The Last Supper (27 page)

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’.
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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.
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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;
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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”?’
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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!’