The trade in stolen and counterfeit securities was international in scope and the crimes had been committed in the United States, Latin America and Europe. Though the other cases were being closed, so much about those monetary schemes remained unknown that there was no thought of going to a grand jury, let alone before the courts. The government had what Coffey had learned on his two trips to Munich, in February and May. It had the transcript of that bugged conversation in the hotel room, but much of the conversation was still enigmatic. It had what the German authorities had supplied, but much of that dealt with the activities of foreign nationals and their crimes in the Federal Republic. And it had the revelations of Tony Grant. What was desperately needed was corroboration, and the answers to those still-puzzling questions—about the way Coca-Cola stock and the other stolen securities had been used, who had used them and who had supplied them. And most important of all were those questions that remained about the Vatican.
To get the answers, Coffey was ordered back to Europe one more time, in mid-November 1972. This time he would not go to bug and tap. This time he would go to confront Ense, Barg and others and get some details. Everyone agreed that Tamarro should go along. He was, after all, the FBI agent most knowledgeable about the case; his presence alongside Coffey could prove essential for the Justice Department, which would eventually be the one to go to court. Everyone agreed that Tamarro should go—except the FBI. It had no intention of deviating from its strict policy of refusing to send agents outside the United States, of relying instead on its legal attachés stationed abroad. Aronwald went to Washington, directly to FBI acting director L. Patrick Gray, and argued strenuously to bend the rules. Gray listened, thought, finally agreed, though only on condition that Tamarro report to the legal attachés every evening as soon as work was done. (Indeed, Tamarro followed that dictum to the letter all through the trip until eventually Coffey, who had been told only to report back to New York when he had something important to relay, threw up his hands in disgust and began to have his drink and dinner alone.)
Their first stop that November, just before Thanksgiving, was Munich. The first call was to Winfried Ense. They met in the office of Rudolph Pecher at the police presidium. Ense disclaimed knowledge of anything, was uncommunicative. Coffey suggested that Ense have a drink alone with the Americans at the bar in the Munich Hilton. Perhaps he would be more relaxed in less official and forbidding surroundings. Ense agreed, sat down, toyed with his drink, watched and waited warily. He continued to pretend ignorance, invented plausible explanations whenever a question seemed based on knowledge, seemed to strike close. They had been talking for nearly an hour when he rose and excused himself to go to the bathroom. As they watched him leave, Coffey turned to Tamarro. “Let’s get him up to the room,” he said.
“What good’s that going to do?” Tamarro asked.
“If we get him there in private, maybe we can think of something to break him down,” Coffey said.
The invitation was extended when Ense returned to the table in the bar. Ense saw little purpose in accepting; he knew so little, he said, of the matters they wanted to discuss. Still, they were guests in his country, and as he did not wish to be impolite, he would go with them.
In the room, they gathered around a low table out on the patio-terrace. Ense continued to claim innocent ignorance. Coffey took a gamble. He picked up the phone, dialed room service, gave the room number, said, “Would you please bring up a bottle of Chivas Regal Scotch—and, oh, some ice and water.”
Ense started, stared at him.
Carefully, with deliberation, calling on his memory, Coffey set out to re-create the scene that had been played out at the Palace Hotel nine months before. He began to quote from the bugged conversation, directing the words with calculation at Ense.
Ense nodded slowly. “Ah,” he said. “So, you know.”
“We know,” Coffey said.
“You were listening?”
“We were listening.”
“Then, what can I tell you?”
“The details. Everything.”
The pretenses were dropped. Ense started to talk. It was past midnight before he finished. He had much to tell, much to make them fully understand and he tried to choose his words with care, to minimize his own role and make himself out an innocent dupe caught in a web of evil spun by dangerous Americans like Ricky and Jerry Jacobs; William Benjamin and, especially, Vincent Rizzo. By the time he departed into the cold of the Alpine darkness, Ense had given them the story in detail as he wanted them to have it—the story of his trade in stolen United States Treasury bills in Brussels, of Barg’s arrangement with Jacobs to borrow the stolen Coca-Cola stock, of the visits of Ricky Jacobs and others, of the terrifying appearance of Rizzo. And he had given them the peripheries of the deal in the Vatican, or at least as much as he knew. He had begun to fill in the details of the picture Tony Grant had sketched.
He was back early the next morning, with Alfred Barg. There was little reason to hide much anymore, at least not anything the Americans wanted to hear about. Ense had convinced Barg of that during a long after-midnight call. Now Barg gave his version, a version in which he, too, was only a victim of the dangerous Americans, or at the very most an unwitting accessory.
One thing both Coffey and Tamarro sensed in Barg and Ense during those days in Munich was a wave of relief. It was not the kind of relief that comes with the baring of the soul to wash away sin and guilt. It was the relief that comes with the knowledge that at last that hoped-for miracle, the means to remove the threat posed by Rizzo and his vengeance, was at hand. And it had come without the fear of official retribution, for Coffey and Tamarro had arrived with a promise, guaranteed by their superiors, of immunity from American prosecution if they would tell all, agree to travel to New York at American expense, testify before grand juries and, if necessary, at ensuing trials. They grasped at the offer eagerly.
(A few months later, both made the trip, were put up at the Westbury Hotel in Manhattan, did their testifying before the grand juries and then went back to Germany, relieved, convinced that the episode was behind them and they had heard the last of it. The day Ense left for home, he was driven to Kennedy Airport by Coffey and Tamarro. Just before he boarded his plane, he had presents for them, expensively wrapped rectangular packages. “Good luck, gentlemen,” he said as he handed over the gifts. “I have enjoyed meeting you. I want you to have this with my appreciation and good wishes.” In each package was a bottle of Chivas Regal Scotch and Wyborowa Polish vodka. Tamarro rejected the gift immediately, declaring that it was a violation of the FBI code of ethics. Coffey took his with thanks and a laugh. “After all,” he says, “Ense was no longer a criminal in our eyes. He was a cooperative witness, so if he wanted to give us a couple of bottles of booze, there was no reason not to take it. We weren’t investigating him anymore, so it wasn’t like he was trying to pay us off or anything or get any favors out of us. We couldn’t do anything more for him and there wasn’t anything more we wanted out of him. But Tamarro couldn’t see it that way. So, I wound up with two bottles of Chivas Regal and two of Wyborowa vodka.”)
Now they had Ense and Barg, and a few days later they had Maurice Ajzen as well, brought to them by his friend and employer, Ense. Ajzen was willing to tell what he knew, and to repeat it in the United States, in exchange for the same guarantees.
Now it was on to Frankfurt and Rudolph Guschall. He had been warned they were coming, that they knew everything, or most of it, and that all the subterfuge and the thin polish of legality he had used for so long to protect himself would no longer work. The veneers had been stripped and all Guschall could do was try to throw himself on their mercy; try, as his friends had done, to tell his story so as to put himself in the best light. “He was so scared the day we questioned him,” Coffey remembers, “he threatened to commit suicide right in front of us. He ran over to the window and tried to force it open so he could jump out. Tamarro and I had to physically restrain him. Then he opened up. He was crying like a baby the whole time he talked to us. His whole life was falling down around his ears. He was going to be disbarred and God knows what else. But he corroborated what other people had been telling us and he gave us some new names and some new details. It was all filling out, just like we’d hoped.”
There was a side trip to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. There, in Arnheim Prison, was. Ernest Shinwell, locked in a dark, dank, tiny cell with only a bare wooden slab for a cot, a single faint light bulb in the ceiling that was never extinguished, a battered tin cup from which to drink cold tea, circumstances that appalled even an experienced New York cop. And Shinwell was ready to talk. “We wanted him to come over to the States to testify,” Coffey says, “but they wouldn’t permit it. They said they didn’t care what he could give us, they weren’t letting him out, not when he was serving time for swindling the Luxembourg banks. He didn’t like that, but it didn’t stop him from talking for hours about Panama and all the rest.”
And then in Vienna, in an interview room in another prison where he was serving time for swindling his fellow Austrians and bedecking himself with fake titles, the honorary consul Dr. Leopold Ledl appeared before Coffey and Tamarro. He greeted them warmly, displaying all his renowned charm. He would tell them whatever they wanted to know, he said, would answer all their questions—if only the Austrian authorities would absent themselves. He did not want them present because what he had to say might be damaging and self-incriminating and he wanted to give them no further weapons to use against him. The Austrians agreed to depart. When they were gone, Ledl, alone with Coffey, Tamarro and an Interpol interpreter, began his tale of wheeling and dealing with American swindlers and mobsters, with cardinals and archbishops and bishops and monsignors, with businessmen and others, in the United States, in Italy, all over the world. When at last he was silent, the picture was nearly complete. There were only a few missing pieces. Some, Ledl would not discuss, would not reveal. For others, he showed them where to find them and how to fit them in.
After Ledl, the direction they had to travel was obvious to both Coffey and Tamarro. They had to journey south. They had to go to Rome. They had to find and talk to Mario Foligni and all those others—Tomasso Amato, Marina Neubert, Remigio Begni, Monsignor Mario Fornasari, the mysterious and still-unnamed monsignor who played such an important role, and all the men in the Vatican.
It had to be done. But it was not done. The Italian authorities, then and later, refused to cooperate. They would, they said, handle things their own way. They did not need the interference or the assistance of the American police.
So, on their own, without the necessary official Italian help, Coffey and Tamarro did what they could from a distance. Most of those Ledl and the others had named were impossible to locate without assistance on the scene. But they did manage to reach Foligni. He listened to them, agreed to make a trip to New York and there provide his own version and his own explanation of what had transpired. It was all that could be done then in Italy. It was not enough, but it was something.
Coffey and Tamarro were home by early December. Their trip had been more successful in some ways than they could have hoped. But it had been a traumatic journey. They had known about the Vatican, of course, ever since Coffey had received the first intimations in Munich in February. They had learned more from Tony Grant, who had told them of the almost comical journey with $14.5 million in counterfeit bonds. What they had not known was who in the Vatican was involved, nor had they known how the deal had come to be nor where it was going. Now they had that. For two devout Catholics, raised to believe in the sanctity and unimpeachable honesty of the leaders of their church, this was an unsettling discovery. They had not come upon ordinary criminals, men who lived in a dark world, men who were their usual targets. They had come upon men of great power and influence, who were respected and admired and much honored. Above all, these were men of the cloth whose reason for being was supposed to be the betterment of man and the church. Now Coffey was confronted with evidence that some of these men had committed grave crimes. It was nearly unthinkable.
It was a disturbed Joe Coffey, then, who went to see District Attorney Frank Hogan that December. They had become close, had shared much, and one of the things they shared was a deep and abiding religious conviction. Hogan listened as Coffey talked grimly. “He was shocked, totally shocked,” Coffey remembers. “We were both absolutely beside ourselves. We couldn’t believe it until we went over everything very carefully and in detail and followed all the lines. Then we were sure it had to be.”
Together, then and later, they explored the implications of the discoveries and evidence. If they should follow the trail now, directly into the heart of the Vatican, uncover and reveal to the world the crimes of those revered leaders of their church, the damage they would do to the church itself was likely to be great, to be immeasurably wounding. There were, obviously, many people who would view this as a condemnation of the church itself, would see it as a clear sign that there was rot at the core of the church and that all the leaders were infected, would not see that it was evidence that men are fallible and that the crimes were those of a few, not a reflection of the whole.
They knew they had a choice. They could ignore the role the Vatican had played, the role of those leaders of the church who had been part of the scheme. No matter how much evidence they managed to gather, they knew there was little chance that they would be able to bring a cardinal or a bishop or a monsignor from Rome, from the Vatican, to stand trial in New York. What would it profit them, then, to stir up a scandal that exposed as criminals some of the men who helped direct the Vatican? What profit except to do harm to their church? Would it not be better to concentrate on what they had, to gather the evidence that could be used to convict Rizzo and the others in the organized American underworld and forget about the rest?
Coffey and Hogan talked about that and they talked about much more. But there was never a question in Coffey’s mind, or in Hogan’s, what course they must travel. “He told me,” Coffey says, “and it was the way I felt, too, that we had a duty to the people we were supposed to be protecting to follow every investigation no matter where it went. He said, ‘I want to pursue it.’ That was fine with me, because that’s what I wanted to do, and so did Vitrano and Goldstock and everybody in our office who knew anything about it, and that was what Tamarro and Aronwald and the guys who were in on it at the Strike Force wanted to do.”