Render Unto Rome (23 page)

On March 8, 2006—one week after the largest payment sent to Mainiero in the Vatican, $140,000—Cardinal Sodano sent a letter of complaint to Follieri. “I feel it is my duty to tell you how perturbed I am,” he wrote,

to hear that your company continues to present itself as having ties to “the Vatican,” due to the fact that my nephew, Andrea, has agreed on some occasion to provide you with professional consulting services.

I do not know how this distressing misunderstanding could have occurred, but it is
necessary
now to avoid such confusion in the future.

I do, therefore, appeal to your sensibility to be careful with respect to this matter. I shall accordingly inform my nephew Andrea as well as anyone else who has asked me for information regarding your firm.

I take this opportunity to send you my regards.
²¹

The letter is clearly in response to Feuerherd’s long article of March 3 in
National Catholic Reporter
. In the course of sending intelligence to its government, the Vatican embassy in Washington undoubtedly alerted the
secretary of state of the Holy See to unflattering news references to himself, his nephew, and the “this thing smells” quote from a religious order official. Cardinal Sodano’s natural instinct was to cover his tracks. Although Andrea was milking the business, Cardinal Sodano—having lent his sacred office to greeting the potential backers and clients at Follieri Group’s Manhattan launch—feigned ignorance. Ties to the Vatican? A “distressing misunderstanding.” How much clearer could the Follieri brochures have been on the Vatican ties, or the sales calls with Andrea in his role? But as Iago prodded Othello to his fate and then withdrew, Andrea, who lived in Italy, could readily cut bait on Raffaello.

Behind the cardinal’s underlining of “necessary … to avoid such confusion” looms the cold mien of power, warning the flamboyant Follieri sotto voce, “Be careful.” One could infer he also meant, “We won’t guard your back.” For as Raffaello Follieri trumpeted his ecclesial connections to potential investors and church sellers, his braggadocio extended to telling people he was the
chief financial officer
of the Vatican! As the tailwinds of Follieri’s hubris wafted back to the Apostolic Palace, Cardinal Sodano sensed trouble. Still, his letter’s ambiguous language of chastisement begs a question: why didn’t the cardinal send Follieri a cease-and-desist message? But to do that would have gored the golden calf servicing sweet meat for Andrea, Antonio Mainiero, Monsignor Carrù, if not the cardinal himself.

Four months after the cardinal’s letter, with Burkle and company feeding money into Yucaipa Follieri Investments LLC, Raffaello and Andrea flew to Brazil on a property-scouting trip. As he had done with the 20,000 euro donation to the Congregation for the Clergy, Follieri had a check for $25,000 for the archbishop of Salvador da Bahia, and a check for $85,000 for the archbishop of Rio de Janeiro. “The recipients of these donations did not know that Follieri had stolen the money to give to them,” cautions the FBI.
²²
Follieri and Andrea Sodano had a strategy that was impossible without Vatican help: take the American money, give some to the right bishops, get an inside track on the available real estate, buy low, sell high.

In the spring of 2007, Ron Burkle suspected he was being fleeced. He wanted to see the engineering reports. Follieri stalled. The billionaire who flew in his private jet and partied with his pal Bill Clinton
demanded
the documents. Follieri made a secretary stay up all night writing the reports, which he backdated and disgorged to Burkle’s people. “The reports were
in Italian,” Theodore Cacioppi, an FBI agent, told me later. “Each one was about two to five pages long. None of them contained any schematics, technical drawings, diagrams, or anything that appeared to relate to engineering.” The reports putatively from Sodano “were almost worthless, did not reflect any engineering work, and were certainly not worth over $800,000.”
²³

Burkle’s Yucaipa Companies had their own investors, notably the New York State Common Retirement Fund, the California Teachers’ Retirement System, and the California Public Employees’ Retirement System. In June 2007, when Yucaipa sued Follieri for $1.3 million, the needle hit the balloon. Raffaello was closing in on a deal with Helios, a London-based company, to buy church properties in Europe. First he had to blunt Burkle’s legal strike. He managed to repay Yucaipa, but a June 15, 2007,
Wall Street Journal
piece by John R. Emshwiller on the lawsuit “got us interested in Follieri,” says FBI agent Cacioppi.

As the FBI probe began, Raffaello was bouncing checks. Hathaway paid the last four months’ rent ($148,000, excluding the chef’s salary) on the Olympic Tower lease, according to Melanie Bonvicino. Raffaello moved in with his mother at Trump Tower. He and Anne were quarreling when he flew to Rome in June 2008. He called Bonvicino, the publicist who had helped him in the start-up months and returned in the pinch. “I was doing crisis management,” she says. “The Helios deal would have put him in a situation where he’d have an opportunity to cover his debts and redeem himself professionally … When the relationship with Yucaipa blew up, Raffaello gave Burkle a pick of his properties. Burkle took the crown jewels of the portfolio. He made a very handsome profit.”

The Catholic Church has extensive property holdings in Ireland and the United Kingdom. Follieri’s development plan with Helios would add new gems to his crown. He was getting information from Antonio Mainiero in the Vatican, whom he promised to set up as an officer of his branch company in Rome. And Monsignor Carrù from Clergy was feeding the fax requests. According to Melanie Bonvicino, “I told the Helios people, ‘
Put him on an allowance, cover his approvable expenses so he does not go out of pocket
.’ Like you do with actors who have drug problems. There’s no magic to what Raffaello did. He worked all the time, very hard. When he traveled he was always meeting people. People are money. Sit with the right person, get your picture taken, find the next person. It was like [the movie]
American Gigolo
, dating a starlet, meeting people, but Raffaello was picking up tabs … He was always looking for business.”

When Bonvicino reached Rome, Raffaello Follieri was short of cash. Monsignor Carrù was hectoring him for money.
We need their support
, Raffaello told her. A cradle Catholic with her own issues about the church, Bonvicino wondered why church officials had tolerated Raffaello’s extravagant promotion of himself in alliance with the Vatican. The reality she found was the Vatican’s involvement in the selling of U.S. church properties. Business is business. People are money. Into her purview that day in Rome came Monsignor Carrù, a small man in his early sixties whose effeminate mannerisms seemed out of sync with his deep, low voice of
furbo
, meaning clever, calculating, a legendary trait. Carrù seemed to her
furbo
personified.

Raffaello told her they needed Carrù’s information to succeed with Helios.

Monsignor Carrù explained he was about to leave on holiday. The trio went to a restaurant, La Rosetta. “Carrù knew a lot,” continues Bonvicino. “I think Carrù was tipped off. It was one last milking of the cow. The priest had wine. I paid for the lunch. He gave me a blessing after the meal.” The next day they met him in Vatican City. She withdrew $1,000 worth of euros on her ATM card and gave it to Monsignor Carrù along with her personal check for $9,000 (on which she wrote
donation
), which he cashed an hour later at the Vatican Bank.

Bonvicino and Follieri flew back to New York, then to London, where Helios was intent on raising 100 million euros for developing church properties in Ireland and the UK. Melanie told Raffaello to stay in London, duck the celebrity lights until he could repay his debts, hire a lawyer, negotiate with the federal authorities in Manhattan, and try to avoid being arrested.

But the heart is a merciless magnet. In the meltdown with Hathaway, the cell calls and text messages flying across continents and time zones pulled Raffaello back without a defense attorney to prepare the way. He wanted his Annie. She was on tour for the movie
Get Smart
as their fraught dialogue played out. Caring for her dog at the Trump Tower apartment, he had no clue his lover was cooperating with the FBI. So were the two American monsignors, Hodge and Tomashek, among others in his employ. On June 24, 2008, Raffaello was asleep in his boxer shorts at his mother’s
flat when the FBI rang at 6:00 a.m. They arrested him for fraud and money laundering. His father, Pasquale, was back in Italy. In Raffaello’s safe, the FBI agents found the letter from Cardinal Castrillón and “the smoking gun” letter from Sodano, as Agent Cacioppi calls it.

“The investigation started because he was in the press constantly and he made a great catch,” opines Melanie Bonvicino. Indeed, the Vatican’s true role was obscured in the media’s juicy coverage of Follieri’s spectacular meltdown with his movie star sweetheart. As he sat behind bars, with a $21 million bail he could not meet because the U.S. Attorney’s office deemed him a flight risk, Follieri had no U.S. passport nor the stroke in Rome to negotiate an extradition so that he might serve time in Italy. He pleaded guilty to fourteen counts of wire fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy on October 23, 2008. He forfeited $2.4 million, jewelry, and twelve watches.

“We believe Studio Sodano [Andrea’s corporate name] took in fraudulently earned money,” Cacioppi told me. And Antonio Mainiero and Carrù? “We considered these people unindicted coconspirators. The relevant part from Italy is that we presumed this was bribe money paid to the little functionary [Mainiero] and to this secretary Carrù. We did not need to put those people on the stand. We did get intimations from the State Department that they were not inclined to talk with us. As a matter of resource allocation it was not worth trying to get them.” Cacioppi went on to investigate Bernard Madoff.

With Follieri sentenced to fifty-four months, questions hover. What did Mainiero do with the $387,300? Did Cardinal Sodano share in the proceeds? Were the incoming funds allocated to the Congregation for the Clergy, or any other Vatican departments? Did the Vatican Bank play a role? How does the Congregation for the Clergy safeguard information when the number-three man—Monsignor Carrù—was put in his job by Sodano and serviced an operator like Follieri? Do Vatican officials profit from property sales in many dioceses? Does the Vatican profit from church sales in other countries? Did the Vatican Bank engage in money laundering?

Despite the bad publicity Carrù took from the press coverage, on July 20, 2009, Pope Benedict installed him as archaeological superintendent of the catacombs, “an important task entrusted to a scholar with great experience,” according to an archbishop at the Pontifical Council
for Culture.
²⁴
Perhaps the new post was an elevation of duties, though the image of Giovanni Carrù prowling the ancient tunnels where Christians hid from Roman authority suggests a soft-glove demotion to make Cardinal Sodano nod with
furbo
of his own. Carrù was not the safest man in Vatican City to handle sensitive real estate information. Still, it took a year after Follieri’s arrest before Carrù was removed from the Congregation for the Clergy.

Follieri was indeed a big catch for the Justice Department in the national media, but the greater corruption was at the Vatican. Burkle’s people realized Raffaello was off the charts when he leased a private jet for $62,000 to make the quick hop from Los Angeles to Las Vegas instead of taking a commercial flight for a few hundred dollars. Why did the Sodanos get involved with him in the first place? Any number of real estate agents would have profited from unique access to Clergy property files, though Andrea’s greed would have become an issue. The Sodano scheme went sour because Follieri lost his grip on reality. When he crashed, at least $800,000 was tucked away in Italy.

CODA

“What Raffaello did in four and a half years takes a lifetime for some people,” asserts Melanie Bonvicino. “He put together a business that ended up making money for Burkle, and would have made serious money for Helios. In the end everybody ditched him. But the Vatican let this man run wild. Why?”

As Raffaello sat in a federal prison, abandoned by Anne, his parents back in Italy, Melanie Bonvicino made occasional visits. He owed her $131,000 for a blizzard of work at the back end, she says. They were never romantically involved. “But,” she adds with a trace of sympathy, “I actually do care about him.”

CHAPTER 6

THE CASE
OF THE
MISSING MILLIONS

As the Boston vigil protesters dug in, Peter Borré culled advice from sympathetic canon lawyers and drafted an appeal that he sent in early 2005 to the Congregation for the Clergy. His goal was to halt the suppression order, to undo Bishop Lennon’s handiwork. Archbishop O’Malley wanted the protesters to vacate the parishes, but for the prelate who had publicly confessed his agony over the parish closings—asking God to take him on the worst days—calling the cops seemed out of character. His religious order was founded by Francis of Assisi. Having cops arrest people for occupying pews could be a body blow to area Catholics already steeped in bad news about the church.