The Last Supper (28 page)

Calvi was not received by the pope and the risks he referred to turned out to be more real than he had perhaps imagined.
Copies of the letters were contained in Calvi’s briefcase, which ended up under Carboni’s control after the banker’s death. Following his release from house arrest in August 1984 the Sardinian businessman contacted the Calvi family to propose a joint effort to access the banker’s safety deposit boxes using their authority and the keys and documents contained in his briefcase. When they refused, he decided to prolong Calvi’s blackmail campaign against the Vatican, offering the documents for sale to a Czechoslovak bishop. Bishop Pavel Hnilica, the head of a charitable organization dedicated to the assistance of Catholics living under communist oppression in Eastern Europe, is believed to have paid Carboni between $3 million and $6 million for documents from Calvi’s briefcase in order to preserve the reputation of the church from harm. Carboni attempted to cash cheques for even larger sums drawn on Bishop Hnilica’s account at the IOR but the Vatican bank refused to honour them.

The episode provides a bizarre twist to an already complex story. Calvi’s Valextra black leather briefcase, with its ‘Sherlock Holmes’ combination lock, first reappeared in public, its contents somewhat depleted, on April Fool’s Day 1986. It was presented with a flourish on a popular television current affairs show and Carboni was on hand to vouch for its authenticity. Seven years later a Rome court convicted Carboni, Bishop Hnilica and a Rome underworld forger, Giulio Lena, for being in receipt of stolen property: the briefcase and its contents. The verdict would later be overturned on appeal, Italy’s highest court ruling that there was no evidence that the briefcase had not originally been entrusted to Carboni by Calvi of his own free will. The investigation into the affair, however, would reveal once again the extraordinary promiscuity between underworld figures such as Lena, who became involved in the case after police raided his home while investigating an unrelated case, and princes of the church and leading politicians. Once again it would be Carboni who
would provide the
trait d’union
between the apparently irreconcilable worlds.

Hnilica was introduced to Carboni by Fr. Kazimierz Przydatek, the Polish priest involved in funding Solidarity who was to run from the room when questioned about Carboni and Pazienza by Jonathan Kwitny. The purchase of the contents of Calvi’s briefcase was part of a propaganda campaign being proposed by Carboni to restore the damaged image of the Catholic church in the wake of the Ambrosiano scandal. According to a document seized by investigators, Carboni was planning to spend a staggering 51 billion lire on the purchase of sensitive documents and in payments to politicians, journalists and magistrates in 19 countries. Behaving with what appears to be extraordinary naivety, Hnilica agreed to back him, even providing him with blank cheques drawn on the IOR, with the polite request that he not exceed his account’s credit limit of 20 million lire. Carboni, unabashed and under pressure from loan sharks, did not scruple to fill in two of the cheques for an optimistic figure of 600 million lire; sums the Vatican refused to pay.

There are reasons to doubt the naivety of the Czech bishop, however. Among the documents found in the offices of his Pro Fratribus charitable organization was an Italian military intelligence file on Carboni, Calvi and the IOR, with details of Calvi’s flight from Italy. A SISMI report dated 25 October 1989 describes Monsignor Hnilica as a member of the secret intelligence service of the Jesuit Order who had been charged with organizing a clandestine parallel church in Czechoslovakia, where the communist government had set severe restrictions on the training and ordination of new priests and bishops. Hnilica, who had been ordained bishop in a secret ceremony in the basement of a private house in Czechoslovakia, had subsequently been tasked with recovering Calvi’s documents relating to the funding of the Polish opposition by the Banco Ambrosiano. Hnilica had carried out the operation on behalf
of the Jesuit secret service and in the interests of the pope, the document said.

Hnilica cut a tragic and pathetic figure when he appeared to give evidence at the Calvi murder trial in Rome on 3 May 2006. Aged 85 and in poor health, he looked deeply uncomfortable as he took the stand, wearing a black suit, clerical collar and with a gold bishop’s chain around his neck. Many of the events of the past had been erased from his memory by the radiation therapy he was undergoing, he told the court in a breathless whisper. The two blank cheques he had given Carboni and which had been filled in for 600 million lire each had been intended for the pro-Vatican press campaign, he explained. ‘That really hurt me, that fraud,’ he said. ‘I was indignant. But Carboni always found an excuse, that he had given them to a friend and the friend had filled them in. I signed things without understanding them. He told me it was something innocent and then it turned out to be a fraud.’ The Rome court that had previously sentenced Hnilica to three years’ imprisonment for receiving stolen property – later overturned on appeal – had little sympathy for his attempt to paint himself as an unworldly man of God duped by a diabolical Carboni. ‘It’s unthinkable that Carboni could have defrauded Bishop Hnilica, because the affair dragged on for about two years in a giddy whirl of billion lire cheques and even with the most ingenuous of ascetics such a game could not have continued for so long,’ the judges observed.

Bishop Hnilica, whom one witness described as being in almost daily contact with the pope, grudgingly admitted to the murder trial that he had been in contact with the highest levels of the Vatican over the Carboni business. He had discussed the matter with Marcinkus and Mennini, who told him they weren’t interested in Carboni’s information and that he had been irresponsible in his financial dealings with him, he said. Had he ever discussed it with the pope? the prosecutor asked. ‘I don’t remember. It’s probable that they kept him informed.
I met the pope frequently on other questions. The pope is like a father to me. If he is slandered I will defend him.’

Hnilica’s explanation as to how he came to be in possession of secret SISMI documents on Carboni rang somewhat hollow as well: ‘I didn’t even know what SISMI was. All the material came from Carboni. I don’t know who else could have given it to me.’ And he didn’t have a ready answer as to why Carboni needed so much money if, as appears, he had been in possession of Calvi’s briefcase all along. ‘I don’t know,’ was all he could offer. The content of the secret documents he was buying from Carboni also appears to have been of little interest to him. Among them was Calvi’s letter of 5 June to the pope describing his anti-communist activities on behalf of the Vatican. ‘I don’t know if what Calvi wrote was true or not, because these matters were of no interest to me. I had other interests, of a moral nature. Probably I asked [Carboni], but I don’t remember.’ Hnilica did at least confirm a version that Carboni had provided him with on the motive for Calvi’s killing, and which he had supplied to magistrates in previous interrogations. Calvi had gone to London to recover large sums of money that were owed to him by people in the city and he had been killed for that reason by English freemasons, Carboni had told him.

A reconstruction of the relationship between Calvi and the Vatican based merely on the self-interested word of Calvi himself and the hearsay version of Carboni is hardly the most convincing of evidence. And the alleged content of Calvi’s briefcase itself has to be viewed with a degree of scepticism when one bears in mind that it was acquired from Carboni in an operation that involved a notorious underworld forger. What does induce one to take it seriously, however, is the $3 million – at least – paid by Bishop Hnilica to acquire it and the pained and inadequate explanations that he furnished to the court. The spectacle left open two discomfiting alternatives: that the church had been represented in some of its most
delicate cold war activities by a bumbling incompetent, or that Monsignor Hnilica had been involved in such sensitive and questionable acts that he could not provide the court with a truthful and plausible account of them. A young woman wearing the long white robes of a nun had accompanied the infirm bishop to court. She followed proceedings from the public gallery, an expression of horror and bemusement frozen on her face.

Flavio Carboni, for what it is worth, invokes the political framework of the Cold War as the key to an understanding of the Calvi affair. In expansive mood after several
amari
in the courtyard bar of Rome’s Hotel de Russie, he insisted, untruthfully, that he had always considered Calvi’s death to be a suicide – numerous newspaper interviews and his confidences to Bishop Hnilica testify to the contrary. The affair was nevertheless of planetary importance, he told me. ‘It’s not just an Italian affair. It’s something enormous that involves the fall of the Berlin Wall, Latin America and this little person called Flavio Carboni, who had money at that time,’ he said. ‘This is a huge affair and it’s a miracle I’m still alive,’ he added, inviting me to participate with him in a joint quest for the truth. He had been a friend of Giuseppe Santovito, the head of SISMI, and Santovito had been responsible for consolidating his relationship – not a friendship, mind you – with Francesco Pazienza. ‘You don’t know how useful Flavio Carboni was in bringing about the fall of the Berlin Wall,’ he boasted. ‘Little Carboni worked to block the advance of the Reds, together with a few friends.’ His euphoric revelations wafted loudly across the courtyard, prompting his wife to call on him several times to pipe down. ‘I’m an honest, clean, sentimental person. I wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

A report by the head of the finance police in Verona, dated 26 February 1990, casts a further, intriguing light on the activities of Pro Fratribus and Carboni. The report draws on information provided by a confidential source to the writer,
Major Matteo Rabiti, when he was serving in an anti-drug unit in Milan. The information does not appear to have led to prosecutions, but reappears in written evidence submitted by the prosecution to the Rome trial. The source informed Rabiti that Flavio Carboni had attended a meeting with three German nationals and three Turks at the Hotel Duomo in Milan in January 1987 to discuss a $12 million loan to a Vatican organization named Pro Fratribus. The money was apparently to be used for the purchase of a private television station. Rabiti’s report added: ‘The above mentioned persons allegedly referred to the possibility, once this first operation had been completed, of becoming involved in the supply of arms to Iraq, at the time at war with Iran.’ The individuals allegedly had an interest in two companies, Aggol Ltd, on which no further details were available, and M[...] Ltd, based in the Liechtenstein capital Vaduz. As surety for the operation, Carboni reportedly provided a £4.8 million cheque drawn on the latter company’s account and in favour of Aggol Ltd.

John Drewe, a convicted art forger who claims to have conducted clandestine work for Britain’s intelligence services, smiled with recognition when I mentioned the name of the Liechtenstein-based company to him. We were meeting for the first time in a pub near Blackfriars Bridge in the City. The company had been connected to both Sindona and Calvi, he said. It was actually an Italian company that had been involved in supplying British-manufactured arms and ammunition to Iraq. The Banco Ambrosiano had jumped at the opportunity to get involved in the lucrative export credit guarantee business in relation to the clandestine sale of arms to Iraq, Drewe maintained. ‘Some of the money [from the Banco Ambrosiano] probably went to finance export credit guarantees that M[the Liechtenstein-based company] obtained to supply Iraq,’ he told me. ‘M was on the Astra commissions list,’ he added, referring to the astronomical political commissions that were allegedly sucked out of Gerald James’s arms
company to finance the secret foreign policy of the United Kingdom. ‘M has a direct connection to Calvi. I have seen correspondence from 1982, when Astra was set up to supply Iraq.’

Drewe said he believed Calvi’s involvement in export credit guarantees connected to the arming of Iraq and Iran could have contributed to the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano. ‘Large sums went missing and most of the missing money went to Iran and Iraq,’ he said. ‘They defaulted on the guarantees.’
⁷
Though Drewe can hardly be described as a ‘reliable’ source, he claims to possess detailed knowledge of a possible ‘British connection’ to the Calvi case. That theory, as we shall see, emanates from the Canadian gun designer Dr Gerald Bull, and ties Calvi’s fate to the activities of the secret services and the international arms trade.

Some possible British connections to the Calvi murder emerge from a number of sources, not all of them as reliable as one might desire. There are a number of corroborating circumstances however that justify paying them careful attention. The possible involvement of British intelligence in the case may go some way to explain the lackadaisical nature of the original UK investigations. Paying undue attention to leads that might implicate the secret services, one police officer explained, could lead to the loss of one’s security clearance: the kiss of death for a career in the police.

Angelo Izzo is perhaps the most off-putting source it is possible to imagine, though he faces stiff competition from the gallery of rogues who have reconstructed the Calvi story as we know it to date. Izzo was one of the ‘monsters of Circeo’, three right-wing extremists who raped and murdered a young woman in an orgy of gratuitous violence at a holiday home near the beach resort of San Felice Circeo in 1975. Thirty years later he took advantage of temporary release from prison to rape and murder a 14-year-old girl and her mother, the family of an organized crime boss from Puglia with whom he had made friends in prison. Izzo became an important witness in numerous terrorism trials after receiving confidences in prison from fellow right-wingers and then relaying the information to the authorities. But the genuineness of his cooperation was thrown into doubt when he failed to return from a temporary
furlough from prison in 1993 and his role as a
pentito
has now come to be viewed with deep suspicion. He does however appear to have had access to influential figures on the far right and to sensitive information they were prepared to share with him because of his reputation for ideological soundness and, perhaps, his pathological brutality.