‘CORRUPTION IS HARD TO COMBAT, because it takes many different forms: when it has been suppressed in one area, it springs up in another. Courage is needed just to denounce it. To eliminate it, together with the resolute determination of the authorities, the generous support of all citizens is needed, sustained by a firm moral conscience.’
From the speech ‘From the Justice
of Each Comes Peace for All’
by Pope John Paul II
1 January 1988
After the attack on the Pope, few people could have prayed more fervently for his full recovery than Roberto Calvi, Bishop Paul Marcinkus, and Licio Gelli, who knew of the arrangements between the Vatican Bank and Banco Ambrosiano. In September 1978, if the billion-dollar scam in operation for six years was to continue, it had been vital to eliminate Pope John Paul I. Karol Wojtyla was a perfect replacement for John Paul I and from October 1978 to 13 May 1981, he continued to protect and support Bishop Paul Marcinkus.
Seven days after the Pope was shot in St Peter’s Square, the chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, Roberto Calvi was arrested. His arrest was the result of carelessness by his great protector Licio Gelli. The police raid had revealed documents that compromised Roberto Calvi, part of Gelli’s blackmail dossiers. Desperate to deflect blame or at least have someone who would share it with the panicking banker, the Calvi family began to phone Marcinkus. Eventually Calvi’s son, Carlo, got through to him. He pleaded with Marcinkus to admit his involvement publicly: ‘The Vatican is its own master. It can volunteer information,’ Carlo Calvi suggested to Marcinkus. He received a bleak reply: ‘If the IOR accepts any responsibility it will not only be the Vatican’s image that will suffer. You’ll lose as well, for our problems are your problems too.’
Indeed they were; the two banks had been interlocked for years. Bishop Marcinkus was in a bind: to tell the truth would bring down on the Vatican the wrath of Italy; the alternative was to leave Calvi vulnerable in the hope that the Vatican’s deep and continuing involvement would remain secret and that after Calvi’s trial he could go back to business as usual. Bishop Marcinkus chose the latter course. Undoubtedly he based his decision on the fact that the charges against Calvi involved only two of his myriad illegal transactions, when Calvi had sold himself shares in Toro and Credito Varesino at vastly inflated prices. This had involved illegally exporting currency out of Italy, an offence on which the Milan magistrates were hoping to secure a conviction. Marcinkus reasoned that if everyone kept calm the game could continue. Calvi, sitting in Lodi prison, was unimpressed by the messages from his sanguine partner in the Vatican. International bankers shook their heads in disbelief as Calvi continued to run Banco Ambrosiano from inside prison.
On 7 July 1981, the Italian Government charged Michele Sindona with ordering the murder of Giorgio Ambrosoli. Calvi’s reaction to the news was particularly interesting: he tried to commit suicide the following evening. He swallowed a quantity of barbiturates and slashed his wrists. He later admitted he acted in a moment ‘. . . of lucid desperation. Because there was not a trace of justice in all that was being done against me. And I am not talking about the trial.’ If he had really wanted to end his life, he had merely to obtain the quantity of digitalis recommended by Gelli by having it smuggled into prison. His trial judges were unimpressed.
On 20 July he was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment and a fine of sixteen billion lire. His lawyers immediately lodged an appeal and he was freed on bail. Within a week of his release, the board of Banco Ambrosiano unanimously reconfirmed him as chairman of the bank and gave him a standing ovation. While the international bankers continued to shake their heads in disbelief, as Marcinkus had predicted, it was indeed business as usual. The Bank of Italy also allowed Calvi to return while the Italian Government made no move to end the extraordinary spectacle of a man convicted of banking offences running one of the country’s biggest banks. One banker did raise objections: Ambrosiano’s general manager, Roberto Rosone, pleaded with the Bank of Italy to approve the removal of Calvi and replace him with the previous chairman, Ruggiero Mozzana. The Bank of Italy declined to intervene.
The second threat to Calvi’s banking empire came from its own branches in Peru and Nicaragua. To counter it, Calvi enlisted the help of Marcinkus, who had declined to give Calvi any support, public or private, during his trial. He was now about to give him every assistance to ensure that the criminal fraud perpetuated by both men should remain secret. During the time of Calvi’s trial, the Vatican announced that Pope John Paul II had appointed a commission of fifteen cardinals to study the finances of the Roman Catholic Church. The function of the commission was to recommend improvements to increase Vatican revenue. Bishop Paul Marcinkus was not included as a member of the commission but he obviously felt that as head of the Vatican Bank he could nevertheless make a powerful contribution.
He held a number of secret meetings with Calvi which resulted in the Vatican Bank officially admitting an increase in its outstanding debts of nearly $1 billion. This was the sum owed to the Calvi banks in Peru and Nicaragua on a series of enormous loans. The securities backing these huge debts were negligible. The Latin American banks, in spite of being Calvi subsidiaries, were finally displaying a little independence. They wanted greater cover. Who picked up the bill in the event of a default? Who exactly owned these mysterious Panamanian companies who had received the loans? Who had borrowed so much with so little? The Peruvians were particularly anxious, having loaned some $900 million.
In August 1981, Calvi and Marcinkus perpetrated their biggest fraud. The documents would become known as ‘letters of comfort’. The letters were written on the headed paper of the Istituto per le Opere di Religione, Vatican City, and were dated 1 September 1981. They were addressed to Banco Ambrosiano Andino in Lima, Peru, and Ambrosiano Group Banco Comercial in Nicaragua. On the instructions of Bishop Paul Marcinkus, they were signed by Luigi Mennini and Pelligrino De Strobel. They read:
‘Gentlemen:
This is to confirm that we directly or indirectly control
the following entities:
Manic S.A. Luxembourg
Astolfine S.A. Panama
Nordeurop Establishment, Liechtenstein
U.T.C. United Trading Corporation, Panama
Erin S.A. Panama
Bellatrix S.A. Panama
Belrose S.A.
Starfield S.A. Panama
We also confirm our awareness of their indebtedness towards yourselves as of 10 June 1981 as per attached statement of accounts.’
The attached accounts showed that the ‘indebtedness’ to the Lima branch alone was $907 million.
The revelations allowed the bank directors in Nicaragua and Peru to relax. They had now clear admission that the massive debts were the responsibility of the Vatican Bank and the Roman Catholic Church would stand as guarantor. No banker could wish for a better security.
There was just one small problem: the directors in Peru and Nicaragua knew only half of the story. There was another letter, this one from Roberto Calvi to the Vatican Bank dated 27 August 1981. It was safely in Marcinkus’s hands before he acknowledged that the Vatican Bank was liable for the debts of $1 billion. Calvi’s letter made a formal request for the letters of comfort in which the Vatican would admit that it owned the Luxembourg, Liechtenstein and Panamanian companies. This admission, Calvi assured the Vatican, ‘would entail no liabilities for the IOR’. His letter concluded with a paragraph confirming that whatever happened, the Vatican Bank would ‘suffer no future damage or loss’. Hence the Vatican Bank was secretly absolved from debts to which it was about to admit.
For Calvi’s secret letter to Marcinkus to have any legal validity, its existence and precise contents would have had to be revealed to the directors in Peru and Nicaragua. Further, the arrangement between Calvi and Marcinkus would have had to be agreed upon by the majority of the directors in Milan. Moreover, to constitute a legal agreement, it would have been essential for the contents of both letters to have been public knowledge to all the shareholders of Banco Ambrosiano, including the many small shareholders in the Milan area. The two letters and the agreement between Calvi and Marcinkus constitute a clear case of criminal fraud by both men. On 28 September 1981, the third anniversary of Pope John Paul I’s death, Marcinkus was promoted by Luciani’s successor. He was appointed Pro-President of the Pontifical Commission for the State of Vatican City. This virtually made him Governor of Vatican City. He still retained his position as head of the Vatican Bank and the new post gave him automatic elevation to Archbishop.
Meanwhile Calvi had learned for the first time of Secretary of State Cardinal Casaroli’s investigations into the joint activities of the Vatican Bank and Banco Ambrosiano. Casaroli’s contact within Italian intelligence was after all also a member of P2. When Roberto Calvi was further advised that the Vatican investigation went back to the brief reign of Pope John Paul I he became deeply alarmed.
My previous book In God’s Name concluded that Pope John Paul I had been murdered. Some within the Vatican observed that the evidence ‘lacked a smoking gun’. In fact, the crucial evidence, the reports on the financial corruption that Albino Luciani had been studying at the time of his death, had been spirited away on Cardinal Villot’s orders. Roberto Calvi discovered the existence of at least part of that smoking gun in late 1981. This was the Vagnozzi dossier, the report carried out on the orders of Pope John Paul I into the Vatican Bank and related matters. Calvi now knew that on the basis of the dossier, additional reports and Luciani’s own knowledge over six years of the Marcinkus-Calvi axis, on the evening of 27 September 1978 Pope John Paul I had instructed his Secretary of State Cardinal Jean Villot to remove Marcinkus from the Vatican Bank the following morning. Just a few hours later the healthy, far from aged Pope was dead.
John Paul I had taken much of his personal knowledge with him to the grave but the Vagnozzi dossier was still in existence. It remained a powerful indictment of banking corruption but more importantly it was physical evidence of motive to murder a Pope. As soon as Calvi learnt about the dossier he became desperate to acquire it. Working through middlemen and an ex-senator, Calvi established that an expert on Vatican affairs, Giorgio Di Nunzio, had a copy that he was willing to sell. Calvi bargained his price down from $3 million to $1.2 million. Having acquired the report Roberto Calvi kept it close to him for the rest of his life.
At this point, despite the many demands upon his time and Ambrosiano’s money, Roberto Calvi responded to yet another plea for help: from Pope John Paul II in person. By late 1981 the situation in Poland had deteriorated markedly. A senior member of Solidarity flew to Rome on ‘union business’ and in the American Embassy he briefed an Italian trade unionist, Luigi Scricciolo, and the United States Ambassador-at-large, General Vernon Walters. The main item on the agenda was the need to organise funding for the embattled Solidarity movement. Following this General Walters also had a meeting with the Pope where the two had a very wide-ranging discussion that inevitably included the Polish situation. Subsequently Bishop Paul Maria Hnilica, acting as a personal emissary of Pope John Paul II, had a meeting with Calvi. The result was the start of a black operation to funnel money into Poland. Calvi and Marcinkus activated the scheme during early 1982. Subsequently Calvi discussed this papal-inspired money-laundering exercise with his friend and business associate Flavio Carboni, who was secretly tape-recording the conversation. On tape Calvi can be clearly heard:
‘Marcinkus must watch out for Casaroli, who is head of the group that opposes him. If Casaroli should meet one of those financiers in New York who are working for Marcinkus, sending money to Solidarity, the Vatican would collapse. Or even if Casaroli should find just one of those pieces of paper that I know of – goodbye Marcinkus. Goodbye Wojtyla. Goodbye Solidarity. The last operation would be enough, the one for twenty million dollars. I’ve also told Andreotti but it’s not clear which side he is on. If things in Italy go a certain way, the Vatican will have to hire a building in Washington, behind the Pentagon. A far cry from St Peter’s.’
Secret payments to the Solidarity movement were destined to become an issue of great controversy in later years. Vast amounts of money vanished somewhere between Italy and Poland. If any one man still living knows the truth about the Banco Ambrosiano millions and exactly where they went it is Licio Gelli. After the collapse of Calvi’s bank Gelli succinctly observed, ‘If anyone is looking for the missing millions, they should look in Poland.’
While Calvi was busy in January 1982 organising the illegal movement of millions of dollars on behalf of John Paul II, the Pope received a letter from a group of Milanese shareholders. Dated 12 January 1982, the letter was long, with a highly detailed list of appendices. The signatories were particularly distressed that the previously staid and devoutly Roman Catholic Banco Ambrosiano and the Vatican Bank had created such an unholy alliance. The letter complained:
‘The IOR is not only a shareholder in the Banco Ambrosiano. It is an associate and partner of Roberto Calvi. It is revealed by a growing number of cases that Calvi stands astride one of the main crossroads of the most degenerate Freemasonry (P2) and of Mafia circles, as a result of inheriting Sindona’s mantle. This has been done once again with the involvement of people generously nurtured and cared for by the Vatican, such as Ortolani, who moves between the Vatican and powerful groups in the international underworld.
Being a partner of Calvi means being a partner of Gelli and Ortolani, given that both guide and influence him strongly. The Vatican is therefore, whether it likes it or not, through its association with Calvi also an active partner of Gelli and Ortolani.’
The letter contained an appeal to Pope John Paul II for help and guidance. Although the Pope spoke many languages, including Italian, the Milanese thoughtfully had the letter translated into Polish and also took steps to ensure that neither the Curia in general nor the Secretary of State in particular could prevent the letter from reaching the Pope. Despite their efforts, the letter was ignored. The Milanese shareholders were not even graced with a formal acknowledgement.
Although the Pope refused to make a public statement on the activities of Roberto Calvi, Marcinkus had no inhibitions. In March 1982 he granted a rare interview to the Italian magazine Panorama. His comments about his business associate Roberto Calvi were particularly illuminating, just eight months after Calvi had been fined $13.7 million and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment and only seven months after the Vatican and Marcinkus (according to the Vatican version) had discovered to their horror that Calvi had taken over $1 billion and left the Vatican to pay the bill. ‘Calvi merits our trust,’ declared Marcinkus,
‘I have no reason to doubt. We have no intention of ceding the Banco Ambrosiano shares in our possession: and furthermore, we have other investments in this group, for example in Banca Cattolica which are going very well.’
Although the Pope could not bring himself to give Calvi a public vote of confidence, in private he fully endorsed the continuing Vatican relationship and even envisaged giving Calvi total control over Vatican finances. Calvi’s wife, Clara, has sworn on oath that around this time the Pope gave Calvi a private audience where they had discussed the problem of the Vatican’s billion-dollar debt (incurred largely because of Calvi, Gelli, Ortolani, and Marcinkus) and according to Clara Calvi, the Pope made Calvi a promise: ‘If you can extricate the Vatican from this debt you can have full control of rebuilding our finances.’
Notwithstanding this extraordinary Papal approval, Calvi was acutely aware that he needed shareholder confidence. His position was even more threatened by the fact that his deputy chairman, Roberto Rosone, in the Banco Ambrosiano was on the side of the would-be reformers. He therefore discussed the situation with his close friend and fellow P2 member, Flavio Carboni. The range of Carboni’s ‘friends’ and contacts was wide. It included such men as the two rulers of Rome’s underworld, Danilo Abbruciati and Ernesto Diotavelli.
On the morning of 7 April 1982, Rosone left his apartment at a few minutes before 8.00 a.m. Fortunately for Rosone he happened to live directly above a branch of Ambrosiano which like all Italian banks even in the early 1980s was protected on a twenty-four-hour basis by armed guards. As Rosone emerged into the street a man approached and began firing. Wounded in the legs, Rosone collapsed to the pavement. The armed guards retaliated. Moments later the assailant was also laid out dead on the ground. His name was Danilo Abbruciati.
The day after the attempted murder, Flavio Carboni paid the surviving leader of the Rome underworld $530,000. Simultaneously Roberto Calvi appeared at the bedside of his wounded deputy chairman complete with the statutory bunch of flowers. ‘Madonna! What a world of madmen. They want to frighten us, Roberto, so that they can get their hands on a group worth 20,000 billion lire.’
A month after the attempted murder of his deputy, the screws tightened further on Calvi. Consob, the Milan Stock Exchange Regulatory Agency, finally forced him to list his shares publicly on the stock market. Such a listing would represent the ultimate nightmare for a man whose prime talent was making money vanish from Ambrosiano’s assets. At the end of May the Bank of Italy wrote to Calvi and his directors. They demanded that the board give a full account of foreign lending by the Ambrosiano Group. The board of directors, in a pitifully late show of resistance to Calvi, voted eleven to three to comply with the Central Bank’s demand.
Licio Gelli, who had secretly returned from Argentina to Europe on 10 May, was also making demands on Calvi. Gelli was in the market for more Exocet missiles to help his adopted country in their Falklands war with the United Kingdom. With the bulk of Argentina’s foreign assets frozen and an official arms embargo operating, Gelli was obliged to turn to the black market arms dealers, who displayed some scepticism about Gelli’s ability to pay what he was offering for the deadly missiles. He was offering $4 million per missile, with a minimum order of twenty. At six times the official price there was considerable interest in the order, subject to Gelli raising the necessary money. He was well known to the arms dealers as a man who had previously purchased radar equipment, planes, guns, tanks and the original Exocets on behalf of Argentina. Now he needed at least $80 million urgently as the war in the Falklands hung in the balance.
Thus Calvi, already juggling the needs of Pope John Paul II, his Mafia clientele, his irate shareholders, the Consob watchdogs on the Milan Stock Exchange, a recalcitrant board of directors and an incompetent assassin who had succeeded in getting himself killed, yet again found Gelli with his hand out. Calvi saw only two avenues of survival. Either the Vatican had to help him fill the ever-growing hole that was appearing in the Bank’s assets or Gelli, the ‘Puppet Master’, must yet again demonstrate that he still controlled the Italian power structure and save his P2 paymaster from ruin. Calvi discussed the options with Flavio Carboni, who continued secretly to run tape on their conversations.
It is clear from Calvi’s remarks that he considered the Vatican Bank should fill the huge hole in Banco Ambrosiano if for no other reason than that they were legally obligated. Calvi observed:
“The Vatican should honour its commitments by selling part of the wealth controlled by the IOR. It is an enormous patrimony. I estimate it to be $10 billion. To help the Ambrosiano the IOR could start to sell in chunks of a billion at a time.”
If any layman in the world should have known the worth of the Vatican it should have been Roberto Calvi. He was privy to virtually all of its financial secrets. For over a decade he had been the man to whom the Vatican had turned in financial matters. I have previously noted that at the time Albino Luciani became Pope in 1978 the wealth controlled by both sections of APSA and the Vatican Bank was conservatively estimated to be in the region of $3 billion. Now in early 1982 the highly conservative Roberto Calvi placed the patrimony of the IOR alone at $10 billion.
Enlarging on the theme of his conversation with Flavio Carboni, Robert Calvi wrote to Pope John Paul II on 5 June: ‘. . . I have thought a lot, Holiness, and have concluded that you are my last hope . . .’ Calvi warned the Pope of the imminent collapse of Banco Ambrosiano and predicted that in that event ‘The Church will suffer the gravest damage.’ He listed just a few of the financial operations he had funded on behalf of the Vatican, in the East, the West and in South America where he had ‘created banks to fund the effort to halt the expansion of Marxist ideologies’. He complained bitterly that the ‘authority for which I have always shown the utmost respect and obedience’ – the Vatican – had now ‘betrayed and abandoned me’. The letter was a desperate appeal for help. Like the devout Catholic shareholders of Milan, Calvi ensured that the letter was placed in the Pope’s hands and, as with those shareholders, his letter was ignored.
In spite of the formidable range of problems confronting him at the time, Roberto Calvi was initially calm when I interviewed him by telephone during the evening of 9 June 1982. When he asked what the central subject of the book was and I told him, ‘It’s a book on the life of Pope John Paul I, Papa Luciani,’ Calvi’s manner suddenly underwent a complete change. The calmness and control vanished, to be replaced with a torrent of loud remarks. His voice became excited and very emotional. My interpreter began to translate the stream of words for me. ‘Who has sent you against me? Who has told you to do this thing? Always I pay. Always I pay. How do you know Gelli? What do you want? How much do you want?’ I protested that I had never met Licio Gelli. Calvi had barely stopped to listen to me before he began again. ‘Whoever you are, you will not write this book. I can tell you nothing. Do not call me again. Ever.’
Eight days later the body of Roberto Calvi was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in the City of London. Within days a hole was discovered in Banco Ambrosiano Milan worth $1.3 billion. The coroner’s jury that first considered the death of Calvi delivered a verdict of suicide. The hearing had been compressed into one day, key witnesses were missing, and several of the witnesses that did testify were obviously lying under oath. Hardly a scrap of the highly relevant background evidence was introduced. In truth, Calvi was ‘suicided’ by his P2 friends – yet another example of the very high risks that are attendant if one pursues a career in Italian banking.
After a number of subsequent inquests, investigations, at least two exhumations of Calvi’s body and several further autopsies, in February 2003, nearly twenty-one years later, a judicial investigation in Rome concluded that Roberto Calvi had indeed been murdered. In October 2005, Calvi’s good friend and business associate Flavio Carboni, the former Mafia financial director Pippo Calo and Ernesto Diotavelli were put on trial for the murder of the man whom Pope John Paul II had wished to see in total control of Vatican finances. We may soon officially learn the identity of the senior Vatican official who was present when the decision to murder Roberto Calvi was taken.
Following Calvi’s death there was a much-publicised run on Banco Ambrosiano. Less publicised – in fact it occurred in total secrecy – was the run by account-holders in the Vatican Bank within the Italian Establishment who were aware of the relationship between the Pope’s bank and Calvi. Many both in and out of the Italian Government knew that Calvi had had help in performing his billion-dollar vanishing trick. The names of Licio Gelli and Umberto Ortolani were placed rapidly in the frame along with others including Archbishop Paul Marcinkus but the Vatican would have none of it and they declared that Marcinkus hardly knew Calvi. The Vatican Bank were not responsible for a single cent of the missing money. The Roman Curia refused to accept judicial papers that the Italian Government attempted to serve not only on Marcinkus but a further three Vatican Bank officials.
By September 1982 Marcinkus, the man who never left the Pope’s side during his visits earlier that year to Britain and Argentina, had become a virtual prisoner within the Vatican. He was replaced as organiser and advance guard on international Papal trips, yet the Pope refused to replace him at the bank. Marcinkus continued to function as the bank’s head, whose own lawyers, after a great deal of prodding from the Italian Government, created a commission of enquiry.
It dragged on fitfully, yet the evidence of total complicity between the bank and Calvi’s criminal schemes was overwhelming. Some of it has been recorded within these pages, a great deal more within In God’s Name. Predictably those who benefited most from the aftermath were the lawyers. Apart from those sitting on the enquiry for the Vatican Bank, there were those assisting the Vatican City with a second enquiry, and then there were those who were helping the Italian Government with a third enquiry.
The Vatican City investigation comprised an ‘objective’ commission of ‘four wise men’. Two of them by their very presence seriously undermined their eventual findings. One was Philippe de Weck, the former Chairman of UBS Zurich, the bank which was then holding $55 million of the stolen money on behalf of Licio Gelli, over $30 million of the stolen money on behalf of the late Roberto Calvi and Flavio Carboni and holding $2 million of the stolen money on behalf of Carboni’s Austrian mistress, Manuela Kleinszig. Philippe de Weck was also at the centre of what the French called ‘the sniffer planes affair’, which swindled the French government out of at least $60 million during the 1980s on an aerial device which could ‘smell’ oil and minerals and nuclear submarines. The swindle had links to a Calvi company, Ultrafin. De Weck was also closely associated with Opus Dei, who would play a key role in subsequent events.
Another member of the Vatican commission was Hermann Abs who was head of the Deutsche Bank from 1940 to 1945. The Deutsche Bank was the Nazis’ bank throughout the Second World War and was in effect Hitler’s paymaster. During this period Abs was also on the board of IG Farben, the chemical and industrial conglomerate that gave such whole-hearted assistance to Hitler’s war efforts. Abs had also participated at board meetings of IG Farben when members discussed the use of slave labour at a Farben rubber plant located in the Auschwitz concentration camp. The thought of Hitler’s banker investigating God’s bank provoked a wide protest. Letters and information poured in to President Reagan in late 1982, especially from furious Jewish communities. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles produced in a 360-page report a history of Abs that overwhelmingly demonstrated his unfitness to serve, concluding:
‘Hermann J Abs, a key official of the Nazi war machine, does not have the moral credentials to represent a spiritual institution such as the Vatican. Whatever expertise he might bring to banking is irrevocably nullified by his active involvement in the Third Reich, a regime universally condemned for the brutal murder and torture of millions of innocent men, women and children.’ [Italics in original.]
As so often with awkward letters and reports, the Vatican ignored these demands. Vatican officials took the view that Abs, who had come heavily recommended by the German Cardinal Höffner, had failed to stimulate any protests when for ten years he had served as an observer for the Vatican on the International Atomic Energy Commission. They claimed he was one of ‘the best minds in the banking business’. A copy of the Wiesenthal dossier was given to Monsignor Jorge Mejia, the Secretary of the Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations with Judaism. Mejia discussed the controversy with the Pope and there the matter rested.
The Vatican’s ‘four wise men’ duly concluded that the ‘Vatican Bank bore no responsibility for the collapse, nor did the bank have any financial obligations towards the bankrupt Ambrosiano.’ At the same time, the College of Cardinals convened in Rome for an extraordinary consistory. The purpose of such rarely called gatherings was to provide the cardinals with an opportunity to give advice to the Pontiff. Inevitably the agenda was dominated by the Banco Ambrosiano crash and the implications not just for the Vatican Bank but the entire Vatican State. The cardinals knew that the ‘not guilty’ verdict of the ‘four wise men’ was not the end of the matter but only a marker put down by the Vatican as an initial negotiating position with the Italian Government. There had been much talk that Church finances would be crippled by the crash, but again this was yet another negotiating position. In fact, its banks and investment arms were awash with money.
As in August 1978 and October 1978, so yet again in November 1982, many cardinals wanted to know why Archbishop Marcinkus was still running the bank. Their questions were stifled by others who knew that it was the Pope and the Pope alone who had constantly blocked the removal of Marcinkus. The consistory also talked of reforming the Roman Curia – an equally futile ambition while Wojtyla was in power. One Vatican resident bitterly observed of this situation, ‘The Holy Father often talks of reforming the Curia. Just talks about it. No action, just words.’ During his closing address the Pope referred to the many public questions being asked about the Vatican Bank and its relationship with Calvi’s Ambrosiano. He said,
‘The exact nature of that relationship must be approached with great prudence . . . It is a complex question which has now been weighed in all parts. The Vatican is prepared to do everything required to resolve the matter with a mind to the whole truth being revealed.’
This statement did not prevent the Pope and his principal advisors from continuing to resist every effort made by the Italian Government and its Justice Department to question the Vatican Bank’s President Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, and his colleagues within the bank, Luigi Mennini and Pelligrino De Strobel. All three were wanted by the Italian judiciary to stand trial yet the Pope’s advisors blocked access to them for years.
The Pope was blissfully untroubled by the scandal and the missing millions. Discussing it with close colleagues, he laughed as he observed, ‘I can’t wait to see how they get out of this.’ The ‘they’ in question were certain members of the Curia. The thought that as ultimately it was his bank, and therefore the legal and moral responsibilities were his, never occurred to Wojtyla.
While the Pope talked of his desire for the whole truth to be revealed, Marcinkus was in secret returning billions of lire to the Italian banks within the Ambrosiano group. Aided by Mennini and De Strobel, his efforts to conceal the extent of the criminal activities began less than one month after the murder of Roberto Calvi. Banca Cattolica del Veneto was owed $31 million and the first tranche made its return journey to Venice on 15 July 1982. By the time Marcinkus had finished that particular exercise the amount with interest had risen to over $35 million. When the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano announced on 17 October, ‘The Institute for Religious Works has not received any amount of money from the Ambrosiano group nor from Roberto Calvi and thus nothing has to be returned,’ Archbishop Marcinkus was returning the loot as fast as he dared. A further $47 million went back to the Ambrosiano head office in Milan. There was still the $213 million that the Vatican Bank owed to the Calvi banks of Peru and Nassau but a man can only do so much laundering at once, with so many eyes on him. The Pope meanwhile assured concerned visitors that ‘I am sure that it will be all happily resolved.’
The resolution was a long time in coming. The Italian media had a field day as headlines demanded, ‘Holy Father give us back our millions.’ Negotiations continued throughout 1983 and into the following year far away from the public gaze. A few months before the second anniversary of Calvi’s murder and the subsequent crash of his empire a deal was announced between the Vatican and the large consortium of international banks that had been taken to the cleaners by Calvi. By mid-May 1984, the details of the deal were clear. The international banks were going to get back approximately two thirds of the $600 million they had loaned Calvi’s Luxembourg holding company. Of that sum $244 million would be paid by the Vatican Bank.
Cardinal Casaroli had done extremely well as chief negotiator for the Vatican. He had urged, indeed insisted, that the Vatican would have to make significant recompense. The payment was made on 30 June 1984 by the Vatican ‘on the basis of non-culpability’ but ‘in recognition of moral involvement’. The $244 million was easily acquired. Firstly Marcinkus sold Vianni, a construction company. He had in 1980 sold two million shares in Vianni to a Panamanian front company, Laramie, already owned by the Vatican Bank. The money to pay for the non-existent sale of the two million shares, $20 million, had come from Calvi. Now in 1984 Marcinkus sold the same shares again plus a further four million shares, thus relinquishing Vatican control over Vianni. In return he acquired $60 million.
The sale of the Banco di Roma per Svizzera in Lugano released further funds and the balance of the compensation payment to the European banks came from the Vatican’s own in-house secret society: Opus Dei. Opus Dei had been negotiating with Roberto Calvi at the time of his murder. The sect was prepared to buy control of Banco Ambrosiano and cover the $1.3 billion hole.
Those who ordered Roberto Calvi’s murder had not believed the Milanese banker’s assurances that the money would be found and that all debts would be covered. With Calvi dead and the hole exposed, by September 1982 some of the most senior members of Opus Dei assured the Pope that when the debris was cleared away and the cost to the Vatican clarified, Opus Dei would be there with the necessary funds. In return for putting the outstanding balance on the table, Opus Dei gained something that they had craved for years. The Pope did not even wait until the financial matters were resolved. Within two months of the Opus Dei offer Pope John Paul II granted the sect recognition as a ‘personal prelature’. This status ensured that this ultra-secret society was answerable to no one within the Roman Catholic Churches except the Pope and the Pope alone. No local bishop could discipline or sanction Opus Dei. Overnight Opus Dei became in effect a global movement without specific diocese. So it remains.
After the multi-million-dollar settlement in mid-1984 the word in the Vatican Village was that Archbishop Paul Marcinkus would be removed before the end of the year. A bank President who has been a partner in the criminal collapse of a string of banks and incurred for his own bank debts running into hundreds of millions of dollars could hardly expect a year-end bonus. Yet again the Pope refused to remove Marcinkus. In his defence, it has been argued that Paul Marcinkus was a ‘virgin banker’, a decent man gulled by criminals. But in reality, in a decade of business partnership with Calvi, Marcinkus’s gambits displayed an extremely astute and devious mind. After Calvi’s murder, he very secretly laundered huge sums of money back to creditors of the Banco Ambrosiano, to conceal the magnitude of his crimes.
Nor, it has to be said, was the Pope a financial innocent. Cardinal Edmund Casimir Szoka, former Archbishop of Detroit, was Head of the Prefecture of Economic Affairs of the Holy See (the Catholic Church’s Treasury Secretary) when he made these comments about the Pope: ‘He’s very sharp, catches on quickly to the figures and accounting. He follows it closely, asks questions. Don’t forget, he was a bishop of a diocese and once had similar responsibilities.’ Though Wojtyla had journeyed through his religious career without benefit of a bank account or personal funds, he was very proficient in financial matters. The needs of his huge archdiocese of Cracow demanded an expertise of a very high order. Its wealth was considerable; unfortunately the diocese was asset-rich and cash-poor. A cash flow problem was a constant companion. Despite all of these difficulties and a great many others the Cracow Archdiocese under Karol Wojtyla not only survived but thrived financially. During the entire period of Wojtyla’s episcopate not one programme or initiative had to be dropped for lack of funds. This was a real achievement, and it gave Karol Wojtyla a thorough training in accounting and finance before he became Pope.
Meanwhile ‘the Shark’, Michele Sindona, hailed by Pope Paul VI as the saviour of the Vatican, was serving out a twenty-five-year prison sentence which had begun in June 1980. He had been found guilty on sixty-five counts, including fraud, conspiracy, perjury, issuing false bank statements and misappropriation of funds in what was at that time the biggest banking disaster in United States history. By 1984 he had settled into a comfortable prison routine in New York State. He was wanted in a variety of other places for other alleged crimes, including many of which I had publicly accused him. In September 1984 the Justice Department found the evidence on these specific crimes so compelling that he was extradited to Milan for trial on charges for the fraudulent bankruptcy of his own financial empire and the contract murder of Giorgio Ambrosoli.
In the light of my central contention within In God’s Name that Pope John Paul I had been poisoned, Sindona’s first reaction upon hearing he was to be extradited back to Milan was particularly interesting.
‘If I finally get there, if no one does me in first – and I’ve already heard talk of giving me a poisoned cup of coffee – I’ll make my trial into a real circus. I’ll tell everything.’ [Author’s italics.]
Back in Milan prison he was visited by other members of P2. Subsequently he had a change of mind about telling everything. He requested that his trial on the fraud charges should proceed without his presence in the courtroom. Surprisingly, this request was granted. In 1985, a Milan court found Sindona guilty of fraudulent bankruptcy and sentenced him to a term of fifteen years’ imprisonment. On 18 March 1986 another Milan court found Michele Sindona guilty of ordering the murder of Giorgio Ambrosoli and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Before he could commence either of these sentences he was due to be returned to the United States to serve the remainder of the initial twenty-five-year sentence. Confronted with the realisation that he would undoubtedly die in prison, the sixty-six-year-old man made a decision. He would break his Mafia oath of Omerta. He would tell all. Italian police intelligence sources advised me that he intended to barter information on a wide range of events including the circumstances surrounding the death of Albino Luciani, Pope John Paul I.
On Thursday, 20 March, after drinking his breakfast coffee he screamed, ‘They have poisoned me!’ He died two days later on 22 March.
The murder of Sindona is a classic example of the power of P2. Because of fears that an attempt might be made on his life, Sindona was being held in a maximum-security prison. He was subjected to constant twenty-four-hour TV surveillance, there were never less than three guards with him, and his food and drink came into the prison in sealed containers.
Luigi Mennini, the Managing Director of the Vatican Bank, was more fortunate than Calvi and Sindona. In July 1984 he was sentenced by a Milan court to seven years’ imprisonment after being convicted of fraud and other charges related to Il Crack Sindona. Mennini – a man described by close associates as ‘rabid to trade and speculate. His behaviour was that of a compulsive gambler, gambling with someone else’s money’ – remained under the protection of the Pope as did fellow Vatican Bank executives Marcinkus and Pelligrino De Strobel.
Double standards continued apace throughout the 1980s. While he continued to give sanctuary to the convicted and the fugitives from Italian justice, Pope John Paul II lectured the Swiss on banking ethics. In July 1984 he told them, ‘The world of finance, too, is a world of human beings, our world, subject to the consciences of all of us.’ While the Holy Father roundly condemned apartheid, the Vatican Bank was secretly loaning $172 million to official agencies of the South African apartheid regime.
Although his P2 masonic network was theoretically in ruins, Licio Gelli continued to demonstrate his resilience. In August 1982 Gelli began to encounter problems with one of his secret bank accounts in Switzerland. Every time that Gelli, still in South Africa, attempted to transfer funds, the account failed to respond accordingly. The USB bank in Geneva advised him that he would have to appear personally. Using one of several false passports that the Argentinian military junta had created for him, he flew to Madrid and then Geneva on 13 September 1982. He duly presented documentation and was advised that there would be a short delay. Minutes later he was arrested. His account had been frozen at the request of the Italian Government.
The account in question had been created for Gelli by Roberto Calvi and the Milanese banker had poured over $100 million into it. At the time of his arrest Gelli had been attempting to transfer the remaining $55 million in the account to Uruguay. Extradition proceedings began but, as always when a member of P2 was involved, they took a very long time. By the summer of 1983 Gelli was still fighting extradition from Champ Dollon Swiss prison. With a general election imminent in Italy, the parliamentary investigation into P2 was suspended, allowing the Christian Democrats to field at least five P2 members at the election.
Signorina Tina Anselmi, who had chaired the parliamentary commission, was asked her views on P2 after two years’ intensive study. She said,
‘P2 is by no means dead. It still has power. It is working in the institutions. It is moving in society. It has money, means and instruments still at its disposal. It still has fully operative power centres in South America. It is also still able to condition, at least in part, Italian political life.’
The evidence overwhelmingly confirmed the validity of Signorina Anselmi’s statements. When news of Gelli’s arrest became known in Argentina, Admiral Emilio Massera, a member of the local ruling junta, remarked, ‘Signor Gelli has rendered invaluable service to Argentina. This country has much to thank him for and will forever be in his debt.’ Admiral Massera, like General Carlos Suarez Mason, the First Army commander, and Jose Lope Rega, the organiser of the Argentine death squads, was a member of the Argentine section of P2. In Uruguay, P2 membership included the former Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, General Gregorio Alvarez.
If anyone in Italy or elsewhere considered that Tina Anselmi was merely attempting to score political points before an election, they must have received a jolt on 10 August 1983. Licio Gelli escaped. The Swiss authorities, attempting to cover their deep embarrassment, laid the entire blame at the feet of one corrupt guard, Umberto Cerdana, who officially took a derisory bribe of just over £6,000 from Gelli. He was driven first to France by his son in a hired BMW, and then the pair were transported by an unwitting helicopter pilot to Monte Carlo where Gelli hoped to get emergency dental treatment. His search for a dentist took him to Uruguay, via a yacht belonging to Francesco Pazienza, a man who claimed to have been a good friend of the late Roberto Calvi. Gelli finally settled in a ranch a few miles north of Montevideo. He was wanted in many countries, accused of many crimes, but the mass of information that he had so diligently acquired over the years ensured his continued protection.
The Italian election in June 1983 resulted in Signor Bettino Craxi, one of the many beneficiaries of Calvi’s largesse, becoming Prime Minister. Told of Gelli’s escape he said, ‘The flight of Gelli confirms that the Grand Master has a network of powerful friends.’ Just how powerful has been demonstrated again and again by l’intoccabile – the ‘untouchable’. Re-arrest would be followed by a reopening of the cell door. When he was finally put behind bars in early 1999 he applied for and was granted a change of location from a prison to his villa on the grounds of his health.
Through all this, through the murders, the imprisonments, the fines, the manhunts, the media battering, the Vatican Three continued in their posts, making money for the Pope, despite the universal condemnation of his bank and its senior staff. Wojtyla acted upon his own advice, given to Marcinkus when his banker had come complaining about the ‘persecution’ by his critics. ‘Ignore them.’