The bad news kept coming the rest of 1982. Eight days after the notice that the lay IOR officials were under criminal investigation, Flavio Carboni was arrested in Switzerland. There was an outstanding warrant for him because of his role in aiding Calvi’s flight to London. When the Swiss police searched his car they found documents in his briefcase revealing that the Ambrosiano had paid Carboni some $20 million in less than a year. Most of that had ended up in Swiss bank accounts controlled by Carboni and a few business associates.1
On Monday, September 13, Licio Gelli was arrested at the main Geneva branch of Union Bank. He was trying to transfer $55 million.2 It was such a large amount that the bank had insisted he come in person. Two policemen were waiting. He presented them with an Argentine passport in a different name. By now, the fugitive Gelli had dyed his silver hair brown, grown a bushy mustache, and abandoned his trademark glasses. But once the police began questioning him at the local station, he admitted his identity.3 When the Swiss announced his capture that evening, the Italian news was captivated with a new round of speculation about P2, Calvi’s corpse, and the Vatican’s silence.
As 1982 closed, Pope John Paul told a gathering of the Sacred College of Cardinals that the church’s trust had been abused. He pledged that the Vatican would do whatever was necessary to bring the entire truth about the Ambrosiano to light.4 What no one then knew was that the prestigious panel of four financiers already had a preliminary report. They concluded that the IOR had owned or controlled ten of Calvi’s ghost companies, but absolved Marcinkus of any blame and instead put the responsibility on Calvi, determining that he had exploited his less sophisticated Vatican Bank colleagues.5 It was because of Calvi’s chicanery, they contended, that the IOR did not realize it had become the owner of the ghost companies now at the crux of the scandal.6 Marcinkus himself would have been hard pressed to write a better report. (Soon he had a new stock answer to deflect questions about the $1.2 billion in loans listed in the patronage letters: “All I can say is that it’s a heck of a lot of money.”)7
The Vatican Bank chief seemed unbowed when questioned by the panel of fifteen cardinals appointed by John Paul. The IOR was only an intermediary, not a real owner of anything, he insisted. Some of the cardinals criticized him for running the Vatican Bank without adequate checks and balances. And there were heated discussions about what to recommend to the Pope. Ultimately the clerics backed the IOR’s beleaguered chief and deputies.8 They did urge that the Vatican Bank curtail its financial speculation, and that it also introduce balance sheets that could be distributed to other Curial divisions.9
The Vatican needed to demonstrate it was serious about addressing whatever shortfalls had led to the Ambrosiano mess. The idea had taken hold in some of Italy’s leftist press that Marcinkus was merely the chief of “an offshore bank in the center of Rome.”10 A nine-member parliamentary panel investigating P2, directed by Senator Tina Anselmi, had expanded into the Calvi and Sindona affairs because both financiers were Masons. They had questions for the IOR. So did separate parallel parliamentary investigations into Calvi and Sindona that were under way.11,I
On Christmas Eve, a joint Italian-Vatican commission composed of lawyers and bankers was established. To most outsiders, it appeared to be yet another in a growing number of competing probes to find out what had happened. But Marcinkus and other insiders knew its real purpose was to start negotiations over how much the Vatican might have to pay to settle the mess.13
On December 29, the Los Angeles–based center named after famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal charged that Hermann Abs, the Deutsche Bank chairman appointed to the special advisory panel, had been a high-level Nazi collaborator. Rabbi Marvin Heir, head of the Wiesenthal Center, issued a press release in which he asked the Vatican to remove Abs from the committee.14
The charge hit the church unawares. No one inside the city-state had done a background check on someone with such solidly Catholic credentials and respected standing inside Germany’s business sector.
Abs told the Vatican that he had not been a Nazi Party member. In 1972, he claimed, a Stuttgart court awarded him $8,400 from an East German author and a Cologne publisher who charged he had seized Jewish property during World War II and given it to the Nazis. A spokesman for Deutsche Bank also dismissed the charges, saying “Hermann Abs does not respond to slander.”15 But Heir was not dissuaded. He released to the press, and mailed to the Vatican, a 360-page, 1946 U.S. Military Government report that listed Abs on the board of “26 important industrial companies and 14 banking institutions” during the war.16
It was evident that despite being on the defensive for a year over the Sindona, P2, and Calvi scandals, the Vatican had learned little about crisis management and handling the media. It took the church more than a week to respond, and then it was only a telephone call from Monsignor Jorge Mejía, the secretary of the poorly named Secretariat of Relations with Jews. He asked the Wiesenthal Center to produce more evidence. The press-savvy Heir on the other hand had barely gotten off the phone with Monsignor Mejía before calling reporters and complaining about the Vatican delay.17
The Wiesenthal Center had by now leveled more charges, including that Abs had personally benefited from expropriation of Polish and Jewish property and that he had attended I. G. Farben director’s meetings at which both slave labor and Auschwitz were discussed. Father John Pawlikowski, a prominent American theologian, urged the Vatican to “fully investigate” the “accusations against Mr. Abs.”18 As with the major financial probes under way in Italy, the Vatican was hesitant to provide any fresh information, engage its critics, or address issues as they became public.
The church did not like playing by the Wiesenthal Center rules that everything that went on between them also went to the press. After Monsignor Mejía’s request for more evidence was leaked to reporters, the Vatican stayed silent. That also did not work well. On January 11, almost two weeks after the story broke, the Wiesenthal Center announced that a research group had pieced together testimony before a 1945 Senate subcommittee, as well as information from a 1979 biography of Pope John Paul II, to conclude that Abs had been an executive at the company that ran the stone quarry where the Nazis had forced Polish prisoners, including the future Pope, to work breaking rocks during the war.19
As with Marcinkus, the worse the news, the more the church seemingly rallied around Abs. That outsiders wanted him out was more reason for the Vatican to resist. Reporters were not certain whether Pope John Paul was referring to Marcinkus, Abs, or both, when he told them in February that “Your faith must be stronger than what you read in the newspapers, especially in this difficult age. . . . I too read the newspapers. You can read many incredible things in newspapers that have no truth in them.”20 That April, John Paul visited Los Angeles as part of his North American tour. He met with Rabbi Heir and twenty-nine other members of the Wiesenthal Center.
“I made a direct appeal to him, both to remove Abs,” Heir recalled, “as well as to issue an unequivocal message condemning anti-Semitism. It was long overdue, and this was the right time.”21 John Paul had spoken out about anti-Semitism during a 1979 visit to Auschwitz and again after the terrorist bombing of a Rome synagogue in 1982.22 But both fell short of what many Jews thought was necessary to make up for centuries of abusive treatment at the hands of Roman Catholics.
The Pope declined to remove Abs.
“That is a moral travesty,” said Heir. And Heir was “disappointed” that while the Pope said Jews and Christians should work together “to deepen their bonds of friendship,” he did not issue a clear denunciation of anti-Semitism.23
All of the missed opportunities merely amplified that—as one journalist later called it—the Vatican’s “public relations operation [was in] the dark ages.”24
Marcinkus and the IOR, desperate for a top-grade crisis manager, unfortunately knew that better than most.
I. In early December, Italian newspapers ran front-page stories about Clara Calvi’s charge that her husband’s “murder” was “to hide the fact” that the IOR “was bankrupt.” A few months earlier she had said the motive was to hide the “risky operation” her husband had undertaken to arrange “the assumption of the IOR debts by Opus Dei.”12