PHILIP WILLAN has worked as a freelance journalist in Rome for more than 20 years and has specialized in covering the murky side of Italian cold war politics. He contributed research to David Yallop’s best-selling book In God’s Name, on the alleged murder of Pope John Paul I and he later helped Charles Raw with his research for The Money Changers, an examination of the relationship between the Vatican and the Banco Ambrosiano, and the events leading up to Roberto Calvi’s death. His first book, Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy was published by Constable in 1991.

THE LAST SUPPER

The Mafia, the Masons and the

Killing of Roberto Calvi

PHILIP WILLAN

ROBINSON

London

Constable & Robinson Ltd

55–56 Russell Square

London WC1B 4HP

www.constablerobinson.com

First published in the UK by Robinson,

an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2007

Copyright © Philip Willan 2007

The right of Philip Willan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

Publication Data is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-84529-296-6

eISBN 978-1-47211-223-1

Printed and bound in the EU

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Cover photographs: Roberto Calvi (centre) AFP/Getty Images.;

Roberto Calvi (bottom) TopFoto. Blackfrairs Bridge, Corbis.;

Cover design: Simon Levy

To my parents

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Notes on Text

List of Abbreviations

Chronology

The Cast

Introduction

Prologue: Dinner at San Lorenzo’s

1   The Hanged Man

2   Source ‘Podgora’

3   God’s Banker

4   The Ministry of Fear

5   The Bologna Bombing

6   Don Michele

7   The Secret Network

8   Meeting Licio

9   Vatican Entanglements

10   The Gorilla

11   Enter Carboni, Armed with a Cheese

12   The British Connections

13   On the Road

14   London

15   Water Under the Bridge

16   Slow Progress

17   Trials and Tribulations

18   The Politics

Notes

Index

List of Illustrations

The banker, Roberto Calvi

(Courtesy of Carlo Calvi)

Roberto Calvi in uniform as an officer of the Novara Lancers

(Courtesy of Carlo Calvi)

Roberto Calvi horse riding

(Courtesy of Carlo Calvi)

Roberto Calvi with his wife, Clara

(Courtesy of Carlo Calvi)

The Milan headquarters of the Banco Ambrosiano

(Photograph taken by Philip Willan)

Roberto Calvi’s bedroom in flat 881 at Chelsea Cloisters

(Evidence photograph from the Rome murder trial)

Roberto Calvi’s false passport in the name of Gian Roberto Calvini

(Evidence photograph from the Rome murder trial)

The scaffolding under the north arch of Blackfriars Bridge from which Calvi was found hanging on the morning of 18 June 1982

(Evidence photograph from the Rome murder trial)

Roberto Calvi’s body at Waterloo Pier

(Evidence photograph from the Rome murder trial)

The rope used to hang Roberto Calvi

(Evidence photograph from the Rome murder trial)

Roberto Calvi’s Patek Philippe watch found on his body

(Evidence photograph from the Rome murder trial)

Documents found on Calvi’s body

(Evidence photograph from the Rome murder trial)

Flavio Carboni, the Sardinian businessman who organized Calvi’s journey and is accused of delivering him to his assassins

(Photograph taken by Philip Willan)

Silvano Vittor, the Trieste smuggler who accompanied Calvi to London as a companion and bodyguard

(Photograph taken by Philip Willan)

Giuseppe ‘Pippo’ Calò, the mafia boss accused of ordering Calvi’s murder to punish him for losing Cosa Nostra’s money

(Photograph taken by Philip Willan)

Ernesto Diotallevi, a businessman from Rome who denies links to the Rome underworld and any involvement in the Calvi murder

(Courtesy of ANSA)

Giulio Andreotti, the former primer minister of Italy, at his trial in Palermo for collusion with the mafia

(Courtesy of ANSA)

Licio Gelli, the head of the P2 masonic lodge

(Photograph taken by Philip Willan)

Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the head of the Vatican bank

(Photograph taken by Chris Warde-Jones)

Michele Sindona, the Sicilian banker who initiated Calvi into the mysteries of offshore banking

(Courtesy of ANSA)

Eligio Paoli, an informant of the finance police known as ‘Source Podgora’

(Photograph taken by Philip Willan)

Carlo Calvi, Roberto Calvi’s son

(Photograph taken by Philip Willan)

Francesco Pazienza, consultant to Calvi and to the Italian secret services

(Courtesy of ANSA)

Acknowledgements

Many people helped me with the research for this book, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. I would particularly like to thank the following: Giacomo Botta, Carlo Calvi, Jenny Chryss, Robert Clarke, John Cornwell, Andrea De Gasperis, Fiore De Rienzo, Piero Gamacchio, Frank Garbely, Aldo Giannuli, David Harness, Bill Hopkins, Gerald James, Jeff Katz, Lovat MacDonald, Andreas Mytze, Dario Piccioni, Charles Raw, Arcelia Rodriguez, Roberto Rosone, Bruno Rossini, Sidney Rotalinti, Sue Stuart, Luca Tescaroli, Felipe Turover and John White. A special thanks to my wife, Cristina, for her patience in the tenser times. This book is dedicated to my parents, who gave their support despite misgivings about its theme.

Notes on Text

Currency rates:

Between 1970 and 1982 the value of the pound moved between a low of around 1,400 lire and a peak of about 2,400 lire. An average conversion rate for the period of this story would be around L2,000 to £1. During the same period the dollar rose against the lira from a low of about 600 lire to a high of about 1,400 lire in 1982. Dividing lira figures by 1,000 gives a ballpark dollar conversion for the period.

P2 membership:

The Parliamentary P2 Commission concluded that the lodge membership lists found in the possession of Licio Gelli are an accurate guide to the lodge’s adherents. Some of those named in the lists disagree.

Notes on sources:

Much of the information in this book is drawn from the mass of documents presented by the prosecution to the trial in Rome of the five people accused of Roberto Calvi’s murder. Made available to the parties on DVD and CD-Rom, the documents have such an incomprehensible indexing system that I have not attempted to identify them in the endnotes. Where quotations were originally in Italian, the English translations are mine.

List of Abbreviations

APSA Vatican financial institution, Amministrazione del Patrimonio della Sede Apostolica (Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See).

Avanguardia Nazionale (National Vanguard) Italian rightist organization founded by Stefano Delle Chiaie.

Bafisud Umberto Ortolani’s Uruguayan bank, Banco Financiero Sudamericano.

BAOL Banco Ambrosiano Overseas Ltd (formerly Cisalpine Overseas Bank), key Ambrosiano offshore subsidiary in Nassau, Bahamas.

BCCI Bank of Credit and Commerce International.

BNL Socialist/P2-controlled Banca Nazionale del Lavoro.

CIA US Central Intelligence Agency.

DC Italian Christian Democrat party, Democrazia Cristiana.

DEA US Drug Enforcement Agency.

DIA US Defense Intelligence Agency.

ENI Italian national oil company, Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi.

FBI US Federal Bureau of Investigation.

FCO Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (foreign ministry).

Grey Wolves Right-wing nationalist movement in Turkey, implicated in plot to kill Pope John Paul II in 1981.

IOR The Vatican bank, Istituto per le Opere di Religione (Institute for the Works of Religion).

KGB Soviet intelligence service.

Mani Pulite (Clean Hands) Massive corruption investigation in Italy in the 1990s, also known as Tangentopoli (Bribesville).

MI5 Britain’s domestic intelligence service.

MI6 Britain’s foreign intelligence service, also known as the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).

OSS US Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA.

P2 Licio Gelli’s secret masonic lodge, Propaganda Due.

PCI Italian Communist party, Partito Comunista Italiano.

PRB Belgian arms company, Poudreries Réunies de Belgique.

Pro Fratribus Catholic charitable organization assisting the persecuted church behind the Iron Curtain. Founded in 1970.

PSI Italian Socialist party, Partito Socialista Italiano.

RAI Italian state-controlled broadcaster, Radiotelevisione Italiana.

Red Brigades Italian left-wing terrorist organization (Brigate Rosse – BR).

SIFAR Armed forces intelligence service, Servizio Informazioni Forze Armate.

SIH Shipping Industrial Holdings, British shipping company in which Banco Ambrosiano took a stake.

SISDE Italian domestic intelligence service, Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Democratica.

SISMI Italian military intelligence service, Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare.

SOE Special Operations Executive, Britain’s clandestine warfare organization during the Second World War.

SRC Gerald Bull’s Space Research Corporation.

UBS Union Bank of Switzerland.

Chronology

1971: Roberto Calvi appointed director general of the Banco Ambrosiano. Archbishop Paul Marcinkus appointed president of the IOR.

23 Mar. Cisalpine Overseas Bank founded in Nassau. Marcinkus takes a seat on the board.

1972: Calvi buys the Banca Cattolica del Veneto from the IOR for 27 billion lire.

1974: 8 Oct. Michele Sindona’s Franklin National Bank is declared bankrupt.

11 Oct. Calvi named Cavaliere del Lavoro (Knight of Labour).

1975: 23 Aug. Calvi initiated as a freemason in Geneva.

19 Nov. Calvi becomes chairman of the Banco Ambrosiano.

1977: 3 Nov. Luigi Cavallo puts up posters in Milan attacking Calvi.

1978: 17 Apr. Bank of Italy inspectors begin a seven-month examination of the Banco Ambrosiano’s books.

17 Nov. Chief inspector Giulio Padalino produces a 500-page report. Verdict: ‘Not entirely favourable.’

1979: Jan. Shah of Iran goes into exile.

Mar. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini establishes Islamic Republic of Iran.

July Giorgio Ambrosoli, liquidator of Sindona’s Banca Privata Finanziaria, is shot dead in Milan. Anastasio Somoza overthrown by Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Saddam Hussein becomes president of Iraq.

2 Aug. Sindona disappears from New York, the beginning of his fake kidnap.

Nov. US embassy staff taken hostage in Iran.

27 Dec. Soviet troops invade Afghanistan. CIA organizes clandestine support for Afghan resistance, initially providing arms of Eastern Bloc origin to conceal its hand.

1980: 4 July Milan magistrates investigating irregularities in the running of the Banco Ambrosiano withdraw Calvi’s passport.

26 Sept. Calvi’s passport returned to him.

Nov. Ronald Reagan elected president of the United States.

1981: Jan. Reagan presidency inaugurated, American hostages released by Iran.

17 Mar. Finance police raid Gelli’s office and home. P2 lists discovered. Calvi has membership no. 1624.

27 Mar. Poland witnesses largest organized protest against a communist government since the Second World War.

30 Mar. President Reagan shot by John Hinckley Jr.

29 Apr. The Ambrosiano group announces purchase of a 40 per cent stake in the Rizzoli publishing company for 115 billion lire.

13 May A Turkish gunman wounds Pope John Paul II.

20 May Calvi arrested for illegal export of currency.

2 July Calvi tells magistrates of his illegal funding of the Italian Socialist party.

3 July The IOR’s chief accountant visits the Banca del Gottardo in Lugano and learns of the debts of Calvi’s offshore companies attributed to the Vatican.

8 July Calvi attempts suicide in prison.

20 July Calvi sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for currency violations.

22 July Calvi released on bail.

Sept. Saddam Hussein invades Iran, beginning a bloody eight-year war.

17 Nov. President Reagan signs National Security Directive 17, authorizing the provision of covert support to anti-Sandinista rebels.

12 Dec. Martial law imposed in Poland. Up to 30 people killed and thousands arrested.

1982: 2 Apr. Argentina invades the Falkland Islands.

27 Apr. Roberto Rosone, Banco Ambrosiano’s deputy chairman, injured in pistol attack.

5 May Ambrosiano shares floated on Milan stock exchange.

6 June Israel invades Lebanon after assassination attempt on the Israeli ambassador to London.

7 June President Reagan and Pope John Paul hold 50-minute meeting in the Vatican, alone and without interpreters.

11 June Calvi flees Italy.

14 June Argentine garrisons on the Falklands surrender.

18 June Calvi found dead under Blackfriars Bridge in London.

23 June Silvano Vittor gives himself up to Italian police at Tarvisio border crossing with Austria.

23 July A first London inquest reaches a verdict of suicide.

30 July Flavio Carboni arrested in Switzerland.

1983: 29 Mar. Three high court judges vote unanimously to quash the suicide verdict and order a fresh inquest.

June A two-week inquest concludes with a unanimous open verdict. The jury foreman says later that he and his colleagues would have opted for murder if they had known more of the background to the case.

1988: Dec. A Milan civil court rules that Calvi was murdered and his life insurer must therefore pay his family the 4 billion lire owed on his policy.

1992: 16 Apr. A Milan court hands out stiff sentences, at the end of a two-year trial, for the fraudulent bankruptcy of the Banco Ambrosiano.

1998: Dec. Calvi’s remains exhumed from cemetery in Drezzo for a further autopsy.

2002: Oct. New forensic report concludes Calvi was murdered.

2003: July Rome prosecutors re-open the case, accusing four suspects.

Sept. City of London police re-open their investigation.

2005: 6 Oct. Five people go on trial in Rome for the murder of Roberto Calvi.

The Cast

Abbruciati, Danilo. Rome underworld boss shot dead on 27 April 1982 after a gun attack on the deputy chairman of the Banco Ambrosiano, Roberto Rosone. Reputedly involved in the kidnap business and linked to the Italian secret services.

Ambrosoli, Giorgio. Liquidator of Michele Sindona’s Banca Privata Italiana. Murdered in 1979.

Andreatta, Beniamino. Christian Democrat politician and treasury minister 1980–82.

Andreotti, Giulio. Seven times prime minister of Italy and leading member of the Christian Democrat party. Feared by Roberto Calvi.

Berlusconi, Silvio. P2 member, business partner of Flavio Carboni, and media magnate who would later found his own political party and become prime minister of Italy.

Berti, Alberto Jaimes. Venezuelan businessman who claims to have met Calvi in London in June 1982.

Botta, Giacomo. Senior official in the Banco Ambrosiano foreign department.

Brenneke, Richard. American who said he was a CIA agent and accused the agency of using the P2 lodge to sponsor terrorism and smuggle drugs.

Calò, Giuseppe, also known as ‘Pippo’. Cosa Nostra’s treasurer, ‘ambassador’ to Rome and defendant in the Calvi murder trial.

Calvi, Roberto. Chairman of Banco Ambrosiano from 1975 until his death in 1982; director general from 1971.

Carboni, Flavio. Sardinian property developer and business partner of future prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Accompanied Calvi to London in June 1982. Defendant in the Calvi murder trial.

Casaroli, Cardinal Agostino. Vatican secretary of state in 1982, equivalent to a secular prime minister.

Cavallo, Luigi. Journalist and cold war protagonist who was convicted of blackmailing Calvi.

Ciolini, Elio. Discredited supergrass who rendered misleading testimony to the investigation into the bomb at Bologna station in 1980 and implicated Calvi in the atrocity. He also provided the secret services and police with information on Calvi’s last journey.

Corona, Armando. Sardinian freemason elected Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy in March 1982.

Craxi, Bettino. Dynamic leader of the Italian Socialist party, later convicted of corruption.

D’Amato, Federico Umberto. Senior Italian policeman, P2 member, CIA asset and restaurant critic.

Di Carlo, Francesco. Woking-based mafioso accused by associates of strangling Calvi, but not called as a defendant in the Calvi murder trial.

Diotallevi, Ernesto. Rome businessman with alleged ties to the city’s underworld and business links to Flavio Carboni. Defendant in the Calvi murder trial.

Franco, Monsignor Hilary. Vatican official enlisted by Flavio Carboni to mediate between Calvi and the Vatican bank (IOR).

Gelli, Licio. Venerable master of the secret P2 masonic lodge. Calvi’s political protector and was questioned over the murder.

Heer, Jørg. A credit manager at Rothschild Bank in Zurich, he claimed to have delivered a suitcase full of cash to Calvi’s killers on the instructions of P2.

Hnilica, Bishop Pavel. A Czechoslovak prelate who headed Pro Fratribus, a charitable organization dedicated to protecting the rights of persecuted Catholics in Eastern Europe. He paid large sums of money to purchase documents from Calvi’s briefcase on behalf of the Vatican.

Kleinszig sisters, Manuela and Michaela. Daughters of an Austrian timber merchant, they travelled to London with Calvi in June 1982. Manuela, Flavio Carboni’s mistress at the time, went on trial in 2005 for complicity in his murder.

Kunz, Hans Albert. Swiss oil trader who made many of the travel arrangements around Calvi’s last days.

Ledl, Leopold. Austrian businessman who claims to have commissioned the purchase of a huge quantity of counterfeit share certificates on behalf of the Vatican. Says Calvi visited him, seeking compromising material to use against the Vatican.

Marcinkus, Archbishop Paul Casimir. Lithuanian-American chairman of the Vatican bank in 1982.

Martelli, Claudio. Deputy leader of the Italian Socialist party, later convicted of pocketing a $7 million bribe from the Banco Ambrosiano on behalf of the party.

Mennini, Luigi. Managing director of the Vatican bank (IOR) in 1982; a layman and the bank’s top banking specialist.

Morris, Odette. Friend of Flavio Carboni who acted as his guide in London in June 1982. Morris denied allegations that she had lied in court to bolster his alibi.

Ortolani, Umberto. A banker and P2 member with strong ties to the Catholic church, reputedly the financial brains behind Licio Gelli’s secret lodge.

Paoli, Eligio. An informant to the finance police known as ‘Source Podgora’, who provided some of the earliest, neglected leads about Calvi’s last days.

Pazienza, Francesco. A consultant and lobbyist for Calvi, currently in prison for his role in the fraudulent collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano.

Pellicani, Emilio. Flavio Carboni’s secretary and one of the main sources of information about his boss’s activities.

Rizzoli, Angelo. An alleged P2 member and chairman of the Rizzoli publishing group, which bought the Corriere della Sera newspaper in 1974 and was financially backed by the Banco Ambrosiano.

Rosone, Roberto. Lifelong Banco Ambrosiano functionary who became deputy chairman in 1981.

Santovito, Giuseppe. P2 member and head of the military intelligence service, SISMI.

Sindona, Michele. Sicilian financier and P2 member who introduced Calvi to the delights of offshore banking. Committed suicide in an Italian prison after being convicted of ordering the murder of Giorgio Ambrosoli.

Vaccari, Sergio. A London-based cocaine-dealer suspected of helping to organize Calvi’s murder. Found stabbed to death at his home in September 1982.

Vitalone, Wilfredo. Rome lawyer acquitted of claiming that he could bribe magistrates for Calvi. In telephone contact with Flavio Carboni around the time of Calvi’s death.

Vittor, Silvano. Trieste-based Adriatic smuggler who accompanied Calvi to London in June 1982. Lover of Michaela Kleinszig and defendant at the Calvi murder trial in Rome.

White, John. City of London Police officer who oversaw the early stages of the investigation.

Introduction

The murder of a banker is always likely to be motivated by money. In the case of Roberto Calvi it may have been the $1.3 billion that was missing from the accounts of his Banco Ambrosiano, Italy’s largest private bank, causing the bank’s collapse and, at the time, the biggest bankruptcy in European financial history. Calvi’s money was of a rather particular kind: the kind that translates directly into power, the power to influence people and shape the events of history, the kind of power that often places an individual above the law. The loss of that money and the desperate measures Calvi was driven to in his attempt to retrieve it almost certainly precipitated his death.

Calvi’s money was highly politicized because of the time and the place in which he did business: the financial capital of a country that straddled one of the fault lines of the cold war conflict. Italy was home to the largest Communist party in Western Europe and its capitalists felt as though they were under siege. Fear of punitive taxation or the expropriation of private property should the Communists win a general election spurred a massive capital flight among the rich. To bolster the ailing economy the government had made it illegal for people to send currency abroad but banks like the Banco Ambrosiano were nevertheless willing to assist, funnelling wealth via the Vatican bank towards the security of Switzerland or offshore finance centres in the Caribbean. It was inevitable that rich individuals who saw their livelihoods threatened would want to use their money to combat the Red menace, and that bankers such as Calvi would be drawn into their struggle.

Those who ordered the murder of Calvi were undoubtedly men of power too. In many ways, they came close to achieving the perfect crime. Though it was hastily classified as suicide by the British authorities, Italians almost universally saw Calvi’s death as murder, and a murder laden with symbolic significances. Suspended by the neck from scaffolding under London’s Blackfriars Bridge and with his pockets stuffed with builder’s bricks, there was a series of elements in the scenography of his death to fire the imagination of amateur sleuths. Could the name of the bridge be a cryptic reference to freemasonry, of which Calvi was a member, or to the black-caped friars of the Dominican order, a way of evoking the Vatican, with which he had been doing business? The bricks in his pockets, too, recalled freemasonry, as did the tide that had washed over his feet, reminding fellow masons of the oath of loyalty and silence that Calvi had so conspicuously breached. In those years the bridge was painted in the pale blue and white of the Argentine flag – a reference perhaps to the recently fought Falklands war and to Argentina’s arms purchases, financed in part by the Banco Ambrosiano? For Calvi’s associates in the worlds of finance, politics and freemasonry the warning was all too eloquent. For the phlegmatic investigators of the City of London Police it was an evident case of self-suspension.

What made the Calvi case exceptional was the banker’s close links to the Vatican, which had earned for him the journalistic sobriquet of ‘God’s banker’. The violent manner of his death and the details of the Banco Ambrosiano’s financial collapse would embroil the Vatican in years of controversy. The institution dedicated to the dissemination of the moral message of Jesus Christ would find itself accused of complicity in fraud, arms dealing and the laundering of drug money on behalf of the mafia. The Roman Catholic church, threatened and persecuted around the globe by atheistic communism, would find itself sucked into some of the most unscrupulous and unpalatable activities of the Cold War, ally and bedfellow of criminals and spies. The tangled relationship between Calvi and Archbishop Paul Casimir Marcinkus, the Lithuanian-American head of the Vatican bank, would baffle investigators and tarnish the pontificate of Pope John Paul II. A relationship of friendship and complicity between the two bankers would sour at the end, pitting the ambitious, introverted, workaholic Italian money-man against the ambitious, extroverted, sports-loving American in a trial of strength which would hasten the desperate Italian’s slide towards death. Calvi’s attempts to blackmail the Vatican are one of the most extraordinary aspects of this remarkable tale, momentarily lifting the brocaded drapes of secrecy that normally concealed the secret inner mechanisms of the West’s cold war operations.

In 1983 the United States Central Intelligence Agency commissioned a guide to guerrilla warfare that was intended to channel the aggression of the anti-communist Nicaraguan Contras in their battle against the Sandinistas. The 90-page war primer, Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare, was published in Spanish and gave tips on ‘neutralizing’ Nicaraguan officials and ‘implicit and explicit terror’. An early edition of what became known in the press as the CIA’s assassination manual contained the words: ‘If possible, professional criminals will be hired to carry out selective jobs.’ Those words could equally well have been applied to the moral morass of cold war Italy. Professional criminals from a variety of regional crime syndicates would play an important role in the personal drama of Roberto Calvi.

Some 23 years after Calvi’s death, in October 2005, five people finally went on trial in Rome for his murder. The defendants were Giuseppe ‘Pippo’ Calò, Flavio Carboni, Ernesto Diotallevi, Silvano Vittor and Manuela Kleinszig. Prosecutors who brought the case to trial say the banker was killed by members of Cosa Nostra because he had lost or embezzled funds entrusted to him for laundering by the mob. But the banker’s capacity and willingness to blackmail politicians, freemasons and the Vatican itself also played a role in his death, they alleged. And it is the wider conspiracy involving the higher echelons of power that sheds most light on the enduring mystery of his death.

Piecing together the fragments of the mosaic has not been easy. Two decades on, many of the tesserae are missing and those that can be found have broken edges, abraded by failing memories and wilful deceptions, but the overall picture can now be clearly delineated. The death of a secretive, reclusive and somewhat unpopular banker may seem a small thing of itself, but the Calvi murder opens up a vast panorama on to the true nature of recent Italian history and how the Cold War was fought over this beautiful but divided land. The lessons that spring from it remain relevant to this day, as western democracies grapple with an implacable new enemy, many of the seeds of whose hatred were buried in that recent past.

The death of Pope John Paul II in April 2005 caused an astonishing public outpouring of grief and affection. The media hailed him as ‘John Paul the Great’ and the massive crowds that paid tribute to him in St Peter’s Square chanted ‘Santo subito’ – ‘Make him a saint now’. But John Paul’s pontificate was confronted almost from the beginning by the repercussions of the Banco Ambrosiano scandal and his handling of it did little to enhance his reputation, or that of the church. Twenty years on, as Catholics celebrated the two-thousandth anniversary of the birth of Jesus Christ, John Paul found himself presiding over one of the most discredited of human institutions. Repeated financial scandals in Italy, coupled with the global scandal of sexual abuse by priests, had reduced the standing of the Catholic church to a nadir for modern times. Such scandals were particularly difficult to deal with for the church. As an institution committed to living and preaching a message of moral excellence, the ethical failings of its members were particularly damaging. Scandal was of itself potentially ruinous, so lies, deception and obfuscation were justified as the lesser of the possible evils. Cover-up rather than confession and penitence would be the response, allowing ills to fester and making the final scandal, when it could no longer be contained, all the more devastating. Catholic dioceses faced bankruptcy because the church had failed to tackle the moral betrayals of paedophile priests and the Vatican bank itself risked financial ruin for its failure to rein in the piratical business practices of men like Roberto Calvi, who acted on its behalf and cloaked their actions in its apparent respectability.

The discredit that clung to the church in the last quarter of the twentieth century may go some way to explain the success of a book like The Da Vinci Code. Ambiguously presented as fact-based fiction, Dan Brown’s tale was eagerly devoured by millions of readers ready to assume the worst about the Roman Catholic church. Lies, deception and murder appeared only too natural in the context of a church clinging to its prerogatives of spiritual and temporal power. The shock troops of Opus Dei, ready to shed their own and others’ blood in the service of their cause, may come across as a grotesque caricature, but not such as to put off Mr Brown’s enthusiastic readers.

In many ways the Calvi case emerges today as a real life ‘Da Vinci Code’: a fiendishly complex plot, a struggle for power, skulduggery in the Vatican and ruthless individuals who do not baulk at murder. The real Opus Dei, with its secrecy, conservative values and attachment to material wealth, plays a key role in the story. As in Mr Brown’s fictional construct, clues of difficult interpretation have been widely scattered and have taken investigators years to piece together and to interpret. Our guides to the Calvi case are not an American professor of religious symbology but a cast of extraordinary crooks and charlatans beside whom Mr Brown’s fictional characters pale into banality. They have an extraordinary tale to tell.

Prologue: Dinner at San Lorenzo’s

Roberto Calvi had good reason to look worried as he left the downmarket apartment in Chelsea Cloisters on the evening of Thursday, 17 June 1982. The man known for his cold stare and lack of social graces was looking particularly ill-at-ease as he travelled down in the lift in the company of two Italian-speaking men. For the first time in his adult life he had shaved off his moustache, though witnesses diverge as to when he had done this and whether he had removed it completely.

His destination on that evening was the fashionable San Lorenzo restaurant in Knightsbridge, a short distance by road from the barracks-like residence where he had spent an unhappy three days, but an entire world away in social terms. It was just the kind of place he had been trying to avoid, frequented by well-heeled and well-connected Italians, some of whom might recognize him. But a new witness, tracked down by Italian investigators some 20 years after the event, places him in that luxury restaurant on that fateful night.

We don’t know for sure who his dinner companions were. The new witness, a waiter who was serving tables in the restaurant at the time, says Calvi was in a group of four or five people. He identified photographs of two of the banker’s travelling companions as people whom he had seen in the restaurant at about that time. And he identified Umberto Ortolani, a Catholic financier and member of the P2 masonic lodge, with whom Calvi had an intense business relationship, as a regular customer at San Lorenzo’s.

Another witness, who provided information to investigators from the finance police just months after Calvi’s death, had the Banco Ambrosiano chairman at dinner that evening at an unknown location in the company of a playboy drug-dealer. The man with whom Calvi ate his last supper, according to this account, was someone whose connections ranged from European aristocrats and antiques-collecting aesthetes to fascist terrorists and underworld thugs. The cocaine trafficker’s role in the Calvi affair, ignored by the first generation of investigators in Britain and Italy, became increasingly significant as investigations progressed.

If Calvi’s visit to London made any sense, it was as an opportunity to meet important new contacts or long-standing associates who could help him resolve his pressing financial problems. Blackmail was on the conversation menu as a desperate Calvi played his last cards in a dangerous game. Former accomplices might be induced to come to his aid if he threatened to reveal the illegal or immoral activities they had participated in together. Calvi was convinced of it, and it was a key part of his survival strategy.

We don’t know how the discussions went. No one has spoken of raised voices or a memorable dispute at Calvi’s table. But we can imagine the scene: one of his dinner companions leans over and speaks to him in hushed tones of the dangers he faces – a subject to which he was always receptive. The police, or mafia assassins, are on his trail, the diner says, and he must leave the country at once. A boat is waiting for him on the river Thames. It will take him downstream to the Port of London, where a larger ship awaits that will carry him abroad, to South America, where he has connections and extensive business interests. Calvi must leave immediately, in the clothes that he stands up in, his apparently solicitous companion says. Someone else will return to Chelsea Cloisters to collect his luggage. How could he anticipate an unscheduled stop hard against the scaffolding under Blackfriars Bridge and the sudden noose slipped over his head?

Calvi was no saint and it is unlikely he would have given himself up willingly to be slaughtered, yet there is no evidence that he ever offered resistance, called for help, or fought back against his assassins. The last days of his life appear to have been part of a long, slow process of betrayal that came to a head in a final, dramatic meeting with his assassins over dinner at an upmarket Italian restaurant. At that moment he may have begun to suspect that his potential saviours were actually his executioners, but it was too late to change course.

If Jesus Christ was not present at the table, the interests of the church he founded certainly were. Not for nothing was Calvi known as ‘God’s banker’. He had represented the financial interests of the Roman Catholic church around the globe, acting as un uomo di fiducia (a man of trust) in some of its most secret and sensitive activities. One of the primary objects of Calvi’s blackmail in those last days was the Vatican, the very institution he had served with such devotion over decades. As a motive for murder, there was much more than ‘thirty pieces of silver’ at stake. And if Judas was not sitting at the San Lorenzo table with him, he was probably somewhere in the vicinity. For this is a tale of betrayal of trust: by Calvi, who was threatening to breach his duty of confidentiality as a banker and his oath of silence as a freemason, and by certain of his travelling companions, who were – allegedly – preparing to deliver him for execution.

1

The Hanged Man

Anthony Huntley’s encounter with the news was early and distressing. At 7.30 a.m. on an overcast Friday morning, he was on the walkway under the north arch of Blackfriars Bridge, one of three wide road bridges that span the Thames between the City of London and the borough of Southwark. As he walked along, the Daily Express postal clerk was tall enough to glance over the parapet and see the body of a man hanging by the neck from scaffolding above the mud-coloured river. The day was 18 June 1982 and the waves caused by his macabre discovery would reverberate through the world’s media for decades to come.

‘I looked over the parapet wall, down towards the river and saw a bald head with white tufts of hair over the ears,’ Huntley said in a statement made to the City of London Police five days later. ‘This didn’t really register at first but on taking a second and longer look, I saw there was a complete body hanging by the neck from a length of orange string that was tied to the top horizontal scaffolding tube on the east side of the construction of scaffolding poles.’ Huntley told police the man was dressed in a two-piece light grey suit and was without a tie. ‘I couldn’t see what footwear he had on because his feet were dangling in the water which was up to his ankle bones.’

Huntley was so stunned by what he had seen that after walking past he stopped on a balcony that projects over the Thames and looked back to confirm that it was real. He arrived at the Daily Express office looking pale and shaken and it was one of his colleagues, Stephen Pullen, who made the first 999 call to alert the police. The two men then returned to Blackfriars Bridge to speak to the police and to make sure that the shocking sight of the hanged man had not been an illusion after all.

One of the first police officers on the scene was PC John Palmer of the City of London Police, an independent police force responsible for investigating crimes that take place in the City, London’s financial district. While expert in tackling financial crime, the City Police is unaccustomed to investigating crimes of violence, but the autonomous force declined to seek the assistance of their more experienced colleagues in the Metropolitan Police, whose writ runs throughout the rest of Greater London.

‘The man . . . had a length of yellow coloured cord tied in a slip knot around his neck and this cord was tied to the scaffolding about three feet above his head,’ Palmer recalled in a statement made the following day. ‘About a further three feet of the same cord was trailing downwards from the knot.’ The tide was on the ebb and the man’s feet were just touching the water by the time the body was removed by Thames River Police, a division of the Metropolitan Police, and taken on a police launch the short distance upstream to Waterloo Pier. ‘A search was made of the man’s clothing and during the search, apart from personal belongings, several pieces of masonry were found,’ PC Palmer’s account continued. ‘[A] half brick was found in his trousers under the fly, [a] half brick was found in his right-hand jacket pocket, two stones were in his right-hand trouser pocket and one stone was found in his left-hand trouser pocket.’ Further searches revealed that the man was carrying about £7,370 of cash, mainly in foreign currencies; a first indication that he was an individual of some wealth.

The body was subsequently taken to Milton Court mortuary where it was stripped. Palmer reported: ‘With the assistance of a mortuary attendant, I took the man’s fingerprints and noted that the man had been wearing a grey two-piece suit (made by Maffioli), a white vest and undershorts, black socks and black casual shoes.’ Though PC Palmer does not mention it in his statement, the dead man was actually wearing two pairs of underpants, a second anomaly after the bricks in his pockets and against his crotch. The officer also noticed ‘scuff marks’ on the man’s shins, marks that were later determined to have occurred after his death – perhaps caused as the inert body was dragged over rough ground by his assassins, or simply from rough handling by police.

Police photographs of the man’s trousers show a small tear at the level of the right hip and a dark stain on the seat. The dark substance is also present, though less clearly visible, at the level of the calves. The stains, which went through the man’s shirt tail and underpants, appear to have been picked up by sitting on a dirty bench and were later determined to be caused by an oily substance compatible with the varnish used on boats.

At 2 p.m. Professor Keith Simpson, an eminent pathologist from the University of London, conducted a brief post-mortem examination. His report gives ‘asphyxia due to hanging’ as the cause of death and suggests it was the result of ‘deliberate self-suspension’. He added: ‘There is NO suggestion from autopsy of drowning and no injury to suggest manhandling or any kind of foul play.’

The clean-shaven man suspended above the river by the length of orange rope had been identified by police as a 62-year-old Italian, Gian Roberto Calvini. That was the name on the false passport he was carrying and that was the name that appeared on his post-mortem report: when Professor Simpson examined the corpse he had no idea that he was dealing with one of Europe’s leading bankers, on the run from a major financial catastrophe in his homeland. Seeing the torn and dirty clothes he was wearing – another anomaly for a man of fastidious cleanliness – some police officers had taken the view that they were dealing with the suicide of a vagrant, and their initial assumption may also have coloured the professor’s view.

Overweight, balding and dressed in a top-quality grey business suit, Mr Calvini’s presence was immediately puzzling. Had he chosen this temporary structure erected for the repair of the banks and storm drains of the river as the setting for a bizarre, acrobatic suicide? Or had unidentified enemies strung him up, staging an awkward and risky execution ritual to broadcast a menacing message to the denizens of his secretive world? The only thing certain was that his death could not have been an accident.

An insight into Simpson’s – and the police’s – initial reaction to the death is contained in a four-page handwritten note he made later, which describes the telephone call he received from the police while at breakfast. ‘ “Hullo, sir. I know you’re coming through the City this morning, sir. We’ve got a man found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge. Doesn’t look like crime, sir, but would you care to look at it on your way through?” Nothing very unusual. The City police had been to the scene, cut the man down, called the Police Surgeon to certify the fact of death and have the body removed . . . just routine, you would say.’ This note was to be presented two decades later in Rome as part of the prosecution evidence for the trial of Calvi’s alleged murderers.

Simpson conducted his post-mortem at 2 p.m. and the body he dealt with was still that of the obscure Mr Calvini. Roberto Calvi was not correctly identified by the London police until around 7 p.m. on that Friday, when, according to a City of London Police report, the head of Rome’s Special Branch telephoned to say ‘he believed the body to be that of Roberto Calvi, an important banker, who had been missing from Rome since approximately 11th June 1982.’ At that point the City Police were also informed that Calvi ‘was involved in a large bank fraud concerning Banco Ambrosiano, a private bank of which he was president’. News of the identification appears to have leaked quickly in Italy. The Rome newspaper Il Tempo was tipped off by an anonymous phone call at around the same time that evening. A woman with a Milanese accent told the paper that the body of Roberto Calvi had been found in London, according to a report by the Carabinieri paramilitary police.

The City Police might have been quicker in establishing Calvi’s true identity: his real name was on a label sewn into the lining of his jacket near the breast pocket.[1]

In his handwritten account Simpson elaborated on the international shake-up and court cases that followed over the next few weeks, and acknowledged: ‘It was no ordinary hanging for sure. Yet I could find absolutely no trace of violence or manhandling – and analysis revealed no drugs that might have been slipped into a drink to make Calvi unconscious, easy to overcome, slip into a noose and hoist onto the scaffolding on which he was hanging.’ The only mark Simpson found on the body was that left by the noose around the neck. The sort of mark, he wrote, ‘I had seen on hundreds of self-hanging suicides over whose deaths no further argument had arisen’. Tiny blood spots had burst out on his scalp and the whites of the eyes owing to constriction of the neck veins – petechiae, or ‘Tardieu spots’ after the French police surgeon who first described them in deaths from asphyxiation. ‘No, there could be no doubt he had hanged alive and died quietly – if that is the word – in that noose.’

More details of the exact circumstances of Calvi’s death can be gleaned from the witness statements of other officers who attended the scene and from a City of London Police report drawn up by Detective Inspector John White, one of the officers who oversaw the original investigation, on 20 July 1982 – one month after the event. Whether the police and other authorities correctly gathered and interpreted that evidence remains controversial to this day.

Police Constable Donald Bartliff was patrolling with the Thames River Police when he was called to Blackfriars Bridge at 7.48 a.m. His testimony, delivered ten days after the event, provides one of the fullest accounts of the crime scene on the morning of Calvi’s death. ‘On arrival at the scene at 8 a.m. under the north arch of Blackfriars Bridge, I saw the lifeless body of a man who I now know to be Roberto Calvi hanging from the scaffolding by a rope which was tied round his neck. The rope which was orange in colour is of a type commonly used on the river. The scaffolding was built on the foreshore alongside the river wall and the body was hanging on the down-river end close to the wall facing upstream. The feet were just resting on the fifth horizontal scaffold pole from the top. The left arm was draped over the third horizontal scaffold pole close to the wall. The full weight of the body was taken by the rope, which had been tied about three feet above the head by two half hitches to a securing eyelet, level with the second horizontal scaffold pole from the top.’

Like PC Palmer, Bartliff noticed ‘a half brick in the front of the trousers under the flies which were buttoned up’. This piece of brick rammed in front of Calvi’s genitals is one of the most telling items of evidence to point away from suicide. However distressed he may have been, it is unlikely that Calvi would have shown such disrespect for his own body, and later reconstructions showed it would have been very difficult for him to walk, let alone clamber athletically over the scaffolding, without the brick dislodging and rolling down one of his trouser-legs. Experiments also showed that any such movement was likely to leave chafe marks on Calvi’s inside thigh. Such physical disrespect would be entirely consistent with murder, however; a mark of scorn in the mafia’s coded language of physical gestures.

PC Bartliff’s evidence is clearly geared towards suicide, though. ‘There is a metal ladder secured to the river wall immediately upstream of the scaffold which would have provided easy access to the structure,’ he said. Calvi’s delivery to the scaffolding by boat, an essential element of the most plausible murder theory, would not have been so easy. ‘I have served on Thames Division at Waterloo Pier since 1964 and in my opinion it would need a boat’s crew with considerable experience and knowledge of the river Thames to place a boat in position alongside this scaffolding so that the body could have been secured in this way,’ he said. Later experiments would show that the procedure could indeed be carried out, much depending on the strength and direction of the tide at the time.

PC Bartliff’s evidence reveals he participated in one of the first operational errors in the police’s handling of the case, for all his long professional experience: ‘A police salvage line was placed loosely around the chest and under the armpits so that PC Johnston could support the body while I untied the rope from the scaffold.’ The knot was not preserved, as it could have been if the body had been cut down, thus destroying a vital clue to the technical competence of the person who attached Calvi to his place of death. Calvi was not an expert sailor and would not have been capable of creating a complex knot. It would not be the last mistake.

Further details of the crime scene were provided in John White’s report of 20 July. ‘The rope which was of a nylon substance, orange in colour and commonly found on the Thames, was secured to the north east corner of the scaffold by two half hitches and round the neck of the body by a loop which had been formed by doubling the rope and making one half hitch.’ The five bricks and stones weighing down Calvi’s pockets amounted to a total of 11lb 15oz (5.4kg). They were compatible with builder’s rubble found on waste ground 300 yards east of the bridge and adjacent to the river, the report said.

Photographs of Calvi’s body were not taken until it had been removed to Waterloo Pier and searched for clues to identity. ‘Calvi’s jacket was unbuttoned to be searched and incorrectly buttoned again by police before the photographs were taken,’ White wrote. The wrongly buttoned jacket, fastened by police officers rather than by Calvi’s killers, would give a spurious boost to the murder theory when the photo of the corpse lying on Waterloo Pier was acquired by L’Espresso magazine in Italy and published on its front cover.

Police were responsible for a catalogue of further errors, according to James Cameron, a professor of forensic medicine at the University of London who was retained as an expert witness by the Calvi family, who were understandably keen to prove Roberto had not committed suicide, for insurance as well as moral purposes. Professor Cameron outlined his misgivings about the police investigation when interviewed in 1992 by representatives of Kroll Associates, an American firm of detectives also hired by the Calvi family. ‘We questioned Professor Cameron about the manner in which the autopsy was conducted and he is of the strong opinion the police presented to Professor Simpson only the facts which supported a case of suicide,’ the Kroll detective wrote in a report on the meeting. ‘Professor Cameron said that when he was retained by Kingsley Napley [the Calvi family’s solicitors] it was known by them the City of London Police officers and Thames Division officers of the Metropolitan Police had from the outset dealt with the matter as a suicide. The usual procedures at the scene of a suspicious death were not adhered to and certain irregularities had occurred.’

The Kroll report said that Dr Arthur Gordon Davies, the coroner at the second London inquest in June 1983, had told all the counsel involved that ‘he did not think his Court was the correct place to question or accuse Police of negligence in relation to the handling of the body.’ Reporting on a second meeting with Professor Cameron, the Kroll agent said: ‘Professor Cameron stated the case was “cocked up” from the start with Police Officers from Thames Division dealing with the body in a most unprofessional manner. Professor Cameron said the Thames Police Officers, from the outset, dealt with the hanging of the body as one of suicide. The scene of the crime, and indeed the body, was not preserved as it should have been.’

The Kroll report said its investigators understood that no police photographs were taken of the crime scene. This was most unusual, it observed, even in obvious suicide cases. ‘There appears little doubt in this case the investigation was badly handled in the first 12 hours which is the most crucial period in any murder or sudden death inquiry,’ the firm said. Modern viewers of the television series Silent Witness or CSI would undoubtedly be shocked at the clumsy way Calvi’s death was initially investigated. But it appears that the handling of the case may have fallen short even of the more primitive standards pertaining a quarter of a century ago. Lieutenant Colonel Francesco Delfino, an officer of the Italian military intelligence service (SISMI), who was sent to London from his base in Brussels to follow developments in the Calvi case, gained the impression that his British colleagues were treating it ‘like the suicide of a tramp’.[2]

Calvi’s real importance was underlined by the extremely swift reaction of Italian authorities to the news of his death. A Rome magistrate, Domenico Sica, flew immediately to London in the company of four senior police officers to assist in the identification of the body. The group arrived at Heathrow by private plane less than 24 hours after the body’s discovery, at 3.30 a.m. on Saturday 19 June, and went straight to Snow Hill Police Station in the City. They were provided with all documents and statements taken in the investigation up to that point and their questions were answered where possible. A month later, DI White was sceptical of Sica’s murder hypothesis. ‘Dr Sica is convinced Calvi has been murdered, but cannot give any tangible reasons to support his belief,’ he wrote in his report of 20 July. ‘He just speculates over the many unanswered questions that arise out of this particular case, bearing in mind the position Calvi held in Italy and the political intrigue which is being disclosed in the Italian press.’

White, in contrast, opts unequivocally for suicide. His report lays out clearly the elements that lead him to this conclusion: the rope used was common on the river and could have been left on the scaffolding by the tide; the knots, in his view, were those of a layman. There were no signs of force, drugs or poison in the body; the neck was not broken. Access to the scaffold was by a fixed ladder and was not difficult.

‘When looking at suicide, matters fall more readily into place,’ he wrote. Calvi had attempted suicide a year earlier, was on the run from police, and in a fragile state of mind. White reiterated his view that the Italian authorities had failed to produce any credible evidence to support their murder theory, adding: ‘There is little doubt that much of the information they have relating to Calvi has not been disclosed to us.’ International judicial cooperation on the case had evidently got off to a bad start.

White does concede that the bricks in Calvi’s pockets are ‘unaccountable’ but adds: ‘one must not speculate as to their presence’. ‘To conclude, although the general Italian opinion is that Calvi was murdered . . . there is certainly no evidence at the present time to support this, although we are quite naturally looking at all aspects of the case.’

Tensions and misunderstandings between the British and Italian authorities would obstruct the investigation for years. A report filed by one of the Italian police officers who visited London on 21 June gives a flavour of the prevailing atmosphere of mistrust. ‘I should say immediately that the presence of the undersigned was not very welcome to the British police which limited itself to a formal collaboration, providing very little information from time to time and often only at the explicit request of the writer,’ complained Maresciallo [Sergeant] Francesco Rosato.

A rush to judgement by the City Police, who are not accustomed to investigating murders anyway, a rushed postmortem by Professor Simpson, and a rushed original inquest all contributed to get the British investigation off to a bad start. The original inquest, presided over by the City of London coroner, Dr David Paul, was crammed into a single day on Friday 23 July 1982, five weeks after Calvi’s death. One of the reasons it was later quashed was the breakneck speed at which Dr Paul conducted the proceedings, pausing only 20 minutes for lunch and winding things up at 10 p.m.

‘Of course it would have been much better if he had chosen one of the other bridges above Chelsea; apart from any other considerations, this inquest would have been heard in somebody else’s court and you and I would not have been here at 10 past 8 at night,’ Dr Paul joked to the jurors towards the end of the day – somewhat prejudging their verdict in the process. ‘But he did choose Blackfriars.’

The coroner was also criticized for suggesting that an open verdict, in the event that the jury could not agree on murder or suicide, ‘may seem like a super open door to scuttle through if you are in any difficulty about returning another verdict’. Such steering of the jury was irregular, an appeal court judge would later rule. In the end the jury did not take the ‘easy’ way out, returning a majority verdict of suicide after deliberating for just under an hour.

Dr Paul concluded: ‘I therefore record that the jury find that Roberto Calvi, a male of 62 years, of Via Frua 9, Milan, Italy, was certified dead at Waterloo Pier, London on Friday 18th June 1982, the cause of death being asphyxia due to hanging, and that he killed himself.’ These were momentous words and the last three would go a long way to postponing the solution of the Calvi riddle, still not fully puzzled out after more than 20 years. Just as most Italians were convinced that Calvi had been killed, many of them were also sure that the court’s verdict of suicide was the result of a deliberate cover-up on the part of the British authorities.

2

Source ‘Podgora’

Roberto Calvi was a desperate man when he decided to flee Italy in June 1982. His bank was in financial trouble, he had serious legal problems and he had to find $300 million with which to pay the Vatican bank by the end of the month. He needed to put pressure on associates and on the beneficiaries of the Banco Ambrosiano’s ‘special’ services if he was to raise the money that would enable him to meet the debt repayment deadline of 30 June. The contents of his black leather briefcase, from which he never normally allowed himself to be parted, would be crucial in achieving that: the papers it contained held the details of the most important and sensitive of his financial operations. Skilfully used, they constituted a formidable instrument of blackmail. According to the prosecutors of those eventually charged with his murder, the potential victims of that blackmail were, first, his former accomplices in politics and government, second, the heads of the secret P2 masonic lodge of which he was a member, and, third, the Vatican bank, the Institute for the Works of Religion, usually known by its Italian acronym as the IOR.

For the past year, Calvi had been on bail pending an appeal against his conviction for violations of Italy’s laws on exporting currency. The appeal hearing was due to begin at the end of June. His passport had been withdrawn by Milan prosecutors pending the appeal hearing, so a legitimate departure was impossible. The bare details of his itinerary are as follows. Smuggled over the border into Yugoslavia on a speedboat from the north-eastern port of Trieste, he travelled on a false passport to Austria and from there flew to London. He left Italy on 11 June and arrived in England four days later, spending the last days of his life in the sporadic company of four people.

The man who had helped him arrange his escape and who had been advising him in recent months was Flavio Carboni, a flamboyant Sardinian businessman, a man who liked to boast to associates that he worked for the secret services and who habitually carried a handgun. His other male companion was Silvano Vittor, a smuggler based in Trieste who had been hired by Carboni to spirit the banker out of the country on board his powerful speedboat L’Uragano (The Hurricane), and to act subsequently as Calvi’s companion and bodyguard. But as well as trafficking in jeans and contraband cigarettes between Italy and Yugoslavia, Vittor rounded out his income by acting as a police informant. He had been recruited by the finance police, a militarized police force with special responsibility for financial, tax and customs matters, in June 1980 and given the codename ‘Umago’, from the name of his birthplace. The choice of Trieste as Calvi’s point of exit was no coincidence; the cold war frontier city, disputed between Italy and Yugoslavia at the end of the Second World War, was Vittor’s base of operations but it had also been an important financial centre for Carboni, who registered numerous companies there to take advantage of its special tax status.

Calvi’s other two travelling companions were women, and not Italian but Austrian. The blonde Kleinszig sisters, in their early twenties, could be relied upon to be loyal and discreet. Manuela was Carboni’s mistress and her sister Michaela was with Vittor, who was the father of her baby daughter. Both men enjoyed living the high life and both were married to somebody else.

Carboni had arranged for Calvi and Vittor to stay in a two-room apartment at Chelsea Cloisters, a massive barrack-like residence of private flats near Sloane Square. They arrived in London on the evening of Tuesday, 15 June.

An early opportunity to crack the Calvi case came in January 1983, just six months after the banker’s death, when another informant of the Trieste finance police provided potentially vital clues apparently drawn from the group of people who had accompanied him to London. Instead of following up the information and sharing it with the British authorities, Italian investigators appeared determined to discourage the source from cooperating with them. Later in 1983 the finance police revealed his true identity to a Trieste prosecutor and he was promptly arrested as an accessory to Calvi’s flight, a charge he was later able to disprove. The man’s name was Eligio Paoli. A friend of Vittor’s and an underworld informant of the Italian secret services, he was known as source ‘Podgora’ to the finance police. His information was at times contradictory and confusing and sometimes it was downright wrong. But there were good reasons for taking Paoli seriously. For one thing, he was in contact with several of the protagonists of Calvi’s last journey, and for another, by the autumn of 1983 he had shown himself capable of accurately predicting future events.

In October 1982 Licio Gelli, the venerable master of the P2 masonic lodge, and Flavio Carboni, the man who guided Calvi on his journey to London, were both in prison in Switzerland awaiting possible extradition to Italy. Gelli had been arrested in Geneva on 13 September as he attempted to withdraw $55 million from the Union Bank of Switzerland. He was wanted by Milan magistrates who had discovered the P2 membership lists in a raid on his home and office on 17 March of the previous year. The 962 names were drawn from Italy’s business, political and military elite and constituted a secret state within the state. One thing in particular united them: hostility to communism and a determination to thwart the electoral ambitions of the Italian Communist party (PCI). The finance police was well represented, with 37 members including the service’s overall commander.

On 29 October 1982 Paoli informed his finance police handlers that a plan was underfoot to organize the escape of Gelli and Carboni from their Swiss prison. The operation would make use of helicopters and was likely to take place on a holiday and during a period of recreation when prisoners were allowed out of their cells to exercise. The subsequent extradition of Carboni to Italy did nothing to change the plan for Gelli’s rescue, Paoli informed the finance police the following month. His information does not appear to have been particularly welcome. Paoli claimed the tip-off was passed to prime minister Bettino Craxi who allegedly dismissed it as a pack of lies.

On 9 September 1983, almost a year after Paoli predicted it would happen, Licio Gelli escaped from the maximum-security prison of Champ-Dollon. He was not sprung by helicopter but less dramatically smuggled out of prison by a guard whom he had suborned. He did use a helicopter later, however, to make good his escape from the south of France. ‘One evening the director of the prison accompanied me to my cell in the infirmary and told me that in Switzerland it was not a crime to escape from prison,’ Gelli recalled 22 years later. ‘One night, at midnight, I found all the doors open and I just went out. I didn’t pay anyone anything,’ he said, stretching credulity to the limit. ‘If it had been necessary to give anyone as much as a slap, I wouldn’t have left.’[1] In reality Gelli was driven out of the prison hiding under a blanket in the back of a guard’s van. He left his pyjamas stuffed with paper tissues in his bed to simulate the presence of a body. An abandoned rope and hook, and a hole cut in the external wire fence, gave the impression that Gelli had escaped over the walls, while a hypodermic syringe and cotton-wool pad impregnated with ether were left in his cell, hinting he might have been seized against his will. A helicopter pilot who flew him out of a small private airport near Annecy said he didn’t get a good view of the passenger’s face: Gelli kept his hand in front of it feigning toothache.

The Swiss authorities had also been informed of the escape plan; their reaction, like Craxi’s, was that the information was totally unfounded.

Craxi’s lack of enthusiasm for Paoli’s divinatory capabilities is understandable. One of the Italian politicians whom Gelli most admired, his Italian Socialist party (PSI) was in fierce competition with the PCI. As a left-wing party firmly rooted in the western camp, it was an ideal instrument for cold war anti-communist operations, contributed several of its leading members to P2, and was a major recipient of the Banco Ambrosiano’s largesse.

Paoli’s first reference to the Calvi case was recorded by the finance police on 7 January 1983. The report is a curious blend of fact, error and distortion, but introduces for the first time a character who, investigators now believe, may have played a crucial role in organizing Calvi’s murder. He is presented by Paoli as a London-based Italian named Volpi. Paoli was unsure of the name, and in fact he got it wrong, along with the details of the man’s death: killed in his room in the ‘Celsea Cristal Center’ residence shortly after Calvi’s murder. But there were some intriguing details that Paoli got right and which would have justified treating his claims with the utmost attention.

The man whose name Paoli had difficulty in remembering was an international drug-dealer called Sergio Vaccari. ‘Volpi was allegedly killed because he knew all about the facts connected to Calvi’s last hours,’ the report said, and his death was ‘made to look like suicide’. It wasn’t: Vaccari died from multiple stab wounds; the death that was made to look like suicide was Calvi’s. The report continued: ‘The person concerned was in contact with Pier Luigi Torri and the world of international finance. The source pointed out that the individual concerned was also involved in drug trafficking.’ Paoli also observed, quite rightly, that this information could form the basis for a fuller reconstruction of the circumstances surrounding Calvi’s death. Torri was a man who had been involved in a banking scandal in London and was suspected of laundering money for the mafia. Flavio Carboni’s office diary records a visit from a ‘Sig. Torri’ at 16.05 on 19 April 1982.

Vaccari, a wealthy playboy whose family had owned a printing works in Milan, financed his high-rolling life in London by trading in drugs and pornography. He had the brilliant idea of importing cocaine in hollowed-out panettoni, an industrially produced type of Italian cake traditionally consumed at Christmas. It may have helped that the cakes normally came with a small bag of icing sugar to sprinkle over the top, and that British customs did not routinely inspect imported foodstuffs. Vaccari’s day job was that of an antiques dealer and he was a partner with other Italians in the London Restoration Centre, a money-losing operation that had to be kept afloat with periodic injections of funds from Italy.

Vaccari was found stabbed to death in the sitting room of his flat in Holland Park by his cleaning lady on the morning of 16 September 1982. Police photos show a grisly scene: his body is slumped on a pale-coloured sofa that has been extensively smeared with blood. He had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest and face, blood had drenched his shirt and pooled behind his head. The grimace on his upturned face and sightless eyes testify to the horror of his final minutes. Rumours spread among his acquaintances that he had been tortured by having his teeth pulled out with a pair of pliers. It didn’t encourage witnesses to come forward.

Police believe Vaccari was killed at about 8 p.m. on the previous evening. He had recently returned from Rome with a consignment of cocaine and a set of electronic scales was set up and switched on ready for business. The lights in his luxuriously furnished ground-floor flat were switched on and the curtains were drawn. Understandably concerned about his personal safety – Vaccari kept a swordstick in the hall and owned a handgun – he had evidently let his murderers in because he recognized and trusted them. He appears to have been struck on the head from behind and then pinioned by one assailant while another struck him repeatedly with a knife.

‘There was more than one murderer and blood all over the place,’ said Detective Chief Superintendent David Harness, who oversaw the murder investigation. The flat had been searched in what police assumed was a hunt by the assassins for drugs and money, blood-stained hands leaving prints on cupboards and the fridge door. There was no knowledge of a possible Calvi connection at that time, so no idea that the killers might have been looking for something else. Among the documents in a briefcase in the sitting room was a summons to a masonic meeting, written in Italian.

There was certainly ample evidence of drug-dealing; besides the precision scales there was a hollowed-out panettone and 500 packets of baby laxative, used for cutting cocaine. ‘By the time I left the flat my lips had gone numb, there was so much cocaine in the air,’ Harness recalled.

His investigation would lead him to Italy, the United States and Denmark, and throw up leads to several Latin American countries as well. ‘It was one of those investigations that took over your life,’ Harness told me 20 years later. ‘It was never solved, and certain things about it made me think it would never go to sleep.’ An initial attempt to make a tentative connection to the Calvi case, partly motivated by the masonic – though not P2 – connection, was rebuffed by the City of London Police. ‘I suggested we compare indexes. The idea was rejected because the Calvi case was a “suicide”.’[2]

The Vaccari investigation did turn up some other intriguing connections, though. A key found in the victim’s flat led to three safety deposit boxes at the London Silver Vaults in Chancery Lane. The boxes were jointly held in the names of Giuseppe Bellinghieri and Gianfrancesco Moccia and were found to contain three British passports, eight false Italian identity cards and two Italian driving licences, as well as £250,000 in cash. Most curiously, they also contained two Polaroid photographs of a Swiss ball watch dated circa 1860 and other photos showing a variety of antique snuffboxes dating from the nineteenth century. The watch had been stolen from a Christie’s showroom in Rome on 30 November 1980 and subsequently had come into the possession of Vaccari. Part of a haul of art and jewellery worth more than £500,000, it would create a still mysterious link between the playboy drug-dealer and the disappearance of Jeannette May, a London socialite who had been married to the banker Evelyn de Rothschild and was now married to Stephen May, a director of the John Lewis retail group. The Mays had bought a house in the rugged Marche region of east central Italy and it was there that Jeannette May and a female friend had disappeared on the day before the Christie’s robbery. The badly decomposed bodies of the two women would only be found 14 months later in a wood near the town of Camerino; victims of murder or of a kidnap that went wrong? Or did they simply die of exposure after losing their way in the mountains and getting caught in a winter storm? An Italian judicial investigation returned an open verdict.

Bill Hopkins, a London antiques dealer who claims to have known both May and Vaccari, says the two met when May was intending to sell a gold and enamel snuffbox. ‘Jeannette May came into my shop,’ he told me. ‘I wasn’t interested, so I put her in touch with Sergio.’ Hopkins, who was Vaccari’s landlord for three years while the Italian lived in a flat above his antiques shop in Notting Hill, says he believes Vaccari agreed to buy the box from May in Italy and then set her up to be murdered. Hopkins believed the snuffbox came from an important Rothschild family collection, commissioned from some of the world’s greatest jewellers, and he suspected it had been stolen.[3]

Hopkins’ suspicion of Jeanette May’s snuffbox is supported by the contents of a British police report. Mrs May was ‘believed to have been involved in some of the shadier aspects of the antiques trade’, the report stated, and she had been in contact with a London restaurateur suspected of involvement in the drugs trade. The restaurateur was Giuseppe Pucci Albanese, owner of a restaurant on the King’s Road and at the heart of a web of social contacts linked to the Calvi affair. Albanese had come to London in the early 1970s and was a business partner of Pierluigi Torri, the financier identified by Paoli as an associate of Vaccari’s. According to the police report, Albanese had also had business dealings with the Italian entrepreneur Carlo Cabassi, whose brother Giuseppe would lend Roberto Calvi his Sardinian villa in the summer of 1981.

Albanese was one of the first people to be questioned by police following Vaccari’s death. Vaccari’s address book and diaries show regular contacts with him and the address and telephone number of his restaurants, as well as the home and office contact details of Pierluigi Torri. And Vaccari was certainly familiar with the San Lorenzo restaurant, the name and telephone number of which were listed in his address book.

A further puzzling link between Jeannette May and the Christie’s robbery emerges from two telegrams sent from a false address in Rome. The first, sent to Christie’s itself three days after the robbery, read: ‘If you want your goods, go to 130 Via Tito Livio, flat 3 – Rodrigo.’ The second arrived at the Ai Pini hotel in Sarnano, where Jeannette and her friend had stayed, nine days after the two women’s disappearance. Addressed to ‘Jeanine’ May, it read: ‘I’m waiting for you Thursday at 130 Tito Livio, flat 3 – Roland.’ Police found no firm connection between the Tito Livio address and either Vaccari, Jeannette May or the Christie’s robbery. Curiously though, another of those finally charged with Calvi’s murder had an address in Via Tito Livio. Giuseppe ‘Pippo’ Calò, the mafia treasurer accused of ordering the murder and who posed as an antiques dealer himself, was arrested in 1985 outside the flat he was living in with his wife at Via Tito Livio number 76. The distance separating number 130 from number 76 still remains to be bridged, however.

Six months after he had first mentioned ‘Volpi’, source ‘Podgora’ added some fascinating new insights into the Calvi case and identified Vaccari by his correct name, setting him at the heart of the drama of Calvi’s last hours. A finance police report dated 5 July 1983 reads: ‘In London on the evening of Calvi’s death Vittor allegedly saw the people who collected him from his residence. These were sent by Gelli and Carboni who were in London. Calvi was allegedly invited to a dinner, one of the participants at which was Sergio Vaccari (the Volpi of our previous report), who subsequently died, who was allegedly the last person to see Calvi alive.’ The report said that Gelli left for the US the next day, while Carboni travelled to Edinburgh with the sister of Vittor’s Austrian lover (which would have meant Carboni’s mistress Manuela Kleinszig). Carboni did indeed fly to Edinburgh, although with a different woman. The contents of this report were communicated to a Trieste prosecutor, Oliviero Drigani, and to finance police headquarters. Drigani considered the information so sensitive that he instructed the finance police not to share it with any other police force or security service.

It did not result in a bold step forward for the investigation, however. On the contrary, Paoli’s detailed knowledge of the events surrounding Calvi’s flight from Italy raised suspicion among investigators that he had actually participated in the illegal operation. On 19 August 1983 Drigani ordered Paoli’s arrest for alleged complicity with Vittor in Calvi’s expatriation to Yugoslavia. Part of the reason for his arrest was that Paoli had been identified by Emilio Pellicani, Flavio Carboni’s personal assistant, as the biondino (small blond man) who had flown to Trieste with an alleged member of the Rome underworld to deliver Calvi’s false passport to him. This ‘crime boss’ was Ernesto Diotallevi, one of the five suspects who would find themselves on trial for Calvi’s murder 23 years later.

Paoli was apparently in the United States at the time and it has now emerged that the biondino may in reality have been the slightly built and fair-haired Vaccari. Attempting later to recall the name for the magistrates, Pellicani said it sounded like ‘Mecalli’ or ‘Mecarri’. An entry in Carboni’s office diary for 9 June 1982 strengthens this hypothesis. A secretary noted that Diotallevi had called and left a message for Pellicani: ‘He asked if a blond youth (Sergio) had arrived.’ Later the same day Diotallevi called again: ‘Sergio has arrived.’ It would be enormously significant if Vaccari had not only been in contact with Calvi during his last days in London but had also participated in the preparations for his journey abroad, accompanying an underworld boss to deliver his forged passport. It would set him at the very heart of the alleged murder plot.

There are other reasons as well for taking a keen interest in Vaccari. One concerns his arrest for drug smuggling in the United States and what appears to be his anomalous treatment by the US authorities on that occasion. Vaccari was arrested by customs officials at Los Angeles airport on 10 June 1978 after arriving on a Varig flight from Lima. He was initially found to be carrying a small quantity of cocaine in his wallet, shrugging off the incident by telling the customs officers: ‘I brought it for the girls. They always ask me for it.’ Less easy to explain was the 2.4 kilos of cocaine found concealed in the false bottom of his suitcase. He was arrested in the company of a Latin American woman called Patricia Noriega.

Vaccari was found guilty of importation of a controlled substance and sentenced by the US District Court of Los Angeles to two years’ probation and a $500 fine and ordered to be deported within three months. The sentence appears exceptionally light in view of the amount of cocaine found in his possession. Heavily edited documents provided to me by the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) show Vaccari described himself as a self-employed salesman in the industrial security sector and gave a California address: 1403 Benedict Canyon, Beverly Hills. The locations of his criminal activity are listed as Los Angeles, Tijuana in Mexico, the Venezuelan capital Caracas and Lima, Peru. His drug smuggling activities evidently continued and a warrant for his arrest was issued in October 1980 by judicial authorities in San Diego. A further warrant was issued by the Southern District of California a year later, alleging that Vaccari had been travelling between the US and South America arranging for the delivery of multikilogram quantities of cocaine in the Los Angeles area. On that occasion he was said to be living in Caracas, where he ‘reportedly owns a Security Agency’. A personal history report dated 19 January 1983 gives Vaccari’s address as West London, England, and his occupation as ‘movie industry’. It lists two aliases: John Max Lloyd and Sergio Ajelli.

Ten pages of the heavily blacked-out DEA material on Vaccari were only released to me after consultation with ‘another government agency’, which had furnished some of the information. Among the reasons cited for the deletions was section (b) (1) of the American Freedom of Information Act: ‘Information which is currently and properly classified pursuant to Executive Order in the interest of the national defense or foreign policy.’ The DEA’s consultation and deletions raise the question as to whether Vaccari may have been recruited as a CIA informant in exchange for his lenient treatment by the Los Angeles court in 1978. Known to frequent senior mafiosi and right-wing extremists in London and Italy, he could have been a valuable intelligence asset.

One of the constant themes in Paoli’s reports for the finance police is the fate of the sensitive documents contained in Calvi’s briefcase. The papers were being held in a safety deposit box in an Austrian bank, he told his handlers, at one point even accompanying them on a trip to Austria to try and identify the bank. But the interest of Paoli and his associates in the documents predates Calvi’s final journey. In an undated note written by Paoli himself, the finance police source said one of his Trieste associates had been angling for a job at the Banco Ambrosiano with the idea of getting his hands on documents ‘of great importance in a war of influence between rival power centres’. The documents could be enormously valuable if sold to interested parties, Paoli observed. They concerned ‘important international operations and, from what he understood, also regarded the Vatican’.

His reports also concern practical aspects of Calvi’s stay in London. Calvi had wanted to go to his customary London hotel, a move considered imprudent by Vittor and out of the question for Carboni. Calvi was extremely unhappy with the flat at Chelsea Cloisters, so Vittor was given the task of seeing that he didn’t go out ‘for his own good’ until such time as Carboni confirmed there was no further danger. Even Calvi’s telephone communications with the outside world were rationed, Paoli wrote. The flat allegedly had a problem with the phone line.

Paoli continued: ‘After a few days, Calvi, who until then had been fairly sure of himself and of the situation, began to be afraid of something. What’s more, the only thing he wanted to do was telephone, but that was exactly what had become impossible. And Vittor did not leave him on his own for a second.’ Calvi had appealed to Vittor to ignore Carboni’s instructions and offered him a lot of money in exchange for his help. Vittor refused: it was better to wait until Carboni had found safer accommodation. According to Paoli’s account: ‘On the last day a phone call arrives and then a vehicle: Calvi must go to dinner with friends.’ Paoli pithily summed up Vittor’s role in London in a deposition to Rome prosecutors in July 2003. His task, the Adriatic smuggler had told him, had been ‘to do little and understand little’.

The tenor of Paoli’s revelations about Calvi was no more welcome to the Italian authorities than his prediction of Gelli’s prison breakout. In another deposition later that month he explained: ‘At a certain point my friendship with Vittor came to an end without any specific reason and I realized that the finance police were no longer interested in acquiring further information about the Calvi affair. I gained that impression from speaking to [his controller, Captain] Rino Stanig, who gave me to understand that someone in Rome did not want him to cultivate this confidential relationship with me any longer.’

Paoli exuded a strange blend of shrewdness and paranoia when I caught up with him in Trieste in November 2005. He told me he was an inventor whose discoveries were worth millions of euros, and that he had been unjustly persecuted and defrauded by some of the biggest names in Italian business. ‘I have been more defamed and accused than Pol Pot,’ he said. He said that having studied industrial and naval design in Yugoslavia and done his military service in the Italian air force – in an office responsible for communications with NATO headquarters in Brussels – he had gone on to work for an import-export company that traded with countries in Eastern Europe from a base in the north-eastern Italian town of Udine. Without saying so explicitly, much of his tale seemed to lead back to the role of the secret services at the time of the Cold War. The decision to take Calvi out of Italy through Yugoslavia had been intended to ‘drag the secret services of the East’ into the affair, he said. And he repeated his account of a desperate and frightened Calvi who had realized, once he arrived in London, that he had fallen into a trap. A lengthy conversation over coffee in the elegant Caffè degli Specchi, which looks on to Trieste’s main sea-front square with its Habsburg-style palaces, hardly gave the impression that the chubby, white-haired inventor and police informant would make a convincing witness when called to the stand at the Calvi trial in Rome. The conspiracies to which he had been witness, or victim, were legion and ultimately did little to bolster his credibility, though that may be the outcome that he actually intends.[4]

Oliviero Drigani, the prosecutor who arrested Paoli in 1983, remains sceptical of his reliability and convinced of the sincerity of Emilio Pellicani, the witness who identified him as the mysterious biondino. Now an appeal court judge in Trieste, he recalled with satisfaction the complex investigation into the illegal export of currency by local businessmen that helped to establish his professional reputation and first led him into contact with the Calvi case. ‘In 1980 there was an enormous outflow of currency because of the economic and political situation,’ he told me. Much of it ended up in Switzerland, in the Banco Ambrosiano-controlled Banca del Gottardo in Lugano, some of it smuggled across the border in suitcases and some of it concealed in anstalts, secretive fiduciary companies created under the Gottardo’s umbrella. Drigani recalled the intense hostility aroused by his investigation at the time and the anxieties expressed to him by his chief investigator, Captain Rino Stanig of the finance police. He continues to wonder whether Calvi’s visit to Trieste was simply a coincidence or in some way connected to the money-smuggling operations he was then probing. ‘The intriguing aspect of Calvi’s passage through Trieste was the possible connection to the financial inquiries I was conducting at that time,’ he said, explaining the investigators’ surprise at seeing this top financier appear ‘like a Ronaldo . . . on the amateurs pitch’.[5] Though Drigani managed to secure convictions, including that of an important Swiss-Italian lawyer, his inquiry never clarified the role of Roberto Calvi.

There were other good reasons for taking Paoli’s initial information seriously, however, clues that lead in the direction of terrorism and the arms trade, two highly sensitive strategic activities at the time of the Cold War. The finance police report dated 5 July 1983 related the following claim from source ‘Podgora’: ‘In Rome, prior to his flight, Calvi was shown a false arrest warrant to which he had previously been alerted by Gelli. This was allegedly the reason for the banker’s flight.’ There is indeed substance to this claim, a substance that creates a surprising connection to the terrorist bomb that exploded at Bologna railway station in 1980.

Other confidential reports show Paoli had informed his handlers of a plot to assassinate Flavio Carboni following his extradition from Switzerland and incarceration in Lodi prison, south-east of Milan. The plan was for a marksman to shoot Carboni with a high-powered rifle from a bell-tower overlooking the prison. The weapon was to be obtained from an arms dealer who happened to live in the same Austrian town as the Kleinszig sisters. The dealer was alleged to be an expert in the procurement of false end-user certificates for the arms trade, and to be in contact with another arms dealer, Henri Arsan, with ‘an Arab arms trader named Kassogi’, and with the Banco Ambrosiano consultant Francesco Pazienza. Right or wrong about the plot to kill Carboni, the last three names mentioned by Paoli all have right of place in the Calvi story and lead us towards the delicate financial activities that may explain the banker’s murder.

Confused and mistaken though he may have been at times, Paoli’s evidence laid out for investigators from very early on a number of remarkable true facts about Calvi’s last days, but investigators preferred to look the other way. The delicacy of the case is understandable: Calvi travelled to London with a Sardinian businessman, Carboni, who claimed to work for the secret services, and an Adriatic smuggler, Vittor, whose speciality was clandestine access to an Eastern Bloc country and who doubled as an informant to the finance police. The potential sensitivity of Vittor’s role led the commander of the finance police to write to Tina Anselmi, the president of the parliamentary commission looking into the activities of the P2 masonic lodge, on 9 September 1983, to ‘firmly reject’ the hypothesis ‘that an agent of the finance police had infiltrated the organization and execution of Roberto Calvi’s flight from Italy’. It would be deeply embarrassing for the Italian state to have its representatives so close to the action, particularly in view of its tragic, criminal conclusion under Blackfriars Bridge. Paoli’s evidence also places Sergio Vaccari at the heart of the operation: a man, though ‘Podgora’ may not have known it at the time, whose profile fits that of a CIA informant. Little wonder then that his information caused disquiet in official circles and that little was done to follow up his leads.

3

God’s Banker

Roberto Calvi was ideally suited for membership of a secret society . . . and made its perfect victim too. A man with deep-seated insecurities, from a relatively humble background, it helped that he believed the world was run by conspiracies. Without a powerful patron – a santo in paradiso – one could not expect to get anywhere in the shark-infested waters of Italian finance, he was convinced. Of the Italy of the 1970s and 1980s, the period when his career was approaching its apex, with its nepotism and ubiquitous political patronage, he was not wholly wrong.

Roberto Calvi was born in Milan on 13 April 1920. His father, Giacomo Calvi, came from the village of Tremenico in the Valtellina, an Alpine valley running north towards the Swiss border from Lake Como. His mother, Maria Rubini, was born in Venice but her family too hailed originally from Tremenico. Despite the move to Milan, the Calvi family retained the dour, canny, austere qualities of mountain folk. Giacomo Calvi’s successful career at the Banca Commerciale Italiana, Milan’s largest bank, did little to change that.

As a small child Roberto was difficult and trouble-prone, often involved in fights with other children. At school he was a bright student who rounded out his pocket money by doing homework for fellow pupils, his widow Clara recalled many years later. ‘His parents were rather mean. With the money he earned he used to go riding at San Siro [a Milan suburb, now home to the city’s football stadium]. All his friends were rich.’[1] Roberto studied at the smart Cesare Beccaria secondary school, mastering Latin and Ancient Greek and showing a flair for modern languages – French and German – too. His natural diffidence was increased by his mother’s insistence that he wear ‘sensible clothes’, which marked him out from his fashionably dressed young contemporaries. In later years she would disapprove of her attractive daughter-in-law’s taste for elegant apparel. Roberto moved on to the prestigious Bocconi university, but dropped out before taking a degree. ‘He wanted to become a lawyer, but his parents signed him up to read business and economics at university. To get his own back he dropped out and volunteered for the army. They couldn’t stop him,’ Clara Calvi recollected.

In 1939, a year before Italy joined the Second World War on the side of Nazi Germany, Calvi enrolled at Pinerolo, a prestigious military academy near Turin where cavalry officers underwent their initial training. He had opted for the Novara lancers, an aristocratic regiment where he would again be rubbing shoulders with the social elite. A fondness for the nobility would remain with him throughout his life and would be responsible for the generous sprinkling of aristocrats on the Banco Ambrosiano board in later years: there were three counts and a marquis under Calvi’s chairmanship.

Calvi was a lifelong conservative but the anti-communism he professed in later years was more of a sop to his powerful sponsors than a fervently held personal belief. At university he had signed up for the student fascist association, lending a hand to support its propaganda activities. ‘We were all fascists then,’ said Clara Calvi. ‘I didn’t take part in the parades because I didn’t like the uniform, or the shoes.’ Roberto Calvi made a more significant contribution to Benito Mussolini’s cause in the autumn of 1941, when he was sent by train to the Russian front. The Russian campaign was a brutal experience but Calvi was proud of the role that he played in it as a young second lieutenant, helping to maintain morale and discipline so as to bring as many as possible of his soldiers back alive. In later years he would recall the bitter battle against the cold, how he forced his men to keep marching, rather than allow them to freeze to death on horseback, and how he warmed his fingers on a live chicken carried inside his coat. One key to his success was the purchase of some carts from a German sergeant, a transaction in which his good knowledge of the language came in useful and perhaps an early indication of his pragmatism and business sense. One of the carts was kitted out as a mobile kitchen, with hot soup always available for the exhausted troops.

Calvi returned to civilian life in 1943 and, through the intercession of his father, found a job at his father’s bank. Life as a clerk at the Banca Commerciale branch in the southern town of Lecce was hardly exciting for a veteran of the Russian war, but his foot was on the first rung of a ladder that would take him to extraordinary professional heights. His first advancement again came about through his father, after Giacomo Calvi ran into an old school friend in the street. The man was a senior official at another Milanese bank, the Banco Ambrosiano, and agreed to take Roberto on for a three-month trial at the slightly higher rank of procuratore (manager). The episode provided further confirmation that who you knew was at least as important as what you knew when trying to get ahead in Italian society. In 1947, Calvi joined the bank to which he would dedicate the rest of his life.

Initially the personal assistant and protégé of Alessandro Canesi, a senior manager who became chairman in 1965, Calvi revealed himself to be a hard-working, intelligent and forward-looking banker and made rapid progress up the Ambrosiano’s hierarchy. Imaginative and a linguist, he was just the kind of person needed to shake things up and introduce some rays of modernity into the stuffy, closeted rooms of the ecclesiastical bank. His performance was finally rewarded when in November 1975, aged 55, he was appointed chairman. In the second half of the 1970s the Ambrosiano would become Italy’s largest private bank, thanks to an ambitious expansion plan promoted by Calvi.

The Banco Ambrosiano had been founded by a priest, Monsignor Giuseppe Tovini, in 1896 to provide financial services to Roman Catholic institutions and families in the wealthy Lombardy region. Named after St Ambrose, the fourth-century bishop of Milan, the bank’s expressly Catholic character was protected by a statute that required shareholders to submit a baptismal certificate and statement of good conduct from their parish priest before they could vote. Bank employees were also expected to be ‘good Catholics’. The Ambrosiano’s independence was protected by a rule barring any individual from acquiring more than 5 per cent of its shares. The bank’s purpose was to serve ‘moral organizations, pious works, and religious bodies set up for charitable aims’, conducting its activities in accordance with Christian ethical principles; a safer and more prudent institution it would be hard to imagine. Given its nature as a Catholic bank, the Ambrosiano was a natural ally for the archdiocese of Milan, the biggest in Italy, and for the Vatican. Paradoxically, it would be the connection with the latter that would lead Calvi into danger.

Calvi’s climb up the Ambrosiano hierarchy did not bring him greater self-confidence or social assurance, however. Roberto Rosone, who worked with him for many years and was deputy chairman when he was chairman, found him pathologically shy and frustratingly uncommunicative. ‘He was a perfectly normal person, without vices. He lived for power,’ Rosone told me. ‘He was frighteningly introverted. He never looked you in the eye when he spoke. It used to drive me mad; I wanted to hit him over the head with a hammer.’ Rosone recalled an occasion in the 1970s when Calvi became embarrassed while attending to an attractive actress, Loretta Goggi. ‘Calvi called me over. I saw he was red-faced. He asked me to carry on, said she made him feel uncomfortable. There was only one woman for him, and that was power.’[2]

Another former colleague, who asked not to be named, harboured a more positive recollection of collaboration with Calvi. He was capable, forward-looking and open-minded, the source says. ‘People in the bank admired him. He didn’t have charisma but was respected because the bank had grown so much. He foresaw many banking changes that actually took place.’ Interitalia, Italy’s first mutual fund, was Calvi’s brainchild, giving small investors a convenient way to participate in the stock market. According to this source, Calvi had been a pioneer in introducing modern management techniques and the use of computers at the Ambrosiano and its affiliates, hiring British and American consultants to teach marketing techniques. ‘If you think about marketing in 1970, it was like having lessons on how to walk on Mars. No one else in the bank had such an open mind. He was always looking for new ideas on how to improve performance.’

The fact that Calvi ran into judicial problems in 1981 did not completely shake the confidence of Banco Ambrosiano staff in their chairman, this source told me. These were things that could equally easily happen to innocent people in Italy at that time. In 1979 arrest warrants had been issued for the governor of the central Bank of Italy and his top supervisory official, in what was generally seen as a politically motivated legal move, possibly made at the instigation of P2. Perhaps the same thing had happened to an innocent Calvi? ‘Until the end we thought we were better than the others. We were successful, expanding, increasing our profits. Larger state banks were feeling the competition,’ says this former banker.

Like Rosone, though, this colleague remarks on Calvi’s social awkwardness. ‘He wasn’t antipatico [unpleasant]. You felt uncomfortable with him because you didn’t know what to say, and he didn’t either, unless it was professional. He had no small talk. I remember parties in Rome where he would sit in a corner and no one would speak to him. His very fluffy wife looked as though she was dressed for a cabaret, in bright colours, violet and pink, with ribbons.’

That lack of social ease, in a sector where personal contacts and political sophistication were essential, made Calvi vulnerable to the throng of political hangers-on, bagmen, fixers and influence-brokers who have achieved epic status in Italy under the collective title of faccendieri. Journalists Gianfranco Piazzesi and Sandra Bonsanti quote a telling observation by the stockbroker Renato Cantoni in their book La storia di Roberto Calvi. ‘Calvi belonged to a bourgeois middle-class family and suffered from a profound sense of inferiority, which he transformed into a granitic superiority complex,’ Cantoni comments. ‘Whatever happened around him was old hat, whatever information he was given was late, because he already knew it. A friend once told him something totally invented: well, he replied that he had already heard about it several days ago.’[3]

It is probable that Calvi’s sense of insecurity actually increased as he climbed his professional ladder. There were good reasons to be concerned about one’s personal safety if one was a prominent businessman in Italy in the 1970s. Kidnappings and terrorist attacks were common. Calvi’s reaction was extreme, nonetheless. His fourth-floor executive suite in the Banco Ambrosiano building in Milan’s Via Clerici, just round the corner from La Scala opera house, was sealed off with heavy bullet-proof glass doors. Armed receptionists checked the identity of visitors. Calvi went to great lengths to ensure the privacy of his professional activities, installing a variety of security devices in his office. An electronic field was supposed to prevent bugs from transmitting out of the room, a scrambler telephone was meant to thwart eavesdroppers, and he clung obsessively to his personal briefcase, stuffed with his most sensitive documents and ‘weighing a ton’, according to his Rome driver, Tito Tesauri. This obsession with secrecy may simply have been the result of a personal paranoia; but it could also be a sign that his activities were more delicate and sensitive than those of a normal banker.

From 1978 Calvi began to travel by bullet-proof Mercedes, hiring ten bodyguards to protect his seventh-floor apartment in Milan’s central Via Frua and between three and five to ensure his protection when he was in Rome. There were even guards on hand when he went on holiday to his country villa; usually three, who occupied a caravan in the garden. His fourth-floor flat in the centre of Rome had three alarm systems, including a panic button he carried with him in his pocket in the event of a kidnap attempt, and security cameras. He wouldn’t go to the cinema for security reasons. By the end of his career he was spending $1 million a year on his personal security.

In his book The Calvi Affair, Larry Gurwin observed: ‘One can only conclude that Calvi, in spite of his successful career, was a man haunted by fears: fear of showing his emotions, fear of appearing unworldly, fear of divulging his secrets, fear for his physical safety.’ Calvi’s fascination with ‘secret power’ was illustrated by his admiration for The Godfather, Mario Puzo’s chronicle of life – and many deaths – in an American mafia family, where conflict and intrigue were the order of the day and a horse’s head left at the bottom of your bed was worth more than a thousand menacing words. A financier confided to Gurwin how Calvi had once recommended the book to him. ‘Do you know The Godfather?’ Calvi asked him. ‘It’s a masterpiece, because everything is in it.’[4] One of Calvi’s lawyers reportedly exclaimed, during the banker’s trial for currency violations in 1981, that it was impossible to defend a man who had two brains. ‘Brain number one is good,’ said a stockbroker who knew Calvi well. ‘That’s the brain that has built up the Banco Ambrosiano into a big, solid, prosperous, well-run bank. Brain number two has no relation to the first. It’s the brain of a man afraid to look in the mirror in case his reflection should learn his secrets. Brain number two thinks the world is run by conspiracies.’[5]

There was really only one source of relief for Calvi from the fear and stress generated by his work, and that was his family. Calvi acquired his ‘fluffy’ wife in 1952, five years after he joined the Ambrosiano. Clara Canetti was a vivacious brunette who was studying chemistry at the university of Bologna. She was engaged to someone else when Calvi first met her in the Adriatic resort of Rimini. Undeterred, he began an assiduous courtship. Little would stand in his way when he set his heart on gaining something. It was a characteristic that also applied in the professional sphere and it would earn him bitter enemies. Clara’s younger brother, Luciano, who was 12, opposed the relationship, but he was won round by the gift of two water-pistols.

Clara has described their first meeting – on the beach of the Pensione Ariston where they were both staying – in an unpublished memoir. ‘He was very handsome: magnificent shoulders, nice legs, a Clark Gable-style moustache; he was rather forward and a bit presumptuous, I would say.’ The war veteran charmed her with tales of his experiences on the Russian front. They talked about books. In addition to Italian authors, Roberto enjoyed Dickens, Wodehouse, Thackeray and Balzac. Clara could picture him as the hero of a Balzac novel, looking out over the roofs of Paris and promising himself: one day this city will be mine! He proposed to her over lunch in a fish restaurant and celebrated her acceptance by standing on his head on the beach.

‘We got married in the sacristy of San Carlo, because the church had been destroyed in the bombing and hadn’t yet been rebuilt,’ she wrote. ‘It was just family, because that was what Roberto wanted: he was, even then, discreet and reserved, perhaps timid.’[6] The couple went on holiday in Switzerland, travelling around the country by train. In those carefree days Roberto may not have paid much attention to the Swiss banks. Later they would become a vital window on the world for the Banco Ambrosiano, landlocked by Italy’s severe laws on the export of currency.

Their first child, Carlo, was born in July 1953, followed six years later by a daughter, Anna. These were happy times for the family; boom years for the Italian economy and good years for the hard-working banker, who was steadily clawing his way up the Ambrosiano hierarchy. Relief from the strains of work was available in Drezzo, a village on the Swiss border where the family had a weekend home. Here Calvi played the role of gentleman farmer, raising chickens, turkeys, cows and pigs. It was while helping to cut up a turkey that he sliced open the index finger of his right hand. He drove himself to hospital and fainted after giving instructions that the finger was not to be amputated. It required plastic surgery and forced him to wear a protective sheath thereafter, a fact that would later have a bearing on the investigation into his death.

Francesco Pazienza, Calvi’s financial and security consultant in the last year of his life, has described the impression he made on the occasion of their first private meeting. Calvi was wearing a dark suit, pale blue shirt and sober, dark blue Mila Schön tie, he remembered. ‘When I got to know him well I discovered that he had a wardrobe that was very extensive but entirely devoid of imagination. He had dozens of suits that were all the same and lots of pairs of shoes, all identical and all black,’ he wrote. ‘Only in the summer did he allow himself some small variation on the theme, wearing suits of a slightly less funereal grey.’[7] His skin colour was milk white, and the few hairs ringing his skull were of an unnatural black, he recalled. For someone so sartorially unadventurous, Calvi did have a touch of vanity: he used to dye his hair almost every day, with the assistance of his wife.

The house at Drezzo provided a discreet venue for business meetings. In later years Calvi was able to use long walks in the garden to cement his relationship with senior Vatican bank officials and other business associates. Similarly, in the Bahamas, where the family bought a house at Lyford Cay, holidays were occasions for the small-scale entertaining in which Calvi felt most at ease. The Sicilian financier Michele Sindona and Archbishop Paul Marcinkus of the Vatican bank, partners in Calvi’s Nassau-based Cisalpine Overseas Bank (later to be known as Banco Ambrosiano Overseas Ltd, or BAOL), would both be houseguests. When the extrovert Marcinkus arrived for the first time, he threw his arms around Clara and started singing ‘Arrivederci Roma’. Later, as Clara recalled in her memoir, relations cooled and Marcinkus would stay instead at the home of the bishop of Nassau when he visited the Bahamas for BAOL board meetings. The cause of the tension, she understood from her husband, was the size of the Vatican’s debt to the Banco Ambrosiano.

Clara Calvi’s memoir records her pride in her husband’s professional achievements. ‘Roberto’s successes made me happy and I am and always was his greatest admirer. Even today I am very proud of him and proud of the name I bear. They killed him, they didn’t defeat him,’ she wrote. ‘If he had been able to conclude his very delicate negotiations with Opus Dei he would today be the most powerful man in Italy.’[8]

Calvi’s widow was lucid and combative when I visited her in an old people’s home in a leafy suburb of Montreal in the summer of 2004. Wheelchair-bound and with the symptoms of advanced Parkinson’s disease, she was still defending her husband’s memory and accusing his enemies with the same determination she had shown ever since his death, her voice now reduced to an almost inaudible whisper. Gianni Agnelli (the Fiat car magnate), former prime minister Giulio Andreotti, Licio Gelli and Umberto Ortolani were all on the list. She mentioned the names of others, people still involved in Italian public life or prominent in the Vatican, whom she said her husband had identified to her as members of P2. Andreotti had threatened her husband, warning him that he must not speak to the magistrates, she said, and the wife of the Socialist party leader Bettino Craxi had called her after Roberto’s death, ‘because they wanted to keep me sweet. But I have always spoken out.’

Her husband kept important papers in London, Clara Calvi said. And she recalled a euphoric phone call received from him shortly before his death. ‘He said to me: “Darling, just be patient for a while, because something marvellous is going to happen that will completely change our lives.” A few hours later he was dead.’ The principal threat to the family came from the Vatican, she was sure of it. But her husband had been ingenuous and had trusted the wrong people. ‘He needed protection because he had so many enemies. When he saw a good business opportunity, he pounced on it. That’s what had made him so many enemies.’ Clara Calvi reserved particular venom for Licio Gelli, who was supposed to have provided that protection: ‘It makes me angry to think he’s still alive.’ And for Flavio Carboni: ‘My husband trusted Carboni, and he turned out to be a murderer.’ Whether or not Mrs Calvi was right to believe this will be determined by the decision of the courts in Rome. Under Italian law a defendant is not considered guilty until two levels of appeal have been exhausted.

As well as identifying the Vatican as a threat to her husband, Clara Calvi set the drama of his last days within the context of the Cold War. ‘We visited the whole of South America. My husband was setting up banks everywhere,’ she said. ‘Who paid for the Berlin Wall? The pope? It was Roberto who paid. He was a banker, not a charitable foundation. He asked for the money back. They wouldn’t give it.’[9] Latin America and Eastern Europe: these were the key fields for Roberto Calvi’s political work.

As the person who was probably closer to her husband than any other, Clara Calvi’s memories provide an indispensable guide to the hopes and fears, and plans, that marked his final days. As someone who has refused to be silenced or cowed by fear, her words provide crucial guidance in reconstructing the forces and factors that may have determined his death. Calvi may not always have told his wife the truth, but her testimony has the authentic ring of genuine personal conviction.

4

The Ministry of Fear

On a May afternoon in 1982, at his country home near Drezzo on the Swiss border, Roberto Calvi took out his handgun and started cleaning it. It was an old 9mm Walther P38 which normally sat in its box in a wardrobe, gathering dust. His daughter Anna asked what he was doing, never having seen him take the revolver out before. ‘If they come, I will shoot,’ he told her, showing her how to hold and aim it. ‘I asked him who on earth might come and he told me that during that period many people could have had an interest in eliminating him, explaining that he had already seen signs that the operation he was working on was creating enemies.’ From then on he began to carry the handgun with him wherever he went, keeping it in his briefcase.

Anna Calvi was giving evidence to investigators from Milan at the Italian embassy in Washington on 22 October 1982, four months after her father’s death. Her 19-page statement provides the fullest account of Roberto Calvi’s last days from the person who was in closest touch with him at that time. Having given evidence in the immediate aftermath of the murder and at the London inquests, Ms Calvi – aged 23 when her father died – made a conscious decision to turn the page on this chapter of her life. While her mother and brother hired detectives and lawyers to seek to track down Roberto Calvi’s assassins and spoke copiously to the press to defend his memory, the daughter, who was the last member of the family to speak to him by phone, has kept clear of their legal battles and opted for silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The two men first met in 1968, when Calvi was deputy chairman of the Ambrosiano. They were introduced by a relative of Sindona, Giuliano Magnoni, who had been a college friend of Calvi. Sindona was impressed by Calvi’s technical abilities and offered him a job in his own burgeoning financial empire. Calvi chose to stay put but became a business partner of Sindona and studied some of the more arcane tricks of the banking trade at his elbow.

‘I saw then that . . . there lurked in Calvi a man clearly set on winning wealth and power – not for the Ambrosiano, but for himself,’ Sindona said later in an interview with the American author Nick Tosches. ‘In effect, he . . . was asking me to find him a way to achieve a position like mine, to become his own boss. So I laid it out for him. I explained how a series of financial institutions could be created – in Luxembourg, the Bahamas, Costa Rica, Vaduz – that would retain the aegis of the Ambrosiano while enjoying the lawful luxury of secrecy offered by those countries. It was, I explained, a luxury whose value had already been proven by the world’s most important banks.’[1]

Sindona’s rise, like that of Calvi, owed much to the Vatican. In 1968 Pope Paul VI decided to reduce the Vatican’s investments in Italy. The government was threatening to revoke the Vatican’s exemption from tax on its Italian share dividends and the pope feared that a new season of industrial unrest could result in workers from Vatican-owned companies bringing their grievances to St Peter’s Square to protest under his window. Disinvestment would also reduce the risk of embarrassing investments coming to light, such as its stake in the Beretta handgun company or in the Istituto Farmacologico Serono, which produced oral contraceptives. The Vatican would hold only minority stakes and refrain from appointing directors to the boards.

Sindona, who had got to know Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini when he was archbishop of Milan, was just the man the Vatican needed: financially astute and with excellent international connections. In May 1969 Sindona and Hambros Bank of London bought out the Vatican’s holding in the engineering company Condotte d’Acqua and all but 5 per cent of its stake in Società Generale Immobiliare (SGI), a sprawling real estate conglomerate. By 1973 SGI had expanded further, giving Sindona control of Italy’s largest luxury hotel group, CIGA, the Montreal Stock Exchange building and the Watergate complex in Washington, a piece of real estate which would be intimately connected with the fall of Sindona’s friend Richard Nixon and where the Calvi family would seek refuge in the aftermath of Roberto’s murder.

Sindona’s choice of Hambros as a partner was significant. Founded in 1839, the British bank had been doing business with Italy for more than a century. A £4 million loan had helped Cavour to create a unified Italy in the nineteenth century, forging the modern state from a patchwork of feudal monarchies, and depriving the Vatican of its temporal power and extensive land holdings. Both Hambros’ chairman, Jocelyn Hambro, and the bank’s representative in Italy at the time, John McCaffery, were veterans of Britain’s wartime Special Operations Executive (SOE), an organization specializing in sabotage and subversion. McCaffery’s perception of business as cold war politics by other means was made clear in an affidavit he swore in 1976 in Sindona’s favour. ‘At the end of the war many leaders of the resistance became the leaders of political parties, of finance and industry throughout Europe. Since they did not know one another and I was the only common link, I tried, on a purely private and personal basis, to bring together people who shared healthy western ideas in an attempt to oppose the spread of communism in Europe,’ he said. ‘In order to pursue this activity I entered the world of business.’

The fateful creation of the Banco Ambrosiano’s network of offshore companies – which would ultimately sink the bank under more than $1 billion of debt – began under the guidance of, and in conjunction with, Michele Sindona. In November 1970 Calvi took the first step, buying from Sindona a Luxembourg holding company called Compendium SA. The company was later renamed Banco Ambrosiano Holding and became the foundation stone of Calvi’s edifice of secret offshore financial power. In March of the following year he added the Cisalpine Overseas Bank in Nassau, another key piece. Both Sindona and the IOR took a 2.5 per cent stake. The origin of around half of the Cisalpine Bank’s initial $450 million share capital has still not been identified to this day, raising investigators’ suspicions that it was from the very start being used to launder mafia money.

Calvi and Sindona began to exchange favours as an intricate financial relationship developed between them. On 14 May 1971 the Cisalpine lent 11.5 million Swiss francs to Compendium, which used the money to buy shares in Sindona’s Geneva-based Banque de Financement (Finabank). Sindona thanked Calvi for the favour by paying him a commission of 540,000 Swiss francs. The money left a private Sindona account at Finabank and was paid into an account opened by Calvi in the name of a ‘Mr C. Ralrov and Mrs K. Ralrov’ at the Swiss Credit Bank in Zurich. Acceptance of this and other bribes would make Calvi vulnerable to blackmail when he and Sindona fell out in the mid 1970s.[2]

The cause of the rift was Sindona’s pressing demands for the money he needed to stave off bankruptcy in his transatlantic financial empire. Using money stolen from his Swiss and Italian bank depositors, as well as some provided by Calvi, Sindona had bought control of America’s twentieth largest bank, the Franklin National Bank of New York, in July 1972. Already financially insecure, a couple of years of Sindona’s piratical management was enough to tip the Franklin National into bankruptcy. Announced on 8 October 1974, it was at that time the largest bank failure in American history.

Calvi did agree to help Sindona out financially but what he offered was not enough. Stepping up the pressure, Sindona leaked embarrassing details of his dealings with Calvi to an Italian journalist, Luigi Cavallo. Cavallo spread the allegations via his news agency, Agenzia A, even writing to the Bank of Italy urging it to mount an inspection. Calvi’s response was lukewarm; he evidently required further prodding. On 9 November 1977 the claims first published in relative obscurity by Agenzia A were plastered all over the walls of central Milan, with particular emphasis on the area around the Banco Ambrosiano headquarters.

‘Jail Roberto Calvi’ was the unequivocal call, and beneath it were the gory details of the two bankers’ secret deals. ‘In connection with the sale by Sindona group companies to the Ambrosiano of equity stakes in Bastogi, Centrale, Credito Varesino, Finabank, Zitropo, etc., Roberto Calvi deposited $10 million in numbered Swiss bank accounts belonging to himself and to which he and his wife are signatories. With the Bastogi operation alone Roberto Calvi appropriated $4,823,000,’ the posters alleged. Calvi had taken secret control of the Corriere della Sera, Italy’s most prestigious and best selling daily newspaper, they alleged. Cavallo challenged the Corriere journalists to report on their new boss’s misdemeanours, including ‘fraud, false accounting, embezzlement, illegal currency export and tax evasion’.

Calvi’s reaction was again low-key; he sent Ambrosiano staff out into the streets to tear down the offensive posters and arranged to pay Sindona $500,000, masked as the purchase of a villa in northern Italy. But this blackmail assault on him was to set in motion a chain of events that would lead directly to Calvi’s disastrous end. To make doubly sure of his hit, Cavallo wrote to the governor of the Bank of Italy on 24 November reminding him of a previous missive containing 30 pages of photocopies giving details of Calvi’s Swiss bank accounts; he complained that the governor had failed to order an inspection or pass on the information to the magistrates. ‘If my appeal remains unheard once again, I will present a complaint against you for dereliction of duty,’ he wrote. On 17 April 1978 a team of 50 officials from the Bank of Italy’s inspectorate arrived at the headquarters of the Banco Ambrosiano to examine the bank’s books.

A cultured and intelligent man, Cavallo was a remarkable protagonist of the Cold War in Italy. A communist resistance fighter during the Second World War – although he also spent part of the war studying philosophy in Berlin – he later broke with the PCI and devoted himself to anti-communist propaganda, operating between West Germany, Italy and France. Dubbed il provocatore by the media, he was employed by Fiat, the Turin-based car manufacturer, and by the Italian secret services to try to intimidate and demoralize the left-wing trade unions. In 1974 he was involved in an abortive coup plot mounted by another resistance hero, the right-wing aristocrat Count Edgardo Sogno, whose efforts were closely monitored and encouraged by the CIA.

Cavallo spelled out his blackmailing message to Calvi in an undated letter written in late 1977. ‘Among the tribes of Uganda the fable of the two scorpions in a bottle is well known,’ he began. ‘If they begin an all-out struggle this invariably has lethal consequences for both contenders’ – meaning, in this case, Sindona and Calvi. Cavallo advised Calvi to give up the struggle and keep the promises he had previously made. If not, he warned, the propaganda campaign against him would continue, inciting police, magistrates, trade unions, political parties and public opinion against him and leading to his removal from the Ambrosiano board. And if that didn’t happen, extremist extra-parliamentary groups – longhand for terrorists – ‘will make your private and social life impossible. You will have to choose: either to flee abroad or be locked up in San Vittore [jail]. A civil suicide or life on the run.

‘And don’t make the mistake of counting on the survival instinct or the mercy of the first scorpion. His mind is made up: either agreement and respect for the undertakings or a fight to the finish . . . Re-finding a friend and normality is certainly more pleasant than the fate of the second scorpion in the bottle.’ Cavallo’s letter was among the documents in Calvi’s briefcase when it re-emerged in public in 1986. The briefcase contained the banker’s most sensitive documents and was a crucial instrument of his own blackmail plans. It is highly significant, then, that Calvi kept this threatening letter among his most closely guarded possessions. And that he continued to pay Sindona’s emissary until the end of his life.[3] Indeed, he may have recruited Cavallo to his own side by this stage, judging from another letter found in the briefcase. Dated 9 July 1980, and written from Paris, it appears to amount to an offer by Cavallo to switch sides. The initiatives he had conducted against Calvi were not the fruit of personal rancour but had been carried out on commission, Cavallo wrote. The Agnelli brothers were behind the latest political and judicial moves against him, Cavallo assured Calvi, but he was available to mount a counter-offensive that would stop them in their tracks: ‘I guarantee an excellent result from the operations within a short lapse of time,’ he concluded.

Cavallo’s original blackmail – for which he would be convicted by a court in Milan in March 1986 – was destined to have grave consequences for Calvi. On 17 November 1978 the Bank of Italy inspectors delivered their report on Calvi’s financial dealings. ‘Not entirely favourable,’ was the verdict, and the substance of their findings was passed on to the Milan prosecutor’s office for further investigation. In July 1980 Milan magistrates withdrew Calvi’s passport, returning it to him temporarily on 26 September. Early on the morning of 20 May 1981 the magistrates’ inquiries came to fruition when officers from the finance police descended on the Calvis’ seventh-floor apartment in Via Frua. The chairman of Italy’s largest private bank answered the door in his pyjamas to be informed that he was under arrest and would be escorted to prison in the nearby town of Lodi.

In 1976 the Christian Democrat government of Giulio Andreotti had tightened restrictions on the export of currency from Italy, increasing the penalty for offenders to a maximum of six years’ imprisonment. The Communist party was growing in electoral strength, the economy was stuttering and a safe financial haven abroad was more attractive than ever for the rich. An institution like the Banco Ambrosiano was an ideal conduit for the flight of capital, with a flexible approach to the rules, a subsidiary – the Banca del Gottardo – in Lugano, and close ties to the Vatican bank, an offshore haven conveniently located in the heart of Rome. One of the techniques Calvi had used to send money abroad was to juggle shares in the Toro insurance company between his offshore dummy companies. The result of the exercise, carried out in the early 1970s, had been to grossly inflate the value of the shares and deposit more than 23 billion lire outside Italy’s national borders.

Exactly two months after his arrest Calvi was found guilty of illegal currency export and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment and a fine of 16 billion lire (more than $10 million). The guilty verdict would make it more difficult for the Ambrosiano to raise cash on international money markets. Released from prison pending an appeal, Calvi suffered the indignity of again having his passport withdrawn by Milan magistrates, meaning he was unable to show his face at international bankers’ gatherings and, more importantly, to continue his hands-on management of his secret offshore financial network.

But what had happened while Calvi was in prison would turn out to be even more destructive. Though not a man with a particular taste for luxury, he was accustomed to living in an exquisitely furnished apartment and being waited on by deferential staff. In Lodi prison he had been treated with humiliating familiarity by the guards and terrorized by his fellow inmates; for the first time he was exposed to uncomfortably close and prolonged contact with the exponents of organized crime – the men whose bosses were allegedly recycling their ill-gotten wealth through the Banco Ambrosiano. An intensely private person, he was traumatized by having to share a cell with two of his fellow defendants. Visitors found him nervous and irritable because he was unable to sleep properly in the presence of strangers. Raffaele Cutolo, boss of the criminal Camorra organization, claims he intervened to protect Calvi from bullying, writing to associates in Lodi prison urging them to keep a protective eye on him.

After seven weeks in prison Calvi had begun to show signs of cracking under the strain. On the morning of 9 July his cell mates woke to find he had attempted suicide, swallowing an overdose of sleeping pills and slashing his right wrist; for Calvi was left-handed. The cut was superficial, however, and he was soon out of danger, after having his stomach pumped. More dangerous for his long-term survival was what he had done a week earlier. On 2 July Calvi had informed the magistrates working on his case that he was ready to cooperate with them. Three magistrates arrived at Lodi at 10 p.m. and continued questioning him until three in the morning. Among the topics Calvi said he was willing to discuss were the role of the P2 lodge, his relations with the Vatican and his illegal funding of the Italian Socialist party (PSI). In exchange, he explained, he would like to be released from jail. The magistrates took his testimony but declined to release him.

One of the sensitive topics the troubled banker had touched on was his relationship with Umberto Ortolani, the financial brains of the P2 organization. ‘Ortolani claimed to have friends in all sorts of circles, even on an international level, in particular in London freemasonry,’ Calvi said. Calvi gradually came to realize that Ortolani also had high-level contacts in the church and that he and Licio Gelli could provide Calvi with the kinds of political, financial and bureaucratic protection that he needed. ‘In this context he led me to understand that there could be advantages to be derived from financial interventions on behalf of the political parties,’ he said. He went on to describe how he had provided the PSI with a discreet payment of $21 million via a Montevideo bank, Bafisud, owned by Ortolani. The money was intended to enable the party to reduce its official debt to the Banco Ambrosiano.

Calvi’s revelations and his suicide attempt had several immediate effects. Socialist politicians sprang to his defence in parliament, accusing the Milan magistrates of damaging the economy and mounting a ‘judicial persecution’ of Calvi. At the same time Calvi was privately warned by Giuseppe Prisco, a lawyer on the Banco Ambrosiano board, to stop talking if he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in prison. Prisco’s message, relayed to him by his wife, said the Socialists had already destroyed all the evidence of what he was alleging. Most importantly for the longer term, Calvi had shown the politicians they could no longer rely on him for his silence. Calvi rapidly withdrew his cooperation with the magistrates and retracted his initial statement.

As an insider with access to information on the secret funding of political parties, a full confession by the Banco Ambrosiano chief could have launched what came to be known as the Mani Pulite (Clean Hands) corruption investigation a decade ahead of time. Between 1992 and 1994 prosecutors in 70 cities ordered the arrest of 5,000 people and began legal proceedings against 12,000 suspects in a traumatic national corruption inquiry also known as Tangentopoli (Bribesville). The name was apt because in many sectors of business life the payment of bribes to politicians was the norm, rather than the exception. One economist estimated that bribes were costing the Italian economy 10 trillion lire (more than £3 billion) a year. Michele Sindona certainly considered that Calvi had opened a delicate chapter when he had started to talk about his payments to the PSI. Blackmailing the political parties was like signing his own death warrant, Sindona told his biographer Nick Tosches. ‘Those documents had to be destroyed, and Calvi with them.’[4]

The experience of prison also put a strain on Calvi’s relations with the Vatican. During his currency trial Calvi maintained to his friends and family that the operations that had got him into trouble had not been undertaken on his own account but on behalf of the Vatican. If the Vatican would only own up to it and publicly acknowledge its responsibilities his judicial troubles would be over.

Matters came to a head when Calvi’s family, accompanied by Alessandro Mennini, a Banco Ambrosiano employee whose father Luigi was managing director of the IOR, went to visit him in prison. The episode has been described by Calvi’s widow, Clara, in her unpublished memoir: ‘They allowed us in after searching us and we found Roberto at the end of a corridor, in a corner; he almost didn’t have the courage to look at us for the humiliation, and was crying.’ Calvi explained his dilemma to his daughter, who took notes on loose leaves of paper. He had been beseeching the IOR to recognize its responsibilities since February, he said. It was true that he could speak out publicly during the trial, but that would be a violation of professional secrecy and he would be finished as a banker if he did.

Anna wrote the words ‘This trial is called IOR’ on a sheet of paper and showed it to Alessandro Mennini outside the prison, as her father had instructed her to do. The young man flew into a fury, telling Anna: ‘That name should not be spoken, even in confession’ and attempting to seize the piece of paper from her. The row took place in the Calvis’ car, with Clara proving too quick for Mennini: she grabbed back the paper and sat on top of it. A long and fruitful relationship with the Vatican was coming to a bitter end and things would only get worse over the following months.

There is little doubt that the experience of prison, and the actions Calvi took while incarcerated, would condition his behaviour during the last year of his life. A colleague who worked with him at the time noticed the visible difference: ‘He came back from prison in Lodi a very frightened man. The experience must have been devastating. He was even more closed, always looking over his shoulder,’ this colleague told me, speaking on condition of anonymity. ‘The experience had softened him. In a way he was more human. He appeared grateful to the people who remained close to him and, for the first time, was capable of saying a kind word.’ But the trauma also bore a cost: ‘He was prepared to listen to anyone who said they could help him to avoid going back to jail.’[5]

5

The Bologna Bombing

Calvi’s fear of a return to jail could well have been used by those who were aware of it to induce his sudden flight abroad, setting him off on the ill-fated journey that led him to Blackfriars Bridge. Eligio Paoli told the finance police in July 1983 that shortly before his disappearance Calvi had been alerted to the existence of a warrant for his arrest by Licio Gelli and had subsequently been shown a false warrant to convince him to flee. But court documents not previously brought to light show that Calvi may genuinely have been about to come under investigation on suspicion of involvement in the gravest act of terrorism perpetrated in Italy since the end of the Second World War.

The purpose of the bomb that exploded in the second-class waiting room at Bologna railway station at 10.25 a.m. on 2 August 1980, killing 85 people and injuring 200, remains obscure to this day. Two right-wing extremists are serving life sentences for the massacre but their guilt remains a subject of controversy. Calvi’s connection to the Bologna railway station bombing, whether well-founded or not, was generated by a now discredited supergrass, whose well-informed but misleading testimony to Bologna magistrates did much to confuse the initial judicial investigation into the atrocity. The witness, Elio Ciolini, combined personal knowledge of many of the protagonists of the story with a febrile imagination. His embroidery on an initially plausible story served to discredit both him and all the elements of his account, and followed a classic disinformation strategy seen in many of Italy’s terrorism inquiries.

The first steps towards the possible issuing of a real arrest warrant for Calvi had been taken by Bologna Judge Aldo Gentile on 11 June 1982 when he sent a telegram to a Milan prosecutor asking for Calvi’s contact details. Sent at 12.45 p.m., it read: ‘Please be so good as to transmit with the maximum urgency the complete identity details and address and telephone number of Calvi Roberto for the purposes of the investigation currently being conducted by this office for the attack on the Bologna railway station 2 August 1980.’ The episode was later recalled by Orlando Gotelli, a sergeant in the finance police, in a letter to Gherardo Colombo, one of Milan’s leading public prosecutors and the recipient of the original request. Dated 22 October 1984, the letter reminded Colombo of Gentile’s request in the context of the bomb investigation. ‘It was a Friday and Calvi, it later emerged, had disappeared either the day before or the very same day,’ Gotelli wrote. ‘The press has never reported such a charge involving Calvi: is it possible that judicial secrecy has been so rigorous on this occasion?’

Gotelli, who had been involved in police investigations into the affairs of Michele Sindona, went on to suggest two possible interpretations: ‘Calvi was in some way involved in the bombing and his flight was the result of a tip-off about a warrant for his arrest. In this case his “suicide/murder” could also be connected to the above (one can reasonably suppose that, already prostrate from his previous misadventures, he was the weak link in the chain).’ Alternatively, he surmised, Calvi was not involved in the bombing ‘but he had been dragged into it deliberately to induce him to flee Italy or for other purposes!!’

Implication in the Bologna massacre would certainly have terrorized the already nervous Calvi and could well have induced him to seek refuge abroad. Based purely on the unreliable word of Elio Ciolini, the idea would appear to be little more than fanciful; but Ciolini’s words fit into a pattern that makes the allegation less easy to dismiss. Real or presumed involvement in such a sinister event would have put Calvi in a state of the highest anxiety, making him frightened and pliable for those who already had designs on his future.

If the finance police’s informant Eligio Paoli comes across as a colourful and at times perplexing witness, Elio Ciolini is one of the largest of the larger-than-life supergrasses who have animated and distorted Italy’s recent judicial history. Even though he has been thoroughly discredited as a witness, Ciolini’s network of personal contacts – and the consequences for Calvi of his claims – still justify a close examination of his words.

Linked variously to the secret services of Britain, France, Israel, Italy and even of Brazil, Ciolini entered the tale in late 1981, from a cell in the Swiss prison of Champ-Dollon. He had been incarcerated two years previously for fraudulently extracting large sums of protection money from an American woman, after convincing her that the Israeli secret services intended to kill her and her husband, an arms dealer, for selling arms to Israel’s Middle Eastern enemies. Ciolini’s get-out-of-jail card was information about the Bologna bombing, which he now offered to Italian investigators. Exploiting a genuine knowledge of right-wing political extremism, Ciolini concocted a story that implicated plausible suspects in a plausible political scenario, two elements that the investigators were still anxiously groping for. His story implicated international terrorists, from France and Germany, in a scenario that closely resembled that being put forward at around the same time by Licio Gelli and senior officers in the Italian secret services who were members of Gelli’s P2 lodge. Some of those officers, in conjunction with the businessman Francesco Pazienza – Calvi’s guide and counsellor in the last year of his life – would even go so far as to plant false evidence to bolster the international connection to the bombing.

Ciolini’s gradually evolving account, backed up by documents that subsequently proved to be forgeries, suggested that the Bologna bombing on 2 August 1980 had been carried out to distract attention from a major financial operation, the secret purchase of a controlling stake in the publicly owned Montedison chemicals company, that had been under way at the time; the purchase was being made by members of the Trilateral Commission, a discussion group linking members of the political and business elites of the United States, Europe and Japan. The commission was founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller, chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, which his family controlled. Without the distraction, Ciolini suggested, politicians and public opinion might have been mobilized against the deal. The terrorist atrocity had, he alleged, been commissioned by Licio Gelli from the right-wing extremist Stefano Delle Chiaie following a meeting of a secret Monte Carlo lodge, a masonic organization containing much of Italy’s political and business elite and destined to replace the P2 lodge as a new centre of occult power. According to Ciolini, present at the meeting on 11 April 1980 had been Calvi, Gelli, the oil magnate Attilio Monti and Umberto Ortolani, the financial brains behind P2. In subsequent testimony Ciolini added further names including those of the Fiat chairman Gianni Agnelli, Giulio Andreotti, the Bank of Italy governor Carlo Azeglio Ciampi and Armando Corona, a leading Sardinian freemason. The presence of the latter group, he said, had been revealed to him by Federico Federici, a Florentine lawyer and member of both the P2 and Monte Carlo lodges, with whom he had been in business.

The Monte Carlo lodge, with its administrative headquarters in the offices of the Locadi estate agency at Rue St Charles 2, does appear to have existed in reality and a number of second-string Italian masons have admitted to membership. But Ciolini’s description of it as an offshoot of the powerful Trilateral Commission frequented by some of the highest-ranking figures in Italian society has never been proven. Nor has its alleged role in the Bologna bombing.

What gave Ciolini’s claims plausibility, before he elaborated on them excessively and then retracted, was the Tuscan fraudster’s first-hand knowledge of international right-wing extremism. He appears to have been in personal contact with Stefano Delle Chiaie, who led the extremist organization Avanguardia Nazionale (National Vanguard), and whom he met in the pursuit of business ventures in Latin America; he was able to supply investigators with details of Delle Chiaie’s activities on behalf of the Bolivian interior ministry, his aliases and his network of associates. Ciolini claimed that Delle Chiaie agreed to carry out Gelli’s request for an Italian ‘distraction’, enlisting the help of the French extremist Olivier Danet and the Germans Karl Heinz Hoffman and Joachim Fiebelkorn.

No convincing evidence has emerged to connect the three foreigners named by Ciolini with the Bologna station bombing. Fabricated evidence bearing a remarkable similarity to Ciolini’s claims did however emerge, thanks to the efforts of the P2-dominated military intelligence service, SISMI. On 13 January 1981 – six months after the Bologna bombing, and ten months before Ciolini began making his claims – weapons and explosives similar to those used in the bombing, together with two French and two German newspapers, were found in a suitcase on a train en route between Taranto and Milan, while it was standing at Bologna station. The find was the result of ‘brilliant intelligence work’ by SISMI, which reported that the transport of explosives was the work of a terrorist alliance involving Stefano Delle Chiaie, French extremists and members of Germany’s Hoffman group. A Mab submachine gun, it would later emerge, had been obtained from an arms cache under the control of the Magliana Band (Banda della Magliana), the Roman underworld organization linked to the secret services and Italian right-wing extremists – and which would be implicated in Calvi’s flight from Italy.

A senior SISMI officer, General Pasquale Notarnicola, told Rome prosecutors in 1984 that he was first alerted to the intelligence operation about a month before the find. He had been summoned to Rome’s Ciampino military airport by the head of SISMI, General Giuseppe Santovito, to be brought abreast of new intelligence concerning planned terrorist attacks on trains or railway nodes. Santovito had just returned from a meeting in France with the head of the French secret service, and was in the company of Francesco Pazienza and the American journalist Mike Ledeen, who would come to prominence two decades later as a neo-con adviser to President George W. Bush.

Ciolini’s account may indeed have been inspired by the SISMI disinformation campaign, but it is inconceivable that he could have based it simply on news reports of the investigation. His account was much more detailed than the SISMI version and the SISMI reports were still covered by state and judicial secrecy. The similarity between the two versions is nonetheless remarkable. Pazienza and two SISMI officers were convicted by a court in Rome in 1985 of organizing the SISMI disinformation operation known as ‘terror on the trains’. It is hard to imagine they would have embarked on this risky course of action – actually planting fabricated evidence of a right-wing conspiracy – unless they had good reason to want to protect the real Bologna bombers.

Federico Federici, the Florentine lawyer known as ‘Papillon’ for the bow ties he habitually sported under a thick brown beard, was a business partner of Ciolini’s before falling out with him over money. He provides an interesting glimpse of Ciolini’s activities and interests in a detailed ‘confidential report’ on their dealings. According to Federici’s report, in the autumn of 1977 Ciolini predicted ‘a grave political event’ in Italy’s near future. In spring the following year the extreme left-wing Red Brigades kidnapped and killed Aldo Moro, the chairman of the Christian Democrat party and one of the most influential politicians of the time. Ciolini also appears to have succeeded in accurately predicting the revival of the ‘strategy of tension’ in the spring and summer of 1992, in a letter to Bologna magistrates. His information was not always so accurate, however. Ciolini offered information to the Italian authorities on a number of high-profile judicial cases that turned out to be extravagant or simply false. In his ‘confidential report’, Federici summed up his own reaction to Ciolini’s ambiguities: ‘The reader should not be surprised if a man of my professional experience and so-called intelligence . . . should have fallen into such a concatenated series of traps, because all the stories that Ciolini recounted, all the lies he told found some minimal confirmation, so that often, if not to say always, one ended up being induced, if not to believe him, at least to wait, perhaps perplexedly, on the evolution of events.’[1]

Given Ciolini’s fascination for the turbid elements of Italy’s recent history, it would have been surprising if he didn’t have something to say about the Calvi case. And indeed he did. A secret service report dated 13 July 1982 reveals that Ciolini had asked Judge Gentile in Bologna to put him in touch with a member of the service so that he could supply him with ‘the complete itinerary of Roberto Calvi from Italy to London’. The source of the information, according to the report, was ‘friends of Ciolini (presumably Gelli, Ortolani, etc.) currently gathered at a villa between Lausanne and Geneva belonging to Francesco Pazienza’.

Ciolini’s account of the Calvi affair – to be taken, as always, with a generous pinch of salt – is set out in a series of notes dating from August 1986, written in French in a spidery hand and with frequent use of cryptic abbreviations. Once again though, it is worth considering, given Ciolini’s alleged contacts with some of the protagonists and the resemblance of certain elements of his account to that offered by the Italian secret services themselves. It has now emerged that one of the Italian police and secret service’s primary sources of information on Calvi’s flight was indeed Ciolini.

The source of the information contained in one of Ciolini’s notes is clearly Francesco Pazienza: ‘Pazienza informs that the Calvi operation was ordered by P2 because Calvi wanted to put pressure on those he had given money to! Money of Gheddafi – mafia – coca – blackmail of Gelli – group (Pazienza consultant of Italian secret services and adviser on Italian problems to Kissinger USA). According to Pazienza, Calvi was supposed to meet [Prince Victor Emanuel of] Savoy in London thanks to Gelli for funds (Banco Ambrosiano bankruptcy IOR). Marcos and Shah. Pazienza considers Gelli responsible in that he knows the mafia. [Mafia boss Pippo] Calò and others, with the agreement of Anderson [allegedly the pseudonym of a CIA officer operating in the south of France] and of the mafia, decide on Calvi’s death.’

Ciolini elaborated on the theme in another note about the activities of Licio Gelli. ‘Calvi wanted back the money given to P2 to finance political parties and for the activities of Gelli[,] Anderson, for ENI and for bribes. PSI see votes and above all the list of 500 that Calvi received from Sindona. The list of 500 is now: 1 copy Anderson 1 copy Pazienza, which he gives to Kissinger via Ledeen. The list deals with the real power of Italian politicians and collusion with the “old mafia” since 1965. Gelli allegedly ordered the elimination of Calvi . . . Calvi also wanted the money he had given to Ortolani’s Banco Financiero Montevideo. Mafia connections. The mafia had also given money to Calvi via Gelli and don’t let’s forget the Vatican, which wanted its money and partly recovered it. So one can say that P2 commissioned the Calvi murder! At the end Calvi was doing blackmail. Anderson, P2 and Gelli said they would “see” him.’

The ‘list of 500’ is something of a phoenix in Italian conspiracy mythology. It is commonly considered to be a list of wealthy Italians who benefited from favourable treatment at Michele Sindona’s banks, for the illegal export of currency in particular. More specifically, the list is believed to contain the names of individuals who exported currency though Finabank in Geneva and who were repaid by Finabank despite Sindona’s bankruptcy and despite a freeze on repayments ordered by the Bank of Italy in July 1974. Ciolini’s note adds that ‘a certain Carboni, a friend of Pazienza’ brought a part of Calvi’s documents to Pazienza in the Swiss town of Gland, where he met Gelli, Ortolani and Pazienza on 15 July 1982. The meeting took place at the Villa La Crique, belonging to the Swiss businessman [Peter] Notz, who was a business partner, in the Middle East and Caribbean, of the Saudi arms broker Adnan Kashoggi and Ortolani. Notz has denied any connection to the Calvi affair.

Ciolini’s personal contacts and business activities return us to firmer ground. An investigation into Federici’s involvement in the arms business turns up an unexpected connection to Roberto Calvi, suggesting the Ambrosiano chief may have been more deeply and personally involved in weapons trading than had previously been understood. An undated secret service report relates information received from an ‘occasional source’ when Ciolini was living in Key Biscayne, Florida. The Bologna supergrass was working as a car collector for the Hertz car hire firm and had recently provided hospitality at his home to his friend Federici. ‘He is in the custom of using “bugs” to record conversations and exploit them for extortion,’ the report said. ‘The source also reports that Ciolini, Pazienza and Federici are in close contact with one another and that the three are in contact with Stefano Delle Chiaie in Costa Rica.’

Federici, in his turn, was in close contact with the American journalist Michael Ledeen, as testified by the intimate tone of their phone calls, intercepted by police, and Federici’s own testimony to Bologna magistrates. He said he had known Ledeen since the American had first come to do historical research in Florence in 1968. One of the topics he had discussed with Ledeen, he said, was his [Federici’s] plan for the publication of a book of memoirs by another friend: Licio Gelli.

Federici’s ‘confidential report’ on his dealings with Ciolini refers frequently to their activities in the arms sector. During a visit to Argentina he had met the army minister, who had shown himself to be ‘extremely interested in the purchase of certain types of light and semi-light weapons, as well as assault pontoons’. Federici’s claims were backed up by correspondence confiscated from him by the police. The correspondence reveals that Federici was in contact with an arms dealer – a man who was, in his turn, in contact with Calvi. The arms dealer, Alberto Sensenhauser, was a German-born director of an Italian mine-producing company called Misar SpA.

That Roberto Calvi should have been in regular contact with the German-born arms dealer is surprising. Sensenhauser’s 1981 diary shows he met the Ambrosiano chairman at least seven times during the month of January and the meetings continued at less frequent intervals during the spring. Within the pages of Sensenhauser’s diary were two faxes received from Federico Federici and a handwritten note showing quantities of ammunition and prices in dollars. It bore the heading: ‘Your request Iraq’. Iraq was at that time at war with Iran, so Calvi may have been venturing into dangerous territory in his dealings with Mr Sensenhauser.

Ciolini was most successful in his account of the right-wing circles connected to Stefano Delle Chiaie, providing information that was at that time unknown to Italian investigators and that leads, curiously, to other protagonists of the Calvi affair. Only his spelling was at times at fault. In a note dated December 1981, Ciolini identified two companies that he said belonged to the terrorist organization behind the Bologna bombing. They were Promicon, a company based in the northern city of Bergamo, and Odel [sic] Prima, with offices in Via Satrico in Rome.

The subsequent police investigation established that a Bergamo company called Promecon was the property of Alfredo Graniti, a right-wing extremist who was arrested on 24 April 1981 after a shootout with the police. Graniti was attempting to cross the border into Switzerland in the company of another right-winger, Massimo Carminati, who lost an eye in the exchange of fire. Carminati was a Roman and in close contact with members of the Magliana Band, the Roman underworld organization, as well as with Valerio Fioravanti, one of the two terrorists eventually convicted for the Bologna massacre. The Rome company, Odal Prima, turned out to be run by two brothers, Roberto and Carmine Palladino. The latter, an associate of Stefano Delle Chiaie, was arrested on suspicion of involvement in the Bologna bombing and was murdered in prison by a fellow right-winger on 10 August 1982. Most intriguingly though, a third partner in the Odal Prima financial consultancy was a man called Pietro Citti.

A right-wing extremist who had also been in contact with Delle Chiaie in the 1970s, Citti had moved after a while to work for another Rome company, Sofint, where his boss was Flavio Carboni. The two men fell out after Citti purloined sensitive documents from the company and attempted to extort money from Carboni. Citti’s initial statement to a Rome prosecutor and the Sofint documents he presented in evidence subsequently disappeared from the court file, according to his own later evidence to Bologna prosecutors. When Odal Prima was formed its principal and in fact only client was Sofint, Citti told the Bologna magistrates. Rome magistrates had issued a warrant for Citti’s arrest in December 1975, following the discovery of an arms cache at an apartment rented in his name. He and the other right-wing extremists connected to the flat – four were arrested on the occasion of the police raid – were subsequently acquitted for lack of evidence. Citti himself described the acquittals as ‘paradoxical’ in his statement to the Bologna magistrates.

If Ciolini’s evidence constitutes a flimsy, if intriguing, connection between Calvi and the Bologna bombing, there is other evidence that renders it potentially less fanciful. When Gelli was arrested in a branch of the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) in Geneva on 13 September 1982 he was attempting to withdraw a large sum of money from the bank. To help him with the operation he had a number of documents with him to remind him of some of the details of his personal financial affairs, which were confiscated from him by the Swiss police. One of the most curious was a table showing payments to a man called Marco Ceruti, a Florentine restaurant owner. The typewritten schedule appears to show that Gelli and Ortolani paid Ceruti a total of $11.6 million between 3 September 1980 and 15 February 1981. Much of the money went into a Ceruti account at the UBS named ‘Bukada’. The table bears the heading: ‘BOLOGNA – 525779 – X.S.’ a reference to the north Italian city that has never been explained.[2]

Ceruti actually received considerably more from his P2 benefactors. A handwritten note in Gelli’s possession referred to cash payments to M.C. of 5,000,000 and 1,000,000, without specifying the currency, made between 20 and 30 July 1980 and to another bank deposit at the UBS on 1 September 1980 for the amount of $4 million. At least some of the money originated from two $10 million payments made on Calvi’s orders from the Banco Ambrosiano Andino in Lima on 22 August 1980 and 26 February 1981. The money passed to Gelli and Ortolani via a Liechtenstein nominee company, Nordeurop Establishment, one of ten offshore companies for which the IOR issued two ‘letters of patronage’ on 1 September 1981. The letters confirmed that the IOR ‘directly or indirectly’ controlled the companies and was aware of their indebtedness towards the Banco Ambrosiano. They were a fraudulent device issued at Calvi’s request and on the understanding that they would not be shown outside the Banco Ambrosiano; in a ‘parallel letter’, dated 26 August 1981 and outlining the favour he was requesting, Calvi indemnified the Vatican bank against any losses resulting from its notional assumption of responsibility.

It has been assumed that these payments were made to Ceruti to enable him to contribute to the solution of Roberto Calvi’s legal problems by bribing magistrates in Milan and Rome. The suspicion had first taken root when police had raided Gelli’s home and office on 17 March 1981 and discovered a UBS payment advice indicating that Gelli had made a payment of $800,000 to Ceruti on 14 October 1980. Typewritten in the box for the ‘details of payment’ were the names Ceruti and Zilletti, the latter the vice-president of the Superior Council of the Magistrature, the body that regulates the activities of magistrates. Zilletti was a Florentine friend of Ceruti and had demonstrated a keen interest, apparently at Ceruti’s instigation, in Calvi’s attempts to recover his passport following its confiscation by Milan magistrates in July 1980. The passport was returned to Calvi, first on a temporary basis and then for a period of three months, as a result of decisions by Milan magistrates in September and October of 1980 – decisions that fell suspiciously close in time to some of the payments to Ceruti. Suspicions about the purpose of the payments were further reinforced when it emerged that Gelli’s schedule described their reason as ‘DIF.MI’ and ‘DIF.ROMA’, interpreted as a reference to Calvi’s ‘defence’ (difesa) in the two cities where he was under investigation.

Bribing magistrates is a serious offence and Ceruti subsequently went to enormous lengths, and expense, to create an alternative explanation for the transactions and thus an alibi. The suspicion remains, however, that $11 million may have been more than enough to corrupt the necessary magistrates and that some of the money may have gone on other even more sensitive purchases. Police investigations show that some of the money was used to buy UBS certificates of deposit in London and New York. In two operations on 3 September and 3 November 1980 Ceruti used $4 million from his Bukada account to buy certificates of deposit in New York. On the same dates he moved a total of $1.7 million from a UBS Geneva account named ‘Tortuga’ to buy UBS certificates of deposit in London. Later in November a further $1.6 million followed the same route to London.

The son of an ecclesiastical tailor and an elegant dresser himself, Ceruti was well connected in influential ecclesiastical, political and business circles. He was a partner in the company that ran Doney’s restaurant in Florence’s fashionable Via Tornabuoni and in a freight forwarding company, ALHA (Air Lines Handling Agent), managed by his elder brother Giampaolo. As curiosity developed over his financial relationship with Gelli he slipped away quietly to Latin America, taking up residence and eventually citizenship in Brazil. He waited until October 1991, as the Ambrosiano bankruptcy trial was drawing to a close, to offer his account of the affair. Gelli’s payments, his lawyer explained, were for the purchase of an important collection of antique jewels and artefacts that Ceruti had obtained for him in London. Ceruti backed up the claim by supplying the court with documents ostensibly describing the details of the transaction.

Ceruti and his backers had apparently bought the collection, variously described as Iranian or Japanese, from a Jersey real estate company, Merlin Writers Ltd. Unfortunately for the credibility of his alibi, it soon emerged that the documentation supposedly dating from 1980 had actually been written on a computer acquired by the Merlin Writers office only in 1987. The owner of Merlin Writers, an accountant named Christopher Delaney, admitted to Jersey police in January 1992 that he had been paid to concoct the fraudulent documents on Ceruti’s behalf. The deception was commissioned by Frank Hogart, an antiques dealer who was prepared to pose as the seller of the jewel hoard, a Swiss lawyer named Charles Poncet, and Ceruti himself. Delaney was paid $50,000 for his pains, and a similar sum was to be paid to Hogart, Delaney said. In December 1996 a Milan magistrate convicted Hogart, Poncet, another Jersey accountant and a Milan lawyer of participating in the fraud.

Calvi’s son, Carlo, who has dedicated most of his adult life to investigating the circumstances surrounding his father’s murder, is convinced of the validity of the Bologna connection. ‘Gelli and Ceruti receive disproportionate amounts of money in Switzerland, which they switch to Jersey with the excuse of buying antiques and jewels,’ he told me during an interview in Canada. ‘The money was paid to antiques dealers, but not for jewels. It was paid to the Bologna bombers. Part of the money was placed at the UBS in London. The dates coincide.’ Carlo’s view of events deserves to be taken seriously, as he has certainly had access to this kind of detailed information. Carlo recalled Paoli’s testimony about a false arrest warrant being shown to his father to induce him to flee. The arrest warrant, he now believes, was a genuine one and was being prepared in connection with the Bologna bombing investigation for the signature of Judge Aldo Gentile. ‘I don’t believe you can separate our case from the Bologna bombing,’ he said.[3]

One further element ties the two events together. Ferruccio Pinotti, the author of a recent book on the Calvi case, claims that Calvi had ‘a confidential report on the people who ordered the Bologna massacre’ with him in his briefcase in London at the time of his death.[4] That report has never come to light and was not present in the briefcase when Flavio Carboni made its residual contents public during the course of a popular television current affairs show in 1986.

It would not be entirely surprising if Calvi’s destiny was linked to the terrorist violence afflicting Italy during the years that he operated there as a banker. Being banker to P2, an organization suspected of involvement in coup plots and terrorist funding, brought him uncomfortably close to the action. His adviser Francesco Pazienza was convicted of plotting to throw the Bologna investigation off its course and one of his alleged murderers, Pippo Calò, is serving a life prison sentence for involvement in a 1984 train bombing of even more obscure political genesis. Members of the Magliana Band, who did business with Carboni, shot Calvi’s deputy, and provided the false passport used for his flight, were in close contact with right-wing extremists operating in the Rome area and allegedly helped them to launder hot money through companies in the Banco Ambrosiano group.

As confusion continues to surround the background to the Bologna bombing – in 2005 members of an Italian parliamentary commission suggested there was evidence in Eastern European intelligence files to indicate that the Venezuelan terrorist known as ‘Carlos the Jackal’ was behind it – silence can sometimes prove more eloquent than words. In his memoir A Spy for All Seasons, Duane Clarridge devotes a chapter to his three years spent as CIA station chief in Rome from 1979 to 1981 but does not have a single word to say about the Bologna bombing. Evidently there is nothing he can say that would be fit for public consumption, but it remains bizarre that he does not even acknowledge such a major event that took place on his watch.

Clarridge, who went on to spearhead the CIA’s clandestine war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, does however have some kind words to say about the P2 masonic lodge, membership of which caused undeserved grief for his colleague Giuseppe Santovito, the head of Italian military intelligence. ‘P2 was a fraternal organization with Masonic overtones. When a fellow member needed help with a promotion, one of his brothers who had the right contacts provided assistance. It was like an old-boy network,’ he observed reassuringly. ‘In the best Italian tradition, however, P2 was blown up into a gigantic conspiracy by the press, and all manner of sinister intentions were read into the organization.’

6

Don Michele

The career of the Sicilian financier Michele Sindona foreshadowed and resembled that of Roberto Calvi in many ways. Both men rose to global power and riches and then went bankrupt; both attempted suicide by slashing a wrist and taking a drug overdose while in prison. And both suffered a mysterious death: in Calvi’s case a murder seen as suicide and in that of his Sicilian mentor a suicide universally viewed as murder.

But there were other aspects that drew their two experiences together and that may shed light on the background to Roberto Calvi’s death. Sindona resorted extensively to blackmail in an unsuccessful bid to stave off bankruptcy and imprisonment. From the mid 1970s Calvi himself was one of his blackmail victims and Sindona’s campaign of extortion drew on his knowledge of some of Italy’s most sensitive political secrets. That too would be Calvi’s course, when he set off on his last desperate bid to save the Banco Ambrosiano. Both men would draw on secret knowledge of how the Cold War had been fought in Italy, and further afield.

Sindona drew inspiration for his most imaginative and elaborate blackmail campaign from one of the most momentous events in Italy’s cold war history. On the morning of 16 March 1978 a Red Brigades commando seized Aldo Moro as he was on his way to parliament, killing all five members of his bodyguard. Moro, chairman of the Christian Democrat party (DC) and architect of an ‘historic compromise’ with the Italian Communist party (PCI) – intended to lead gradually to Communist participation in a coalition government – was held for 55 days before his captors dumped his bullet-riddled body in the back of a red Renault 4 in a Rome street half way between the headquarters of the DC and PCI. During his imprisonment Moro was interrogated by his captors in a ‘people’s trial’ intended to extort embarrassing secrets about the country’s governing elite. Moro, battling to save his life, obliged his interrogators, revealing sensitive information about the ‘strategy of tension’ that underpinned the right-wing bomb massacres, about NATO’s ‘stay-behind’ network Gladio (an organization preparing for armed resistance in the event of an invasion), about political corruption and the role of Michele Sindona.

Like Calvi, Moro kept his most sensitive papers in a briefcase that he rarely allowed out of his sight. Some of the documents, according to one of his assistants, concerned the Lockheed affair: the payment of bribes to Italian politicians to persuade the government to buy Hercules military transport planes from the United States. Moro gave the Red Brigades the benefit of his knowledge in a lengthy handwritten response to their questions, clearly written under duress but believed to represent his genuine views. A photocopy of the handwritten document, running to 416 pages, was found concealed behind a panel in a Red Brigades hideout in Milan in October 1990. A similar typescript, apparently incomplete, had been found by police in the same Via Montenevoso apartment 12 years before, giving rise to the suspicion that the earlier text had been censored by the authorities, and causing fierce controversy over the failure to find the second version at that time. A cryptic reference to ‘anti-guerrilla activities that NATO could, under certain circumstances, deploy’, had been ‘edited out’ of the earlier document. As had a discussion of CIA funding of the Christian Democrat party. ‘Frankly it must be said that this is not a good way, a dignified way of harmonizing our policies. Because when this happens it should happen out of authentic conviction and free of all conditioning. But here you have a brutal do ut des [tit for tat],’ Moro wrote.

Moro suggested in the document that the strategy of tension – and notably the Piazza Fontana bombing that had killed 16 people as they queued for service in a Milan bank on 12 December 1969 – had been intended to ‘normalize’ the political situation after the student riots and industrial unrest that began in 1968. It was safe to assume, he said, that ‘countries variously connected with our politics’ had taken action through their intelligence services. Speaking of his fellow Christian Democrat Giulio Andreotti, prime minister at the time of the kidnapping and who had revealed in a newspaper interview the identity of a secret service informant suspected of involvement in the atrocity, he observed that Andreotti had held responsibility for the secret services for longer than anyone else and enjoyed excellent relations ‘with his colleagues at the CIA’.

Andreotti’s close relationship with Sindona is mentioned several times in Moro’s document. Moro recalled how as foreign minister he had advised Andreotti against attending an official banquet organized by the controversial Sicilian financier in New York, only to find his, and the Italian ambassador to Washington’s, advice ignored. ‘Perhaps that wasn’t a great day for the DC,’ he observed. He also recalled how Sindona had provided the party with a loan of 2 billion lire to help it fight an unsuccessful campaign for the repeal of the divorce law in 1974, demanding in return, and successfully, that his business ally Mario Barone should be appointed managing director of the state-owned Banco di Roma. In general, Moro acknowledged, the power of his party was based on its dominance of the banking sector, where jobs were divided under a political spoils system. ‘It must be said that here too the DC’s strength in votes is matched by an excess of financial power. The DC has more than it should, even if one were to apply a mechanistic criterion: so many votes, so much power in the banks.’

Andreotti is the subject of Moro’s most venomous barbs, his friendship with Sindona and his ‘incredible unscrupulousness’ both considered worthy of remark. ‘What will be the other manifestations of such a personality in an environment like Rome, in a varied but ceaseless activity?’ he wondered. ‘What will have been the result of his long tenure at the defence ministry; what solid and lasting contacts must that have produced?’ Surprisingly, the Red Brigades considered Moro’s revelations unworthy of note. Having initially promised that the results of the ‘people’s trial’ would be made public, they decided to keep the Christian Democrat chairman’s confessions to themselves. The Red Brigades commander, Mario Moretti, claimed Moro had told them nothing new, but other observers suggest that they may have traded his secrets in exchange for their own lives. Moro’s life, it turned out, was expendable.

As Michele Sindona’s financial and judicial problems mounted he embarked on a programme of blackmail inspired by the Moro affair, used information relating to cold war politics and focused on Giulio Andreotti as one of its principal targets. A flavour of the campaign can be gained from a letter sent to Andreotti by Rodolfo Guzzi, Sindona’s lawyer, in the spring of 1979. ‘Until now our man hasn’t denounced any major personalities, nor has he revealed important state secrets that could damage relations between Rome and Washington and even national security,’ Guzzi wrote, as he tried to persuade the prime minister to give his backing to a rescue package which would have shuffled off Sindona’s losses on to the Italian tax-payer.[1]

The blackmail operation got into full swing on 3 August 1979, more than a year after the Moro kidnap. Sindona disappeared from New York; his secretary received a phone call from a man speaking in English with an Italian accent, saying that he had been kidnapped. The anti-communist Sicilian financier was in the hands of a strangely named ‘Proletarian Subversive Group for a Better Justice’, who were intensely interested in the misdemeanours of his associates in the Italian political and business establishments. The nature of their interest was made clear at the end of August when Sindona’s lawyer received a first letter from his client outlining his plight. ‘Clearly they have overestimated me here and they think I know “everything” about “everyone” and that I have elements and documents of such importance as to implicate important people,’ Sindona wrote. ‘Besides, the people implicated haven’t lifted a finger to defend me and I don’t feel in any way morally inclined to protect them.’

A second letter reached Guzzi’s office in Rome on 12 September and spelled out the kidnappers’ demands even more clearly. ‘1. List of 500 – Provide names: 10 are enough provided they are high-profile individuals from finance and politics. 2. The names of foreign companies . . . owned by or available to people connected to the Christian Democrat party and associated movements of funds. 3. The same for the PSI and the PSDI [Italian Social Democrat party]. 4. Payments made, with money drawn from Sindona’s Italian or foreign banks, to political parties and political personalities. [...] 7. False balance sheets deposited with the bank by important (publicly quoted) companies in order to obtain loans.’ Item 9 concerned irregular operations carried out with Sindona’s help on behalf of some of Italy’s leading financiers and corporations and the Vatican.[2] The message was clear to anyone who had enjoyed Sindona’s financial favours: someone, and it wasn’t very clear who, was threatening to go public with their guilty secrets.

In the course of time the identity of that someone also became clear. On 9 October police arrested a mafioso named Vincenzo Spatola as he attempted to deliver a message from the ‘kidnappers’ to Rodolfo Guzzi: Sindona, it would turn out, was not in the hands of left-wing revolutionaries but staying as a guest of Cosa Nostra friends in Sicily. Even more strangely, by his own admission his visit to Sicily was connected to a far-fetched plan to organize a secession, separating the conservative, mafia-dominated island from an increasingly communist-oriented Italian mainland. Even some of his mafia hosts were sceptical of the workability of the plan but a number of witnesses have since given detailed accounts of what was afoot. It is possible that the secession plan itself was a message to Sindona’s previous political backers rather than a practical reality.

By his own account, Sindona’s secession plot had the backing of Cosa Nostra and international freemasonry, and those who accompanied him on the enterprise were indeed mafiosi and freemasons. To what extent he believed he had the support of the United States for his project remains unclear. In 1980 Sindona was held in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, awaiting sentencing on charges of fraudulent bankruptcy. In his account to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, Sindona claimed that had the secessionist coup been successful Sicily would have been offered to the government of the United States as a Mediterranean naval base. He also claimed that the United States had backed a similar project in which he had been personally involved in 1972; the apparent re-run in 1979 may have served above all as a reminder of past complicities.

However slim the prospects of success, the plot does appear to have led to practical steps being taken on the ground. According to one witness, Licio Gelli, the P2 master himself, travelled to Sicily to confabulate with the plotters but advised them against going ahead with the plan. In 1997, Angelo Siino, a state’s witness once known as ‘the mafia’s minister of public works’, described his participation at a meal with some of the plotters in evidence given to the Palermo court at that time trying Giulio Andreotti for alleged complicity with Cosa Nostra. ‘Approaching the others I heard Gelli say it was madness what Michele – Michele was Sindona – wanted to do, that they absolutely could not trust the Americans, that the Americans could not be trusted because once they had achieved their purpose they would leave everyone in the lurch,’ Siino told the court in a deposition delivered on 17 December 1997.

Siino said Sindona had assured him the secession plot had the backing of international freemasonry and, in particular, of American freemasons. ‘I only heard one thing about foreign intervention . . . I heard it from the mouth of Sindona himself. He said an American aircraft carrier was cruising off the coast of Palermo and that there was a ship full of men ready to give military assistance to this coup.’ The ship, he claimed, had come all the way from Argentina and the men were commanded by Count Edgardo Sogno, a second world war resistance hero and staunch anti-communist with a long curriculum in American-backed coup plots.

Siino said the plotters had obtained the agreement of a number of ferry captains to blockade the Straits of Messina when the coup went ahead and other conspirators were going to plant devices on communication towers overlooking the straits in order to cut all radio and television links between Sicily and the mainland. Siino had enquired whether the technician responsible for carrying out this last task was fully trustworthy and was assured by a fellow plotter that ‘if he wasn’t reliable we would make him so, in other words he was prepared to kill him’.

Fanciful though the coup plot may seem, it was not out of character for Sindona, who had been actively involved in anti-communist activities for many years. His links to high-powered American anti-communists went back a long way. Richard Nixon he met in the 1960s, when the future president was practising law in New York. Over convivial lunches the two saw eye to eye on the future of Italy and ‘the need for the United States to help prevent the Mediterranean region from falling into enemy hands’, according to Sindona’s biographer Nick Tosches. ‘Nixon said he agreed with this view of Italy’s strategic nature and with the desirability of supporting the democratic parties, the friends of the United States, in Italy,’ Tosches quotes Sindona as saying.[3]

There is considerable evidence to show that Sindona’s anti-communism moved well beyond the theoretical stage of lunchtime discussions with a lawyer named Nixon. John McCaffery, the Hambros Bank representative in Italy – the Special Operations Executive veteran with the highly politicized conception of business – was unequivocal in an affidavit sworn in Ireland on 3 February 1981. ‘Sindona is anti-communist, pro-American and planned a coup d’état in Italy in 1972,’ he affirmed. ‘It was intended to install a pro-American and capitalist government. I too participated in this project.’ Both men had meetings with senior officers in the Italian armed forces, McCaffery said, and Sindona held meetings of his own ‘with members of the CIA and high-ranking officials at the US embassy’.[4]

McCaffery had been more guarded in another affidavit he had sworn five years earlier and which he provided to Sindona’s lawyers to help them resist efforts to obtain his extradition from the United States to Italy. ‘This man had undoubtedly spoken to members of the police and the armed forces about the dreadful state of the country and the direction it was taking. Any responsible and patriotic person who had the opportunity to do so would have done it,’ he had stated in 1976. Sindona was a sincere patriot who was prepared to sacrifice much for the good of his country and a sincere admirer of the American way of life, McCaffery had said. ‘As a successful businessman and an open supporter of capitalism and free enterprise, Mr Sindona was an obvious target for elimination for elements of the Italian left.’ If he were returned to Italy, read the affidavit, Sindona would not be given a fair trial.[5]

Numerous other sources, less well disposed towards Sindona, have spoken of the Sicilian financier’s involvement in coup plotting in the early 1970s. Roberto Cavallaro, a participant in the Rosa dei Venti [Compass Rose] conspiracy, told magistrates he had learned of Sindona’s role from a fellow conspirator, Giancarlo De Marchi. ‘De Marchi told me that the previous April (1973) in conjunction with Andreotti’s trip to America and Japan there was to have been a coup d’état and that Andreotti had delayed his return by 12 hours to allow it to happen. Leading the attempt was allegedly Andreotti himself, financed by Sindona and supported by the American General Johnson,’ Cavallaro said. Cavallaro, a right-wing trade unionist who was able to canvass military officers’ opinions by posing as a magistrate in the military justice system, said the conspirators had withdrawn from the plot at the last minute because they feared Andreotti wanted to seize power for himself, ‘dealing a blow to the right and one to the left, sorting out the extremes once and for all’.[6]

The global reach of Sindona’s anti-communism becomes apparent from the testimony of Carlo Bordoni, a money trader who worked for Sindona’s banks before falling out with him. When asked by a Manhattan district attorney where Sindona might have disappeared to in 1979 he came up with a list of countries where Sindona had been involved in politico-financial operations, which included Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Taiwan and Greece. In Greece, Bordoni said, Sindona had been active in financing the regime of the colonels. And of the Sindona-backed coup attempt in Italy, he observed: ‘To understand the purpose of the coup d’état you have to remember the relations that Sindona had established in the United States with President Nixon, with the ambassador to Italy John Volpe . . . and with David Kennedy, the former treasury secretary and chairman of Fasco, Sindona’s holding company.’[7]

If the Sicilian secession project had little prospect of success – some witnesses have suggested that the Americans were no longer interested because the threat of Moro’s ‘historic compromise’ with the Communists had receded by 1979 – the recovery of Sindona’s missing money may have been a more realistic objective. Several mafia pentiti (‘repentants’) have suggested that Cosa Nostra organized the Sicilian trip and attendant blackmail exercise because it wanted to recover funds it had entrusted to the troubled financier and to ensure it was first in line for reimbursement. Sindona was accompanied on his visit to Sicily by John Gambino, the representative of a powerful American crime family: an indication of the priority given to the bizarre scheme by the US mafia. Sindona’s ostensible kidnap by left-wing extremists would have the added benefit of arousing sympathy for him in America and masking the spurious nature of the blackmail campaign. The pentito Gaspare Mutolo told Palermo prosecutors in 1993 that the mafia bosses Pippo Calò, Stefano Bontate and the man who would later become the Sicilian mafia’s ‘boss of bosses’, Salvatore ‘Totò’ Riina, had all invested large sums of money with Sindona. ‘Sindona’s business started to go wrong and the Palermo people demanded the restitution of their money,’ Mutolo said. ‘That’s why in 1979 Sindona was forced to return to Italy to report on his conduct and to recover the necessary funds.’ To achieve that, he said, Sindona intended to use the ‘list of 500’ for blackmail purposes.

There is little doubt that Andreotti was high on the list of his blackmail targets. Angelo Siino told the Palermo court in 1997 that he overheard Sindona as he spoke in exasperated tones from a payphone to an unidentified interlocutor: ‘Giulio, you can’t do this to me!’ His assumption that Sindona was speaking to Andreotti was confirmed by a fellow conspirator. ‘He made me understand that Sindona had documents that were very, but very compromising, that could cause embarrassment to the Hon. Andreotti,’ Siino said. According to his associate, Giacomo Vitale, a mafioso and freemason, Sindona had come back to Italy with the intention of blackmailing Andreotti.

Numerous mafia witnesses have spoken of Sindona’s role in laundering money for Cosa Nostra. Francesco Marino Mannoia, for example, told the Andreotti mafia trial on 4 November 1996 that Cosa Nostra had invested large sums, derived from drug trafficking, in the Vatican bank and in Sindona’s banks. ‘Most of the heroin was sent to the United States, to John Gambino,’ Marino Mannoia said. Through Gambino, Sindona and other bosses, he alleged, large sums were invested in hotels, land and financial companies in Florida and on the island of Aruba. To give an idea of the amount of money flowing through Cosa Nostra’s hands, Marino Mannoia explained that he had worked for a number of mafia bosses but for one alone, Stefano Bontate, he had helped to refine more than 1,000 kilograms of heroin at a time when a kilo would fetch between $130,000 and $150,000 on the American market. Bontate’s quota could therefore have been worth up to $150 million. According to Mannoia, Pippo Calò and other mafia bosses had chosen Licio Gelli as their money-laundering channel, while Bontate and John Gambino had opted for Sindona’s financial services. (Gelli denies his own part in this allegation.) Mannoia began cooperating with the authorities in 1989. The very next day his mother, sister and aunt were murdered by the mafia.

Elements of Mannoia’s account have been confirmed by another mafia witness, Antonino Giuffrè, whose decision to collaborate is much more recent and whose experience of Cosa Nostra at a high level stretches beyond the turn of the century. Giuffrè is a particularly important witness in the Calvi case because of the confidential relations he enjoyed with top mafia bosses over many years and because he claims that one of his own followers was personally involved in the plot to kill Calvi. Speaking to the court by video link from a secret location, Giuffrè confirmed vital elements of the prosecution case when he gave evidence to the Calvi murder trial in Rome on 14 December 2005. His evidence is related in more detail in Chapter 9.

Sindona had been a key figure in the mafia’s financial affairs, he explained, and had been instrumental in introducing Calvi to the organized crime community. ‘Pippo Calò was introduced to Roberto Calvi by Michele Sindona, who came originally from Messina,’ Giuffrè explained. ‘Sindona was one of the most important people from Cosa Nostra’s economic point of view. At a certain point he began to have financial problems, and problems with the justice authorities in Italy and America.’ Sindona then sponsored Calvi, who took over his role in laundering the massive amounts of money being generated for Cosa Nostra by the drug trade in the 1970s and early 1980s, he said. A triangular relationship developed, Giuffrè claimed, between Cosa Nostra, P2 and Marcinkus. ‘A large portion of the drug trade was controlled by Cosa Nostra and a flourishing refinery business developed in Sicily. Roberto Calvi became one of the most important points of reference for Cosa Nostra.’ Sindona himself, who always denied allegations that he was in contact with the mafia, was actually a ‘man of honour’, who had been formally inducted into the secret association, Giuffrè claimed.

Michele Sindona’s actions in the course of 1979 were crucial for his own personal destiny, but they were also indirectly important for the history of Italy. On the night of 11 July, the month before Sindona’s ‘kidnap’, a gunman shot dead the liquidator of Sindona’s Banca Privata Italiana as he returned to his home in Milan at around midnight. Giorgio Ambrosoli had proved unreceptive to pleas that he accept the rescue package Sindona was trying to promote and had been subjected to a campaign of threats and intimidation. An American mobster, William Joseph Arico, later admitted responsibility, saying Sindona had promised him $50,000 if he carried out the hit. By 1984 Sindona was serving a sentence for fraudulent bankruptcy in Otisville prison in the United States. Towards the end of that year he was extradited to Italy and transferred to Voghera prison, south-west of Milan. On 18 March 1986 a Milan court sentenced Sindona to life imprisonment for Ambrosoli’s murder. Two days later the Sicilian financier drank a cup of coffee laced with cyanide, draining the deep cup to the bottom despite the strong smell of almonds it gave off and despite the fact that the poison burnt the inside of his mouth and throat. Sindona called his guards – he was the only male prisoner incarcerated in Voghera women’s prison – shouting: ‘They have poisoned me!’ It took him two days to die.

More significant for Italy were the actions and admissions of Joseph Miceli Crimi, a Sicilian-American doctor and freemason who in 1979 had helped Sindona organize his fake kidnapping; Crimi actually shot Sindona in the thigh with a small-calibre pistol to try and increase the authenticity of the performance. A plastic surgeon who spent part of the year in New York, Crimi had worked for almost a decade as a doctor at police headquarters in Palermo. His Sicilian co-conspirators suspected him of being a CIA spy. But more significant than his role in the kidnap charade was an admission he made afterwards to the Milan prosecutors, curious to discover why he had travelled 600 miles to visit the Tuscan town of Arezzo (ostensibly to see his dentist) during Sindona’s stay in Sicily. He finally conceded that he had gone to Arezzo to meet Licio Gelli, his ‘masonic brother and a close friend of Michele Sindona’. That admission would lead directly to police raids on Gelli’s premises in March 1981 and the discovery of the P2 membership list, diverting the course of Italy’s modern history.

Sindona’s death and blackmail activities were the subject of curious documents presented in evidence at the Bologna bomb trial in 1984 by Francesco Pazienza, Roberto Calvi’s aide and assistant to Gen. Giuseppe Santovito, the head of Italian military intelligence. A handwritten two-page document titled ‘Andreotti Operation O.S.S.A.’ outlined a ‘supersecret’ operation Pazienza had undertaken for Santovito towards the end of 1980. O.S.S.A. stood for ‘Honoured Society Sindona Andreotti’, Pazienza explained. ‘There was a fear that Sindona might start to talk about his relations with Andreotti because he felt abandoned by Andreotti.’ Pazienza flew to New York and received assurances from an unnamed interlocutor that Sindona had been ‘convinced’ to remain quiet.

In another document titled ‘How Sindona Will Be Eliminated’, Pazienza speculated about the fate awaiting Sindona on his transfer to an Italian jail. The document bears the stamp of Sindona’s American lawyer and the date 27 September 1984, prior to Sindona’s extradition from America. Pazienza suggested that if Sindona was put in a normal prison he would be murdered by his fellow inmates, but if it was a maximum-security prison and he was kept in isolation – as he was – he would be given a poisoned cup of coffee by one of the two branches of the Italian secret services. ‘If Sindona were to die in a “clean” and sudden manner it means that the Americans have entered the game,’ he wrote. Only they were capable of killing people with sophisticated poisons that left no trace. ‘The Italians don’t know . . . anything more than arsenic or cyanide.’ Those potentially interested in Sindona’s elimination were Andreotti, the Vatican and the Americans, he claimed. ‘Andreotti: It’s unnecessary to give the reasons. . . . The Vatican: It would eliminate “the other one who knows”. Calvi, in fact, is the other “other”. The Americans: Sindona certainly didn’t go to Sicily in 1979 of his own free will and initiative.’ Sindona’s son Nino had confided to him, Pazienza claimed, that ‘his father didn’t go to Sicily for pleasure but on behalf of elements in the Carter administration.’

A third handwritten document – ‘More on the Possible Elimination of Sindona’ – says the death of Sindona could make Licio Gelli either stronger or more vulnerable. In it, Pazienza alleges that Gelli had acquired part of Sindona’s sensitive material in 1979. ‘The elimination of Sindona would make Gelli the only possible blackmailer of Roman high society on the Sindona – Vatican – DC – Andreotti affairs. We shall see,’ Pazienza concluded the prescient document, it too bearing the stamp: ‘Received 27 September 1984.’

The CIA appears to have taken a close interest in Sindona’s affairs during the last years of his life, putting one of its Italian agents in contact with him to monitor his behaviour in prison. A regular correspondent and occasional prison visitor was a man called Carlo Rocchi. Rocchi told the Milan magistrate Guido Salvini that he had worked for a number of American intelligence services, including the CIA from 1978 to 1985. His intelligence gathering on potential Piazza Fontana bombing witnesses had brought him into the sights of Milan investigators. By a curious coincidence, Rocchi was a partner in a Milan private detective agency with a former policeman who provided Italian military intelligence officers with the crucial tip-off that enabled them to secure the arrest of Flavio Carboni in Switzerland following Calvi’s death.

Rocchi told the prosecutor investigating Sindona’s death that he had first met the financier in the United States in around 1975, striking up a superficial friendship with him. He made contact with him again in 1984, on the instructions of his controller, to try and gather information from Sindona on the activities of the New York crime families and, in particular, their money-laundering techniques. Sindona, in prison in Otisville, declined to cooperate, citing concerns for the safety of his family.

Contacts between the two resumed when Sindona was transferred to Voghera. Sindona wrote to Rocchi inviting him to visit him in jail and making a number of requests, one of which was for an affidavit from the State Department ‘declaring that he was a reliable person and that President [Ronald] Reagan was prepared to grant him a pardon’. Rocchi’s interest intensified as Sindona indicated that he was once again ready to go on the blackmail warpath. In a letter to Rocchi dated 5 February 1986, Sindona informed him that he was not interested in the topics they had previously discussed when he was in prison in the United States. ‘Instead I want to talk about scandalous matters that constitute grave moral and penal irregularities, about which I have remained silent until now to maintain the habit of professional reserve to which I have always wished to be faithful,’ Sindona wrote. He had now decided to change his position ‘and make known the true reasons for the unjust accusations and the sentences that have been imposed on me.’

Rocchi was ready to intercept any such confessions, writing to Sindona on 18 March 1986, after witnessing the financier’s conviction for Ambrosoli’s murder, encouraging him to react. ‘Let the great battle against you-know-who begin and let me have all the necessary documents,’ he wrote. ‘Take care not to forget anything, neither the national aspects nor the USA ones.’ Rocchi explained later to the investigating magistrate that he had wanted to take advantage of Sindona’s vulnerable psychological state to discover whether he really did possess valuable information and documents. Naturally he was particularly fascinated by ‘the part concerning events that might interest the American authorities’. If Sindona wanted to blackmail the CIA he was certainly talking to the right person. Rocchi visited him three times during his detention at Voghera and was one of the last visitors to see him alive.[8]

It is not implausible that the blackmail material that made Sindona powerful, but ultimately failed him in his hour of need, should also have passed through the hands of Roberto Calvi, Sindona’s successor in his money-laundering activities and Gelli’s close associate. An anonymous document sent to the Italian embassy in Madrid in 1985 for onward transmission to Giovanni Falcone, the leading anti-mafia prosecutor in Palermo, offers an intriguing account of the nature and fate of these ‘sensitive materials’. A chronology, typewritten in capital letters, it begins by mentioning accounts and companies allegedly associated with Sindona’s secret funding of the Christian Democrat party. The entry for 14.7.74 reads: ‘Michele Sindona hands over the list [of] 538 Italian clients [of] Finabank to Licio Gelli, who makes photocopies of the list and of other documents then prepares three packages marked with codenames. Package 1 Bonnieprince. Package 2 Rosenkrauz [sic]. Package 3 Caronte [Charon, the mythological ferryman of the river Styx]. Bonnieprince to Roberto Calvi.’ The entry for 4.10.74 adds the theme of arms trading to the ‘sensitive material’. ‘Gelli telephones Sindona and warns they are about to arrest him. Sindona flees to Bangkok, Formosa [Taiwan], New York, then goes to Jamaica with Laura Turnez and gives her documents on arms traffic via H. Arsan, the Magyar Bank Nemzeti, the Moscow Narodny Bank and Tradinvest, Nassau. Turnez takes the documents to Gelli in Argentina.’

The document goes on to describe how Sindona stole money from the bank of his P2 associate Umberto Ortolani, Bafisud, and trafficked in stolen diamonds. ‘13.9.79 Sindona meets P....ienza F.’, an apparent reference to Pazienza. ‘21.6.80 Roberto Calvi refuses to hand over to Pazienza the Bonnieprince package given him by Gelli in 1974. 7.82 Calvi leaves Rome with briefcase containing Bonnieprince package with the Finabank list, two diaries and documents on payments to political parties. 17.7.82 Calvi telephones Roberto Memmo [a businessman and alleged P2 member] and says he has Ortolani under his thumb and is ready to go to a London lawyer. Memmo warns Ortolani. 18.6.82 Calvi eliminated in London. 19.6.82 Calvi’s briefcase taken to Edinburgh by a woman and embarked on a private plane. 20.6.82 Calvi’s bag delivered to Ortolani’s son.’

The date of Calvi’s flight from Rome, and his alleged phone call to Roberto Memmo, seem to be typing errors giving July rather than June. But beyond that, it seems far-fetched to suggest that Ortolani could organize a murder in the space of a day. The author may have been an attentive newspaper reader with a fertile imagination, but his choice of ingredients was plausible. The arms trafficker Henri Arsan undoubtedly comes into the Calvi story, as does the ENI subsidiary Tradinvest, in Nassau. The Italian embassy in Madrid passed the document on under the label Riservatissimo [Highly confidential]. Judge Falcone’s view of it is unknown; he was killed by a mafia bomb in 1992.

7

The Secret Network

‘Even a coup can be an encrypted message destined for those capable of understanding the code, a blackmail note to be deciphered, a threat of embarrassing revelations.’ So wrote the author Vincenzo Vasile in a comment on Michele Sindona’s mysterious 1979 visit to Sicily.[1] Sindona himself appeared to confirm this interpretation when questioned about the escapade by a Palermo judge in November 1984. The banker told the judge that he had given advice on money laundering to the US President’s Commission on Organized Crime prior to his extradition to Italy. His past financial experience, he explained, had enabled him to learn that certain organizations of industrialized countries, for ideological reasons, protected groups from Palermo that were involved in drug trafficking. The CIA, Sindona appeared to be hinting, had been in league with Sicilian drug smugglers. An evocation of that kind of complicity may have been the true purpose behind Sindona’s self-kidnap operation.

Sindona’s cryptic suggestion was spelled out explicitly by another operator from the shadowy world of the intelligence services who claimed to be privy to some of its most sensitive secrets. His allegations link the CIA specifically to the Gambino crime family, the organization that oversaw Sindona’s Sicilian adventure, and appear to be based on first-hand knowledge. A paunchy, balding, bespectacled real estate manager from Lake Oswego, Oregon, Richard Brenneke made an unlikely and, to many, unconvincing source. His claim to have participated in secret negotiations to delay the release of US embassy hostages in Teheran and so favour the 1980 election of the Republican President Ronald Reagan made him immediately controversial. His knowledge of and apparent participation in arms deals with Iran give a certain plausibility to otherwise seemingly far-fetched claims, and a court in Portland, Oregon, cleared him of lying about these controversial issues. Congressional investigators, however, remained sceptical.

Some of Brenneke’s most startling claims came in evidence to a joint investigation of the US Congress and the office of the Arkansas State Attorney General in which he described his dual role as a contract pilot and money launderer for the CIA. Brenneke said he had flown weapons from Mena airport in the southern US state of Arkansas to Panama, a staging post on their journey to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, between 1984 and 1986. On return flights, he said, he had carried cocaine and marijuana for delivery to representatives of the Gambino crime family and its then head, John Gotti. The deposition was made in Little Rock, Arkansas, on 21 June 1991 in the presence of Congressman William Alexander Jr. and Chad Farris, chief deputy attorney general for the State of Arkansas. Brenneke identified one of the recipients of the drug shipments as a Gotti lieutenant and director of security at Kennedy international airport in New York. He said the Gotti organization had paid the CIA around $50 million for the drugs. He confirmed that the CIA was in the business of bringing drugs into the United States and that there was a close alliance between the agency and Gotti’s organization.

Brenneke told the investigators he had begun laundering drug money for the New York crime families on the CIA’s instructions in 1969, salting away the money ‘in nice safe places’ such as Swiss banks. To do this he had created a network of offshore companies and bank accounts that spanned the globe and that was active at a time that increasing quantities of hard drugs were flowing into the United States from Central America and Sicily under the watchful eye of Cosa Nostra. Sindona and Calvi’s financial institutions played a similar role in the laundering of that drug money, according to the testimony of numerous mafia pentiti, and it seems likely that the two networks intersected. The ultimate masters of both were the same and their purpose, combating communism, was shared.

Brenneke’s allegations may appear wild and, like many witnesses in this story, he has severe credibility problems – partly because of a propensity to modify his account as he goes along – but his claims about the drug operations at Mena airport have been backed up by the independent testimony of an investigator from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Testifying on the same day as Brenneke to Congressman Alexander and a representative of the Arkansas attorney general’s office, Treasury Department criminal investigator William C. Duncan described how his money laundering inquiry had been frustrated by colleagues in the IRS and the US Attorney’s Office. ‘What Mr Brenneke has related concerning the Mena operation would be consistent with testimony from a variety of individuals and additional information that we received concerning the method of operation at Rich Mountain Aviation [one of the companies operating at the airport],’ Duncan said. The allegations of collusion between the CIA and the mafia were perhaps not so far-fetched after all. Not long before, the US government agency was looking to Cosa Nostra for assistance with the assassination of Fidel Castro, and there is no more discreet form of off-the-books money – always a valuable commodity in an intelligence agency – than that generated by drug-dealing.

Richard Brenneke was ideally suited to his role as a CIA money launderer. A conservative Roman Catholic who studied at Jesuit high school in Portland, he read philosophy and mathematics at university, gaining an MA in mathematical theory from the University of Toronto in 1966. He went on to teach mathematics at the Jesuit-run St John’s College in New York. While there he had his first contact with the Central Intelligence Agency, applying for a job with the agency in 1968. ‘I had a very intense feeling of patriotism, and a very, very strong feeling that American ideals, the American Dream, had a right to be shared with other people,’ Brenneke told the left-wing newspaper the Village Voice years later. He was offered a job as a computer analyst at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, but decided to turn it down.

The Village Voice summed up his character: ‘A true believer, Brenneke placed the same kind of faith and trust in his government that his Jesuit instructors had taught him to have for the Catholic church. The church’s fervent anti-communist teachings seemed to rhyme with cold war idealism: being a soldier for Freedom was not unlike being a soldier for the pope.’ And his role: ‘Brenneke, a low-level covert jack-of-all-trades, did his bit in the 1980s while Americans and their allies created a multinational covert warfare network of arms dealers, money launderers, drug smugglers, cut-throat mercenaries, and professional spooks that stretched from Portland to Pakistan to Paris to Panama.’[2]

Brenneke claims to have worked for the Israeli government in a number of sensitive capacities during the 1970s and 1980s, from installing and upgrading computer systems in Guatemala and Costa Rica to flying Jewish refugees out of Iran after the fall of the Shah. Israel was selling a lot of weapons in Central and South America, he explained to Portland’s Willamette Week, sometimes as a proxy for the CIA to the Contras, or to the government of Guatemala, sometimes to the other side, to the Marxist rebels of Shining Path in Peru, for example. ‘Every country has an army and a revolutionary opposition,’ he told the local magazine. ‘It’s a very profitable place to do that kind of business.’[3]

Brenneke’s illegal activities, if true, place him in the same sphere of activity as Sindona and Calvi, if the word of the ‘repentant’ mafiosi implicating them in money laundering is to be believed. But the story he told in an interview broadcast on Italy’s principal state-run television channel on 2 July 1990 moves him even closer to the world of Roberto Calvi. It concerns the P2 masonic lodge and paints a portrait of the organization that is far removed from the reassuring old boys’ club described by the CIA’s Duane Clarridge in Chapter 5. The lodge had been involved in fomenting terrorism and smuggling drugs and had been generously funded for those purposes by the CIA, Brenneke alleged. He had been in contact with P2 from 1969 and had been personally responsible for making some of the payments, which amounted, on occasion, to more than $10 million a month.

‘The CIA’s money went to P2 for a variety of purposes, one of which was terrorism,’ Brenneke told the RAI Uno interviewer, Ennio Remondino. ‘Another aim was to obtain its help, at the beginning of the 1970s, in smuggling drugs into the United States from a number of different countries. They were people who had influence within the government, important people. We made use of these people to help get money and drugs into and out of the United States and to get money and drugs in and out of Italy. We used them to create a situation that would favour the outbreak of terrorism in Italy and other European countries at the beginning of the 1970s. These were very important activities, since certain governments fell as a result of them.’

Brenneke said both he and Licio Gelli had worked for the CIA as contract agents and that P2 and the American mafia had collaborated on the import of drugs into the United States. He had met Gelli on a number of occasions, once in Colorado when Gelli was on the run from Italian justice, and once in Argentina at around the time of the Falklands war in 1982 when the two men had discussed P2’s funding and ‘the supply of armaments to various people’. Gelli was not the real head of P2, but he was ‘the man we dealt with’, Brenneke said. Gelli had also been present at a meeting in Paris in autumn 1980 to head off a premature release of the 52 US embassy hostages in Teheran during the final stages of the US presidential election. Such a pre-election welcome surprise might have led to the re-election of Jimmy Carter as Democratic president. Brenneke claimed he had been present himself at this ‘October Surprise’ gathering and had spotted William Casey, Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager and the future director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Donald Gregg, a CIA officer who would later be appointed ambassador to South Korea, a key observation post from which to monitor the United States’ cold war foes in North Korea and China.

Brenneke’s interview caused uproar in Italy, its impact augmented by the fact that it had been broadcast on the normally cautious Christian Democrat-controlled RAI Uno. Gelli himself responded with an indignant denial, announcing that he would be seeking ‘purely symbolic’ damages of 10 billion lire (£5 million). He followed this up with a somewhat contorted statement to the news magazine L’Europeo. ‘This Mr Brenneke, of whose existence I was unaware until now, must be a sleepwalker or a dreamer,’ he said. ‘If he really had been a CIA agent he should know that certain revelations are forbidden. And if they were false, it would be forbidden even to think them.’[4] Even the CIA was moved to issue a formal denial that Brenneke ‘was ever an agent of the CIA or associated in any way with the CIA’. Agency spokesman Peter Earnest added: ‘We repeat this public denial because of the outrageous nature of his claims. Allegations attributed to him regarding agency involvement in terrorist activities in Italy... are absolute nonsense.’[5]

Brenneke is best known in the United States for his ‘October Surprise’ allegations, a continuing source of unresolved controversy. When he was put on trial for perjury, though, a Portland court found they believed him rather than his federal accusers. In May 1990 the court acquitted Brenneke on five counts of lying under oath to a federal court. The 12-member jury voted unanimously in his favour on every count. The court may also have been influenced by the final outcome of the hostage standoff in Iran: the 52 Americans were set free only minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president on 20 January 1981, a full three months after the alleged Paris meetings.

To bolster his credibility with RAI’s interviewer, Brenneke handed over a series of documents detailing his alleged financial activities on behalf of the CIA and P2. They make for an illuminating read and support his contention that P2 was part of a wider international conspiracy. One of the instruments for channelling funds from the CIA to the P2 lodge, he indicated, was a company called the Amitalia Fund SA, incorporated in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg on 12 March 1970. Brenneke’s documents describe the company as ‘an open-ended, diversified investment company offering its shares for sale primarily in Italy’.

Brenneke’s documents specify the custodian of the Amitalia Fund as the Banque du Benelux–La Luxembourgeoise of 10 Rue Aldringen, Luxembourg. Significantly, a subcustodian is Michele Sindona’s Banca Privata Finanziaria, of 7 Via G. Verdi, Milan. Among the bank accounts allegedly used for CIA/P2 transactions was one at the Bank of Credit and Commerce International branch at 33 Boulevard Princesse Charlotte, Monte Carlo. The BCCI is another potentially significant partner; dubbed the ‘Bank of Crooks and Criminals International’ by senior CIA official Robert Gates, the bank was extensively used both for espionage and for the funding of cold war operations by western secret services before going bust with debts of more than $1.7 billion in 1991.

The breadth of Brenneke’s interests is illustrated by other documents provided to the RAI interviewer and subsequently handed over to Italian investigators in Rome. Among them is a contract for the purchase of 20 Dassault-Breguet Mirage 2000 fighter jets at a cost of $440 million from a company in Hong Kong. The operation bears the codename ‘Molasses’ and the correspondence from the Hong Kong company is signed by the arms dealer Eugene Bartholomew.

Where Brenneke appears to be on the firmest ground is in his knowledge of secret arms sales to Iran, the subject that first brought him to the attention of the media in the United States. His contact with the arms business goes back a long way. According to his own account, the Brenneke family used to manufacture high-quality shotguns in Germany until the 1920s. Hunting down those rare collectors’ items brought him into contact with dealers in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, facilitating the contacts that would subsequently enable him to buy Eastern Bloc weapons for the CIA, particularly from sources in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Such eastern-origin weapons are particularly useful if one wants to arm guerrilla organizations, such as the mujahedin in Afghanistan, without leaving telltale western fingerprints on the operation.

If Brenneke participated, as he claims, in the airlift that led to the exchange of arms for Iranian Jews in 1980, an operation allegedly brokered by French, US and Israeli secret services, it would seem that he was in at the very conception of what would become the Iran–Contra scandal in 1986. The scheme would morph through the ‘October Surprise’ phase, when Brenneke claims to have helped launder some $40 million needed to grease palms in the Iranian mullahs’ regime and ensure the delayed release of the US embassy hostages, into what became the fully fledged Iran–Contra operation: the overcharging on the sale of weapons to one enemy, Iran, to fund a clandestine war against another, the left-wing government of Nicaragua. It was his involvement in this operation that made Brenneke aware of the drugs for arms exchange. He says he had particular moral qualms about the drug trafficking because the life of his teenage son had been ruined by drug addiction. ‘Typically, the drugs were run through Panama and into the United States,’ he told the Willamette Week. ‘If the shipments were extremely sensitive, you’d see Israeli pilots and aircraft.’[6]

Later in the 1980s Brenneke claims he approached Vice-President George Bush with details of an Iranian offer to begin normalization of relations with the US and to provide the Americans with samples of their Russian weapons systems and intelligence in exchange for US weapons systems, but was rebuffed.

Secrecy, and secret services, exist for just such circumstances as these. Ronald Reagan had vowed not to negotiate with terrorists or hostage-takers, so he couldn’t afford to be seen negotiating with Teheran; Iran had been placed on the US government’s official list of terrorist states on 18 January 1984 and William Casey, the director of the CIA, routinely referred to the country in speeches as ‘the most dangerous state sponsor of terrorism in the world’. The United States had vowed to remain neutral in the Iran–Iraq war of 1980–88; it did so by arming both sides, and the West watched while its arms industries grew rich and two enemies of Israel poured their blood and treasure copiously into the desert. The eight-year conflict, which resulted in more than a million deaths, produced a kind of oil crisis in reverse: the two oil-producing belligerents were forced to pump extra crude to pay for the war, thus bringing down energy costs and boosting the dollar economy.

Israel’s role in arming Iran has been detailed by Ari Ben-Menashe, an Israeli military intelligence officer who claims to have personally participated in some of the secret deals. In 1983 the Iranian-born Ben-Menashe negotiated the sale of 4,000 TOW anti-tank missiles to Teheran, he says. The missiles were part of an old stock and their power supply was due to run out in two years’ time. That consignment was followed by two more of a similar quantity, the first batch drawn from NATO stock in Europe and the second directly from the United States, but shipped via Guatemala and Australia. A total of 12,000 TOWs were sent to Iran between 1983 and 1987, he claims. ‘These, we believed, eventually changed the face of the war,’ he wrote in his controversial memoir, Profits of War.

Ben-Menashe claimed Israel used a slush fund, fed from the arms-trading profits, to buy the goodwill and silence of politicians in the US, Britain and Australia. Democrats on the Iran–Contra panel also received payments, intended to blunt their curiosity, some of them channelled through the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, he claimed. The friendship with Conservative politicians in the UK, which had been similarly lubricated, came to an end in 1988, ‘when Margaret Thatcher supported the sale of military equipment for unconventional warfare to Iraq,’[7] he alleged.

Details of Britain’s alleged role in the arming of Iran and Iraq on behalf of the United States are contained in a written statement made in March 1991 by Terence Charles Byrne Snr., an American arms dealer and former director of a British company, Allivane International Ltd. Byrne claimed that Allivane International had been set up by his son, Terence Charles Byrne Jnr., in 1982 at the request of William Casey to help him deliver on his ‘October Surprise’ promise to Iran: huge quantities of ammunition, long-range artillery and electronics in return for the delayed release of the American embassy hostages. ‘Allivane and Allivane International Ltd were only two of more than 120 companies which to my knowledge were set up in Europe with the sole objective of supplying Iran and Iraq with ammunition and equipment from Europe,’ Byrne said.

The secret policy of the United States was to supply Iran and Iraq even-handedly, Byrne claimed, with the United Kingdom being used to furnish ‘every type of defence material, including ammunition, radar, artillery and chemical and biological filling for shells’. The false accounting involved in the operation led to the closure of Allivane International in September 1988, following an investigation by the Dutch police. Byrne and his son were accused of involvement in the Iran–Contra affair and embezzlement, charges that he denied. Byrne claimed that the contracts and false end-user certificates that facilitated the trade were organized by officials in Britain’s Department of Defence Procurement. Allivane International acted as an intermediary and companies such as British Aerospace, Royal Ordnance, ISC Ferranti and Astra Defence Systems supplied the military hardware. False end-user certificates identified Spain, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Jordan as the recipients of weapons that were in reality destined for Iraq, he alleged. ‘I can document [that] one consignment of three large flasks of radioactive caesium was sent to Denmark from where it was exported to Portugal and onwards via Cyprus and Israel to Iran.’

Britain’s culture of secrecy and dependency on the United States facilitated the illicit trade, Byrne said. Britain was overwhelmingly dependent on the US for its strategic military intelligence, including electronic surveillance, satellite reconnaissance and signal decoding. ‘Although the United Kingdom operates in tandem with the United States, the relationship is not a partnership. The United Kingdom must comply with the decisions of our administration,’ Byrne claimed. As an example of the unequal relationship, Byrne said the Royal Navy was unable to target or launch its Polaris nuclear missiles without the approval of the United States, and US intelligence agencies had free rein in Britain. ‘Our Defence Intelligence Agency and CIA now operate in the United Kingdom with the knowledge and consent of that country’s government. No other country outside the United States is now so effectively under the control of these agencies.’

One of the companies that Byrne alleged was involved in the clandestine trade was Astra Defence Systems. He claimed that the assistant director of the Ministry of Defence’s Procurement Department organized the supply of explosives to Allivane from a company in the Netherlands, ‘with a contact at Astra Defence Systems supervising the manufacture of the ammunition. This was on instructions from the Ministry of Defence, without the knowledge of the board of directors of Astra Defence Systems.’ The ammunition was secretly shipped to Iran using false end-user certificates provided by the MOD, he claimed.

Byrne’s startling allegations are supported by Gerald James, who was chairman of Astra at the time. James believes Astra and a number of other arms companies were used by the secret services as instruments of covert Anglo-American foreign policy and then wound up and dismantled to prevent details of their activities from coming to light. In a speech to a conference of the Environmental Law Centre in London, he said he had become concerned about Astra’s payments to and business with Allivane between 1983 and 1988, describing the latter company as an ‘MI6/CIA front’.

James said he had been encouraged to expand the Astra group by MOD officials who had assured him he would receive generous government contracts, but then failed to deliver on the promises. ‘The companies all had off-the-books secret activities,’ he discovered. Astra itself, he found, was paying far more than its entire turnover on political commissions to mysterious companies with names such as Casalee, Richwhite, Bhojwani, Passive Barriers and the European Pacific Trust. Allivane International was a regular recipient, as was the Italian arms company Valsella. In 1986 Astra paid a total of around £93 million in commissions, according to company records, and this at a time when its annual turnover was not much more than £10 million. ‘We checked, but you can’t deal with it if your own staff deceive you,’ James said, speaking over coffee in a London club. ‘You may think it ridiculous, but I was reduced to sitting in a corn field with a pair of binoculars to try and see what was going in and out of my facility.’

Banks naturally play a key role in the network of people and institutions that implements the secret foreign policy engendered by the arms trade, an activity that can alter the balance of power between regional contenders and generates rich off-the-books commissions, which can be converted into a further source of covert political influence. Gerald James of Astra recalled his own company’s frequent dealings with BCCI in London and the role of Italy’s Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, a Socialist-controlled bank that channelled some $4 billion towards the Iraqi arms procurement programme while authorities in Italy and the US turned a blind eye. Astra’s US accountants, he noted, were the same firm who provided accountancy services to some of Richard Brenneke’s ventures: Laventhol, Krekstein, Horwarth & Horwarth of New York. Federico Cossio, a professionally relaxed accountant who acted as the Nicaraguan arm of Horwarth & Horwarth, provided accountancy services to Calvi’s Nicaraguan subsidiary, the Banco Comercial. It is not hard to imagine a role for a banker like Roberto Calvi in a similar secret service/arms dealing network to that encountered by James during his Astra days.

‘It is my view Calvi was part of an earlier network in connection with South America and the Caribbean. He had become a liability because he had outlived his usefulness and was a possible security risk,’ he said. James said a connection between Calvi and the CIA would make perfect sense, given Calvi’s active involvement in political and financial activities in Latin America. ‘It was vital for the US to prevent these places from going communist,’ he said. ‘I can’t see it makes any sense otherwise. A man like him wouldn’t have taken these risks unless he felt he had enormous backing. These people have a terrible habit of pulling the rug from under you and leaving you high and dry.’[8]

There are other elements, as we shall see, that link Calvi’s death to western intelligence services and the arms trade. One of the most suggestive is a letter purportedly written by Gerald Bull, the military engineer who designed a long-range ‘supergun’ for Saddam Hussein, and who cited two of the dummy companies in receipt of Astra handouts in the same missive. These he said, were shell companies set up by the British government to handle arms projects in the Middle East. The letter is dated 12 December 1989, a time at which Bull was preparing legal action against the British government for its allegedly corrupt role in the clandestine arms market. Three months later he would be dead, shot by an unidentified gunman at the entrance to his Brussels home. Mossad, understandably concerned at his involvement in the arming of Iraq, has always been the principal suspect.

8

Meeting Licio

If the exact role of the P2 masonic lodge in recent Italian history remains controversial, there can be no doubt that it played a fundamental role in the rise and fall of Roberto Calvi. Clara Calvi places her first meeting with Licio Gelli in the winter of 1974. Her husband wanted to introduce her to two important people when he invited her to join him for dinner in Rome at one of the restaurants of the Grand Hotel. The important contacts were Gelli and Umberto Ortolani and the group was joined at the meal by four other people: a government minister, a businessman and two senior civil servants. All seven men were members of the secret Propaganda Due masonic lodge. Her husband’s first meeting with Gelli and Ortolani dated back to the spring of 1973, according to her memoir, and was the result of his pressing need for political protection. Two years earlier the family’s summer holiday had been ruined by a financial scandal affecting the Venice branch of the Banco Ambrosiano and another small Venetian bank, the Banco di San Marco. Calvi had managed to sort out the crisis but it had underlined his need for political patrons. Gelli and Ortolani had later made contact, saying they had been partly responsible for his problems but were prepared to give him a hand because they had been impressed by the way he had defended himself.

Documentation found in Gelli’s possession in March 1981 showed Calvi had joined the World Organization of Masonic Thought and Assistance in Rome on 15 July 1975, receiving membership card number 020. A month later, on 23 August 1975, he was initiated into the P2 lodge in Geneva, paying a subscription fee of 530,000 lire (around £250). Three months after that he would become chairman of the Banco Ambrosiano. Calvi’s entry in the confiscated membership lists showed only that he had paid his dues from 1977. Geneva was the location chosen that same month of August 1975 for the initiation of Alberto Ferrari, the managing director of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, and also for Prince Victor Emmanuel of Savoy, heir to the abolished Italian throne, who lived in the Swiss city – just across the road, as it happens, from Hans Kunz, the man who would provide the private plane that carried Calvi on his final journey to London. Victor Emmanuel and Hans Kunz shared a predilection for business activities in Iran and, according to some accounts, had even been in business together.

Calvi himself attributed his decision to join the lodge specifically to his need for protection. He told magistrates that he had been impressed by Gelli’s business initiatives and his claim that he operated under the aegis of the Grand Mother Lodge of London. ‘Gelli gathered people around him, and he managed to gather me too, because of the sense of protection that he gave to membership of the P2 lodge,’ he said. Attempting to extend that helpful patronage to business circles in the City of London, he reportedly joined London Lodge 901 at about the same time.[1]

Appropriately enough, a certain amount of confusion continues to surround the exact date and circumstances under which Calvi began his liaison with Gelli. Michele Sindona claimed he was responsible for introducing the two men over the telephone when Gelli visited him in New York in 1975. Gelli and Calvi met in Rome the following week, Sindona claimed in an interview with the author Nick Tosches. The by now bankrupt Sicilian financier asked Gelli to pump Calvi for the money he considered that the Banco Ambrosiano chief owed him. ‘Calvi, who in his worldly impotence was ever eager to believe in the occult powers of others, was quite swept away by Gelli at their first meeting. He believed that Gelli and P2 could be of inestimable help to him in Italy and abroad,’[2] Sindona said. Another version has the men meeting for the first time at a Christmas dinner in Rome as early as 1969, a social occasion hosted by Umberto Ortolani and attended by Michele Sindona as well. Ortolani’s own recollection, in an interview with L’Espresso news magazine, in the edition of 25 December 1983, was that Gelli had first introduced him to Calvi in 1974, at the Intercontinental Hotel in Geneva.

The P2 venerable master’s taste for secrecy was apparent in his dealings with Calvi. The banker had a special phone installed at his country home to receive calls from Gelli and Ortolani. Ever the one for discretion, Gelli would identify himself as ‘Signor Luciani’ when he called. Clara took an almost instant dislike to her husband’s new friends. She would refer to them as the ‘Cat’ and the ‘Fox’, two cunning characters from Pinocchio. In Collodi’s fable the two villains manage to separate Pinocchio from his treasure by convincing him that his gold coins will grow into bushes and multiply if he plants them in a magic field overnight. Exactly the same fate befell Roberto Calvi for accepting the financial advice of the crafty P2 duo. The dream of multiplied wealth and power that they encouraged led him straight to bankruptcy, and – unlike Pinocchio – to death.

The rest of the world’s first real meeting with Licio Gelli and his secret organization dates from 17 March 1981. At 9 a.m. on that morning officers of the Milan finance police raided Gelli’s home on a hillside outside the Tuscan town of Arezzo, and his office in a mattress factory nearby. They were acting on the orders of Milan magistrates investigating Michele Sindona’s mysterious disappearance to Sicily two years earlier and were brought to Gelli’s door by the admissions of Joseph Miceli Crimi, the Sicilian-American doctor implicated in Sindona’s fake kidnap. What the magistrates, Giuliano Turone and Gherardo Colombo, were probably hoping to find was Sindona’s fabled ‘list of 500’. Instead they found something even more explosive: in a locked suitcase ready to be spirited abroad from Gelli’s office in the Giole mattress factory in Castiglion Fibocchi was a list of 962 members of his secret, elite lodge. Calvi’s name was among the ‘C’s, Sindona’s listed under ‘S’. They were in good company. There were 43 members of parliament, including four cabinet ministers, plus the heads of all branches of the armed services and of the principal intelligence agencies. There were businessmen, journalists and public officials, but Gelli appeared to have a particular predilection for the world of finance. Some 119 lodge members were distributed between the treasury and finance ministries and the banks. The director of currencies at the foreign trade ministry – potentially important for bankers seeking permission to send money abroad – was also apparently a P2 ‘brother’. Thirty-seven names on the list were drawn from the finance police, the body carrying out the raids on Gelli’s properties; among them the commander of the corps, General Orazio Giannini, who telephoned while the search was under way to recommend the maximum discretion.

Another person to telephone while the premises were still being inspected was Licio Gelli himself, who was out of the country at the time. The venerable master urged his secretary to do everything in her power to prevent the police from taking away his documents. A recording of his call revealed his remarkable ability to think on his feet. ‘Use the [informal] tu form and call me Dad, do you understand?’ he instructed the secretary, who promptly fell in with his suggestion to foil possible eavesdroppers.

Other documents seized by the finance police showed the close interest Gelli had been taking in Calvi’s business affairs. There was a file on the dealings between Calvi and the publisher Angelo Rizzoli, former owner of the Corriere della Sera newspaper, and another containing the text of a confidential agreement between Calvi and the cement magnate Carlo Pesenti. A memo found among the papers read: ‘The Calvi case is the most sensational and disquieting of recent times, both because it is linked to many of Sindona’s operations, and, in particular, to deals carried out on behalf of the Vatican.’[3] A number of envelopes contained secret service reports marked ‘secret’ and ‘confidential’. According to one of his closest associates, Gelli claimed that the daily intelligence briefing prepared for the prime minister was delivered to him, as well, every morning.

Suspected but unconvicted of a thousand unsolved crimes, Licio Gelli and his masonic lodge came to symbolize the malaise of Italian society in the second half of the twentieth century. The vices attributed to them ranged from nepotism and political intrigue to plotting to overthrow the elected government, terrorism and murder. Gelli’s exercise of secret power was based fundamentally on access to privileged information and the exploitation of that information for blackmail purposes. On joining the lodge, new members were invited to bring information on other people of potential interest. General Giovanni Allavena, a former head of the military intelligence service then known as SIFAR (Servizio Informazioni Forze Armate), made a particularly valuable contribution. He brought thousands of pages of sensitive secret service dossiers with him when he joined the lodge in 1967.

The courts have been unable to prove almost any of the accusations levelled against Gelli, in some cases because the terms of his extradition from Switzerland shielded him from trial and in others because they simply weren’t able to muster the proof. The suspicion is inevitable that the P2 octopus, infiltrated into the ganglions of the state, worked well to protect its master. In the end, the only crime for which he served a term of house arrest in his luxury Tuscan home, named Villa Wanda in honour of his wife, was complicity in the fraudulent bankruptcy of the Banco Ambrosiano. The trial showed that Gelli had received $83 million from the bank between 1975 and 1982, only outdone by Ortolani, who received almost $224 million in the same period.

The son of a Tuscan miller, Gelli was born in Pistoia on 21 April 1919. A convinced fascist, he enrolled as a volunteer in the 735th Blackshirts battalion at the age of 17 and went to fight for Franco in Spain. It was the beginning of an adventurous career in which he would rarely find himself far from the front line of ideological conflict. His elder brother Raffaello was killed at Malaga in April 1938. Raffaello, a lieutenant, was shot and wounded while fighting beside his brother and died later in a military hospital. Gelli’s friend and biographer Pier Carpi recorded Licio’s reaction to the traumatic event: ‘Raffaello, I swear that I will dedicate my entire life, all myself, to fighting that communism that has killed you.’[4] Though controversy persists about Gelli’s true political allegiance, if any, it appears that he remained fundamentally true to that promise for the rest of his life.

Gelli expressed pride in his political militancy when I interviewed him at Villa Wanda in the autumn of 2005. Elegantly dressed in a grey suit and black tie, with a narrow white beard and moustache, he was stooped by age but still mentally alert despite his 86 years, the very image of inoffensive respectability. He received me in a spacious drawing room that could have been mistaken for an annex of the Uffizi gallery, with old master paintings on the walls, a large statue of a ‘Madonna and Child’ in one corner and a ceramic bas-relief of ‘Christ on the Mount of Olives’ on the end wall. The $83 million he had allegedly stolen from the Banco Ambrosiano had evidently been put to good use! The victory over Bolshevik forces in Spain was communism’s first military defeat and he had been proud to play a part in it, Gelli said. ‘If communism had not been defeated in Spain it would have spread and conquered the whole of Europe, because the Communist party was very strong then. It was a victory for which the whole of Europe should be grateful to the legionnaires.’

In an unusually frank moment, Gelli hinted there may have been a link between his P2 masonic lodge and the NATO stay-behind network known as Gladio, which has been suspected of involvement in right-wing terrorism in Italy. ‘It was an invisible army, just as Gladio was an invisible army,’ he said of the lodge. ‘Remember that Gladio was formed in 1948 with men recruited from among the Spanish legionnaires and from elements who had fought for the Republic of Salò [Benito Mussolini’s last-stand fascist regime in northern Italy], because they were young and knew how to use arms and they were anti-communist and ruthless. You’ll notice that both in Gladio and in P2 there have been no pentiti. There was only one pentito, [the journalist Maurizio] Costanzo. He said he joined the lodge because he was a cretin. Among so many people there is always going to be one cretin.’ Realizing he might have said too much, Gelli subsequently backpedalled on the P2/Gladio connection. ‘Gladio, as far as one knows, was a military organization. The P2 masonic lodge was a social and cultural matter. There was no connection.’ But weren’t there many military personnel present in the lodge membership? I asked. ‘Certainly,’ he replied, ‘from the chiefs of staff to the heads of the secret services. But the fact they were members of P2 didn’t mean anything. They might just as well have been members of the carboneria [an anti-clerical secret society that plotted against the temporal power of the church in the nineteenth century] if it had still existed.’[5]

The Propaganda Due lodge was originally founded in the 1890s but almost immediately ran into trouble when its grand master got caught up in the scandal of the Banca Romana, a major banking crisis that in many ways foreshadowed the Banco Ambrosiano affair. Reputations in the government, parliament and the Vatican were all damaged by the messy bankruptcy, which involved the printing of false banknotes and the payment of bribes to cardinals, politicians and freemasons. P2, membership of which was kept secret to protect the privacy of the lodge’s important members and prevent them from being importuned by less well-to-do ‘brothers’, went into a state of extended hibernation. It was Gelli who was called on to revive the sleeping creature almost a century later, when he was appointed organizing secretary in 1971.

Freemasonry was outlawed in Italy under Mussolini’s fascist regime but revived at the end of the war with the encouragement of Italy’s American and British liberators. When Gelli began his masonic career in 1965, joining the Romagnosi lodge of the Grand Orient of Italy, Italian freemasonry was divided into two principal groupings commonly referred to by the name of their Rome headquarters. The Grand Orient, with between 15,000 and 20,000 members, had its headquarters in Palazzo Giustiniani. Its chief rival, with 5,000 to 10,000 affiliates, was based in the central Piazza del Gesù, next to the headquarters of the Christian Democrat party.

Gelli needed all his considerable talent for survival to pass unscathed through the latter part of the Second World War and thrive in the early years of peace. A certain amount of double-dealing and contacts with the secret services on all sides of the new ideological divide were almost certainly required. The complexity of his experiences during the war and the fact that he was not shot as a fascist at the end of it have given rise to speculation that he was at some point recruited by the Italian Communist party, the largest force in the anti-fascist resistance, and went on subsequently to serve the interests of the Soviet KGB. There are equally suggestions that he was prepared to betray his fascist comrades to the communists’ western allies and that by October 1944 he had begun collaborating with the Counter Intelligence Corps of the American Fifth Army. The parliamentary P2 Commission concluded there was persuasive evidence that Gelli had worked for the Italian secret services after the war, operating under the cover name of Filippo and providing a contact telephone number that corresponded to an office of military intelligence in Florence.

There is little doubt that Gelli used his position within freemasonry to pursue the ideological struggle against communism that he had begun in Spain. In his interview with me, he recalled his participation at the first conference of the World Organization of Masonic Thought and Assistance in Rio de Janeiro in the mid 1970s: ‘I made a very strong speech there, declaring that communism was a tumour on the world. After that conference our troubles began, because the KGB began working hard against us.’

This anti-communist commitment naturally led him into contact with the western superpower that was the principal protagonist of that very same struggle. Richard Brenneke, as we have seen, has described the secret relationship he claimed existed between the P2 chief and the CIA, but there were also overt contacts between Gelli and senior members of the American political establishment. Gelli was invited to attend the inaugural ceremonies of presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan, and was ‘the only Italian invited to Reagan’s inaugural lunch’.[6] Such an honour appears all the more curious in the light of Brenneke’s allegations about a Gelli role in the ‘October Surprise’ negotiations that supposedly preceded Reagan’s election.

One American contact of the enterprising Gelli was Philip Guarino, an Italo-American ex-priest who was director of the Senior Citizens Division of the Republican party National Committee and who had been introduced to Gelli by Michele Sindona. In a letter dated 28 August 1979, a copy of which was found in the police raid on Gelli’s office, the P2 chief asked Guarino whether General Alexander Haig, a former commander of NATO troops in Europe, would be the Republicans’ next presidential candidate. ‘As you know, we are able to help both through the Italian press, to influence Italo-Americans and Italians resident in your country, and through other channels, as well as economically,’ Gelli wrote. Guarino replied on 19 September, informing Gelli that there was no doubt that Ronald Reagan would win the White House. He made it clear: ‘General Haig is a good man but he has no political base.’ Guarino’s reply was evidently a bit late. In the meantime the Corriere della Sera, Italy’s most prestigious newspaper, recently bought with Banco Ambrosiano money and now under the editorial control of P2, had already dedicated three-quarters of a page to a glowing portrait of the general, in which it observed that he might make ‘the president best suited to the times, perhaps among the best of the century’.[7] It didn’t matter in the end. The Republican National Committee was happy to grant Gelli a ‘Citation’: ‘In recognition of dedicated and untiring service to the Republican party’. Gelli published the award in his memoir La Verità (The Truth), where it sits proudly across the page from a reproduction of his invitation to the ‘Inauguration of Ronald Wilson Reagan as President of the United States of America’.[8]

The war on communism brought Licio Gelli into contact with another natural ally: the Vatican. Atheist communism had mounted a global onslaught against Christianity, confiscating and destroying church property and suppressing religious activity wherever it held sway. It was natural that the church should seek to react, allying itself with those temporal powers that were likely to prove the most effective: among them the United States of America and international freemasonry. The fact that until 1983 Catholics who joined a masonic lodge were punishable by excommunication was not an insurmountable hurdle for a man of Gelli’s ingenuity. Gelli had been tasked with improving relations with the Catholic church early in his masonic career and masonic representatives discussed the harmonization of biblical texts with representatives of the Vatican as part of this initiative. P2 meetings often opened with a reading from the Gospel of St John, the evangelist being considered a kind of patron saint of freemasonry, he told me.

It is hard to imagine churchmen joining an organization seen as hostile to the Vatican and which Catholics had been banned from joining for more than two centuries, since the papal bull of Pope Clement XII, In Eminenti, in 1738. But the suspicion that priests had indeed done so has long existed and was particularly strong when Roberto Calvi was head of the Banco Ambrosiano and doing business with the church. The ideal place for bishops and cardinals, if they were going to become freemasons, was Licio Gelli’s Propaganda Due, where members’ identities were kept rigorously secret both to protect the rich and powerful and to shield those who had political, ideological or moral reasons for wanting to conceal their affiliation.

In September 1978, with the short-lived Pope John Paul I recently elected to the throne of St Peter, the maverick weekly magazine Osservatore Politico (OP) published a picture of a cardinal wearing a black hood on its front page and the title: ‘The Vatican Grand Lodge’. ‘On Monday 28 August we came into the possession of a list of 121 cardinals, bishops and senior prelates identified by a membership number and codename as members of freemasonry,’ the magazine, published by the journalist Mino Pecorelli, wrote. Pecorelli, who was renowned – or perhaps notorious – for his journalistic scoops, had excellent secret service sources, was himself a member of P2, and would be shot dead by a still unidentified killer in a Rome street less than a year later. Pecorelli’s ‘list of presumed masons’ contained the names of many progressive church leaders and has been attributed by some to a manoeuvre by traditionalist circles close to the rebel Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. The list included the names of Cardinal Jean Villot, the then secretary of state, of his successor Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus (said to have joined on 21 August 1967, membership number 43/649, codename MARPA), his deputy at the IOR Donato De Bonis, and Pope Paul VI’s personal secretary Pasquale Macchi.

Other witnesses have confirmed the presence of bishops and cardinals in the P2 lodge, not impossible if one accepts the assumption that the membership lists discovered in 1981 were incomplete. A former general and P2 member claimed as much to the P2 Commission and Gelli’s biographer Pier Carpi alleged in a magazine interview that senior churchmen belonged to an ‘Ecclesia Lodge’ in contact with Michael Duke of Kent, the Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of England. It had been active in the Vatican since 1971, he claimed: ‘More than 100 cardinals, bishops and curia monsignors belong to it. They manage to maintain the most absolute secrecy, but not to the point of evading the investigations of Opus Dei’s men.’[9] When I asked Gelli about the existence of the Vatican lodge, he replied cryptically: ‘What you’re saying belongs to the secrets of the Vatican. The Vatican is full of secrets.’

A particularly effective bridge between freemasonry and the Vatican was offered by Gelli’s friend and fellow P2 member Umberto Ortolani. Ortolani, a lawyer by training, worked for Italian military intelligence during the war before throwing in his lot with the anti-fascist resistance. His contacts with western intelligence agencies appear to have continued ever since. After the war Ortolani made a career for himself in public administration, finance and the media. As owner of the Banco Financiero Sudamericano (Bafisud), based in the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo, he did business with both Sindona and Calvi, helping the latter to establish his Latin American banking network. A close friend of Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro of Bologna, he lent the cardinal his villa at Grottaferrata in the Alban Hills for a pre-conclave meeting with colleagues from the college of cardinals in June 1963; Lercaro and his friends decided to back Archbishop Giovanni Battista Montini of Milan for the papacy. Once elected, Pope Paul VI was quick to show his gratitude to Ortolani for his helpful gesture, appointing him a ‘Gentleman of His Holiness’, an honour that was only withdrawn in 1983, after the breaking of the P2 scandal and the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano.

Licio Gelli developed his own strong contacts in the Vatican. He used to lunch regularly with the conservative Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani – ‘his sister was more fascist than Mussolini’, he observed to me. Cardinals Giovanni Benelli and Lercaro, both considered progressives, were also counted among his friends, as well as numerous monsignori from the middle ranks of the hierarchy within the curia (the papal court). He provided an illuminating account of how he managed to insinuate his way into the Vatican in an unpublished first draft of his book La Verità. As a director of the Permaflex mattress company, he came up with the bright promotional idea of offering a specially made mattress to the Holy Father. The gesture gained him access to the private papal apartments in the Vatican and at the pope’s summer residence of Castelgandolfo and won him a series of private audiences both with Pope Pius XII and Paul VI. At the end of a meeting with the latter, Paul VI asked him with a smile: ‘If I should need to get in contact with you, how, with what name, and where can I call you?’ The pope then gave him a piece of paper and asked him to write down his telephone number ‘and the name of the person I should ask for’. Gelli wrote down the details and then waited while the pope disappeared behind a curtain to have them typed up, returning to hand him back the piece of paper with a benevolent smile. The implication was clear: the pope intended to call him for the kind of delicate services that were better carried out under an assumed name.

It would appear that such services were satisfactorily performed. The published version of La Verità contains a letter from the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, dated 13 December 1965, informing him that the Grand Master of the Order, Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, had appointed him a commendatore (commander). It was a significant honour, coming from a Catholic order of chivalry whose head is a cardinal directly appointed by the pope. It was all the more astonishing given that Gelli was a leading freemason. The name of Tisserant has been associated with a curious financial scandal known as the ‘Vatican Connection’ that connects, in its turn, to the last days of Roberto Calvi. In 1980 the P2 chief was promoted to Grand Officer of the order, a title that would later be accompanied by an honorary degree in financial science – appropriately enough for a convicted bankrupt! – from the Opus Dei-linked Pro Deo University in the United States. His long and prestigious career would also be recognized by the civil authorities. On the recommendation of industry minister Giulio Andreotti, he was made a commendatore of the Italian Republic in June 1966, and in 1980 Italy’s king in exile, Umberto II, conferred on him the title of count, an honour to be passed down through the male line ‘to his legitimate and natural descendants’. The Vatican, the Italian state and the exiled royal family had all found significant ways of expressing their appreciation. His many international honours, including letters putting forward his name for the Nobel Prize for Poetry in 1995, are published in a large hagiographical tome titled: ‘Licio Gelli, European Poet’.[10]

What might Gelli have done to deserve all these honours? One intriguing suggestion comes from Arrigo Molinari, a former deputy police chief in Genoa whose name features on the P2 lists, and whose account links Gelli to Calvi in an extremely delicate political activity. Questioned by the Trento public prosecutor, Carlo Palermo, in May 1984, Molinari said he had joined P2 in order to gain access to information that would be useful to him in his police work. Molinari said the senior P2 official who had recruited him had told him that the P2 archive was stored in the United States and that the lodge was led by senior figures from the worlds of finance and politics in America. He said he had learned from another source of a meeting at the US embassy in Rome involving Gelli, representatives of the US and Italian secret services and multinational companies, to discuss their response to electoral gains made by the PCI in June 1975. ‘Since a coup-type solution did not seem possible, being alien to our mentality, the most feasible solution to be put forward was that of taking control of the press as a channel for influencing the masses,’ Molinari told the magistrate. Large sums were put up by Italian multinationals for this purpose and went into the pockets of Gelli, Calvi and the Italian secret services, he said. In 1976 the money was returned. ‘I presumed from that that the money was managed by the secret services rather than by Gelli and Calvi, who probably wouldn’t have returned it.’

The idea of taking control of the press remained alive in P2 circles, however. In 1981, Molinari said, Gelli was involved in a plan to take control of the Corriere della Sera via Calvi. ‘Calvi . . . was in contact with the secret services of half the world, in particular the Americans, . . . [and] able to exert a direct influence on the political affairs of various countries, particularly Argentina, through his banking and masonic contacts,’ Molinari said. He added that Calvi had tried to force his way into an exclusive sector of English freemasonry by financing the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands; a strange way to seek acceptance in London! The Falklands war did in fact coincide with the last weeks of Roberto Calvi’s life and there have been suggestions from elsewhere that it may have had a bearing on his death.

Molinari was stabbed to death in September 2005 in the hotel room where he lived in a small town on the Ligurian coast. The 42-year-old man who admitted responsibility said he had been surprised by Molinari when he broke into his room with the intention of stealing his handguns. There has been no suggestion that his death was connected to his allegations about P2 some 20 years earlier, but Molinari was still an active political campaigner at the age of 73. He had recently brought a suit against the Bank of Italy, disputing its legal right to print banknotes for the state.

Gelli spoke highly of his friend Calvi when I interviewed him in 2005. ‘My relations with Calvi were very cordial. He was a serious man, dedicated to his family and his work, very Catholic, timid. I don’t think he ever had an affair with a woman. He didn’t discuss his work,’ Gelli recalled. There were further words of praise for Calvi in Gelli’s memoirs. ‘I was a sincere friend of Roberto Calvi, generally recognized as a man of rare intelligence, one of Italy’s best bankers and currency experts,’ he wrote. Calvi was a man of quick reflexes, extreme reserve, pragmatism and sense of organization, he added, meticulous in his business and, ‘as far as I know’, with a profound respect for the law.[11]

Had Calvi been the heir of Sindona in terms of their position in the Italian financial world? I asked. ‘I am not aware of that. If you’re saying that, perhaps you have more information than I do. Relations between them were not very close,’ Gelli replied. He had been more forthcoming in an interview with his biographer Francesco De Rosa a few years earlier, suggesting the existence of an extremely significant relationship between the two men. After an initial period of hostility, Gelli told De Rosa, the two bankers realized that they were better off forming a common front against their difficulties. ‘After their pact I surmised, and it was more than a hypothesis, that many of the things that Sindona knew had been passed on to Calvi. And I am not just talking about financial questions, agreements, possible future alliances, but also about compromising material, documents and other things that could have unleashed an earthquake. This, I believe, could be what links their deaths,’ Gelli said.

Calvi’s enemies, he told me, were ‘in a certain freemasonry, which wasn’t P2, in which he intended to seek refuge when he went to London’. Gelli described Calvi as an ‘intelligent, complicated, blackmailed man’ who had aroused the appetite of many adversaries. ‘In the last contacts he had before fleeing Italy, he said that if the Vatican did not make up its mind to pay back the money it had received from his institution, he would make known events and facts that were so grave that the Holy See would simply have been forced to leave Italian territory . . . He certainly had information. Calvi represented at that time a certain way of doing business in Italy. A financial sector that paid large sums to the political world.’ There can be little doubt today that Calvi was intending to blackmail the Italian political world when he found himself with his back to the wall and that that decision could have contributed in no small measure to his death. In his interview with De Rosa, Gelli also spelled out the nature of the information his friend may have been threatening to use against the Vatican, saying Calvi had confided to him: ‘If tomorrow the “most holy one” doesn’t pay me the $80 million for the bills that I have paid for Poland, I will destroy him.’ ‘I don’t know what he was alluding to with those words, but I know he said them to me personally, in the presence of avvocato [lawyer] Umberto Ortolani.’[12]

Gelli confirmed the latter episode when I visited him at Villa Wanda, describing an agitated Calvi letting off steam one evening over dinner. Calvi was threatening to force the Vatican to sell off some of its antiquities if it refused to honour its debt, he said. ‘He was threatening to reveal what he had done.’

The P2 boss had no qualms about discussing Calvi’s death, a crime for which he is himself a suspect, repeating his conviction that the banker had been ‘suicided’. But who might have been behind it? I asked. ‘I have always asked myself that,’ Gelli replied. ‘He didn’t have enemies. I think of the famous briefcase. He used to keep it close to his leg, always in contact, when we were at lunch together. “Do you take it to bed with you? Have you made it a set of pyjamas?” we used to rib him. There’s a monsignor involved, [Armando] Corona [a rival masonic leader], this Carboni, whom I have never met.’

Gelli has long been under investigation in a secret, parallel judicial inquiry intended to fill in the gaps in the investigation that led to the Rome murder trial and, above all, identify who gave the order for Calvi’s assassination. A two-page SISMI report dated 25 August 1982, just two months after Calvi’s death, provides a succinct summary of the situation at the time and appears to point an accusing finger at Gelli himself. ‘Calvi’s crisis begins with the decision of the Bank of Italy to carry out an inspection of the Banco Ambrosiano to clarify the financial situation of its foreign affiliates and the resulting need to eliminate the bank’s deficit,’ the secret service report observed. ‘According to a confidential source, Calvi turned first to the IOR and then to influential political personalities without obtaining any concrete results. He therefore resumed contacts with Licio Gelli to resolve all outstanding financial disputes between the two and to find the best way of avoiding the imminent financial collapse. He therefore went to London to meet Gelli or his emissaries, taking with him highly blackmailing documents. Here he was killed and the documentation taken from him.’

The report went on to say that Calvi’s documents were now either in the possession of Flavio Carboni’s lawyer, [Gianfranco] De Petri, in Lugano, or held at a villa between Geneva and Lausanne belonging to Peter Notz, a partner of Pazienza in the company TAG AMJ. The official secrecy covering intelligence service documents is often a convenient screen for the irresponsible collation of gossip and tittle-tattle that is unsuitable for public consumption because libellous or unreliable. In the Calvi case, however, secret service documents deserve the most careful scrutiny. The world of P2, which gravitated around Calvi, permeated the secret services that were drawing up the reports. It was in many ways a family affair, and the secret service officers reporting the story were, in some sense, spying on themselves.

9

Vatican Entanglements

If Licio Gelli professed admiration and affection for his friend Roberto Calvi, it cannot be said that the banker reciprocated, at least not to judge by a letter that he wrote towards the end of his life. The text, without a date or recipient, was found in Calvi’s famous black briefcase when it surfaced again some four years after his death. The letter gives an insight into Calvi’s strained relationship with the Vatican and his equally fraught dealings with Gelli; an entanglement which it dates from 1977 and a meeting in Umberto Ortolani’s office in Rome’s central Via Condotti. Gelli had assured him of P2’s link to the Grand Mother Lodge in London and outlined to him the national and international advantages if he were to become a member.

‘In short he had convinced me that all political and financial power really depended on him and that no deal of any importance could go ahead without his consent,’ Calvi wrote. In joining P2 he had also been motivated by a need for protection from ‘the vile blackmails of Sindona’. He discovered to his cost, however, that Gelli and Ortolani had an ambiguous attitude to Sindona and that they had encouraged him (Calvi) to embark on a number of financial operations, notably the purchase of the Corriere della Sera newspaper, which turned out to be disastrous. ‘My acquaintance with the Gelli–Ortolani duo has procured me nothing but grave economic and moral harm, and even today they persist in threats and extortions of every kind together with their worthy friend Michele Sindona,’ he complained.

The letter moved on to consider Calvi’s relations with the Vatican, which existed in the context of a single guiding principle: the struggle against communism. Calvi had been introduced to the Vatican by Sindona, the letter said, presented as a technically competent banker with vast international relations capable of guaranteeing ‘an effective politico-religious penetration’. In order to achieve results, it had been necessary to secure control over the necessary banking institutions. ‘The enormous importance of what I have just said induced me to incur debts, in foreign currency, in order to buy Banco Ambrosiano shares in sufficient quantity to guarantee us control over the institution.’ Calvi believed he had represented the interests of his own group and the Vatican in what he had done: that is, in the secret and illegal purchase of a controlling stake in the Ambrosiano through offshore companies.

Calvi had created ideological and financial bases on behalf of the Vatican in extremely dangerous and difficult areas. ‘On more than one occasion I believed that my life was at risk as I rushed from one Latin American state to another, seeking to oppose the growing ferment of anti-clerical ideologies,’ he wrote. ‘I did my utmost in every sense, even to the point of concerning myself with the supply of warships and other war materiel to support those capable of contrasting the advance of well-organized communist forces.’ Thanks to his efforts the church could boast an authoritative presence in countries such as Argentina, Colombia, Peru and Nicaragua.

Calvi went on to demand the return of money he had advanced to the anti-communist Polish trade union Solidarity and for the creation of centres of financial and political power in five South American countries. He had spent more than $175 million on these projects, he claimed.

The gist of the note was clear: if Calvi had been involved in illegal activities it had been on behalf of the Vatican and some of the most sensitive things that he had done were part of the global war on communism. The Vatican owed him, in short, both in terms of money and of moral obligation.

The relationship between Roberto Calvi and Archbishop Paul Marcinkus and his Vatican bank was fundamental for the development of Calvi’s career and is the key to understanding how it finally unravelled. Based on secrecy, lies and deception, it remains largely opaque even to this day. Calvi was introduced to Marcinkus by Michele Sindona in the late 1960s and the three men went into business together. In 1971 they became partners in the Cisalpine Overseas Bank in Nassau, the Bahamas, which changed its name to Banco Ambrosiano Overseas Ltd (BAOL) in July 1980. The bank would be the fulcrum for Calvi’s offshore financial activities. Beyond the reach of Italian regulatory authorities, those activities would ultimately sink the Ambrosiano. And the three men were partners in Manic SA, a Luxembourg holding company that would also play an important role in the dissipation of the Ambrosiano’s resources. Another Luxembourg company, Banco Ambrosiano Holding (BAH), would also weigh heavily in the financial collapse; originally named Compendium, Calvi had bought the company from Sindona. As Sindona headed towards his own bankruptcy in 1974, his partners Marcinkus and Calvi would pull away from him, continuing the offshore financial juggling to which Sindona had originally introduced them.

The collaboration between Calvi and Marcinkus was of mutual benefit. The IOR connection offered Calvi respectability, discretion and a channel for the illegal export of currency from an offshore bank situated in the heart of Rome. For Marcinkus it was an opportunity to make money, by charging a healthy commission on the back-to-back deposits that enabled Calvi to funnel money to his offshore companies under the noses of the Bank of Italy inspectors. A deposit with the IOR looked safe and respectable in the Banco Ambrosiano’s accounts; in reality the IOR had passed the money straight on to the BAOL or a Panamanian company, something Calvi was forbidden from doing directly himself under Italian law. The complex fiduciary relationship between the two institutions meant both sides were able to hide potential sources of embarrassment under a cloak of secrecy. Marcinkus may well have hoped that the money-making schemes of the enterprising Calvi would help to fill the hole left in both men’s accounts by the financial collapse of their friend Michele Sindona. Furthermore, Calvi was evidently determined to fill Sindona’s shoes in terms of the global struggle against communism, a matter of no little interest to Marcinkus and his masters.

There may also have been more direct, personal advantages accruing from the relationship. According to Giorgio Ambrosoli, the liquidator of Sindona’s financial empire in Italy, the Sicilian banker paid a secret $6.5 million commission to Calvi probably in connection with Calvi’s purchase from the Vatican of the Banca Cattolica del Veneto in 1972. Sindona had helped to broker the deal and the commission, Ambrosoli said, had been shared by ‘an American bishop and a Milanese banker’. The bishop was Marcinkus, Ambrosoli confided to a journalist friend.

Such a claim would not surprise Giacomo Botta, a Banco Ambrosiano official who helped to manage the bank’s overseas network. ‘Marcinkus was definitely not a man of the church. He was a man without scruples,’ he told me, when I visited him in the Alpine village where he now lives. ‘The old guard of the Vatican had to put up with his presence because he had someone behind him who was supplying him with money.’

Botta, who was initially sentenced to 11 years’ imprisonment for his involvement in the Ambrosiano bankruptcy and whose wife became ill with cancer while he was in prison, said both Marcinkus and Calvi had raked off money for themselves from some of their financial operations. ‘There were operations that brought personal enrichment for Calvi and Marcinkus. The money came out of the Nassau bank, where Marcinkus was on the board,’ he said. ‘I was invited to some of the board meetings in Nassau. I remember the great deference and attention that Calvi showed to Marcinkus, as if Marcinkus were the boss of the Nassau bank.’[1]

Who really ran their joint enterprise remains unclear. For Calvi’s family it was the IOR that owed the Ambrosiano money, rather than the other way round. Yet Calvi’s problem in 1982 was the repayment of $300 million to the IOR by the end of June, a problem that precipitated his flight from Italy and the Ambrosiano’s collapse. On 1 September 1981 the IOR provided Calvi with two ‘letters of patronage’ confirming its control over a total of ten offshore companies, eight of them domiciled in Panama. ‘We also confirm our awareness of their indebtedness towards yourselves as of June 10, 1981 as per attached statement of accounts,’ the letters said. At the same time Calvi provided the IOR with a letter freeing the Vatican bank of any responsibility for the indebted companies, which ‘belonged exclusively to this Banco Ambrosiano Overseas Ltd’ and which were being linked only ‘pro forma’ to the IOR. Written in his role as chairman of the BAOL, the letter pledged to hold the IOR harmless both financially and judicially in respect of the offshore companies, and Calvi promised that the IOR’s letters of patronage would be used only internally at the two banks to which they were directed: the heavily indebted Banco Ambrosiano Andino and the Ambrosiano Group Banco Comercial of Managua.

When the Ambrosiano collapsed the IOR agreed to make a ‘goodwill payment’ of $240 million to its creditors. It was a ‘voluntary contribution’, the Vatican said, and did not imply guilt. The alternative, however, was to be sued by more than a hundred international banks that had lent the Ambrosiano money on the basis that the letters of patronage did indeed make the IOR liable. The threat of a deeply embarrassing legal action had been wielded by the International Steering Committee of the creditor banks, which was spearheaded by Britain’s Midland and National Westminster banks. The compensation was paid to the liquidators in 1984, cancelling approximately a third of the $650 million owed by Banco Ambrosiano Holding in Luxembourg, which had been the vehicle for most of the international bank loans. By the time the liquidation of BAH closed in 2001 liquidators had recovered around 87 per cent of the company’s debts.

Italian magistrates investigating the Banco Ambrosiano bankruptcy took the view that Archbishop Marcinkus and his closest aides at the IOR were indeed responsible for the bank’s collapse. On 20 February 1987 they issued a warrant for the arrest of Marcinkus and his lay deputies Luigi Mennini and Pellegrino De Strobel for complicity with Calvi in the bankruptcy. The warrant cited their contribution to the creation of the offshore companies and the issuing of the letters of patronage, which had enabled Calvi to continue his destruction of the bank’s resources. The men never found themselves in the dock to test the prosecution’s case because the Court of Cassation, Italy’s highest appeal court, ruled that Italian courts had no jurisdiction over officers of the pope’s bank.

That the IOR bore more than a merely moral responsibility for the Banco Ambrosiano’s collapse emerges from the testimony of Giacomo Botta to Milan magistrates investigating the bankruptcy and at the bankruptcy trial itself. The trial eventually began in Milan in May 1990 and concluded 23 months later in April 1992. At the time of the bank’s collapse the IOR owned a modest 1.6 per cent stake in the Ambrosiano. But according to Botta, this official shareholding was supplemented by a further 5.2 million shares, equivalent to around 30 per cent of the total, held in an offshore company as security for its loans to the Ambrosiano. ‘This block of shares was very large and could give it control over the Banco Ambrosiano, given the bank’s share structure, which was divided between many small shareholders,’ he told prosecutors on 6 July 1982.

There were other reasons why Botta felt the IOR was the senior partner, if not the owner of the Banco Ambrosiano. The remarkable career of Alessandro Mennini, son of IOR managing director Luigi Mennini, was one. He had joined the Ambrosiano unexpectedly as a deputy director despite an almost total lack of banking experience, Botta told the bankruptcy investigation in April 1983. Another telltale sign was the purchase of the Banca Cattolica del Veneto from the IOR: no changes were made to the management following the change in ownership, Botta said. He cited the IOR’s provision of $150 million as startup money for the Cisalpine Overseas Bank and Marcinkus’s presence on the bank’s board. Offshore companies Ulricor and Rekofinanz, which held shares in the Banco Ambrosiano, belonged to the IOR, as did United Trading Corporation (UTC), a key player in Calvi’s offshore financial conjuring, he claimed.

‘Already in 1977/78, when I became a director of the Managua bank, Calvi and [the general manager for international business, Filippo] Leoni told me that the Ambrosiano group was controlled by the IOR, which held a significant overseas shareholding in the bank,’ Botta told the court. ‘I learned from them that the companies that Managua was financing at the time belonged to the Vatican. Calvi probably wanted to apprise me of these secrets, which he guarded jealously, and also wanted to justify the loans by saying that they were imposed by the Vatican, which was in substance the owner of the Banco Ambrosiano.’[2]

Botta told me that he had been assured by Fernando Garzoni, the chairman of the Banca del Gottardo and a man he considered utterly reliable, that both Manic and UTC belonged to the IOR. Garzoni was in a good position to know, since his Swiss bank had created and administered many of the companies in Calvi’s offshore network. ‘He told me Manic and UTC belonged to the IOR. He was absolutely sure of that, so we felt reassured,’ Botta told me. Banco Ambrosiano employees may have had good reason to want to shuffle responsibility for their actions on to the IOR but much more hinged on the veracity of their assertions than their own individual positions in the face of Italian justice. If the IOR controlled the Banco Ambrosiano then it was perhaps not the Milan bank that was bankrupt after all, but rather – heaven forbid! – the Vatican itself. The issue remains controversial precisely because of the secrecy and obfuscation with which Calvi and the burly American archbishop surrounded their activities. Calvi would not allow any of his staff to have direct dealings with the IOR, Botta explained. ‘Marcinkus was his exclusive contact.’

Botta’s analysis has received support from the chief liquidator of Banco Ambrosiano Holding. The Luxembourg lawyer Paul Mousel highlighted the anomalies in the IOR–Ambrosiano relationship in evidence to the Calvi murder trial in April 2006, when called as a prosecution witness. The IOR was a direct shareholder in BAH, he told the court, although it had not been possible for the liquidators to determine its precise shareholding. ‘The Banco Ambrosiano SpA [Calvi’s Milan headquarters] had a majority holding of 60 per cent. The IOR had a minority holding, we think about 20 per cent,’ Mousel told the court.

Mousel said it had been extremely difficult to trace the money funnelled via the IOR to Panamanian companies. ‘In some cases the money was paid into bank accounts and withdrawn as cash,’ he said. ‘I can’t exclude that money was used for Vatican purposes. One possibility is that the IOR wanted to finance certain activities it didn’t want publicized and so it used Calvi’s network. Another possibility is that the IOR wanted to take a stake in Banco Ambrosiano SpA.’ Untraceable money flows could account for half of the total of missing money, Mousel said. He had found no concrete examples of money laundering, which in any case was not a crime under Luxembourg law at the time of the liquidation, but he could not rule out the possibility that the complex financial transactions organized by Calvi and Marcinkus had served to conceal that activity. ‘The mechanism set up by the Banco Ambrosiano with the connivance of the IOR is typical of money laundering,’ he said. ‘I can’t prove it was done.’

Mousel pointed out the anomaly of Archbishop Marcinkus’s position as head of the IOR and director of the BAOL, a financial institution with which the IOR had a busy relationship. ‘In modern parlance one could speak of a conflict of interests,’ he said. Many of Calvi’s offshore companies were run by a Luxembourg-based management company called Ambrosiano Services Ltd, the liquidator explained. His office had found a letter addressed to that company by the IOR, which appointed ‘Mr Roberto Calvi as our attorney in fact’. Zitropo, a Luxembourg company created by Sindona in 1972 and later a somewhat lethargic component of Calvi’s offshore network, was ‘a direct emanation of the IOR’, Mousel said.

There was little doubt, he explained, that Calvi had taken full advantage of the Vatican’s extra-territorial status to get round the restrictions imposed by Italian law. He had done so in pursuit of an international strategy that made no sense. ‘Baspa [Banco Ambrosiano SpA] was a local Italian bank. It had a participation in the Banca del Gottardo, which was absolutely normal. It had tried to open a bank in London but failed to get permission. That would have been normal. There was no economic reason to open a bank in Peru or Nicaragua at that time. There was no business down there. Nicaragua was under the dictatorship of [Anastasio] Somoza. The Banco Ambrosiano was the only international bank to have a subsidiary there. It made no economic sense.’[3]

If Paul Mousel found no concrete evidence of money laundering in the BAH accounts, there have been plenty of allegations that that was indeed Roberto Calvi’s purpose in the complex international financial transactions he orchestrated with Archbishop Paul Marcinkus’s help. Numerous mafia pentiti claimed as much in evidence to investigating magistrates and in depositions at the Calvi murder trial. On the whole their testimony was long on hearsay and short on concrete detail. Most agreed, however, that Calvi and Marcinkus had been involved in laundering drug money for Cosa Nostra, taking over a role that had previously belonged to Michele Sindona. They also agreed that Giuseppe ‘Pippo’ Calò, the head of Palermo’s Porta Nuova crime family and the mafia’s representative in Rome, played an important role in the management of Cosa Nostra’s illicit funds.

Perhaps the most impressive testimony was delivered by Antonino Giuffrè. Known as ‘Mannuzza’ (Little Hand) because of his deformed right arm, Giuffrè is the most important mafia boss to turn state’s evidence in recent years. Prior to his arrest in April 2002 he had been close to Bernardo Provenzano, the elusive ‘boss of bosses’ who spent 43 years on the run from justice, and he had frequented the top echelons of Cosa Nostra over more than two decades. Speaking in a slow Sicilian drawl by video link from an undisclosed location, with only the back of his head visible to the court, Giuffrè’s testimony to the Calvi murder trial was detailed and relentless and particularly damaging for the position of Flavio Carboni. He had direct knowledge of the circumstances surrounding Calvi’s death, he claimed, because a mafioso from his own Sicilian mandamento (district) of Caccamo, Lorenzo Di Gesù, had participated in the murder plot. The best efforts of the defence lawyers failed to ruffle him or interrupt the inexorable flow of his story.

Pippo Calò, the mafia’s treasurer, had been put in contact with Roberto Calvi by Michele Sindona, Giuffrè told the court. When Sindona’s financial problems and judicial investigations, both in Italy and the US, had meant his influence as a money launderer had waned, the baton was passed on to Calvi in the second half of the 1970s, Giuffrè said. ‘It’s Sindona who promotes Calvi within Cosa Nostra. A triangular relationship develops. On one side you have Cosa Nostra, on another side a certain kind of freemasonry, and on another side we find Cardinal [sic] Marcinkus,’ Giuffrè told the court. ‘Soon Calvi finds himself in the midst of a massive money flow.’

Just as Francesco Marino Mannoia had recounted at the Andreotti mafia trial in 1996, Giuffrè recalled the huge revenues generated by Cosa Nostra-managed heroin trafficking between Sicily and the United States in the 1970s and early 1980s, and Calvi’s role in its laundering. Archbishop Marcinkus, whom he mistakenly promotes to cardinal, was an active accomplice in the money laundering, Giuffrè claimed. (Paul Marcinkus never actually achieved his cardinal’s red hat precisely because of these suspicions.) Such allegations had been heard before, but this was the first time they had been made publicly, in a court of law, by a mafia boss of Giuffrè’s standing. Marcinkus had used Calvi and the Banco Ambrosiano to transfer large sums of money belonging to Cosa Nostra, he said. ‘It’s fairly well known in Cosa Nostra circles, in a wider context that touches the United States as well, that Cardinal Marcinkus had both direct and indirect contacts with Cosa Nostra,’ Giuffrè said. ‘I know that Cardinal Marcinkus played an important role, as well as Cosa Nostra and a certain type of freemasonry. I’m referring in particular to P2. The most important person in that world at the time was Licio Gelli.’

Giuffrè identified the Socialist and Christian Democrat parties as the political forces that had been most interested in the outcome of the Calvi drama. Calvi’s success had not been achieved without cost, Giuffrè said. He had been forced to pay political bribes, particularly to the Socialists and Christian Democrats, and particularly during the last period of his life, when he had started to encounter difficulties. Calvi had been in contact with important people in the course of his career and he tried to cling to them when things started to go wrong at the Banco Ambrosiano, Giuffrè claimed. ‘When he finds himself with the water up to his neck, he broaches the subject of threats. He tried to grab hold of those important people, saying he would take them with him if he were to fall. At that point there is no hope for Calvi of recovering his professional position and he’ll lose his life over it,’ Giuffrè told the court. Asked by defence lawyers whether he had gathered his knowledge from reading the newspapers, Giuffrè replied disdainfully: ‘My statements are based on what I heard during the 20 years and more that I was in Cosa Nostra. I always had a high-level role. I couldn’t give a damn about the newspapers.’

Was Marcinkus one of the people with an interest in Calvi’s elimination? Giuffrè was asked by Carboni’s defence lawyer, Renato Borzone. ‘I can reply in the affirmative to your question. These people were interested because they could have been damaged if Calvi had talked to the magistrates.’ Marcinkus was vulnerable, Giuffrè explained, not only because of what he had done with Calvi, but also because of his prior involvement with Sindona, ‘in certain questions involving Sindona and America’. Did Marcinkus commission the murder? ‘No.’

At this point Pippo Calò and Cosa Nostra had assumed responsibility for resolving the Calvi problem, Giuffrè claimed. Were members of the secret services involved in the murder? he was asked. ‘I don’t feel I can assert that there was a secret service role. There was a role of certain individuals from the deviant secret services, but not of the secret services as such.’

Perhaps the most intriguing revelation came when Giuffrè was asked about the fate of the missing Banco Ambrosiano millions. Cosa Nostra had recovered a part, but not all, of the money it had entrusted to Calvi, he said. ‘There were rumours that some of this money came in the door and went out the window and that it was used for what we in the mafia call the “tragedies”. Part of what Cosa Nostra invested was never recovered.’[4] Giuffrè never explained what he meant by the ‘tragedies’. Was he thinking of the terrorist outrages that bloodied Italy while P2 – and mafia – power was at its height? Given the enduring suspicions about the political role of Calvi’s P2 associates, such an interpretation remains perfectly plausible.

In his evidence to the murder trial, Paul Mousel said liquidators had discerned three distinct phases in Calvi’s career as a banker. In the first phase the Banco Ambrosiano Holding had had preferential dealings with the IOR. In a second phase it had dealt with Gelli and Ortolani, payments to the P2 duo being considered ‘political’ by the liquidators. In the last phase of his career Calvi had been dealing with ‘common criminals’, making large payments to individuals such as Francesco Pazienza and Flavio Carboni with no apparent business justification, a comment that caused no little irritation to Carboni’s lawyers.

Pazienza and Carboni, the ‘guardian angels’ of the twilight period of Calvi’s career, both entered his life as potential mediators in his difficult relationship with the Vatican. Francesco Pazienza has furnished a variety of accounts as to the genesis of his relationship with the secretive Milanese banker. The constant elements of his story concern Calvi’s need for political protection and Pazienza’s knowledge of highly sensitive aspects of Calvi’s relationship with the Vatican bank. It is generally acknowledged that the meeting between Calvi and the buccaneering young faccendiere (‘fixer’) who would become his consultant, and later his tormentor, took place in the spring of 1981 under the patronage of Flaminio Piccoli, the secretary of the Christian Democrat party, and of Giuseppe Santovito, the head of Italian military intelligence and a member of P2. It is likely that Pazienza was blackmailing Calvi from the start of their connection.

Pazienza at the time was a talented young entrepreneur with wide international experience, mastery of four foreign languages – English, French, Spanish and Arabic – and contacts with the secret services of the United States, France, Panama and Saudi Arabia. He had been working as a consultant for Italian military intelligence (SISMI) and a recent mission undertaken at the request of Santovito made him of particular interest to Calvi. Santovito had asked him to dig up dirt on Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, relaying a request he had received from a Vatican power faction opposed to the growing influence of the American monsignor. The request came from Monsignor Luigi Celata, an assistant to the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, whose policy of cautious diplomatic engagement with the communist regimes of Eastern Europe was being undercut by the hardline anticommunism of the new Polish pontiff. Marcinkus’s family origins in Lithuania – a country with strong linguistic and ethnic ties to Poland – created a natural bond with Pope John Paul. The American archbishop placed the resources of his bank at the service of the new pope’s Ostpolitik, and in return obtained his unswerving support and loyalty.

The reaction of the Casaroli faction – referred to by Pazienza as the ‘Faenza clan’, as several of its members hailed from Casaroli’s home town in north-east Italy – was to seek to undermine Marcinkus’s hold over the Vatican purse strings. The Faenza clan, supported by Monsignor Achille Silvestrini, the Vatican’s ‘foreign minister’, and Cardinal Pio Laghi, a papal nuncio with experience in Latin America and Washington, now squared off against the Marcinkus group, backed by Monsignor Virgilio Levi, the deputy director of the Vatican’s newspaper Osservatore Romano, and Monsignor Luigi Cheli, the papal representative at the United Nations. Victory in the power struggle could be achieved, Pazienza explained in his memoir Il Disubbidiente (The Disobedient One), by ‘finding documents capable of showing that the activities of the [Vatican] bank and its head were not in keeping with those of the Catholic Church’.

That was Pazienza’s task and he set about it with alacrity and some good fortune. He managed to track down a man who had been blackmailing Calvi with the contents of a dossier on the IOR that had been put together by the late Cardinal Egidio Vagnozzi, an administrator of the Vatican’s finances who had been a bitter rival of Marcinkus. The documents were in the possession of one Giorgio Di Nunzio, who had worked for the engineering group of alleged P2 member Mario Genghini and who now rounded out his income by selling Vatican gossip to the right-wing weekly magazine Il Borghese. Cardinal Vagnozzi had died before having an opportunity to use the papers – which Pazienza described as concerning, in particular, the ‘spurious’ relations between Marcinkus and Sindona – and they were now deposited with a Swiss lawyer in Zurich. Pazienza pondered the advisability of delivering the documents to Santovito, Casaroli or even Marcinkus himself and finally plumped for Marcinkus’s ally Roberto Calvi as the ideal purchaser. The documents were handed over to Calvi in return for $1.2 million, paid to Di Nunzio partly in Switzerland and partly in Italy, and Pazienza was signed up as a personal adviser to the Banco Ambrosiano chairman at a salary of more than half a million dollars a year.

The lesson to be drawn from the episode, Pazienza observed in his memoir, was that the pope was viewed with hostility by some of his closest collaborators. ‘His “fault” was that of being a kind of “Martian”, an authentic “alien” descended from Poland and completely removed from the hard core of Italian prelates who constituted the historic nucleus of the curia and who were accustomed to running in their own way, and with absolute power, the complex but almost perfect machinery of the Vatican.’[5] A power struggle was evidently swirling around the pope, the issue at the heart of it was the Catholic church’s relations with communism, and no holds were barred in the struggle for supremacy.

In another account of his dealings with Calvi, offered at the Ambrosiano bankruptcy trial in Milan, Pazienza said it was the banker who first made contact with him via Flaminio Piccoli, the leader of the Christian Democrats, Italy’s dominant political party. Calvi and Pazienza had met fleetingly once before, at a meeting of the International Monetary Fund in Washington in 1978. Since then Pazienza’s career had advanced and he had achievements under his belt that might well have caught Calvi’s eye. For one thing, Pazienza had excellent contacts with the newly elected administration of President Ronald Reagan. Reagan had good reason to be grateful to him: Pazienza had come up with the details of the Billygate story, a journalistic scoop that had helped to sink Jimmy Carter’s hopes of re-election. Carter’s accident-prone brother Billy had accepted an invitation from Muammar Qaddafi to visit Libya, where he had shared accommodation and fraternized with George Habbash, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

The PFLP was categorized as a terrorist organization by the US State Department, so it wasn’t a wise association for Billy Carter. His brother Jimmy’s popularity was already low, thanks to his botched handling of the Iranian hostage crisis. With the help of Michael Ledeen, the American historian and journalist, Pazienza was able to ensure that the story enjoyed huge play in the American media. Some of his information came from his friend Federico Umberto D’Amato, another P2 member who was responsible at the time for Italy’s border police. D’Amato had full details of Billy Carter’s stopover in Rome on his return from Tripoli, with six days of alcoholic revelry at the Hilton Hotel paid for by a generous Libyan embassy. The story broke shortly before the presidential election, in October 1980, so the timing could hardly have been better.

Reagan’s gratitude became quickly apparent. The Reagan administration had no confidence in the outgoing ambassador to Italy, Richard Gardner, and promptly removed the Rome CIA station chief, Hugh Montgomery. In the diplomatic interregnum Pazienza and Ledeen handled relations between the Italian and American governments. Pazienza’s importance became visible when he organized a visit to Washington for the Christian Democrat leader, and Piccoli was grateful to Pazienza for ensuring that his scheduled meeting with Secretary of State Alexander Haig actually took place. Haig had been abruptly summoned to Camp David by the president but agreed to delay his departure after some string-pulling by Pazienza. The Haig connection was strong. Ledeen was a special adviser to the secretary of state and Pazienza had reportedly worked with Haig when the latter left the command of NATO forces in Europe to become head of the arms multinational United Technologies. Pazienza’s organizational tour de force found its way into the newspapers and made him seem just the kind of influence-broker Calvi was looking for.

Pazienza told the Milan court Calvi had contacted him through Piccoli because he too wanted help in establishing relations with the new American government. ‘The Banco Ambrosiano group had a representative office in Washington and everyone at that time, including Calvi, wanted relations with the new American administration,’ he said. His claim was confirmed by the testimony of Federico Umberto D’Amato, who told magistrates Pazienza had mediated in secret contacts between the Vatican and the Palestine Liberation Organization, and knew Marcinkus, Haig and Ledeen well. ‘Calvi believed that the solution to his problems could come from a grand-scale agreement to be made with the Americans; Pazienza’s contacts could be useful to him,’[6] D’Amato said. Calvi may also have been attracted by the rumours that Pazienza had worked for the CIA as well as for SISMI. ‘Calvi struck me as a lost, disoriented individual. I never saw him smile, as if he was always on the edge of a catastrophe,’ D’Amato told magistrates on another occasion. ‘He had an extraordinary belief in mysterious things . . . Another of his obsessions was with the secret services. Once, for example, he said to me, knowing that I had good relations with the secret services and with the CIA: “Why don’t we go to Washington once and for all and talk to these people from the CIA?” I told him that the secret services, at least from what I knew and believed, didn’t intervene in financial matters.’[7] D’Amato, who had enjoyed excellent links to the Central Intelligence Agency since its founding after the Second World War, was being disingenuous at the very least.

Pazienza’s curriculum vitae provides numerous further reasons why Calvi might have been interested in employing him. He had trained as a doctor at Rome university, specializing in the effects of deep water on physiology, and had cultivated an interest in deep sea diving, which he combined with a career in marine engineering that took him to the four corners of the globe. In the early 1970s he worked with the French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau and negotiated oil contracts in Iran and Libya on behalf of Cousteau’s Cocean company. He later worked for the Italian engineering group Condotte d’Acqua, headed by alleged P2 member Loris Corbi, ultimately acquiring wide experience in Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa and the United States.

This was the overt part of Pazienza’s career, documented in a c.v. that he prepared himself. The clandestine part, which would have been of even greater interest to Calvi, was documented by the Italian secret services. An undated report headed Highly Confidential declares: ‘His international credit cards are his relations with SDECE [French intelligence], CIA, the Saudi Arabian secret services, Vatican circles, international freemasonry through the Grand Orient of Italy. His membership of the board of the Luxembourg company Sedebra links him to the Sindona–Calvi–IOR connection from 1977.’ The report goes on to enumerate other significant links: to Bob Armao, administrator of the deposed Shah of Iran’s fortune, to the Shah’s son [Ali Reza Pahlavi], and to the arms dealer Adnan Kashoggi. ‘He also carried out public relations tasks for the Saudi businessman [Akram] Ojjeh,’ the report averred. It referred to a ‘Sicilian Connection’ and Pazienza’s ‘links to the Italo-American mafia clans headed by the Gambino family’. The Gambinos were the crime family who allegedly conducted drug imports to the United States in the context of the Iran–Contra operation and who oversaw Sindona’s mysterious visit to Sicily in 1979.

Another undated secret service report refers to the public relations work done for Ojjeh in Europe and the United States and suggests that the construction contracts in the Shah’s Iran obtained for Condotte d’Acqua by Pazienza were the result of high-level introductions procured by the Saudi businessman. The report referred to Pazienza’s close ties to Monsignor Marcinkus, saying the IOR chief had been responsible for introducing Pazienza to Calvi. Yet another report, drawn up for SISMI on 22 February 1982, alleged that Pazienza was involved in exporting arms from Europe to Oman, ‘for the probable subsequent transfer to Iraq’, via West German companies and a Yugoslav arms company with alleged links to Kashoggi. These were the kind of secret operations likely to impress Calvi: a potential source of rapid enrichment and an indication of ties to the world of secret power to which he aspired and which he admired so much.

Francesco Pazienza began working for Calvi in March 1981. It would be the beginning of a busy time for Calvi and his world. On 17 March police raided Gelli’s home and office in Tuscany, setting off a political scandal that would rock Italy and deprive Calvi of his politico-masonic protection. On 10 May Calvi was arrested for currency violations, introducing him to the traumatic experience of prison and creating the first doubts about the creditworthiness of his bank, doubts that would make it more difficult for the Ambrosiano to raise funds on the international money market from then on. Three days later a Muslim extremist shot the pope, an event that would incapacitate John Paul for weeks and undermine the position of Archbishop Marcinkus within the Vatican, which depended on the constant contact and support of the pontiff. Pazienza stuck close to Calvi’s family while the patriarch was in prison, giving them moral support and assisting them in their contacts with possible political patrons. Psychological pressure on the family increased on 9 July, when Calvi attempted suicide in prison. When he was released two weeks later, Pazienza arranged for a holiday in Sardinia, where Calvi and his wife could recuperate from the accumulated stress. There Calvi would be introduced for the first time to Flavio Carboni, whom Pazienza said he had met by chance in a policeman’s office at about the time he began work for Calvi.

By his own account, Pazienza worked for Calvi on some of his most delicate projects. In his autobiography Pazienza describes how the Banco Ambrosiano funnelled money to the anti-communist trade union Solidarity in Poland, a cause close to the hearts of Pope John Paul and President Ronald Reagan. Solidarity’s success in undermining Polish communism would create the first real breach in the monolithic power of the Eastern Bloc, a trickle through the dyke that would soon be transformed into an unstoppable flood. Reagan’s Roman Catholic CIA director, William Casey, who saw fighting communism as something of a religious mission, coordinated American and Vatican efforts to support Solidarity to ensure that neither organization trod on the other’s toes in the dark of clandestine operations. ‘The money flowed towards Warsaw via the IOR and, more concretely, via the financial institution that served as the secular ally par excellence of the Vatican bank and Marcinkus: the Banco Ambrosiano,’ Pazienza wrote. He had received confirmation of these flows from French intelligence in January 1981, he said. According to this account, Calvi had been the protagonist and Pazienza the passive observer.[8]

Pazienza changed his story significantly when called to give evidence at the Calvi murder trial in April 2006. Now he claimed he had personally been involved in smuggling gold ingots to Gdansk in the false bottom of a Lada jeep. The entrepreneur appeared in court wearing brown corduroy slacks and a blue pullover with holes at the elbow. He had been accompanied by prison guards from Livorno jail, where he was serving a prison sentence for his role in the fraudulent collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano, a far cry now from the days when he travelled by private jet or Rolls-Royce and owned luxury yachts. He had organized the shipment of a $4 million consignment to Solidarity in March 1982, he said, revealing his own direct involvement for the first time. ‘I dealt with it on Calvi’s behalf and with Marcinkus’s approval. Calvi told me to speak to Marcinkus, and the operation got under way,’ he told the court. Pazienza had discussed the gold consignment with Marcinkus during a meeting at the archbishop’s residence, Villa Stritch. The organizers used a jeep with Polish number plates, he said, and the gold was delivered in small ingots that could then be melted down for further distribution at Solidarity-controlled factories.[9]

Calvi’s Banco Ambrosiano was involved in other sensitive financial operations with the IOR, including the payment of ransoms for kidnap victims. When the son of Francesco De Martino, a former secretary of the Socialist party and a candidate at the time for the Italian presidency, was kidnapped in April 1977, the Banco Ambrosiano was one of the institutions to rally round. Licio Gelli has described how Calvi apologized to him for arriving late for a dinner engagement: he had been delayed by the process of counting and delivering a billion lire needed for the ransom of De Martino’s son. ‘Smiling, he explained the nature of the delay: when the work had been completed they had noticed that the banknotes were in bags bearing the letters IOR,’ Gelli explained in a memorandum sent to the parliamentary P2 Commission. ‘He had therefore given orders for the containers to be replaced, but he was satisfied that he had contributed to saving a human life.’

Francesco Pazienza was personally involved in the negotiations for the release of another kidnap hostage: a Christian Democrat councillor responsible for public works in the Naples area. Pazienza was asked to intervene by his political patron Flaminio Piccoli after Ciro Cirillo was seized by the Red Brigades in April 1981. The solution, he realized immediately, was to contact the Camorra, the criminal organization that controlled the territory where the kidnap had taken place. Exploiting the contacts of a builder friend, Alvaro Giardili – whose business card would be found in Roberto Calvi’s pocket under Blackfriars Bridge – Pazienza got in touch with Vincenzo Casillo, the top lieutenant of imprisoned Camorra boss Raffaele Cutolo. After a memorable lunch with a dozen of Casillo’s soldiers, heavily armed and dripping with jewellery, Pazienza got to meet Casillo himself. Known as ‘O Nirone’ (The Black One) for his dark complexion, Casillo got straight down to business and within days was able to deliver the goods: councillor Cirillo’s safe deliverance from captivity. It was an important meeting for Pazienza, as Casillo would later be accused of strangling Calvi and of having done so on his, Pazienza’s, orders. ‘He was tall, thin, with incredibly long bony hands. Unlike his aides he was dressed in sober fashion, with a pale blue shirt and khaki trousers,’ Pazienza recalled in his memoir. Unlike his aides, Pazienza observed with relief, he eschewed gold chains, rings and bracelets, as well as the long nails on the little finger that were worn as a sign of criminal affiliation – a kind of visible masonic handshake for Camorristi.[10]

A Camorra pentito, Enrico Madonna, told magistrates that Casillo had admitted to him that he had personally participated in Calvi’s murder. ‘He didn’t give me any details on the murder, or its motives, but he said that if he hadn’t killed him, other people with whom he was connected would have done so,’ Madonna claimed. He deduced that the other people Casillo was referring to were ‘the secret services and people connected to the Banco Ambrosiano, like Pazienza’.[11]

Pazienza and Casillo’s negotiations for the release of the kidnapped councillor were brought to a satisfactory, if disreputable, conclusion. The Italian authorities agreed to pay the Red Brigades a ransom of £850,000 and a reward of more than £1 million went to the Camorra for its mediation efforts. The deal included the promise of earthquake reconstruction contracts for Camorra-controlled firms – and an offer by the Camorra to assassinate policemen and magistrates on behalf of the Red Brigades. It was the kind of problem-solving at which Pazienza excelled, but where it was impossible to achieve results without getting one’s hands dirty. The Banco Ambrosiano is believed to have contributed to the ransom, though Pazienza does not say as much in his autobiography. He does however mention another contributor to the ransom pot: Enrico Nicoletti, the treasurer of the Magliana Band. The Rome underworld gang that would play an important role in Calvi’s flight from Italy had contributed hundreds of millions of lire for the redemption of the Christian Democrat councillor. Flavio Carboni was one who said that the Banco Ambrosiano had contributed directly to the ransom. He told magistrates Calvi had confided to him that he had entrusted Pazienza with ‘a huge sum’ for the purpose.

Pazienza confronted suspicions that he may have played a role in Calvi’s murder head on when he gave evidence at the trial in Rome. In the mid 1980s prime minister Bettino Craxi was convinced that Pazienza was responsible for Calvi’s flight from Italy and death in London on the basis of what he had been told by his intelligence chief, Admiral Fulvio Martini. ‘If Martini was telling the truth then I am responsible for Calvi’s death,’ Pazienza told the court. ‘Alternatively, he may have been lying to cover for Mr Carboni and Mr Calò, or perhaps for somebody else altogether.’

Pazienza had spent the night of 11 June at the Dorchester Hotel in London before flying out to America. It was the right sort of time to be in London if arrangements were to be made in advance for Calvi’s murder. He had twice called a London company called Fairways Marine Ltd – perhaps to book a boat for use on the Thames? He was asked about the calls by the public prosecutor, Luca Tescaroli, whose faulty English pronunciation made it necessary to spell out the company’s name letter by letter. It was a travel agency and he had called to book a flight, Pazienza said at first. No, said Tescaroli, it was a boat hire company. ‘I don’t remember,’ said Pazienza. ‘At the time, if I was renting a boat it would have been a large boat. It must have been a yacht broker.’

Pazienza conceded that he had become exasperated with Calvi in the latter part of their relationship, frustrated by his stop-go approach to business projects. He had been asked to find a buyer for the Vatican’s Vianini construction company and the Corriere della Sera publishing group only to have the rug pulled from under him at the last minute by Calvi. Calvi had reacted in a similarly inconsistent manner in response to his efforts to find an American buyer for the Banco Ambrosiano itself. The financier Robert Armao and Rockefeller interests had been contemplating taking a controlling stake, he said. ‘The problem is this: everything is fine with Calvi if you say “well done, bravo”. But if you say that everything is not fine, he starts to talk about treachery. It’s true that I used to cut him down to size. I know Carboni used to treat him differently, “Yes, presidente, yes, presidente”.’ Pazienza bobbed his head from side to side, mimicking a servile Carboni in the presence of the chairman of the bank.

Pazienza had claimed to have the Ambrosiano’s salvation within his grasp when he was interviewed for the British television documentary programme Panorama more than 20 years earlier. Two American investors, three Saudi individuals and two banks had been prepared to pay $1.2 billion for a 12 per cent stake in the Banco Ambrosiano to be purchased from Calvi’s Panamanian companies, he said, in rather unimpressive spaghetti-English. It would have solved Calvi’s problems ‘absolutely 100 per cent’. But Calvi’s problems could not be solved so easily. Buying control of the Banco Ambrosiano meant gaining access to his unconfessable secrets, and there were few, if any, whom he could contemplate trusting with them.

If Pazienza was not responsible for Calvi’s death, then who was? The former secret agent declined to be drawn on the subject when questioned in court. ‘If I knew who had killed Calvi, I would tell you. I have my own fairly clear ideas, but they are the ideas of an analyst not a witness. I’m in prison, I won’t fall into the trap of calumny, I’m not permitted to,’ he said. But Pazienza did offer a cryptic hint to the court, inviting it to reflect on who benefited from the banker’s death. ‘Cui prodest [who gains from] Calvi’s death? I leave the answer to you,’ he said, then added in Latin, after a moment’s reflection: ‘Sinite parvulos venire ad me.’ Who was he evoking with Christ’s words: ‘Let the little children come unto me’?

Pazienza has indicated on several occasions that his collaboration with Calvi had given him access to highly sensitive information about the Vatican’s financial activities. In an interview conducted in 1986 from his prison cell, while on remand pending the outcome of the Bologna bombing trial, he blamed the Ambrosiano’s collapse on its vertiginous rate of expansion in the last three years of Calvi’s life. This was the result, he told the news magazine L’Espresso, of its strategic accord with Paul Marcinkus. ‘The Ambrosiano was to represent the modern, secular arm of the church in the world. The new temporal power was seen as the penetration and control of financial and publishing activities to counterbalance the secular and Marxist influences that were becoming ever more preponderant in Italy.’ Pope Paul VI did not have such an aggressive secular programme as John Paul II, so Marcinkus had not needed so much money in the past. The pope’s foreign policy was focused on Poland and new activities in the Third World, Pazienza explained. ‘I will give you a little example. The company Erin SA, controlled by the Vatican, owed the Ambrosiano more than $60 million in 1981. Well, in mid 1981 the German secret services and the CIA received a report from the English security services asking them to investigate the purchase of strategic material by a well-known German arms dealer, material that was destined for the IRA [Irish Republican Army]. The report referred to “a Panamanian company, considered close to Catholic circles and probably the Vatican, named Erin SA”.’ The Vatican had been buying arms for a terrorist organization? Not something the Holy See would like to see publicized, if true!

Pazienza has hinted strongly that he was aware of links between Monsignor Marcinkus and the Central Intelligence Agency. In his autobiography, Il Disubbidiente, he said an American lawyer of his acquaintance had been asked to provide the IOR chief with legal advice in the wake of the Ambrosiano’s collapse. The request came from a fellow lawyer, the Catholic director of the CIA, William Casey. ‘Was Paul Marcinkus in contact with the American espionage organization?’ he asked rhetorically. Pazienza provided his own answer in a handwritten note presented by his defence lawyers at the Bologna bomb trial and titled: ‘Ambrosiano– IOR–CIA’. The text, dated 23 January 1983, reads: ‘The CIA transferred (according to Calvi) money to Poland via the IOR and the Catholic Church.’ There was a slight hitch, however, the note continued: Marcinkus asked Calvi to advance him a few million dollars, which would be more than compensated when the CIA funds arrived. ‘The problem was that these funds never arrived and Marcinkus swindled the good Calvi.’

Calvi had been convinced that Robert Armao and another American financier interested in acquiring a controlling stake in his bank were linked to the CIA, who knows why? Pazienza reflected. ‘It occurred to me that the diabolical Marcinkus had not just “fucked” Calvi but the CIA as well, helping himself to the Ambrosiano dollars. It is very probable, in fact, that Marcinkus found himself in the Turner–Casey interregnum at the CIA and needed Calvi’s “emergency assistance”. But then he must have forgotten to pay. It happens to the best of us.’ By 1983 Pazienza was disenchanted with the CIA, the Vatican and Calvi; hinting at a knowledge of explosive political secrets might have been no more than a desperate defensive ploy by someone facing the prospect of long years in jail. But given Pazienza’s delicate professional role and secret service contacts, it may have been more than just a legal bluff.

10

The Gorilla

Jesus Christ outlined his approach to temporal power when he instructed his followers to render unto Caesar the things which were Caesar’s – coins bearing the effigy of the Roman emperor – and to God what was God’s – their spiritual allegiance. He taught that his kingdom was not of this world and allowed himself to be put to death by Roman soldiers. The relationship between the Christian religion and temporal power changed significantly when the Emperor Constantine publicly converted to Christianity in AD 313, bringing to an end the Roman persecution of the early church. A new church would emerge, combining spiritual and temporal powers, with its own territories, its own state administration and its own armies. Most of that temporal power was stripped away at the end of the nineteenth century by the Risorgimento, the movement for the liberation and unification of Italy in which freemasons such as Giuseppe Garibaldi played a leading role. The pope’s temporal reign would be confined from then on to the 43 hectares of the Vatican City. This did not mean that the Vatican’s temporal ambitions had come to a complete end. They would simply be pursued more discreetly, and money – Caesar’s coin – would play an increasingly important role.

The Vatican bank, the Institute for the Works of Religion, was founded by Pius XII on 27 June 1942, while the Second World War was raging. It was intended to facilitate the movement of funds on behalf of church bodies in a violently fractured world; global reach and secrecy would be essential. The Vatican Yearbook describes its mission more blandly: ‘The purpose of the Institute is to provide for the care and administration of the capital destined for the works of religion.’ The IOR absorbed an earlier institution, the Administration of the Works of Religion, which Leo XIII had set up in 1887. It was believed to have deposits of around $2 billion – making it the equivalent of a regional bank in the United States – when Archbishop Paul Marcinkus joined its staff in 1968. Much of the Vatican’s lands and buildings had been confiscated from it by the new Italian state when Rome was incorporated into it in 1870. Almost 60 years later the Vatican was paid compensation of around $80 million by the government of Benito Mussolini on the signing of the Lateran Pact in 1929. The money was not administered by the IOR, however, but by a specially created Vatican administration. When Marcinkus took over the IOR the money derived from the seized real estate assets that had once made up the Papal States was under the control of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA), a rival centre of financial power within the Vatican.

From the start, secrecy was one of the major assets of the financial institution that conducted its business from behind the stout medieval walls of the Bastion of Nicholas V, just inside the Vatican’s St Anne’s Gate. Italian banking authorities had no jurisdiction over it and it declined to publish its accounts. Its activities were nominally supervised by a committee of five cardinals, but the committee met rarely and when it did the cardinals were given a concise statement of the bank’s activities, which they were not supposed to take away. Their restraint was customarily rewarded with a cheque for the equivalent of $5,000 contained in an envelope attached to the IOR statement and marked: ‘For Your Eminence’s personal charities’.

When Marcinkus joined the bank there were around 9,000 depositors. They included religious orders, ecclesiastical colleges, dioceses, parishes and other religious institutions. Senior prelates, accredited Vatican diplomats and other select lay people could hold personal accounts in return for the pledge that part of the funds would be made available for good works. The New York Times journalist Paul Hoffmann described the atmosphere there at that time in his book Anatomy of the Vatican. ‘No mistake, the well-lit office was a bank. It might look a little old-fashioned with marble floors and glass partitions, tellers in correct civilian suits, and customers – priests, nuns, a few laymen, hardly ever a laywoman – making deposits or withdrawals. The atmosphere was almost that of a church; loud words were seldom heard, and a crucifix hung on a wall. The mother superior of some order, flanked by another elderly nun, probably their community’s treasurer, shoved a bundle of cheques across the marble counter; at the next window a young priest looking like a junior curialist [curia official] counted the dollar bills he had just received.’

An account at the IOR was a much coveted but little publicized privilege, Hoffmann explained. Money deposited there was safe from Italy’s ‘stringent, confusing, and often outright vexatory fiscal and currency regulations. A resident of Rome might on any business day walk through the Gate of St Anne into the pontifical enclave with a satchel full of 100,000 lire bills and deposit them at the Institute for the Works of Religion if he (or she) had an account there. He could expect to get interest on the money that he wouldn’t have to report on his Italian income tax return, or he might transfer funds to Switzerland, Luxembourg or the Bahamas.’ In the early 1980s the bank promised the government it would observe Italian fiscal laws in its dealings with Italian clients. An accommodating friend with a foreign passport and an account at the Institute became a particularly valuable commodity.[1]

The Vatican had an opportunity to participate in geopolitics at the end of the Second World War, when it joined with western allies in a bid to counter the spread of communism with a buffer zone of Christian democracies in central Europe. It was hoped that a kind of resuscitated Austro-Hungarian Empire might fill the void between the Baltic and the Aegean with a Pan-Danubian Confederation, halting the westward expansion of Soviet power. The instrument for achieving this goal was Intermarium, an anti-communist Catholic lay organization founded in Paris by a former Tsarist general in the mid 1930s. The organization had been funded by British and French intelligence before the war and after it Intermarium recruited supporters from 16 central European nations bent on liberating their home territories from the Soviet yoke. Almost inevitably its members were drawn, at least in part, from exfascists and Nazi collaborators, among them Father Krunoslav Draganovic, a Croatian priest wanted as a war criminal for his role in the persecution of Croatia’s Serbian minority. As well as supporting the work of Intermarium, Draganovic played a leading role in the Vatican-run ratline that enabled many Nazi war criminals to escape to South America.

Itermarium’s most active branch was in Rome and it participated in the battle against atheistic communism under the direct leadership of the pope, according to British author Stephen Dorril. ‘The branch campaigned among the Allies for permission to establish a volunteer anti-communist army for use in an imminent war against the USSR,’ Dorril wrote in his history of the British foreign intelligence service, MI6. Senior Vatican priests and bishops became leading members of Intermarium, an activity that inevitably led them into contact with the intelligence services of the major western powers. Some of them were hardliners, happy to assist anti-communist Nazis and their collaborators in their flight from Europe even when they were wanted for war crimes. Intermarium was one of the first organizations to campaign openly for freedom for Waffen-SS prisoners of war, Dorril wrote. The Vatican appears to have provided a discreet financial channel to support another transnational anti-communist organization, the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), at about this time. ‘ “Vast sums” were being paid to the ABN by MI6 through a Vatican channel, to disguise its true source,’ Dorril claimed.[2] Such discreet support for the clandestine operations of western secret services could well have continued until the Sindona and Calvi eras and provide a possible key to understanding Calvi’s demise.

Evidence to that effect entered the public domain as a result of the Bank of England/BCCI trial in London in 2005. Liquidators of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International were suing Britain’s central bank for misfeasance in public office, arguing it had been negligent in its supervision of the Luxembourg-registered financial institution. BCCI was founded in 1972 by Pakistani banker Agha Hasan Abedi and was initially capitalized by Sheik Zayed of Abu Dhabi, developing into the first multinational bank at the service of the Third World. By the time it was shut down in 1991 it had expanded into 73 countries and become a $23 billion operation, with almost a million depositors worldwide. Robert Morgenthau, the New York district attorney who played a leading role in unravelling what he called ‘the largest bank fraud in world financial history’, claimed BCCI had ‘operated as a corrupt criminal organization throughout its 19-year history’.

The liquidators claimed that the Bank of England bore at least part of the blame for that, for it had possessed information about the bank’s criminality but done little or nothing to rein it in. Though incorporated in Luxembourg and with offices in offshore havens such as the Cayman Islands, Netherlands Antilles and Hong Kong, the real centre of BCCI’s operations was in Britain. When the bank received a licence from the Bank of England in 1980 there were already more branches in the UK than in any other nation. One of its primary economics advisers was the former British prime minister James Callaghan. A United States congressional inquiry headed by Senator John Kerry concluded that the Bank of England had participated in a cover-up of BCCI’s criminality in a last-ditch effort to save the institution from bankruptcy. It had agreed with the bank’s UK accountants, Price Waterhouse, and with the government authorities in Abu Dhabi on a plan to rescue BCCI in April 1990; Price Waterhouse had been induced to certify the BCCI accounts as ‘true and fair’, mentioning the huge losses only in a footnote. ‘As a consequence, the certification was materially misleading to anyone who relied on it ignorant of the facts then mutually known to BCCI, Abu Dhabi, Price Waterhouse and the Bank of England,’ the Kerry committee observed. The decision to seek to reorganize BCCI, rather than to advise the public of what they knew, ‘caused substantial injury to innocent depositors and customers of BCCI’.

The Bank of England’s decision may have been made in good faith and under difficult circumstances, but there are reasons to be suspicious; reasons that stem from the nature of BCCI’s criminality. American authors Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne spell that out in the introduction to their book The Outlaw Bank: ‘This is the story of how the wealthy and corrupt in Latin America managed to steal virtually every dollar lent to their countries by western banks, creating the debt crisis of the 1980s; how heads of state such as Ferdinand Marcos, Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega, and others skimmed billions from their national treasuries and hid them in Swiss and Cayman accounts forever free from snooping regulators; how Pakistan and Iraq got materials for nuclear weaponry and how Libya built poison-gas plants. BCCI is also the story of how governments manage to put together arms deals with supposedly hostile governments, as in the case of Israel’s clandestine trades with Arab states, or the United States’ supplying weapons to both Iraq and Iran in violation of its own laws.’[3]

Perhaps the real reason that the Bank of England didn’t want to get to grips with the BCCI problem earlier, however, was BCCI’s entanglement with western secret services. As well as serving the financial interests of assorted Middle Eastern terrorists, despots, arms dealers, drug cartels and organized crime bosses, BCCI was also reportedly used by the secret services of Israel, Pakistan, Britain and the United States. The CIA made use of BCCI’s Pakistani branches, for example, to channel funds to the Afghan mujahedin engaged on their jihad against the Soviet Union. That operation, which began in 1979 under President Jimmy Carter, placed the bank at the heart of one of the West’s most important and ultimately successful clandestine cold war operations, good reason in itself to protect the bank from prying regulatory eyes. The bank reportedly funnelled millions of dollars to Iraq for arms purchases between 1985 and 1989 when Saddam Hussein was being backed by the United States as a secular Arab bulwark against fundamentalist Iran. Some of the BCCI money was channelled through the Atlanta branch of Italy’s Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, which ultimately contributed a massive $4 billion to the Iraqi war effort.

The Bank of England had heard about the BCCI’s unorthodox activities from at least November 1986, when the governor received an anonymous letter stating: ‘The BCCI is involved in helping people avoid tax, illegal transfers of money, Hawala transfers, off the record deposits, conduit for drug and crime money and also as banker to intelligence agencies for most major agencies of the world.’ That same year MI6 – which, as the trial made clear, has close ties to the Bank of England – was informed by the CIA that BCCI was being used by the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO), a Palestinian group dedicated to the destruction of Israel. The CIA had received the information from a senior ANO defector. According to Appendix 8 of Lord Justice Bingham’s ‘Inquiry into the Supervision of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International’ – marked Top Secret Umbra but declassified for the Bank of England trial – an ANO account was first opened at the Park Lane branch of the BCCI in London on 31 March 1981 by Samir Najmeddin, an alleged arms dealer and ANO operative. A healthy $30 million deposit was made into the account the following day. By 1989 the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, or MI6) had been introduced to BCCI president Swaleh Naqvi by the former head of Saudi intelligence, Sheik Kamal Adham, according to the Bingham report. It seems highly unlikely, however, that the two organizations – SIS and BCCI – were not already intimate by then.

The BCCI liquidators’ case against the Bank of England collapsed in November 2005 after a hearing lasting 256 days. The liquidators abandoned their claim after the chancellor of the high court, Sir Andrew Morritt, ruled that it was no longer in the best interests of the creditors to continue. Proceedings at the Old Bailey, largely ignored by the press, had been somewhat surreal, as participants danced around the unspoken heart of the matter: the role of MI6 in the affair. Had the Bank of England failed to rein in the BCCI because the bank was involved in crucial intelligence operations mounted by Britain and its allies? There was no clear, overt evidence to that effect, and everyone involved was too polite to mention the hypothesis directly.

A document linking the IOR to this ambiguous world emerged during the course of the trial. A cryptic note on a London-registered company called Manlon Trading Ltd, drawn up by a Mr Barnes of the Bank of England, reads: ‘A check through our system throws up a variety of references for Aziz and Patel but none that could reasonably be linked to this deal. Instituto per le Operata Religione [sic] pops up in a 1985 reference attached. The whole thing seems rather odd and should, I think, be looked at more closely.’ Further details on the link are available in a note from an A.R.W. Davies, manager of the Bank’s Realizations Department, and dated 11 October 1988. ‘Also, and again rather strange, there are a number of credits originating from what appear to be church organizations abroad. Paul cited two; Habitat for Humanity, a US based organization who paid in US$10k and an Italian religious group, calling themselves Istituto per le Operata Religione [sic], based in Vatican City. They paid in three credits amounting to US$130k over a six week period.’ The note pointed out that the liquidator of Manlon had found evidence that the company had accounts with the Bombay and Luxembourg offices of BCCI in May 1987 and that a director of the company had lied to the liquidator about the company’s affairs.

According to documents deposited at Companies House, Manlon’s principal – and somewhat vague – activity was to ‘act as confirming agents in the sale of goods of all kinds’. It appears to have been active in West Africa, with promissory notes drawn on the Central Bank of Nigeria featuring large in its last, 1987, accounts. The Davies note observes: ‘From my discussions with Ray Hocking and Paul Sarling, it is quite clear that they consider the activities of the company, as evidenced by its TDB [Trade Development Bank] bank account, to be so unusual as to be disturbing. The Liquidator has therefore to consider whether or not to involve the Serious Fraud Office (SFO).’ The Trade Development Bank was a scandal-plagued financial institution founded by the controversial Lebanese-born banker Edmond Safra and sold by him to American Express in 1983. Why was money from the IOR arriving in the account of such an anomalous enterprise as Manlon? Significant sums had reached Manlon from the IOR, and there had also been payments from the Banco Ambrosiano and the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, a source familiar with the liquidation said. ‘Very secretive people were involved.’ Among the surprising recipients of Manlon’s funds was an association of Catholic priests in Chicago, Archbishop Marcinkus’s home town, the source said.

The Vatican had a new opportunity to play geopolitics with the election of a Polish pope in 1978. Karol Wojtyla wasted no time in beginning his mission, travelling to his native Poland to inspire his compatriots with the desire for freedom in June 1979, eight months after his election to the throne of St Peter. His rapport with the huge crowds that turned out to greet him helped lay the groundwork for the Solidarity movement, the beginning of non-violent opposition to the communist regime. As archbishop of Krakow he had already helped to sow the seeds of the democratic revolt. The Solidarity movement blossomed the following year with the creation of an independent trade union: anathema for a communist system ostensibly governed by and for the people. On 14 August workers at a Gdansk shipyard walked off the job. The strike that began over workers’ rights and pay became a battle for the soul of the nation and ultimately for the possibility of freedom behind the Iron Curtain, throwing up the moustachioed electrician and union organizer Lech Walesa as one of its unlikely heroes. Pope John Paul’s unwavering moral support and his restraining influence – which prevented a radicalization of the conflict and the consequent risk of a Soviet military invasion – played an enormous role in the movement’s success. ‘Certainly the pope felt communism was as bad as nazism as a system,’ the American reporter Wilton Wynn, who covered the visit, told me. ‘When John Paul went to Poland in 1979 I saw the reawakening of Polish nationalism. It was mind-boggling. He could have had a revolution if he wiggled his little finger.’

There were other, more practical forms of support, however. The CIA reportedly sent Solidarity a total of $50 million between 1982 and 1989 and further funds and material support were supplied through the efforts of Polish churches in the United States and through the American AFLCIO trade union.[4] It was only natural that the Vatican should be involved. Among those at the forefront of the Vatican’s effort was the Polish Jesuit Father Kazimierz Przydatek, who ran a Polish pilgrims’ centre near the Vatican and arranged audiences with the pope for his visitors. ‘Przydatek helped the Polish people a lot,’ a fellow Polish priest, Father Hieronim Fokcinski, told the American author Jonathan Kwitny. ‘Father Przydatek would receive money. He was chaplain at an exclusive hospital here and knew many important people. He took part in many meetings organized by his friends to raise money for Poland.’

Francesco Pazienza has claimed to have been personally involved in the funding of Solidarity on behalf of the IOR, as we have seen. Kwitny, who was not convinced that the CIA made any significant contribution, says one of Przydatek’s financial backers was Flavio Carboni and that the Polish priest also knew Pazienza. ‘Przydatek literally ran from the room in mid-interview when I asked him about Pazienza and Carboni, and wouldn’t answer further questions when I followed him, asking about them,’ Kwitny wrote. His biography of Pope John Paul, Man of the Century, also contains evidence of Roberto Calvi’s direct involvement in the Polish fund-raising. The Polish socialite Wanda Gawronska told Kwitny she met the banker at a dinner party, presented to him as someone involved in raising money for Poland. ‘She says Calvi apologised for not having his checkbook with him, then pulled one hundred million lire out of his pocket – worth about a hundred thousand dollars at the time – and handed it to her. She says she was stunned: she had never dreamed that anyone walked around with so much cash, and now she feared having to carry it home,’ Kwitny wrote.[5]

If anyone was a natural for an important role in the clandestine anti-communist activities of the Roman Catholic church it was Paul Marcinkus: an American of Eastern European origins who controlled the purse strings of the church. A gifted athlete standing six foot three inches tall, Marcinkus’s ecclesiastical career was based on his considerable organizational skills and a robust physique that made him an effective informal bodyguard for the pope on his international travels. Organizing papal trips abroad would bring him into contact with the secret services of many countries – and gain him the nickname ‘the Gorilla’.

Marcinkus first appeared to British author John Cornwell as a looming figure in a Vatican doorway. ‘A big man dressed all in black had come to scrutinise me,’ Cornwell wrote. ‘He was leaning easily against the door jam lighting a curled Petersham pipe of enormous capacity. As he sucked at the stem he gazed at me with very still, hooded eyes, a steady, bemused, cold-looking expression. His head was strangely huge, and steep at the sides – like a beehive – and he held a lighted match delicately above his pipe with massive, not too clean hands, blemished with dark warts around the thumbs.’[6]

Paul Casimir Marcinkus was born on 15 January 1922 in the tough ethnic Chicago suburb of Cicero, the fourth son of a Lithuanian-born window-cleaner. The town had a population of 70,000, the best known of whom was the gangster Al Capone. In the Grant Works quarter, where the Marcinkus family lived, the residents were drawn from Poland, Ireland, Lithuania and Czechoslovakia and the biggest employer was the Western Electric Company. ‘Later on Cicero became famous, not so much for Al Capone but for the race riots which they had. It’s true these ethnic groups were very jealous of their property. They slaved like dogs to get it in their hands and they weren’t going to let somebody come in and take over their stuff,’ Marcinkus said in a partially unpublished 1988 interview with a European journalist, given to me on condition of anonymity. The morality of property rights, how money was earned and what good causes it was to be used for, would be an important part of Marcinkus’s personal story.

Marcinkus entered the junior seminary at the age of 13 and was ordained priest in 1947, the same year that Roberto Calvi joined the Banco Ambrosiano. A promising student, he had been sent to Rome to study canon law at the Gregorian university, specializing in matrimonial aspects of church law. He got his first lucky break in 1952 when he was invited to carry out holiday relief work in the English section of the Vatican secretariat of state. The top man was Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, later to become Pope Paul VI, and Marcinkus caught his eye for his diligence, loyalty and efficiency – it would prove a useful connection.

Marcinkus’s career proceeded with a two-year stint as secretary to the papal nuncio in Bolivia, again an opportunity to show his organizational powers. The young American priest came up with the idea for a kind of lend-lease programme to supply the impoverished parishes of Latin America with priests drawn from their wealthier equivalents in the United States or Britain. The imported priests would show their colleagues how to operate a parish: ‘help them to get a certain stature as priests instead of just being the lowest of the low.’ Next stop: Canada, where Marcinkus continued in his role as the Vatican’s diplomatic representative, relishing the opportunity to get involved in pastoral work as well.

He returned to the secretariat of state in Rome in 1959 and his career advanced again when Montini was elected pope in 1963. Marcinkus cemented his relationship with the new pontiff by interpreting for him and giving him private English lessons. He interpreted for the pope at meetings with US President Lyndon Johnson and the Catholic novelist Graham Greene. Marcinkus also became friendly with the pope’s powerful secretary, Monsignor Pasquale Macchi, who had worked for Montini in Milan and shared an interest in modern art with Roberto Calvi.

Where Marcinkus really came into his own was in the organization of the pope’s foreign travel. Methodical, blunt and endowed with a good memory, he would travel ahead of the papal party to ensure the logistical arrangements were in order. His robust physique proved itself useful during Paul VI’s historic visit to the Holy Land in 1964, enabling him to shield the frail and diminutive pontiff and prevent him from being crushed by the crowd at Jerusalem’s Mandelbaum Gate. ‘Naturally, I wasn’t the pope’s security guard, because we always took four or five Vatican security men,’ he told the British author John Cornwell. ‘But when there was a real crush around the Holy Father maybe I became a little more... spontaneous, I guess, and because of my size and so forth I could clear a way for him.’ Paul VI rewarded his service by appointing him secretary of the IOR in 1968 and making him a bishop the following year. Two years later, aged only 48, he took over from the 87-year-old Cardinal Alberto Di Jorio as chairman of the Vatican bank.

For all his administrative abilities, Marcinkus had no banking experience whatever when he was first appointed to the IOR. ‘As for financial experience . . . Well, let’s say I counted the Sunday collection and never got it wrong,’ he joked to John Cornwell.[7] The gap was filled by a three-day course at Continental Illinois Bank in Chicago, another couple of days at Chase Manhattan in New York and some brief work-observation at a trust business, a stockbroker and another small bank in the United States. It was enough, Marcinkus would maintain later, because the IOR had its own technical experts and his role was simply to set policy.

Marcinkus talked frankly about his relationship with Sindona and Calvi in previously unpublished parts of his 1988 interview, playing down the extent of his connection to the two men and offering sometimes confused and contradictory explanations for the financial scandals in which he had mired his bank. Michele Sindona expressed scant respect for Marcinkus’s abilities when interviewed by the author Nick Tosches. He told his biographer how the IOR helped Italian banks to export lire illegally in nero. ‘I know these things very well because the IOR acted in this capacity for clients of my Banca Privata and Banca Unione,’ Sindona said. He claimed he had advised Marcinkus to suspend the illegal money transfers after the Italian parliament made it a criminal, rather than a civil, offence. ‘I told him that if representatives of the Vatican were ever dragged into the courts as accomplices in black money crimes – something the Italian government would dearly love – the prestige of the IOR, and of the papacy itself, would never recover. But Marcinkus believed himself to be beyond the reach of the law. He continued to pursue the profits that he flaunted to the pope as proof of his competence and worth and that he hoped would bring him the scarlet berretta [of a cardinal].’[8]

In the 1988 interview Marcinkus claimed he had met Sindona only about a dozen times in his life, ‘sometimes for a minute, sometimes at a baptism, once or twice at lunch, at a reception or a ceremony. He dropped in here [at the IOR] once or twice. The whole 12 times might have been six hours. I never had a dealing with him. The ones that were dealing with him were APSA. They sold him the shares for [Società Generale] Immobiliare and so on. So when they said Immobiliare is sold to Sindona by the Vatican, immediately they said it was me. I had nothing to do with it. Sindona himself said he never had dealings with me.’

The assertion that he never had any dealings with Sindona squares rather loosely with the facts. Marcinkus inherited a relationship with the Sicilian financier on joining the IOR and helping Sindona’s clients export money illegally is not quite the same thing as not dealing with him. Marcinkus was a partner with Calvi and Sindona in the Cisalpine Overseas Bank in Nassau. In 1964 his predecessors had sold Sindona a majority stake in Finabank in Geneva, remaining as Sindona’s partner with a 29 per cent stake. In 1968 the IOR became a partner in another Sindona bank, when the dynamic Sicilian bought a controlling stake in the Banca Unione, in which the IOR had a minority stake. The Vatican bank’s technical expert, its managing director Luigi Mennini, sat on the Banca Unione’s board, as well as on that of two other Sindona banks, Banca Privata Finanziaria and Finabank.

Marcinkus’s next comment in the 1988 interview is therefore a bit of a non-sequitur to his assertion that he never had dealings with Sindona. ‘So when Sindona left, the next natural candidate for it [a relationship with the Vatican bank] was Ambrosiano, who had dealings with us. But these dealings, these [letters-of-patronage] companies and stuff, I’ve never even heard of them. Whether a number of them might have been given to us as a guarantee for a loan, the stocks and that sort of thing, but that’s all.’

Marcinkus was clearly aware of the fact that Sindona was a man who bent the rules, but the idea does not seem to have perturbed him. ‘When Sindona went to the States I said: You know, if you operate there as you do in Italy you’ll end up in jail. They have different rules, different regulations.’ He also appears to have had few illusions about Calvi’s probity. ‘Money that he put in his pocket or gave away? I’m sure there must have been some, that’s the Italian system.’ It was not a reason for not doing business with him, however. ‘When he was in jail I asked somebody very high up, I said: What’s going on? He said: Nah, in Italy if you’re not caught you’re not worth it.’

Marcinkus’s verdict on the two disgraced financiers, whose ruin had severely damaged the reputation of the Vatican as well, was mild: ‘I think both of them maybe got carried away with their own importance. If there is anything that I would criticize, it would be that.’ It was much the same judgement as Sindona had passed on him.

Marcinkus was adamant that the Vatican should never have agreed to make its $240 million ‘goodwill payment’ to the creditors of the Banco Ambrosiano, a decision he opposed from the very beginning. ‘I said: we worked like dogs to build up our own capital in here, in case anything happened, and now you’re just wiping it out. My whole goal on this thing was to help you guys, building up this stuff so that we can help you with your problems, pension funds and everything, which all went out the window.’ The admission that the payment was being made ‘for moral considerations’ had been a major blunder, he said. ‘What do you mean moral considerations? There are no moral considerations. If there are moral considerations we must be guilty, and we’re not guilty. Because of that payment the stigma’s there.’ Marcinkus argued that the matter should simply have been put in the hands of lawyers, leaving them to negotiate a hard-headed business settlement, but without any acknowledgement – however tenuous – of blame. ‘They could have gotten away with it if they wanted to,’ he said.

Asked whether he felt he had anything to be ashamed of concerning his management of the IOR, he replied: ‘If you didn’t do anything, you’ve nothing to be ashamed of. I might be ashamed of one thing: maybe I trusted Calvi too much. It wasn’t hard to do because Calvi had a tremendous reputation. He was well respected in the banking community. He’d got that bank up from just an ordinary bank to a very important bank. And maybe as a human being, in my limited relationship with him, I felt he was a decent fellow.’ The relationship had been purely on a business level, he said, adding, somewhat perplexingly: ‘I never did one bit of business with Calvi, but my office did . . . Maybe there we were too trustful. But everything else led us to do that: tremendous recommendations from Milano, from the church up there, from people around here [in the Vatican]. He had a great rapport with government officials. So if there was anything, it was maybe that I should have known the man personally a lot better.’

Personal relations with Calvi had been superficial, he insisted. He had met Calvi’s wife and family on a couple of occasions when he was in the Bahamas to attend board meetings of the Nassau bank, but nothing more. Social conversation had rarely gone beyond how Calvi passed the time at his weekend cottage. He didn’t know where Calvi lived and had never set foot in the Banco Ambrosiano.

Marcinkus was, again, less than convincing when he embarked on an explanation of what he knew as a director of the Cisalpine Bank and how he had been induced to sign the letters of patronage for Calvi’s mysterious Panamanian companies: the error that lay at the heart of the IOR’s compensation payment. Marcinkus said the auditors and administrators of the BAOL (formerly Cisalpine) had assured him that all the loans leaving the Nassau bank were sufficiently guaranteed. The administrators informed the board of the bank’s activities after the fact rather than seeking the directors’ approval in advance, he said. ‘There’s a difference between the board of directors and the administration. The administration isn’t going to bring up all the questions, the problems they might have. Well, I suppose they should, but we never saw them. There was a girl who was vice-president of the outfit. I used to ask all the time. I said: Tell me, how’s the bank going? She says: Wonderful. I said: Everything in perfect shape? She said: Perfect shape. Audit? Perfect. I have to tell you something: If I knew, I’d be partially responsible. I never knew.’

Marcinkus explained his decision to sign the letters of patronage for Calvi’s Panamanian companies: ‘Here’s a fellow who comes out of jail and he says: I’m having trouble, I’ve got to get this thing all set up and I can’t get around to different places, so would you kind of oversee these things. In the letter, as a condition, he said: I ask you as a third person to take control of these companies. Then he said they’re not yours, they never have been yours. And I said no other efforts would be made for indebtedness. Everything has to be done to decrease indebtedness. No operations could be made except in that particular thing [decreasing debt] and in one year and a half it’s got to be all settled and we’re out. It’s like a trustee. The letters didn’t give any guarantees or anything like that. They were just statements of fact: We know what your indebtedness is, that’s all.’

The Panamanian companies had not been set up in the Vatican’s name, Marcinkus insisted. There was no evidence that the IOR had authorized their creation or directed their activities. If Calvi had really been operating on the Vatican’s behalf he could have saved himself and his bank by simply producing the proof. ‘If all these accusations are true . . . he was handling for me, why did Calvi have to commit suicide or be murdered? All he had to do was to come with a piece of paper and say: I want my money.’

In the wide-ranging interview Marcinkus denied taking bribes from Calvi, denied being a freemason – there was no masonic lodge in the Vatican and membership of one was still a mortal sin for a Catholic – and denied all knowledge of the funding of Solidarity. Calvi had never talked to him about Solidarity, he said. ‘Our conversations as a rule were talking about generic things. As I said to you before, I never sat down and talked specifics with him in any sense. He never mentioned Solidarity to me at all. If he gave something to Solidarity, OK, but I don’t know anything about it. Somebody said he gave 6 million bucks to me as well. I’d like to know where it is. I never saw it. I’ve never seen from him, personally, one lira.’ He had received the normal emoluments to cover his costs as a BAOL director, he said, but nothing more. ‘He’d say: If you ever need anything, let me know. I said: Don’t worry about it. Never asked. I know others were receiving, but I haven’t, never once.’

He had begun doing business with the Banco Ambrosiano when the Milan bank was on the up and up and it had always repaid the loans it received from the IOR. He had not chosen to do business with Calvi because he was rewarded with higher than normal interest rates, as some had suggested. He could understand Calvi telling his employees that the Vatican was behind his operation, and their believing him, but it simply wasn’t true. All in all, there was nothing to be ashamed of in the relationship. ‘There was no reason for us to question his honesty, his integrity. The relationship that we had with the banks were things that all banks do,’ he said.

Roberto Calvi’s son Carlo confirmed Marcinkus’s description of the limited social relations that had existed between the archbishop and his father, but he disputed his minimalist account of the business ties. ‘Marcinkus was a guest of my family on three occasions in the Bahamas, but we saw him in Nassau at other board meetings. He would stay one night at our house. We’d have a meal, and we talked,’ Calvi said. The banking relationship with his father was not as bland and normal as Marcinkus sought to imply, however. ‘There were too many operations, they were too anomalous and they took place over too long a period of time. I don’t have a reason to blame Marcinkus for anything in particular, but he was involved in bad corporate practice over a long period. Even in the best case, the parallel correspondence relating to the letters-of-patronage companies is a deliberate joint attempt to mislead. They conspired together to mislead third parties.’ Carlo Calvi said the IOR controlled numerous offshore companies in the Swiss city of Lugano and had received information about their activities and returned it to the Banca del Gottardo, in some cases even backdating documents. The IOR had indeed been paid more than the normal market percentages by his father, he told me. ‘It’s worse if he says the percentages were not high. Then why was he doing it? You were conducting an enormous number of operations that would appear to a normal person as very anomalous. What Marcinkus says makes no sense.’[9]

Marcinkus’s career at the IOR threatened to come to an end in 1978, with the death of his patron, Paul VI. His successor, John Paul I, had a long-standing reason to be displeased with him. In 1972 Marcinkus had sold the Banca Cattolica del Veneto, the Catholic bank that provided favourable terms to priests and religious institutions in the Veneto region, to Roberto Calvi. In doing so he had failed to consult the patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Albino Luciani, who had now been elected pope. Luciani was rumoured to have visited Marcinkus to complain and to have been rudely shown the door by the gruff American monsignor. Luciani was reportedly planning to fire Marcinkus and to remove three of the IOR’s top administrators along with him, including Luigi Mennini. According to the author David Yallop, who turned the inconsistencies in the Vatican’s account of John Paul I’s death after just 33 days on St Peter’s throne into a best-selling murder conspiracy, the pope had decided to send Marcinkus back to Chicago as an auxiliary bishop after a 45-minute personal interview. ‘He had not indicated his thinking to Marcinkus, but the cool politeness he had shown to the man from Cicero had not passed unnoticed,’ Yallop wrote. ‘Returning to his bank offices after the interview, Marcinkus later confided to a friend, “I may not be around here much longer”.’[10] Marcinkus strongly denied this suggestion in his 1988 interview: ‘It was a wonderful audience, a magnificent audience, he asked me to stay on. Later on, when I read about this, I said to myself: That’s the funniest way to fire a guy. He couldn’t have been nicer.’

Whatever John Paul I’s true intentions, his sudden death removed any immediate threat to Marcinkus’s banking career. His successor, an anti-communist Pole, had a much stronger cultural affinity for the burly Lithuanian-American and little appetite for the minutiae of church administration. According to Francesco Pazienza, the bond between the two men was rapidly sealed by Marcinkus’s discreet and efficient response to a financial scandal in the United States. The scandal involved the Philadelphia diocese, run by Cardinal John Krol, the son of Polish immigrants to America and one of John Paul II’s grand electors. ‘A religious order of Polish origin had been caught up in a financial scandal, in which there were also some rather piquant aspects, and needed to honour a $6 million debt,’ Pazienza recalled in his memoir. ‘Marcinkus had sorted things out quickly and effectively, paying off the losses and covering everything in silence.’[11] Pope John Paul showed his gratitude by promoting him to archbishop and making him governor of the Vatican City State in 1981. As a kind of Vatican mayor, his power now stretched beyond the money-bags of the IOR to buildings, newspapers, museums and general city administration. And once again it was his discretion in delicate circumstances that had seen him through.

The financial scandal referred to by Pazienza was almost certainly that revolving around the construction of a massive Polish shrine at Doylestown in Pennsylvania. Costly and mismanaged, the project threatened the livelihoods of many Catholic families who had bought the bonds issued to finance it. An internal church report referred to rumours surrounding the shrine’s founder, Father Michael Zembrzuski, and his ‘friendship with a woman, whom he supported generously with monastery funds’. Jonathan Kwitny suggests the lax accounting associated with the project may have concealed the secret funding of the Solidarity cause, as well as high living by Polish Pauline monks. John Paul certainly showed solidarity for Fr. Zembrzuski, publicly embracing him during his first visit to Poland as pope and including him in the official papal entourage. As Pazienza mentions, the shrine’s debts were paid off by the church, the shrine was restored to the control of Fr. Zembrzuski, and the whole affair was hushed up – as far as possible. ‘Wojtyla’s handling of the Doylestown scandal revealed a nonchalance about financial wrongdoing that would play an important part in his papacy and even in the Solidarity revolution,’ Kwitny commented. ‘It was ironic, considering that he advocated tighter control of priests in other areas.’[12]

One of the most bitter attacks on the probity of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus came in a pamphlet published in September/October 1982 by Luigi Cavallo’s scandal-mongering Agenzia A. The 100-page document, entitled Corruption in the Vatican, accuses Marcinkus of crimes ranging from financial irregularities to murder. Though Cavallo is hardly a reliable source, he was certainly close to the heart of the action. He worked for Michele Sindona and was convicted of extortion against Roberto Calvi, using material supplied by Sindona. Some of his blackmailing letters were among the documents found in Calvi’s briefcase after his death.

Addressing himself directly to the pope, Cavallo placed the activities of the IOR in the context of the Cold War. ‘Leo III kissed the feet of Charlemagne; you prefer to discuss politico-financial matters with Ronald Reagan, on whom depend the health of the dollar, the continuation of the economic war against the communist countries and the economic well-being of the Vatican, ever more the financial giant (despite the ripoffs of Marcinkus & Co.) and ever less the charismatic leader of the “church of the poor and oppressed”,’ he wrote.[13]

In another passage Cavallo claimed that Pope John Paul had received Roberto Calvi in secret in January 1982 to discuss the creation of a large Catholic bank to be entrusted to Opus Dei. The ‘clandestine’ meeting was similar, he claimed, to several unreported meetings in the Vatican between Paul VI and Michele Sindona. In a final broadside Cavallo accused Marcinkus of being an ex-OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA) agent and of making a personal profit from the organization of the pope’s foreign trips. He said the archbishop’s jet-set lifestyle – hardly compatible with that of a priest – was being curtailed by the Milan magistrates’ warrant for his arrest. ‘For this reason he no longer plays golf at the Olgiata or Acquasanta golf courses, nor can he enjoy fine food at George’s or the Piccolo Mondo, showing off with irreverent jokes and telling blasphemous stories while puffing on Havana cigars and drinking top-quality Scotch.’ Was the pope intending to remove him from the IOR by making him a cardinal? Cavallo asked. ‘Will you send him into the conclave as the spokesman for “organized crime”?’[14]

Cavallo’s accusations may not have received very wide currency, but they were undoubtedly embarrassing. For all the doubts about the reliability of Cavallo’s word – he was, after all, convicted of extortion against Calvi, so a protagonist rather than a mere observer – his charges cannot be simply swatted away. A gadfly he may have been, but one that sucked blood from some of the larger animals in the cold war jungle.

Marcinkus left the Vatican in 1990 and returned to the United States to work as a parish priest, his original vocation and the activity that probably gave him the greatest satisfaction. A keen sportsman, in his youth he had practised swimming, basketball and baseball to a high level. Known in later years for his love of golf, he also ministered discreetly to youth groups in Rome and was one of the first people to introduce baseball to the Italians. With very rare exceptions, he refused to discuss the banking scandals in which he had become so disastrously embroiled; he would not speak to me.

The archbishop would be found dead, apparently of natural causes at the age of 84, on 20 February 2006 at his home in Sun City, on the outskirts of Phoenix. He offered his own best epitaph, perhaps, in his interview with John Cornwell: ‘I’ve been accused of murdering a pope, and then getting involved in the Ambrosiano. Both of these things are completely unfounded. If I have any inner strength, if I believe in myself, I say to myself, this might be God’s way of ensuring that I get my toe in the door of paradise. If I get my toe in, he can’t slam the door.’[15] It was typical of his dry humour and disenchantment.

Marcinkus’s commitment to priestly celibacy has been repeatedly questioned, and not only by Roberto Calvi. In its obituary, The Times stated: ‘He had a son by a mistress’, a claim it subsequently retracted. Were the rumours about Marcinkus’s affairs true? I asked Wilton Wynn, who had been a friend of his while Rome bureau chief for Time magazine. ‘He was a big handsome fella, athletic. I would say it’s conceivable,’ he replied, with a smile. Marcinkus had relied heavily on Luigi Mennini and the other technical experts at the IOR, Wynn said. ‘I think he was too trusting of people like that and too eager to make money at the bank. He was careless about what he signed. A lawyer friend told me Marcinkus signed a contract with an Italian company without reading it. I think he didn’t know for sure whether he was innocent or not.’[16]

For all the scandal and the damage that he caused to the reputation of the church, Marcinkus has not lacked for defenders. Monsignor John McIntyre, a former rector of the Scots College in Rome, wrote an angry letter to the Tablet after the English Catholic weekly published a flippant diary article joking about Marcinkus’s prospects for sainthood. ‘The Marcinkus many of us knew was a priest notably kind, approachable and helpful to people like myself who found ourselves unexpectedly part of the Roman clerical world,’ he wrote.[17] ‘He was a man who conscientiously celebrated Mass in a Roman parish each Sunday and whose only luxury seemed to be his golf. He drove an unpretentious car, was hardly ever seen at receptions, and when he ordained deacons at one of the Roman colleges always refused the customary stipend with the remark that the privilege of acting as bishop was reward enough.’

11

Enter Carboni, Armed with a Cheese

Flavio Carboni, one of the small circle that accompanied Calvi on his final journey to London, is one of the story’s most colourful characters. For Italian prosecutors he was the heart and motor of the conspiracy that conducted the luckless banker to his death. A Magliana Band witness has described the diminutive businessman as he received workmen building a swimming pool for him in the garden of his villa off Rome’s Via Aurelia. He was high on cocaine, wearing only his underpants and with a pistol tucked into the waistband. The witness, Fabiola Moretti, who was romantically linked to Danilo Abbruciati, the man shot dead during an attack on Ambrosiano deputy chairman Roberto Rosone, attributed the scene to Francesco Pazienza, but the magistrates interviewing her concluded that she was actually referring to Carboni. Pazienza had never owned a villa on the Via Aurelia, but Carboni, who was known for his fondness for cocaine, had.[1]

The flamboyant Sardinian property developer was introduced to Calvi by Pazienza. It was 16 August 1981 and Calvi was recuperating in Sardinia with his wife after his traumatizing experience in Lodi prison. The couple were staying with Pazienza at the Villa Monastero, a secluded retreat on the Costa Smeralda lent him by the financier Giuseppe Cabassi – brother of Carlo. Carboni turned up on the doorstep with a huge pecorino cheese under his arm to begin a process of seduction and ingratiation that would eventually lead the suspicious-minded banker to put his life and fortune in his hands. They agreed to meet the next day at sea, anchored off the tiny island of Budelli, for a swim. In the event, Calvi’s boat was dwarfed by the super-yacht occupied by Carboni, whose guests included the son of a prominent Christian Democrat leader and the Venezuelan ambassador to Italy.

Carboni was a man accustomed to living beyond his means and, like Pazienza, his contacts ranged from Vatican monsignori to gangland hoodlums. In his memoir Pazienza describes his rival as a short man who talked fast and was extremely extrovert, despite the reputation of Sardinians for frosty reserve. Under the guidance of the dynamic entrepreneur, who had first come into contact with the world of Roman power-broking as the personal assistant of a Sardinian Christian Democrat MP, Calvi would find himself drawn increasingly into the clutches of a powerful and peculiar organized crime group based in the Italian capital. The Magliana Band, named after the southern suburb where it was based, practised the normal criminal arts of armed robbery, kidnap, extortion and drug trafficking. What made it unusual, and particularly dangerous, was its connection with politics. Contacts in the secret services, the judiciary, the mafia and with right-wing terrorists enabled the group to operate for years with virtual impunity, playing a crucial role in many of Italy’s most sensitive criminal mysteries.

Carboni’s playboy lifestyle did not come cheap. He had a wife and two mistresses, loved fast cars, owned a yacht, the Zingarella II, worth over a million dollars, and a private plane. As a result, he was always short of money. It was this perennial shortage of cash that drew him into the orbit of Rome’s loan sharks and through them into contact with the Magliana Band. ‘Always on the hunt for money, today to pay the debts of yesterday, and tomorrow to settle up for today, always in the hands of the worst type of loan sharks and usurers, he exuded a pyrotechnical charm,’ Pazienza wrote of that first meeting. ‘The crackling, and unsolicited, assertions about his important connections were not mere boasts but reality.’[2]

Clara Calvi also recalled that meeting in her unpublished memoir. ‘In that period in Sardinia a strange little man came to meet us, a Sardinian called Flavio Carboni. While we were talking Francesco [Pazienza] played a joke on him: he lifted up a flap of his jacket and there was what he knew he would find: a pistol. I wasn’t surprised but thought that if Carboni was rich, as they said, then it was right that he should have it to protect himself from kidnappers.’ Calvi’s widow was also struck by the huge size of Carboni’s yacht and how he scrambled around it like a true sailor, ignoring his important guests. Among them on that occasion was General Giuseppe Santovito, the portly, whisky-drinking head of military intelligence, accompanied by his wife. Santovito and Calvi took the opportunity to speak together in private for a while, his widow recalled. On another occasion she was struck by Carboni’s eccentric behaviour and the torrent of his words, likening the performance to that of a clockwork toy. Rumours about his cocaine use reached the family, and Calvi gave the Sardinian the codename ‘Mr Penicillin’ in conversations with Pazienza.

Whatever his weaknesses, Carboni had contacts that Calvi believed could be useful to him: in the press, politics, judiciary, freemasonry and in the Vatican. As Pazienza and his associates began to appear increasingly intrusive and overbearing, Carboni emerged as a more malleable and accommodating alternative. The cheerful Sardinian fixer with his limited experience of the outside world would eventually supplant the more sophisticated but hectoring Pazienza as Calvi’s most trusted counsellor and aide. What interested Calvi particularly at this stage was Carboni’s contacts in the Vatican and the hope that they could prevail on Archbishop Marcinkus to give him a helping hand. Putting the squeeze on the Vatican would be no easy task. Blackmail would have to be used if necessary and if Marcinkus failed to see sense, Calvi would reveal the most arcane secrets of their relationship, however disastrous the consequences.

Carboni had two principal contacts in the Vatican, Monsignor Hilary Franco, an Italo-American prelate of uncertain influence, and Cardinal Pietro Palazzini, the most senior representative of Opus Dei at that time. Monsignor Franco’s role is particularly ambiguous. A former assistant to the influential American preacher Bishop Fulton Sheen, he served for two years in the Prefecture for Economic Affairs in the Vatican before becoming head of the English desk at the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy. According to his own testimony to magistrates after Calvi’s death, he had sporadic contacts with Calvi and Carboni in April and May of 1982 at the request of a fellow priest. Calvi was depressed because of his problems at the IOR and Carboni had asked him to procure a meeting with Marcinkus because Franco and Marcinkus happened to live in the same Villa Stritch residence used by senior American prelates, Franco said. One meeting with IOR officials, set up by Franco for an afternoon at the end of May, ended in disaster because Calvi insisted on going hours early, in the morning. He was literally evicted from the IOR by a furious Luigi Mennini. And that was it, according to Franco’s account.

For Carboni and his associates, however, Monsignor Franco was a channel that led directly to the Reagan White House and the top levels of the Vatican. Carboni told magistrates the monsignor had been involved in shuttle diplomacy during the Falklands war, visiting both the United States and the Falkland Islands themselves to seek an end to the conflict on behalf of the pope. The Milan court trying the Ambrosiano bankruptcy case was not impressed by Monsignor Franco as a witness. His name and two telephone numbers had been found on a piece of paper in Calvi’s pocket and Carboni’s office diary showed numerous calls from him, including one on 3 June, just a week before Calvi’s disappearance, inviting Carboni to call on him in his office. Furthermore, Carboni claimed that he had called the monsignor several times from London urging him to keep in touch with the Ambrosiano vice-president, Rosone. Franco admitted to the court that he had been apprised of Calvi’s need to find $300 million to meet his repayment deadline with the IOR at the end of June, but insisted he had received no explanation as to the urgency of the matter or the nature of Calvi’s dispute with the Vatican bank. The judges described this position as ‘absolutely incredible’ in their written verdict. And his attempts to downplay the significance of the phone calls he received from Carboni while the latter was on the run with Calvi prompted the judges to comment that he had shown scant respect for the truth, for his oath as a witness and ‘for the intelligence of the Tribunal’.[3]

There is no doubt about the influence of Cardinal Pietro Palazzini, the prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints and Opus Dei’s senior representative. Palazzini had taken an interest in the alleged mismanagement of the Vatican’s finances since the subject had come up in discussions at the conclave that elected Pope John Paul I in 1978. But he had another, less edifying connection to the world of high finance. He had been a personal friend of Camillo Cruciani, a controversial manager of the Finmeccanica arms company who had fled to Mexico in 1976 in the wake of the Lockheed bribery scandal.[4]

Palazzini was cross-examined by the Ambrosiano bankruptcy court in the Rome office of his lawyer, a privilege accorded to him as a cardinal. He told the court he had been introduced to Carboni by Luigi D’Agostino, a lawyer who frequented the Vatican curia, who suggested he receive Carboni to ward off a looming scandal. At their first meeting in January 1982 Carboni made it clear to him that Calvi needed his assistance in re-establishing relations with the IOR, which had been completely interrupted. Calvi himself was present at a third meeting between Carboni and the Opus Dei cardinal, although the banker left most of the talking to Carboni. ‘I understood that Calvi’s principal objective was to succeed in obtaining huge quantities of liquid funds from the IOR in order to face up to a very difficult financial situation,’ Palazzini said. Calvi’s justification for the request, the cardinal explained cryptically, consisted in substance in the convenience for the IOR and the Vatican of accepting his requests. Calvi and Carboni’s approach, as it emerged from Palazzini’s testimony, was of a ‘heavily blackmailing character’, the court observed.

Palazzini confirmed that he had pressed unsuccessfully for access to the IOR’s accounts at the time of John Paul I’s election and that he had been well aware of the blackmailing intent behind Calvi’s approach to him later. ‘They were putting pressure on me to intervene by threatening, pointing out the scandal that was possible and that could be avoided by a resumption of relations [between the IOR and the Ambrosiano],’ he told the court;[5] a painful admission for a prince of the church in the face of secular Italian justice.

Marcinkus claimed that he was able to hold on to his job as president of the IOR in the wake of the Ambrosiano scandal because he was able to find the $240 million paid to the Ambrosiano creditors from the Vatican bank’s own internal resources. Other sources, including Francesco Pazienza in his memoir, suggest that the money actually came from Opus Dei and that the financial favour was repaid when Pope John Paul II promoted the organization to the status of ‘personal prelature’. The prelature, the first in the history of the church, meant that Opus Dei reported directly to a Vatican official appointed by the pope, rather than coming under the authority of local bishops in the various dioceses where it operated. The honour was forced through despite the misgivings of many senior church figures, who respected the organization’s message that the faithful can achieve holiness by serving God in all walks of secular life but were suspicious of its secrecy, its links to conservative political and financial forces and its anachronistic attachment to the practices of self-mortification. The announcement of the pope’s decision was made by the head of the Vatican press office, Father Romeo Panciroli, on 23 August 1982, two months after Calvi’s death and it was ratified by the Congregation for Bishops on 27 November. Father Panciroli would be replaced two years later as the Vatican’s spokesman by a lay member of Opus Dei, Joaquin Navarro-Valls. The agreement to pay compensation to the Ambrosiano creditors was not actually finalized until May 1984, but the IOR would have had need of emergency funds from the moment of the Banco Ambrosiano’s collapse. It began repaying lire debts to banks in the Ambrosiano Group: the Banca Cattolica del Veneto, the Credito Varesino and the Ambrosiano itself, as early as July 1982.

An indication of the nature of the scandal threatened by Calvi and Carboni can be gathered from documents confiscated from Carboni in Switzerland, from Carboni’s early statements to the Italian magistrates and from copies of letters allegedly written by Calvi and found in his black briefcase after his death. Carboni offered an account of his dealings with Calvi in a handwritten note found in Switzerland. The Sardinian fixer had been asked to use his ecclesiastical contacts to press for acceptance of Calvi’s proposed accommodation with the IOR. Calvi had told him there were ‘ghost companies abroad, the activities of which it was in the church’s interest to keep hidden’. Calvi had met frequently with Monsignor Franco in his office at the Congregation for the Clergy, showing increasing nervousness and ‘speaking ever more clearly of colossal scandals’, Carboni wrote. ‘He even reached the point of saying that if things dragged on for too long the Vatican would end up based in a rented house identified by a plaque reading “the Vatican”.’

Calvi told Carboni he was planning to send his wife away to the United States and was even contemplating a move to Sardinia, to escape his worries and spend some time living incognito on the rugged holiday island. At a dinner in Milan, Calvi had confided to Carboni that he urgently needed money to settle up international debts and debts to the IOR and that he was contemplating selling a 10 per cent stake in the Banco Ambrosiano to either the IOR or Opus Dei. Sale of the stake for 1.2 billion lire would give the purchaser control of the bank and avoid a scandal that would otherwise have overwhelmed the Vatican and many others besides. Calvi asked Carboni to pass on the message to Franco, informing him that they were now only a matter of days from collapse. Franco, according to Carboni’s memorandum, said he had passed on the request to American institutions and reassured him that a solution would be found.

Carboni spelled out the nature of the scandal still more clearly in evidence to Italian magistrates following his extradition from Switzerland in November 1982. Calvi was anxious to eliminate his galaxy of offshore companies in order to conceal the ‘dirty operations’ they had been involved in on behalf of the Vatican, he claimed. But to do so he needed Marcinkus’s approval, and the two men were not speaking. Relations between them had been complex and intense, not the superficial acquaintance described afterwards by Marcinkus. Marcinkus was the diplomat and politician, while Calvi was the technical banking expert. ‘Their aim was to create an enormous international financial force, a chain of banks throughout the world that would provide support for their business dealings,’ Carboni told Milan magistrates in February 1984. He had invited them to record his testimony in Parma prison in the absence of his defence lawyer, given the delicacy of the issues he intended to discuss. ‘Calvi always told me that before his arrest there wasn’t a single operation that he didn’t coordinate with Marcinkus.’

Carboni dated the breakdown in relations between the two men from a stormy meeting at the Vatican in September 1981, to which Calvi had been summoned from his holiday in Sardinia. In that meeting, he said, Marcinkus had asked Calvi to send $4 million from the Banco Ambrosiano in Nassau to ‘the usual person’ in Poland. ‘Calvi didn’t tell me the name of the beneficiary, but I imagined that it was the Solidarity trade unionist Lech Walesa.’

The close relationship between Calvi and Marcinkus had come about as a result of the discovery of a $200–$300 million hole in the Vatican’s accounts following the collapse of Michele Sindona’s financial empire, Carboni explained. Calvi and Marcinkus had done profitable business together, but the relationship started to sour following a visit to the Banca del Gottardo in Lugano on 3 July 1981 by the IOR’s chief accountant, Pellegrino De Strobel. Having examined documentation relating to the management of Calvi’s secret offshore network of companies, the IOR must have gained a shrewd idea of what Calvi had been up to in its name and a clear inkling of the kind of damaging revelations he might have been inclined to make. Clearly Calvi considered any information relating to the secret Vatican funding of Solidarity to be of the utmost sensitivity, given the cold war tensions of the time. In an interview with La Stampa on 7 October 1982, his widow claimed Calvi was planning to reveal his role in channelling a total of $50 million to Solidarity. ‘If the whole thing comes out it’ll be enough to start the Third World War,’ he had allegedly confided to her.

The same theme cropped up in a conversation between Calvi and Carboni secretly recorded by the latter in his home. Calvi: ‘I told Marcinkus to his face: Look, if it comes out from some accountant in New York that you’re sending money to Solidarity on behalf of [Pope] Wojtyla, there won’t be one stone left upon another here . . . [Referring to Marcinkus] You’ll need to rent a building behind the Pentagon, and then . . .’ Carboni: ‘And put up a sign reading “Vatican City”?’[6] Calvi’s choice of location for the new Vatican headquarters – ‘behind the Pentagon’ – is an eloquent evocation of cold war secrets and the kinds of embarrassing entanglement the Vatican’s anticommunist efforts had entailed.

Calvi was equally explicit in a series of letters he sent to leading Vatican figures during the last two months of his life. In a letter dated 30 May 1982, he appealed to Cardinal Palazzini to obtain an audience for him with the pope. He wanted to discuss the plans of ‘the enemies of the church’ with the Holy Father, and reminded the cardinal that he had conducted an intense activity as a banker in Latin America and Eastern Europe in the service of the Vatican’s political interests. The blackmailing intent of the letter was clear: Calvi referred to the division of bribes by senior Vatican prelates on operations carried out by Sindona and offered to back up the claim with quantities and bank account numbers. ‘Besides,’ he wrote, ‘many loans and bribes paid by the Banco Ambrosiano to parties and politicians were undertaken on their recommendation.’ Calvi struck a similar tone in a letter to the pope himself dated 5 June 1982, less than a week before his flight from Italy. Again he sought a personal meeting with the pontiff, so he could show him ‘the important documents in my possession’. Many people were trying to induce him to reveal his activities on behalf of the church, he claimed: ‘Many would like to know from me whether I supplied arms and other equipment to certain South American regimes to help them fight our common enemies, and whether I supplied funds to Solidarity or arms and funds to other organizations of Eastern countries; I will not submit to nor do I want to blackmail; I have always chosen the path of coherence and loyalty even at the cost of grave risks!’

Calvi was not received by the pope and the risks he referred to turned out to be more real than he had perhaps imagined. Copies of the letters were contained in Calvi’s briefcase, which ended up under Carboni’s control after the banker’s death. Following his release from house arrest in August 1984 the Sardinian businessman contacted the Calvi family to propose a joint effort to access the banker’s safety deposit boxes using their authority and the keys and documents contained in his briefcase. When they refused, he decided to prolong Calvi’s blackmail campaign against the Vatican, offering the documents for sale to a Czechoslovak bishop. Bishop Pavel Hnilica, the head of a charitable organization dedicated to the assistance of Catholics living under communist oppression in Eastern Europe, is believed to have paid Carboni between $3 million and $6 million for documents from Calvi’s briefcase in order to preserve the reputation of the church from harm. Carboni attempted to cash cheques for even larger sums drawn on Bishop Hnilica’s account at the IOR but the Vatican bank refused to honour them.

The episode provides a bizarre twist to an already complex story. Calvi’s Valextra black leather briefcase, with its ‘Sherlock Holmes’ combination lock, first reappeared in public, its contents somewhat depleted, on April Fool’s Day 1986. It was presented with a flourish on a popular television current affairs show and Carboni was on hand to vouch for its authenticity. Seven years later a Rome court convicted Carboni, Bishop Hnilica and a Rome underworld forger, Giulio Lena, for being in receipt of stolen property: the briefcase and its contents. The verdict would later be overturned on appeal, Italy’s highest court ruling that there was no evidence that the briefcase had not originally been entrusted to Carboni by Calvi of his own free will. The investigation into the affair, however, would reveal once again the extraordinary promiscuity between underworld figures such as Lena, who became involved in the case after police raided his home while investigating an unrelated case, and princes of the church and leading politicians. Once again it would be Carboni who would provide the trait d’union between the apparently irreconcilable worlds.

Hnilica was introduced to Carboni by Fr. Kazimierz Przydatek, the Polish priest involved in funding Solidarity who was to run from the room when questioned about Carboni and Pazienza by Jonathan Kwitny. The purchase of the contents of Calvi’s briefcase was part of a propaganda campaign being proposed by Carboni to restore the damaged image of the Catholic church in the wake of the Ambrosiano scandal. According to a document seized by investigators, Carboni was planning to spend a staggering 51 billion lire on the purchase of sensitive documents and in payments to politicians, journalists and magistrates in 19 countries. Behaving with what appears to be extraordinary naivety, Hnilica agreed to back him, even providing him with blank cheques drawn on the IOR, with the polite request that he not exceed his account’s credit limit of 20 million lire. Carboni, unabashed and under pressure from loan sharks, did not scruple to fill in two of the cheques for an optimistic figure of 600 million lire; sums the Vatican refused to pay.

There are reasons to doubt the naivety of the Czech bishop, however. Among the documents found in the offices of his Pro Fratribus charitable organization was an Italian military intelligence file on Carboni, Calvi and the IOR, with details of Calvi’s flight from Italy. A SISMI report dated 25 October 1989 describes Monsignor Hnilica as a member of the secret intelligence service of the Jesuit Order who had been charged with organizing a clandestine parallel church in Czechoslovakia, where the communist government had set severe restrictions on the training and ordination of new priests and bishops. Hnilica, who had been ordained bishop in a secret ceremony in the basement of a private house in Czechoslovakia, had subsequently been tasked with recovering Calvi’s documents relating to the funding of the Polish opposition by the Banco Ambrosiano. Hnilica had carried out the operation on behalf of the Jesuit secret service and in the interests of the pope, the document said.

Hnilica cut a tragic and pathetic figure when he appeared to give evidence at the Calvi murder trial in Rome on 3 May 2006. Aged 85 and in poor health, he looked deeply uncomfortable as he took the stand, wearing a black suit, clerical collar and with a gold bishop’s chain around his neck. Many of the events of the past had been erased from his memory by the radiation therapy he was undergoing, he told the court in a breathless whisper. The two blank cheques he had given Carboni and which had been filled in for 600 million lire each had been intended for the pro-Vatican press campaign, he explained. ‘That really hurt me, that fraud,’ he said. ‘I was indignant. But Carboni always found an excuse, that he had given them to a friend and the friend had filled them in. I signed things without understanding them. He told me it was something innocent and then it turned out to be a fraud.’ The Rome court that had previously sentenced Hnilica to three years’ imprisonment for receiving stolen property – later overturned on appeal – had little sympathy for his attempt to paint himself as an unworldly man of God duped by a diabolical Carboni. ‘It’s unthinkable that Carboni could have defrauded Bishop Hnilica, because the affair dragged on for about two years in a giddy whirl of billion lire cheques and even with the most ingenuous of ascetics such a game could not have continued for so long,’ the judges observed.

Bishop Hnilica, whom one witness described as being in almost daily contact with the pope, grudgingly admitted to the murder trial that he had been in contact with the highest levels of the Vatican over the Carboni business. He had discussed the matter with Marcinkus and Mennini, who told him they weren’t interested in Carboni’s information and that he had been irresponsible in his financial dealings with him, he said. Had he ever discussed it with the pope? the prosecutor asked. ‘I don’t remember. It’s probable that they kept him informed. I met the pope frequently on other questions. The pope is like a father to me. If he is slandered I will defend him.’

Hnilica’s explanation as to how he came to be in possession of secret SISMI documents on Carboni rang somewhat hollow as well: ‘I didn’t even know what SISMI was. All the material came from Carboni. I don’t know who else could have given it to me.’ And he didn’t have a ready answer as to why Carboni needed so much money if, as appears, he had been in possession of Calvi’s briefcase all along. ‘I don’t know,’ was all he could offer. The content of the secret documents he was buying from Carboni also appears to have been of little interest to him. Among them was Calvi’s letter of 5 June to the pope describing his anti-communist activities on behalf of the Vatican. ‘I don’t know if what Calvi wrote was true or not, because these matters were of no interest to me. I had other interests, of a moral nature. Probably I asked [Carboni], but I don’t remember.’ Hnilica did at least confirm a version that Carboni had provided him with on the motive for Calvi’s killing, and which he had supplied to magistrates in previous interrogations. Calvi had gone to London to recover large sums of money that were owed to him by people in the city and he had been killed for that reason by English freemasons, Carboni had told him.

A reconstruction of the relationship between Calvi and the Vatican based merely on the self-interested word of Calvi himself and the hearsay version of Carboni is hardly the most convincing of evidence. And the alleged content of Calvi’s briefcase itself has to be viewed with a degree of scepticism when one bears in mind that it was acquired from Carboni in an operation that involved a notorious underworld forger. What does induce one to take it seriously, however, is the $3 million – at least – paid by Bishop Hnilica to acquire it and the pained and inadequate explanations that he furnished to the court. The spectacle left open two discomfiting alternatives: that the church had been represented in some of its most delicate cold war activities by a bumbling incompetent, or that Monsignor Hnilica had been involved in such sensitive and questionable acts that he could not provide the court with a truthful and plausible account of them. A young woman wearing the long white robes of a nun had accompanied the infirm bishop to court. She followed proceedings from the public gallery, an expression of horror and bemusement frozen on her face.

Flavio Carboni, for what it is worth, invokes the political framework of the Cold War as the key to an understanding of the Calvi affair. In expansive mood after several amari in the courtyard bar of Rome’s Hotel de Russie, he insisted, untruthfully, that he had always considered Calvi’s death to be a suicide – numerous newspaper interviews and his confidences to Bishop Hnilica testify to the contrary. The affair was nevertheless of planetary importance, he told me. ‘It’s not just an Italian affair. It’s something enormous that involves the fall of the Berlin Wall, Latin America and this little person called Flavio Carboni, who had money at that time,’ he said. ‘This is a huge affair and it’s a miracle I’m still alive,’ he added, inviting me to participate with him in a joint quest for the truth. He had been a friend of Giuseppe Santovito, the head of SISMI, and Santovito had been responsible for consolidating his relationship – not a friendship, mind you – with Francesco Pazienza. ‘You don’t know how useful Flavio Carboni was in bringing about the fall of the Berlin Wall,’ he boasted. ‘Little Carboni worked to block the advance of the Reds, together with a few friends.’ His euphoric revelations wafted loudly across the courtyard, prompting his wife to call on him several times to pipe down. ‘I’m an honest, clean, sentimental person. I wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

A report by the head of the finance police in Verona, dated 26 February 1990, casts a further, intriguing light on the activities of Pro Fratribus and Carboni. The report draws on information provided by a confidential source to the writer, Major Matteo Rabiti, when he was serving in an anti-drug unit in Milan. The information does not appear to have led to prosecutions, but reappears in written evidence submitted by the prosecution to the Rome trial. The source informed Rabiti that Flavio Carboni had attended a meeting with three German nationals and three Turks at the Hotel Duomo in Milan in January 1987 to discuss a $12 million loan to a Vatican organization named Pro Fratribus. The money was apparently to be used for the purchase of a private television station. Rabiti’s report added: ‘The above mentioned persons allegedly referred to the possibility, once this first operation had been completed, of becoming involved in the supply of arms to Iraq, at the time at war with Iran.’ The individuals allegedly had an interest in two companies, Aggol Ltd, on which no further details were available, and M[...] Ltd, based in the Liechtenstein capital Vaduz. As surety for the operation, Carboni reportedly provided a £4.8 million cheque drawn on the latter company’s account and in favour of Aggol Ltd.

John Drewe, a convicted art forger who claims to have conducted clandestine work for Britain’s intelligence services, smiled with recognition when I mentioned the name of the Liechtenstein-based company to him. We were meeting for the first time in a pub near Blackfriars Bridge in the City. The company had been connected to both Sindona and Calvi, he said. It was actually an Italian company that had been involved in supplying British-manufactured arms and ammunition to Iraq. The Banco Ambrosiano had jumped at the opportunity to get involved in the lucrative export credit guarantee business in relation to the clandestine sale of arms to Iraq, Drewe maintained. ‘Some of the money [from the Banco Ambrosiano] probably went to finance export credit guarantees that M[the Liechtenstein-based company] obtained to supply Iraq,’ he told me. ‘M was on the Astra commissions list,’ he added, referring to the astronomical political commissions that were allegedly sucked out of Gerald James’s arms company to finance the secret foreign policy of the United Kingdom. ‘M has a direct connection to Calvi. I have seen correspondence from 1982, when Astra was set up to supply Iraq.’

Drewe said he believed Calvi’s involvement in export credit guarantees connected to the arming of Iraq and Iran could have contributed to the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano. ‘Large sums went missing and most of the missing money went to Iran and Iraq,’ he said. ‘They defaulted on the guarantees.’[7] Though Drewe can hardly be described as a ‘reliable’ source, he claims to possess detailed knowledge of a possible ‘British connection’ to the Calvi case. That theory, as we shall see, emanates from the Canadian gun designer Dr Gerald Bull, and ties Calvi’s fate to the activities of the secret services and the international arms trade.

12

The British Connections

Some possible British connections to the Calvi murder emerge from a number of sources, not all of them as reliable as one might desire. There are a number of corroborating circumstances however that justify paying them careful attention. The possible involvement of British intelligence in the case may go some way to explain the lackadaisical nature of the original UK investigations. Paying undue attention to leads that might implicate the secret services, one police officer explained, could lead to the loss of one’s security clearance: the kiss of death for a career in the police.

Angelo Izzo is perhaps the most off-putting source it is possible to imagine, though he faces stiff competition from the gallery of rogues who have reconstructed the Calvi story as we know it to date. Izzo was one of the ‘monsters of Circeo’, three right-wing extremists who raped and murdered a young woman in an orgy of gratuitous violence at a holiday home near the beach resort of San Felice Circeo in 1975. Thirty years later he took advantage of temporary release from prison to rape and murder a 14-year-old girl and her mother, the family of an organized crime boss from Puglia with whom he had made friends in prison. Izzo became an important witness in numerous terrorism trials after receiving confidences in prison from fellow right-wingers and then relaying the information to the authorities. But the genuineness of his cooperation was thrown into doubt when he failed to return from a temporary furlough from prison in 1993 and his role as a pentito has now come to be viewed with deep suspicion. He does however appear to have had access to influential figures on the far right and to sensitive information they were prepared to share with him because of his reputation for ideological soundness and, perhaps, his pathological brutality.

Izzo’s evidence about the Calvi case deserves careful consideration because of his direct knowledge of the links between right-wing extremism and the Magliana Band in Rome and his contacts with right-wing terrorists on the run in London – some of the suspected players in Calvi’s murder. In a statement made to Milan magistrates on 17 December 1993, following his recapture, Izzo spoke of his acquaintance with Loris Facchinetti, a senior right-winger and freemason who was allegedly involved in cold war operations behind the Iron Curtain on behalf of western secret services. Facchinetti had helped Josef Stalin’s daughter to escape to the West and had been involved in the funding of the Afghan resistance with money supplied by masonic interests in Central and South America, Izzo claimed.

In his lengthy statement to Judge Guido Salvini, Izzo made a number of surprising claims that appeared to imply detailed knowledge of some of the most secret aspects of the Ambrosiano affair. Some of the information made him seem particularly knowledgeable, but there was one small drawback: it had already been published in books. Izzo’s overall conclusions, however, had not, and they were illuminating.

Izzo had spent time in prison with another right-wing extremist, Valerio Fioravanti, who is serving a life sentence for the Bologna railway station bomb massacre. Fioravanti had confided to him that he had once travelled to Sydney, Australia, to kill an American banker linked to the CIA. ‘The motive for the murder was that there had been losses in the laundering of $15 million coming from the Banco Ambrosiano, which had passed through the murdered banker’s institution and had been laundered at the BCCI in Manila,’ Izzo claimed. (In a statement full of spelling mistakes, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International came out as BCCA.) ‘The money was destined for the Afghan resistance.’

Izzo went on to explain that the Central Intelligence Agency had been forced to seek alternative sources of funding for the Afghan guerrillas because President Jimmy Carter had refused to authorize their support. The money had been obtained from the South American cocaine cartels, from Turkish mafia families dealing in Afghan-produced heroin, and from contributions made by Saudi Arabia and important masonic circles. In Italy, he said, the money came from the drug earnings of the Sicilian mafia and from the Italian Socialist party (PSI). The money from the latter organization was managed by a friend of Henri Arsan (spelt Eri Harsan in the statement), the latter ‘an Armenian from Aleppo who works for the CIA’. Henri Arsan, as we shall see, ran a drugs and arms trading business out of an office in Milan rented from the Banco Ambrosiano. The money from Italy passed via the Banco Ambrosiano to a Panamanian company called Piramid [sic] Corporation, Izzo claimed. The company was run by an official of the Banco Ambrosiano of Managua and one of its board members was a South American cocaine boss, Gabriel Abuchibe [sic]. ‘The man who pulled all the strings is an important Saudi businessman who lives in Khartoum because he’s a fundamentalist,’ Izzo said. He couldn’t remember the man’s name, although the portrait seems to bear a remarkable resemblance to the biography of Osama Bin Laden. Another bank implicated in the international money laundering was BCCI, Izzo alleged.

Some of the details of Izzo’s story reflect the results of a US Customs Service investigation into the laundering of drug money in the Miami area, an inquiry that led the US investigators to take an interest in the Banco Ambrosiano Overseas Ltd (BAOL) in Nassau. ‘Operation Greenback’ had examined the alleged laundering of $34 million through the BAOL and the names Gabriel Abuchaibe and Pyramid Corporation had emerged in the course of the inquiry. Curiously, evidence had also emerged of phone calls between some of the suspects and telephone numbers in Italy connected to Michele Sindona and Licio Gelli. Impressive access to confidential information on Izzo’s part? Not necessarily. Details of Operation Greenback – including the roles of Abuchaibe and Pyramid – had been published in 1991 in a book The Marcinkus Case by journalists Leonardo Coen and Leo Sisti. The arming of the Afghan resistance, however, does not appear to have been previously connected to the Ambrosiano affair.

Izzo continued his story, claiming he had heard allegations that the Calvi murder was the work of right-wing fugitives from justice living in Britain. That reminded him of the presence in London of Italian antiques dealers who trafficked in works of art and currency, he said. ‘I remember that one of these antiquarians was called Vaccari.’ Izzo said he had been given further details of the Calvi case by a friend, Maurizio Maggio, who had lived in England. According to Maggio: ‘Calvi went to England because he was in great financial difficulty, taking with him documents with which he intended to blackmail members of the United Grand Lodge of England and [a named English bank].’ In a story peppered with elements that he could have gleaned from reading the newspapers, from the prison grapevine or from sources with direct knowledge of the facts, Izzo said Calvi had been put in contact with members of the Magliana Band whom he was using to try and pacify angry representatives of the Sicilian mafia worried about their money that had gone missing from the Banco Ambrosiano. Picking up an item of gossip that was current in the criminal underworld, he said Calvi had been the lover of a woman who had also been the mistress of Danilo Abbruciati, the Magliana boss killed in an attack on Roberto Rosone. Neyde Toscano, a glamorous Brazilian, had allegedly had a number of affairs with important figures from the worlds of finance, the judiciary and organized crime. Her sister, Lilian, was married to a member of the Camorra with alleged links to Licio Gelli. If the rumour, confirmed by a number of underworld sources, proved true, it would revolutionize the image of Calvi as a staid banker and devoted family man, as well as placing him in uncomfortably intimate contact with the criminal milieu suspected of his murder.

‘Returning to Calvi and his flight to England, Maggio told me he had heard that in that country Calvi had fallen in with dangerous people. He specified that the dangerous people were Vaccari and his friends.’ These individuals had shown Calvi a pornographic film showing the torture and murder of a young woman and threatened that his daughter would star in the next film if he didn’t hand over his blackmailing documents, Izzo claimed. The story resembles that told by Frank Jennings to the journalist Charles Raw, and that may indeed be the source. Raw’s book The Money Changers had been published a year earlier and was also inspiring the affabulations of one of Izzo’s friends, the right-wing terrorist Valerio Viccei, who kept a copy of it with him in his prison cell while trying to convince the justice authorities of the validity of his testimony as a pentito. Izzo, however, said the story came from Maggio, who had heard it in his turn from Andrea Ghira, one of Izzo’s accomplices in the San Felice Circeo massacre. Ghira told him that Vaccari and his group had killed Calvi and that Ghira himself had then killed Vaccari on the orders of the man who had originally commissioned the Calvi murder. The documents Calvi had with him and which he intended to use to ‘blackmail the [named English bank] and American freemasonry, concerned the huge money-laundering operation in support of the Afghan revolutionary war’. Izzo may have meant British, rather than American freemasonry here, and his word, as always, has to be taken with a pinch of salt. It does appear to be true, however, that his friend Ghira spent a period on the run in London and that there was a colony of right-wing refugees there with contacts in the Magliana Band who might have contributed to the murder. But his most interesting contribution regards motive: if Calvi had indeed been threatening to reveal the role of the Banco Ambrosiano in channelling criminal funds to the Afghan rebels his threat would have set alarm bells ringing far and wide. Judge Salvini sent the deposition to his colleagues in Rome, but there is no indication that any serious effort was made to investigate the substance of his claims.

The essence of Izzo’s hypothesis receives confirmation from a distant and unexpected quarter. Felipe Turover, a key witness in the corruption scandal that helped bring down the Russian government of Boris Yeltsin in 1999, witnessed the end of the Cold War and its aftermath from a privileged vantage point. Descended from a family of Spanish Jews who had fled to the Soviet Union to escape the dictatorship of General Franco, he had subsequently worked as a financial consultant on both sides of the Iron Curtain, collaborating in post-communist Russia’s first tentative steps towards a somewhat piratical capitalism. His work as a debt collector for the Banca del Gottardo gave him a particular insight into the financial world that had once done Roberto Calvi’s bidding. Armed with personal experience of high-level business activities across the Iron Curtain, he offered a confident analysis of the Calvi affair that coincided in many respects with that of Angelo Izzo.

‘The whole of Gelli and Calvi’s story can be called Stay Behind,’ he said, referring to the secret NATO resistance network set up across Europe after the Second World War. ‘This was the financial bed of Operation Stay Behind.’ Established as a clandestine resistance organization that would go into action in the event of a Soviet invasion, the Italian branch of Stay Behind – known as Gladio after the short stabbing sword of the Roman legionnaires – has been suspected of involvement in domestic Italian terrorism. Gladio or related clandestine organizations are believed to have pre-empted the Soviet invasion, using the terrorist techniques of unconventional warfare to battle their domestic communist foes. Coup plots and indiscriminate terrorist outrages – to be falsely blamed on the left – were part of their repertoire. ‘This whole problem descends from the Yalta Accord [the pact dividing Europe into communist and western spheres of influence at the end of the war in 1945],’ Turover said. ‘Italy was politically [rather than physically] divided. And it’s from there [the Yalta Pact] that all modern terrorism and proxy wars have come. The Banco Ambrosiano was exactly the same thing as the BCCI, used to finance the mujahedin in Afghanistan, to break the Soviet empire in Asia.’

The Vatican was a natural partner in the enterprise, being an historic opponent of communism and having helped Nazi leaders escape from Europe at the end of the war so that they could contribute to the struggle against the new global enemy. ‘The Banco Ambrosiano was the BCCI of Operation Stay Behind,’ Turover explained, when I met him in a pretty lakeside town in Switzerland. ‘Stay Behind was an enormous political operation.’ With the Americans playing the leading role, the clandestine funding of the Solidarity trade union in Poland served to split the Warsaw Pact, Turover said. Switzerland’s Banca del Gottardo, controlled by the Banco Ambrosiano and the Vatican, had played a key role in clandestine activities involving Italy and the Eastern Bloc, he claimed. Italy and the Banco Ambrosiano had been chosen as the financial motor for penetrating the Catholic, Spanish-speaking world in Latin America. ‘Marcinkus was the shadow finance minister of Operation Stay Behind. I don’t know if he was a CIA informant or an officer. He dealt with the White House and the CIA worked for him.’

Turover declines to pass moral judgement on the events of this period, saying criminal and immoral methods were used by both sides. ‘In 1982 the destiny of the Cold War was being decided. It was the final, frontal battle, the battle of Waterloo,’ he said. The shooting of Pope John Paul II the previous year was part of this same titanic struggle, he suggested. ‘It was a really brutal message. The aim was to destroy this whole financial mechanism.’ Cosa Nostra naturally had a role, both in the clandestine activities of the Cold War and the funding of secret operations with drug money, and in the death of Roberto Calvi. ‘This was a clandestine strategic operation, in which you always find criminality, thievery and fraud. Clandestine operations feed on the worst of human qualities,’ he said. The mafia had remained faithful to the OSS and CIA since the days when it had helped prepare the ground for the American landings in Sicily during the Second World War and had been poorly rewarded for its loyalty. An ally such as Cosa Nostra, with its blanket control of the territory, would be precious in any conflict and invaluable in a situation such as the American occupation of Iraq. ‘In the art of war it is not so important to seize territory as to be able to hold on to it afterwards. We saw that with the Soviets in Afghanistan,’ he said.

Calvi fell from favour with his cold war masters because he had the temerity to finance the Italian Communist party (PCI) as well as the client parties of the West. Countries could sometimes get away with playing a double game, but not a banker, Turover said. And he offered a startling hypothesis as to the motive for Calvi’s murder: the banker was planning to defect, with all his sensitive secrets, to the East. ‘I think he wanted to sell all his information to the Russians. He was a walking library of secrets. I believe he was negotiating his surrender to the Bulgarians. The problem was that he wanted to defect and to defect with his documents. He wanted to be exfiltrated from Switzerland, from Zurich. Someone persuaded him to go to London instead. He was sent to a country where he could be killed without problems.’ If Turover’s theory is true, Calvi’s defection would have amounted to an extraordinary propaganda coup for the Soviet Union. The most secret details of how the West had funded its global war on communism could have been systematically leaked to the press in a propaganda campaign judiciously coordinated by the KGB and lasting for months.

If the mafia was technically involved in Calvi’s killing that did not mean that it necessarily gave the order for the crime, Turover observed. He was not convinced by theories of a British vendetta for Calvi’s alleged role in funding the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands either. ‘Your secret services are very elegant; they would never indulge in a vulgar vendetta like this. The Americans could do it, though. America is a big, honest gorilla. The British staged a cover-up afterwards, that is for sure. It was a way of giving moral support to their cousins from Langley. It was covered up at the highest levels of government, that is absolutely certain. The English police are very efficient: in Britain you don’t have organized crime, you have “authorized crime”.’[1] The Cold War, the Americans, the shooting of the pope: the noose under Blackfriars Bridge appears to tie them all together.

Another fascinating hypothesis, which does tie British intelligence to Calvi’s murder, emerges from a written source, albeit the modern world’s unreliable source by antonomasia: a document posted on the internet. The document is a letter ostensibly written by the Canadian gun designer Dr Gerald Bull to Peter Harris, at the London address of a company called Merrion Corporation, and dated 12 December 1989. It was originally posted on the website of an organization called VOMIT – Victims of Masonic Ill Treatment, by an anti-masonic campaigner living in Buckinghamshire by the name of JM Todd. There are plenty of reasons to be suspicious of it, but people who knew Bull and his activities have corroborated some of its contents and it has become increasingly difficult to find on the Web.

The letter begins by discussing the clandestine politics of the arms business before moving on to make some startling claims about Roberto Calvi’s death. Bull opens by discussing the possibility of deploying the Merrion SW System with 155mm artillery and the prospects for getting an export licence for sale of the combined system to China. ‘Your anxiety with regard to the manoeuvres of the Board of Trade were well expressed,’ he continued. ‘I can confirm that [company X] is one of these shell companies which they set up to finance these projects in the Middle East. [Company Y] is being used for exactly the same purpose.’ The latter of the named companies received a £23,000 commission from Gerald James’s company Astra in December 1990, while the former was handed £75,000 between 1989 and 1990. Bull observed that UK companies had been used as proxies by US arms companies to get round an embargo on weapons exports to particular destinations. ‘All the loose ends are now being tied up. Those proxy companies set up to fuel the conflict between Iran and Iraq have served their purpose and are being put into receivership.’

Bull said he had complained to the Foreign Office after a visit from two named individuals. ‘They told me that an accident was “imminent” if I continued to cause trouble by my financial investigation of SRC/PRB [Poudreries Réunies de Belgique].’ Bull accused several leading Tory politicians of having creamed off commissions on arms contracts, salting the money away in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. ‘So far the Tory party alone has been enriched by £20 million, following the tradition established by Reginald Maudling.’ Bull added that he had identified the recipients of some of the largest transfers with the help of a friend in the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in Washington. ‘The lesson is that nothing financial is really secret, because the bank somewhere holds the information identifying the account holder, or their representative. Clearly US Intelligence has cameras recording every visit by customers of the main banks in places such as Switzerland where these payoffs take place,’ he commented. ‘There is in effect an established method whereby the Foreign Office is raising money for its active participation in foreign politics. The money cannot be declared to any of the committees which oversee routine expenditure, since it is being used to subvert foreign governments, supposedly thereby protecting our national interest.’ Bull explained that the system involved the exchange of arms for cheap oil and minerals from developing countries. ‘They are also persuaded to buy from us defence equipment that they don’t really need, which prevents them developing their industrial infrastructure and competing with us industrially.’

Bull pointed out that those in power understood the real position, while ‘noisy politicians and the press are too stupid to make it worthwhile providing them with an explanation’. Bull’s lesson closely resembles the experience of Astra chairman Gerald James, whose company is mentioned as one of those facing imminent ruin. Three named individuals, Bull claimed, had been working with company accountants ‘to extract money in the form of commissions paid to companies set up solely with this in mind.’ His investigation of these matters had resulted in his receiving a number of threats, including the information that he was considered an ‘unviable proposition’ by ‘the spearhead of our political establishment’. Three months later Bull would be shot dead in Brussels.

It is in the context of the threats against his own life that Bull moves on to discuss the death of Roberto Calvi: ‘My position is at present an invidious one. [Stephan] Kock described how Roberto Calvi was persuaded to fly to Gatwick by [a named individual]. I suppose this example was designed to emphasize the dangers I might face. Apparently Calvi’s Banco Ambrosiano was being used by Julius [Julian] Faux to raise money by a scheme which resembles in every respect that in which PRB and SRC are now embroiled. [The named individual] was operating the finance company in Brighton that Faux set up to extract money from Cisalpine Overseas Bank in Nassau. Calvi was murdered while he was in London. He travelled there by train from Brighton, having told Faux he would release to the press details of how Ambrosiano, Cisalpine and BCCI had inadvertently funded the Security Service.’

A visit by Calvi to Brighton has never been mentioned before and is incompatible with all existing accounts to date of his movements while in Britain. The names mentioned by Bull, however, appear to correspond to real people who were active in the fields that he describes. Significantly, the letter repeats the recurring theme that Calvi was murdered to prevent him from revealing the sensitive information in his possession. Going public with the details of how the Ambrosiano and BCCI had ‘inadvertently funded the Security Service’ would have been a deeply unwelcome and potentially dangerous initiative.

‘The Bull letter is very significant,’ said Gerald James, after I drew it to his attention. ‘The sequence of events is spot on, and the style is Bull’s.’[2] John Drewe, who claims to have known Bull and to have worked with several of the people mentioned in the letter, also corroborated its authenticity. ‘It’s 100 per cent. Bull wrote letter after letter saying he’d been threatened by the FCO [Foreign and Commonwealth Office] here,’ he told me. Another of Bull’s letters, addressed to Philippe Glibert, a colleague at his Space Research Corporation, and dated 31 October 1989, was partially published by James in his memoir In The Public Interest. In it Bull wrote: ‘I addressed a blunt memorandum to the Foreign Office on the whole matter. Through publicity, they were making me a target of terrorist groups. I was advised in a letter of an imminent “accident”.’[3] Drewe said he didn’t believe Bull was killed by Mossad but by agents of the British government. The Supergun, which Bull had been designing for Saddam Hussein, was for pointing at Iran, not Israel. ‘Bull was working for the Israelis,’ he said.

Both James and Drewe said the purported recipient of the first of these letters, Peter Harris, worked in a security capacity for the South African embassy in London. ‘Peter Harris was a partner of mine. He was employed by the South African embassy and Boss [the South African intelligence service],’ Drewe said. Merrion, the company to which Bull’s letter was addressed, was an American company that designed computers for security purposes, Drewe added. ‘They were installed on board ship to detect incoming missiles. Merrion designed a system for electronic countermeasures that was tested in the Iran–Iraq war.’

Julian Faux was the deputy director of the domestic security service, MI5, and the other individual named in the letter had worked under him, Drewe explained. The art fraudster claimed he had worked personally with both Faux and the employee and that the latter, under the influence of drink, had confided to him a similar story to that set out in the Bull letter. ‘What he told me was that Calvi was lured to the United Kingdom to have a meeting with him or Faux. He [the employee] made the phone call. It was to discuss the loans made by the Banco Ambrosiano to companies based in Brighton for export credits. The companies were set up by Faux to finance the trade of arms to Iraq. We can prove that huge sums went on export credits,’ Drewe said. Britain had thrown its financial and military weight behind Iraq following the expulsion of British Petroleum from the Abadan oil refinery during the death throes of the Shah of Iran’s regime, he said. The Banco Ambrosiano, the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro and BCCI had all been involved in the financial push to sustain Saddam.

Drewe was sceptical of the thesis that Calvi had been murdered by the mafia for losing or embezzling its funds. ‘Calvi was murdered by the British, who had the most to hide. That’s my hypothesis,’ he said. He hinted that the CIA, with whom he had also allegedly cooperated, may have played a supervisory role in the affair. ‘He who pays the piper calls the tune. The Americans have been paying the piper for a long, long time.’[4]

A small, thin man with wiry brown hair, Drewe is hardly what one could describe as a copper-bottomed source. He achieved notoriety in 1996, when he was arrested for fraud at his home in Reigate, south of London. He was charged with commissioning forgeries from an impoverished British painter, John Myatt, who had a knack for turning out creditable imitations of the works of modern masters such as Braque, Matisse and Giacometti. While Myatt aged his works by smearing them with mud and dust from a vacuum cleaner, Drewe gave them a spurious authenticity by raiding the archives of leading London art galleries and forging certificates of authenticity. Police said it was the biggest contemporary art fraud of the twentieth century. He served two years of a six-year sentence for forgery, fraud and theft and was described as a fantasist by the prosecutor who obtained his conviction. The court disbelieved his claim that his illegal activities had taken place in the context of an international arms dealing conspiracy sanctioned by British intelligence. However, there does appear to be evidence that Drewe was given a raw deal at his trial. He claims to have been badly let down by his defence lawyer, refused permission to introduce relevant financial information as evidence and that police even denied the existence of the arms company Allivane International. In the light of the statement in 1991 by Allivane director Terence Byrne (Chapter 7), one can understand why they might have been tempted to do so.

Whatever doubts may persist about Drewe’s reliability, Gerald James – himself an arms trade insider – is convinced that the fraudster had inside knowledge of the workings of the intelligence world that he could not have possessed if he had not belonged to it. ‘Drewe was on the board of companies in the United States that were involved in weapons sales,’ James told me. ‘His involvement in art started because the South Africans sold art through Sotheby’s and Christie’s and used the money to fund operations by people like Harris.’ The dirty work of the intelligence services is rarely carried out by saints and it is rare enough to find intelligence insiders prepared to lift the veil of omertà that normally cloaks the secrets of their trade.

One further source suggests a link between British intelligence and Calvi’s demise. In evidence at the Rome murder trial, Francesco Pazienza appeared to hint that the Vatican was the institution with the strongest interest in Calvi’s elimination. But interviewed in January 1985 by a US Customs investigator, Thomas K. Galligan, he had told a somewhat different story. Galligan’s note of the interview states: ‘Pazienza stated that Calvi used Ambrosiano funds, passing through Bank [Banco] Andino, Peru, to finance the purchase by Argentina of Exocet missiles, used by Argentina against Britain during the Falklands War.’ The note continued: ‘Pazienza stated that he was not in London at the time Calvi died but had left England the day previous. He further stated that he was certain, although could not then establish, that Calvi had been murdered by British Masons, members of M5/M6 [sic] at the request of the Italian Masonic Lodge P2.’ Pazienza also stated that he had obtained documents ‘which he claimed established a far greater involvement by the Vatican in the financial machinations of Ambrosiano than had previously been established’.

A P2 interest in the Argentine invasion of the Falklands and in the arming of Argentina prior to it is not in the least unlikely. The political brain behind the invasion was Admiral Emilio Massera, a friend of Licio Gelli and member of Gelli’s secret lodge. A former member of the military junta that seized power in 1976, Massera was hoping to become president after a return to democratic elections, buoyed by popular enthusiasm for the recovery of Las Malvinas from Britain. ‘The money for Massera’s political project came from P2. Massera bought a publishing company, Editorial Abril, with which to begin his political campaign. The money came from Calvi,’ said a source familiar with events of the time. ‘When war broke out the principal offensive weapon that the Argentinians had was the Exocet missiles bought by Massera for the navy’s air force. Calvi had financed the Exocet acquisitions and the military junta, there’s no doubt about that.’

It is estimated that Argentina spent as much as $14 billion on arms purchases – a quarter of its total foreign debt – between 1976 and the beginning of the Falklands war in 1982. As head of the navy, Massera had been responsible for a significant slice of those purchases and his friend Licio Gelli acted as a broker in many of the deals. The equipment ordered by the navy included six submarines and four destroyers from West Germany, 14 Super Etendard fighter planes and accompanying Exocet missiles from France, and 10 Lynx helicopters and two destroyers from Britain. The Exocets are believed to have been paid for through Calvi’s Banco Andino in Peru. Peru reportedly resupplied Argentina with munitions, including the precious Exocets, while the conflict was under way. Argentina was originally supposed to buy frigates from Italy, but Massera took umbrage and cancelled the deal after workers in the La Spezia shipyards came out on strike to protest against his 1977 visit to Italy.

The Banco Ambrosiano helped to underwrite part of this expenditure by organizing a $200 million syndicated loan, to which it contributed a modest $500,000 directly. Gelli’s influence was particularly strong in the Banco Ambrosiano in Argentina, the offices of which were in the same building as those of Admiral Massera. Giacomo Botta, who worked in the Banco Ambrosiano’s foreign department, recalled how Calvi had commissioned a well-connected German banker in Argentina to introduce him to three or four suitable candidates for a seat on the new bank’s board. ‘He brought him the very best of Argentina’s financial establishment, but at the last minute Calvi changed his mind and replaced them with other names,’ Botta said. The new figures were connected to the military establishment and a key role in their selection was played by Aldo Alasia, an alleged member of P2. The Ambrosiano was involved in financing arms purchases elsewhere in Latin America too, helping Venezuela, Ecuador and Peru to acquire warships.

The invasion of the Falklands on 2 April 1982 posed an awkward dilemma for the common allies of Britain and Argentina, foremost among them the United States. The White House and State Department feared the conflict would undermine their anti-communist policy in Latin America and the US government only swung itself fully behind Britain some four to five weeks after the invasion. The Argentine president, General Leopoldo Galtieri, was convinced that the Americans would end up by backing the Argentine cause. President Reagan was obsessed by the threat from the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, fearing that the Central American country would become a second Cuba, and Argentina had offered to do something about it. Reagan was attempting to organize an intervention in Nicaragua by a multinational Latin American force and Galtieri had been the first leader to offer troops. The Argentinians were already training death squads in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras and had previously backed the Somoza regime with arms. When the chips were down, however, Britain’s role as an ally against the main enemy in Moscow meant the United States had little choice but to side with its democratic ally and the victim of aggression rather than with the dictatorial aggressor.

The conflict posed a quandary for Italy as well, where public opinion was divided between sympathy for a European ally and blood ties to a significant portion of the Argentine population. On 9 April the Council of Ministers of the European Economic Community (EEC) agreed to impose economic sanctions on Argentina. The sanctions were to be renewed weekly on a voluntary basis and Italy and neutral Ireland soon opted out. The Italian Socialist party appeared particularly sensitive to the pressure from Argentina. A possible explanation is offered by a SISMI report dated 4 August 1982, which relates information supplied by ‘Source Franz’, later identified as Walter Beneforti, an Italian ex-policeman. ‘The position assumed by the PSI on the question of the Falkland Islands was imposed by Gelli via Pazienza,’ the report said. ‘The former head of P2, in fact, threatened to reveal documentation on the $21 million given to the PSI via Bafisud bank of Montevideo (run by Ortolani’s son) if the PSI didn’t take a clear position in favour of the Argentines.’ The document added a curious note of colour: ‘In this context Gelli recalled his old friendship with the Socialists, recalling that he had dedicated, years ago, a “line” of his men’s clothes (Claude Martel) to the deputy secretary of the PSI, Claudio Martelli.’

In the immediate aftermath of Calvi’s death SISMI sent one of its most experienced officers to London to investigate. Francesco Delfino, then Lieutenant Colonel, was a Calabrian-born Carabiniere officer who was destined for a brilliant but controversial career. He would later play a significant role in the capture of the mafia’s ‘boss of bosses’ Salvatore Riina, but be convicted of fraud in the context of a high-profile kidnapping case. He was based in Brussels at the time of Calvi’s death and had been actively engaged on investigations into the P2 scandal. One of Delfino’s best sources, the ex-policeman Walter Beneforti (‘Franz’), would play an important role in the dénouement of the Calvi affair by providing the SISMI officer with information on the whereabouts of Flavio Carboni. Furnished to him within a matter of hours from the request, the information enabled Swiss police to arrest Carboni, his brother Andrea, and Manuela Kleinszig near the villa where they were hiding in the Villaggio del Sole near Lake Origlio in the Italian-speaking province of Ticino on 30 July 1982.

Walter Beneforti was both well-informed and well-connected. His long-standing connections to American intelligence make him of particular interest for this story. He first came in contact with US and British intelligence while working as a police officer in Trieste after the Second World War, when the north-eastern city was claimed by Yugoslavia and under the administration of the western allies. An Italian intelligence report on him from that time describes him as ‘rather venal and sensitive to gifts’, and as working directly for British intelligence. Beneforti also worked with the Americans, however, putting their sophisticated bugging equipment to good use and organizing a fleet of fake taxis as mobile listening posts. Beneforti was later moved to a senior position in Milan but his police career went into decline when the interior minister objected to the interest he and some of his colleagues had been showing in a suspected sexual relationship between the popular actress Silvia Koscina and . . . the then interior minister.[5] In later years Beneforti would go into private practice, becoming embroiled in the early 1970s in an illegal phone-tapping scandal. A partner in his Milan private detective agency was a certain Carlo Rocchi, the CIA informant who had shown such interest in the knowledge and intentions of the imprisoned Michele Sindona.

Delfino told the Calvi murder trial that he had travelled to London on 20 June for a meeting with colleagues at MI5 headquarters. He had met senior officers and the MI5 lawyer and been taken to lunch at a London club by a British colleague with a keen interest in Roman antiquities. The lawyer had explained that the security service could not provide him with information since the investigation was in the hands of the police. More usefully, a colleague had been delegated to show him round London, taking him to see the scaffolding under Blackfriars Bridge and then to the nearby building site where, Delfino was told, the bricks in Calvi’s pockets had come from. He returned to Rome to brief the prime minister, Giovanni Spadolini, that ‘Calvi had been suicided.’ When SISMI director Ninetto Lugaresi rebuked him for his eccentric use of the Italian language, Spadolini intervened: ‘No, that corresponds [to the facts].’ Delfino’s at times confusing testimony shed little light on the matters before the court. Presiding Judge Mario D’Andria seemed unconvinced that Delfino had actually visited the scene of Calvi’s death, suggesting he might even have been taken to the wrong bridge by his British colleagues.

A SISMI report that appears to correspond to Delfino’s visit, although the date of the meeting is incompatible with the officer’s recollection, casts an intriguing light on relations between the two countries’ intelligence services. Contacts with his English counterparts were characterized by ‘evident signs of admiration and moral debt towards our service’, the anonymous author wrote in his undated report. The report opens with a description that appears to correspond to Delfino’s morning meeting at MI5 HQ, dated now at 28 June. Those present were John Parker, described as the head of operational contacts for the whole of the United Kingdom, Trevor Pidgeon, the head of European affairs, and Nigel Morley, who was tasked with taking care of the Italian visitor. Parker was the head of MI5’s S Branch at the time, while his two colleagues appear to have been from MI6, the service with which SISMI would liaise most naturally. His hosts emphasized their willingness to respond to the Italians’ requests ‘but pointed out the risks of their involvement given that the news would immediately be reported in the press.’ The Italian domestic intelligence service SISDE had made a similar request and been told by the City of London Police to contact the Italian police for information. ‘An attempt by the corresponding English service to at least obtain the file number of the Calvi case from Special Branch did not receive a response but requests for an explanation of the reasons for the request.’

In the afternoon the officer met with MI6 director Colin Figures, who also expressed his regret that he could not be of help for the moment because of the risks, despite his desire to repay at least in part ‘the debt of collaboration that he personally has towards the director of SISMI’. Figures intended to send his Italian counterpart a personal, confidential message the following day, the report said. The tenor of the report somehow doesn’t give the impression that the various intelligence services were motivated by a desire to clarify the facts and see justice done, perhaps the opposite.

Delfino, now a retired general, described his impressions of the visit to me over lunch in a Rome restaurant. ‘It wasn’t for me to ask for explanations. My assumption is that it [the debt of gratitude] concerned the Falklands war. I think it might have concerned the exact position of a ship that was later sunk,’ he said, a possible reference to the sinking of the Belgrano at the start of the conflict. ‘I wasn’t of a rank to be received by the director. I am convinced it was a sign of their gratitude.’ Delfino said he felt the British police were treating the case like the death of a tramp, but insisted that criticism did not apply to the intelligence services, which hadn’t underestimated the importance of the case. Calvi’s financial problems and flight from Italy could not have failed to attract the attention of MI6 in Rome, he said. And his intelligence service guide had imparted an important item of information that appeared to come from MI6’s own sources: it suggested that the last known person to see Calvi alive was Flavio Carboni.

Delfino, like many others, placed the Calvi affair in the context of the Cold War. ‘We need to rewrite the history of Italy in the years from the Second World War to the 1980s, in which Italy was a colony of several countries, but in particular of the United States,’ he said. ‘The espionage services of the US, the USSR and Israel were all active and their interests often coincided. One of the most important was preventing the Communist party from achieving power. In that context all sorts of things happened in this country. P2 was nothing less than an emanation of the United States intended to prevent political change in Italy. There were billions of dollars in US subsidies and billions of dollars from the Russians to support the PCI, because both sides had such large territorial organizations that local funds were insufficient to maintain them. This is where the Tangentopoli corruption scandal was born. This Calvi affair can only be placed in an international context.’[6]

Delfino’s British colleagues were much less keen to talk when I attempted to contact them. ‘It was a long time ago. I honestly don’t think I can offer anything,’ Trevor Pidgeon told me when I succeeded in contacting him by phone. ‘Any documentation must be either now in the Foreign Office or the archives of the Metropolitan Police. Delfino must have gone away a rather disappointed man from any discussions here. I would have thought he should have gone to the police. It was the mafia wasn’t it, because he’d embezzled money?’ This was the height of loquacity compared to his colleagues, who declined to respond to my letters. Mr Pidgeon agreed to consider whether he might have anything more to say but before I could contact him again I was called by someone from the FCO press office to inform me that Mr Pidgeon – a ‘retired diplomat’ – did not wish to speak to me and that I should call the press office before pursuing further contact with him. The tone of the message left on my answerphone made it clear that the intention was not to facilitate my research. I called back and left a message on another answerphone and heard no more from the Foreign Office ‘facilitators’. Well-informed friends appeared to consider the Calvi case a highly sensitive matter, for the British as well as for the Italians, and despite the long passage of time since the events took place. The unwillingness of informed British sources to discuss it only seemed to confirm that impression.

13

On the Road

Roberto Calvi realized that matters were coming to a head when Luigi Mennini threw him out of the IOR after he turned up half a day early for a delicate meeting with Vatican bank officials on 31 May 1982. Archbishop Marcinkus was away at the time, accompanying Pope John Paul II on a delicate diplomatic mission to London, but he confirmed Mennini’s hard line by telephone on his return. The pope was taking his message of peace to the two countries then embroiled in war in the South Atlantic. Two weeks later he would be in Argentina, its people gripped by war fever and just days away from defeat.

Calvi, whose role as a secret conduit for the financial lifeblood of conflict may have led to his death, was beginning to think of flight. He needed to find a quiet place outside Italy where he could finalize negotiations for the rescue of the Banco Ambrosiano, somewhere he could not be reached by his enemies and where, if absolutely necessary, he could release his damaging information to the press with maximum effect. Logistics for his escape would be handled by the faithful Flavio Carboni, with assistance from some of his friends. The role of those friends, and their interesting international connections, has never been examined in detail before. It offers some intriguing surprises.

Carboni’s diaries for the month of June show the emergence of a team of heterogeneous helpers clustering round in preparation for Calvi’s departure. An entry in his personal diary for 1 June shows he is expecting the visit from Livorno of a certain Hans Kunz. A Swiss businessman with extensive experience of the international oil business and alleged links to Licio Gelli and the arms trade, Kunz will play a crucial role in Calvi’s travel arrangements. Carboni’s office diary shows numerous calls from the Vatican power-broker Monsignor Hilary Franco, still engaged on the desperate bid to rescue the Banco Ambrosiano, and from Ernesto Diotallevi, the Rome businessman with alleged ties to the Magliana Band.

On Friday 4 June Calvi returned to Milan in an agitated state after a wearing week in Rome. He and his daughter must both urgently leave Italy, he told Anna, and the two of them began packing their suitcases the following morning. The crisis came to a head the next Monday, when a meeting of the Ambrosiano board was convened to discuss the latest correspondence between Calvi and an anxious Bank of Italy. Calvi read out the contents of a letter of 31 May from the Bank that identified a $1.4 billion risk in the Ambrosiano’s foreign affiliates. It was chilling news for his already unhappy colleagues and for the first time in his 11 years at the helm they banded together to vote against their chairman. The issue was minor: the directors insisted they must be allowed to take the official documentation home with them rather than being obliged to study it only in the secure surroundings of Banco Ambrosiano headquarters. But for Calvi the writing was on the wall: the absolute control he had exercised for so long was slipping from his grasp. And there would be more bad news that evening when Carboni visited Calvi and his daughter at their Milan home. ‘The IOR has been closed. The situation is catastrophic,’ was the Sardinian’s alarmist message. The next day, 8 June, Carboni passed by the Via Frua flat to collect the Ambrosiano chairman’s suitcases. Hotel and flight information shows Carboni was travelling often to Switzerland at this time, spending a night in a hotel in Lugano on 3 June and taking a private flight to Geneva and Zurich on the 8th.

On Wednesday 9 June Calvi bid a particularly emotional farewell to his daughter before flying from Milan to Rome. He was fearful for her and his own safety; he would not see her again. On that day Francesco Pazienza’s assistant, Maurizio Mazzotta, arrived for a four-day stay at the Dorchester Hotel in London. Mazzotta was in London to see his baby son, a child he had had by Claire Getty, an heiress from the American oil family, and he was accompanied on the visit by his own mother. Pazienza arrived two days later for a two-day stay in the same hotel. He was on his way to Costa Rica via New York and had stopped over in London to see his assistant’s new son, Pazienza told the Rome murder trial.

That day Ernesto Diotallevi called Carboni’s office and left some messages. The office diary records: ‘Sergio has arrived.’[1]

Calvi’s last business engagement before leaving Milan was a dinner with important guests in the Banco Ambrosiano’s hospitality suite. It was perhaps the last realistic opportunity of saving the bank before his flight abroad, but Calvi appeared distracted and left early. The guests included the Austrian businessman Karl Kahane, the French banker Pierre Moussa, the head of Paribas (Banque de Paris et Pays Bas), and Florio Fiorini, the ENI finance director. Moussa and Kahane were reportedly offering $200 million for the Ambrosiano’s offshore network, but Calvi wasn’t interested, saying he was only prepared to part with a few companies, Ultrafin in New York, or Inter Alpha Asia in Hong Kong perhaps. His guests were astonished when he suddenly rose to his feet and stalked out of the room. One, who followed him to the lift without catching up with him, returned to the table disconsolately. ‘Like the devil, he has disappeared towards hell,’ he told his fellow diners.

Earlier that evening Calvi had received another visitor, whose presence would not have been welcome in the company of elite bankers. His name was Alvaro Giardili, an associate of Francesco Pazienza with alleged links to Cosa Nostra and the Camorra. Giardili bore a warning that Calvi’s wife and children faced death threats. Giardili claimed later that Calvi had summoned him with a request for help in obtaining a postponement of his appeal hearing. Calvi had suggested Giardili contact the businessman Silvio Berlusconi, who was known at the time for his close ties to the Milan magistrates. In later years a new generation of magistrates would become the bane of Berlusconi’s political life and Berlusconi’s lawyer would be convicted of bribing magistrates – this time from Rome. Finding a way of softening the magistrates’ attitude towards him and recovering his passport was an obsession with Calvi at this time. Favours could be bought, he was convinced, and he was prepared to pay massive amounts of money to achieve his judicial rehabilitation.

On Thursday 10 June Anna travelled across the Swiss border to Morcote and checked into a hotel with her boyfriend, Vittorio Senso. She called her father at the bank in Rome and was told by him that he expected to be out of contact for a while: the die was cast. Calvi visited his lawyers and discussed the possibility of transferring the Banco Ambrosiano’s headquarters to Rome, to be closer to the centre of political power that had been occupying so much of his attention of late. In the evening he prepared a large meal, as though he was expecting a guest, and told his driver-cum-bodyguard Tito Tesauri not to put on the alarm in his central Rome flat. It was already hot summer and he might want to keep the windows open. The banker then ruffled the bedclothes to give the impression that he had slept in the bed and left a note for Tesauri saying he had been obliged to leave unexpectedly. Fearful for his safety and worried about the possibility of arrest, he decided to spend the night at the modest flat of Carboni’s assistant, Emilio Pellicani, in the Magliana quarter. The head of Italy’s largest private bank was now a fugitive.

At 11.25 a.m. on the Thursday, Dr Kunz called the office for Carboni and left a message: the name ‘MacDonald’ and a telephone number in Geneva. The following day a man named Carboni was registered as staying at the Century Hotel in Geneva – it may have been Carboni’s brother, Andrea.

Calvi’s attempt to slip away quietly got off to an inauspicious start. Tesauri, his driver, informed the bank of his disappearance on Friday morning; the bank informed his Rome lawyers and the lawyers immediately reported it to a Rome prosecutor, Domenico Sica. One of the lawyers also put in a quick call to Federico Umberto D’Amato, then head of Italy’s frontier police – and a long-standing US intelligence asset – and D’Amato passed on the information to Pazienza and Mazzotta in London. A secret service report says D’Amato, a member of P2, had helped Calvi and Carboni to move people and money across the Italian border, receiving a reward of 800 million lire for his favours. D’Amato was evidently viewed with some suspicion within the Calvi family, who considered him an accomplice of Pazienza in extorting money from the Banco Ambrosiano. Calvi had confided to his wife that he was perplexed and worried after receiving a visit from D’Amato at their weekend home in Drezzo. ‘My husband even suggested that D’Amato might have come to plant bugs, since he had heard it said that he was the head of the CIA in Italy,’ Clara told the Milan magistrates who interviewed her in Washington in October 1982.

Telephone calls from Calvi to colleagues at the Banco Ambrosiano may have reassured them about his well-being but they could not put the cat back in the bag. In the afternoon of Friday 11 June, Calvi caught a scheduled flight to Trieste together with Emilio Pellicani. During the journey he told Pellicani he intended to travel to Zurich to sort out his financial problems and that if things went awry he would leave for South America. He didn’t intend to go back to prison, he assured him.

In Trieste the two met up with Silvano Vittor, who was waiting for them on the sea-front by the Hotel Savoia, ready to transport the Ambrosiano chairman out of Italy and into Yugoslavia on his speedboat L’Uragano. Tall, athletic and with the right connections to avoid serious problems with the law, he was just the man for the job. And his close connection to Carboni guaranteed discretion; the two Kleinszig sisters, Michaela and Manuela, were their mistresses. A family affair, one might say. That evening Diotallevi flew up to Trieste on Carboni’s private jet to deliver Calvi’s false passport and Calvi was finally ready to set off by boat under cover of darkness, having entrusted his precious briefcase to Vittor. Two of Vittor’s colleagues would accompany Calvi across the Yugoslav border into Austria and Vittor himself would bring the briefcase the following day, when the appointment was at the Kleinszig family home outside Klagenfurt. Vittor asked Calvi for the combination to the briefcase lock, in case border police asked to look inside, and – according to Pellicani – took the opportunity to photocopy the contents on Carboni’s behalf.

While Calvi was setting out on his journey Pazienza was on the phone from the Dorchester Hotel. On 11 June he made two calls to a company called Fairways Marine. Though no longer in business when the Calvi murder investigation was revived, the City of London Police established that the company had traded in boats and motorboat engines. An officer from the force testified at the Rome murder trial that no documents on the company were available at Companies House. Documents on a company called Fairways Marine Ltd were available, however, when I made inquiries there in 2005. That company, which had moved its headquarters from Old Brompton Road to Soho Square in March 1980, would have been in liquidation when Pazienza called in 1982. Shareholders passed an extraordinary resolution on 28 July 1981 that the company be wound up voluntarily. The previous year, on 16 April, three new directors had joined the company, all giving the same address, a PO Box in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Also on 11 June $11 million originating from the Banco Ambrosiano were accredited to a Carboni account at the Zurcher Kantonal Bank in Zurich. The account was called ‘Pifra’, an abbreviation of the words Piccolo fratello (Little brother), and according to the testimony of Hans Kunz, a joking reference by Carboni to the male sex organ. Carboni’s personal diary for that day bore a curious entry: the name ‘William Morris’ and a London telephone number. William Morris was a family connection of Carboni’s – married to the aunt of Carboni’s Sardinian mistress Laura Scanu Concas – and would provide Calvi and Carboni with assistance in changing money and seeking suitable accommodation for the banker in London. Carboni insists he didn’t think of contacting Morris until Calvi complained about the quality of the Chelsea Cloisters flat after his arrival there on 15 June. It is of course possible that the Sardinian simply used a recently passed blank page in his diary to note the number and that the entry had no particular connection with the diary date. The following year Morris was interviewed on the hoof by Jeremy Paxman of the BBC’s Panorama programme, looking deeply uncomfortable when asked why a millionaire like Carboni should have needed his help in London and whether he was a freemason.

That day Pazienza also called Clara Calvi in Washington to inform her of her husband’s disappearance. He appeared to be in tears. Pazienza called again on the Saturday, this time apparently from the Hotel St Regis in New York, and told her Roberto had gone off ‘with the people who do kidnappings’. The secret agent was now at a convenient distance from impending events in London, perhaps putting into practice a modus operandi he had once outlined to Clara: ‘When something happens in Italy, I’m in America, when something happens in America, I’m in Italy.’[2]

Calvi and his unidentified travelling companions arrived unexpectedly at the Kleinszig home early on the morning of Saturday 12 June. A large, white-walled villa on a gentle hill, it looked out over the Klagenfurt plain to the Karawanken mountains marking the border with Yugoslavia and was a handy five minutes by car from Klagenfurt’s small private airport. The Kleinszig girls’ father, Stephan, ran his business as a timber merchant from the family home. Later that morning Calvi called Anna to reassure her. He said he was in Austria staying with a family and felt safe, but she should not reveal his whereabouts to anyone else. Anna could hear the sound of children’s voices in the background and was comforted by the positive tone of her father’s voice. At the same time he seemed unclear of his plans and evidently depended on other people for his decision-making. Calvi later gave her the telephone number of Hans Kunz, saying he would find accommodation for her in Zurich, but warning her not to trust him too much. Carboni and Vittor arrived in Klagenfurt later that day and the party spent the night in Klagenfurt, catching up on sleep and making plans for the rest of the journey.

The following evening – Monday 13 June – Calvi left by car to travel to Innsbruck with Vittor. The Trieste smuggler would now be his bodyguard and the most assiduous companion of his few remaining days. By this stage Calvi appears to have developed a predilection for moving by night, a clear sign of his nervousness and acute fear of detection. The two arrived at 4 a.m. on Tuesday and checked into the Hotel Europa Tyrol.

At around this time Calvi may have made an important visit to Vienna. Like Gerald Bull’s account of a hypothetical visit to Brighton, it has been omitted from the itinerary described by his travelling companions, but confirmed by one key witness: the man he allegedly went to see. Leopold Ledl, an Austrian businessman, was by his own admission one of the protagonists of the financial scandal that came to be known as the ‘Vatican Connection’ – the alleged attempt by senior Vatican officials to buy $950 million worth of counterfeit US securities from the American mafia in the early 1970s. After being arrested in Italy in 1988 for allegedly attempting to sell counterfeit deutschmarks, Ledl told magistrates that he had met Calvi in Vienna about a week before his death. The Italian banker was looking for sensitive information to use against Archbishop Marcinkus and set up a meeting with Ledl in the bar of the Intercontinental Hotel.

Calvi was accompanied by an attractive young blonde who acted as interpreter for him and explained over a cup of coffee that he had urgent need of 1 billion marks. He had already been in contact, unsuccessfully, with a director of the Bank of Austria and with the financier Kahane, Calvi explained. The real purpose of the visit was another, Ledl said: Calvi wanted to know how the Austrian had succeeded in cutting his links with the Vatican after playing such a delicate role on its behalf. Ledl had a ‘reinsurance policy’, he said, which involved Vatican documents commissioning the sensitive financial operations in which he had been involved. ‘Calvi, even if he didn’t say so openly, made me understand that obtaining copies of such documents, which constituted the proof of involvement by the Vatican in a colossal operation of forgery and fraud . . . meant saving his life and obtaining help from Marcinkus,’ Ledl told Prosecutor Giorgio Della Lucia when interviewed by him in Milan’s San Vittore prison on 22 January 1988. Ledl, who had taken his wife’s surname – Zant – for security reasons, declined to hand over the documents. He told Calvi he had given his word of honour to Cardinal Giovanni Benelli that he would not use or even refer to the documents. Calvi told him he was planning to fly to Spain and from there to South America. Ledl described his meeting with an anxious and frightened Calvi in a second deposition to Milan magistrates, in February 1988: ‘He told me that if he could obtain a copy of documents proving a giant illegal operation carried out by the Vatican and involving Marcinkus he would in some sense have been able to neutralize the aforementioned Marcinkus.’

Ledl claimed in his depositions that both the Vatican and the Bank of Italy had been complicit in this fraud plan and were prepared to pay 65 per cent of the face value of the counterfeit blue chip stocks ordered via Ledl from Cosa Nostra in America. Those involved on the Vatican side were Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, an eminent biblical scholar, veteran of the first world war and the Vatican’s leading cold war strategist, another Frenchman Cardinal Jean Villot, Archbishop Marcinkus, and the then Monsignor Giovanni Benelli. Ledl later described the background to the fraud in a memoir of his adventures in the netherworld between Cosa Nostra and the curia called On Behalf of the Vatican: ‘Tisserant explained that both the Vatican and the Italian state were in a precarious financial situation. The fiscal demands of the Italian government had created such serious problems for the Pontifical State that it could barely remain economically on its feet. And as a result of the continual strikes and of inflation Italy’s public accounts were in a disastrous state. Both, therefore, had urgent need of financial assistance.’ Ledl hints that the US government may have given its tacit assent, making the fraud a kind of clandestine low-cost funding operation for the US’s cold war allies. Part of the first consignment of counterfeit shares were to be lodged at the Banco di Roma, part at the Bank of Italy, and the rest at the IOR, Ledl claimed in his memoir.[3]

A Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiry into Ledl’s allegations resulted in the questioning of several Vatican officials, including Marcinkus, by FBI agents, but no clarity and no prosecutions. Tisserant had predicted to Ledl that even if things had gone wrong no one would have dreamed of accusing the Vatican of involvement in such a brazen, even mind-boggling fraud. People would have thought that the Holy See had been duped, the cardinal had predicted, and Washington would have come to the Vatican’s aid with secret financing to cover its losses. The original agreement provided for payment of the forged shares in dollars or marks, Ledl told Prosecutor Della Lucia, but Marcinkus had subsequently tried to convince him to accept payment in lire instead. Cardinal Tisserant, who had become fond of him, advised against accepting the Italian currency ‘telling me the money came from kidnaps’.

All this may seem hard to believe, particularly for people who expect a minimal adherence by the Catholic church to the ethical code of its founder. But the allegations come from someone who claims to have been a protagonist in the events he describes. Given Calvi’s intense efforts to pressure the Vatican into helping him, his interest in Ledl’s sensitive documents would be only too plausible. A detour to Vienna to seek documentary proof of the earlier scandal would make perfect sense as Calvi embarked on his final battle for financial and personal survival.

Silvano Vittor, Calvi’s travelling companion, denies that any such meeting ever took place. After what appeared to be a momentary hesitation, he ruled it out decisively when speaking to me during a pause in the murder trial. ‘There was never any question of going to Vienna, absolutely not. There is no evidence for it whatsoever.’ Gerald Bull’s account of a journey to Brighton was also untrue, he insisted.[4] What he says may well be true: Ledl was a self-confessed fraudster and may have invented the story as a way of alleviating his Italian judicial problems. On the other hand, his account of the Vatican’s financial shenanigans is backed up by an FBI inquiry and copious detail and it provided exactly the kind of blackmail material that Calvi was seeking. Vittor, Carboni and the Kleinszig sisters, the only known witnesses to Calvi’s movements, have every reason not to confirm details that would place them at the heart of an international conspiracy and aggravate their problems with Italian justice. Mario Sarcinelli, the Bank of Italy inspector who was arrested in an intimidatory judicial operation believed to have been inspired by P2, was prepared to give credence to Ledl’s apparently unlikely Vatican scam. ‘There are many souls in the Vatican. I wouldn’t necessarily rule it out,’ he told me.[5]

On Monday 14 June, Calvi’s last full day in continental Europe, he and Vittor drove to Bregenz, a small Austrian town on the shores of Lake Constance not far from the Swiss border, and spent the night at the Hotel Centrale. According to Carboni, news reports of Calvi’s flight had led the banker to change his plans: he was too well known in Switzerland and it would be too dangerous to cross the border; the party would therefore travel to London. This arrangement was finalized when Carboni and Hans Kunz travelled from Zurich by car to meet Calvi and Vittor for dinner in Bregenz. Vittor’s testimony always more or less tallied with that of Carboni, and Vittor’s defence lawyers had been chosen and paid for by his wealthy Sardinian friend. Now though, when put under pressure by the new Rome prosecutors in the murder case, their stories began to diverge. It was not Calvi who opted for London but Kunz and Carboni who persuaded him to go there, telling him it would be safer than crossing into Switzerland, Vittor told the prosecutors, Luca Tescaroli and Maria Monteleone; a change of emphasis perhaps, but nonetheless significant.

In Rome, police moved to arrest Carboni’s secretary, Emilio Pellicani. Pellicani would spend a long time on remand, but testified that he was always correctly treated by the police. The news of his arrest soon filtered through to Calvi and his party, but it would be significantly distorted for Calvi’s benefit. When the banker spoke to his daughter on the last day of his life, urging her to leave at once for the United States, he passed on the news of Pellicani’s arrest. Pellicani had been brutally beaten while in custody and the same could happen to members of his family if they too were caught, he told Anna.

Tuesday 15 June: Hans Kunz made arrangements for Calvi and Vittor to fly from Innsbruck to London by private jet, booking them into a two-room apartment at Chelsea Cloisters, a huge residence on Sloane Avenue.

A sea of contradictory evidence surrounds this last move, but there is no doubt that the mysterious Swiss businessman played a key role and has never been asked to explain it. Calvi and Vittor flew to Gatwick in the afternoon aboard a Cessna Citation jet booked in Vittor’s name. An invoice for the flight, which cost £2,900, was issued by the London Airtaxi Centre Ltd. The invoice was addressed to Draycott Trading and Finance SA, a Fribourg-registered company owned by a Scottish businessman named Lovat MacDonald, but it was sent c/o the Grays Inn address of a London lawyer, Robert Sandifer Clarke. A handwritten note at the top of the invoice added the name ‘H. Kunz’ and the telephone number of a hotel in Zurich. No one seemed keen to assume direct responsibility for the operation.

MacDonald had been on the board of the Shah of Iran’s private bank and had worked for many years in the Middle Eastern country as a trader in agricultural supplies and equipment. A farmer and engineer by training, he had moved to Iran at the beginning of the 1960s to teach the mechanization of agriculture in a Foreign Office-sponsored project. While subsequently working in the country for the Ford tractor company, he had met Hans Kunz, who was a leading player in the oil industry thanks to a close relationship with the Shah’s sister. With the fall of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi’s regime MacDonald had been briefly arrested by the Khomeini government, who possibly hoped he could lead them to the Shah’s hidden financial assets. Following his release he continued to trade as a foodstuffs importer in Iran and was for a while the country’s largest supplier of grains, wheat and rice, before switching his centre of operations to Switzerland.

In Switzerland MacDonald ran into Kunz again and the two men went into business together. One joint project involved selling gambling machines to mafia-controlled casinos in the United States, a scheme that ran into financial difficulties in 1982 and required the legal assistance of a London lawyer: Robert Clarke, who had met MacDonald in his Iran days when he had visited the country on behalf of a client. Kunz had originally met Carboni through MacDonald when the Sardinian businessman had led a delegation from the Italian state energy company ENI with a view to selling ammonium phosphate to MacDonald. Since no one in the ENI party spoke adequate English, Kunz, who was a regular visitor to the Draycott offices, had been drafted in as interpreter. MacDonald didn’t warm to Carboni, especially after discovering that he habitually carried a handgun in a holster under his jacket – a necessity in Italy in those turbulent times, Carboni assured him. Kunz did, however, meeting Carboni several times in Switzerland and visiting his real estate projects in Sardinia. One source suggests he invested in property development projects with Carboni in both Italy and Spain. ‘Kunz visited Carboni twice in Sardinia,’ MacDonald told me. ‘He invited me to go but I didn’t want to be involved. He met Calvi there.’[6] Such a meeting would be highly significant, and has been denied by Kunz himself, who insisted to magistrates he had not met Calvi until he and Carboni dined with him in Bregenz on the eve of Calvi’s journey to London.

Contact with individuals such as Kunz and MacDonald may have featured large in Calvi’s increasingly desperate efforts to raise money at this stage. Robert Clarke, who first met Kunz in early 1982 in connection with the troubled US business venture and then bumped into him again in Switzerland on several occasions, said he had been asked to take care of the flight and accommodation requirements of Calvi and his party by his long-term client Lovat MacDonald. It was he [Clarke], rather than Vaccari or MacDonald, who had come up with the idea of Chelsea Cloisters, he recalled. He had been told by MacDonald that the flight was for two Fiat directors who wanted a discreet address in London at which to hold meetings. Clarke told City of London Police in June 1982: ‘Mr Kunz called me and explained that he had been asked to make the arrangements by Mr Flavio Carboni who was a very important business associate of his from Sardinia who was acting on behalf of Vatican interests, who had told him that if the arrangements had not been made the government might have fallen. Although this does not agree with what Kunz had told Mr MacDonald about the two Fiat directors.’ The threat of the Italian government falling if Calvi had lived and talked was all too real.

Clarke said he believed Calvi may have been hoping to take advantage of one of MacDonald’s borderline financial schemes to raise the money he needed to meet the Vatican’s $300 million debt repayment deadline. ‘I heard from Kunz that Calvi tried to deposit $35 million at the Zurich airport bank and was refused,’ Clarke told me. Clarke said he was told Calvi intended to come and see him in London to bank the $35 million, possibly making use of the relationship between Clarke’s law firm and the private bankers C. Hoare & Co. ‘MacDonald was involved in substantial financial projects, such as the purchase and sale of corporate debentures and treasury notes at a huge profit. MacDonald had schemes for making huge returns almost overnight, so Calvi could have made $300 million through one of MacDonald’s schemes. That would fit with why he was sent to me.’[7] Clarke told me his business card had been found on Calvi’s body after the banker’s death, a fact that does not appear to have been made public before. The business card of another leading City lawyer was also present in the banker’s pocket and that too was not made public until later.

Lovat MacDonald denied that he had ever been approached by Calvi with a view to multiplying his $35 million nest egg, but he confirmed that Kunz and Carboni had been involved together in substantial financial transactions. Kunz told him Carboni had opened a bank account at Geneva airport, depositing $1 million. A couple of weeks later Kunz had telephoned MacDonald to ask for his help. This time Carboni wanted to deposit $10 million and the bank was making difficulties. A month later he had met Kunz at a lakeside restaurant in Geneva. ‘You missed a trick, Mac,’ the Swiss businessman told him. ‘He has put $136 million in so far, and I’m getting a half a percent commission.’ MacDonald said he was peeved at the way Kunz had dragged him into the Calvi affair by using his company’s name to book Calvi’s flight and accommodation and he said he suspected his Swiss partner was more deeply embroiled in the matter than had so far emerged. ‘If there was money in it, Kunz would have been at it. His commission on the $136 million was not a bad sum for just saying hello.’ His own personal involvement in the affair had been peripheral at most, MacDonald said. The request for assistance with the booking arrangements had arrived as he was departing for a 10-day visit to Tunisia, and he had delegated the task to his company’s secretary.

MacDonald told me the nearest he had come to involvement in the oil business had been occasional trading in soya oil. Documents presented in evidence at the Rome murder trial appear to contradict this, however. One is a letter, apparently signed by Hans Kunz, on the headed paper of Draycott Trading & Finance International Ltd, Panama, and addressed to a ‘Dear Dr Carboni’. It reads: ‘We confirm our conversations of today, Sunday, September 27 1981, regarding the purchase by Draycott Panama Ltd, acting on behalf of certain refineries to be named, of 300,000 barrels per day for three years of Saudi Arabian Light crude oil through your services.’ Another is a letter to an official of the Geneva branch of the Banque Nationale de Paris instructing him to make a payment to a Mr Ihsan Khudhairy in connection with a Saudi oil purchase. Unsigned but bearing the name ‘L. MacDonald for Draycott Trading and Finance SA’, it is dated 29 September 1981 and reads: ‘We undertake to pay to Mr Khudhairy or to his order US 6 cents per barrel delivered during the life of the contracts.’ The commitment is ‘made in strict secrecy’ and ‘not to be disclosed except to the beneficiary’.

An article in the November 1982 issue of The Middle East magazine makes a connection between MacDonald’s company and a particularly sensitive type of oil trading. ‘Evidence has recently come to light of further links between the Iranian regime and Israel,’ the magazine wrote. ‘West German diplomatic sources in Beirut told The Middle East that Israel has received substantial quantities of cheap oil from Tehran.’ Deliveries began at the most crucial time in the battle of Beirut and were brokered by a Lebanese company based in Switzerland, which was owned by a group of Shiite businessmen with ties to both Israel and the Phalange Party. ‘The group also works closely with an Italian arms dealer, Stefano Delle Chiaie, who had been based in Bolivia,’ the magazine said. ‘There was also a Swiss company involved – the Dreikot Driving and Financial Company [sic]. This belongs to the Kunz brothers (Hans and Albert) of Geneva, who were the main Swiss connections with banker Roberto Calvi (recently found hanged in London).’ The article misspells the company name and mistakenly turns a single Hans Albert Kunz into two brothers, but otherwise offers serious food for thought, particularly the alleged involvement of our old friend Stefano Delle Chiaie.

The article winds up with the financial details of the deal, which could have plausibly exploited Kunz and MacDonald’s Iranian savoir faire. ‘On 2 August Iran signed an agreement with this group [Draycott] for the delivery of arms and ammunition worth $50 million which Israel had acquired from Syrian and Palestinian stocks in south Lebanon. In return Tehran began supplying oil at $22 a barrel, against a spot-market price of $31 and $29. In fact the final price paid by the Israelis was $26–27, allowing $5 commission for the intermediaries.’

Involvement in sensitive strategic aspects of the oil business would not be in the least out of character for Hans Kunz; or for MacDonald, for that matter. One of the keys to Kunz’s fortune was his involvement in the suborning of Libyan officials, an activity which enabled the Russian-born American entrepreneur Armand Hammer to win vital oil concessions from the monarchist government of King Idris, the foundation of the success of his Occidental Petroleum Corporation. Kunz was able to help Hammer procure the Libyan oil concessions through the influential contacts of a business partner, Kemal Zeinal Zade, a Soviet-born citizen of Iran who was half Azerbaijani and half Chechen and had made the useful connections while studying and working in London. Kunz’s role in the affair is described in detail by the writer Edward Jay Epstein in his book The Secret History of Armand Hammer. Epstein describes him as he was in the 1960s when the delicate negotiations were going on: ‘Kunz was a large man in his early forties with a bulldoglike head and a massive jutting jaw. Even with his glasses, his poor eyesight caused him to tilt his head and peer almost menacingly. He spoke English with a heavy guttural accent.’ Kunz had lived in Cairo as a young man and made valuable connections among the Arab sheiks, connections that enabled him to become a facilitator for western oil companies prospecting for oil and building pipelines in the Middle East. ‘He catered meals for their crews and also provided their employees with visas, import permits, and whatever else they needed from recalcitrant government officials,’ Epstein wrote.[8]

Working for Hammer would have been a particular challenge, adding the complexity of a figure who bestrode the cold war divide to the already abundant complexities of Middle Eastern politics. Hammer broke the monopoly of the Seven Sisters in Libya by the generosity of his bribe: $2.8 million in cash to his corrupt partners on the day the concessions were awarded and an overriding royalty of 3 per cent of the value of the oil. The money for the ‘commission’ was channelled through a joint account belonging to Kunz and Zade at the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) in Zurich, according to Epstein. When Occidental officials baulked at making such a large payment Hammer showed them the contract, a document so secret it had to be kept in his safe-deposit box at the City National Bank in Los Angeles and of which no copies could be made. The first payment went through on 5 April 1967 and Epstein estimated that the conspirators would eventually pocket approximately $90 million.

Some of the alleged details of Kunz’s agreement with Armand Hammer emerged in 1988 as a result of litigation between the two men in US District Court for the District of Columbia. In his complaint for breach of contract, Kunz pointed out that he and a partner had signed the first oil concession ever granted by Libya in 1955. Oxy-Libya had entered into an agreement with Kunz on 25 July 1965 ‘by which Kunz agreed to provide information and data garnered by him, as well as to lend the standing and credibility necessary for Occidental to obtain concessions for the commercial production of oil in Libya’, Kunz’s complaint states. Occidental had agreed to pay a 4.1665 per cent royalty on all of the oil produced from two Libyan concessions to Kunz, the document claims, and had paid a total of $23 million between 1968 and 1986.

When Colonel Muammar Qaddafi staged his coup in August 1969 he created a challenge and an opportunity for Hammer. The challenge was the threatened nationalization of the country’s oil resources, the opportunity an excuse to cut off the bribe to the corrupt officials of the monarchist regime who had won him his concessions in the first place. According to Epstein, Hammer continued to divert the royalties into the Kunz and Zade account at the UBS to create a massive slush fund at his own disposal, while duping Occidental financial officers into believing the commission was still being paid to its original recipients. Part of it was eventually used to support some of Hammer’s favourite charities, including the Armand Hammer United World College of the American West, inaugurated by Britain’s Prince Charles. Handling funds of this type would have put Kunz at a crossroads where clandestine politics met international strategic interests in the twentieth century’s version of the Great Game. That a man of this experience should have taken such a major role in the logistics of Calvi’s last journey is therefore of the greatest significance.

Kunz was not only instrumental in chartering Calvi’s flight to London and booking his flat at Chelsea Cloisters but he also arranged a private flight to London on the evening after Calvi’s death, believed to have been used to collect some of the banker’s most precious documents, and he personally flew to Edinburgh in the same private Learjet 55 to fetch Carboni on 20 June. On the day Calvi and Vittor flew to London, Carboni and the Kleinszig girls flew from Zurich to Amsterdam by private plane. All the flights other than Calvi’s – where Kunz had insisted the service should be provided by a company from outside Switzerland – were booked from the Geneva company Aeroleasing SA by Kunz himself. This was the company, used on occasion by both Calvi and Marcinkus, that was chosen by Colonel Oliver North for his secret shuttle diplomacy with Iran during the Iran–Contra affair and in which the Swiss businessman Peter Notz reportedly had a stake. Daniel Brandt, an Aeroleasing dispatcher at the time, confirmed North’s use of the company. Notz, one of the company’s founders, had sold his stake in Aeroleasing by then, he said. ‘I remember meeting North in our offices once,’ Brandt told me during a break at the Rome murder trial.[9]

An Italian secret service document adds further fragments of Kunz’s biography of particular relevance to the Calvi story. It is headed ‘Kunz–Gelli’: ‘Three men ate together at the beginning of May 1982 at the Cheval Blanc de Vandeuvre restaurant in the vicinity of Geneva, one of the best in the city. The reserved table was in a corner of the main room. One of the three was Licio Gelli, who was sitting with his back to the room, the other, on his right, was Hans Kunz, the third, on his left, has not been identified. All three men spoke Italian.’

City Police investigators appear to have shown a curious lack of curiosity about Kunz’s role in organizing Calvi’s last movements. At the second London inquest, which opened almost exactly a year after Calvi’s death, the Calvi family lawyer, George Carman QC, put it to Detective Chief Superintendent Barry Tarbun that it would be natural to want to question Kunz, who had not been called as a witness. ‘Not really, sir,’ was Tarbun’s surprising reply. Carman highlighted Kunz’s contacts with the Calvi family, his involvement in the travel arrangements and his close telephone contact with Carboni to suggest he ought to have been interviewed. The commander of the police investigation replied grudgingly that if he had been easily accessible – he was believed to be in the United States at the time – he would perhaps have interviewed him: ‘Yes. As a witness; not as a suspect.’ ‘Witnesses sometimes turn into suspects, don’t they?’ Carman responded. ‘They do indeed.’ ‘Sometimes people start life as witnesses and end up as defendants?’ ‘Sometimes, yes,’ Tarbun conceded. Efforts to call Kunz to give evidence at the Rome murder trial were also ineffectual, Prosecutor Tescaroli complaining of a foot-dragging response to requests for assistance from his colleagues in the Swiss judiciary.

The pilot of the Citation One executive jet – call sign GB.FAR – which flew Calvi and Vittor to London recalled the journey for City Police in a statement delivered on 28 June 1982. ‘The second passenger I would say was in his mid 50s, about 5ft 5in to 5ft 7in tall, chubby build. He had greyish hair, balding. I am not sure whether or not he had a moustache. Although he was wearing a suit,’ Reginald Graham Mulligan told the police. More important than his physical description of Calvi was his description of Calvi’s luggage. Calvi and Vittor had between them only two items of luggage: ‘A suitcase and a holdall, both apparently matching and of good quality. I believe they were a light check design.’ These were the items that would be found in room 881 of Chelsea Cloisters after Calvi’s death. The famous black briefcase was nowhere to be seen when Calvi arrived in London, if Mulligan’s memory served him well just two weeks after the event.

14

London

Roberto Calvi and Silvano Vittor arrived at Gatwick airport in the early evening of Tuesday 15 June. It is still not entirely clear to what extent the decision was Calvi’s or imposed upon him by Carboni and Kunz, whom he was intending to see in London, and how exactly he spent the remaining three days of his life. Our knowledge of these events is still largely based on the incomplete and unreliable account of those who travelled with him, although a few new witnesses have come forward to fill in some of the gaps.

Carboni had told Calvi and Vittor there would be a car waiting to meet them at Gatwick, but they were unable to find it. Calvi was immediately nervous. ‘Silvano, we’re in trouble here. We’re right in the wolf’s mouth, where lots of bankers who recognize me are likely to pass.’ Vittor suggested they wait a bit to see if the minicab arrived. ‘We won’t wait for anything. Let’s take a taxi and get out of here,’ Calvi replied.[1]

Calvi was furious when they arrived at Chelsea Cloisters and checked into their small flat on the eighth floor. He would soon be on the phone to Carboni to complain, summoning the Sardinian to London to sort out the problem and find him the kind of accommodation that would enable him to receive bankers of his own standing in dignified surroundings. ‘Calvi complained about the quality of Chelsea Cloisters. It was a brothel frequented by a louche clientele,’ Vittor told me. The red-brick and concrete building was one of the largest in Europe when it was completed in 1938 with the intention of providing reasonably priced accommodation for the employees of London’s large department stores. For anyone intending to make Calvi disappear it had an inestimable advantage: entrances on all four sides of the building through which people were free to come and go without identifying themselves.

Marguerite Lilley, the letting manager at Chelsea Cloisters, told City Police 12 days after Calvi’s death that the flat had been booked by a Mr MacDonald who telephoned from Geneva on 15 June, the day of Calvi’s arrival. The booking was in the name of Silvano Vittor, whose name had been recorded as Bietor, and was for a period of 22 days. ‘Later that day Mr MacDonald telephoned again and said that Mr Robert Clarke from Wood, Nash and Winters would be paying the rent,’ Lilley told police. It was presumably MacDonald’s office that called as MacDonald himself was ostensibly on his way to Tunisia at this point.

As Calvi was settling into his squalid quarters in Chelsea, Carboni was embarking on a pleasure trip to Amsterdam with the two Kleinszig sisters. The flight, as all the other key movements of his group, was provided by Aeroleasing and booked by Hans Kunz. Before leaving the Hotel Baur au Lac in Zurich, Carboni made a total of 17 phone calls; one was to Kunz’s home, one to the London Airtaxi Centre, which provided Calvi’s flight to London, one to MacDonald’s service company in Geneva, Challencode SA, two to Mazzotta’s home in Rome, two to the Vatican, one to Rome police headquarters and one to a number in the United States.

Early on the morning of Wednesday 16 June Calvi’s deputy, Roberto Rosone, visited the Vatican to see if he could persuade the IOR to help shore up the tottering Banco Ambrosiano as it staggered into the terminal phase of its financial crisis. The heads of the Banco Ambrosiano’s foreign department had assured him that the IOR stood behind the indebtedness of the Ambrosiano’s offshore network and the Ambrosiano had the IOR’s letters of patronage to prove it. Rosone described the occasion in dramatic testimony to the Rome murder trial, where he appeared walking with a stick, pale, breathless and clearly in the poorest of health. ‘I went to the IOR a few days before Calvi’s death, given that I didn’t know what the hell to do except to go and see the people who had guaranteed the debt,’ he told the court.

Accompanied by two senior Ambrosiano group officials, Rosone was received by Luigi Mennini and the Vatican bank’s chief accountant, Pellegrino De Strobel. Marcinkus was abroad again, this time accompanying the pope on a visit to Switzerland. Rosone called on the bank to honour its commitment to Calvi and the offshore companies but was told for the first time of the existence of Calvi’s letters of indemnity, absolving the IOR of all responsibility for the heavily indebted companies. ‘I became as angry as a buffalo,’ Rosone recalled. ‘I told them this was a criminal conspiracy. They had committed fraud. The letters were from the IOR and they were a guarantee. All that was missing was the signature of Jesus Christ.’ Rosone insisted that Calvi’s letters of indemnity were invalid, as they had been signed by Calvi as the chairman of BAOL without the authorization of the bank’s administrative organs. The IOR officials listened to him in silence, Mennini looking pale. The letters of indemnity were not immediately produced for him to view, as they didn’t have copies of them in the office. ‘It was the proof that a fraud had been perpetrated,’ he said of Calvi’s counter-letters, raising his voice in breathless indignation. The IOR rejected a suggestion it should raise a $1 billion syndicated loan to help rescue the Banco Ambrosiano’s offshore companies, proposing instead that it would begin repaying the debts to the Ambrosiano that it did recognize, but without interest. ‘It was as if the ceiling had fallen on our heads. You go in to the Vatican and they say it was all a joke. You don’t understand a thing at that point.’[2] If Calvi couldn’t come up with a miracle in London his bank and his career were finished.

Something that looked like a miracle to Calvi may have appeared that day in the podgy form of a middle-aged Venezuelan financier named Alberto Jaimes Berti. Jaimes had managed the funds of the Venezuelan Catholic church, ending up embroiled in a financial scandal and litigation with the Venezuelan bishops. He had done business in Europe as well as Latin America and claimed to have contacts in the Vatican bank, as well as a superficial connection with Calvi himself dating from the 1970s. He was just the kind of person therefore whom Calvi might have turned to in these desperate last hours.

Jaimes came forward in 1993, and like so many pieces of the Calvi jigsaw his story was strange and scarcely believable. In a nutshell, Jaimes claimed that he had used his connections in the Venezuelan church to help European investors get round currency restrictions in their own countries and invest their fortunes discreetly in the US stock market. The biggest operation of this type had involved the investment of a staggering $2.2 billion in bonds on the American Stock Exchange – not the better-known New York Stock Exchange. The investment had been carried out through a Panamanian company called Hemisphere Entrepreneurs Incorporated on behalf of six parties. Five of these were tentatively identified by Jaimes as: the Opus Dei-linked Spanish sherry magnate Jose Maria Ruiz-Mateos, the Banco Ambrosiano, Roberto Calvi, the IOR, and Opus Dei itself. The sixth, it has been suggested, was Cosa Nostra in conjunction with the Camorra.

Jaimes told his story to Kroll Associates, the detective agency working for the Calvi family, to the weekly news magazine L’Espresso, to the City of London Police and to Rome magistrates, who promptly arrested him on suspicion of perjury and withholding material information. The Banco Ambrosiano had been one of the financial channels that fed his offshore investment schemes, Jaimes told the magistrates, much of the money passing through the bank’s subsidiaries in Peru, Nicaragua and Beirut. Curiously, the Ambrosiano had no representative office in a major financial centre such as London – where permission to open a branch had been refused – but was present on the ground in both Beirut and Teheran, where particularly delicate types of business were the order of the day.

In his statement to the City Police, Jaimes said he was telephoned by Calvi in the early afternoon of Wednesday 16 June, with a request that he meet him at Chelsea Cloisters, which was not far from his home in Hans Place. ‘I assumed that Calvi wanted to discuss something with me in connection with the Panamanian transaction as there was no other reason for a meeting,’ he told the police. Calvi met him at reception and the two men talked for about 20 minutes in the Chelsea Cloisters entrance lobby, sitting side by side on a sofa. ‘He looked normal, had a moustache, was smiling and was well dressed and very correct in his manner, but at the same time, as always, he seemed a little timid or reserved. He did not invite me to go up to his room,’ Jaimes said. Calvi asked him how long it would take to convert part of the Panamanian investment into cash and was disappointed to learn from him that it could not be done in under several weeks. ‘He then asked me whether it would be possible to obtain a bank loan using the portfolio as security and I told him that provided the six shareholders gave their consent this would be possible and could be arranged in a few days. He seemed very pleased and greatly satisfied with my reply and said something to the effect “then the problem is solved”.’

Jaimes provided a detailed account of the financial channels involved in the Panamanian investment, including the names of Opus Dei-linked operatives whose identity he would have been unlikely to have known if he had not been personally involved in the affair. That evening Calvi called his wife and daughter, telling both of them that something marvellous was about to happen that would solve all their problems. Both women believed that Opus Dei was the key to solving the Ambrosiano’s financial crisis and here was a financier allegedly representing Opus Dei interests who appeared to offer an answer to the banker’s prayers.

Access to the Hemisphere Entrepreneurs fund could be obtained by presenting a token, Jaimes said: half of a piece of security paper cut across in a zigzag manner with a filigree border, with the same number on the upper and lower part. A sealed envelope with five or six credit slips and Jaimes’ half token were in a safety deposit box in the Banque de Paris et Pays Bas in Geneva, the Venezuelan financier told the police. Unfortunately for his credibility, there was nothing to back up his story when Italian magistrates finally gained access to what should have been his safety deposit at the Geneva branch of Paribas, and several of the bankers and businessmen with whom he claimed to have been in contact failed to confirm his story. Had Jaimes met Calvi in an attempt to dupe him or had he never run into the Ambrosiano chairman in London at all? Had the witnesses who contradicted him lied to conceal their involvement in a highly sensitive international financial scandal? The Venezuelan, who was no stranger to scandal himself and died in poverty in Colombia in 2001, may have invented the whole story for his 15 minutes of media fame or for some more abstruse conspiratorial purpose. The fact remains, however, that he was a genuine player in the same financial game as Calvi and his story contained many elements that only a player could have known.

That afternoon Carboni arrived from Amsterdam with the Kleinszigs in tow and checked into the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane, opposite Hyde Park; the kind of address Calvi would have been happy to operate from if he hadn’t feared recognition. Vittor and Calvi hurried over to meet them, but Calvi refused to enter the hotel and the group went for a walk in the park instead. Carboni and Calvi talked privately during the walk, about Calvi’s efforts to solve the Ambrosiano’s financial crisis and his urgent need for better accommodation. It was at this point, Carboni says, that he remembered the London connection of his Sardinian mistress: William Morris, a local government officer, and his Italian wife Fidalma. The Morrises would help Carboni in a fruitless search for a new flat for Calvi and their 21-year-old daughter would act as the Sardinian’s guide and interpreter. Later, police say, she provided him with an alibi in connection with one of the unresolved mysteries of his stay in London: the visit of a private plane to Gatwick airport on the day after Calvi’s death.

The last day of Calvi’s life began early for Carboni. At 6.59 a.m. on the Thursday he called the Rome telephone number of Wilfredo Vitalone, a lawyer who Calvi hoped would help resolve his legal problems and who was a close associate of Giulio Andreotti. At 7.46 he called Calvi in Chelsea Cloisters and at 8.13 he was on the phone to Hans Kunz’s office in Geneva; Kunz was to provide Anna with the money for her airline ticket to Washington. Calvi also was on the phone, calling his daughter, who was now in Zurich, to tell her she must leave at once for the United States, and telling her about the arrest and ‘torture’ of Pellicani – a false rumour that had increased his sense of alarm.

Later that morning the Ambrosiano board met, voting to revoke Calvi’s powers as chairman lest he be ‘induced to commit acts against his will’, to dissolve itself and to call in the Bank of Italy. The meeting ended at 5 p.m. Two hours later a reporter from L’Espresso was talking on the phone to Rosone when the sounds of an unfolding tragedy could be heard over the open line: muffled noises, shouts, a woman crying. ‘What’s going on?’ the reporter asked. ‘My God, Calvi’s secretary has killed herself . . . she’s thrown herself from the window,’ came Rosone’s reply. Graziella Corrocher, a 55-year-old spinster who had given years of loyal service to Calvi and the bank, had thrown herself from a fourth-floor window into the Ambrosiano’s inner courtyard. She left a note referring to the depression for which she had been receiving treatment and expressing the hope that Calvi ‘be doubly cursed for all the harm he has done to the bank and the group, of which we were once so proud’.[3] If Calvi had spoken to someone from the bank that evening and been informed of the day’s events he would have had plenty of reason to be depressed. If he himself was not thinking of suicide, his thoughts must certainly have turned to escape.

If Calvi was not travelling to Brighton or meeting with Jaimes Berti, as Vittor maintains, he appears to have spent a lot of time waiting around in his apartment for Carboni to resolve his accommodation problem. Over the years new witnesses have come forward to fill in some of the gaps in his last day. Vittor himself changed some of the details of his story, telling Rome magistrates in December 2003 that Calvi was ready to make a move on 17 June to a luxury villa on the outskirts of Liverpool – a possible prelude to taking ship to South America? The villa setting would now be appropriate for a business meeting with two very important people, Vittor said.

A restaurant where he and the Kleinszig girls ate that day, and where the sisters spent a long time waiting, may have been Pucci Pizza, the Italian restaurant on the King’s Road frequented by Sergio Vaccari and owned by the nightclub owner Giuseppe Pucci Albanese. His restaurant was conveniently close to Chelsea Cloisters but may also have represented a point of contact between the Calvi party and criminal forces capable of organizing the banker’s physical elimination.

In 2006 another source came forward with a story placing Calvi himself in Pucci Pizza on the night of his death. The source, a former Italian restaurant worker in London, contacted a RAI 3 current affairs programme to tell them of his meeting with Calvi on that Thursday evening. The man was visiting Pucci Pizza to discuss the offer of a job as restaurant manager. He was sitting at a table near the door when Roberto Calvi came in with a large bag and asked if he could sit down. Calvi was without his moustache – Vittor says he had shaved it off that day – and stared at the man with an intense, vacant gaze, to such an extent that he thought he might have been homosexual. Calvi wrote something on a page from his diary, tore it out, crumpled it up and left it in the ashtray. The source said he looked at the sheet after Calvi’s departure and saw it bore the name Carboni, a fact he remembered because his then employer was called Carbone. The man, who agreed to be filmed only from behind and later repeated his account to the Rome prosecutors, said he had known the mafia exile Francesco Di Carlo in London and that Di Carlo knew Pucci Albanese.

Source ‘Podgora’ told investigators in 1983 that Calvi had consumed his last supper in the company of Sergio Vaccari, who had been the last person to see him alive. Another witness who claimed to have seen Calvi in a more upmarket London restaurant than Pucci Pizza was traced by Italian magistrates in 2004. Vincenzo Mortillaro said he had seen Calvi in the chic San Lorenzo restaurant in Knightsbridge – a favourite with Princess Diana – where he worked as a waiter, a few days before the news of the banker’s death was reported in the press. He thought it had probably been on a Thursday evening. Mortillaro said Calvi was in a group of four or five people and he had seen him from a distance in another section of the restaurant. When questioned at the Calvi murder trial he repeated his claim, identifying Flavio Carboni and Michaela Kleinszig as visitors to the restaurant and telling the court he had recognized a photo of Umberto Ortolani as a regular visitor to the San Lorenzo over the years. The latter reminded him of the American actor who starred in the television series Magnum P.I. The round-faced and staid-looking Ortolani, who died in 2002, would probably have been flattered to be compared to someone as glamorous as the actor Tom Sellek.

Mortillaro, who now works as a waiter in Italy, was asked why he hadn’t come forward voluntarily to offer his testimony. ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘As far as I’m concerned the information was of no use to the investigation.’ He particularly remembered a young woman in a mini-dress with curly brown hair who was with Calvi on that evening. She had visited the restaurant four or five times, spoke English with a German accent and told him on one occasion she was waiting for her sister. ‘I remember the girl made an impression on me because she was very vivacious,’ Mortillaro told the court. He recalled discussing Calvi’s visit with the other waiters after the news of the banker’s death was reported in the newspapers. Several of his colleagues at the restaurant were Sardinians from Porto Rotondo, the stamping ground of Flavio Carboni, he said.

Podgora’s report of 5 July 1983 said Vittor had seen the people who had collected Calvi from his apartment on the evening of his death. ‘These had been sent by Gelli and Carboni, who were in London,’ Eligio Paoli told his handlers.

If Vittor, as he insists, did not see the people with whom Calvi left Chelsea Cloisters, another witness, who was first traced by Calvi family investigators in 1989, said that he did. Cecil Coomber, a South African painter who was a long-term resident of Chelsea Cloisters, said two men speaking Italian had knocked on the door of his eighth-floor flat on that Thursday evening. Some time later he and a friend had seen them again as they waited to go down in the lift. This time – it was around 10 p.m. – the two men were in the company of a third man whom Coomber was later able to identify as Calvi. Coomber told Italian investigators he had been struck by Calvi’s narrow, Hitler-style moustache – already shaved off completely according to Vittor – and his penetrating gaze. The group appeared to be put out at running into Coomber and his friend and Calvi in particular looked worried. The banker was not carrying a bag, Coomber said, but one of his companions might have had a bag or overnight case in his hand. The Italians left by a back entrance to Chelsea Cloisters, while Coomber and his friend went out the front. Coomber, who had a reputation for being well up on Chelsea Cloisters gossip, said he had heard from cleaners in the building that Calvi seemed petrified during his stay, opening his door with great circumspection and even moving a desk in front of it to block access to flat 881 during the night.

Calvi’s apparently empty days were spent in similar fashion, according to Vittor. The two would get up between 8 and 9 a.m. and get ready for breakfast at an open-air bar some 200 metres from Chelsea Cloisters, Calvi normally tucking into a plate of fried eggs. They would walk back to their apartment via a newsagent, where Calvi bought the Italian financial newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore to keep an eye on the stock market and was upset to see that the news of his flight was on the front pages of all the Italian newspapers. Vittor picked up a copy of the Gazzetta dello Sport to read about the ongoing World Cup finals in Spain. He spent much of his time in the flat watching the matches on television as Italy progressed towards a final, unexpected victory; much to Calvi’s irritation, since the sound of the TV preyed on his already frayed nerves. ‘Calvi spent his time in the flat walking around in slippers, boxer shorts and a vest,’ Vittor told me. When he returned from a clothes-shopping trip with the Kleinszig girls – he had left Austria without luggage – Vittor found Calvi’s mood had changed for the worse. ‘I found him irritable, also towards me for the first time. He was more worried than ever because I had arrived late and he had no information from Flavio. He told me he needed to meet people but that he couldn’t receive important people in that place.’

On the Thursday evening Carboni came to Chelsea Cloisters to inform them that he had resolved the accommodation problem. Strangely though, he refused to come up and speak to the crotchety Calvi in person. ‘I told Flavio that Calvi was angry, very nervous, and that he should come up to help calm him down,’ Vittor told me. ‘Flavio said he would come the next day. “I’m tired as I have been walking around since this morning and the girls have been waiting for us all afternoon in a bar.” ’ Instead of Carboni coming up to reassure Calvi, Vittor went down and accompanied the Sardinian to the nearby Suchet pub, where the Kleinszig girls had been waiting and which was about to close. Calvi had packed his bags and was waiting anxiously for the word from Carboni that would enable him to move into more congenial surroundings. His last words to Vittor were: ‘Tell Carboni to come up.’ But by that stage he had lost control over his bank and even over his travelling companions. If Coomber’s account was accurate though, Calvi may not even have been in Chelsea Cloisters by the time this exchange is supposed to have taken place, around 11 p.m.

After leaving Carboni and the girls Vittor says he returned to Chelsea Cloisters and found flat 881 empty. At around 1 a.m. he persuaded a porter to accompany him to the flat and let him in, saying he could produce proof of his identity once inside. Having tried initially to open the luggage in the flat, without success, he suddenly appeared to remember that he had an identity card in his wallet all along and pulled it out for the porter. The object of the exercise appears to be to avoid going into the flat alone: evidently Calvi was not the only person in a state of high alarm by this stage.

Vittor later agreed to participate in the BBC’s Panorama documentary about Calvi’s disappearance, driving a youthful Jeremy Paxman over the remote mountain roads that had constituted Calvi’s escape route through Austria. Paxman pointed out to a nervous-looking Vittor that it had been highly convenient that both he and Carboni were absent at the moment Calvi went missing. ‘I can’t answer that question, because any answer would be the wrong one,’ the smuggler replied with admirable candour.

Vittor spent a sleepless night in the Chelsea Cloisters apartment and left early the next morning, flying to Vienna under the assumed name ‘Vitula’. He didn’t speak to Carboni and didn’t use the telephone, he claims. This leaves an unexplained phone call from the flat that was recorded as taking place between 10.45 p.m. and midnight. The Chelsea Cloisters telephone system didn’t record the destination numbers, so no one knows who made the call or to whom. The Hilton Hotel’s system did record destination numbers and showed that a call was made from Michaela Kleinszig’s room to Chelsea Cloisters between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. on the morning of 18 June. Did Vittor’s girlfriend call him then and urge him to flee? Carboni at this stage had moved to the Sheraton Hotel at Heathrow airport. Hotel records there showed a call had been made to Chelsea Cloisters during the same time frame at a cost of three units, so Carboni may also have touched base with Vittor during the night.

Two things happened on 18 June, the day Calvi was found dead, that raise suspicion about the roles of people in his immediate entourage. The first was in the morning, when Hans Kunz’s wife called on Anna Calvi and her boyfriend in their Zurich hotel to deliver 50,000 Swiss francs advanced to her on behalf of her father. Kunz had called earlier to announce the visit, saying he was expecting to see Anna’s father later that day. Mrs Kunz spoke poor English, the group’s only common language, and was soon talking at cross-purposes with Anna and Vittorio. Anna mentioned the news of Graziella Corrocher’s suicide, which she had heard the day before, and was amazed by Mrs Kunz’s reaction. ‘It was an exaggerated reaction for someone she had never known. We had to reassure her that it wasn’t a member of our family,’ Anna told the Rome murder trial. ‘We thought that she had understood that it was my father who was dead, because her reaction was completely abnormal . . . I had the impression that she already knew my father was dead and she was alarmed that we knew too.’ Mrs Kunz started to talk about the fact that Calvi was in London – something Anna didn’t know at that point – and that he was looking for new accommodation because the owners had shown an undue interest in his identity. ‘She didn’t realize that we didn’t know my father was in London. So she stopped then, but she was very confused and agitated.’[4] Anna left for Washington that afternoon without having received the phone call her father had promised for that morning.

That morning Flavio Carboni visited the Morrises at their home not far from Heathrow and immediately struck William Morris by his nervousness. ‘He seemed quite agitated and kept pacing up and down,’ Morris told police three weeks later. ‘He didn’t give any indication as to why he was restless. I assumed it was business.’ Morris’s daughter Odette took the day off work to act as guide and interpreter for their agitated visitor. The two took a taxi to the Chelsea Hotel in Sloane Street and booked into a room so Carboni could use the phone. After lunch he asked Odette to call a London telephone number and ask for room 881. Having failed to get a response four times, Carboni sent her round to Chelsea Cloisters on her own to knock on the door. Later the two tried again, once again Carboni sending Odette up alone to the flat to knock on the door. Finally Odette made two copies of a cryptic note for him, leaving one under the door of flat 881 and the other with reception. The note, written in rudimentary Italian, read: ‘Dear Silvano Vitor, I have telephoned many times but have not heard from you. Tell me how I can find you. Telephone Elde and Vito immediately. Odina.’ Elde was actually the Kleinszig girls’ mother, Hildegard. To keep things discreet Odette had modified her own name too. She was, after all, assisting someone who had helped Calvi to leave Italy illegally . . . if nothing more serious than that.

In January 2006 Odette Morris – now with the married name Jones – was arrested by City Police on charges of perjury and perverting the course of justice. The reason was that she had originally failed to mention an important event that allegedly took place on that Thursday evening: a visit by taxi to Gatwick airport with Carboni to meet an incoming private jet sent by Kunz. Both Odette and Carboni forgot to mention this trip in their early testimony, and Odette failed to mention it at the first inquest, only doing so after news of the flight was reported in a British newspaper. At that point Carboni said he had been to the airport to meet a friend to whom he owed money, and Odette confirmed his account. He had initially forgotten about the appointment and arrived late, after his friend’s plane had already returned to Geneva, Carboni claimed. The episode is unquestionably strange, and British police now believe that Odette, and possibly even Carboni, never did go to the airport on that Friday evening. The time-line based on the evidence of other witnesses made it impossible for Odette to reach Gatwick and arrive home at the time her father and other family members said she returned. In the end Odette was released without charge.

Italian investigators suspect Carboni summoned a friend, the Rome antiques dealer and interior decorator Ugo Flavoni, to take possession of some of the crucial items of Calvi’s blackmail exercise: sensitive documents and the keys to bank safety deposits. If Carboni and Odette didn’t go to the airport, it raises the question as to whether an unidentified accomplice did. Flavoni, who was tried and convicted for perjury over the episode, said he was called to Geneva to recover a 20 million lire debt for refurbishment work on Carboni’s Rome office. He set out by car on the evening of 17 June – before Calvi’s death – and drove overnight to Geneva in the company of his mistress, her brother and the latter’s wife. In Geneva he met Carboni’s brother, Andrea, and Hans Kunz, and Kunz kindly arranged for the group to fly by private plane to Gatwick on the evening of 18 June. By this time Calvi was dead and those with access could help themselves to his property. Kunz paid 11,000 Swiss francs for the flight, well over half of Carboni’s presumed debt to Flavoni. The flight arrived at 8.05 p.m. and departed one hour and 41 minutes later. Flavoni has since died, but his female travelling companions told the Rome murder trial that they had looked for Carboni fruitlessly at Gatwick and returned to Geneva without meeting him. They acknowledged, however, that Flavoni could conceivably have met someone in the airport during the brief moments that he was out of their sight. The following morning the group met Andrea Carboni in Geneva, who apologized for the contretemps, and they returned to Rome, once again driving through the night.

The episode, which Rome prosecutors cite as evidence that Carboni knew, in advance of Calvi’s death, that the banker would soon no longer need the sensitive documents that amounted to his life insurance policy, illustrates one of the curious features of the Calvi story: the traipsing of extraneous characters through some of its most delicate moments. Flavoni’s friends said they viewed the exhausting and extravagant marathon to London as something of a pleasure jaunt. And the presence of the Kleinszig girls on Calvi’s last journey – though Manuela has been charged as an accomplice to murder – appears somewhat de trop in a well-ordered murder conspiracy. Perhaps, as investigators surmise, they were brought along to reassure Calvi and quieten his fears, as well as to create the impression afterwards that this had been another pleasure jaunt and not a murder conspiracy.

The 21-year-old Odette, who worked as a clerk in a department store, was similarly out of her depths in Carboni’s international intrigue. On Saturday 19 June she flew with him from Gatwick to Edinburgh, as Carboni was keen to get out of London as quickly as possible, having spent Friday night in the safety and seclusion of the Morris home. They took rooms in the George Hotel, booked in Odette’s name, and the next day Carboni was collected from Edinburgh airport by Kunz himself, once again in a private jet provided by Aeroleasing. Before leaving the hotel Carboni made five calls costing £22.93. Two were to the Rome number of the lawyer Wilfredo Vitalone and one to the Zurich home of Hans Kunz, presumably calling him to the rescue. Odette was to have accompanied him, to look for work in Italy, but a sudden health crisis for her father led her to return home instead. The latest generation of City Police investigators viewed Odette’s sudden modification of her story as deeply suspicious. Detective Superintendent Trevor Smith told the Rome trial he was convinced Odette lied when she claimed she had been to Gatwick with Carboni and that the lie played an important role in frustrating the original police inquiry. The change in her story had less impact on the earlier generation of City Police investigators, who required much more than that to arouse their professional curiosity.

The entire London party – minus Calvi of course – then met up again in Zurich, where they stayed at the Holiday Inn, with plenty of time to agree on a coherent version of events before Vittor decided to give himself up to the Italian police a few days later. The fact that he had returned voluntarily, Vittor told me during the early phase of the trial, was proof of his good faith. ‘My conscience is clear,’ he said. ‘Those who do much pay little; those who do little pay much in Italy. Sometimes someone has to pay just to keep public opinion happy.’[5]

The Calvi family in Washington received news of Roberto’s death on the night of 18 June, when Clara’s brother Luciano Canetti telephoned from Italy. The news wasn’t certain at that point, but they immediately knew it was true. They moved into a flat in the Watergate Building and hired half a dozen private security guards for their protection.

One of the most damaging testimonies for Carboni at the Rome murder trial came from the mafia boss Antonino Giuffrè, who claimed to have direct knowledge of the Calvi affair from associates in his own mafia ‘family’ who had been personally involved. Carboni had played Judas in a classic mafia murder scenario, he alleged. ‘From the moment when Calvi’s death was decreed, as always happens, someone plays the role of compare [friend] to Calvi. That is the person who collects Calvi and delivers him into the hands of those who will kill him. One of these people was Carboni,’ he told the court. ‘These are old stories that I didn’t participate in myself. As in many murders, you have someone who establishes a relationship of trust and plays the role of compare. First he gains Calvi’s confidence and then he delivers him to those who will strangle him . . . Flavio Carboni is the person who guided Calvi on this last stretch of the road.’ The quiet authority of Giuffrè’s account and the parallel with traditional mafia murder strategies, of which Giuffrè was an acknowledged expert, had a powerful impact in court. Giuffrè said Carboni had been entrusted with this delicate role by the mafia boss Pippo Calò and that the businessman Ernesto Diotallevi, with links to the Rome underworld, had played ‘a manual role’ in the murder. He later backtracked on this second statement, which went beyond anything the prosecution had attempted to prove, to say that Diotallevi had simply helped to organize the murder.

His description of Carboni’s links to organized crime was devastating, however. ‘There were people who were particularly suited to questionable activities in connection with the worlds of politics and finance. One of these was Flavio Carboni,’ Giuffrè said. Asked whether the secret services were involved in the crime, his answer brought him back to Carboni. ‘One heard a lot of stories about Carboni, that he had links here, that he had links there. He was a very crafty person. One heard rumours that certain representatives of the deviant secret services had made a contribution in this context. I can’t give you the names.’ The murder had been staged to look like suicide, Giuffrè said. ‘These things happen frequently in the world of Cosa Nostra.’[6]

Calvi had seriously injured his right index finger at his country home, an injury that would have a double bearing on the investigation into his death. The banker normally wore a rubber sheath on the finger to prevent it from bleeding if he had to do any energetic activity with his hands. Prosecutors were therefore sceptical that he could have climbed along the Blackfriars scaffolding without his finger protector and without reopening the wound, no mention of which was made in Professor Simpson’s report of his autopsy in 1982. They were even more suspicious when a sheath similar to the one used by Calvi was found in Carboni’s luggage following his arrest in Switzerland. Carboni had had control of Calvi’s belongings and had helped himself to whatever he wanted, its presence seemed to imply. The exuberant Sardinian was questioned about this curious fact by Rome magistrates in 1990. Knowing that the sheath had been found, he was ready with his answer. Pulling another sheath and a red handkerchief from his pocket, Carboni told the magistrates that he often used the object as a prop for conjuring tricks and he proceeded to attempt a demonstration. The credibility of his explanation was somewhat undermined however, as he repeatedly tried, and failed, to make the item disappear. Finally his exasperated lawyer, with his head in his hands, pleaded with his client to put the conjuring tools away.

15

Water Under the Bridge

The murder/suicide of Roberto Calvi turned out better than its perpetrators could have dreamed, coming close to being the perfect crime, at least for the first 20 years. In Italy almost everyone was convinced from the start that Calvi had been ‘suicided’ and the symbolic elements of his death were seen as sending an eloquent message to any of his associates who might have been tempted to ‘squeal’. A crime dismissed as suicide by the British police, and cursorily investigated, was read as murder by the Italian public, with all the intimidatory power of a high-profile mafia assassination.

Some of the scenographic elements of Calvi’s death were almost certainly the product of chance, but they were interpreted nevertheless as part of a carefully staged drama rich in symbolic messages. The name of Blackfriars Bridge could not have been more appropriate for the public punishment of ‘God’s banker’, evoking at once his connection with Roman Catholicism and with freemasonry. And the manner of his death – by hanging – bore the hallmark of a state execution, as perhaps indeed it was. The bricks in his pockets completed the symbolic ingredients of a pitiless masonic rite.

Blackfriars Bridge, designed by the Scottish architect Joseph Cubitt, was completed in 1869, carrying traffic into the City across its five wrought-iron arches. It was named after a large Dominican monastery situated near the City end. An order of mendicant friars founded in the early thirteenth century to combat heresy, the Dominicans were known as Black Friars for the black capes they wore over their white habits. The name perfectly encapsulated one part of Calvi’s professional identity: his relationship with the Vatican. But it also contained masonic overtones that could have alluded to his troubling membership of P2. A British ‘Blackfriars’ lodge is listed as number 3,722 in the ‘List of Lodges Masonic’, the official register of European freemasonry.[1] And though most masons are more likely to be seen in a blue apron than a black hood, the name evokes popular cultural stereotypes of freemasonry. Mino Pecorelli chose a photograph of a figure wearing a black hood over the red robes of a cardinal to illustrate his Osservatore Politico article on ‘The Grand Vatican Lodge’.

One of the most striking aspects of freemasonry is its fierce devotion to secrecy and some commentators have seen elements of masonic ritual in Calvi’s death that could have referred to the threatened breach of his masonic oath of silence. The First Degree initiation ceremony contains a blood-curdling commitment to maintain the organization’s secrets: ‘These several points I solemnly swear to observe, without evasion, equivocation, or mental reservation of any kind, under no less a penalty, on the violation of any of them, than that of having my throat cut across, my tongue torn out by the root, and buried in the sand of the sea at low water mark, or a cable’s length from the shore, where the tide regularly ebbs and flows twice in twenty-four hours.’[2]

The noose around Calvi’s neck could recall the ‘cable tow’ placed around a candidate’s neck during the First Degree initiation ceremony and if his tongue wasn’t buried on the seashore, the tide was certainly ebbing and flowing past his body on that tragic summer morning. Calvi was a man who had built his career on secrets, had achieved wealth and power through membership of a secret society, and who, at the last, was attempting to save his career and his bank by threatening to spill those very same secrets. The ‘Emulation First Degree Ritual’ can be bought in any respectable masonic bookshop and stresses over and again the good mason’s commitment to secrecy. The most bloodthirsty parts of the oath are coyly concealed behind the initial letters of each word. The relevant passage concludes reassuringly: ‘The inclusion of such a penalty is unnecessary, for the Obligation you have taken this evening is binding on you for so long as you shall live.’[3]

Observers have seen another potential level of meaning in the location of Calvi’s death. Now painted blood red, in 1982 Blackfriars Bridge bore the pale blue and white livery of the Argentine national flag: a possible reference to the Falklands war, which had ended four days before Calvi’s death, and to the Ambrosiano’s role in funding Argentina’s arms purchases? Or perhaps just the blue and white of a masonic apron?

If these interpretations were really to hold true, to amount to more than just a fortunate coincidence from the point of view of Calvi’s killers, one would have to assume that they had deliberately arranged for his death to be enacted under that particular bridge. It is difficult to believe, however, that the scaffolding, which had been erected five weeks earlier as part of regular maintenance work on the Thames river bank, had been specially placed there as part of an international murder plot. And it would be hard anyway to stage a death by hanging without having recourse to a noose. The bricks and stones in Calvi’s pockets, with their masonic association, do appear to constitute a deliberate symbolic message rather than a necessary part of the mechanics of his death. They might make practical sense if they were intended to make his body sink, but it seems highly unlikely that they were anything but an awkward encumbrance for a hanging and it is inconceivable that Calvi would have thrust a half brick on top of his own genitals, however suicidal his mood.

If the circumstances of Calvi’s death were rich in masonic symbolism, his relationship to freemasonry in London is much less clear. Italian reporting on the Calvi affair is full of tales of the enormously powerful Grand Mother Lodge in London, a source of the international financial power of Calvi, Gelli and Ortolani and a natural port of call for Calvi in a time of difficulty. It is still not clear, however, who Calvi’s masonic contacts were, if any. As well as being a member of P2 – which he publicly denied to the last – Calvi was a member of Gelli’s World Organization of Masonic Thought and Assistance. When questioned by the P2 Commission he admitted membership of a secret foreign lodge but refused to divulge its identity. It has been variously suggested that he was a member of the City Lodge no. 901, of the Royal Alpha Lodge no. 16, or of the Navy Lodge no. 2612 – in which Prince Philip has been a dormant member for many years. Martin Short, in his book Inside the Brotherhood, claims Calvi visited a London lodge in which the banker Peter De Savary was treasurer and where a member of the British royal family also belonged.[4]

Calvi certainly knew De Savary. The two men had discussed a possible merger of their Bahamas banks, Calvi’s BAOL and De Savary’s Artoc Bank and Trust, and Calvi hoped the connection would lead to an infusion of desperately needed fresh funds as a result of De Savary’s ties to the Arab banking world. Calvi and his wife had stayed at the St James’ Club in London, which was owned by De Savary, and De Savary told police he had been in contact with Calvi at about the time of his disappearance from Italy and was expecting to see him in a few weeks in the Bahamas.

The United Grand Lodge of England, which one would think ought to know, still professes ignorance as to Calvi’s masonic contacts in London. John Hamill, the Grand Lodge’s urbane and patient spokesman, told me he was certain Calvi had never been a member of a London lodge. ‘We computerized membership in the mid 1980s and we ran a check. He was certainly not a member of a lodge under the United Grand Lodge in London. He could have visited London lodges as a guest.’ Gelli and Ortolani, too, were not members of a London lodge but could have been invited as guests. There are around 400 lodges in the City and more than 1,500 in London as a whole, so checking visitors’ books would have been a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack, Hamill said. ‘We did quite a bit of checking at the time of the P2 affair and drew blanks all round.’ What he could say, Hamill made clear, was that Peter De Savary’s name did not appear in the UGLE’s membership registry, that the Alpha Lodge was the Grand Master’s private lodge, met about three times a year for dinner and did not accept visitors, and that he knew from personal experience that Calvi had not been a member of the Navy Lodge. It was extremely unlikely Calvi had attended the City 901 Lodge, he added, since that was frequented by small businessmen rather than high-flying international bankers. ‘I checked the register and the nearest thing to a financier was an insurance salesman,’ he told me.[5]

One definite international masonic connection Calvi appears to have had is to masonic lodges in the Bahamas. Among his personal papers was a handwritten note in English with a calendar of meetings at the Lodge of Unity no. 8760 and the Royal Victoria Lodge no. 443, plus a simple hand-drawn map showing how to reach the masonic temple in Bay Street, Nassau. ‘If he did visit it was purely as a guest,’ Hamill told me, and the Bahamas lodges had no particular corresponding relationship with UGLE lodges in London. Hamill remains sceptical of the masonic interpretations of Calvi’s death. ‘There are freemasons who will see masonic symbolism in the proverbial two flies climbing up a wall,’ he said. ‘I have a wide masonic acquaintance in London and have yet to come across someone who actually met him.’ It is of course possible that neither Calvi, Gelli, nor Ortolani had any London masonic connection at all, but used such a mystifying claim as part of their bluff.

Pragmatic readers may dismiss the masonic symbolism in the staging of Calvi’s death, but a series of threatening messages the banker appears to have received before his death could give them pause for thought. The most extraordinary of these was a postcard of Blackfriars Bridge that was found in a secret drawer of a cupboard in the Calvis’ country home at Drezzo and which had presumably been received by Calvi before he left Italy. It was found by Anna Calvi when she was going through her father’s papers in around 1984 and handed to her uncle Leone for safekeeping or delivery to the Milan magistrates. Leone Calvi has denied such a postcard was found and the original, unfortunately, has now been lost. Anna described the episode in evidence to Milan magistrates in 1994 and confirmed it again at the Rome murder trial. ‘In the drawer there was a colour postcard of Blackfriars Bridge, I can’t remember whether it had been sent or not,’ Anna told the prosecutor. Attached to it with a paperclip was a business card bearing an Italian name and a handwritten message: ‘Who does it should expect it.’ Anna added: ‘I remember well that the business card was with the postcard and that what struck me then was the association with the photograph of the bridge. We didn’t attach too much importance to the thing because it seemed strange that someone should make such grave threats and attach their own visiting card.’

In the evidence filed at the Calvi murder trial is a photocopy of a handwritten note which reads: ‘From the manual of the Young Marmots: “WHO DOES IT SHOULD EXPECT IT” G.M.’ On the same sheet of paper there is a photocopy of a business card in the name of Dr Emanuele Dubini, the president of the Association of Italian Joint Stock Companies. It would certainly be very strange if someone had sent a threatening message to Calvi before his death and associated it with a photograph of Blackfriars Bridge and his own visiting card. The connection may have been made by Calvi himself, rather than the sender, but the three items appear to have been found together by Anna as she was going through her father’s papers.

Dubini was the epitome of vagueness when I visited him in his central Milan home to ask him about this episode. He could remember nothing about it, he told me, and it was hard to object, since he had reached the ripe age of 97. He had known Pope Paul VI as archbishop of Milan, and after he became pope used to visit him in the Vatican twice a year to brief him on the state of Italian industry. He had also known Archbishop Marcinkus, he told me, and Calvi as well, though he hadn’t cared for him. He had even known Licio Gelli, he said, but not well.

During his career Dubini had represented Pirelli in the association of northern industrialists and moved on to represent Italian business globally as president of the Association of Italian Joint Stock Companies, a role in which he had been succeeded by Roberto Calvi. He had had good relations with the Americans, he recalled, visiting Washington twice a year to talk to the State Department’s Italian experts. ‘They knew more about our affairs than we did ourselves,’ he told me.

Dubini was open about his dislike of Calvi. Whether he had sent him a threatening message attached to his official business card – an act of extraordinary imprudence – it wasn’t really possible to say, as Dubini appeared to have no recollection of the matter. He did seem to have operated in international finance at a level where Roberto Calvi must – at the end – have constituted a strategic challenge, but it was impossible to get a clear word from him on exactly what he had done.[6]

To make real sense, the threatening message with the postcard of Blackfriars Bridge had to be sent before Calvi’s death – and it appears that he had indeed received it and filed it away in his secret drawer – and after 10 May, the date the scaffolding was erected under the bridge, making Calvi’s method of death technically possible. Blackfriars Bridge, like many London bridges, has chains hanging underneath its arches to facilitate the mooring of boats. Calvi could conceivably have been left hanging from these permanent chains, but the operation would have been considerably more difficult than the one that made use of the conveniently placed builders’ scaffolding.

Calvi lived the last period of his life in a climate of intense fear, and another cryptic message evoking potential enemies and a fateful bridge was sent to him at the Banco Ambrosiano, arriving after his departure from Italy. Again the message was in postcard form. It was delivered by the bank to Calvi’s lawyers after his death and by them to the Carabinieri in Milan for investigation in June 1985. This time the postcards were actually two and they represented the same scene: the Chapel of San Michele at Novacella near Bressanone in the South Tyrol; a reference to Calvi’s former friend Michele Sindona perhaps? Both postcards were addressed in black felt pen to the ‘Illustrious President of the Banco AmBrosiano, RoBerto Calvi’. Every ‘B’ in the address, including in the middle of words, was capitalized, strengthening the impression that the writer wanted to send a cryptic message. The message side of the postcards bore the letters Mi, for Milan, and an illegible signature, both in red felt pen. One of them seemed particularly significant because it was dated by hand 15 June 82 – two days before Calvi’s death – and bore an Italian stamp evoking Il Gioco del Ponte (The Game of the Bridge), a traditional Pisan game recalling feats of arms from the Middle Ages and now played as a kind of tug-of-war in reverse.

The second bore a less immediately evocative stamp showing the ‘Castle of Cerro al Volturno’ and did not have a postmark, possibly having been delivered to the bank by hand. Curiously, neither stamp had been licked and attached to the card in the normal way but both were attached by paperclip, leading the Calvi family’s lawyers to surmise that ‘the sender wanted to communicate the concept that he – the sender – didn’t use his tongue even to attach stamps’. This was before the age of DNA identification, so there was no question of the sender being worried about the possibility of leaving DNA traces in his saliva. Calvi was in danger because of the way he was threatening to use his tongue, so the symbolic significance of the paperclips might not have been lost on him. If the postcard with a stamp evoking a bridge was indeed sent in advance of Calvi’s death it would appear to indicate that the sender was aware of his imminent fate and possibly a participant in the international conspiracy that shepherded him to Blackfriars Bridge. The insistence on the bridge theme in these various cryptic messages does seem to indicate that the means of Calvi’s death were not left to chance or improvised at the last minute. And if that reading of the messages is correct, it gives additional resonance to the symbolic elements of his hanging.

Bruno Rossini, the Calvi family lawyer at the time, recalled the distinct lack of enthusiasm among Carabinieri officers when he delivered the postcards that had arrived at the bank to them. ‘The Calvi case was very sensitive. No one wanted to deal with it,’ he told me. ‘Calvi could have been killed in a hundred ways without leaving a trace. The significance of the method they chose was this: there should be no juridical proof of murder, and in fact the first coroner said it was suicide, but at the same time all the players must understand that we have killed him.’ It was a ‘crime of power’, Rossini said, and Carboni was the character who had led Tom Thumb into the woods.[7]

A witness linking Calvi’s murder to freemasonry in a direct and concrete way came forward to talk in 1992. He was ideally placed to know about the subject since he was himself a banker operating very much in the same world as Roberto Calvi and he claimed – astonishingly – that he had personally delivered a suitcase containing $5 million to Calvi’s killers. He was the credit manager of Rothschild Bank AG in Zurich, where he had worked for some 20 years, and his name was Jørg Heer. Heer had fallen out with the bank, which accused him of pocketing illegal kickbacks in return for unsecured and unapproved loans, which had caused the bank losses of $155 million. Heer retorted that he had broken the law but that he had done so on behalf of the bank and because it was bank policy, he alleged. In a series of newspaper interviews he claimed that Rothschild’s had thrived on the illegal export of currency from Italy, charging its valued Italian clients premium prices to shield them from their own country’s law.

But Heer’s most sensational claim concerned the murder of Roberto Calvi. The European edition of the Wall Street Journal (11–12 December 1992) reported: ‘He tells of receiving a phone call from an Italian whom he won’t name, but who he says was a close aide to an official of the secretive P2 Masonic Lodge. The message was short: We need your services for a “very secret” action. Mr Heer agreed, and a leather suitcase was delivered to the bank, along with an envelope containing half a dollar bill. About a week later, Mr Heer says, two men he describes only as “rather odd” arrived at the bank in an armoured Mercedes with the other half of the dollar bill. Mr Heer handed over the suitcase. Later, he says, he asked the P2 Lodge official’s aide what the whole affair had been about. He says he was told: “This money was for the killers of Calvi”.’

Heer was a little more forthcoming the following January, when a reporter from the Italian news magazine Panorama caught up with him in Madrid. He told basically the same story with slight modifications and more detail. The person who telephoned him, he said, was a senior aide to Licio Gelli and the half banknote used to identify the authorized recipients of the money was now a $100 bill. Looking inside the suitcase, Heer saw that it was full of $10 and $100 bills for an estimated value of around $5 million. ‘About two weeks later two people came unannounced to the bank. They were Italians, with an armoured Mercedes. They showed me the other half of the $100 bill and they left with the suitcase.’ The payment took place about five weeks after Calvi’s death, and Heer said he learned of its true purpose a little while later from a relative of the person who had ordered the operation, who was a major client of the bank and a friend of Heer’s. His reaction? ‘I was shocked. One can do many things in life, but this was beyond the limit.’

In his interview with Panorama (3 January 1993), Heer revealed his detailed knowledge of Italian political corruption. It was the kind of information that gave him a sense of being ‘The King of Italy’, it was the kind of information that gave power, and it was the kind of information which he shared with a fellow banker named Roberto Calvi. ‘Several of our clients, after receiving major contracts for public works, told us to make payments to other Swiss accounts. I can’t affirm that that money went to politicians, but I suspect that it did. In short, if I made a payment, let’s say, to account Rosemarie at the UBS, I can’t know whether a prime minister was concealed behind that name.’

Heer, a homosexual aesthete, enjoyed the good life that Rothschild money brought him. He collected vintage cars and modern art, boats, fine wines and properties in Switzerland and Spain. His Zurich lawyer, Valentin Landmann, was impressed by Heer’s intelligence and the quality of his knowledge. ‘Many things Heer described came up later in Italian court proceedings, and there were no instances where it was proved that he lied,’ Landmann told me. ‘He was reliable but unbelievable; an interesting mixture.’ Landmann said Heer’s work for Rothschild’s gave him knowledge of Italy’s important industrial families, of dubious families and of politicians. Heer had even spoken of his knowledge of murders connected to business frauds in Italy, Landmann said, but the lawyer had not pressed him on the issue because it was not strictly relevant to his defence. ‘His descriptions were like Goya’s paintings, not very favourable to the people described, but very accurate. He thought about writing a book, but I never saw a manuscript,’ Landmann said. ‘He told us things that were later part of an indictment against Andreotti. He mentioned a flat provided to a family member of the prime minister.’

Heer and Rothschild were involved in screening the ownership of a significant stake in Italy’s Rizzoli publishing group at the time it was being taken over by Calvi’s La Centrale holding company. ‘Heer had contact with Banco Ambrosiano managers,’ Landmann told me. ‘He described his dealings with the P2 Lodge, mentioned who gave the orders, and was in touch with Gelli and Ortolani.’ As a member of this inner circle it is therefore plausible that he might be trusted even with the organization’s most dangerous secrets, particularly if he was already involved in illegalities on its behalf. Why he should have chosen to go public with the story of the secret payment to Calvi’s killers remains something of a mystery however. It was perhaps simply exasperation with his former employer. The decision was taken, Landmann said, before Heer learned he was suffering from AIDS. Sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for embezzlement, Heer was released early and died in a Zurich hospice in 2001, his alleged brush with Calvi’s killers just one of the unresolved mysteries of a controversial career.

Licio Gelli, who has reportedly been under investigation for Calvi’s murder in a secret parallel inquiry about which very little has emerged, was not shy about discussing the circumstances of his ‘friend’s’ death when I visited him at Villa Wanda. ‘If I was an investigator I would want to know who took him to London and why. They will have altered his appearance, I imagine. Someone who wants to take his own life would simply open the window and throw himself down. Instead, he eludes his surveillance and walks for 10 kilometres,’ Gelli said, before moving on to highlight other anomalies in Calvi’s death. ‘All those bricks and stones that they put on him, that was stupid. You load someone with bricks if they have to sink, not if they are going to remain above water.’ Gelli also expressed scepticism about Calvi’s ability to climb out over the scaffolding in his leather-soled city shoes. ‘I think they suicided him. They induced him to leave the hotel; they will have massacred him and hanged him when he was already dead. This was a premeditated murder carried out by several people. He would have defended himself if it had been just one person, they must have been two or three.’

The P2 boss said he had always asked himself who might have been behind it but had found no answer, as Calvi did not have enemies. He did suggest that the depredation of the troubled Banco Ambrosiano by those who acquired control of it after the bankruptcy could have featured among the motives, however. ‘They bought gold as scrap for the price of scrap-iron,’ he said. Gelli said the sale of any one of the jewels in Calvi’s financial empire – the Banca del Gottardo, Banca Cattolica, Credito Varesino or Assicurazioni Savoia – would have been enough to cover the Ambrosiano’s debt. ‘If the Vatican’s letters of patronage were valid then the Banco Ambrosiano wasn’t bankrupt. They didn’t want to save the Ambrosiano. They took advantage of those days in August, when no one was around, to assume control.’ Gelli confirmed the delicate role of the Banca del Gottardo in the whole affair – ‘it was a frontier bank, with the entrance in one state and the exit in another’ – and that Calvi was threatening to reveal what he knew and what he had done on behalf of the Vatican.[8]

Gelli seemed unperturbed as he discussed the subject of Calvi’s death, a crime of which he has himself been accused by numerous sources. It was hard to associate this mild-mannered and inoffensive old gentleman with the trail of murder and mayhem he is reputed to have left behind him.

The cold war period left a trail of violence and mystery in the Vatican, with the violence washing around the figure even of the pope himself. Given the several suggestions that Cardinal Eugène Tisserant was involved in financial scandals possibly related to the Cold War, it is worth returning a second time to this remarkable character. Tisserant was born in Nancy in northern France in 1884 and was ordained priest in 1907, becoming one of the few senior clergyman of his time to have participated in a cavalry charge while in holy orders. France’s anti-clerical Third Republic required all adult males to perform military service and there were no exemptions, even for priests. A gifted linguist who had already mastered Arabic, Hebrew, Ethiopian and Assyrian, his talents were later harnessed by the military intelligence service to further French colonial ambitions in Syria and Lebanon.

With the arrival of peace Tisserant returned to his biblical studies in Rome, where he was head of the Vatican library from 1930 to 1936. In that year he was appointed head of the Congregation for the Eastern Churches, a crucial position for the church’s relations with the communist world, which he would occupy for the next 23 years.

In 1962 he was charged with a delicate diplomatic mission by Pope John XXIII, a man for whose intellectual abilities he had scant regard. At a secret meeting with a representative of the Russian Orthodox church near the northern French town of Metz, he negotiated a remarkable non-aggression pact. Representatives of the Orthodox church would be allowed to participate as observers at the forthcoming Second Vatican Council in return for an undertaking that the Council would not utter any public condemnation of communism, as many of its participants would have wished. Tisserant’s counterpart in the Metz negotiations was Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad, whose meteoric rise through the Orthodox hierarchy was widely seen as confirmation that he also belonged to the KGB. It was all the more remarkable therefore, given this highly delicate background, that Nikodim should collapse and die of a heart attack in the Vatican while paying a courtesy visit to the newly elected Pope John Paul I. Further complicating the issue was the suggestion, reported by Peter Hebblethwaite in the National Catholic Reporter in 1993, that Nikodim was ‘secretly a Catholic bishop, recognized by Rome with jurisdiction from Pope Paul VI throughout Russia’. Just 23 days later John Paul I would also be dead under circumstances that gave rise to suspicion. The contradictory information provided about his death by the Vatican and speculation that he would not have tolerated Archbishop Marcinkus’s continuing dalliance with Roberto Calvi and his P2 associates only served to strengthen the doubts. The Vatican’s untruthful insistence that the pope’s body had been found by his secretary, rather than a nun, added to the confusion and subsequent distrust, confirming an observation made to me by Flavio Carboni: ‘The Vatican will forgive anything, except scandal.’

If the alleged heart attacks that claimed the lives of Nikodim and Papa Luciani in quick succession remain open to question, there were other violent episodes involving the pope and Italy’s premier Catholic bank where the criminal intent was all too evident. On 13 May 1981 a Turkish gunman shot and seriously wounded Pope John Paul II as he toured St Peter’s Square in an open-topped jeep. Two shots from Mehmet Ali Agca’s 9mm Browning pistol struck the pope in the abdomen, in the left index finger and the right forearm. Several trials and hundreds of thousands of words of journalistic, historical and intelligence analysis have left the background to the attack shrouded in fog.

As Felipe Turover has suggested, the most obvious reading of the assassination attempt was as an Eastern Bloc response to the pope’s anti-communist activities, particularly in Poland. A number of alternative theories have been put forward that suggest a connection to the Banco Ambrosiano affair. Flavio Carboni told magistrates in 1993 that Calvi had identified the motive for the attack on the pope in the Vatican’s anti-communist strategy, pursued in Latin America and Poland with the help of the Banco Ambrosiano.

Other theories link the Agca case to the Ambrosiano, but in a completely different interpretative scenario. One, outlined in SISMI reports that were presented in evidence at the Calvi murder trial, draws a connection between the right-wing Grey Wolves organization in Turkey, to which Agca belonged, and the right-wing Italian extremist Stefano Delle Chiaie. An undated report on ‘The Agca Case’ quotes Francesco Pazienza as accusing the United States government of protecting Stefano Delle Chiaie and of hiding vital information about the plot to kill Pope John Paul II. It links Delle Chiaie to Abdullah Catli, a leader of the Grey Wolves and alleged accomplice of Agca in the attack, underlining the ideological affinities between Delle Chiaie and Catli. The two men were linked by fierce anti-communism and hatred of the Roman Catholic church, as well as by their alleged involvement in illegal arms and drug trafficking. Delle Chiaie had participated in the so-called ‘cocaine coup’ in Bolivia in July 1980, the report said. ‘Joachim Fiebelkorn . . . currently in prison in West Germany, has told the German police that Delle Chiaie acted as intermediary between the Bolivian cocaine colonels and the Sicilian heroin bosses.’ The Turkish crime bosses of the Grey Wolves were involved in the same activities, trafficking in arms and drugs with a Bulgarian state-controlled import-export firm called Kintex. ‘The Turkish godfathers who ran the traffic in arms and drugs through Bulgaria were involved – through a series of contacts with the Syrian businessman Henri Arsan – in contraband operations touching Milan, Zurich, London and New York,’ the report said. Such business activities may well have brought both Delle Chiaie and the Turkish crime lords into contact with some of the mafia bosses suspected of killing Calvi.

Henri Arsan, the arms trafficker mentioned in the secret service report, provides yet another link between the attack on the pope and the Banco Ambrosiano. The Syrian smuggler, who had become an informant of the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in 1973 and who also worked for the CIA – if Angelo Izzo is to be believed – was arrested in November 1982 on suspicion of illegal arms and drug-dealing by a young prosecutor from the northern town of Trento, Carlo Palermo. An alleged accomplice in his organization was Bekir Celenk, a member of the Turkish Grey Wolves and another suspect in Agca’s plot to shoot the pope. Arsan was accused of importing large quantities of morphine base from Turkey, which he delivered to the Sicilian mafia to be refined into heroin. On the arms front, he was accused of using false end-user certificates to arm both sides in the Iran–Iraq war.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Arsan’s business was his address. The Syrian, who died of a heart attack in Milan’s San Vittore prison one year after his arrest, was the owner of a Liechtenstein company called Stibam International Transport, with offices in London, Frankfurt, Buenos Aires, Madrid and New York. Its principal office, however, was at Via Oldofredi no. 2 in Milan, a five-room apartment rented from the Banco Ambrosiano and situated directly above the private home of the bank’s deputy chairman, Roberto Rosone. Rosone said he had no dealings with the Stibam people and was clearly not keen to discuss the subject when I questioned him about it during a visit to his home. The Ambrosiano not only provided Arsan with his Milan business address but also helped to finance and process some of his arms exports. Banco Ambrosiano billing information, for example, shows Stibam sent a consignment of 3,500 Beretta handguns and related munitions worth a total of 203 million lire to Qatar in 1977. The recipient was a Mr Hassan El Katib and the invoice bears an export authorization number and the stamp of the Banco Ambrosiano dated 4.2.77.

As well as the ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ connections to the attack on the pope, a third hypothesis emerged in the course of the investigation that suggested the pope might have been the victim of a ‘Vatican’ connection, the attack being commissioned by senior church figures as part of an internal Vatican power struggle.

Another mysterious event, the kidnapping of the daughter of a Vatican employee, gave new life to the ‘internal’ theory and renewed suspicions that the Vatican was not cooperating fully with Italian investigators. Emanuela Orlandi, the 16-year-old daughter of a Vatican messenger and herself a citizen of the Vatican City State, disappeared without trace on the evening of 22 June 1983 after attending a flute lesson in a building belonging to the Vatican at Piazza Sant’Apollinare no. 49 in the centre of Rome. Emanuela’s father, Ercole Orlandi, had a lowly job in the Vatican, but the family lived in a flat underneath that of Angelo Gugel, a close personal collaborator of Pope John Paul II, who had a daughter of the same age. At around that time Gugel’s daughter, Raffaella, had had the impression she was being followed; it is possible Emanuela’s kidnappers had seized the wrong girl. Two weeks later an organization calling itself the ‘Turkes Anti-Christian Turkish Liberation Front’ claimed responsibility for the kidnap and offered to exchange the girl for Agca. The group’s name contained a reference to Colonel Alpaslan Turkes, the founder of the right-wing National Action party, which had in its turn formed a paramilitary youth group . . . known as the Grey Wolves. The ‘Turkes’ group never produced persuasive evidence that it had Emanuela in its custody.

Italian investigators found the Vatican authorities uncooperative, gaining the impression that the Holy See was pursuing secret negotiations that it was not prepared to share with Italian colleagues. Vincenzo Parisi, the deputy head of the domestic intelligence service SISDE, felt the Orlandi case had become the subject of a sophisticated disinformation campaign in which the Vatican itself was involved. The investigators began to suspect that the Turkes messages and the negotiations for the release of Agca were simply play-acting, efforts to distract attention from what was really at stake. But what was that? ‘In the Vatican the prevailing opinion is that the people responsible for the kidnap belong to the world of common crime, and that the proposal for an exchange with Agca is just an excuse to extort considerable sums of money [from the Vatican] in exchange for the release of the girl, and to throw the investigators off the track,’[9] the ANSA news agency reported. One possibility was that the money being demanded was money that a criminal organization believed belonged to it by right: the money entrusted to Roberto Calvi and Paul Marcinkus by Cosa Nostra perhaps?

Some observers have noted the remarkable resemblance between an identikit made by police of a young man seen talking to Emanuela after her music lesson and Ernesto ‘Renatino’ De Pedis, a leading member of the Magliana Band. After a fruitful life in the Rome underworld, De Pedis was gunned down in a narrow street full of antiques shops off the central Campo dei Fiori square on 2 February 1990. His violent death and previous career in crime did not prevent him from receiving an extremely rare honour – normally reserved for popes, cardinals and bishops: burial in the crypt of a prestigious Roman church. By the strangest of coincidences the church was that of Sant’Apollinare, an eighteenth-century basilica adjoining the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music whence Emanuela Orlandi had disappeared eight years earlier.

De Pedis had made plenty of money from the Magliana’s criminal activities, particularly loan-sharking and illegal gambling, so could afford to be generous when it came to good works. His funeral was celebrated by Monsignor Piero Vergari, who cited De Pedis’s generosity towards the poor of the basilica as well as to priests and seminarians, when writing to Cardinal Ugo Poletti to seek approval for his burial in the crypt. Poletti agreed, and De Pedis’s body was removed from its initial resting place in the Verano cemetery and installed in some pomp beneath the church of Sant’Apollinare. Photos of the crypt show a white marble tomb with the name ‘Renatino’ picked out in gold and sapphires on the side. A photo of De Pedis in a silver frame rests on top of the tomb, flanked by a small terracotta angel. The church and adjoining building were bought by Opus Dei two years after De Pedis’s burial. The new management, though bearing no responsibility for the questionable decision to grant him eternal hospitality, is not keen on allowing visitors into the crypt, officially off-limits because of problems of ‘damp’.

The identikit is not the only element linking De Pedis to the disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi. An anonymous caller told the current affairs television programme Chi l’ha visto? (Who has seen them?) in 2005: ‘Do you want to resolve the Emanuela Orlandi case? Then look inside the tomb of De Pedis...’ Antonio Mancini, De Pedis’s former colleague in crime, has also accused him of responsibility for the kidnap. He told an interviewer from the same TV programme that the kidnap was carried out by members of the Magliana Band from the Testaccio quarter of Rome, acting on the orders of Renato De Pedis.

The Banda della Magliana played an important role in another violent episode that directly affected the life of the Banco Ambrosiano and which gives a clear idea of the climate in which the bank operated during Calvi’s last years. That episode too was located in Via Oldofredi, scene of the Stibam offices, of a branch of the Banco Ambrosiano and of Roberto Rosone’s private residence. It was the morning of 27 April 1982, only two months before Calvi’s death, and Rosone was on his way to the office. He had just left his home and was walking to his chauffeur-driven car. ‘I saw a handsome-looking man in a camel overcoat. You see things, but you don’t understand,’ Rosone told me. The man walked up to him and suddenly shot him at close range in the thigh. ‘The gun misfired. He recocked it and the bullet hit me in the leg, narrowly missing my testicles, which I was very attached to at the time.’[10] The man ran to a waiting motorbike and was escaping with an accomplice when an Ambrosiano security guard returned fire, hitting him in the head. The camel-coated gentleman left sprawling in the street turned out to be Danilo Abbruciati, a senior boss of the Magliana Band. Inside a matchbox on his body was a telephone number for Ernesto Diotallevi, Carboni’s associate and a fellow defendant in the Calvi murder trial.

Calvi visited Rosone in hospital, looking grey in the face and in a state of extreme agitation: ‘Mamma mia, what is happening to us? Everyone is going mad.’ Calvi himself might have been responsible, Rosone reflected, seeking to punish his deputy’s disloyalty after Rosone suggested the chairman should be replaced because of his embarrassing arrest on the currency charges. But Pazienza and Carboni could have had a motive too, since Rosone was opposing Calvi’s plans to shower them with unsecured loans. Carboni and Diotallevi were convicted by a Milan court of commissioning the attack but subsequently acquitted on appeal. The Sardinian businessman had passed on $530,000 of Ambrosiano money to Diotallevi on 4 May 1982, just a week after the shooting. It was simply the repayment of a debt, he explained, and the judges of the Court of Cassation believed him.

16

Slow Progress

Neither British nor Italian justice has fared particularly well when it came to dealing with the Calvi case. Having jumped to the conclusion that Mr Calvini had committed suicide, the British police were loath to question their initial assumptions, and a serious investigation into the foreign background to the hypothetical murder of a foreign banker may not have been considered the best use of Britain’s public resources. Magistrates in Italy too, initially seem to have been happy to accept the suicide verdict as an excuse to do little. On both sides there seems to have been a sense that the Calvi affair was a Pandora’s box, that powerful interests were involved and that it was much better to sit on the lid.

This at least was the initial impression of Robert Clarke, the London lawyer who had helped confirm Calvi’s travel arrangements. Clarke recalled his shock when he received a call on 20 June 1982 from Lovat MacDonald’s office in Geneva asking him to read the Sunday newspapers and then call them back. There was the news: ‘God’s banker found hanged’ and reports explaining how police didn’t know how Calvi had got into the country or where he had been staying. Clarke called the police on Monday morning to offer the information in his possession: how Calvi had arrived in the country and where he had been staying. He spoke to Detective Inspector John White of the City Police, who told him he was too busy to see him until the next day, and later postponed their appointment to Wednesday. ‘I was amazed. There was a man found hanging off a bridge with umpteen millions and they didn’t really want to know,’[1] he told me.

On finally meeting White, Clarke mentioned what he had heard from Kunz about Calvi wanting to make a $35 million deposit, but again White didn’t seem to be interested. ‘Oh, that’s telephone numbers to me, sir,’ the investigator replied. The lawyer asked whether an autopsy had been done to see if there were traces of drugs in the body. ‘He gave me a very curious look and he said: “Well, sir, we’ve taken all the bits and pieces away.” He didn’t seem to be very excited about events. It was considered suicide and that was that,’ Clarke said. ‘I formed a distinct impression there was a ring around the whole operation.’[2]

A distinct lack of enthusiasm was what struck police sergeant Francesco Rosato when he travelled to London in the early hours of Saturday 19 June to act as interpreter for a delegation of senior police officers and the Rome public prosecutor. The group was in London from 3 a.m. to 8 a.m., during which time they visited Snow Hill police station, examined Calvi’s body at the morgue and paid a fleeting visit to Blackfriars Bridge. ‘The English police asked us why we had got up in the middle of the night for something that was of no importance for them,’ Rosato told the Rome murder trial. He returned to London the following Monday to collaborate with his English colleagues on the first phase of the investigation, but found that little was happening. ‘My presence was never welcome and collaboration was non-existent,’ he told the court. ‘The English police had only investigated the details of the journey and of Calvi’s accommodation. I reported back that there was absolutely no collaboration and that no inquiries were being made. They told me that further inquiries would be made in three weeks’ time, after the examination by the coroner.’ The key early phase of the investigation was slipping by in virtual inactivity. ‘They always said the same thing: there’s nothing to be done until after the coroner’s examination. After a few days I was invited to go back to Italy, because my presence was totally useless.’[3]

DI John White, who oversaw the controversial early stages of the investigation, insists his officers investigated the case competently and in good faith and that there is still no conclusive proof that Calvi was murdered. His recollections of the case differed significantly from those of Robert Clarke. The retired police officer said there had been no delay in gathering Clarke’s information. ‘Clarke was interviewed on the Monday. The force produced a press release and Clarke got in contact. I went to see him in his office in Gray’s Inn. It must have been the Monday or Tuesday,’ he told me.

White acknowledged that when Calvi’s body was removed from the scaffolding the knot should have been been preserved. The error had happened before he joined the case at around 7 p.m. on the first evening. He had been to meet the Italian police delegation at Heathrow airport, he recalled, and he confirmed that the two forces had been at odds from the start. ‘They wanted to take the body home with them there and then. No chance!’ The City Police had never said they thought it was a case of suicide, he pointed out, only saying there were no suspicious circumstances. ‘Up till my retirement I wasn’t aware of anything I had missed. I tried to be as balanced and honest as possible with everyone. I had nothing to hide. The Italians believed he was murdered but you have to prove it.’

If the Italians were dissatisfied with the collaboration they received from their British colleagues, the same feeling applied in reverse. British investigators felt they had not been fully briefed on the Italian political and financial background to the Calvi case. And the Italians never shared the information from Eligio Paoli about the alleged involvement of Sergio Vaccari in the murder plot. ‘The Italians never mentioned the name of Vaccari to us,’ White said. ‘I drew the Vaccari file from the Met, but I cannot recall there being any connection between the two cases other than the informant Jennings.’ Clearly White did not recall any offer of cooperation from the Vaccari case detective David Harness, who told me his offer of help was rebuffed by the City Police.

The theory that Calvi was taken to his place of death by boat had emerged fairly early on, White acknowledged, but police were not able to find any proof that a boat had actually been to Blackfriars Bridge on the night. It is not clear that any serious effort was ever made to find it, given that suicide was still the primary assumption. ‘It would have been the easiest thing for the City Police to say: “It’s a murder.” We were investigators and we did our job to the best of our ability. We never uncovered any evidence that he was murdered,’ White told me. ‘He may well have been murdered and there may be some evidence, but I’m not aware of it. That’s why the open verdict [in 1983] is the right verdict.’[4]

An open verdict was indeed the result of the second coroner’s inquest in June 1983, a verdict reached after a much more thorough examination of the facts lasting 11 days. Even that was not exhaustive, however. The jury foreman later told The Times that he and his colleagues would probably have returned a verdict of murder by persons unknown if the information that had subsequently emerged in the press had been available to them at the time of their deliberations.

There are, however, a number of episodes that call into question the good faith of the City Police, as well as their competence. Robert Clarke recalled being told his business card had been found on Calvi’s body but that information was never made public. The business card of another leading City lawyer with strong business contacts in Italy was also found in Calvi’s jacket pocket – a potentially important lead, given that Calvi was trying to resolve the Ambrosiano’s financial problems and needed to be in contact with professionals of exactly this type – and that information too was not at first made public. The story was broken by Paul Foot in the Daily Mirror on 22 September 1983, after both London inquests had already come and gone. The lawyer was Colin McFadyean, a senior partner at the top City law firm of Slaughter and May.

McFadyean was interviewed by John White on 21 June 1982, three days after Calvi’s death. In a handwritten note White recorded the scant result: ‘Calvi not known by McFadyean. Shown photograph, not known. No business done for Banco Ambrosiano.’ The lawyer repeated his denial when he was interviewed by Paul Foot more than a year later. McFadyean had many close friends among leading commercial lawyers in Rome and Milan, Foot wrote, but he had never acted for Calvi. Nor was he a Catholic or a freemason. ‘In fact, I find freemasonry rather creepy,’ McFadyean told Foot. ‘When the police told me the dead man was Calvi of the Ambrosiano, I suggested they talk to Mr Ellsworth Donnell.’ Donnell was a director of Peter De Savary’s Artoc bank, in which Calvi’s BAOL had taken a 20 per cent stake in 1981, and one of McFadyean’s clients. Though Donnell managed some of Calvi’s money for him and lived in Chester Square, less than a mile from Chelsea Cloisters, it does not appear that the Italian banker got in touch with him. ‘I can absolutely swear to that,’ Donnell told Foot. ‘He never came anywhere near us.’

One of McFadyean’s Italian clients was Vincenzo Cazzaniga, head of the large holding company Bastogi when it went bankrupt. He was arrested in 1977 on charges of fraud and bribing politicians. McFadyean had ceased acting for him by that point, but the connection was nevertheless an interesting one. Six years earlier Calvi had made a secret pact with Hambros Bank and Michele Sindona to take the company over. The bid had failed and Calvi was left with a large secret shareholding in Bastogi, which he had to conceal in the labyrinthine network of his offshore companies. A close friend and ally of the ultra-conservative Cardinal Giuseppe Siri, Cazzaniga had been chief executive of Esso Italiana for many years, a position which gave him responsibility for channelling CIA and oil multinational payments to Italy’s anti-communist political parties. Part of the money was allegedly funnelled through the Socialist-controlled Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, headed at the time by alleged P2 member Alberto Ferrari.

White later told detectives from Kroll Associates, who had been hired by the Calvi family in 1991, that McFadyean’s business card and statements from McFadyean and Donnell had been presented to the coroners at both inquests. But the card, despite its potential importance, was not mentioned at either inquest and neither coroner called either man to give evidence. What’s more, it was not among the documents found on Calvi’s body that were reproduced in police photographs and the Calvi family was not told about it. Carlo Calvi was indignant that the presence on his father’s body of a business card belonging to the underworld-connected Alvaro Giardili was highly publicized, while that of a top City lawyer – potentially relevant to his father’s efforts to save his bank – was never made public.

In an original draft of his article, which Foot submitted to McFadyean for vetting, the Mirror journalist briefly mentioned Cazzaniga and quoted McFadyean’s denial that there had been any cover-up. Both items were omitted from the published version. ‘I don’t know why this never came out,’ Foot quoted the lawyer as saying in the unpublished draft, which was among prosecution papers presented to the murder trial in Rome. ‘I’ve always been quite open about it, and I’ve never asked anyone to keep my name out of it. It’s an extraordinary mystery, and I’d really like to know how that card got into Calvi’s pocket.’ To be fair to Foot, his covering letter to McFadyean explained that he wanted his interviewee’s approval because he hadn’t recorded the conversation and had only taken notes at its end. He had in any case only learned of McFadyean’s card through his friendship with the lawyer’s daughter and was therefore treating the subject with particular delicacy.

There are other reasons to consider the McFadyean connection potentially significant. Slaughter and May had close ties to Britain’s intelligence establishment dating back to the Second World War, when many of the partners worked for the Special Operations Executive. One wag is reported to have commented on SOE’s early lack of success: ‘Seems to be all may and no slaughter.’[5] John Drewe, the ‘MI6’ art forger, laughed out loud when I showed him a list of McFadyean’s directorships. He was particularly struck by his seat on the board of one particular art and antiquities company. Drewe claimed the company had been used to launder money and to reward people for special services during the Cold War. ‘You want to give your friend in the Cold War a little tip? You say: “Your aunt has died. She has left you this painting.” The company was used to reward people during the Cold War.’[6]

A confidential report on the company in question drawn up for Kroll seemed to point in a similar direction. ‘When the business first started it was . . . specializing in discovering unknown masterpieces, mostly Old Master paintings and drawings, sculpture and antiquities. These were transported out of Europe, mostly to America and Japan, and sold to certain museums . . . anxious to expand their collections and willing to collude in not revealing their places of origin, since this often contravened international agreements on illicit removals of national treasures,’ the anonymous author wrote. The company was formed as a consortium including a financial partner whose identity has never been revealed. The report continued: ‘Is it possible that Roberto Calvi was induced to contribute to the war chest, financing buys? . . . Is it possible Carlo’s father was coming to London to see him regarding payments from investments? The company dealt in huge amounts of money in its clandestine buying.’

The idea is not as far-fetched as it might at first seem. Roberto Calvi collected modern art, doing some clandestine buying himself in Russia, and had contributed financially to the creation of Pope Paul VI’s modern art collection for the Vatican. The pope’s secretary, Monsignor Pasquale Macchi, travelled extensively to build the collection and was accompanied, as English interpreter, on some of the trips by Monsignor Paul Marcinkus – the origin of their friendship, according to one source.

Other names on McFadyean’s list of company directorships brought a flicker of recognition to Gerald James, the former Astra arms manufacturer. ‘Texas Instruments was involved in electronic stuff for weapons’, he told me, while he thought a number of others had traded with Iraq and had been involved in its supergun project.

Zapata Off-Shore Services Ltd recalled the Bush family oil company, Zapata Offshore, that was allegedly used by the CIA as cover in the planning of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

‘A lot of illegal arms operations went though Italy,’ James recalled. BMARC, an Astra subsidiary, had exported a lot of large guns to Iraq, he said. ‘Rapid-firing cannon have to be niterided [a hardening process for the barrels]. Oerlikon Italia had a niteriding department and shipped a lot of weapons to the Middle East after processing them. I suspect Calvi played a big part in all of that,’ he said. ‘Of course it continued after his death. Other banks like BNL and BCCI were heavily involved. I would think Calvi came here [to London] because a lot of the operations he’d been running were probably centred here.’[7]

Calvi himself had a penchant for cloak and dagger activities, as well as an abiding fascination with secret power. Among the scraps of paper found on his body was a narrow strip about three inches long containing a simple alphanumerical code: ten one-digit numbers and their corresponding letters of the alphabet.

For all these reasons it seems extraordinary that the McFadyean connection was not more thoroughly investigated. The apparent lack of interest continues to this day. When City Police sent copies of police photographs reproducing the documents on Calvi’s body to the Rome prosecutor in 2006 the McFadyean business card was still not part of the official collection. Only after a specific request from the prosecutor, Luca Tescaroli, did a reproduction of the card and DI White’s handwritten note of his interview with McFadyean find its way to Rome. Kroll too seems to have been less than forthcoming on the subject. The detective agency reported the list of McFadyean’s directorships to the Calvi family but neglected to mention the potential connections to the arms industry and the world of intelligence.

The kid glove treatment reserved for McFadyean could possibly be explained by his own personal connections to the intelligence world. The Slaughter and May solicitor had seen war service in the Royal Navy, rather than SOE, and had subsequently been recruited to serve in naval intelligence by Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond novels. His transfer to intelligence duties had been the result of a domestic accident: his sight was damaged after a chip flew into his eye while he was chopping wood, making him unfit for service as an officer of the watch. He turned his attention instead to interrogating German prisoners of war, according to an article about his second world war experience by his daughter, Melanie, published in the Guardian Weekend magazine on 6 July 2002. ‘A fluent German-speaker, he was appointed to interrogate U-boat prisoners at a secret Buckinghamshire location,’ Melanie McFadyean wrote. Rather than resorting to violence, the future lawyer preferred to coax information from the prisoners with kindness, taking one out to dinner in Soho and another on a mushroom-picking expedition in the countryside. The results were evidently satisfactory, as at the end of the war he was asked to debrief Admiral Karl Dönitz, the German naval commander, who had been chosen by Adolf Hitler as his successor.

McFadyean, who retired shortly after the Calvi affair, was distinctly unkeen to discuss the subject when I contacted him by letter via Slaughter and May. ‘Nothing has happened in the meanwhile to change what I told Paul Foot. I have no further information since then,’ he told me by telephone. ‘I had quite a lot of Italian clients and knew colleagues in Italy, but they wouldn’t have had my business card. I don’t know who could have given it to him [Calvi]. He never contacted me.’[8]

If there is no proof that freemasonry exerted an influence on the progress of the Calvi inquiry, there is certainly evidence that it was a problem in the City Police at the time. In 1978 a massive investigation into corruption in the City and Metropolitan Police forces had begun, making use of police officers drawn from outside the London forces. For all the effort expended, ‘Operation Countryman’ secured the conviction of only one police officer.

In 1982, the year of Calvi’s death, City Police Detective Philip Cuthbert was found guilty at the Old Bailey of taking up to £80,000 in bribes to secure bail, overlook past convictions and not gather evidence against eight men charged with a 1977 robbery at the City branch of Williams & Glyn’s Bank – a partner with the Banco Ambrosiano in the Inter Alpha Group. Cuthbert, a freemason, was sentenced to three years in prison.[9]

One of the severest critics of the original City Police investigation was a City Police officer himself. Detective Superintendent Trevor Smith, an officer with previous experience in the Metropolitan Police, was asked to begin a reexamination of the case in July 2002. He found a catalogue of errors and omissions that had seriously undermined the early phases of the inquiry and which he listed to devastating effect in testimony to the Rome murder trial. As well as failing to preserve the knot attaching the rope to the scaffolding, his colleagues had failed to fingerprint items found on Calvi’s body or take fingerprints from the scaffolding; failed to search premises or investigate bank accounts associated with Calvi’s death; failed to investigate international travel by Italian citizens in the period around his death; failed to explore alternative theories as to how Calvi’s body arrived at the scaffolding. The body and the crime scene had been mishandled from the start. The body was not photographed before its removal from the scaffolding and it was not searched under controlled conditions at the morgue but at Waterloo Pier, where the bricks in Calvi’s pockets and down his fly were removed and his jacket wrongly buttoned up to be photographed. Particularly damaging was the decision of the original head of the inquiry, Detective Chief Superintendent Barry Tarbun, to suspend most investigative activity for almost a month pending the outcome of the first inquest. An investigation of rentals and thefts from Thames boatyards was not done until ten years later, and then only by private detectives hired by the Calvi family.

‘The post-mortem was very short and not of the type I would have expected in the case of a suspicious death,’ Smith told the court in Rome. ‘There seemed to be a rush to judgment, to the conclusion that it was a suicide.’ A draft report listing the death as ‘fatal incident/suicide’ had been drawn up very early on, Smith said, and officers had briefed Professor Simpson, the pathologist, that Calvi’s death was a probable suicide, influencing the outcome of his examination. Flavio Carboni claimed he arrived in London from Amsterdam on 16 June but no effort was made to corroborate his story at the time. When Smith attempted to do so himself 20 years later, he found flight documentation from that time had been destroyed. And his colleagues had failed to follow up on Odette Morris’s and Carboni’s account of their Gatwick visit on 18 June, allowing a significant change to their stories to pass with no investigative reaction.[10]

Smith’s catalogue of his force’s blunders – at least 20 – was depressing news for his City Police colleagues. But it also made depressing hearing for the five defendants, raising the question as to whether they had been protected by a masonically influenced British police. Carboni’s lawyer, Renato Borzone, was particularly savage, worrying at Smith’s evidence on the controversial trip to Gatwick in particular and accusing the City Police of submitting inaccurate written evidence to the court on the historical background to Calvi’s death. ‘Historically false information has been presented to the court by this man, who has come here to pontificate to us about the omissions of his colleagues,’ Borzone said, in a fiery exchange with the prosecutor at the end of Smith’s two-day deposition. Judge Mario D’Andria apologized to the City policeman for the intemperate performances as he dismissed him at the end of the hearing. Borzone snapped back: ‘I do not apologize.’ ‘He obviously didn’t like what I said,’ Smith commented afterwards.

A number of mafia pentiti have accused two men of being the killers of Roberto Calvi: Vincenzo Casillo, a Camorra boss with ties to the Magliana Band and the secret services, and Francesco Di Carlo. Casillo, who had also been in contact with Francesco Pazienza, was killed in Rome when a bomb went off underneath his car on 29 January 1983, seven months after Calvi’s death. His girlfriend, Giovanna Materazzo, a nightclub dancer known in the underworld as ‘Pesca Vellutata’ (Velvet Peach), was killed by Camorra assassins shortly afterwards on the assumption that she knew too many of her lover’s secrets.

Di Carlo was accused of strangling Calvi by the leading pentito Francesco Marino Mannoia. Di Carlo had acted on the instructions of Pippo Calò to punish Calvi for having embezzled money belonging to Licio Gelli and Cosa Nostra, Mannoia said, and he repeated the gist of his accusations to the Rome murder trial by video link from a secret location in the United States.

Francesco Di Carlo had an explanation for everything. An influential mafia boss who had been close to ‘boss of bosses’ Totò Riina, Di Carlo had been suspended from Cosa Nostra for stealing a consignment of drugs and had moved to England in 1979. Di Carlo claims his suspension was the result of his refusal to play ‘Judas’ in a murder plot targeting his drug trafficking partners Leonardo Caruana and Pasquale Cuntrera, who operated profitably out of Venezuela and Canada. He had been successful in business, acquiring a hotel, a travel agency, a currency exchange and a wine bar. But his most profitable activity was heroin trafficking, conducted under the cover of running an antiques business. In 1985 he was arrested after the seizure in Southampton of 37 kilos of heroin concealed in a consignment of furniture destined for the United States and he was sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment. Eleven years later he was extradited to serve the rest of his sentence in Italy and immediately began collaborating with the authorities. His evidence was valuable for an ongoing investigation into the alleged mafia ties of Silvio Berlusconi and his close Sicilian associate Marcello Dell’Utri, a fact that may have taken the edge off judicial curiosity about his suspected involvement in the Calvi murder. Dell’Utri was sentenced in 2004 to nine years imprisonment for complicity with Cosa Nostra, which he is currently appealing; the investigation into Berlusconi was shelved. Di Carlo was nothing if not well-connected, a fact that may have saved his life on a number of occasions. His indiscretion over the missing drug shipment would normally have been punished by death.

It was true, Di Carlo told the court, that Pippo Calò had been looking for him in June 1982 to ask a favour of him, but this was before the days of mobile phones and he wasn’t able to make contact. Some time later he ran into him in Italy and Calò reassured him that the problem had been taken care of. ‘He told me that he had resolved everything with the Neapolitans.’

Unfortunately for Di Carlo, police investigators discovered that the London-based mafioso had received a significant payment from a mafia colleague just four days before Calvi’s death. On 14 June $100,000 was transferred to his account at Barclays Bank from an account belonging to Alfonso Caruana at the Discount Bank Overseas in Lugano. It was credited to his account as £56,802 on 16 June. That same day – the day Flavio Carboni briefly visited Amsterdam – the same Caruana account transferred $50,000 to an account at the DBO in Amsterdam. Di Carlo told investigators that Caruana sent him the money because he intended to buy a house in the UK and didn’t have a bank account there. Di Carlo passed the money on to him a few days later. Inconveniently for the credibility of his explanation, Di Carlo put a similar amount of money – £40,000 – on deposit for a year with Barclays just over a month later, on 19 July 1982. Being a successful businessman accustomed to handling large sums of money, it is of course possible that the two transactions were unrelated. Di Carlo’s complex explanations of his movements at this time and the reasons why Calò was unable to get hold of him were delivered to the court from behind a protective screen and seemed less than wholly convincing. In 2006 he remained a potential suspect, but no charges had, as yet, been laid against him.

The notion that Casillo had been drafted in to replace Di Carlo raised a whole new can of worms for the prosecution. Casillo was number two in a Camorra faction that was at that time at war with Cosa Nostra, as well as with rival Camorra gangs. Was it believable then that he could be recruited to perform such an important task by his Cosa Nostra enemies? Hours of contradictory testimony were expended on the shifting kaleidoscope of alliance and enmity in the world of organized crime at the time and on the mercurial loyalties of Casillo himself. If it didn’t seem to be clarifying the question of who really murdered Roberto Calvi, it did give the court a crash course in the traditions and folklore of the criminal underworld.

17

Trials and Tribulations

The City Police may have underperformed in its response to the Calvi case, but the Italian judicial authorities fared little better. The suicide and then ‘open’ verdicts of the London coroners initially provided their colleagues in Italy with an excuse to skirt round the murder issue. And the detailed information provided by Eligio Paoli to the finance police in Trieste, highlighting the alleged role of Sergio Vaccari in the affair, does not appear to have been passed on to British investigators. The political, financial and historical background is essential if one is to understand Calvi’s death; it was in Italy and it remained there, at least for the first 20 years. A succession of Rome and Milan magistrates attempted to probe the case in good faith, while others of their colleagues sat on the Pandora’s box.

The murder hypothesis first gained official recognition in Italy in 1988, when a civil court in Milan ruled that Calvi’s life insurer, Assicurazioni Generali, was obliged to pay his family under the terms of their contract. The policy, for a total of 4 billion lire, would have been invalidated if the banker had taken his own life. Though Calvi had good reason for feeling suicidal on 17 June 1982, the court said, the evidence for murder was more persuasive. The court organized the reconstruction of the scaffolding under Blackfriars Bridge and employed a stuntman of Calvi’s stature to test the feasibility of his suicide under the light and tide conditions prevailing at the presumed time of his death. It concluded that it was most likely that Calvi was brought to the scaffolding by other people on a boat and strangled before being suspended from it. The court observed that a large supply of medicinal drugs had been found in the banker’s luggage, which would have allowed him to commit suicide in the relative comfort of his room. ‘The hypothesis of aggression . . . must therefore be considered the most probable and plausible,’ the judges ruled. Calvi, for insurance purposes at least, had been murdered.

New forensic evidence strengthening the murder hypothesis, and the arrival of an energetic young prosecutor, Luca Tescaroli, paved the way for the reopening of the case in July 2003. Potential witnesses were forgetting or dying – Walter Beneforti, for example, died one day before he was due to be questioned by the prosecutor – so time was running out for a meaningful judicial process. Eventually five people would be charged with complicity in the murder of Roberto Calvi, having acted in conjunction with Cosa Nostra and the Camorra. Their motive, the prosecutors said, had been to punish Calvi for embezzling Cosa Nostra’s funds, ensure their own impunity and protect the profits derived from the Banco Ambrosiano’s money-laundering activities, as well as to prevent Calvi from blackmailing his former accomplices in politics, freemasonry and at the IOR.

The trial of the five defendants got under way in a fortified courtroom on the outskirts of Rome on 6 October 2005, more than 23 years after Calvi’s death. There were five television cameras, half a dozen photographers and about 20 reporters on hand to witness the start of what was inevitably billed as one of the ‘trials of the century’. Proceedings in the ‘bunker courtroom’ of Rebibbia prison offered a unique and perhaps last opportunity to clarify one of the enduring mysteries of recent Italian history. Two judges and 12 jurors wearing tricolour sashes would have to pick their way through months of evidence evoking a largely vanished era when criminal and terrorist groups were a law unto themselves, when Italy was partly governed by occult forces and when the Cold War provided an ideal excuse for the secret exercise of unaccountable power. Calvi had been at the heart of that system and his threat to go public with what he knew could well have been the key to his murder. But would the court proceedings make sense of the story?

Flavio Carboni arrived punctually, looking a little nervous. Pippo Calò, the mafia boss, was connected to the court by video link from his prison at Ascoli Piceno. His image appeared on television screens distributed around the edges of the courtroom. Thin and with a white beard, he looked relaxed, as a practised veteran of such affairs; he was already serving life imprisonment for a terrorist bombing – the only defendant in custody at the time – and had several other ongoing trials making claims on his attention. Silvano Vittor, Manuela Kleinszig and Ernesto Diotallevi were absent, the last two evidently determined to boycott the court proceedings, and under no obligation to attend. The press would soon melt away too, with the exception of two RAI documentary teams; the Italian public had tired of the Calvi story, the events had occurred more than two decades ago, and there was a constant risk that what appeared to be new ‘revelations’ from the court had actually been reported on years before. There was one single member of the public sitting in splendid isolation in the gallery at the back of the court, a long, high-ceilinged shoebox of a room with cages, once intended for the defendants in terrorism trials, lining the sides and the words ‘The law is equal for everyone’ on display in front of the judge’s bench. Few non-professional observers would make the pilgrimage to Rebibbia, with the occasional school or university party the only, rare representatives of the public. It was perhaps understandable. The large modern prison in a scruffy north-eastern suburb of Rome is an intimidating place at the best of times, and all the more so with its armed guards at the gate and on duty in the courtroom.

That there was a certain tension surrounding the proceedings became evident when the second prosecutor who had participated in the investigation, Maria Monteleone, announced she was dropping out at the start of the trial for ‘personal reasons’. She was replaced as substitute prosecutor by an older male colleague who seldom attended and almost never spoke. The remaining prosecutor, Luca Tescaroli, sometimes gave the impression of being outnumbered and outgunned by the team of aggressive lawyers representing the defendants. Charged with tracking down and summonsing witnesses, continuing a parallel investigation into unresolved aspects of the case and preparing his own cross-examinations, the young magistrate from north-east Italy – aged 40 when the trial began – appeared to have little visible assistance from the organs of the state that one might have expected to be supporting him. His task was immense. He had a complex tale to tell, through witnesses called out of chronological order and handicapped by physiologically failing memories or an understandable desire to forget. Before the court had finished hearing the prosecution’s witnesses it discovered that 25 on the list were no longer living, while others proved untraceable or simply refused to attend. Witnesses resident abroad could not be compelled and those living in Italy frequently invoked ill-health. Comprehension was made more difficult by the chaotic state of the documentary evidence, made available to defence lawyers on DVD. Faded photocopies, frequent repetitions and the inclusion of irrelevant bureaucratic material served to bury the truth under the mountain of paperwork generated in more than two decades of investigation.

Judge D’Andria was determined to set a cracking pace, and showed himself to be even-handed, authoritarian and highly intolerant of time-wasting. In contrast, Tescaroli proceeded through the evidence with slow, at times exasperatingly slow, deliberation, earning himself the nickname ‘the sloth’ from his opponents on the defence benches. One reluctant witness was scathing of his oratorial style and the sometimes soporific tone of his voice. ‘I’d send him to work as a postman,’ he said during a pause in the proceedings.

The trial gave an opportunity finally to clarify some of the forensic aspects pertaining to Calvi’s death. Calvi’s body was subjected to three autopsies, the first by Professor Simpson in London, a second in Milan after its return to Italy and a third in 1998, when it was exhumed from the family tomb in the village cemetery at Drezzo. On this occasion one of the experts was the anthropologist Luigi Capasso, who had previously honed his skills on the 5,000-year-old remains of ‘Oetzi the Iceman’, whose mummified body had emerged from a shrinking Alpine glacier in 1991. Experts called by the prosecutor and the Calvi family say their findings confirm the hypothesis that Calvi was murdered, a conclusion naturally contested by the defendants’ forensic experts. Professor Capasso examined the microscopic traces of material deposited under Calvi’s fingernails and failed to find the elements that should have been there if he had committed suicide: rust from the scaffolding poles and brick and limestone dust from the bricks and stones found in Calvi’s pockets. ‘Under our fingernails we have a record of all our activities lasting for about three months,’ Capasso told me during a pause in the trial. ‘We found traces of serpentine stone coming from another site under Calvi’s fingernails, but no traces of brick, limestone, or basalt from the bricks he was supposed to have handled. Murder is the only reasonable explanation. This is the scientific evidence, but why did the experts who worked on this before us not study it?’[1]

Professor Berndt Brinkmann, the head of forensic medicine at the university of Munster and leader of one of the prosecutor’s teams of forensic experts, confirmed the murder analysis. The failure to find traces of rust or paint from the scaffolding on Calvi’s hands and the soles of his shoes demonstrated that he could not have climbed along the scaffolding under his own steam, Brinkmann told the court. Brinkmann’s team had examined Calvi’s clothes in detail and found that one of his fly buttons had been knocked off and the cloth damaged by the violence with which one of the stones was thrust on top of his genitals. Other experts testified later that the stone appeared to have been inserted through the flies, and therefore most likely by a third party. If Calvi had done it himself, they said, he would simply have sucked in his stomach and pushed the stone down the front of his trousers. Traces of hydrocarbons compatible with the varnish of a boat had been found in the seat and calf area of Calvi’s trousers, Brinkmann added, indicating that he had probably sat in a boat. There were serious omissions in Professor Simpson’s autopsy, Brinkmann said, to such an extent that he had to wonder whether the autopsy had really been carried out by the eminent pathologist at all. Brinkmann placed the time of death at between 2.45 a.m. and 3.30 a.m. and said Calvi’s body had not been submerged more than 26 cm up his lower leg.[2]

Professor Angela Gallop, a British forensic scientist hired by the Calvi family, confirmed Brinkmann’s murder hypothesis but contradicted him on a number of details. Professor Gallop, who set the time of death at between 2.10 a.m. and 3.05 a.m., said there was evidence that Calvi’s shirt, vest and underpants had been submerged in the Thames, which had come up to the level of his waist. She acknowledged that there had been planks on the scaffolding, which would have been under water until 3 a.m., and if Calvi had walked along them after that time then the absence of rust or paint on his shoes would cease to be significant. An experiment using some of Calvi’s clothes and with a stone stuffed down a volunteer’s crotch showed that the stone moved around and left scratch marks on the man’s legs, as well as making it very difficult to clamber down a ladder, she said. ‘The problem we all had was that the original investigation was not very thorough,’ Gallop told the court. ‘I understand from the river police that it would have been perfectly possible to put the nose of a boat into the scaffolding on the ebb tide. The evidence shows suicide was improbable.’

Despite the best will of Judge D’Andria, the court’s progress in the early months was slow, sometimes pursuing apparent irrelevancies in exasperating detail, or grappling with witnesses who were unable or unwilling to remember. The defence strategy of Ernesto Diotallevi’s combative lawyer, Pierpaolo Dell’Anno, proved particularly effective. ‘Do you know my client? Do you know of his involvement in any crime? Do you know if he was involved in the Calvi murder?’ he would ask. The answer would come, over and again: ‘No.’ And the prosecution’s case was not helped by the poor quality of many of its police and expert witnesses. Many seemed to have an incomplete knowledge of the overall story, passing responsibility for particular areas of research to other colleagues, who in their turn would plead ignorance as well.

Sometimes the witnesses were illuminating, however, going even beyond the prosecutor’s intentions. One such case was the testimony of Renato Squatriti, an elderly antiquarian who had been a partner of Sergio Vaccari in the London Restoration Centre in Westbourne Grove. Vaccari had joined the business as a sleeping partner, taking care of the accounts and the administration. Elegant and sophisticated, he had left his father’s printing business in Milan because he was afraid of the Red Brigades, Squatriti said. The two had worked together for seven or eight months, until one day Vaccari had come to the office drugged to the eyeballs, and Squatriti had decided to put an end to the relationship. Vaccari was of right-wing views and a braggart, Squatriti said. ‘He boasted of belonging to [Stefano Delle Chiaie’s right-wing] Avanguardia Nazionale, to P2, to [a non-existent] P4. He was a lion in appearance and a rabbit in reality.’

Squatriti became concerned at whispered conversations over the telephone and gentlemen of unsettling appearance who came to look for Vaccari at the Restoration Centre. ‘The work I did depended on total trust. I did work for the Queen, for Sotheby’s and Christie’s,’ he said. Squatriti went on to identify photographs of people he had seen in contact with Vaccari, some of whom were looking for him insistently after he and Vaccari had parted ways. Vaccari had offered to give him his new address, but Squatriti decided he preferred not to know. The names of the people in contact with Vaccari, he said, were Domenico Balducci, a Magliana Band loan-shark who was murdered in Rome in September 1981, Giulio Di Carlo, a Cosa Nostra member and brother of Francesco Di Carlo, and Giuseppe Bellinghieri, the drug trafficker. Two men with Sicilian accents had come to the London Restoration Centre asking for Vaccari not long before his death. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll find him,’ they had said, in a less than reassuring manner. Vaccari may have sensed that he was in serious trouble and was planning to leave London, Squatriti said. He had seen him for the last time on the afternoon of the day he was killed. ‘He walked up to me with an ice-cream cone in his hand – it was summer – and he told me he would be leaving the next day to follow the sun.’

Squatriti’s testimony touched on one of the most sensitive aspects of the ongoing secret investigation. With an associate, Vaccari was known to have rented apartments in a block of flats at 92 Moscow Road for use as ‘safe houses’. When police visited one of the flats they found it had been ‘wiped down’ to remove fingerprints. ‘Roberto Calvi could have been murdered there,’ a British investigator told me. ‘It had clearly been wiped down. You don’t do that unless something fairly heinous has happened there.’ Suspicions of Vaccari’s role in the Calvi murder have also increased with the discovery that he was looking to hire or purchase a boat at about the time Calvi visited London. ‘We know he visited the London Boat Show,’ another investigator said.

Of all the five defendants, the one who followed proceedings most assiduously was Pippo Calò. The mafia’s former ‘ambassador’ to Rome did not have many competing claims on his time: he was serving a life sentence in prison already. The most serious crime of which he had been convicted – and for which he consistently denies responsibility – was a terrorist train bombing two days before Christmas 1984. Sixteen people were killed and 180 injured when a remote-controlled bomb ripped through a train as it entered a tunnel between Florence and Bologna. The era of military coups and the ‘strategy of tension’ had come to an end by this time, so the significance of the bombing remained indecipherable. Prosecutors argued that it was the joint work of the mafia, the Camorra, right-wing terrorists and members of the Magliana Band, all of them groups with which Calò had personal contact. The atrocity was interpreted as an attempt to distract attention from an increasingly incisive investigation into the activities of Cosa Nostra in Sicily based on the testimony of the historic supergrass Tommaso Buscetta. If it wasn’t intended to bring about a military coup, it could have been a way of reminding organs of the state of previous complicities. Calò was convicted after police found explosives and remote control devices similar to those used in the bombing at a country house he owned and after the court heard evidence that his organization had commissioned such devices from a German technician with connections in the Rome underworld. Given the suspicion that Calvi could have been involved in funding the Bologna bombing, it is significant that one of his suspected murderers should carry such a grave terrorist offence on his criminal record.

Calò was punctiliously polite in his contacts with the court, asking the judge’s permission to rebut allegations against him whenever mafia witnesses mentioned his name. This sometimes resulted in angry exchanges with his accusers, with Calò invoking his devotion to Cosa Nostra’s archaic moral code. It was inconceivable that he had ever had contact with certain pentiti, he insisted, because they were notorious for their sexual immorality or for their contacts with the police. For a man accused of more than 70 murders, the unforgivable crime, it would appear, was for a mafioso to take a mistress.

Calò insisted on appearing in court in person for his cross-examination, travelling from his prison at Ascoli Piceno to mount an impassioned rebuttal of the charges against him. He appeared in court on 10 October 2006, elegant in an open-necked blue shirt and blazer and accompanied by five prison guards in their distinctive pale blue berets. The determination with which he rejected the most serious charges against him was perhaps surprising for someone already serving multiple life sentences, but his defence was somewhat cramped by the rigorous rules that he imposed upon himself. He had chosen to disassociate himself from Cosa Nostra, he told the court – following the example of terrorists disillusioned by the armed struggle – but he would not volunteer information that might damage former associates. As a result, he attempted to mount a paradoxical self-defence that made use of the earlier testimony of pentiti, where it suited his purposes, while damning them as liars when they accused him.

‘Do you know if the mafia exists?’ Prosecutor Tescaroli asked him. ‘I don’t know what the mafia is,’ Calò replied. ‘Cosa Nostra is something else. I have acknowledged I belonged to it, but this mafia I know nothing about.’ Despite being a member of the illegal organization, he had not engaged in crime himself, Calò said, with the possible exception of a 5 million lire flutter on the cigarette smuggling business in the mid 1970s. Above all, he had not been involved in the Christmas 1984 train bombing, or in the mafia bombings that killed judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992. He had been living as a tranquil pensioner in Rome at the time of Calvi’s death, he insisted. ‘There are two accusations I can’t rid myself of: that I was the mafia’s treasurer and the head of the Magliana Band. I have been dragging them behind me for the last 20 years.’ Calò said he was tired of being accused by the pentiti, who were simply trying to ingratiate themselves with the prosecutors. ‘I know I’ll die in prison, but I can’t accept it. I can’t accept these accusations on the bomb massacres.’

Calò’s archaic moral code emerged clearly during his cross-examination. He had fallen out with the historic pentito Tommaso Buscetta over the latter’s sexual immorality. The man had had the gall to turn up at Calò’s home in Rome accompanied by a Brazilian woman whom he presented as his wife, but who wasn’t. And all these Magliana Band pentiti who claimed to have known him: it was inconceivable he would have had anything to do with people who used drugs all day and frequented prostitutes!

‘Were you responsible for killing Roberto Calvi?’ Tescaroli asked him. ‘Absolutely not.’ ‘Do you know who did?’ ‘Absolutely not.’ Calò said he had only ever seen Calvi on television and the banker had never been involved in laundering money for Cosa Nostra. The mafia boss dismissed suggestions that he had attempted to enlist Francesco Di Carlo’s assistance for the murder before falling back on the services of the Camorra’s Vincenzo Casillo. But with his denial came a fleeting moment of gritty frankness: ‘If I had wanted to, I could have had him killed in Rome. Why would I have turned to a Neapolitan drug addict who was in contact with the secret services, who was supposed to be my enemy, and who confided in his lover?’ Casillo’s lover had, after all, been murdered precisely because of her companion’s indiscreet pillow-talk.

The trial reached its climax in the autumn of 2006 with the cross-examination of Calò and two of the other defendants: Flavio Carboni and Silvano Vittor. Perhaps the most eagerly awaited testimony was that of Carboni, the man who had known Calvi best and organized his journey to London. Carboni readily admitted that he had lied in the past about the circumstances surrounding Calvi’s death. He had done so to shield himself and others from the possible legal consequences of their actions – minor offences such as aiding Calvi in his illegal expatriation or violating Italy’s currency laws – or to save friends from embarrassment. Now, of course, he was telling the truth.

During several days of testimony, between 3 and 25 October, he offered explanations for many of the more troubling anomalies in his behaviour. The decision to go to London was Calvi’s and not his own and was prompted by the media furore over the banker’s disappearance, he told the court, contradicting the more recent testimony of Vittor to investigators. Calvi feared he might be recognized and arrested if he pursued his original plan of travelling to Zurich. In London he might pass unnoticed, but it was a city that Calvi knew and Carboni did not. The fact that he had noted the name and telephone number of his London contact William Morris in his diary on 11 June did not mean he had been in touch with him in advance of Calvi’s visit. He used the diary as a notepad and jotted things down irrespective of the dates, he said. And his failure to go up to his flat and reassure Calvi that he was making progress in the search for new accommodation on the evening of the banker’s death was perfectly understandable. He had run into Vittor in the Chelsea Cloisters lobby and had been led away to a neighbouring pub where the Kleinszig sisters were waiting impatiently, having kicked their heels around central London for the entire day. The pub was about to close, so it was necessary to go and collect the girls before they were turned out into the street. ‘They had been abandoned all day. It was logical that we should give priority to the girls.’ An angry Calvi had already packed his bags in eager anticipation of a move and was paying Carboni $19 million for his services, but the Kleinszig girls – on a pleasure trip to London – came first.

Carboni was perhaps more convincing when he came to explain why he had asked Odette Morris to search for Calvi at Chelsea Cloisters on Friday 18 June, while he himself studiously avoided the building. ‘I was afraid that the police might be there,’ he told the court. But he was less so when dealing with the subject of his failed meeting with his friend Ugo Flavoni at Gatwick airport on that same Friday evening. It was not wildly extravagant to fly Flavoni to London by private jet in order to enable him to collect a modest debt, he said. The plane was intended to collect him as well, enabling Carboni to return to Italy having sorted out Calvi’s logistical problems, had things gone to plan. He had completely forgotten about the appointment in his agitation over Calvi’s unexplained disappearance, arriving, as a result, at the airport after Flavoni had departed. And he had attached so little significance to the episode that he had forgotten to mention it in his earliest accounts of his movements in London.

Carboni said he learned of Calvi’s death when he telephoned his Sardinian mistress, Maria Laura Scanu Concas, on the evening of 18 June. The television news was just then announcing that the body of a Gianroberto Calvini had been pulled from the river Thames, and he knew immediately it was the missing Calvi. ‘I fell into a state of total prostration,’ he recalled. ‘I remember the Morrises gave me a glass of whisky to pick me up.’ ‘Were you responsible for the murder of Roberto Calvi?’ Tescaroli asked him. ‘Not only was I not responsible but I have been a victim of Roberto Calvi’s death,’ Carboni replied. ‘Today I am profoundly convinced that Calvi committed suicide.’

Carboni was not entirely successful in persuading the court that that conviction was well founded. Having offered explanations for his behaviour that he had had almost a quarter of a century to ponder and having acquitted himself fairly well, his credibility crumbled at the end when he was subjected to the probing and methodical questioning of Judge D’Andria. If Calvi was not afraid for his personal safety, as Carboni insisted, why did he avoid sleeping in his own apartment on his last night in Rome and why did he take Silvano Vittor with him on his travels as an unofficial bodyguard? Given the dramatic nature of the problems he was helping Calvi to resolve, and pressing problems of his own at home, why did Carboni not accompany him to London but travel instead to Amsterdam on 15 June for a recreational jaunt with the Kleinszig girls? And if Calvi’s briefcase had remained from the start in Klagenfurt under the control of the Kleinszig family, why did Carboni wait until 1986 before making it available to Italian investigators? The Sardinian businessman’s responses could not hide the fact that, at the very least, he had played an odd role in a rum affair.

The deposition of Silvano Vittor followed a similar course to that of Carboni, casting little fresh light on the mystery of Calvi’s last days. In his testimony, delivered on 6 and 11 November 2006, the former contraband smuggler contradicted himself, contradicted his earlier statements and contradicted Carboni. If he had lied in the early stages of the investigation, he explained, it was because he was confused, felt under pressure, or was advised to do so by his lawyers. Vittor broke down and wept when he finally confessed to prosecutors that the decision to go to London rather than Zurich had been Carboni’s, and not Calvi’s. In court, though, he was vague when he addressed the issue again. Carboni, Kunz and Calvi had discussed it over dinner in Bregenz. Carboni had told him of the decision in the evening and Calvi had confirmed it the next morning. He had never heard Calvi say he did not want to go to London, he told Carboni’s lawyer.

On key aspects of the story his evidence was either vague or aligned with Carboni’s and tended to corroborate the theory that Calvi had taken his own life. Carboni had told the court that Calvi had reduced his moustache by the time he met him for their walk in Hyde Park on the afternoon of Wednesday 16 June. Vittor confirmed that the moustache had by then been trimmed to a thin strip, before being totally removed the next morning. But while Carboni claimed he had left the meeting with Calvi on several occasions to make phone calls, Vittor said he had been in visual contact with the two men throughout and Carboni had never absented himself. Was Calvi worried about his personal safety? Vittor was asked. No, he replied, he was just frightened of being recognized. In previous testimony he had acknowledged that the banker was indeed afraid, refused to leave his apartment after dark, insisted Vittor telephone him every quarter of an hour if he went out without him, and had told him the only people he trusted were Vittor and Carboni.

Vittor’s explanations for why he left Calvi alone for hours on the last evening of his life, why he pretended to have lost his identity card so that a Chelsea Cloisters employee would accompany him to the flat later that night, and why he fled precipitately the following morning without even leaving a message for his companions were all far from convincing. He told the court that Calvi was highly agitated that evening after learning he had been sacked as Banco Ambrosiano chairman and that his secretary had committed suicide. He had specifically ruled out that Calvi knew of Graziella Corrocher’s suicide at the London inquest and had neglected to mention the ‘fact’ in his first 16 interrogations, Prosecutor Tescaroli pointed out to him. ‘I don’t know why. I must have forgotten it, even though it was the most important thing,’ he conceded.

Judge D’Andria was unimpressed. ‘You say one thing and a few seconds later you say another, which is different or contradictory. First you say white, then black. You have the right to lie, but there is a limit, if you want to be believed.’ The man who had spent more time than anyone with Calvi during the last five days of the banker’s life was still spreading confusion with a pitchfork some 24 years after the event.

Among the many court testimonies that left a strong sense of perplexity was that of Roberto Calvi’s brother Leone. Aged 80, with a bald head and tufts of white hair around his ears, he was the very image of what his brother might have looked like had he lived – minus the moustache. Asked to account for the presence of a half-brick wrapped in a newspaper that was found by police in a safety deposit box that had belonged to his mother in October 2002, his explanation was weak and convoluted. The newspaper was a copy of the Corriere della Sera from 29 May 1981 and it carried the news of the start of his brother’s currency trial on the front page, as well as a report on the death of the Polish Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, described in a long profile on an inside page as ‘The great defender of the Church in the East’. A symbolic reference to freemasonry wrapped in a newspaper that talked of some of his brother’s most delicate activities? Not a bit of it. He had put the half-brick into the safety deposit at the Milan branch of the Banco Ambrosiano himself, he admitted, but it was to prevent people from noticing the change in weight when he removed the valuables that had been contained in it before. And he had wrapped the brick in a newspaper to avoid getting his hands dirty. The explanation seemed so unlikely that some observers wondered that it might not be true.

Leone Calvi was also asked to explain a handwritten note that had been confiscated from his home and that appeared to refer to the need to make a 150 million lire payment to obtain the transfer of his brother’s currency trial from Milan to Rome. The note was on headed paper of the airline KLM and opened with a shopping list: ‘Fruit, Vegetables, Bread . . .’ before moving on to what appeared to be a bribe to magistrates, possibly something he had discussed with Roberto when his brother was in prison. Leone denied writing it; he didn’t write the number ‘5’ in that way, he said.[3] The unresolved episode somehow seemed to encapsulate the spirit of the Calvi affair: a bribe of 150 million lire could be jotted down at the bottom of a shopping list, after ‘Cheese, Ham, Roast meat’, becoming equally commonplace and banal.

After months of evidence taken at the unusually intense pace of two hearings per week, the court had good reason to be suspicious of the defendants but it also had plenty of scope for a reasonable doubt. It had heard much about the mafia, the power of the P2 lodge and the financial problems of the Banco Ambrosiano, but much less about who had really killed Roberto Calvi and how. The evidence on that was hearsay – which is acceptable in the Italian justice system – and vague. Flavio Carboni’s disreputable actions and connections had been discussed in detail, as well as his friendships with members of Italy’s political and social elite. In response to the prosecutor’s suspicions, Carboni had outlined his defence from the witness stand: Calvi had almost certainly committed suicide, psychologically crushed by the news of his secretary’s suicide and by the certainty of impending financial disaster and professional disgrace. And in the unlikely event that he had been killed, Carboni had nothing to do with it. Calvi was his friend and he had been battling to the last to help him resolve his financial problems and reap the rich rewards that the Ambrosiano chairman had promised him. His sudden death was contrary to Carboni’s own material interests, depriving him of a valuable source of income and professional influence. Delivered with breathless speed and multiple digressions, his interventions often left the jurors with their heads in a whirl.

Vittor’s position was more succinct: he had been caught up in the whole ghastly imbroglio by accident. A simple man, he knew nothing of the complex background to Calvi’s financial and political affairs. He had merely helped the banker to escape to Austria as a favour to his friend Carboni. His role should have finished there, in Klagenfurt, but he had been persuaded at the last minute and against his will to continue the journey with Calvi to London, departing unexpectedly and without even a change of clothes – no carefully planned murder plot here. It was only natural that he should flee to safety on the discovery of Calvi’s mysterious disappearance from Chelsea Cloisters on the night of 17 June.

Little had been heard in court on the role of Ernesto Diotallevi, as his lawyer tirelessly pointed out, and of Manuela Kleinszig, who appeared to have fallen into the story by mistake. According to the prosecution, she had received large sums of money from her Sardinian lover and helped him to conceal Calvi’s crucial blackmail documents after his death, but it was hard to imagine the then 21-year-old Austrian girl had actually conspired to murder him. If the court had a somewhat unclear idea on the individual responsibilities of the defendants, the political background to the case also remained confused. Some of the most sensitive secrets of the cold war era had been aired in the Rebibbia courtroom, but the overall story remained vague and incoherent. The Calvi case – described to me by one experienced justice official as the very emblem of Italy’s corrupt First Republic – had not, it seemed, completely lost its mystery.

18

The Politics

When I ran into an Italian colleague in the street and mentioned I was working on a book on the Calvi case, his immediate comment was: ‘It stinks to heaven.’ The comment was peculiarly apt: the ungodly story of ‘God’s banker’ does give off a disagreeable odour. Jeff Katz, the Kroll Associates investigator who revived the investigation into Calvi’s fate in the early 1990s, got the same impression. A contact with ties to US intelligence warned him to tread carefully. Investigating Calvi’s death would be like ‘dancing in the mouth of the wolf’, he said. And the Calvi family lawyer, Bruno Rossini, confirmed the same idea. The Calvi murder was a ‘crime of power’.

Whatever the outcome of the Rome murder trial, it is clear that Calvi’s story unfolded in a context of bribery, secrecy, blackmail and bluster. And there can be little doubt that the single most sensitive activity he undertook was the financing of the clandestine cold war operations of western secret services. Who exactly in the Vatican was responsible and what Pope John Paul II knew is still not clear. The man who could have done most to explain, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, died before he could give evidence, and in any case it seems likely he would have declined to come to court. Marcinkus was quietly removed years after the scandal, believed to have cost the Vatican losses of around $500 million.[1] The IOR was finally reformed in the latter part of John Paul’s pontificate, with authority passing for the first time to competent laymen and a more prudent and transparent management gradually nursing the institution back to financial health. Whether the lesson of the Marcinkus public relations disaster has really been taken to heart is less clear. The name of the IOR has continued to crop up in the context of Italian and international financial scandals. In the 1990s senior church officials would lend the name and prestige of the Holy See – exploited so comprehensively by Calvi – as cover for one of the biggest insurance frauds in American history. And in the summer of 2006 a leading member of Opus Dei, the Italian financier Gianmario Roveraro, would be murdered and hacked to pieces by a business partner.

For Roman Catholics the moral failings of their religious leaders are discomfiting, but they are nothing new in the history of the church. Christ, after all, came to save sinners and left a church made of sinners behind him. As for the secular sinners, the story seems to be one of mediocrity and incompetence, of people promoted beyond their abilities and muddling through on a cushion of nepotism. In the end, some of the most serious-minded and determined actors in the story turned out to be the professional criminals, people who operate in an environment that is particularly unforgiving of failure, as Roberto Calvi learned to his cost.

Calvi may have had reason to fear for his life because of his role on the international political scene, but there were also reasons for disquiet relating to the Banco Ambrosiano’s involvement in domestic Italian politics and the control of the Italian press. The political strategy in which he became involved was the political strategy of the P2 masonic lodge, spelled out clearly in a theoretical document drawn up for Licio Gelli in the mid 1970s, called the ‘Plan for Democratic Revival’. The government was not to be overthrown by force but the democratic state infiltrated and controlled from within. In substance, P2 would simply buy up the three key instruments of democratic control: the political parties, the press and the trade unions. ‘The availability of sums of not more than 30 or 40 billion lire [£20–£25 million] should be enough for well-chosen men of good faith to conquer the key positions necessary for their control,’ the document said. Another document, a ‘Memorandum on the Political Situation in Italy’, suggested that 10 billion lire would buy outright control of the Christian Democrat party, the dominant partner in coalition governments since the war. Such operations did not come cheap, so banks could play an important role.

Many of the notions expressed in the ‘Plan for Democratic Revival’ were perfectly respectable conservative political ideas, and many would later be put into practice in the professional and political career of an ambitious young man who would join the lodge in 1978. His name was Silvio Berlusconi and Gelli’s ‘Plan’ was in some ways the blueprint of his career.

The press was a particular focus of Gelli’s attention. The ‘Plan’ called for the co-opting of two or three elements from every major daily or weekly newspaper. Once ‘acquired’, the journalists would be given the task of supporting selected politicians who formed part of Gelli’s cabal. In a second phase, P2 intended to buy control of a campaigning weekly magazine, coordinate the local press through a centralized news agency, coordinate local cable TVs through the same agency, and dissolve the state broadcaster RAI-TV in the name of broadcast freedom. Control of the local press and cable TV was seen as an important way of controlling ‘average public opinion in the heart of the country’.

Gelli began putting his plan into action by secretly acquiring control of Italy’s best-selling and most influential newspaper, the Corriere della Sera. The newspaper had previously been bought by the Rizzoli family, which had made its fortune with a successful printing business, with money loaned by the Montedison chemicals group. When the Montedison debt passed to the Banco Ambrosiano in 1977 the Corriere entered the P2 fold and an alleged P2 member, Franco Di Bella, was appointed as editor. P2 made subtle use of the Rizzoli Publishing Group, using it to buy local newspapers around Italy in line with Gelli’s plan, influencing staff appointments and the editorial line at the Corriere della Sera, while the paper’s operating losses dug an ever deeper hole in the Banco Ambrosiano accounts. Keeping the operation secret involved complex financial engineering, with the IOR and Rothschild’s Bank helping to screen the true owners. Secret Gelli documents seized from his home referred to a controlling stake that belonged to ‘the Institution’, though it was not clear whether the Institution was P2, the Vatican or some other international entity. Those involved in the financial operations rewarded themselves handsomely, Gelli, Ortolani and the newspaper’s director general Bruno Tassan Din at one point pocketing $30 million each as a ‘commission’.

Ownership of Italy’s most prestigious newspaper was a vital consideration at that stage of the Cold War, though it wasn’t always easy for the owners to impose their will on an independent-minded staff. P2 was nevertheless able to influence what went into the newspaper and what was kept out. The Corriere frequently criticized the weaknesses and inefficiencies of the democratic state. This was not a difficult task, but a line that may have been inspired by less-than-democratic military officers awaiting developments in the wings – it supported the deployment of Euromissiles, a hot strategic topic at the time, and even gave its backing to a military coup in Turkey. Coverage of Latin America had to be particularly sensitively handled. When a Corriere della Sera correspondent was told by the Argentinian Nobel Peace Prizewinner Adolfo Perez Esquivel that one of the financiers of Latin America’s right-wing death squads was Umberto Ortolani’s Bafisud, the newspaper sat on the story for a while before censoring the troublesome reference to one of Rizzoli’s backers. Silvio Berlusconi, in contrast, had no difficulty in getting published, writing a series of analytical business articles for the P2-controlled paper.

Naturally the newspaper sprang to Calvi’s defence when he was arrested for currency violations in 1981. ‘We were strongly urged to provide massive support for Calvi, attacking the Milan magistrates and criticizing their conduct,’ Tassan Din admitted later. Christian Democrat and Socialist politicians, who also had reason to be grateful to Calvi, echoed the campaign, denouncing the politicization of justice and the threat to the stock market.

Ownership of the Corriere della Sera was a serious drain on the Banco Ambrosiano’s resources but finding a buyer who would be acceptable to the main political parties was not easy. Calvi found himself in a bind: Treasury Minister Beniamino Andreatta, an independent-minded Christian Democrat, was pressuring him to disinvest from the newspaper, 40 per cent of which was held by the Ambrosiano’s holding company, La Centrale. Banks were not supposed to control newspapers, so Andreatta had revoked La Centrale’s voting rights in Rizzoli, making it even more difficult for Calvi to sell his stake.

Secret service reports from the time give an indication of who might have been interested in buying. One undated report says Argentinian Admiral Emilio Massera had met a Rizzoli representative in Madrid on 15 September 1982 to discuss the possible purchase of a 10 per cent stake in the publishing group. ‘The transaction would pass through Bafisud Bank in Montevideo on behalf of Lima Golf [Licio Gelli] and Uniform Oscar [Umberto Ortolani].’ Another report, dated 2 July 1982, reads: ‘Tassan Din, before Calvi died, had secretly reached agreement with the latter to sell shares (10.2 percent) to Berlusconi, who would be helped financially in the operation by Calvi himself.’ A report from the same source dated on the previous day said Calvi’s death was being attributed to Gelli by people ‘close to the Tassan Din clan’. It described Berlusconi as being linked to the Christian Democrats and in possession of the necessary funds to make the Rizzoli purchase.

Calvi considered the delicate matter of control over the press, and his knowledge of its secret mechanisms, to constitute one of the potential threats to his life. ‘He spoke to us in a vague way about a US project to finance the media. He considered it very dangerous,’ Carlo Calvi told me when I visited him in Canada. ‘Once in a restaurant in Zurich he told us there was a project carried on by Ortolani with the purpose of influencing Italian politics and the media. It involved political payments by state and non-state oil interests. It was an incumbent danger for him and he was mad at us for not taking it seriously. He presented it as a grave danger.’ Carlo Calvi said he saw the Rizzoli operation as part of this US-sponsored plan to control the Italian media. ‘I tend to see it as an offspring of Gladio. It has its origins in US projects to control the press,’ he told me.[2]

Relations with the Italian political parties were equally delicate for Calvi. He couldn’t dispose of the Corriere della Sera, for example, in a way that might upset the national political equilibrium. The Rizzoli group itself was constantly paying politicians and political fixers to try and resolve its problems. Several hundred million lire were paid to Claudio Martelli – a regular guest on board the Rizzoli company jet – because it was important for the company to establish good relations with the new Socialist party leadership, according to the testimony of Angelo Rizzoli and Bruno Tassan Din.[3]

Roberto Rosone, Calvi’s deputy, described to the Rome murder trial how jealous Calvi was of his relationship with the political parties. The Banco Ambrosiano advanced money to some of the major parties against reimbursements they were due from the state, but the parties, and the newspapers associated with them, took in the state’s money and failed to pay off the debts. ‘I looked at the loans that had already been made to the political parties. When I saw the payments made to the PCI [Italian Communist party] I thought: it’s just as well we’re a priests’ bank!’ Rosone told the court. The PCI, in fact, was the party with the second largest exposure to the Banco Ambrosiano when the bank went bust. The party itself owed 10.5 billion lire and the Ambrosiano’s liquidators were surprised to discover that the bank was the majority shareholder in the Rome evening newspaper Paese Sera, which supported the PCI. The Socialist party (PSI) was easily the bank’s largest political debtor, owing the Ambrosiano 13.6 billion lire in June 1982. Calvi wanted the political payments under his direct control because he knew he was in constant need of political protection. There were no particular political criteria to Calvi’s largesse, Rosone said. ‘Calvi was prepared to give money to everyone, provided they were prepared to help him, knowing the pig’s ear he had made of things. He never showed any particular political orientation,’ he told the Rome court.[4] Paying off all sides in the end would prove a dangerous policy, and would not save him from disaster.

Among the Gelli Plan’s socio-economic provisions was: ‘New town planning legislation favouring satellite cities.’ Silvio Berlusconi began his career as a property developer, laying the foundations of his wealth through the construction of Milan’s modernistic satellite cities, Milano 2 and Milano 3. His involvement in property development brought him into contact with the enterprising Sardinian property developer Flavio Carboni.

Berlusconi would apply the guidelines of the Gelli ‘Plan’ in his approach to politics too, establishing his Forza Italia party in just the way Gelli recommended: ‘The primary objective and indispensable premise of the operation is the creation of a club (of Rotarian type for the heterogeneity of its membership) where operators from business, finance, the liberal professions, civil servants and magistrates are represented at the highest level, as well as selected politicians, numbering no more than 30 or 40.’ Berlusconi’s party, founded in 1994, was made up largely of professional people, with a few ‘professional politicians’ drawn from the ranks of the disintegrating Socialist and Christian Democrat parties.

Berlusconi’s luxurious Villa Certosa on Sardinia’s northern Costa Smeralda has often been the focus of the international media, especially when high-profile guests such as Britain’s Tony Blair or Russian President Vladimir Putin were visiting. Reports on these gatherings rarely mentioned a curious but embarrassing fact: the villa used to belong to Carboni, Berlusconi’s former business partner. Carboni didn’t actually sell the villa and its extensive beachside grounds directly to Berlusconi. As ever in debt, Carboni had hocked the property to two creditors, who had sold it on to Berlusconi without consulting him. Carboni had been forced to sue Berlusconi to try and extract a figure closer to the real value of the property, but being in urgent need of money had settled for an extra 800 million lire.

Carboni had been introduced to Berlusconi in March 1981 by Romano Comincioli, a childhood friend of the Milanese entrepreneur. Using his local knowledge and political connections, Carboni could identify promising plots of land and get their zoning changed, from agricultural to residential, vastly increasing their value virtually overnight. It was the kind of talent Berlusconi appreciated; he had used it to good effect himself in his developments outside Milan. It could be put to good use to create an Olbia 2, a rich man’s holiday complex on the Sardinian coast near the northern city of Olbia, with villas, mooring space for boats and a golf course. Within a year Berlusconi would have sunk 21 billion lire into the project and they would have acquired some 1,000 hectares of building land. Carboni had useful friends on the island: he was close to several leading local Christian Democrats and to Armando Corona, president of the regional government, an influential member of the Republican party and later to be elected Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy. But sometimes friendship is not enough. Carboni and Berlusconi agreed on 7 billion lire of political costs, Carboni’s assistant Emilio Pellicani later told the parliamentary P2 Commission. ‘That was the political cost of the operation.’[5] Despite their initial enthusiasm the project soon ran into difficulties. Berlusconi found Carboni unreliable as well as insolvent, and Carboni began to suspect that Berlusconi did not intend to honour their initial agreement on dividing the enterprise. Furthermore, Berlusconi was suffering the negative consequences of the P2 scandal combined with a downturn in the housing market and a need to concentrate his financial resources on a new scheme: commercial television. For a while at least, there would be a parting of the ways.

Carboni had effectively dragged Berlusconi into a business environment where he was rubbing shoulders with representatives of the mafia and the Rome underworld. Berlusconi may not have been too surprised; like Carboni and Calvi himself, he appears to have cultivated personal relations that touched all levels of society. Berlusconi joined the P2 masonic lodge in January 1978, presented by his journalist friend Roberto Gervaso and receiving membership card no. 1816. He appears to have enjoyed favourable treatment by P2-controlled banks in the early part of his career. It would be strange therefore if the same P2 connection had not worked in his favour in his dealings with the Banco Ambrosiano. It would seem not, however, if we are to believe what Berlusconi told the Milan prosecutor Pierluigi Dell’Osso on 27 August 1982. ‘I never had any business relationship with the late Roberto Calvi,’ he told Dell’Osso. He had met Calvi twice at dinner and each time he had called on him two weeks later in his office because Calvi had expressed an interest in having a business relationship with his group, Berlusconi said. Calvi was cordial and said he would like to number him among his customers, but nothing ever came of it. The last time he had seen Calvi, a few months previously, it had been to discuss his interest in purchasing the profitable TV listings magazine TV Sorrisi e Canzoni, which was 52 per cent owned by Calvi’s holding company La Centrale. The magazine was part of the Rizzoli Group and Berlusconi had already discussed the matter with the Rizzoli director general, Bruno Tassan Din. Tassan Din had told him the magazine was owned by an offshore company and had suggested he discuss it with Calvi – possibly the same discussions that gave rise to the secret service report saying Berlusconi was negotiating to buy a 10.2 per cent stake in Rizzoli. ‘The meeting took place in Calvi’s office,’ Berlusconi said. ‘He received me rather coldly and told me brusquely to discuss it again directly with Tassan Din and [Angelo] Rizzoli, who were in charge of the group, as he didn’t intend to be responsible for it.’

The testimony of some of the individuals who were close to Calvi in the latter part of his life suggests the reality may have been somewhat different. A memorandum written by Francesco Pazienza in August 1982 describes the ‘asphyxiating insistence’ with which Carboni asked to be introduced to Calvi. ‘One day he presented himself with a man who he said was one of the closest collaborators of Silvio Berlusconi and they told me that a very fruitful dialogue could be arranged between Calvi and Berlusconi,’ Pazienza wrote. There was no lack of interest on Berlusconi’s side, according to this account. Pazienza’s version is confirmed by the testimony of Flavio Carboni, delivered before Milan magistrates in the course of a judicial confrontation with Pellicani on 17 May 1984. Carboni said he had told Calvi of the unhappy experience of his business partnership with Berlusconi and the money that Berlusconi still allegedly owed him. ‘Calvi told me literally that things had gone well for me, because Berlusconi was a rogue and had previously called on him in Gelli’s name asking him for a loan of 20 billion lire. When Calvi asked him what guarantees he could count on, Berlusconi had said he didn’t need guarantees since he came in Gelli’s name,’ Carboni said. When Calvi objected that that was irrelevant, Berlusconi had allegedly exclaimed: ‘So, you couldn’t care less! You’ll see what happens to you.’ Carboni said Calvi had told him later that he had received a series of anonymous threatening phone calls to the effect that it was the last time that he could permit himself the luxury of playing jokes like that on people belonging to the group that supported him. ‘Calvi concluded the confidence by saying that on that occasion he had not allowed himself to be intimidated and had not given way,’ Carboni said.

Pellicani confirmed the gist of Carboni’s account, saying he had already told him much the same thing although in more general terms. ‘On the occasion of a trip that Berlusconi made with me and Carboni on his private plane from Milan to Rome, the former mentioned that he had had a meeting with Calvi for business reasons and added that the man had struck him as very determined and with a hard heart [literally: with a hair in his heart], a phrase that I think I remember verbatim.’ Pellicani said the episode had occurred shortly after the publication of the P2 membership lists in 1981.

Berlusconi was close to the leaders of the dominant political parties from the late 1970s, as well as to Licio Gelli. He was close to Flaminio Piccoli, the secretary of the Christian Democrat party who had latched Pazienza on to Calvi’s coat-tails, and he was a personal friend of Bettino Craxi, the powerful and unscrupulous secretary of the PSI. Recent investigations have indicated that the Banco Ambrosiano and the clandestine international financial channels of the PSI may have contributed to the original financing of Berlusconi’s business endeavours, a matter still largely shrouded in mystery.

In 1976 the Banco Ambrosiano’s Nassau subsidiary Cisalpine Overseas Bank bought a 16 per cent stake in another Nassau-registered company, Capitalfin International Ltd, a financial consortium that had been set up five years earlier by ENI, the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, the chemicals company Montedison and IFI, a holding company of the Fiat Group. Capitalfin was not a good investment for Calvi, but it had a stake in a Berlusconi company called Fininvest Ltd Grand Cayman, and it was clearly taken on for political reasons. It wasn’t a bad deal for Gelli and Ortolani, as they shared a $1.2 million commission on the transaction. Questioned by Rome investigators in August 2004, Geoffrey Robinson, a Touche Ross accountant who worked on the liquidation of the Banco Ambrosiano Holding in Luxembourg, had this to say of the investment decision: ‘The reasons for this share purchase can only be understood in the light of the Italian political situation at the time, since the operation made no sense in itself; it was a bit like throwing money out the window.’ BA Holding had made another investment in a Fininvest-related company in the early 1970s, Robinson said. Both the Italian national oil company ENI and the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro were strongly influenced by the PSI and P2, so it was natural that Capitalfin should be too. The chairman was BNL chairman Alberto Ferrari, a suspected member of P2, and another of the directors was Gianfranco Graziadei, his BNL colleague and alleged ‘brother’ in P2. ENI was represented on the board by its vice-president, Leonardo Di Donna, another alleged freemason from P2.

Carlo Calvi also highlighted this connection when he was questioned by the Rome magistrates in 2002. His father had told him in the early 1970s that Capitalfin represented interests close to Craxi and the PSI and that it had been funded by passing money from the BNL to the Cisalpine in Nassau, the Banco Ambrosiano in Managua, the Panamanian company Belrosa and thence from Capitalfin to the final beneficiaries; unbeatable discretion! ‘On one occasion around 1973–74, while we were in our rented house at North Point in the Bahamas . . . my father referred to the fact that among the beneficiaries of the BNL loans that I have just mentioned there were also companies in the Fininvest Group,’ he said.

The discretion of these warm-water financial channels may also have been used for the kinds of delicate international operations that may have put Roberto Calvi’s life at risk. Calvi was doing a favour to his Socialist/P2 friends in BNL and ENI by buying a stake in the financially troubled Capitalfin. In 1974 Capitalfin partnered with a white Russian shipping magnate, Boris Vlasov, to buy control of a British shipping and shipbroking company, Shipping Industrial Holdings (SIH), which numbered Exxon among its favoured customers. Vlasov, who was based in Monte Carlo and had strong ties to the Italian business world, was interested in the SIH fleet and was prepared to leave the shipbroking and insurance activities of the London group to his Capitalfin partners. Capitalfin duly purchased these, which became known as H. Clarkson Holdings, with disastrous results. At this point the Ambrosiano agreed to perform another favour for ENI, purchasing 80 per cent of Clarkson from Capitalfin and agreeing to hold it in a fiduciary capacity on behalf of ENI. A confidential memo on the operation says: ‘Remember to use Ciso [Cisalpine Overseas/BAOL], Nassau, as clearing bank for all financial movements among the interested parties.’ Calvi clearly considered the affair important and sensitive. ‘My father had a stack of documents this high on Clarkson’s in his Bahamas safe,’ Carlo Calvi told me, indicating a two-inch pile with his fingers. ‘What is not clear is why ENI’s stake could not be held openly.’[6] One, perhaps banal, explanation is that rival oil companies might not have wanted to use Clarkson’s shipbroking or insurance services if they had known a competitor controlled the company.

There is reason to believe, however, that the secrecy surrounding the operation may have been intended to conceal an even more sensitive reality. A director of H. Clarkson Holdings since 1975 was Sir Patrick Reilly, a British ambassador to Moscow in the 1950s. During the Second World War, Reilly had worked at the Ministry of Economic Warfare, where he met the future SOE chief Charles Hambro, whose bank would later be an important SIH shareholder, and he had then moved on to become personal assistant to the head of the Secret Intelligence Service, Brigadier Stewart Menzies. During the Cold War a lot could be done with a shipping company controlled by an anti-communist Russian. A mortgage taken out on one of Clarkson’s vessels in 1977 suggests it may have been used in a rather buccaneering role. The mortgage agreement between Clarkson and Citibank recites: ‘Short particulars of the Property Mortgaged or Charged: Sixty-four shares in the British vessel “Clarkspey” (“the Vessel”) registered at the Port of London under official number 377268 and in her boats, guns, ammunition, small arms, and appurtenances.’

Sir Patrick Reilly left many of his papers to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, with the idea that they should be made available to researchers. The library has unilaterally restricted access to a significant portion of the papers, in apparent contradiction of its role as a disseminator of knowledge, citing the terms of the UK’s Privacy Act. The documents I was allowed to consult at the library were not enough to form a clear idea as to whether the censorship related to simple libel issues or commercial secrecy or whether it was in some way connected to national security and the history of the Cold War. Documents written by Reilly in connection with a planned history of Clarkson’s touch on some of the issues he clearly considered sensitive. To tell the true story in full of the SIH takeover would be hurtful to some individuals and ‘could involve legal proceedings with Hambros, to whom it would surely be very damaging’, Reilly observed.

It could of course be just a coincidence that Calvi’s path kept crossing those of other secret influence-brokers during the hottest years of the Cold War. In any event, his flirtation with Capitalfin cost him a $33 million loss, which he buried in the labyrinth of his offshore companies. One good turn deserves another, and in the second half of 1978 ENI offshore financial institutions lent the Banco Ambrosiano Holding in Luxembourg a total of $140 million. It was just this kind of back-scratching that kept Calvi afloat when he should already have been bankrupt and which, he clearly believed, might buoy him up for ever.

Unfortunately for Calvi that would not be the case. The members of his secret power network deserted him in his hour of need, if they didn’t actually conspire together to murder him. Roberto Calvi had achieved power through conspiracy and almost certainly died by it. The mafia may indeed have killed him to punish him for embezzling its funds, as the Rome murder trial endeavoured to prove, but Calvi unquestionably had enemies who were more powerful and more dangerous. His threatened revelations, if they had gone ahead, could have seriously damaged the reputation of the Vatican, upset the mechanisms of political corruption in Italy and disrupted a wider network of secret global power. Any one of those interest groups, or all of them acting in concert, could have decided that Calvi had to die.

The mysteries of the Calvi case continue to interrogate the present and the future. In 1994 and again in 2001 Silvio Berlusconi, whose wealth and power had its roots in the same P2 system that promoted Calvi’s career, became prime minister of Italy. Just as the Calvi case has not been fully clarified in court, so the true nature and significance of P2 remains to be understood. Perhaps the real key to Calvi’s death was his participation in a clandestine mechanism for the international projection of state power, and his threat to go public with that knowledge. The story would have been messy: of corruption, violence, impunity, in short the exercise of unaccountable power. It was understandable how the system came about, in the emergency circumstances of an undeclared global war, but the aberrations it produced betrayed the western values that Calvi’s cold warriors ostensibly defended. In the renewed emergency created by the real threat of Islamic fundamentalism similar mechanisms will be working overtime once again. The challenge for western democracies is to understand what happened in the past so that they can develop appropriate forms of oversight and curb the worst abuses. The seeds of the hatred that animates the fundamentalist warriors of today were in part sown by the Machiavellian machinations of the warriors of yesterday and an immoral short-cut to victory may actually lead to long-term defeat.

Perhaps this would have been Calvi’s message if he had finally blown the whistle on the secret western power network he had served behind the scenes. If he had ever really contemplated defecting to the East, as Felipe Turover suggested, no one knows for sure with whom he was negotiating. On 2 June 1982 the Banco Ambrosiano received a telex from the International Department of the Exterbank in Budapest seeking an appointment with Calvi for two of its officials. ‘We are pleased to inform you that Mr Caspar Gaspar, deputy president, accompanied by Mr Laszlo Csuros, regional manager, will be staying in Milano and would like to pay a visit to your bank on Friday 25 June. Please cable convenient time for appointment and name of your gentlemen who will receive them.’ Perhaps they just wanted to discuss trade finance. By the time the Hungarian gentlemen were due to visit Milan Roberto Calvi would be dead.

Notes

Chapter 1

[1]   Procura della Repubblica. Udienza Preliminare. Memoria del Pubblico Ministero Omicidio di Roberto Calvi. (Public Prosecutor’s office. Preliminary hearing. Public Prosecutor’s memorandum on the murder of Roberto Calvi.) Rome, 28.12.2004, p. 2.

[2]   Ibid., p. 78.

Chapter 2

[1]   Licio Gelli to the author, 18.10.05.

[2]   David Harness to the author, 13.4.04.

[3]   Bill Hopkins to the author, 21.11.04.

[4]   Eligio Paoli to the author, 15.11.05.

[5]   Oliviero Drigani to the author, 15.11.05.

Chapter 3

[1]   Clara Calvi to the author, 25.5.04.

[2]   Roberto Rosone to the author, 01.2.05.

[3]   Gianfranco Piazzesi, Sandra Bonsanti, La storia di Roberto Calvi, Longanesi, Milan, 1984, p. 13.

[4]   Larry Gurwin, The Calvi Affair, Pan Books, London, 1984, pp. 31–6.

[5]   Charles Raw, The Money Changers, Harvill Press, London, 1992, p. 344.

[6]   Clara Calvi, unpublished memoir, pp. 1–2.

[7]   Francesco Pazienza, Il Disubbidiente, Longanesi, Milan, 1999, p. 207.

[8]   Clara Calvi, op. cit., p. 4.

[9]   Clara Calvi to the author, 25.5.04.

Chapter 4

[1]   Nick Tosches, Power on Earth, Arbor House, New York, 1986, pp. 119–20.

[2]   Charles Raw, The Money Changers, Harvill Press, London, 1992, p. 68.

[3]   Carlo Calvi to the author, 5.6.04.

[4]   Nick Tosches, op. cit., pp. 244–5.

[5]   Anonymous source to the author, 8.12.05.

Chapter 5

[1]   P2 Commission, Allegati alla Relazione, Vol. 7, Tome 20, Rome, 1987, p. 611.

[2]   Charles Raw, The Money Changers, Harvill Press, London, 1992, p. 303.

[3]   Carlo Calvi to the author, 5.6.04.

[4]   Ferruccio Pinotti, Poteri Forti, BUR, Milan, 2005, p. 378.

Chapter 6

[1]   Vincenzo Vasile, Michele Sindona: Troppo Caffè Può Fare Male, Nuova Iniziativa Editoriale, Rome, 2005, p. 77.

[2]   Sindona: Gli Atti d’Accusa dei Giudici di Milano, Editori Riuniti, Rome, 1986, pp. 65–72.

[3]   Nick Tosches, Power on Earth, Arbor House, New York, 1986, p. 78.

[4]   Paolo Cucchiarelli, Aldo Giannuli, Lo Stato Parallelo, Gamberetti Editore, Rome, 1997, p. 281.

[5]   P2 Commission, Allegati alla Relazione, Vol. 1, Tome 1, Rome, 1984, pp. 151–6.

[6]   Quoted in Vincenzo Vasile, op. cit., pp. 40–41.

[7]   Vincenzo Vasile, op. cit., p. 39.

[8]   Ibid., pp. 125–33.

Chapter 7

[1]   Vincenzo Vasile, Michele Sindona: Troppo Caffè Può Fare Male, Nuova Iniziativa Editoriale, Rome, 2005, p. 42.

[2]   ‘Have Guns, Will Travel’, Village Voice, 22.7.91.

[3]   ‘Noriega: America’s Drug Dealer’, Willamette Week, 1–7 February 1990.

[4]   L’Europeo, 4.8.90.

[5]   ‘National furore mounts over television allegations linking the CIA with Italian terrorism’, UPI, Rome, 23.7.90.

[6]   ‘Burning Bush’, Willamette Week, 14–20 July 1988.

[7]   Ari Ben-Menashe, Profits of War, Sheridan Square Press, New York, 1992, pp. 115–19.

[8]   Gerald James to the author, 20.9.05.

Chapter 8

[1]   Sergio Flamigni, Trame Atlantiche, Kaos Edizioni, Milan, 1996, p. 287.

[2]   Nick Tosches, Power on Earth, Arbor House, New York, 1986, p. 171.

[3]   Sergio Flamigni, op. cit., pp. 9–11.

[4]   Pier Carpi, Il Venerabile, Gribaudo & Zarotti, 1993, p. 99.

[5]   Licio Gelli to the author, 18.10.05.

[6]   P2 Commission, Allegati alla Relazione, Vol. 3, Tome 19, Rome, 1984, p. 679.

[7]   P2 Commission, Allegati alla Relazione, Vol. 1, Tome 2, Rome, 1984, p. 1093.

[8]   Licio Gelli, La Verità, Demetra Edizioni, Lugano, 1989, pp. 386–7.

[9]   Mario Guarino, I Mercanti del Vaticano, Kaos Edizioni, Milan, 1998, p. 57.

[10]   Paolo Borruto (ed.), Licio Gelli, Poeta Europeo, AGAR Editrice, Reggio Calabria, 2004, pp. 525–624.

[11]   Licio Gelli, op.cit., p. 195.

[12]   Francesco De Rosa, Licio Gelli, La Lunga Vita, Giuseppe Laterza, Bari, 2003, pp. 109–13.

Chapter 9

[1]   Giacomo Botta to the author, 8.3.05.

[2]   Banco Ambrosiano bankruptcy verdict, Milan assize court, 16.4.92, pp. 3848–55.

[3]   Paul Mousel to the Calvi murder trial, Rome assize court, 12.4.06.

[4]   Antonino Giuffrè to the Calvi murder trial, 14.12.05.

[5]   Francesco Pazienza, Il Disubbidiente, Longanesi, Milan, 1999, pp. 177–84

[6]   Banco Ambrosiano bankruptcy verdict, pp. 2664–5.

[7]   Tribunale di Roma, Ordinanza di Rinvio a Giudizio, GI Francesco Misiani, Rome, 1.3.85, pp. 10–11.

[8]   Francesco Pazienza, op. cit., p. 186.

[9]   Francesco Pazienza to the Calvi murder trial, 11.4.06.

[10]   Francesco Pazienza, op. cit., p. 479.

[11]   Quoted in Maria Antonietta Calabrò, Le Mani della Mafia, Edizioni Associate, Rome, 1991, p. 163.

Chapter 10

[1]   Paul Hoffmann, Anatomy of the Vatican, Robert Hale, London, 1985, pp. 180–82.

[2]   Stephen Dorril, MI6, The Free Press, New York, 2000, pp. 172–443.

[3]   Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, The Outlaw Bank, Random House, New York, 1993, p. xxv.

[4]   Carl Bernstein, Marco Politi, His Holiness: John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Time, Doubleday, London, 1996, p. 357.

[5]   Jonathan Kwitny, Man of the Century, Warner Books, London, 1998, pp. 437–8.

[6]   John Cornwell, A Thief in the Night, Viking, London, 1989, p. 46.

[7]   Ibid., op. cit., pp. 55–6.

[8]   Nick Tosches, Power on Earth, Arbor House, New York, 1986, p. 126.

[9]   Carlo Calvi to the author, 17.5.06.

[10]   David Yallop, In God’s Name, Corgi, London, 1985, p. 300.

[11]   Francesco Pazienza, Il Disubbidiente, Longanesi, Milan, 1990, pp. 182–3.

[12]   Jonathan Kwitny, op. cit., p. 267.

[13]   Luigi Cavallo, Corruzione in Vaticano, Agenzia A, Turin, 1982, p. 67.

[14]   Ibid., p. 99.

[15]   John Cornwell, op. cit., p. 53.

[16]   Wilton Wynn to the author, 6.9.05.

[17]   The Tablet, 13.5.06.

Chapter 11

[1]   Franca Mangiavacca, Memoriale Pecorelli, Vol. 1, International EILES, Rome, 1996, p. 464.

[2]   Francesco Pazienza, Il Disubbidiente, Longanesi, Milan, 1999, pp. 251–2.

[3]   Banco Ambrosiano bankruptcy verdict, Milan, 16.4.92, pp. 3049–51.

[4]   Ferruccio Pinotti, Poteri Forti, Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, Milan, 2005, pp. 285–6.

[5]   Banco Ambrosiano bankruptcy verdict, op. cit., pp. 3081–5.

[6]   P2 Commission, Allegati alla Relazione, Vol. 3, Tome 21, Rome, 1984, pp. 301–3.

[7]   John Drewe to the author, 3.5.06.

Chapter 12

[1]   Felipe Turover to the author, 3.2.05.

[2]   Gerald James to the author, 2.5.06.

[3]   Gerald James, In The Public Interest, Little, Brown & Co., London, 1995, p. 365.

[4]   John Drewe to the author, 3.5.06.

[5]   Aldo Giannuli, Strategie della Tensione, L’Ufficio Affari Riservati Vol. I, Nuova Iniziativa Editoriale, Rome, 2005, pp. 49–57.

[6]   Francesco Delfino to the author, 4.2.06.

Chapter 13

[1]   P2 Commission, Allegati alla Relazione, Vol. 3, Tome 21, Rome, 1984, p. 236.

[2]   Clara Calvi, unpublished memoir, p. 42.

[3]   Leopold Ledl, Per Conto del Vaticano, Tullio Pironti Editore, Naples, 1997, pp. 110–11.

[4]   Silvano Vittor to the author, 4.7.06.

[5]   Mario Sarcinelli to the author, 25.3.06.

[6]   Lovat MacDonald to the author, 3.12.04.

[7]   Robert Clarke to the author, 16.11.04.

[8]   Edward Jay Epstein, Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer, Random House, New York, 1996, p. 223.

[9]   Daniel Brandt to the author, 21.3.06.

Chapter 14

[1]   Silvano Vittor to the author, 15.3.06.

[2]   Roberto Rosone to the Calvi murder trial, 6.6.06.

[3]   Gianfranco Piazzesi, Sandra Bonsanti, La storia di Roberto Calvi, Longanesi, Milan, 1984, pp. 205–6.

[4]   Anna Calvi to the Calvi murder trial, 20.6.06.

[5]   Silvano Vittor to the author, 10.1.06.

[6]   Antonino Giuffrè to the Calvi murder trial, 14.12.05.

Chapter 15

[1]   Rupert Cornwell, God’s Banker, Victor Gollancz, London, 1983, p. 199.

[2]   Cited in Stephen Knight, The Brotherhood, Panther Books, London, 1985, p. 317.

[3]   Emulation First Degree Ritual, Lewis Masonic, Hersham, 1994, p. 42.

[4]   Martin Short, Inside the Brotherhood, Grafton Books, London, 1989, p. 414.

[5]   John Hamill to the author, multiple interviews.

[6]   Emanuele Dubini to the author, 31.1.05.

[7]   Bruno Rossini to the author, 31.1.05.

[8]   Licio Gelli to the author, 18.10.05.

[9]   Cited in Pino Nicotri, Mistero Vaticano, Kaos Edizioni, Milan, 2002, p. 51.

[10]   Roberto Rosone to the author, 7.3.05.

Chapter 16

[1]   Robert Clarke to the author, 16.11.04.

[2]   Robert Clarke to the author, 16.11.04.

[3]   Francesco Rosato to the Calvi murder trial, 14.3.06.

[4]   John White to the author, 14.6.05.

[5]   M.R.D. Foot, SOE, Pimlico, London, 1999, p. 52.

[6]   John Drewe to the author, 3.5.06.

[7]   Gerald James to the author, 2.5.06.

[8]   Colin McFadyean to the author, 24.11.04.

[9]   Martin Short, Inside the Brotherhood, Grafton Books, London, 1989, p. 217.

[10]   Trevor Smith to the Calvi murder trial, 22.3.06.

Chapter 17

[1]   Luigi Capasso to the author, 24.1.06.

[2]   Berndt Brinkmann to the Calvi murder trial, 24.1.06.

[3]   Leone Calvi to the Calvi murder trial, 13.6.06.

Chapter 18

[1]   Charles, Raw, The Money Changers, Harvill Press, London, 1992, p. 16.

[2]   Carlo Calvi to the author, 5.6.04.

[3]   Cited in Sergio Flamigni, Trame Atlantiche, Kaos Edizioni, Milan, 1996, p. 204.

[4]   Roberto Rosone to the Calvi murder trial, 6.6.06.

[5]   Cited in Mario Guarino, Berlusconi, Inchiesta Sul Signor TV, Kaos Edizioni, Milan, 1994, p. 156.

[6]   Carlo Calvi to the author, 17.5.06.

Index

Abbruciati, Danilo xxi, 183, 204, 285

Abu Nidal Organization (ANO) 163–4

Afghan resistance 163, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207

Agca, Mehmet Ali 279, 280, 282, 283

Allivane International Ltd 106, 107, 108, 214

Ambrosoli, Giorgio xxi, 90, 132

Andreotti, Giulio xxi, 46, 47, 57, 66, 81, 82, 84, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 124, 251, 276

Anglo-American foreign policy 107, 108

Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN) 161

anti-communism 15–16, 32, 55, 85, 86, 100, 116–17, 119, 120, 142, 144, 148, 160, 161, 166, 192, 196, 207, 217, 221, 280, 292

Armao, Robert 147, 152, 155

arms trade 28, 52, 65, 71, 72, 104, 106, 110, 147, 203, 210, 211, 281

Artoc Bank and Trust 268, 291

Astra Defence Systems 107, 108–9, 199, 211

Avanguardia Nazionale 67

Banca Cattolica del Veneto 132, 135, 176, 189, 277

Banca del Gottardo 27, 57, 137, 176, 191, 206, 207, 277

Banca Privata Finanziaria 103, 171

Banco Ambrosiano 5, 25, 27, 32, 33–5, 36, 38, 55, 57, 59, 111, 112, 121, 149–51, 153, 165, 198, 199, 212, 325, 333

and Afghan resistance funding 206, 207

arms purchase funding 216–17

Bank of Italy investigations 55, 57, 128, 224

bankruptcy trial 76, 116, 134, 135, 186–7

collapse of xxv, 123, 133, 134, 153–4, 189, 199

money laundering 78, 137, 202–3

offshore companies 53, 57, 130, 131, 137, 190, 191, 225, 247, 249

rescue plans 45, 47, 152, 153, 190, 223, 224, 225

and Solidarity funding 130, 148, 149, 167, 191, 194, 207

and the Vatican Bank (IOR) 13, 40, 45–6, 57, 74, 130, 133–6, 137, 154, 172–3, 188, 189, 191, 237, 246–7

Banco Ambrosiano Andino 74, 133

Banco Ambrosiano Holding 53, 131, 134, 136, 141, 334

Banco Ambrosiano Overseas Ltd (BAOL) 40, 131, 132, 133, 137, 174, 203–4, 268

Banco Financiero Sudamericano (Bafisud) 59, 95, 122, 218, 325

Banco di Roma 81, 232

Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) 103, 109, 161–5, 203, 212

Bank of England 161, 162, 163, 164

Bank of Italy 35, 55, 57, 71, 128, 224, 232

Banque de Financement (Finabank) 53, 71, 95, 171

Belgrano, sinking of 221

Bellinghieri, Giuseppe 20, 310

Beneforti, Walter 218, 219, 304

Benelli, Cardinal Giovanni 123, 231, 232

Berti, Alberto Jaimes xxi, 248–9

Blackfriars Bridge xxvi, 1–2, 6, 265–6, 267, 270, 271–2

Bologna bombing 28, 63–6, 67, 68, 73, 74, 77, 78, 91, 202

Bontate, Stefano 88, 89

Borzone, Renato 140, 298

Botta, Giacomo xxi, 132–3, 134–5, 136, 216–17

Brenneke, Richard xxi, 97–103, 104–5, 109, 119

Brinkmann, Berndt 307–8

Bull, Gerald 110, 199, 209–12, 233

Buscetta, Tommaso 311, 313

Bush, George H.W. 105

Byrne, Terence Charles 106–8

Cabassi, Giuseppe 21, 183

Callaghan, James 161

Calò, Giuseppe (Pippo) xxi, 22, 78, 88, 89, 90, 138, 139, 140, 262, 299, 300, 305, 311–13

Calvi, Anna 39, 43–6, 50, 61, 224, 225, 226, 230, 234, 251, 257–8, 270

Calvi, Carlo 39, 77, 176, 326, 332, 333

Calvi, Clara 31–2, 36, 38, 40–1, 46–8, 60, 111, 113, 185, 227

Calvi, Giacomo 31, 33

Calvi, Leone 270, 318–19

Calvi, Luciano 38

Calvi, Roberto

alleged defection plan 208–9, 336

alleged mistress 204–5

anti-communism 32, 132, 196

art connections 294

autopsies 3, 4, 5, 297, 307–8

background and early life 31–2

and Berlusconi 226, 329–31

blackmail by xxvii, xxxii, xxxiii, 13, 44, 56, 60, 127, 188, 192, 193

blackmail of 54, 55–7, 79, 142, 143, 179

and the Bologna bombing 63–5, 66, 74, 77

briefcase and contents 13, 25, 77, 179, 189, 193, 194, 196, 228, 244

character 34, 35–7, 39, 126

and the CIA 109–10

death 1–12, 267, 276–7, 303–4

flight from Italy 13–14, 23, 26–7, 64, 70, 95, 133, 194, 227–35, 242, 243–4

and Gelli 63, 70, 111, 112–13, 126–8, 129–30, 149–50, 276–7

imprisonment 57–8, 60–1, 148

inquests 11, 243, 290

in London xxxi–xxxii, 25–6, 245–57

and the mafia 90, 139, 141, 208, 209, 213, 281, 298–301, 335

and Marcinkus xxvii, 40, 46, 131–3, 134, 136, 138, 140, 154–5, 172, 173, 174, 175–6, 185–6, 190, 191, 232, 279, 294

marriage and family 38–9

masonic symbolism of death xxvi, 267, 269

military service 32–3

and money laundering 90, 94, 99, 138

and P2 77, 111–12, 113, 129, 268, 274

Rome murder trial xxvii–xxviii, 89, 128, 136, 138–41, 149, 195, 215, 219, 225, 228, 238, 243, 253, 258, 260, 261–2, 270, 288, 292, 297, 298, 304–20, 321, 326, 335

and the secret services 125, 128, 140, 146, 151, 196, 213

security anxieties 36–7, 43, 44

and Sindona 40, 51, 53, 53–4, 55, 56, 60, 90, 112, 113, 129, 130, 131, 132, 139

suicide attempt 58, 59, 148

and the Vatican xxvi, 41, 60–1, 75, 121, 127, 129, 130–1, 141, 190, 196

see also Banco Ambrosiano Cameron, James 8, 9

Camorra 58, 150, 151, 226, 248, 298, 300, 311

see also mafia

Capasso, Luigi 307

Capitalfin International Ltd 331–2, 333, 334

Carboni, Andrea 218, 227, 260

Carboni, Flavio xxii, 15, 16, 18, 22, 28, 46, 73, 77, 93, 138, 141, 151, 152, 167, 197, 198, 218, 229, 236, 238, 246, 258, 259, 260–1, 262–3, 279, 327, 328, 329, 330, 331

and Calvi 14, 25, 29, 41, 46, 148, 183–6, 187–8, 189–90, 191–2, 193, 194, 196, 221, 223, 224, 230, 233–4, 242, 245, 250–1, 256, 262

extradition from Switzerland 16, 28, 190

and Rome murder trial 305, 314–16, 319

Carman, George 243

Carter, Jimmy 102, 119, 144, 163, 203

Casaroli, Cardinal Agostino xxii, 45, 121, 142

Casey, William 102, 105, 106, 148, 154

Casillo, Vincenzo 150, 151, 298, 300–1, 313

Castro, Fidel 99

Catholic church

anti-communism 100, 120, 142, 144, 160, 161, 166, 192, 207, 280

church–state relations 157

cold war activities xxvii, 47, 197, 207, 277–8

discredited status xxvii–xxviii

and freemasonry 120, 121–2, 175

and Nazism 160, 207

see also Vatican bank

Cavallo, Luigi xxii, 54, 55–7, 178, 179–80

Champ-Dollon 16, 65

Chelsea Cloisters 14–15, 25, 50, 235, 237, 242, 244, 245–6, 249, 254, 258

Christian Democrat party 57, 69, 79, 80, 94, 118, 139–40, 142, 325, 331

Christie’s robbery (1980) 20, 21

CIA xxvii, 51, 55, 80, 81, 86, 93, 97, 98, 99, 146, 163, 213, 294

and Afghan resistance funding 203

and anti-communist funding 80, 154, 166, 292

CIA/P2 alleged transactions 101, 103

and drugs trafficking 97, 98, 101

and Italian terrorism 102

Ciolini, Elio xxii, 63–4, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69–70, 71, 72

Cirillo, Ciro 150

Cisalpine Overseas Bank 40, 53, 135, 171, 174, 212, 331, 333

see also Banco Ambrosiano Overseas Ltd (BAOL)

Clarridge, Duane 78, 101

Cold War 41, 47, 55, 103, 163, 206, 208, 221, 334

Compendium SA 53, 131

Condotte d’Acqua 52, 146, 147

Coomber, Cecil 254–5, 256

Cornwell, John 168, 170, 180

Corona, Armando xxii, 66, 128, 328

Corriera della Sera 54–5, 115, 120, 125, 152, 323–5, 326

Corrocher, Graziella 252, 257, 317

Cosa Nostra xxviii, 83, 84, 88, 89, 90, 99, 138, 139, 140, 141, 208, 226, 248, 300, 304, 311, 312

see also mafia

Craxi, Bettino xxii, 16, 17, 40, 151, 331

Credito Varesino 189, 277

Crimi, Joseph Miceli 91, 113–14

currency exports, illegal xxv, 27, 57, 71, 170–1

Cutolo, Raffaele 58, 150

D’Amato, Federico Umberto xxii, 144, 145, 146, 227

D’Andria, Mario 220, 298, 306, 316, 317

Davies, Arthur Gordon 8

De Martino, Francesco 149, 150

De Pedis, Ernesto 283–4

De Rosa, Francesco 126, 127

De Savary, Peter 268, 291

Delfino, Francesco 9, 218–20, 221–2

Delle Chiaie, Stefano 66, 67, 71, 72, 73, 239, 280

Di Carlo, Francesco xxii, 253, 298, 299–300, 313

Diotallevi, Ernesto xxii, 23, 224, 225, 228, 262, 285, 305, 320

Donnell, Ellsworth 291, 292

Drigani, Oliviero 22, 23, 27–8

drugs trafficking 18, 19, 23–4, 89, 90, 98, 99, 105, 139, 147, 203

Dubini, Emanuele 270–1

ENI 331, 332, 334

Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem 123–4

Erin SA 154

Fairways Marine 152, 228–9

Falcone, Giovanni 94, 96, 312

Falklands war 125, 186, 209, 215, 216–17, 218, 221

FBI 84, 232

finance police 14, 15, 17, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 63

Fioravanti, Valerio 73, 202

Flavoni, Ugo 259, 260

Foot, Paul 291, 292–3, 296

Franklin National Bank 54

freemasonry 84, 85, 118, 157, 266

Bahamas 269

British lodges 122, 268–9

and the Catholic church 120, 121–2, 175

Monte Carlo lodge 66–7

see also P2 masonic lodge

Gallop, Angela 308–9

Galtieri, Gen. Leopoldo 217

Gambino crime family 88, 97, 98, 147

Gambino, John 88, 89

Gawronska, Wanda 167

Gelli, Licio xxii, 15, 16, 22, 40, 41, 59, 65, 66, 72, 74, 75, 77, 84, 91, 92, 94–5, 102, 110, 116–17, 119, 216, 218, 243, 254, 268–9, 327, 332

and Banco Ambrosiano 115–16

and Calvi 63, 70, 111, 112–13, 126–8, 129–30, 149–50, 276–7

and the mafia 89

military intelligence operations 118–19

and P2 15, 112, 114, 115, 117, 118, 122, 129, 323, 324

prison escape 16–17

and Sindona 85, 92, 94–5, 119, 126, 129

and the Vatican 120, 123–4

Gentile, Aldo 64, 77

Ghira, Andrea 205–6

Giardili, Alvaro 150, 226, 292

Giuffrè, Antonino 89, 90, 138–41, 261–3

Gladio 80, 117, 206–7

Goggi, Loretta 34, 35

Grey Wolves 280, 282

Guarino, Philip 119, 120

Guzzi, Rodolfo 82, 83

H. Clarkson Holdings 333, 334

Haig, Gen. Alexander 119, 120, 145

Hambros Bank 52, 291, 333, 334

Hamill, John 268, 269

Harness, David 19, 290

Heer, Jørg xxii, 273–6

Hnilica, Bishop Pavel xxiii, 193, 194–6, 197

Hopkins, Bill 20–1, 48, 49, 50

Hussein, Saddam 110, 162, 163, 213

Institute for the Works of Religion see Vatican bank

intelligence services/arms dealing network 109, 110

intelligence services/banking network 163

Interitalia 35

IOR see Vatican bank

IRA (Irish Republican Army) 154

Iran 98, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105–6, 107, 112, 147, 199, 239–40

Iran–Contra affair 104, 106, 107, 147, 242

Iran–Iraq war 105, 213

Iraq 106, 107, 147, 162, 163, 198, 199, 213

Israel 105–6, 163

Italian Communist party (PCI) 16, 17, 57, 80, 125, 208, 326–7

Italian Socialist party (PSI) 17, 59, 70, 83, 139–40, 203, 218, 327

Izzo, Angelo 201–3, 204, 205, 206

James, Gerald 108–10, 198, 211, 212, 213, 214–15, 294

Jennings, Frank 48–9, 50, 205

John Paul I, Pope 121, 176–7, 187, 279

John Paul II, Pope xxviii, 142, 143–4, 148, 154, 165–6, 177–8, 188, 192, 208, 223, 321

attempted assassination of 148, 208, 279–80, 281, 282

Kahane, Karl 225, 231

Kashoggi, Adnan 71, 147

Katz, Jeff 321

KGB 118, 119, 209

kidnappings 36, 149–51, 283, 284

Kleinszig, Manuela xxiii, 14, 22, 218, 228, 233, 242, 246, 256, 260, 305, 314, 320

Kleinszig, Michaela xxiii, 14, 228, 233, 242, 246, 253, 256, 257, 260, 314

Kroll Associates 8–9, 248, 292, 293, 295, 321

Kunz, Hans Albert xxiii, 112, 224, 227, 229, 230, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 251, 257, 259–60, 261

Kwitny, Jonathan 167, 178

Landmann, Valentin 275–6

Ledeen, Mike 68, 71, 72, 144, 145

Ledl, Leopold xxiii, 230–2

Leoni, Filippo 135

Lercaro, Cardinal Giacomo 122, 123

Libya 144, 162, 240, 241

Lockheed affair 80, 187

Macchi, Pasquale 121, 169, 294

Madonna, Enrico 151

mafia 6, 22, 37, 48, 70, 84, 88, 90, 96, 101, 138, 139, 141, 147, 184, 203, 204, 208, 218, 222, 231, 236, 262, 265, 305, 311, 313, 319, 329

and Calvi 90, 139, 141, 208, 209, 213, 281, 298–301, 335

CIA–mafia alleged collusion 99

drug trade 90, 139, 147, 203

money laundering 18, 53, 89, 93, 99, 101, 138

and P2 masonic lodge 90, 101, 139

pentiti 88, 99, 138, 298, 312, 318

see also Camorra; Cosa Nostra

Magliana Band 67–8, 73, 78, 151, 183, 184, 202, 204, 206, 224, 283, 284, 285, 298, 311, 313

Magnoni, Giuliano 51

Mani Pulite (Clean Hands) corruption investigation 60

Manic SA 131, 135, 136

Manlon Trading Ltd 164, 165

Mannoia, Francesco Marino 88–9, 139, 299

Marcinkus, Archbishop Paul xxiii, 40, 46, 142, 143, 147, 148, 149, 154, 167–81, 168–9, 207, 233, 321

and Calvi xxvii, 40, 46, 131–3, 134, 136, 138, 140, 154–5, 168–70, 172, 173, 174, 175–6, 186, 190, 191, 232, 279, 294

and the CIA 154–5, 207

and John Paul I 176–7

and John Paul II 177–8

and the mafia 139

and money laundering 138, 139

and P2 90, 121

and the Panamanian companies 174–5

and Sindona 170–2

and the Vatican bank 134, 137, 158, 170–1, 172–3, 176, 179, 181, 188

Martelli, Claudio xxiii, 218, 326

Massera, Admiral Emilio 215–16, 325

Materazzo, Giovanna 298

May, Jeanette 20, 21–2, 48

Mazzotta, Maurizio 225

Mena airport drug operations 98, 99

Mennini, Alessandro 60, 61, 135

Mennini, Luigi xxiii, 46, 134, 171, 177, 186, 223, 247

Merlin Writers Ltd 76

MI6 161, 163, 164, 220, 221

Molinari, Arrigo 124–6

money laundering 78, 89, 93, 94, 98–9, 101, 104, 137, 138, 202–4

Montedison chemicals company 66

Monteleone, Maria 234, 306

Moro, Aldo 69, 79–81, 82, 87

Morris, Odette xxiii, 258, 259, 260–1, 297, 315

Morris, William 229, 251, 258, 314

Mortillaro, Vincenzo 253–4

Mossad 110, 212

Mousel, Paul 136–8, 141

Mulligan, Reginald Graham 243–4

Mussolini, Benito 32, 117, 118, 158

NATO 80, 106, 117, 145, 206

Nazism 160, 207

Nicaragua xxvii, 78, 104, 137, 217, 249

Nikodim, Metropolitan 278–9

Nixon, Richard 52, 85–6, 87

Noriega, Manuel 162

North, Colonel Oliver 242

Occidental Petroleum Corporation 240, 241–2

October Surprise allegations 102, 104, 106, 119

Operation Greenback 203–4

Operation Stay Behind 80, 206, 207

Opus Dei xxix, 40, 45, 46, 47, 122, 124, 179, 187, 188–9, 190, 248, 249, 250, 284, 322

Orlandi, Emanuela 282, 283, 284

Ortolani, Umberto xxiii, xxxi–xxxii, 40, 59, 66, 74, 95, 96, 111, 113, 116, 122–3, 127, 129, 253–4, 268–9, 324, 326, 332

Osservatore Politico 121

P2 masonic lodge 13, 29, 35, 59, 70, 101, 125, 222, 322–4, 327

alleged CIA funding 101, 103

and drugs trade 101

and the Falklands invasion 215

and the mafia 90, 101, 139

membership xiii, 15–16, 17, 40, 65, 78, 91, 114, 118, 121, 122, 329, 331

P2/Gladio connection 117

Pahlavi, Mohammed Reza, Shah of Iran 147, 235

Pakistan 162, 163

Palazzini, Cardinal Pietro 186, 187–8, 192

Palestine Liberation Organization 145

Panamanian companies 132, 133, 136, 153, 174–5, 203, 248, 249

Paoli, Eligio 15, 16, 17, 18, 22–3, 25–7, 28, 29, 50, 63, 65, 77, 254, 289, 303

Paul, David 11

Paul VI, Pope 51–2, 122–3, 154, 169–70, 176, 179, 271, 294

Paxman, Jeremy 229, 256–7

Pazienza, Francesco xxiii, 28, 39, 65–6, 68, 70, 71, 77–8, 91–2, 128, 141–2, 143, 144, 145–7, 148, 149, 150, 151–4, 155, 167, 177, 183, 184, 185, 188, 215, 225, 228, 229, 330

Pecorelli, Mino 121, 266

Pellicani, Emilio xxiv, 23, 27, 227, 228, 234, 251, 329, 331

Piccoli, Flaminio 142, 145, 150, 331

Pius XII, Pope 123, 157

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) 144

postcards, threatening 270, 271–3

Pro Fratribus xvi, 194, 197, 198

Przydatek, Father Kazimierz 166–7, 194

Raw, Charles 48, 50, 205

Reagan, Ronald 93, 98, 103, 105, 119, 120, 144, 145, 148, 179, 217

Red Brigades 69, 79–80, 82, 150, 151

Reilly, Sir Patrick 333–4

Riina, Salvatore 88, 218

Rizzoli, Angelo xxiv, 115, 326, 330

Rizzoli Publishing Group 324, 325, 326, 330

Rocchi, Carlo 93, 94, 219

Rockefeller, David 66

Rosa dei Venti conspiracy 87

Rosato, Francesco 11, 288–9

Rosone, Roberto xxiv, 34–5, 183, 187, 246–7, 251–2, 281, 284–5, 326, 327

Rossini, Bruno 273

Roveraro, Gianmario 322

Salvini, Guido 202, 206

San Lorenzo xxxi, 21, 253

Santovito, Gen. Giuseppe xxiv, 68, 78, 91, 142, 185, 197

Shipping Industrial Holdings (SIH) 333

Sica, Domenico 9, 227

Sicilian secessionist project 84–5, 87, 88, 97, 113

SIFAR (Italian military intelligence) 115

Siino, Angelo 84–5, 88

Simpson, Keith 3, 4, 5, 8, 263, 297, 308

Sindona, Michele xxiv, 40, 51–2, 52, 53, 64, 71, 79, 81, 82–95, 137, 179, 191, 291

anti-communism 82, 86, 87

blackmail operations 79, 82–3, 88, 93–4

and Calvi 40, 51, 53, 53–4, 55, 56, 60, 90, 112, 113, 129, 130, 131, 132, 139

fake kidnapping 82–3, 88, 91, 97, 114

fraudulent bankruptcy 84, 90

and Gelli 84, 92, 94–5, 119, 126, 129

imprisonment 90–1, 92, 93

and Marcinkus 170–2

money laundering 88–9, 99, 138

Sicilian secessionist project 84–5, 85, 87, 88, 97, 113

SISDE (Italian domestic intelligence service) 220, 282

SISMI (Italian military intelligence service) 9, 67, 68, 128, 142, 147, 196, 218, 220, 280

Smith, Trevor 261, 297, 298

Società Generale Immobiliare (SGI) 52, 171

Sogno, Count Edgardo 55, 85

Solidarity 130, 148, 149, 166, 167, 175, 178, 191, 194–5, 207

Spadolini, Giovanni 220

Squatriti, Renato 309–10

Tangentopoli corruption scandal 60, 222

Tassan Din, Bruno 324, 325, 326, 330

terrorism 28, 36, 117, 141, 202, 207

see also Bologna bombing; Red Brigades

Tesauri, Tito 36, 226, 227

Tescaroli, Luca 152, 234, 243, 295, 306, 312, 313

Tisserant, Cardinal Eugène 123, 124, 232–3, 278

Tosches, Nick 51, 60, 86, 112, 170

Trilateral Commission 66, 67

Turover, Felipe 206, 207–8, 209, 279, 336

Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) 74, 75, 76, 241, 242

United Grand Lodge of England 122, 268, 269

United Trading Corporation (UTC) 135, 136

Vaccari, Sergio xxiv, 17–19, 20–1, 22, 23–5, 29, 48–50, 205, 253, 289–90, 303, 309, 310

Vagnozzi, Cardinal Egidio 143

Vatican bank (IOR) 13, 45, 53, 61, 74, 132, 224, 232, 324

and Banco Ambrosiano/Calvi 13, 40, 45–6, 57, 74, 130, 131, 132, 133, 133–6, 137, 154, 157–9, 170–1, 172–3, 186, 188, 189, 191, 246–7, 321–2

and BCCI 164, 165

and the mafia 89, 231

and Marcinkus 134, 137, 158, 170–1, 172–3, 176, 179, 181, 188

and offshore companies 176

Vatican Connection scandal 124, 231, 233

Villot, Cardinal Jean 121, 232

Vitalone, Wilfredo xxiv, 251, 261

Vittor, Silvano xxiv, 14, 22, 25–6, 29, 228, 230, 233, 234, 235, 245, 246, 255–7, 261, 305, 314, 316–18, 319–20

Walesa, Lech 166, 191

World Organization of Masonic Thought and Assistance 111–12, 119, 268

Wynn, Wilton 166, 180–1

Yallop, David 177

Yalta Accord 207

Zapata Off-Shore Services Ltd 294

Zitropo 137