God's Banker

by Rupert Cornwell

  There was, moreover, an interesting footnote to the Vianini affair. According to Francesco Pazienza, who claimed to have found an American buyer willing to pay $60 million for Vianini, the deal fell through at a "Kafkaesque" meeting between himself, Marcinkus and Calvi at the Vatican. Pazienza simply could not understand whether it was the IOR, or Ambrosiano, which controlled the company. On this occasion, one could sympathize with Pazienza.

  Probably the full truth about the Vatican bank's relations with Calvi would never be known—except maybe in the confessional box. Indeed it was possibly in too many people's interest that it would not be. Documents abounded to prove many things, but not the spirit in which they were written. Undoubtedly, Calvi tricked the Vatican; the question remained: where did negligence and naivety end, and collusion begin?

  What the unfortunate outcome of its dealings with Calvi certainly did show, was how the concern of the Vatican with financial secrecy had been its own worst enemy. If the IOR's activities had been properly scrutinized by outside accountants, if it had dealt with banks less underhand than the Ambrosiano of Calvi, such an affair would never have happened.

  In that respect at least the scandal might bring benefit. The pressures to reform the IOR had never been as great as after the Ambrosiano affair. They derived not only from the Italian Govern­ment, which would like to see the Vatican bank open a branch on Italian soil, and be treated exactly as are the Italian branches of Barclays Bank or Chase Manhattan bank. Many within the Catholic Church also decided that clarity, even at the price of truly "lay" management of the IOR, is preferable to the impenetrable methods of the past, with all their damaging consequences.

  These questions would perhaps be resolved by the mixed commis­sion established on the Christmas Eve of 1982. Less certain of complete solution was another of the mysteries at the heart of the Ambrosian scandal, the final destination of exactly $1,287 million.

  "All I can say," Marcinkus would shrug to visitors who afterwards pressed him on the matter, "is that it's a heck of a lot of money." And so indeed it was. Almost $1,300 million—a sum, he may have estimated while ruing the day he first set eyes on Calvi all those years earlier, to match the entire proceeds of St Peter's Pence since the donations to the Pope began in 1860, and enough to cover the Vatican's total declared expenditure for a decade.

  Close Italian observers of Ambrosiano, including the Bank of Italy, had a similar reaction. Certainly, they had suspected that

  Calvi's secrecy was a sign that he had something unpleasant to hide behind the screen of Latin American affiliates. It was not the nature of his difficulties which surprised; rather the sheer extent of them. Where did so vast an amount of money disappear?

  Nearly a year after the demise of Banco Ambrosiano and the gruesome climax in London, the answer had not been established with any certainty. But thanks to the endeavours of the magistrates, liquidators, and the police (by 1983 the Guardia di Finanza alone was conducting eight separate investigations into the affair), a picture was beginning to emerge.

  By far the largest single culprit, as this book has made clear, was the purchase of shares in various companies of the group Calvi control­led. The process began with Zitropo and Pacchetti in 1972, but most important was the holding, between ten and fourteen per cent, built up in Banco Ambrosiano itself.

  The shares were mostly bought at inflated prices in the first place, and then passed on with even higher theoretical value, from one tiny company to another. By this device the new loans required to finance their purchase and pay for interest could be justified, on paper, to the banks of Ambrosiano in Nassau, Managua, and then Lima which would provide the money. In this way Manic and Astolfine, the two companies which near the end were holding between them 5.8 million Banco Ambrosiano shares, booked them at a value of $509 million— compared with a historic maximum worth on the Milan stock market of only $207 million. That latter valuation, moreover, had only been achieved by massive illegal support buying by Ambrosiano itself.

  The case of Astolfine was most instructive of all. The 2.1 million shares it had pledged were ascribed a book value of $200 apiece, compared with an actual price, at the moment of Ambrosiano's full quotation, of about $36. By the end Astolfine had borrowed no less than $486 million from Banco Andino in Lima, although its own capital was just $10,000.

  Then there were the shares in Banca del Gottardo, Pacchetti, Credito Varesino, La Centrale, TV Sorrisi e Canzoni, Vianini and Rizzoli, Suprafin, Montreal Holding and Banco Ambrosiano Over­seas, which featured either in the letters of patronage of autumn 1981, or at the moment of reckoning nine months later.

  Other money was spent for undeclared shareholdings, most not­ably the 30 per cent of Banco Ambrosiano Holding in Luxembourg which the Milan parent did not own, but which it undoubtedly controlled. Some of these shares, with a face value of $50 million, were held by the United Trading Corporation of the IOR, others by Banco de la Nacion, Calvi's ally in Lima. By the end, moreover, Banco Andino there had a capital of $75 million, subscribed almost entirely by Ambrosiano in Luxembourg.

  All in all, the Italian authorities reckoned that $800 or $900 million might have been used for these purposes, in other words about two thirds of the total debt. But that still left $400 million or more to be accounted for—one of the largest puzzles outstanding after the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano.

  A broad subsidiary category of losses may have been money provided to companies and individuals which had earlier been doing business with Ambrosiano at home. In 1978 the central bank had identified a potentially dangerous concentration of loans within Italy to custom­ers such as Rizzoli, the Genghini construction company, and Voxson, the electronics company owned in part by Umberto Ortolani, all of them of course in one way or another within the orbit of the P-2. If inspection by the Bank of Italy had prompted Calvi to increase concealment of the true ownership of his bank, what more natural than that he should also seek to hide the extent of his lending to such favoured but suspect customers?

  One piece of evidence suggesting financial links between Ortolani and Calvi abroad was the $37 million loan provided by Erin, one of the Panamanian companies, which in turn had received the money in 1980 from Banco Andino in Lima. It was made over to an emanation of Bafisud, the bank in Uruguay owned by Ortolani. Then there was the puzzle of the two transfers in spring 1981, of $95 million and $48 million from Bellatrix, one of Erin's Panamanian sisters, to those peculiar Zirka and Recioto accounts held at Rothschild Bank, Zurich. That the operations were in some way connected with Rizzoli seemed beyond doubt; Tassan Din, the former managing director of Rizzoli, as well as Leoni, Botta and Costa, the senior Ambrosiano executives on the board of Banco Andino at the time, would later be arrested and charged over the financings. Possibly they were to pay for a subsequent transfer, into Panama or elsewhere, of the 40 per cent of Rizzoli acquired by La Centrale, Ambrosiano's holding company in Italy, shortly beforehand. But as we have seen, that transfer never took place—probably because of Calvi's sudden im­prisonment in May 1981. So what did happen to the money? Did part of it at least go to Gelli, to Ortolani, or somewhere else within the labyrinth of the P-2? Some $30 million, it was later discovered, was held in a proxy account at a bank in Dublin—of all places—on behalf of Bruno Tassan Din.

  Indeed, Gelli and Ortolani were surely prominent among the next group of likely recipients of the money of Ambrosiano: those whom Calvi paid, willingly or less willingly, for the protection from which he believed he might benefit, or without which he might be endangered. Some $55 million, which Gelli tried to retrieve in person from a Swiss bank account, probably originated at Ambrosiano. And how much more did he receive? Pazienza was another whose services did not come cheaply; nor did those of Carboni. As we have seen, more than $20 million was found in Swiss accounts of Carboni, including those $14 million despatched from Ambrosiano Overseas in Nassau in February 1982. Nor was it hard to imagine that political parties within Italy were also among the beneficiaries; if not
directly, then indirectly through intermediaries like Rizzoli.

  In Latin America too, where the P-2 was active, Calvi must have been generous; both locally, and for the benefit of favoured associ­ates back in Italy. How much money oiled the wheels in Peru and elsewhere in Latin America (or indeed if any was employed, as frequently rumoured, to finance the purchase of arms) had not been established with certainty. But Calvi would always take precautions against any eventuality. Anastasio Somoza, the late dictator of Nicaragua, was said to have received money from Ambrosiano in Managua. Calvi himself would claim to have provided later much financial assistance to the left-wing Sandinistas who overthrew Somoza in 1979.

  Then there were a host of smaller outlays. They included the $8 million spent on those unnecessary new headquarters in the Baha­mas, the $10 million or so which may have disappeared with the collapse of Banco Occidental in Spain in 1981, as well as $16 million lost through a company called Capitalfin which burnt its hands badly after the shipping collapse of the mid-1970s. The Ambrosiano group held 25 per cent of Capitalfin. Nor could the personal use of funds be ruled out entirely. It was not known what money Calvi had accumu­lated for himself abroad; but the precedents established by other Italian financiers of little scruple suggest it would be strange if he had accumulated none.

  Last, but not least, there was the Vatican itself. Its denial that it received any money from Calvi or his bank had to be weighed against the consideration that there would seem little reason other than that of profit, for the IOR to have worked with Calvi so unquestioningly and so long. The Vianini transaction alone would suggest it benefited, quite apart from whether Ambrosiano helped finance Solidarity— which the Vatican strongly denied. A great deal remained unclear, many months after the disaster; but all in all, it was not so difficult to imagine how over a period of ten years and in such a variety of fashions, so much money could have been squandered; the precise purpose of its going obscured by a tracery of front companies and nominees.

  In any case, much of the $1,287 million quite clearly was beyond recovery, without a change of heart on the part of the IOR. The calculation of Leemans on that last desperate day in the Vatican, that the realizable value of the assets which secured the debts in Panama was $250 million or so, was hasty but probably not very wide of the mark.

  The most valuable of them all by far was the 51 per cent holding in Banca del Gottardo, whose gradual disengagement from Calvi's affairs from 1980 left it little damaged by the downfall of Ambrosiano two years later. Several potential buyers were showing cautious interest in early 1983, although the risk that Gottardo might find itself at the wrong end of a lawsuit over the missing money was plainly a deterrent. Some of the other shareholdings moreover, like Vianini and even TV Sorrisi e Canzoni might fetch useful prices; but the total would probably not differ much from Leemans' guess in June 1982, when the game was about to be lost.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Epilogue

  Early on a cold, damp Saturday in mid-November, the physical remains of Roberto Calvi were laid to rest at last. The ceremony in the little parish church of Drezzo was simple. Journalists and photo­graphers outnumbered the mourners. From his family there was his daughter Anna, closest in many ways of all to him, his two brothers and his aged mother. A wreath of red roses had come from his wife and son in Washington. The old Banco Ambrosiano, to which, for better or worse, Calvi had given his life, sent nobody. Just a few loyal ex-colleagues were there in a personal capacity. His driver Tito Tesauri went; so did Costanzo Zugaro from the representative office in Rome, who had first known him as a promising young cavalryman leaving for Russia more than 40 years earlier.

  Locked and silent on the hillside stood the modest villa, the weekend refuge where he had played host to the powerful. Its gates were now sealed by order of the magistrates, who had confiscated all Calvi's assets in Italy.

  By 9.30 a.m. Calvi had been buried in Drezzo's tiny cemetery, and the cortege was on its way back to Milan in the rain. In the Corriere next day just four of those little obituary notices appeared to mark his final going. One was from his wife and family, lamenting the "count­less injustices" inflicted upon Calvi in the final years of his existence. Even after death, it read, "there is no peace or comfort, only resignation".

  As 1982 gave way to 1983, and 1983 to 1984, that sadhearted and bemused reflection proved exact. The Ambrosiano affair and its varied ramifications seldom left the headlines of the Italian, indeed the world's, press. But all the while a sense of resignation grew, that the truth about how Calvi met his death in London, or about the whereabouts of hundreds of millions of dollars, would not be exactly established.

  Not that there was any lack of endeavour to do so. Carboni, Pellicani, Vittor and others connected with the last days in London were at different times detained, questioned and arrested. In Rome, the parliamentary commission examining the P-2 scandal conducted its own parallel, if cumbersome, enquiries.

  Carboni did consent in the autumn of 1982 to be extradited back to Italy, but only to answer the comparatively minor charges of abetting Calvi in his illegal flight abroad, and of being party to the bankruptcy of Ambrosiano. For the Swiss magistrates had quickly found out all about those $14 million extracted from Calvi's bank in Nassau the previous February. Their Italian counterparts meanwhile were dis­covering much else about the dealings of Carboni.

  Gradually a most unattractive picture was emerging from about a dozen separate investigations up and down the country. Carboni, his name unknown until Calvi's death, was one who appeared to mix political influence-peddling with common crime, ventures in the press with involvement in an illegal cocaine traffic and right-wing terror­ism. With little doubt, Carboni was a crossroads of wrongdoing of many kinds, and the Italian authorities sought his extradition for other offences also.

  Most serious of all was the charge that Carboni—and thus by implication Calvi himself—had inspired the attack in Milan on Roberto Rosone, deputy chairman of Ambrosiano, which had been carried out the previous April by Danilo Abbruciati, the underworld acquaintance of Carboni.

  Nor did it seem entirely a coincidence that Carboni had been a friend of Giuseppe Pisanu, the junior Treasury minister who had read out in Parliament the astoundingly innocuous answer about Banco Andino on June 8, when the final collapse of Ambrosiano was only nine days off. In January Pisanu was forced to resign, insisting that it was pure accident that it fell to him to reply. Then there were odd tales of dinner parties given by Carboni for the likes of Ciriaco De Mita, the new Christian Democrat leader, Armando Corona, grand­master of Italian freemasonry, as well as Carlo Caracciolo, proprietor of La Repubblica, the Rome paper long among Calvi's severest critics. Truly Carboni was a man for many seasons.

  From Switzerland meanwhile, news had come quickly of an even bigger prize. Staff at a Geneva bank were instantly suspicious of the tall dark-haired man with glasses who appeared at the counter one mid-September day in 1982, seeking to withdraw no less than $55 million from an account connected with the Ambrosiano affair. They made time, politely telling the somewhat impatient gentleman to return in the afternoon. In the meantime they alerted the police. When he came back he was challenged and found to be travelling on a false passport. Quickly his real identity was established. It was none other than that most venerable of grandmasters, Licio Gelli himself, sought for eighteen months and facing accusations ranging from espionage to fraud and common extortion.

  Italy, once again, demanded his extradition, but at first the chances of success seemed slender. Gelli engaged some of the most expensive lawyers in Europe on his behalf. From the comfort of the modern, supposedly escape-proof, prison of Champ Dollon on the edge of Geneva, he proclaimed himself a victim of political persecution and intimated that he was writing his memoirs.

  But as the summer of 1983 wore on, Gelli's defences were patiently broken down. A court hearing was set for the middle of August in Lausanne, at which—it was universally assumed—the request of the Italian authorities w
ould finally be granted. The prospect was tan­gible that decisive light might be thrown not just on the disaster of Banco Ambrosiano, but on other dark episodes of recent Italian history also.

  It was not to be. On a hot summer night between August 9 and 10, Gelli escaped from Champ Dollon, taking his secrets with him. His cell was left in disarray, with smears of blood on the floor, as if to indicate that he had been forcibly abducted. In fact he vanished with the complicity of a prison guard, bribed for just 20,000 Swiss Francs— and evidently of others as well. A van carried him at dawn across the border into France. Gelli travelled southwards to Monte Carlo and thence, with little doubt, to the well-tried refuge of Latin America.

  Yet again, Gelli had shown how the ordinary constraints of law did not apply to him. Just who else had had a hand in his flight could not be said with certainty. But a few months later a mightily embarrassed Swiss Government made diplomatic complaint to Rome about the unfettered activities of the Italian secret service upon its territory; a pointer perhaps that an organisation once so heavily infiltrated by the P-2 had once again served the grandmaster of the lodge in his moment of need.

  Gelli, none the less, was most unlikely ever to return to face Italian magistrates or an Italian court—to the profound relief, it could safely be observed, of many of power and influence within the country. His case, as did that of his old friend Michele Sindona, merely proved a rule of modern Italy: that somehow potentially embarrassing defen­dants never managed to be called to justice at home.