The Last Supper (26 page)

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.’

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.