The Last Supper (21 page)

Mousel pointed out the anomaly of Archbishop Marcinkus’s position as head of the IOR and director of the BAOL, a financial institution with which the IOR had a busy relationship. ‘In modern parlance one could speak of a conflict of interests,’ he said. Many of Calvi’s offshore companies were run by a Luxembourg-based management company called Ambrosiano Services Ltd, the liquidator explained. His office had found a letter addressed to that company by the IOR, which appointed ‘Mr Roberto Calvi as our attorney in fact’. Zitropo, a Luxembourg company created by Sindona in 1972 and later a somewhat lethargic component of Calvi’s offshore network, was ‘a direct emanation of the IOR’, Mousel said.

There was little doubt, he explained, that Calvi had taken full advantage of the Vatican’s extra-territorial status to get round the restrictions imposed by Italian law. He had done so in pursuit of an international strategy that made no sense. ‘Baspa [Banco Ambrosiano SpA] was a local Italian bank. It had a participation in the Banca del Gottardo, which was absolutely normal. It had tried to open a bank in London but failed to get permission. That would have been normal. There was no economic reason to open a bank in Peru or Nicaragua at that time. There was no business down there. Nicaragua was under the dictatorship of [Anastasio] Somoza. The Banco
Ambrosiano was the only international bank to have a subsidiary there. It made no economic sense.’
³

If Paul Mousel found no concrete evidence of money laundering in the BAH accounts, there have been plenty of allegations that that was indeed Roberto Calvi’s purpose in the complex international financial transactions he orchestrated with Archbishop Paul Marcinkus’s help. Numerous mafia
pentiti
claimed as much in evidence to investigating magistrates and in depositions at the Calvi murder trial. On the whole their testimony was long on hearsay and short on concrete detail. Most agreed, however, that Calvi and Marcinkus had been involved in laundering drug money for Cosa Nostra, taking over a role that had previously belonged to Michele Sindona. They also agreed that Giuseppe ‘Pippo’ Calò, the head of Palermo’s Porta Nuova crime family and the mafia’s representative in Rome, played an important role in the management of Cosa Nostra’s illicit funds.

Perhaps the most impressive testimony was delivered by Antonino Giuffrè. Known as ‘
Mannuzza
’ (Little Hand) because of his deformed right arm, Giuffrè is the most important mafia boss to turn state’s evidence in recent years. Prior to his arrest in April 2002 he had been close to Bernardo Provenzano, the elusive ‘boss of bosses’ who spent 43 years on the run from justice, and he had frequented the top echelons of Cosa Nostra over more than two decades. Speaking in a slow Sicilian drawl by video link from an undisclosed location, with only the back of his head visible to the court, Giuffrè’s testimony to the Calvi murder trial was detailed and relentless and particularly damaging for the position of Flavio Carboni. He had direct knowledge of the circumstances surrounding Calvi’s death, he claimed, because a
mafioso
from his own Sicilian
mandamento
(district) of Caccamo, Lorenzo Di Gesù, had participated in the murder plot. The best efforts of the
defence lawyers failed to ruffle him or interrupt the inexorable flow of his story.

Pippo Calò, the mafia’s treasurer, had been put in contact with Roberto Calvi by Michele Sindona, Giuffrè told the court. When Sindona’s financial problems and judicial investigations, both in Italy and the US, had meant his influence as a money launderer had waned, the baton was passed on to Calvi in the second half of the 1970s, Giuffrè said. ‘It’s Sindona who promotes Calvi within Cosa Nostra. A triangular relationship develops. On one side you have Cosa Nostra, on another side a certain kind of freemasonry, and on another side we find Cardinal [sic] Marcinkus,’ Giuffrè told the court. ‘Soon Calvi finds himself in the midst of a massive money flow.’

Just as Francesco Marino Mannoia had recounted at the Andreotti mafia trial in 1996, Giuffrè recalled the huge revenues generated by Cosa Nostra-managed heroin trafficking between Sicily and the United States in the 1970s and early 1980s, and Calvi’s role in its laundering. Archbishop Marcinkus, whom he mistakenly promotes to cardinal, was an active accomplice in the money laundering, Giuffrè claimed. (Paul Marcinkus never actually achieved his cardinal’s red hat precisely because of these suspicions.) Such allegations had been heard before, but this was the first time they had been made publicly, in a court of law, by a mafia boss of Giuffrè’s standing. Marcinkus had used Calvi and the Banco Ambrosiano to transfer large sums of money belonging to Cosa Nostra, he said. ‘It’s fairly well known in Cosa Nostra circles, in a wider context that touches the United States as well, that Cardinal Marcinkus had both direct and indirect contacts with Cosa Nostra,’ Giuffrè said. ‘I know that Cardinal Marcinkus played an important role, as well as Cosa Nostra and a certain type of freemasonry. I’m referring in particular to P2. The most important person in that world at the time was Licio Gelli.’

Giuffrè identified the Socialist and Christian Democrat parties as the political forces that had been most interested in
the outcome of the Calvi drama. Calvi’s success had not been achieved without cost, Giuffrè said. He had been forced to pay political bribes, particularly to the Socialists and Christian Democrats, and particularly during the last period of his life, when he had started to encounter difficulties. Calvi had been in contact with important people in the course of his career and he tried to cling to them when things started to go wrong at the Banco Ambrosiano, Giuffrè claimed. ‘When he finds himself with the water up to his neck, he broaches the subject of threats. He tried to grab hold of those important people, saying he would take them with him if he were to fall. At that point there is no hope for Calvi of recovering his professional position and he’ll lose his life over it,’ Giuffrè told the court. Asked by defence lawyers whether he had gathered his knowledge from reading the newspapers, Giuffrè replied disdainfully: ‘My statements are based on what I heard during the 20 years and more that I was in Cosa Nostra. I always had a high-level role. I couldn’t give a damn about the newspapers.’

Was Marcinkus one of the people with an interest in Calvi’s elimination? Giuffrè was asked by Carboni’s defence lawyer, Renato Borzone. ‘I can reply in the affirmative to your question. These people were interested because they could have been damaged if Calvi had talked to the magistrates.’ Marcinkus was vulnerable, Giuffrè explained, not only because of what he had done with Calvi, but also because of his prior involvement with Sindona, ‘in certain questions involving Sindona and America’. Did Marcinkus commission the murder? ‘No.’

At this point Pippo Calò and Cosa Nostra had assumed responsibility for resolving the Calvi problem, Giuffrè claimed. Were members of the secret services involved in the murder? he was asked. ‘I don’t feel I can assert that there was a secret service role. There was a role of certain individuals from the deviant secret services, but not of the secret services as such.’

Perhaps the most intriguing revelation came when Giuffrè was asked about the fate of the missing Banco Ambrosiano
millions. Cosa Nostra had recovered a part, but not all, of the money it had entrusted to Calvi, he said. ‘There were rumours that some of this money came in the door and went out the window and that it was used for what we in the mafia call the “tragedies”. Part of what Cosa Nostra invested was never recovered.’
⁴
Giuffrè never explained what he meant by the ‘tragedies’. Was he thinking of the terrorist outrages that bloodied Italy while P2 – and mafia – power was at its height? Given the enduring suspicions about the political role of Calvi’s P2 associates, such an interpretation remains perfectly plausible.

In his evidence to the murder trial, Paul Mousel said liquidators had discerned three distinct phases in Calvi’s career as a banker. In the first phase the Banco Ambrosiano Holding had had preferential dealings with the IOR. In a second phase it had dealt with Gelli and Ortolani, payments to the P2 duo being considered ‘political’ by the liquidators. In the last phase of his career Calvi had been dealing with ‘common criminals’, making large payments to individuals such as Francesco Pazienza and Flavio Carboni with no apparent business justification, a comment that caused no little irritation to Carboni’s lawyers.

Pazienza and Carboni, the ‘guardian angels’ of the twilight period of Calvi’s career, both entered his life as potential mediators in his difficult relationship with the Vatican. Francesco Pazienza has furnished a variety of accounts as to the genesis of his relationship with the secretive Milanese banker. The constant elements of his story concern Calvi’s need for political protection and Pazienza’s knowledge of highly sensitive aspects of Calvi’s relationship with the Vatican bank. It is generally acknowledged that the meeting between Calvi and the buccaneering young
faccendiere
(‘fixer’) who would become his consultant, and later his tormentor, took place in the spring of
1981 under the patronage of Flaminio Piccoli, the secretary of the Christian Democrat party, and of Giuseppe Santovito, the head of Italian military intelligence and a member of P2. It is likely that Pazienza was blackmailing Calvi from the start of their connection.

Pazienza at the time was a talented young entrepreneur with wide international experience, mastery of four foreign languages – English, French, Spanish and Arabic – and contacts with the secret services of the United States, France, Panama and Saudi Arabia. He had been working as a consultant for Italian military intelligence (SISMI) and a recent mission undertaken at the request of Santovito made him of particular interest to Calvi. Santovito had asked him to dig up dirt on Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, relaying a request he had received from a Vatican power faction opposed to the growing influence of the American monsignor. The request came from Monsignor Luigi Celata, an assistant to the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, whose policy of cautious diplomatic engagement with the communist regimes of Eastern Europe was being undercut by the hardline anticommunism of the new Polish pontiff. Marcinkus’s family origins in Lithuania – a country with strong linguistic and ethnic ties to Poland – created a natural bond with Pope John Paul. The American archbishop placed the resources of his bank at the service of the new pope’s
Ostpolitik
, and in return obtained his unswerving support and loyalty.

The reaction of the Casaroli faction – referred to by Pazienza as the ‘Faenza clan’, as several of its members hailed from Casaroli’s home town in north-east Italy – was to seek to undermine Marcinkus’s hold over the Vatican purse strings. The Faenza clan, supported by Monsignor Achille Silvestrini, the Vatican’s ‘foreign minister’, and Cardinal Pio Laghi, a papal nuncio with experience in Latin America and Washington, now squared off against the Marcinkus group, backed by Monsignor Virgilio Levi, the deputy director of the Vatican’s
newspaper
Osservatore Romano
, and Monsignor Luigi Cheli, the papal representative at the United Nations. Victory in the power struggle could be achieved, Pazienza explained in his memoir
Il Disubbidiente
(The Disobedient One), by ‘finding documents capable of showing that the activities of the [Vatican] bank and its head were not in keeping with those of the Catholic Church’.

That was Pazienza’s task and he set about it with alacrity and some good fortune. He managed to track down a man who had been blackmailing Calvi with the contents of a dossier on the IOR that had been put together by the late Cardinal Egidio Vagnozzi, an administrator of the Vatican’s finances who had been a bitter rival of Marcinkus. The documents were in the possession of one Giorgio Di Nunzio, who had worked for the engineering group of alleged P2 member Mario Genghini and who now rounded out his income by selling Vatican gossip to the right-wing weekly magazine
Il Borghese.
Cardinal Vagnozzi had died before having an opportunity to use the papers – which Pazienza described as concerning, in particular, the ‘spurious’ relations between Marcinkus and Sindona – and they were now deposited with a Swiss lawyer in Zurich. Pazienza pondered the advisability of delivering the documents to Santovito, Casaroli or even Marcinkus himself and finally plumped for Marcinkus’s ally Roberto Calvi as the ideal purchaser. The documents were handed over to Calvi in return for $1.2 million, paid to Di Nunzio partly in Switzerland and partly in Italy, and Pazienza was signed up as a personal adviser to the Banco Ambrosiano chairman at a salary of more than half a million dollars a year.

The lesson to be drawn from the episode, Pazienza observed in his memoir, was that the pope was viewed with hostility by some of his closest collaborators. ‘His “fault” was that of being a kind of “Martian”, an authentic “alien” descended from Poland and completely removed from the hard core of Italian prelates who constituted the historic nucleus of the
curia and who were accustomed to running in their own way, and with absolute power, the complex but almost perfect machinery of the Vatican.’
⁵
A power struggle was evidently swirling around the pope, the issue at the heart of it was the Catholic church’s relations with communism, and no holds were barred in the struggle for supremacy.

In another account of his dealings with Calvi, offered at the Ambrosiano bankruptcy trial in Milan, Pazienza said it was the banker who first made contact with him via Flaminio Piccoli, the leader of the Christian Democrats, Italy’s dominant political party. Calvi and Pazienza had met fleetingly once before, at a meeting of the International Monetary Fund in Washington in 1978. Since then Pazienza’s career had advanced and he had achievements under his belt that might well have caught Calvi’s eye. For one thing, Pazienza had excellent contacts with the newly elected administration of President Ronald Reagan. Reagan had good reason to be grateful to him: Pazienza had come up with the details of the Billygate story, a journalistic scoop that had helped to sink Jimmy Carter’s hopes of re-election. Carter’s accident-prone brother Billy had accepted an invitation from Muammar Qaddafi to visit Libya, where he had shared accommodation and fraternized with George Habbash, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).