more money could be provided. Rosone then disclosed how the bank had (illegally) spent over 60 billion lire buying up its own shares in the final months, to support their price before and during the brief quotation on the main Milan market.
But even at this hopeless juncture, the struggle for power between Rosone and Bagnasco continued. The acting chairman should resign, Bagnasco accused Rosone in fury. He had known the truth and lied about it, saying nothing at board meeting after board meeting. Rosone equally angrily rejected the charges. At 2.30 p.m. the meeting was suspended for half an hour, to permit tempers to cool and yet more calls to lawyers.
Rosone produced a new draft motion requesting the Bank of Italy to step in; but Bagnasco remained adamant. He would agree to nothing until he had had more time to study the true situation of the bank. Meanwhile Botta, the head of the foreign department warned that unless Banco Andino received $15 million to repay a loan by the end of June, the group would be thrown into default by other creditors. Finally the vote was taken. By nine votes to nil, and the abstention of Bagnasco, the board of Banco Ambrosiano voted to dissolve itself. Hardly had the news begun to clatter out on wire service printers just after 6 p.m. than the Bank of Italy activated its contingency plan.
The most senior of the team of inspectors in Milan, Vincenzo Desario, was named provisional commissioner. Only hours later he was telexing all the foreign and Italian banks which had dealt with Ambrosiano, pleading for their "widest possible" co-operation, and promising that the regular administration of Ambrosiano would be guaranteed. Nothing however would again be regular or normal in the affairs of the bank.
Every one of Ambrosiano's 4,200 employees must have been bewildered and fearful at the upheavals of the week. None more so than Graziella Corrocher, the 55-year-old personal secretary of Calvi, and before that of the previous chairman Mozzana. She was a spinster who had given her life to the bank. In recent weeks she had been worried not only by the ill health of her sister, but at the evident irritability and dissatisfaction of Calvi himself. Not even with his personal secretary could he form a relationship of trust and warmth. Towards the end, he would complain to his lawyers about her performance; maybe in some obscure way he saw Corrocher too as part of the great conspiracy against him.
Shortly after the directors had agreed to ask the Bank of Italy to take over, she took a red felt-tipped pen and wrote a short note. She apologized for what she intended to do. Her work with Calvi though had been miserable. How much coldness she had endured, how little satisfaction Corrocher had derived from her work; "I stand by the decision taken by the board," she wrote, "but I cannot stand by Calvi any longer. . . what a disgrace, to have run away. May he be cursed a thousand times for the harm he has done to everyone at the bank, and to the image of the group we were once so proud of."
Then, just before 7 p.m., she climbed on to the windowsill of her fourth-floor office and threw herself to her death. Her body landed with a thump on the ramp leading down to Ambrosiano's underground garage in the inside courtyard. Rosone was talking to a journalist on the phone, telling what had happened that day. The caller heard a din in the background, and Rosone broke off the conversation. Then he ret
urned to the phone. "My God," he said, "Calvi's secretary's just killed herself."
Some have been tempted to see Corrocher's death as murder, not suicide, that she did not jump, but was pushed to her death. The motive, presumably, that she should not divulge the secrets she must have known. But to have devised a suicide note of such despairing intensity would surely have taxed the most cynical assassin. In that overcharged moment, it was more probably a gruesome, but melodramatically fitting, end to a day when the last illusions died. Or at least it seemed the end.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Death in London
Roberto Calvi never did return to Italy. Perhaps, in his initial relief at successful escape to Klagenfurt, he really thought he could. His family in Washington had already learnt of his flight; both from Pazienza, who mysteriously visited London briefly on Friday June 11 before taking the Concorde back to New York on the morning of Saturday June 12, and from Giorgio Gregori, their lawyer in Rome. On her father's instructions, Anna relayed on Calvi's reassurances to his wife and son, telling them to go as planned on a trip to Los Angeles.
That weekend the participants in the last journey gathered at the house of the Kleinszig sisters. Vittor drove up from Trieste, while Carboni flew in from Rome. Calvi spent the weekend making phone calls and burning documents he had brought with him in the fireplace in the sitting room. It is not known whom else he telephoned from Klagenfurt, or what were the documents he destroyed. Presumably they related to his links with the Vatican and the P-2. Maybe he was still in touch with the IOR, or trying to mobilize what allies he had left, in a final attempt to save Ambrosiano. But his room for manoeuvre was fast vanishing. That Sunday his disappearance was on the front page of Italian newspapers: by Monday it was news all over Europe.
Roberto Calvi was now the most sought after man in Europe and his last four days of life were to be spent dodging furtively, under a transparent alias, halfway across Europe. Not least of the riddles of this period is why, if Calvi had to run, he did not go to join his family in America—or travel to South America, a traditional refuge for runaway Italians, and where he had such strong connections, both business and political. Perhaps he was unable to face his family, and present them with conclusive evidence of his failure; perhaps intermittently he still was able to persuade himself that salvation was possible; perhaps he was no longer physically free to decide. We do not know. It is impossible to be sure.
True to his love of the shadows, Calvi travelled mostly by night. Late in the evening of the Sunday, June 13, he and Vittor left Klagenfurt for the drive across the mountains to Innsbruck, where they arrived at dawn on Monday. Carboni himself that day travelled on to Zurich, where he was joined by Ernesto Diotallevi, his underworld associate who is believed to have procured the false passport for Calvi.
Calvi, however, did not stay in Innsbruck long. He and Carboni agreed that their next rendezvous would be at Bregenz, a small town close to the border with Switzerland and West Germany, on the shores of Lake Constance. There Calvi spent the night of Monday, June 14, and there he met Hans Kunz, the Swiss businessman and friend of Carboni, and who was to be the main organizer of the last stage of the journey to London.
The decision to go to London may have been in doubt right up to the last moment. That night Calvi called his daughter telling her that Kunz was arranging a flat for her in Zurich, adding cryptically that perhaps he would be coming to join her. In the event he was not to see Anna again, nor was she to have the promised flat.
The following morning, of Tuesday June 15, Calvi and Vittor abruptly returned to Innsbruck. The banker still seemed in good humour; again we do not know whom he spoke to by phone, or what promises he received. He can hardly have been unaware, however, of developments in Italy, above all the savage run on Ambrosiano's shares. As his daughter travelled to a hotel in Zurich, waiting for Kunz or his wife to get in touch, and as Leemans and Rosone in Milan prepared for their fateful trip to the IOR in Rome, Calvi left for London.
Accompanied by Vittor, he travelled in a private jet, which had been arranged by the Swiss businessman. The pilot of the plane was told his two passengers were executives of the Fiat motor company. At sunset that Tuesday evening the plane touched down at Gatwick airport. Calvi's false passport aroused no suspicions at Gatwick's immigration controls. Together with Vittor, he went straight to the lodgings Kunz had arranged for them at Chelsea Cloisters in Sloane Avenue. Vittor, both guardian and Calvi's last bodyguard, signed in for both of them, and they were assigned apartment 881.
Foreigners are often misled by its name, for Chelsea Cloisters is no romantic, luxurious hideaway in bohemian Chelsea, but a vast barracks like building, containing innumerable apartments and small rooms for short- or longer-term letting. Here, in the anonymous circumstances of the fugitive, the man who until a few months earlier had been Italy's most powerful private banker was to spend the last two days of his life.
Calvi's mood changed to match his new surroundings. He became, Vittor said, agitated, depressed, and again frightened. Most of Wednesday he spent in the room stretched on the bed, staring at the television, or making phone calls. Vittor, whenever he went out, had to call him every twenty minutes. During the day, Carboni arrived with the Keinszig sisters from Zurich via Amsterdam, and booked into the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane. From there he phoned Calvi, who protested strongly about the conditions under which he had to live, demanding to move somewhere else. The two met that evening, with Vittor, in Hyde Park, and Carboni promised to make new arrangements. It was, he maintains, the last time he saw Calvi alive.
But why London? As far as can be established Calvi contacted none of his previous business associates in the city, neither De Savary, nor others in the banking world, with whom the Calvis were on friendly terms after that visit to London in February 1981. Calvi's knowledge of London was that of the occasional business visitor; his command of English was adequate but no more. True, Pazienza had been in London a few days earlier; but practised antennae in the City had picked up no signal of unusual activity indicating that the improbable deal, to sell the Panamanian shares in Ambrosiano for $ 1,000 million or more, was nearing completion.
Perhaps the key lay in the shadowy "Loggia di Londra", a "London Lodge" of freemasons of which Calvi would sometimes cryptically admit membership. Those to whom he spoke of it gained the impression that Gelli had put him in touch with it; Calvi would imply that it was of enormous financial influence and had helped him in many of his dealings. The "Loggia di Londra" would fit in with Calvi's love of secret clubs and cabals, with his preference for the back rather than the front door. The fact, however, was that Calvi was rarely financially active in London—Ambrosiano did not even have a representative office in what is, after all, Europe's financial capital.
Conceivably, London was chosen because it was so huge a metropolis, where identity checks were minimal. A fugitive could easily go to ground, and connecting flights abounded to every corner of the world. What can be said is that if there did exist a premeditated plan, then the arrangements devised by Carboni and his fellows, and their behaviour, bore little sign of it. Rather, a nervous improvisation was the order of the day.
Early on Thursday June 17 Carboni appears to have made a call from the Hilton to Wilfredo Vitalone, a Rome lawyer enlisted by himself and Pazienza to help persuade Italian magistrates to take a gentler line towards the banker. Afterwards he spoke to Calvi himself by telephone and then checked out of the hotel.
Carboni then contacted an English acquaintance called William Morris, a local Government officer from West London, whose Italian wife was aunt to Carboni's mistress of many years. Morris insisted he had previously met Carboni just twice, while on holiday in Italy. And so, as the Kleinszigs spent that Thursday shopping, the Sardinian enlisted his help to find more satisfactory lodgings for his unhappy charge.
For all the while Calvi was becoming more restless and depressed. At some point on June 16 or 17 (the accounts of Carboni and Vittor differed) he shave
d off the thin moustache he had always worn. He spent the whole of Thursday in his room, his only contact with the outside world, apart from his faithful Vittor, the telephone. Even his family, to whom he had seemed cheerful in the days before, noticed the change. In one of the last conversations with his wife, he was still talking of the "wonderful thing" that was going to change their existence. But that Thursday morning he spoke three times with his daughter Anna in Zurich, insisting on the danger she faced, and that she should leave Europe for the US: "Something really important is happening, and today and tomorrow all hell is going to break loose."
Anna booked a flight the next day from Zurich to New York, and her father called again to tell her that the Kunz would provide the money required to buy the ticket. He added he would be in touch the following morning to make sure she was on her way. Early on Friday the Swiss businessman's wife arrived at the hotel to give Anna 50,000 Swiss francs in cash. By that time, of course, her father was dead.
The state of Calvi's mind that last afternoon can only be guessed at. It is hard to believe that he did not learn of the tumult in Milan: the removal by Ambrosiano's board of his power to sign documents, which banished what hopes there were of the rescue deal, the decision to place Banco Ambrosiano in the hands of the Bank of Italy, and finally the death of his secretary Corrocher. And it is inconceivable that in one way or another they did not bear on what was to happen that night. Back in Italy, the events at Banco Ambrosiano's headquarters (though not those within the Vatican earlier) were the top item on the evening news at 8 p.m., or 7 p.m. London time.
Only later was Carboni, who had meanwhile booked into the Sheraton Hotel near Morris's home, back in touch with Calvi and Vittor at Chelsea Cloisters, saying he was on his way at last. Not until about 11 p.m. did he arrive in Sloane Avenue. But instead of going up to Calvi's room, he asked Vittor to come down. They then left, to collect the Kleinszig girls, who had long been waiting in a nearby bar. Both assert that from that moment, they never saw Calvi again. Vittor's version was that Calvi earlier had refused to go down and meet Carboni. When he returned to the apartment, after leaving Carboni and the girls, he found it locked and empty. Calvi had left on the last journey of his life. After having himself let into the room by a porter, Vittor spent an anxious night before taking the first flight the next day for Vienna. The Kleinszig sisters also left for Austria.
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