In God's Name (28 page)

The poster and pamphlet attack by Sindona was a flea-bite compared with the problems now facing Calvi. News of the massive investigation leaked around Milan’s business world. The price of Ambrosiano shares plummeted further, forcing Calvi to divert even more money to prop up the price. By now the tangled empire he controlled had a branch in Nicaragua; another was planned for Peru. There were Calvi companies in Canada, Belgium and the USA.

The Achilles heel was Suprafin. If the bank inspectors discovered the truth about Suprafin then the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano and the arrest and imprisonment of Calvi were inevitable. Equally the long-desired extradition of Sindona would become a much simpler operation. Both men stood to lose everything, including their liberty, if the inspectors could crack the Suprafin puzzle. In Milan Calvi became agitated. In New York Sindona stopped gloating about the half-a-million dollars he had just extorted from The Knight. The one hope for both men was Bishop Paul Marcinkus. Marcinkus duly obliged. When the Bank of Italy inspectors asked Ambrosiano’s General Manager Carlo Olgiati who owned Suprafin, he told them it was owned by the Instituto per le Opere di Religione, the Vatican Bank.

Calmly the Bank inspectors continued probing, working their way through the maze of share purchases, transfers, cross transfers, buy backs, parking. They were severely limited by Italian law. The
information they could insist upon with regard to the foreign associates left much to be desired. If for example they had been able to obtain detailed information on Calvi’s Luxembourg holding company and had realized that millions of dollars borrowed on the European market had been funnelled to Nassau where Marcinkus sat on the Board with Calvi and Managua and that these two Ambrosiano-owned banks had then loaned millions to small Panamanian shell companies
without security,
the game would have been up there and then. But full information on the Luxembourg holding company was denied to the inspectors. Calvi stalled; he grew evasive. ‘It was so difficult, you know what these foreigners are like? I cannot breach their rules on “confidentiality”’. The Bank inspectors continued to dig. They discovered that on May 6th, 1975 Luigi Landra, a former chief executive of Banco Ambrosiano, and Livio Godeluppi, brother of Ambrosiano’s chief accountant, had been made directors of Suprafin. Had these two men clearly in the trust of Ambrosiano also joined the elite ranks of the Vatican’s ‘uomini di fiducia’ – men of trust?

The inspectors established that Suprafin had been created in Milan in November, 1971 by two of Calvi’s closest associates, Vahan Pasargiklian, who by the time of the 1978 investigation had become Managing Director of Banca Cattolica, and Gennaro Zanfagna. Perhaps they too had become men of trust for the Vatican? Suprafin had ‘owned by Calvi’ written all over it.

The probe continued. Careful analysis of the current accounts held by Suprafin convinced the inspectors that the company was indeed owned by Banco Ambrosiano and not the Vatican. Why would the Bank buy La Centrale shares from Suprafin at 13,864 lire as against a market price of 9,650 and then sell the shares back to Suprafin at 9,340? To obtain a letter of thanks from Pope Paul? A pat on the back from Marcinkus?

In July 1978 they tackled Calvi’s executive colleague, Carlo Olgiati, again. Olgiati consulted Calvi. He returned bearing a letter. With great Milanese charm Olgiati gave the letter to Padalino to read. It was from the Vatican Bank to Roberto Calvi. It was dated January 20th, 1975.

It read:

This is to refer to the portfolio of shares as per December 31st 1974, held by the company Suprafin SA. A company pertaining to our Institute. You are herewith requested to manage and administer the said portfolio in the most appropriate form and to
arrange for all suitable and divestment operations. Will you please keep us periodically up to date as regards the position of the above named portfolio and related transactions.

The letter was signed by Luigi Mennini and the Vatican Bank’s Chief Accountant, Pellegrino De Strobel. It might well be dated January 1975 but the bank inspectors strongly suspected that it had been written after their investigation had begun in April 1978, and was written with the full approval of Bishop Marcinkus.

If Marcinkus and his colleagues at the Vatican Bank were to be believed then the Holy See had given a new definition to the phrase ‘Christian charity’. It now embraced entering the Milan stock market and spending millions merely to defend the price of Banco Ambrosiano shares. It seemed unlikely to the Bank of Italy officials that the offerings of the poor in churches around the world had been given with quite this course of action in mind. Nevertheless, Calvi, by courtesy of Bishop Marcinkus, was off the hook, at least temporarily. Here was the apparent proof that Suprafin was indeed owned by the Vatican Bank. The normally cold and aloof Calvi became almost affable in the eyes of some of his more senior colleagues at the Milan headquarters. Confident that he had blocked the bank investigation in what was potentially his most vulnerable area, he finalized the arrangements for a trip to South America with his wife Clara. The trip was planned to be part business, part pleasure. There was to be some sightseeing of potential sites for branches on the South American continent plus the inevitable business meetings associated with such a development, then sightseeing of a more plebeian nature.

Once in South America Calvi began to relax. Then Pope Paul VI died. The lines between Calvi’s hotel suite in Buenos Aires and various parts of Italy became busy. When he heard the name of the new Pope, Albino Luciani, Calvi was shocked. Virtually any of the other 110 Cardinals would have been preferable.

Calvi was fully aware of the anger his takeover of the Banca Cattolica Veneto had generated in Venice; aware that Luciani had gone to Rome in an attempt to regain diocesan control over the bank. He was equally aware that Luciani was a man with a formidable reputation for personal poverty and intransigence towards clerical wheeler dealing. The episode of the two priests and the speculating salesman in Vittorio Veneto was legendary in northern Italy. From Buenos Aires Calvi phoned instructions to sell some of the shares in the bank that Suprafin held. With bank inspectors looking over their
shoulders his staff had to move cautiously. Nevertheless in the first three weeks of September, 1978, they unloaded 350,000 shares. Then Calvi heard the news he had been dreading. Bishop Paul Marcinkus’s days were numbered. If Marcinkus went, total exposure of the entire fraud was inevitable. He recalled what Marcinkus had said to him by telephone within days of Luciani’s election: ‘Things are going to be very different from now on. This Pope is quite a different man.’

Albino Luciani represented a very serious threat to both Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi. Subsequently events were to demonstrate powerfully what happened to people who represented serious threats to these two.

The new Pope also clearly represented a major threat to Bishop Paul Marcinkus, President of the Vatican Bank. If Luciani dug into the Bank there were likely to be quite a number of vacancies. Mennini and De Strobel who had put their names to the Suprafin letter were also on borrowed time. Both had been involved over the years with the criminal activities of Sindona and Calvi. If Marcinkus was in any doubt whatsoever about the capacity of Luciani to take vigorous effective action he had but to confer with De Strobel, a lawyer from near Venice who was fully conversant with the affair of the embezzling priests in Vittorio Veneto.

Bernardino Nogara may well have had a purely capitalistic mentality but compared with what came after him in Vatican Incorporated, the man was a saint. The company had come a long way since Mussolini gave it its modern impetus in 1929.

By September, 1978 the Pope sat at the head of massive multinational corporation. As Albino Luciani looked out of the windows of his third-floor nineteen-room apartment this man who was dedicated to a poor Church for the poor had a task that was as supreme as his position.

If his dream to be the last ‘rich Father’ was to become a reality then Vatican Incorporated would have to be dismantled. The Papal States might have been lost for ever but in their place was an extraordinary money-making machine.

There was the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See (APSA), with its President Cardinal Villot, secretary Monsignor Antonetti, and its ordinary and extraordinary sections. The ordinary section administered all the wealth of the various congregations, tribunals and offices. It specifically administered a great deal of the real estate of the Papacy. In Rome alone this amounted to over 5,000 rented apartments. In 1979, its gross assets were in excess of 1 billion dollars.

The extraordinary section, the Vatican’s other bank was as active
in its daily stock speculations as the IOR controlled by Marcinkus. It specialized in the currency market and worked closely with Crédit Suisse and the Société des Banques Suisses. Its gross assets in September 1978 were in excess of 1.2 billion dollars.

The Vatican Bank, which Marcinkus was running, had gross assets of over 1 billion dollars. Its annual profits by 1978 were over 120 million dollars; 85 per cent of this went directly to the Pope to use as he saw fit. Its number of current accounts were over 11,000. Under the terms by which the Bank was created by Pius XII during the Second World War these accounts should have belonged very largely to religious orders and religious institutes. When Albino Luciani became Pope only 1,047 belonged to religious orders and institutes, 312 to parishes and 290 to dioceses. The remaining 9,351 were the property of diplomats, prelates and ‘privileged citizens’; a significant number of this last category were not even Italian citizens. There were four who were: Sindona, Calvi, Gelli and Ortolani. Other accounts were held by leading politicians of every shade and major industrialists. Many of the account holders used the facility as a conduit through which to export currency out of Italy illegally. Any deposits made were not subjected to any taxation.

The two departments of APSA and the Vatican Bank were Albino Luciani’s major problems which had to be overcome before the Church could revert to its early Christian origins. There were many others, not least the wealth that had been acquired over many centuries. This took many forms, including a multitude of art treasures.

Vatican Incorporated, like all multi-nationals which aspire to respectability, was not negligent in matters of art. Vatican patronage is there for all to see, opening times permitting: the Caravaggios, the Raphael tapestries, the Farnese gold altar cross and candlesticks by Gentile da Fabriano, the Belvedere Apollo, the Belvedere Torso, the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci, Bernini’s sculptures. Would the words of Jesus Christ be heard less clearly in somewhere more modest than the Sistine Chapel with its majestic Last Judgment by Michelangelo? The Vatican classifies all of these as non-productive assets. What the founder of Christianity would classify them as can be gauged from his own comments about wealth and property.

What would Jesus Christ have felt if he had returned to earth in September 1978 and been allowed into the Vatican City State?

What would the man who declared, ‘My Kingdom is not of this earth’, have felt if he had wandered through the departments of APSA with its teams of clerical and lay stock analysts, each an expert in his own field, following the day-by-day and often minute-by-minute fluctuations of the shares, securities and investments that APSA owns throughout the world? What would the carpenter’s son have made of the IBM equipment that functions both in APSA and the Vatican Bank? What would the man who compared the difficulty of a rich man entering the Kingdom of Heaven with a camel passing through the eye of a needle have said about the latest stock market quotations of London, Wall Street, Zürich, Milan, Montreal and Tokyo that chatter endlessly into the Vatican?

What would the man who said ‘Blessed are the poor’, have said about the annual profit from the sale of Vatican stamps? Profit in excess of 1 million dollars. What would have been his opinion of the annual collection of Peter’s Pence that went directly to the Pope? This annual collection, considered by many to be an accurate barometer of the popularity of the Pope, had under the charismatic John XXIII produced between 15 and 20 million dollars per annum. Under Paul VI this had dropped after
Humanae Vitae
to an average of 4 million dollars per annum.

What would the Founder of the Faith have felt about these few examples of how far his teaching had been perverted? The question is of course rhetorical. If Jesus Christ had returned to earth in September 1978, or if he came now and attempted to enter the Vatican, the result would be the same. He would not get as far as the doors of the Vatican Bank. He would be arrested at the Saint Anne Gate and handed over to the Italian authorities. He would never have the opportunity to learn at first hand about Vatican Incorporated, the multi-national conglomerate that is fed from so many directions. He would not hear, for example, how it derives vast sums from the USA and West Germany; how in 1978, through the State tax of ‘Kirchensteuer’, the Roman Catholic Church of West Germany received 1.9 billion dollars, of which it then subsequently passed on to the Vatican a significant proportion.

If Albino Luciani was to succeed with his dream of a poor Church for the poor, it was going to be a Herculean task. The modern monster created by Bernardino Nogara had by 1978 become self-generating. When the cardinals elected Albino Luciani to the Papacy on that hot August day in 1978 they set an honest, holy, totally incorruptible Pope on a collision course with Vatican Incorporated. The irresistible
market forces of the Vatican Bank, APSA and the other money-making elements were about to be met by the immovable integrity of Albino Luciani.