15

Images

“You Can’t Run the Church on Hail Marys”

During this frenzied stretch of work, Sindona had a fateful meeting with Paul Casimir Marcinkus, a Catholic priest.1 Two years older than Sindona, the six-foot-three American-born Marcinkus seemed more like a football lineman than a low-ranking clerical bureaucrat assigned to the Secretary of State’s office. The youngest of four sons of Lithuanian working-class immigrants (his father was a window washer), he grew up in Cicero, a rough Chicago suburb best known as Al Capone’s hometown.2 Marcinkus later recalled, “We were poor. . . . This was [the] time of the Depression. I had twenty-five cents a day for food and travel to school, and I was always figuring out ways to make it stretch so I could afford a ball game or take in a movie.”3 The family was one of the few without a car.4 A solid student and competitive athlete, he surprised most of his friends when at eighteen he entered St. Mary of the Lake, a seminary in Mundelein, Illinois.5 He had been thinking “this was the kind of life I’d like” since he was thirteen.6

Although America was soon at war with the Nazis and Japanese, his seminary enrollment gave him an automatic draft exemption.7 He studied theology for four years and philosophy for another three before his ordination as a priest in 1947. After two years of pastoral work at St. Christina’s, a working-class Chicago parish, he later said he “must have shown some proclivity for the law” since he was moved to the matrimonial tribunal in the diocese’s chancery office.8 Within a year he went to Rome to study canon law at the Gregorian University.9 It was a career move made by ambitious priests who hoped someday to have a shot at becoming a bishop.I Marcinkus joined the English Section of the Secretariat of State in 1952, earning $90 a month plus room and board. He earned a doctorate in divinity the following year.11 In 1954, after graduating from the Vatican’s diplomatic school, he was dispatched for assignments in Bolivia and Canada. His energetic work in both postings won the admiration of his superiors and he was promoted to monsignor.12 In 1959, he returned to Rome and what he later described as “rather mundane” work in the Secretary of State’s office.13

His colleagues thought the gruff Marcinkus was quintessentially American. Most of them had never been to America, but there was little doubt from all they had read and the movies they had seen that Paul Marcinkus was the epitome of whatever that meant. When he drank whiskey he did not hide the bottle when a senior cleric walked into the room. He smoked cigars and did not ask permission before lighting one. A large borrowed Chevrolet was his trademark as he navigated the chaotic Roman traffic, offering to take a visiting group of pilgrims to Castel Gandolfo or a few kids to a local soccer match. A rough-and-tumble amateur sportsman who enjoyed boxing and tennis, he had founded the Vatican’s first baseball team, and starred on its intramural rugby squad.14 He was also an avid golfer—with a reputed five handicap—and one of the few priests who could talk his way into playing a round at the SGI-owned luxury country club, Oligata Romana.15 (He later told a journalist that he “loved physical work because it got the badness out of me.”)16

Full of energy, he talked as loudly and as animatedly as any native Italian.17 Some at the Vatican found him amusing and his lack of piety refreshing. But most disliked his apparent lack of self-doubt. His love of sports was thought by many to be inappropriate for a Vatican-based prelate.18 They bristled whenever he told newcomers, “just call me Chink for short” (in Italian, his surname was pronounced Mar-chink-us). When they discovered that he liked reading Westerns, it fit with the caricature they had of him, and made it easier to dismiss the perennially tan Marcinkus as a cowboy priest who would likely soon be back in America.19

Marcinkus knew that he was hard to miss. A Chicago Tribune reporter who knew him said he “possessed the tact of a trailer truck.”20 But Marcinkus had decided when he first arrived in Rome not to change his style. He observed that in the Vatican, “with Italians you have to be careful. It’s kind of Oriental. . . . There is subterfuge.”21 Inside the Curia, he was wise to the pitfall of falling into the back-and-forth gossip that often derailed promising careers. “I don’t want to work like a Hoover, pick up dirt, pass it on.”22 He thought that Vatican City was like a “village of washerwomen” who spent every day “squeezing all the old dirt out. In normal life people get away and have other interests, but here what else is there to talk about?”23

It did not take Marcinkus long to learn that the Curia was a bureaucratic nightmare. “The way they do things around here,” he later said, “annoys me at times. You can send a memo and not get an answer for months. Your memo just gets ignored. That’s the way they deal with things: ignore them and hope they just go away on their own.”24 The Italians considered him naive.

“The careerists were in awe of him,” said Peter Murphy, years later the Deputy Chief of Mission for the U.S. embassy to the Vatican. Murphy, who became a good friend with Marcinkus, recalled, “He was so unlike any Italian. They just didn’t know what to make of him. Even his sense of humor rubbed them the wrong way, they were so serious.”25

Marcinkus got his first break in 1962 when John XXIII picked him as an interpreter for a visit to the Vatican by America’s Catholic First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy.26 The Pope and the First Lady mostly spoke French during their thirty-two-minute meeting, but Marcinkus used the opportunity to ingratiate himself with some of the U.S. clerics who had traveled with Mrs. Kennedy, including Scranton’s influential Archbishop Martin O’Connor and the future cardinal of New York Edward Egan. The U.S. delegation left Rome with a good impression of the gregarious young priest. And John XXIII—who had himself been criticized for so sharply breaking from the stiff formality of Pius—liked the brash American.

Marcinkus had picked a good time to make an impression on the Pope. John XXIII’s Second Vatican Council was about to begin that October. Some three hundred American bishops—most unfamiliar with Rome—would soon arrive. Ernest Primeau, an American bishop living in Rome, recommended to the Pope that the young American monsignor with a reputation for orderliness and punctuality be put in charge of helping the U.S. bishops.27 Pope John agreed and made Marcinkus a one-person service bureau.28 Soon, he was everywhere, flitting around Vatican City from dawn until late at night. Marcinkus did everything for the bishops, keeping minutes for key meetings, arranging flights, smoothing out problems during their long stay, tending to them like a five-star-hotel concierge. By the time the Second Vatican Council finished, almost all U.S bishops knew him and had a good impression. They left Rome trading their personal favorite stories of “the Pope’s man.”29

His status was much grander than would have been expected if someone knew only his lowly rank in the Secretary of State’s office. That alone irked many contemporaries. One of them leaked to Italian newspapers gossip that Marcinkus was pocketing money from a charter business that handled the travel for most of the bishops at the Council, as well as for groups of pilgrims. Marcinkus went out of his way to deny it. “I didn’t want to see all our cardinals and bishops getting fleeced by all these airlines, so I got ahold of this friend who ran pilgrim deals. . . . I didn’t make anything out of it.”30 After four years in Rome, Pope John understood how rumors in the Curia developed from the tiniest germ of truth. He dismissed the reports as baseless.31

Marcinkus’s ascent as a can-do administrator was not derailed when John died in 1963. Giovanni Montini had been friends with Marcinkus since the early 1950s when they were stationed in Rome.32 Both then served in the Secretary of State’s office. Marcinkus was a newly arrived junior priest and Montini a monsignor then directing the Vatican’s refugee programs. “I used to see him [Montini] walking around the grounds,” Marcinkus later told a reporter from the Chicago Tribune, “and I’d give him a lift in my car.”33 Marcinkus had made an impression on Montini. The future Pope, who at first found him overbearing, admired his organizational skills, hard work, and take-charge attitude.34

On the day Montini was elected Pope, all the clerics in the Secretary of State’s office paid respects to him. When it was Marcinkus’s turn to kneel before the Pontiff and kiss his ring, the new Pope greeted him affectionately and said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”35 Marcinkus became his private secretary for English affairs.36 In 1964, after a chaotic trip to Jerusalem, Paul VI promoted Marcinkus to the honorary grade of Domestic Prelate and christened him as his advance man for other Eucharistic Congresses (they traveled eventually to nine cities on five continents).37 Marcinkus was aggressive when it came to protecting the Pope while ensuring that the trip went well. In India, when police tried blocking him from following the Pope onto an altar platform, he lifted one of them to the side so he could stay astride Paul VI. At the airport tarmac in Bogotá, when Archbishop Giovanni Benelli, the Deputy Secretary of State, arrived and questioned some security arrangements at the last moment, Marcinkus shut him down in front of the entire Papal delegation.38 It earned him the lasting enmity of Benelli, a powerful Curial official.39 (Years later in Britain, Anglican officials almost banned Marcinkus from the Canterbury Cathedral after a contentious argument over the extent of protective services.)40 But his talent was more than organizing the logistics and watching out for the Pope’s safety. On each trip, local church officials fought to see who would sit closest to the Pontiff, and each submitted long lists of contributors and friends with whom they insisted the Pope meet. A prelate told Marcinkus he was the “only man I know who will say no to a cardinal.”41 That made him irreplaceable.42 It also earned him, as he later recalled, “an enemy or two among our own people.”43

Papal watchers soon noticed that at the Vatican, every time an English-speaking dignitary had a Papal audience—from Chicago Mayor Richard Daley to Martin Luther King Jr. to British Prime Minister Harold Wilson to Robert Kennedy—Marcinkus was there.44

In his roles as private interpreter and advance man, Marcinkus had earned a place inside the Pope’s inner circle. Marcinkus realized he was more than a literal translator. Paul trusted that when they met with American politicians such as Richard Nixon or Hubert Humphrey, Marcinkus knew what was important to emphasize.45

In the following year, 1965, Marcinkus accompanied the Pope for a much anticipated visit to the United States, the first ever North American visit by a Pontiff.46 He was again the translator when Paul VI met Lyndon Johnson in a suite at New York’s Waldorf Towers.47 In 1966, the Pope dispatched Marcinkus back to the U.S. so he could deliver a Papal letter to LBJ at his Texas ranch. It carried Paul VI’s unsuccessful plea that Johnson stop bombing North Vietnam and that America unilaterally declare a cease-fire.48

When Cardinal Spellman died on December 2, 1967, Marcinkus let it be widely known in the Curia that he had wealthy patrons in Chicago and New York. Spellman had been an incredible fundraiser.49 Some leading American clerics disliked that the U.S. church’s main strength in Rome was its ability to raise money, and thought it was insulting that Italian clerics nicknamed Spellman “Moneybags.”50 But the Italian-dominated Curia needed American dollars. The U.S. economy was growing at a robust 10 percent a year. In Europe, the postwar expansion was winding down. National economies were struggling under fast rising inflation. Many in the Vatican admired the American model. Even without Spellman’s contributions, U.S. Catholics were far and away the largest contributors.

Marcinkus hailed from the largest American diocese, and he had good relationships with every key cardinal in the United States. Two weeks after Spellman’s death the Pope transferred Marcinkus from the Secretary of State’s office to the Vatican Bank. Soon after that he became the secretary to the three-cardinal Commission of Vigilance that oversaw the IOR.51

Marcinkus was a financial neophyte. He later tried to downplay that. He told one journalist he had spent several days picking up tips by visiting banks in New York and Chicago. “That was it. What kind of training you need?”52 To another he claimed to have taken several weeks of business administration classes at Harvard.53 There is no evidence he ever took any.54 He later admitted, “I didn’t do a course because I didn’t have any time.”55

As for the history of the IOR and Special Administration, Marcinkus figured that he did not need to know it since Mennini and de Strobel—the “technicians” as he called them—had worked there for decades and could answer any questions.56 He bought some books about international banking and business. After he talked to the two senior IOR laymen for some additional background, he told Chicago’s Cardinal John Cody that from 1940 on “[the IOR] has been a gravy train.”57 His new bank colleagues were not so sure he was the right choice. One noted that he “couldn’t even read a balance sheet.”58

Marcinkus met Sindona only a month after his promotion. It took Sindona little time to discover that the monsignor’s widespread reputation as frank and outspoken was well deserved.

Marcinkus asked Sindona what he thought about Mennini and de Strobel. Without waiting for an answer, Marcinkus volunteered that he thought little of them. He surprised Sindona by saying if he ran the IOR he might start his tenure by dismissing Mennini. Sindona thought that Mennini—who had been with the IOR since its inception—was “the only competent man there.”59 He told Marcinkus that he greatly underestimated the talent of those laymen.60 In subsequent meetings Sindona concluded that it was in fact Marcinkus who was in over his head, inept in financial matters, yet had the “pretensions to be a financier.”61

“He was not very smart,” Sindona told a reporter years later, “[and he] thought a free meal in a good restaurant was a big deal.”62 Marcinkus’s borderline incompetence was made only worse by his unrestrained overconfidence on matters about which he knew nothing.63 But since Marcinkus had the unconditional backing of the Pope, Sindona had no choice but to learn as best he could to live with the American monsignor.

•  •  •

At the same time that Marcinkus arrived at the IOR, another newcomer appeared on the periphery of the church’s financial web, someone who would prove every bit as important as Sindona. At first glance Roberto Calvi seemed just another smart Milanese banker. But Calvi’s ambition was grander, his focus sharper, and his persistence unyielding. He would win over Sindona and every key official in the Vatican Bank, even the newcomer Marcinkus.

Calvi, the eldest of four children from a middle-class Milanese family, was born in 1920, a month before Sindona. His father was a midlevel BCI bank manager. Calvi studied economics at Bocconi University before joining an aristocratic cavalry unit in which he served honorably on the Eastern Front during the war.64 After the Germans occupied northern Italy in 1943, he went to work as a clerk for a small BCI branch in Bari.65 Although not blessed with Sindona’s charm, he was as determined to become a banking titan.

In 1946, Calvi thought he might have a better chance of reaching his goal if he worked at a Catholic bank. Friends at Catholic Action helped him land a job at the “bank of priests,” Milan’s Ambrosiano, which had been founded in 1896 to counter the influence of lay banks.66 Monsignor Giuseppe Tovini, the Ambrosiano’s founder, had named it after St. Ambrose, the city’s patron saint.67 Its bylaws required that anyone opening an account should first produce a baptismal certificate (that let in Protestants but barred Jews).68 Only “good Catholics” could work there, although obtaining a letter of recommendation from a parish priest normally sufficed. Tovini—beatified in 1998 by Pope John Paul II—required that the bank’s work be “moral and pious” and that its profits be distributed “for charitable purposes and Catholic schools.”69 (Through the 1980s, every annual report expressly thanked “Divine Providence” for guiding the bank to greater profits.)70

When the twenty-six-year-old Calvi joined the staid Ambrosiano, the bank managed the investment portfolios of most Catholic religious orders. His colleagues thought Calvi a humorless workaholic who wore formal dark suits and matching fedoras to appear he held a more important post than he did.71 And the prematurely bald, mustached man was socially awkward. But his reserved appearance and personality made him popular with the bank’s many conservative clients.72 Having refined his school-taught French and German, he soon handled many of its Swiss, German, and French customers.73

In 1956, when Sindona and Montini had celebrated the end of communist control at Milan’s largest trade union, Calvi toasted his own appointment as a joint manager at the Ambrosiano. Although it was only a midlevel position, it marked a milestone. It was the highest rank his father had achieved over a fifty-two-year career. Two years later, one of the Ambrosiano’s senior executives, Carlo Alessandro Canesi, became Calvi’s mentor and promoted him as his private deputy.74

In 1960, while Sindona and the Vatican were negotiating the terms of their joint venture in Banca Privata Finanziaria (BPF), the forty-year-old Calvi was devising a way to bypass Italy’s ban on banks offering mutual funds. Calvi encouraged the Ambrosiano to take stakes in a Swiss bank and two in Luxembourg, through which he devised a rudimentary mutual fund, offering Italian investors the opportunity to invest in foreign stock funds.75 A smashing success, the Ambrosiano had the market pretty much to itself. With the exception of a couple of Vatican-owned institutions, other Italian banks did not follow with competing products for nearly a decade.76 Calvi was ecstatic.77 When Canesi became the Ambrosiano’s chairman in 1963, he promoted the forty-five-year-old Calvi to the post of direttore centrale, making him one of the bank’s six most powerful officers.78 Calvi did not try hiding his ambition. “He lived for power,” another longtime colleague, Roberto Rosone, recalled. “There was only one woman for him, and that was power.”79

Just after the New Year in 1969, Sindona’s son-in-law—a college friend of Calvi—told Sindona that the Ambrosiano banker wanted to meet him.80 When they got together, Sindona was amused that instead of talking about business, Calvi regaled him with stories about his family and a small retreat he owned near the Swiss border. At one point, he showed Sindona a badly scarred right index finger and then launched into a long account about how he mishandled an ax while killing a turkey at his country getaway. Only at the end of their meeting did Calvi briefly mention that he considered the Ambrosiano an antiquated bank. He hoped to modernize it with Sindona’s help.81

When Sindona asked Calvi’s Ambrosiano boss for his judgment about the young banker, he was told to dismiss whatever Calvi said. The advice to disregard Calvi had the opposite effect on Sindona. His second meeting with Calvi a few days later was all about business. Calvi was direct. He said that the Ambrosiano held large sums of money in safe but dull money market accounts. He would like to use that cash in more aggressive ventures with Sindona. The problem was that the bank’s conservative board of directors was certain to reject it as too risky. Did Sindona, he asked, have any ideas about how to get the Ambrosiano’s cumbersome bureaucracy to free up that money?

Sindona knew that if anyone had influence at the Banco Ambrosiano, it would be the lay officials at the IOR. The Vatican could always use an eager new colleague. If Calvi could gain more power at the Ambrosiano, he might become an integral partner.

Calvi liked the idea. “You must help me. Introduce me to Massimo Spada and ask him to speak on my behalf to the board and the general manager of the Ambrosiano.”82

Sindona introduced Calvi to Spada. Although Spada now worked for Sindona, he had been at the IOR for more than three decades and was still involved on many projects with his former colleagues there. Spada judged Calvi as sincere and eager, and assured him he would try to help. A few weeks later, Calvi went to the IOR and met Luigi Mennini, Pellegrino de Strobel, and Monsignor Marcinkus.83 They all liked the young Ambrosiano banker. Calvi soon ingratiated himself further by hiring one of Mennini’s sons, Alessandro, as an assistant manager in the Ambrosiano’s international division.84

A month before Calvi’s arrival, Pope Paul VI had consecrated the forty-six-year-old Marcinkus as a bishop.85 He also elevated him to be Secretary of the Administrative Office of the IOR, the Vatican Bank’s first non-Italian director.86 Although eighty-four-year-old Cardinal di Jorio was still the highest-ranking prelate on the oversight committee, his role was now an honorary one. Everyone realized that the outspoken American bishop was effectively running the Vatican Bank.87 The ultimate sign of his new power: Marcinkus requested direct access to the Pontiff. Paul VI agreed. Marcinkus was the first cleric inside the IOR to have a straight reporting line to the Pope. Many envied this accommodation.88 Making matters worse for Marcinkus’s enemies, he retained his role as the Pope’s advance man for foreign trips, which gave him a chance to stay personally close to Paul.

Two weeks after his promotion, a Time magazine profile of Marcinkus noted he “is now the key man in Vatican finances,” controlling assets that “run into the billions.” As for his lack of financial experience, “By his own admission, Marcinkus needs all the help he can get. . . . He is a first class organizer, but readily confesses: ‘I have no banking experience.’ ”89,II

The question why appoint him? dominated the gossipy Curia. Cardinals John Wright of Pittsburgh and Michele Pellegrino of Turin expressed to the Pope their concerns about Marcinkus’s inexperience. But Paul VI’s private secretary, Monsignor Pasquale Macchi, told him to ignore the naysayers. Macchi was sick of the imperious di Jorio and he liked Marcinkus, who he thought would learn quickly on the job.91

Some thought that the Pope had selected Marcinkus hoping that his take-command style might shake up the church’s staid finances. But most believed Paul VI wanted to know the details of what was happening inside the opaque IOR. Marcinkus was a trustworthy guard dog who would report honestly.92 Since Marcinkus was tough, the Pope figured he could withstand the IOR’s intensely competitive environment.93 A few even speculated Marcinkus was a stalking horse for the American church, laying the foundation for the future election of a U.S. cardinal as Pope. That theory had legs. Cardinal John Cody, from Marcinkus’s hometown of Chicago, seemed to be the new Spellman. Cody flew to Rome for Marcinkus’s consecration. When boarding his plane, Cody had told a reporter, “Although Bishop-elect Marcinkus has served for many years in important tasks outside the archdiocese, we still consider him one of our own.”94 In the Machiavellian world of the Curia, with ever-shifting allegiances in quests for power, some interpreted that to mean that Marcinkus had dual loyalties that made him untrustworthy. The Pope evidently paid no heed to the chatter.

Mennini and de Strobel were disturbed that the Pope had not weighed financial qualifications as a prerequisite for appointing someone as the overseer of an institution as important and powerful as the IOR. They now had to report to Marcinkus. Their hope was that he might follow in the tradition that the clerics who oversaw the IOR did so passively. That was quickly dashed. Although Marcinkus did not dismiss Mennini, as he had once told Sindona he might, he let it be known he intended to be a hands-on manager.95

Not long after his appointment, Marcinkus summoned Sindona to his office in the squat fifteenth-century Tower of Nicholas V.96 When Sindona arrived, Vittoria Marigonda, Marcinkus’s secretary for a decade, greeted him. Sindona knew Marigonda because she worked briefly at an investment bank at Group Sindona before she moved to the Vatican.97 He also noted several new, young Italian secretaries, prettier than any women Sindona had ever seen working at the Vatican.98 Once he walked inside the bishop’s office, he noticed that di Jorio’s traditional décor had been replaced with modern black leather sofas and chairs, a low-rise glass coffee table, and some large metal sculptures. A golf bag was in the corner, with a tag from Acquasanta (Holy Water), Rome’s most exclusive country club. Marcinkus had moved up from his days of having to sweet-talk his way into playing a round of golf at the SGI-owned Oligata Romana.99 The archbishop had also gotten an “honorary membership” at one of Rome’s oldest and most prestigious clubs, the Circolo della Caccia (The Hunting Club).100

Marcinkus was smoking a pipe and sitting in an overstuffed leather chair. A large pewter ashtray overflowed with Marlboro butts and cigar stubs. The bishop beckoned Sindona to sit in an adjoining chaise.

“I asked for full powers as the condition sina qua non for my accepting the presidency,” Marcinkus told Sindona. He paused for dramatic effect. “And the Holy Father granted them to me.”III

Sindona said nothing but felt Marcinkus was exaggerating.102

Both men knew they had the Pope’s unquestioned backing. Marcinkus’s showy display confirmed to Sindona that the path to business at the IOR was now through the bishop. As for Sindona, he hoped that Marcinkus might stumble and make a mistake that could shake Paul VI’s faith in him. But instead of making an error that sidelined his career, events unrelated to the Vatican Bank boosted the Pope’s confidence in him. When Nixon came to the Vatican in 1969, tens of thousands of students protesting the Vietnam War rioted in Rome’s streets.IV Marcinkus personally took control of security arrangements for the church, directing Nixon’s helicopter to land in St. Peter’s Square. He then stood down the Secret Service in a tense argument and barred them from a private meeting with the Pope, at which Marcinkus was the translator. As the police battled huge running crowds, the President and the Pope met. A couple of months later Marcinkus used a body block to free the seventy-one-year-old Pontiff from a crowd that besieged him in Switzerland.104 In July, Marcinkus played a key role on a trip to Nigeria where the Pope tried in vain to promote a peace conference between the Nigerians and the secessionist state of Biafra.105 The following year, he helped get the Pope to safety in Sardinia when a left-wing mob stoned the motorcade, as well as at Castel Gandolfo when a heckler just missed the Pope’s head with a brick. In a visit to the Philippines, a man wielding a butcher knife jumped out from a Manila crowd and lunged at the Pontiff.106 Marcinkus’s quick reaction proved a Boston Globe article from the previous year correct that his unofficial role on foreign trips was to be “a one-man squad of bodyguards.”107 Paul VI gave him a special commendation when they returned to Rome. In the Curia some now dubbed him il gorilla (he disliked that nickname because, “A gorilla at home in the States is like . . . a hood”).108

Leading prelates in the Curia knew that Marcinkus provided far more than just good security and planning. The Pope had come to completely trust his instincts and judgment. In 1971 the Pope elevated Marcinkus to president at the IOR to more accurately reflect his full authority there.109

•  •  •

In February, Roberto Calvi was promoted to general manager at the Ambrosiano, the bank’s third-ranking position. When the CEO retired that December, Calvi became its consigliere delegato, its president. With Sindona’s help, he set about to transform the sleepy Ambrosiano into an international merchant financial institution that traded stocks, invested in real estate, and even took stakes in private companies. To bypass restrictive Italian banking laws that limited the permissible scope of activities for a bank, Sindona had shown Calvi how to establish a web of holding companies in offshore banking havens such as Luxembourg, the Bahamas, Panama, and Costa Rica. Those jurisdictions prided themselves on the strictest client secrecy, allowing local attorneys and bankers to serve as proxies so that the true ownership of companies and banks was hidden from Italian tax authorities. On March 23, 1971, Calvi used Compendium, a Luxembourg holding company that he later renamed Banco Ambrosiano Holding, to register the Cisalpine Overseas Bank in Nassau, Bahamas.110 It was impossible on paper to track it back to the Ambrosiano, much less to discover that the Vatican Bank and Sindona held minority shares (the bank was capitalized for just $2.5 million, but in a few months would boast about $100 million in equity, most of it redirected Ambrosiano deposits, and $16.5 million in Swiss francs and German marks from the IOR).111 The maze of offshore holding companies was so effective in hiding the real owners that an official from Italy’s central bank would later admit they only found out the details of the Ambrosiano’s Bahamian operations when “we . . . read it in the newspapers.”112

A huge unregulated business dubbed the Eurocurrency Market had boomed in the island nation. It was a $65 billion industry in funds loaned by U.S. and European banks outside their country of origin.113 The banks avoided domestic disclosure about the details of loans, and in some cases, such as British banks, they avoided a tax on earnings connected to interest on the loans. It would take a decade before British and U.S. authorities managed to close most of the Eurocurrency loopholes. But in 1971, when Calvi first visited the Bahamas with a handful of other Ambrosiano executives, it was an ideal place to establish the bank’s most distant offshore subsidiary.

Calvi asked Marcinkus to become a member of the Bahamian bank’s board of directors. Sindona had told Calvi it was a good idea because wherever “I put him in . . . it helps me get money.”114 The bishop accepted. On August 5, 1971, a letter from Cisalpine informed the Bahamian registry of companies that a “Mr. Paul C. Marcinkus” was a new director. “The Most Reverend” was left off. Nogara’s unofficial rule had been that only IOR laymen or Black Nobles should join the boards of companies into which the Vatican invested. Nogara thought it would be untoward to have one of the cardinals from the oversight committee serve as a corporate director. The clerical garb carried too great a symbolic moral approval from the church. But there was no Nogara to persuade Marcinkus that it was a bad idea. Instead, when Calvi asked him, Marcinkus thought, “Why not?”115 As a director of Ambrosiano’s Bahamian branch, he was the first bishop in church history to serve on any board of any bank.V

Sindona suggested Pierre Siegenthaler, a Swiss thirty-four-year-old world-class yachtsman who also had some New York banking experience, become Cisalpine’s managing director. Calvi agreed.117 Siegenthaler, with a penchant for Gucci shoes and oversized Rolexes, ran Cisalpine from his Nassau home.118 Calvi liked the Bahamas so much that he bought a villa in a new luxury development in Lyford Cay. When Calvi and his wife, Clara, and their two teenage children spent their first holiday there that year, Marcinkus joined them.119 When Clara saw Marcinkus, she recalled that “he threw his arms around me and sang ‘Arrivederci Roma.’ ”120 The men spent the holiday discussing their bold new ventures while tuna fishing.121

In the following months, Calvi used his Luxembourg holding company Compendium to establish more offshore banks, not only in traditional European havens such as Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein, but also in less savory asylums like Panama, Nicaragua, and Peru. Calvi formed so many shell companies in Panama that he soon ran out of people to name as directors, resorting on the last one to naming the Ambrosiano’s switchboard operator.122

Calvi soon had a new deal to pitch to Marcinkus. He wanted the IOR to help the Ambrosiano move large sums out of Italy, in excess of what was permitted by Italian currency regulations. To help disguise the money moves, Calvi proposed conto deposito, so-called back-to-back operations in which the Ambrosiano would make deposits with the IOR, who would then pass the money to Cisalpine and other Calvi-controlled offshore companies. For Italian banking regulators, it would appear that the Ambrosiano’s money was merely parked at the IOR, when it had actually been moved to little-regulated foreign shells. At times, the IOR could direct the money to companies that needed it temporarily to boost their balance sheets. For its role, the IOR would earn one quarter of one percent of all the money that passed through it (that was later reduced to one sixteenth).123 Marcinkus thought it sounded like easy profits. By the end of December, the IOR had opened a $37 million five-year Cisalpine certificate of deposit, at an above-market rate of 8.5 percent interest.124

At the Vatican Bank, Mennini was one of the few who knew about Marcinkus’s decision to join Cisalpine’s board. He did not think it wise for the IOR to become further entwined in offshore deals. But Marcinkus dismissed him as well intentioned but old-fashioned. The IOR had to adapt to new and more sophisticated times. “You can’t run the church on Hail Marys,” he said.125


I. Thirty-five years later, in the middle of an unfolding scandal, Marcinkus claimed somewhat disingenuously to a Chicago Tribune reporter, “I can assure you that a career here [at the Vatican] wasn’t what I wanted. All I ever really wanted was to be a parish priest. But at my ordination, when I promised to obey, I felt that what happened to me after that was in my superiors’ hands. I’ve never asked for a specific task, but I’ve also never refused a job that was given to me. I guess you’d call me a team player. I play whatever position the coach puts me in.”10

IITime noted that Marcinkus’s annual salary was $6,000, “about a teller’s salary in a New York City bank.” As for the value of the church’s stocks under his control, Time estimated the value between $10 billion and $15 billion ($94 billion and $153 billion in 2014 dollars).90

III. Fifteen years later, when embroiled in a great scandal, Marcinkus told author John Cornwell just the opposite: “I said four times, ‘You must be out of your minds!’ I said, ‘Why don’t you get somebody else? I have no experience in banking!’ And they said, ‘You have to kind of watch over things.’ I said, ‘I’m incompetent for that!’ That’s the way they do things around here!” He told Il Sabato, the Catholic weekly, “I have never been a businessman. I would not know where to begin.” But Marcinkus said he felt he had no choice but to accept the posting. “I’ve never asked for a job and I’ve never refused one. I don’t believe I have a right to refuse.”

“He’s never ever technically run the bank,” claimed his private secretary, Vittoria Marigonda. “The bank has been run by Luigi Mennini for nearly forty years.”101

IV. The riots that greeted Nixon were just another sign to the members of the P2 Masonic lodge that Italy was under siege by militant leftists. In April, Milan’s main railway station was bombed. In August, explosions hit several trains. Just before the 1969 Christmas holidays, bombs exploded at the National Bank of Agriculture in Rome’s Piazza Fontana, the National Bank of Labor, and a national monument to King Victor Emmanuel II. Seventeen innocent bystanders were killed and nearly one hundred maimed. The following month marked the formation of the Red Brigades, a radical Marxist group whose goal was the violent overthrow of the government. Sindona and many other P2 members considered themselves the last line between order and chaos. The turn to violence, coupled with a rapidly declining lira, brought the IOR a new flood of rich Italians seeking a safe haven. As for the Piazza Fontana bombings, police thought they were the work of leftists and anarchists. But eventually investigators believed right-wing fanatics were responsible. In 1995, after twenty-six years of multiple arrests, indictments, trials, and appeals, the police and prosecutors admitted defeat. No one was ever convicted of the bombings. Conspiracy theories about it are as popular in Italy as JFK assassination theories are in the United States.103

V. Much later, when the IOR faced embarrassing questions over the extent of the church’s relationship with Calvi and his complex business network, Marcinkus tried downplaying his Cisalpine role. He told the BBC’s Panorama television program that he seldom saw Calvi and that when it came to Cisalpine, “I am not even present [at board meetings] because of commitments elsewhere.” In fact, records reveal that over eleven years, Marcinkus only missed one of twenty-two board meetings, traveling to attend them in Paris, London, New York, Geneva, Zurich, and Nassau.116