God's Banker (28 page)

Another such moment had come a few days earlier in Milan, as trading opened on the full market in Banco Ambrosiano shares. Calvi, obviously, had to attend. He wandered morosely down to the
corbeille,
or main ring on the trading floor, where the dealers shouted and gesticulated their transactions. His face pale and expressionless, he watched the price slide downwards: from 50,000 to 45,500 lire at the first call, then to 40,000 lire at the close. Despite friendly support buying arranged in advance, the value of the main asset under­pinning the Panamanian folly had fallen twenty per cent in a single day.

Later on there was the routine cocktail party to mark a supposedly happy occasion. Calvi greeted Isidoro Albertini, one of Milan's leading stock brokers, who had known him vaguely since the Bocconi days. Sipping at a fruit juice, Calvi avoided conversation about Ambrosiano, limiting himself to reminiscences about the Russian campaign. He was fatalistic and dejected—for reasons only too obvious.

The importunings of the central bank and the attentions of the magistrates (concerning Sindona, the P-2, and the Genghini affair, to name but three of the most serious) were only two of the vicious interlocking pressures upon him. None had ever shared his power, and now none, beyond his family, could share his ordeal.

To his wife and daughter, Calvi would confide his darkest forebod­ings. But often pure fantasy must have offered the only release from the stress to which he was subjected. For Calvi the line between truth and fiction was always blurred, but probably never more so than now. The belief that he was being persecuted became an obsession, coloured by deepening fears over his physical safety. He took to carrying to work in his briefcase the pistol he kept in a drawer at Drezzo. Outside his family he was virtually friendless. The calibre of those to whom he turned for help, Pazienza and the flashy Carboni, the courtier with underworld connections, was the measure of the isolation of a man until recently reputed to have been among the most powerful in Italy. The politicians were bothered only insofar as the fate of the
Corriere
was concerned, or a claim might be staked at Ambrosiano itself when Calvi had been forced aside.

But the central difficulty remained financial; and no amount of juggling of money from one corner of his realm to another could plug the leaks opening up from Panama to Luxembourg, as the Bank of Italy peeled away one layer of secrecy after another, and foreign banks remained cold. The IOR would grant no more than the letters of patronage, and the promised deadline of June 30 was approaching. He would describe to his family the unavailing entreaties in the Vatican. "The priests will be our ruin," he told his daughter Anna after one fruitless visit there. "They believe that even if a person dies his soul will survive, so there's no great harm done." The entreaties, moreover, would sometimes be mixed with threats to reveal all, but with equal lack of success.

The foreign banks, on the other hand, were taking less of a long-term view. To fill the gaps left by their defections, Calvi and his two lieutenants, Botta and Leoni, were being forced to siphon money directly out of Milan to the increasingly stretched foreign subsidiaries, irrespective of what the Bank of Italy might say.

A first clue had come in the 1981 report, those $131 million despatched to Lima and Managua. Hundreds of millions of dollars more would be transferred in this fashion in 1982, as the end approached. But in the closing months a further $230 million left Milan less obviously to the same destinations. The device, to cause no little controversy afterwards, was that of "back to back" deposits. Ambrosiano in Milan would borrow money on international markets and deposit the funds with a compliant foreign bank. By prior agreement this bank would lend on an equivalent sum to Peru or Nicaragua, charging a slightly higher rate of interest than it was paying Ambrosiano in Milan, to ensure a profit on the operation. But in the monthly accounts Ambrosiano (like any Italian bank) had to submit to the Bank of Italy, such an ebb of resources down the bottomless wells of Lima and Managua would appear as innocuous interbank deposits.

The foreign bank intermediaries would insist on another point too: they would not repay Ambrosiano until they had first been repaid by the foreign affiliates. Thus the device of the "back-to-back" deposit, not unexceptional in itself, ensured that subsequent default in Lux­embourg, Lima and Managua would fatally involve the Milan pa­rent—just as the Bank of Italy's inspectors had feared in the case of Nassau, and set out in their report of four years earlier.

But Calvi knew that even this expedient could not last long. If his affairs were to be unscrambled, only two options, however remote, were left. Either the Banco Ambrosiano and other shares held by the Panamanian companies could be sold for a high enough price for the latter to be able to repay their debts; or he could find a more accommodating partner than the IOR under its present management. For the first task, it seems, he employed Pazienza, for the second his new Sardinian friend Carboni.

There remains only Pazienza's word to gauge how nearly he succeeded. He has said he almost managed to sell one IOR asset held in Panama, by the picturesquely named Laramie Inc. This was a block of two million shares in Vianini, a thriving construction company in Rome, controlled by the Vatican. According to Pazienza, an Amer­ican group was ready to buy Vianini for $60 million, but the deal never materialized.

But if the circle was to be squared, the 5.2 million shares in Banco Ambrosiano itself deposited in guarantee, had to be disposed of at around $200 apiece, compared to a Milan stock market peak of around $40. The only way such a difference could ever be justified was if this ten per cent holding gave control not only of the bank, but of all its valuable Italian interests as well. And in a sense, of course, they did.

Pazienza asked his associate Robert Armao, closely linked to the Chase Manhattan bank and representative in the US of the assets of the Pahlevis, the deposed Iranian royal family, to have Ambrosiano evaluated. The study, carried out by a "foreign affiliate of Chase", was presented on December 9, 1981. It spoke in glowing terms of Calvi's bank, as a first rate investment. A consortium embracing American, Iranian exile and Saudi Arabian interests took shape. Armao and Pazienza discussed the matter further with Calvi in Rome the following February. The consortium was apparently ready to pay over $1,000 million for the Ambrosiano shares. In return Calvi would stay on for three years as chairman, while the consortium had the option to withdraw if something went wrong. But Pazienza never was quite clear just how much of Ambrosiano was involved: sometimes it would be ten per cent, then twelve per cent, and on occasion fifteen per cent. When Pazienza asked who owned them, and how much was involved, Calvi would reply only that he could deliver the shares, and that Pazienza would be told "at the appropriate moment".

Pazienza has claimed that even
after
Ambrosiano's demise and Calvi's death, the consortium was still keen to go ahead, and that
he
had to counsel them against the idea. But little independent confirma­tion has ever been forthcoming, beyond gossip within the bank from spring 1982 on, that a deal was ready to sell a major interest in Ambrosiano. It would have been only too easy for Pazienza to play on Calvi's fascination with the Arabs and their wealth, in those fraught times. For who would pay five times the going market price for shares in a bank as controversial as Ambrosiano, without even knowing who was the seller? Possibly, the deal was a desert mirage, conjured up by Pazienza and Calvi himself as comfort when all else failed.

And beyond doubt Calvi had other irons of rescue in the fire, of which he did not inform Pazienza. From January, he curiously

Seemed to lose interest in the consortium idea. The reasons for his cooling were probably not unconnected with the endeavours of Carboni.

Flavio Carboni is
perhaps the key figure in the final stages of Calvi's life. From January 1982 onwards, he would with increasing frequency visit Calvi in Milan, or for weekend consultations at Drezzo. The small Sardinian, who once boasted to his family he would become the richest man in Italy, would be companion and paid counsellor to the chairman of Ambrosiano, right up to the end. Vaunting contacts among the Roman politicians, the press and the highest echelons of Italian freemasonry, Carboni took over the role that Gelli had once assumed for Calvi—and more besides.

For Carboni was not only on good terms with Armando Corona, who in March 1982 was to become the head of the Italian Grand- Orient. He could also enlist the services of such as Ernesto Diotallevi and Danilo Abbruciati, notorious bosses of the Rome underworld. Magistrates would later charge that Carboni's building and property businesses were used to recycle the proceeds of organized crime and maybe right-wing terrorism also. In most of the subsequent discover­ies which seemed to link Calvi's Ambrosiano with common crime, the name of Carboni would be a constant thread.

Calvi was attracted to Carboni, as he was to Pazienza, by his promised access to hidden, and therefore real power. Precisely to what extent his helpers were in collusion it is hard to establish. But Calvi feared Carboni, just as he was afraid of Pazienza with his vaguely threatening
braggadoccio
, and well-advertised secret service connections. Reading of
The Godfather
was not only instructive of the advantages of hidden power, but also of the fate which might befall those who offended it.

Calvi was by this stage scared not only for his own safety (his retinues of bullet-proof Alfa Romeos and bodyguards were costing his bank four million lire every day) but for that of his family as well. From February on, he was imploring his wife to leave Italy for somewhere less dangerous. In May, and with some reluctance, she finally yielded to his urgings and went to join their son Carlo in Washington. And with good reason, for the violent undertows grip­ping Ambrosiano's affairs had broken dramatically to the surface.

Roberto Rosone, despite his lofty rank of general manager and deputy chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, had lived for many years in a modest first-floor flat in a corner block of Via Olofredi, close to the central station in Milan. On the ground floor of the same building was the branch office No. 18 of Ambrosiano in Milan. It was protected round the clock by armed private guards, as indeed are bank premises up and down Italy, as a matter of routine.

On the morning of April 27,1982 Rosone left as usual for his office shortly after 8 a.m. Suddenly, as he turned into the street, a man with a pistol stepped forward and fired wounding him in the legs. But the guards had quickly noticed the danger and shot back, killing the assailant outright. To their great surprise police identified the corpse as that of no ordinary Milanese delinquent, but the important Rome gangland figure Abbruciati.

Abbruciati's links with Carboni, and indeed Carboni's intimate dealings with Calvi, were not yet public knowledge. Even so, the episode raised more questions than it answered, casting a yet more sinister shadow over Ambrosiano. What was a high-ranking gangster from Rome doing carrying out a task that would normally fall to a minion? Was the attack a botched attempt at murder, to punish Rosone for some affront to the underworld; or was it a deliberate warning and no more, delivered in classic fashion? But what had Rosone done to merit such punishment? Or was the warning intended not for him but for Calvi himself? Later, after Calvi and Ambrosiano had perished, a still darker possibility emerged—that Calvi himself, through Carboni and Abbruciati, was directly or indirectly respons­ible for the attack on his own vice-chairman, suspected of plotting against him.

What is certain, is that Carboni was already receiving money from Calvi. In Italy, Ambrosiano lent large sums to companies owned by Carboni, and Calvi even provided finance to help the campaign of

Corona to become the new head of Italian freemasonry. Abroad, Ambrosiano was more generous (and more desperate) still, if a bizarre incident involving Ambrosiano Overseas in Nassau was any­thing to go by.

On February 9,1982 the bank received instructions from Europe to credit $14 million to six numbered accounts in Switzerland, through four different correspondent banks. Siegenthaler was away at the time sailing. But Calvin Knowles, the treasurer of Overseas, was uneasy enough to cable back to Milan asking for more details, to ensure that the transfers were not "against correct banking practice". But Ambrosiano's head office ordered the money to be paid over, offering only a vague undertaking to make good the sum in 48 hours. It was not.

Swiss investigators found afterwards that the $14 million had ended up as part of $20 million held in personal accounts by Carboni and a girlfriend. Carboni was later to insist that the payment was to settle an earlier loan
he had made to Calvi.
According to another version, the money was to pay for a fabulous consignment of stolen jewels passing through Carboni's and then Calvi's hands: in other words, that the chairman of Banco Ambrosiano was by this stage also an underworld fence. Carboni was also preserving for history others of his dealings with Calvi by secretly taping some of their conversations.

And what was Carboni offering in return? Above all promises of help in finding escape from the approaching financial disaster, of which Calvi was receiving almost daily reminders. Not only was the Bank of Italy piecing together the truth about Nassau, Managua and Lima, but periodically staff from Banco Andino or Ambrosiano Services in Luxembourg would visit Milan. Their demands never varied: that he should start making good his undertaking to reduce debts which had now become to all intents and purposes unmanage­able.

One project, mentioned by Calvi, and in which Carboni seems to have been instrumental, was of scarcely believable proportions. No less than 80 billion lire would be paid out to buy a package solution to Calvi's difficulties with the Milan magistrature and the central bank, and over the future of the
Corriere.
There was another idea too, and hardly less remarkable. Agreement would be sought from that obscure Catholic organization, the Opus Dei, for it to shoulder part,

at least, of the debts of the IOR towards Ambrosiano.

Whether a serious plan was drawn up, or whether the scheme extended little further than Calvi's own tortuous mind, we do not know. Such obscurity is entirely appropriate. Opus Dei and its 72,000 members were once described as "executive class Catholics", whose ideal member is rich, "with sharp suits, a snappy briefcase and steel-rimmed lips". Equally important, it is secretive even by the Vatican's own standards. Pope Paul VI disliked Opus Dei and tried to curb its influence within the Church, especially in Spain where the movement had originated, and was most strongly rooted. John Paul II, on the other hand, was more sympathetic, and in November 1982 bestowed upon the organization the status of a "personal prelature", increasing its independence, and its standing within the Vatican.

Calvi recounted to his wife that he had met the Pope in early 1982, who agreed to entrust him with the task of sorting out the financial troubles of the IOR.The Vatican has flatly denied that any such meetings took place, and that Opus Dei admits to no dealings whatever with Calvi. Nonetheless, through the offices of the ubi­quitous Carboni and his masonic ally Corona, Calvi did meet with Cardinal Palazzini, one of the Curia figures most strongly supporting the Opus Dei. He also sought the aid of Hilary Franco, an Italo- American prelate in the Curia. Calvi's motive, plainly, was to get around the obstacle posed by Marcinkus.

However, as he told his wife, these manoeuvres had drawn him into a fierce power struggle within the Vatican. The price of the putative support of the Opus Dei in making good the errors of the IOR was control of the Vatican's finances, and with it a much more conserva­tive diplomatic stance on the part of the Church. This would imply less truck with Communist regimes (including the Pope's own Po­land) and a setback for the Vatican's established Ostpolitik towards Eastern Europe. As such, the scheme—according to Calvi—was being resisted by both Marcinkus and by Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, the Holy See's secretary of state, in a sense its "Prime Minister". His version to his family was that the rescue of IOR/Ambrosiano, spon­sored by the powerful financial interests the Opus Dei could mobilize, was about to go ahead, until thwarted at the last by Marcinkus and others. The truth of all this would remain obscure; the Vatican, it should be recorded, has denied all. In any case, moreover, the debate would soon be academic.

On the other side of the world, far from the subterranean eddies of ecclesiastical politics, another of Calvi's final illusions was being enacted.

On April 26 Ambrosiano House, the vulgar but opulent new headquarters of Ambrosiano Overseas, on whose board still sat Archbishop Marcinkus, opened for business for the first time out on Nassau's East Bay Street. That business now ranged from the long­standing exchanges of secret telexes and letters with Milan, Monte Carlo and Managua, to a new retail or "high street" banking service for ordinary customers. For these last, a special car park, capable of holding 150 cars, had been extravagantly provided behind the build­ing.

The Bahamas banking community, as it watched Ambrosiano House take shape, was quite baffled by the motives for so lavish an investment. For the tiny size of the domestic market, already domin­ated by the Royal Bank of Canada, meant that ordinary domestic banking was never likely to be a money spinner. But for Calvi, image and credibility were now all. Anything which might camouflage the real nature of his business was justified. Siegenthaler (incidentally chairman of Astolfine, the tiny Panamanian Company which on its own had by now borrowed nearly half a billion dollars from Banco Andino) was back from his sailing holiday for the opening. He showed off to the press Ambrosiano House's ornamental internal staircase in Italian marble, his own palatial suede wall-papered office, and an electronic security system surpassing anything in Nassau. "The style of this organization is to do things with taste and to do them well. We're not looking to the next five years, but to the next fifteen,' he declared. "We're going to be here a long, long time." As disingenuous last words go, they rivalled Marcinkus' almost simul­taneous pronouncement in Rome that Ambrosiano was an "excellent investment". The grandiose new premises were built on the flimsiest foundations. For within three months Ambrosiano Overseas had lost its banking licence, and within four was in voluntary liquidation. The Bank of Italy now had the evidence it needed. For Calvi it was checkmate.

On May 31 as usual, the Bank of Italy's annual meeting listened respectfully to the dismal verdict of Ciampi on the country's financial and economic performance the previous year. That was in Rome. While Ciampi was speaking, the deputy head of the Bank of Italy's office in Milan was writing a far more destructive missive, to Calvi in person.

The letter from Michele Bonaduce, standing in for Alfio Noto, the director of the Milan branch, bore the serial reference number 30671. But everything else about it was exceptional, above all the crucial paragraph at the foot of the second of its four pages. Documents so far submitted by Banco Ambrosiano, it said, showed that the group's lending to unspecified "third parties" exceeded $1,400 million. This exposure was abnormally high, and worse still was concentrated on three banks, Banco Andino in Lima, Ambrosiano Group Banco Comercial in Managua, and Ambrosiano Overseas. Of the total sum, more than $650 million was provided directly by Ambrosiano Over­seas and Banco Ambrosiano Holding of Luxembourg. The last-named, moreover, had given its guarantee for a further $300 million of loans.

Conceivably Calvi, when he had read that far, still thought that the issue could be fudged as before. But any such illusion vanished at the bottom of page three. The central bank ordered him to issue a separate copy of the letter to every director, to be discussed at a forthcoming board meeting. Once again, as in February, each board member would have to separately confirm that he had sufficient information to perform his duties. Finally, a copy of the minutes to that effect should be sent back to the Bank of Italy. Calvi realized the long deceit was about to end. The most useful service Carboni could now render was to organize his escape.

May 31, the day the letter was sent, was a Monday. He spent almost all the week in Rome, in a last effort to persuade the Vatican bank to honour its debts. But on his return from the Papal journey to Britain on June 2, Marcinkus told Calvi flatly there was nothing to be done. Desperately, Calvi worked on contingency plans with Carboni. He also saw Pazienza a last time, to see if the famous consortium, supposedly ready to pay $200 a share for the ten per cent of Ambro­siano in Panama, could be mobilized
in extremis.
By Friday evening he was back in his Milan flat, alone with his daughter Anna, waiting anxiously late into the night for a call from Carboni.

At dawn the next day Calvi woke his daughter, ordering her to pack a suitcase in readiness to leave the country. He too would probably be leaving. "Events are getting out of hand. I can't stay here any longer," Anna was told by her father. "I've got to continue my work outside Italy where it's safe." Calvi prepared two suitcases for himself, loaded them into the boot of the chauffeured Alfa Romeo his daughter usually used, and the two left for Drezzo. What remained of the weekend, the banker spent anxiously. For the following day, Monday June 7, the board meeting was due, and by this stage Calvi nursed few illusions about its probable outcome.