The Last Supper (13 page)

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.
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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.
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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.’

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.
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