The Last Supper (9 page)

Her evidence reveals the climate of fear in which he lived and which conditioned his last weeks on earth. She herself was at the heart of those fears: the fear that a member of his family could be kidnapped or killed to force him into a particular course of action. The banker’s response was to surround himself with bodyguards, to travel by bullet-proof car, and, finally, to send his closest family members to live abroad. It was a strategy followed by many wealthy Italians at the time. But Calvi went further, surrounding himself with questionable advisers who offered to protect him and whose links to the secret services and organized crime he found reassuring.

Fear was the key to his destiny in another way, too. By 1982, Calvi himself was feared by powerful associates, terrified by what he knew and what he might do with the knowledge. Blackmail was his last resort and most effective weapon and he had no qualms about using it or brandishing it in the face of friend and foe. Ultimately it would be a dance of mutual fears, a deadly tango with shadowy partners, which would steer his steps to the scaffolding under Blackfriars Bridge.

Anna Calvi’s statement provides a revealing account of her father’s activities and objectives and identifies some of the protagonists of his story, including those he had reason to fear. Though her father may at times have been self-serving or self-deluding in what he told her, there is no cause to suspect him of systematically deceiving his own daughter. In a story for the most part told by conmen and criminals, hers is a sane and lucid voice.

‘To start with, I will say that from the beginning of the current year, with the passage of the months, my father showed himself to be more and more worried and at a certain point he started to say that I and my mother were in danger and that he was afraid,’ Ms Calvi told the investigators. In the second half of May he succeeded in convincing her mother to leave Italy
for the United States, insisting she faced ‘a grave incumbent danger’. By June he was acutely worried for the safety of his daughter, waking her early on the morning of the 5th to tell her to pack her bags. Until then she had resisted his pressure to go abroad because she was preparing for exams at university in Milan. Calvi had told her that he too intended to leave Italy so that he could continue his work in safety.

The source of his anxiety, her father explained, lay in a major financial operation he was preparing, to stave off bankruptcy at the Ambrosiano. ‘One weekend which we spent together in Drezzo, during the last days of May I think, I asked him to explain to me what was really happening.’ Her father told her he was planning to resolve his problems with the Vatican bank by bringing in Opus Dei, the secretive and conservative religious organization which he believed would be prepared to pay more than $1 billion to wipe out the IOR’s debts to the Banco Ambrosiano. ‘My father said he had spoken about it directly to the pope, who had assured him of his support and approval.’ He added, though, that there were factions in the Vatican which opposed the plan – it would have altered the balance of power within the Vatican by giving control of the IOR to Opus Dei. ‘Precisely because of these conflicts and internecine struggles, my father was very worried. He told me that Cardinal [Agostino] Casaroli opposed the plan and... that if the deal wasn’t concluded the IOR would collapse and would bring down the Banco Ambrosiano in its fall.’ If this happened, her father said, the Vatican would be forced to sell off St Peter’s Square. His tone was grave and bitter, rather than ironic, she said.

It was no joke. Her father’s story takes us straight to one of the central mysteries of the Banco Ambrosiano case: was it her father’s bank or the Vatican’s that was really about to go bankrupt? Who owed what to whom and who really controlled the Ambrosiano? In 1982 Roberto Calvi knew that he had to pay the IOR $300 million by the end of June, but
was it the IOR that in fact owed the Ambrosiano $1 billion once their relationship was definitively untangled?

For the sums of money at stake people would be perfectly capable of killing, Calvi had pointed out to his daughter. On one occasion he had told her his real problem was not with the judges but with the IOR. ‘The priests will be the end of us. They believe in any case that if someone dies their soul lives on, so it’s not such a bad thing.’ She added: ‘I remember well the grave and bitter tone in which he told me these things.’

Among the people who opposed her father’s plan, according to her statement, were the former Christian Democrat prime minister, Giulio Andreotti, and Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the head of the IOR. Calvi had recently met with Andreotti and had been alarmed by his attitude. He confided to his daughter that ‘he was very afraid of Mr Andreotti because he knew he [Andreotti] was linked to the Vatican faction that was battling against the Opus Dei plan.’ Her father said he was trying to get Marcinkus and his deputy, Luigi Mennini, removed from their positions at the IOR. ‘He told me that Marcinkus was in a fairly precarious position in the Vatican and that he was undergoing a kind of internal inquiry because of the irregular financial operations he had carried out and because he had a private life unworthy of a priest.’

There is little doubt, according to Anna Calvi’s account, that her father was prepared to resort to extreme measures to achieve his own ends in his battle with the IOR. Listening outside a half-open door, on one occasion she heard her father discuss his troubles with the Vatican with Flavio Carboni, who was then seeking to mediate in the dispute. ‘I heard my father telling Carboni that he must make them understand clearly in the Vatican that the priests must make up their minds to honour their commitments, because otherwise he would tell all.’

This sense of impending danger was confirmed by Calvi’s widow. Speaking to investigators at around the same time as
her daughter, she too identified Giulio Andreotti as one of the opponents of her husband’s rescue plan. Her husband had received explicit death threats directly from the former prime minister, she said. A claim that at first sight would appear hard to believe: the ravings of a distraught widow, perhaps?

Clara Calvi confirmed that Opus Dei was the potential white knight her husband hoped would rescue him from his financial predicament. In early spring 1982 Roberto had expressed the intention to visit Spain. ‘I asked him, very surprised, why he wanted to go to Spain and my husband first smiled at me with a crafty look on his face and then told me that Opus Dei was very powerful in Spain, because it was very rich.’ It was the first time he had spoken to her of Opus Dei and he explained that the organization was capable of resolving the Vatican’s financial problems and emerging as the dominant force in the power struggle then under way over the Catholic church’s policy towards Eastern Europe. The central issue of the Cold War for the Vatican, whether to engage with communist leaders and negotiate better conditions for Catholics behind the Iron Curtain, or to avoid diplomatic contacts and simply wage all-out ideological war, was now the key to Roberto Calvi’s professional survival. Throwing in his lot with the conservative Opus Dei faction was the option for war.

Clara Calvi gave the Milan investigators further details of the sense of threat hanging over the family and of its effect on her husband. The Sunday before her departure for Washington in mid May, she found Roberto lying on his bed looking depressed. ‘I went up to him to encourage him and he said: “If they kill me, perhaps we won’t see one another again,” and then he burst into floods of tears.’ She learned the nature of the threat on another occasion. A senior Carabiniere general had warned him that there were armed bands abroad in the area around their country villa, bent on the extermination of the whole family. ‘The armed bands were sent by the
priests,’ Calvi had told her. The paranoia of a desperate man or the wild accusations of his disconsolate widow?

Allegations of a specific threat to Calvi’s family, and more precisely to his daughter, emerged in 1983 when a London antiques dealer named Frank Jennings made contact with the
Sunday Times.
Jennings worked as a driver and odd-job man for his colleague Bill Hopkins, who had rented a flat in the Notting Hill area to the drug-dealer Sergio Vaccari. Jennings provided a detailed account of his dealings with Vaccari in an illiterately written four-page note which he supplied to the
Sunday Times
journalist Charles Raw. Typed entirely in capital letters, it begins: ‘I first met Serg in a friend’s antique shop. My friend introduced us and told me that he was staying in the flat above his shop. I found him to be a pleasant sort of chap, well educated and well groomed.’

Jennings went on to describe how he had once been hired by Vaccari to help him collect a second-hand safe. While waiting for Vaccari in the Italian’s car he opened a small bag that turned out to contain photographs. Three of the photos were of Roberto Calvi; in one he was wearing a priest’s dog collar. There were also two photos of women, one of whom he recognized as Jeannette May. Noticing Jennings had looked at the photos, Vaccari told him he had been asked to investigate the Calvi case. Vaccari said he had at first thought that the man in the dog collar was a double for Calvi but had then realized that was not the case. ‘Roberto was definitely the fellow hanging under Blackfriars Bridge,’ Vaccari had told him. ‘Some horrible, ruthless men got him to do it [commit suicide] by showing him some videos of mafia torturings and told him that the next video they would show him his daughter would be the star. I do not know if the videos were shown to him in England or back in Italy.’

Vaccari had said he would be travelling to Italy the next week to try and find out more about the Calvi case. ‘Isn’t that
a little dangerous for you to go back to Italy, Serg?’ ‘Very,’ Vaccari had replied. ‘I wouldn’t want to end up on a video myself. And what you know now is dangerous information.’ Vaccari’s violent death in September 1982 had borne out the last remark.

A number of elements in Frank Jennings’ account appear to be true and the result of his own first-hand knowledge. Jennings knew Hopkins and Hopkins had rented an apartment to Vaccari above his antiques shop at 21 Kensington Park Road, so it is highly plausible that the two men would have met, a fact confirmed by Hopkins in an affidavit he swore in 1992. In his statement to the
Sunday Times
Jennings also said that Vaccari had been to Italy the week before he was killed, another fact that turns out to be true, although Jennings might have picked it up from a newspaper.

In his affidavit, Hopkins gives an assessment of Vaccari’s character and adds another small item of information that potentially ties the Italian drug-dealer to the events at the end of Calvi’s life. Hopkins first met Vaccari in 1979 and got to know him over the subsequent three years. ‘He had a criminal cast of mind. For example, he proposed that I find rich businessmen who would commission bogus business catalogues at vastly inflated prices for tax purposes,’ he swore. ‘He had a tendency towards and took pleasure in violence. He would smile when he talked of inflicting pain on others. He would, I believe, have done anything for money – including murder.’ Hopkins added: ‘He possessed a pistol which I once observed lying on a table during a visit to the Kensington Park Road flat.’

Having been warned by an Italian friend that Vaccari was a dangerous man, Hopkins told Vaccari that he needed his flat back and assisted the Italian in finding a new apartment in Holland Park. He was surprised therefore when a few weeks later Vaccari contacted him again to ask him for the address of Chelsea Cloisters, one of the alternative accommodations
that Hopkins had originally proposed to him. Vaccari told him that he wanted the Chelsea Cloisters flat for someone else. ‘I remember this particularly because I had placed the address on a spike at my desk and Vaccari remembered I had done so. We spent about 20 minutes going through the two spikes on my desk to find the relevant piece of paper. He took it away with him. This was around the first or second week of June 1982.’ Though other witnesses have described a different process leading to Calvi’s unsatisfactory descent on Chelsea Cloisters on 15 June, Hopkins’ account ties Vaccari into the logistics of Calvi’s journey and appears to bear out the claims made in Italy by Eligio Paoli.

If Frank Jennings’ claims about the threats to Calvi’s daughter were true they would explain the banker’s acute concern for the safety of his family, and of Anna in particular, whom on 5 June he ordered to leave Italy abruptly for the United States. By all accounts Jennings was not the sort of man who enjoyed the company of policemen or who relished the thought of giving evidence under oath in court. When he was finally traced and interviewed in 1992 he retracted the substance of his account to the journalist Charles Raw. John White, now Detective Superintendent with the City of London Police, sent a seven-line fax to his colleague at Interpol in Rome to apprise him of the development: ‘Informant “Frank” traced and interviewed. States he [k]new Vaccari having been introduced by mutual friend. However ALL other details supplied to Charles Raw were false and had no bearing on the truth.’ Sighs of relief all round, it would appear.

Although a skilled and intelligent banker, part of the key to Calvi’s rapid rise up the Ambrosiano hierarchy was his willingness to seek the protection of powerful, and at times
unscrupulous, sponsors. The most important of these was a Sicilian tax lawyer named Michele Sindona.

Sindona had begun his business career trading in grain and other agricultural products in his native Sicily at the end of the Second World War. He then moved to Milan where his combination of commercial acumen and tax expertise served him well, allowing him to progress from tax adviser to the rich to become a financier and banker in his own right. The curve of his career would resemble that of Calvi’s in many ways: from honour and riches, through disgrace and bankruptcy, to a death that could be suicide or murder. And the ingredients of his career would also be the same: links to the Vatican, cold war service to the US Central Intelligence Agency, relations with organized crime, embezzlement and fraud.