The Last Supper (32 page)

On Wednesday 9 June Calvi bid a particularly emotional farewell to his daughter before flying from Milan to Rome. He was fearful for her and his own safety; he would not see her again. On that day Francesco Pazienza’s assistant, Maurizio Mazzotta, arrived for a four-day stay at the Dorchester Hotel in London. Mazzotta was in London to see his baby son, a child he had had by Claire Getty, an heiress from the American oil family, and he was accompanied on the visit by his own mother. Pazienza arrived two days later for a two-day stay in the same hotel. He was on his way to Costa Rica via New York and had stopped over in London to see his assistant’s new son, Pazienza told the Rome murder trial.

That day Ernesto Diotallevi called Carboni’s office and left some messages. The office diary records: ‘Sergio has arrived.’
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Calvi’s last business engagement before leaving Milan was a dinner with important guests in the Banco Ambrosiano’s hospitality suite. It was perhaps the last realistic opportunity of saving the bank before his flight abroad, but Calvi appeared distracted and left early. The guests included the Austrian businessman Karl Kahane, the French banker Pierre Moussa, the head of Paribas (Banque de Paris et Pays Bas), and Florio Fiorini, the ENI finance director. Moussa and Kahane were reportedly offering $200 million for the Ambrosiano’s offshore network, but Calvi wasn’t interested, saying he was only prepared to part with a few companies, Ultrafin in New York, or Inter Alpha Asia in Hong Kong perhaps. His guests were astonished when he suddenly rose to his feet and stalked out of the room. One, who followed him to the lift without catching up with him, returned to the table disconsolately. ‘Like the devil, he has disappeared towards hell,’ he told his fellow diners.

Earlier that evening Calvi had received another visitor, whose presence would not have been welcome in the company
of elite bankers. His name was Alvaro Giardili, an associate of Francesco Pazienza with alleged links to Cosa Nostra and the Camorra. Giardili bore a warning that Calvi’s wife and children faced death threats. Giardili claimed later that Calvi had summoned him with a request for help in obtaining a postponement of his appeal hearing. Calvi had suggested Giardili contact the businessman Silvio Berlusconi, who was known at the time for his close ties to the Milan magistrates. In later years a new generation of magistrates would become the bane of Berlusconi’s political life and Berlusconi’s lawyer would be convicted of bribing magistrates – this time from Rome. Finding a way of softening the magistrates’ attitude towards him and recovering his passport was an obsession with Calvi at this time. Favours could be bought, he was convinced, and he was prepared to pay massive amounts of money to achieve his judicial rehabilitation.

On Thursday 10 June Anna travelled across the Swiss border to Morcote and checked into a hotel with her boyfriend, Vittorio Senso. She called her father at the bank in Rome and was told by him that he expected to be out of contact for a while: the die was cast. Calvi visited his lawyers and discussed the possibility of transferring the Banco Ambrosiano’s headquarters to Rome, to be closer to the centre of political power that had been occupying so much of his attention of late. In the evening he prepared a large meal, as though he was expecting a guest, and told his driver-cum-bodyguard Tito Tesauri not to put on the alarm in his central Rome flat. It was already hot summer and he might want to keep the windows open. The banker then ruffled the bedclothes to give the impression that he had slept in the bed and left a note for Tesauri saying he had been obliged to leave unexpectedly. Fearful for his safety and worried about the possibility of arrest, he decided to spend the night at the modest flat of Carboni’s assistant, Emilio Pellicani, in the Magliana quarter. The head of Italy’s largest private bank was now a fugitive.

At 11.25 a.m. on the Thursday, Dr Kunz called the office for Carboni and left a message: the name ‘MacDonald’ and a telephone number in Geneva. The following day a man named Carboni was registered as staying at the Century Hotel in Geneva – it may have been Carboni’s brother, Andrea.

Calvi’s attempt to slip away quietly got off to an inauspicious start. Tesauri, his driver, informed the bank of his disappearance on Friday morning; the bank informed his Rome lawyers and the lawyers immediately reported it to a Rome prosecutor, Domenico Sica. One of the lawyers also put in a quick call to Federico Umberto D’Amato, then head of Italy’s frontier police – and a long-standing US intelligence asset – and D’Amato passed on the information to Pazienza and Mazzotta in London. A secret service report says D’Amato, a member of P2, had helped Calvi and Carboni to move people and money across the Italian border, receiving a reward of 800 million lire for his favours. D’Amato was evidently viewed with some suspicion within the Calvi family, who considered him an accomplice of Pazienza in extorting money from the Banco Ambrosiano. Calvi had confided to his wife that he was perplexed and worried after receiving a visit from D’Amato at their weekend home in Drezzo. ‘My husband even suggested that D’Amato might have come to plant bugs, since he had heard it said that he was the head of the CIA in Italy,’ Clara told the Milan magistrates who interviewed her in Washington in October 1982.

Telephone calls from Calvi to colleagues at the Banco Ambrosiano may have reassured them about his well-being but they could not put the cat back in the bag. In the afternoon of Friday 11 June, Calvi caught a scheduled flight to Trieste together with Emilio Pellicani. During the journey he told Pellicani he intended to travel to Zurich to sort out his financial problems and that if things went awry he would leave for South America. He didn’t intend to go back to prison, he assured him.

In Trieste the two met up with Silvano Vittor, who was waiting for them on the sea-front by the Hotel Savoia, ready to transport the Ambrosiano chairman out of Italy and into Yugoslavia on his speedboat
L’Uragano.
Tall, athletic and with the right connections to avoid serious problems with the law, he was just the man for the job. And his close connection to Carboni guaranteed discretion; the two Kleinszig sisters, Michaela and Manuela, were their mistresses. A family affair, one might say. That evening Diotallevi flew up to Trieste on Carboni’s private jet to deliver Calvi’s false passport and Calvi was finally ready to set off by boat under cover of darkness, having entrusted his precious briefcase to Vittor. Two of Vittor’s colleagues would accompany Calvi across the Yugoslav border into Austria and Vittor himself would bring the briefcase the following day, when the appointment was at the Kleinszig family home outside Klagenfurt. Vittor asked Calvi for the combination to the briefcase lock, in case border police asked to look inside, and – according to Pellicani – took the opportunity to photocopy the contents on Carboni’s behalf.

While Calvi was setting out on his journey Pazienza was on the phone from the Dorchester Hotel. On 11 June he made two calls to a company called Fairways Marine. Though no longer in business when the Calvi murder investigation was revived, the City of London Police established that the company had traded in boats and motorboat engines. An officer from the force testified at the Rome murder trial that no documents on the company were available at Companies House. Documents on a company called Fairways Marine Ltd were available, however, when I made inquiries there in 2005. That company, which had moved its headquarters from Old Brompton Road to Soho Square in March 1980, would have been in liquidation when Pazienza called in 1982. Shareholders passed an extraordinary resolution on 28 July 1981 that the company be wound up voluntarily. The previous year, on 16 April, three
new directors had joined the company, all giving the same address, a PO Box in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Also on 11 June $11 million originating from the Banco Ambrosiano were accredited to a Carboni account at the Zurcher Kantonal Bank in Zurich. The account was called ‘Pifra’, an abbreviation of the words
Piccolo fratello
(Little brother), and according to the testimony of Hans Kunz, a joking reference by Carboni to the male sex organ. Carboni’s personal diary for that day bore a curious entry: the name ‘William Morris’ and a London telephone number. William Morris was a family connection of Carboni’s – married to the aunt of Carboni’s Sardinian mistress Laura Scanu Concas – and would provide Calvi and Carboni with assistance in changing money and seeking suitable accommodation for the banker in London. Carboni insists he didn’t think of contacting Morris until Calvi complained about the quality of the Chelsea Cloisters flat after his arrival there on 15 June. It is of course possible that the Sardinian simply used a recently passed blank page in his diary to note the number and that the entry had no particular connection with the diary date. The following year Morris was interviewed on the hoof by Jeremy Paxman of the BBC’s
Panorama
programme, looking deeply uncomfortable when asked why a millionaire like Carboni should have needed his help in London and whether he was a freemason.

That day Pazienza also called Clara Calvi in Washington to inform her of her husband’s disappearance. He appeared to be in tears. Pazienza called again on the Saturday, this time apparently from the Hotel St Regis in New York, and told her Roberto had gone off ‘with the people who do kidnappings’. The secret agent was now at a convenient distance from impending events in London, perhaps putting into practice a
modus operandi
he had once outlined to Clara: ‘When something happens in Italy, I’m in America, when something happens in America, I’m in Italy.’
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Calvi and his unidentified travelling companions arrived unexpectedly at the Kleinszig home early on the morning of Saturday 12 June. A large, white-walled villa on a gentle hill, it looked out over the Klagenfurt plain to the Karawanken mountains marking the border with Yugoslavia and was a handy five minutes by car from Klagenfurt’s small private airport. The Kleinszig girls’ father, Stephan, ran his business as a timber merchant from the family home. Later that morning Calvi called Anna to reassure her. He said he was in Austria staying with a family and felt safe, but she should not reveal his whereabouts to anyone else. Anna could hear the sound of children’s voices in the background and was comforted by the positive tone of her father’s voice. At the same time he seemed unclear of his plans and evidently depended on other people for his decision-making. Calvi later gave her the telephone number of Hans Kunz, saying he would find accommodation for her in Zurich, but warning her not to trust him too much. Carboni and Vittor arrived in Klagenfurt later that day and the party spent the night in Klagenfurt, catching up on sleep and making plans for the rest of the journey.

The following evening – Monday 13 June – Calvi left by car to travel to Innsbruck with Vittor. The Trieste smuggler would now be his bodyguard and the most assiduous companion of his few remaining days. By this stage Calvi appears to have developed a predilection for moving by night, a clear sign of his nervousness and acute fear of detection. The two arrived at 4 a.m. on Tuesday and checked into the Hotel Europa Tyrol.

At around this time Calvi may have made an important visit to Vienna. Like Gerald Bull’s account of a hypothetical visit to Brighton, it has been omitted from the itinerary described by his travelling companions, but confirmed by one key witness: the man he allegedly went to see. Leopold Ledl, an Austrian businessman, was by his own admission one of the protagonists
of the financial scandal that came to be known as the ‘Vatican Connection’ – the alleged attempt by senior Vatican officials to buy $950 million worth of counterfeit US securities from the American mafia in the early 1970s. After being arrested in Italy in 1988 for allegedly attempting to sell counterfeit deutschmarks, Ledl told magistrates that he had met Calvi in Vienna about a week before his death. The Italian banker was looking for sensitive information to use against Archbishop Marcinkus and set up a meeting with Ledl in the bar of the Intercontinental Hotel.

Calvi was accompanied by an attractive young blonde who acted as interpreter for him and explained over a cup of coffee that he had urgent need of 1 billion marks. He had already been in contact, unsuccessfully, with a director of the Bank of Austria and with the financier Kahane, Calvi explained. The real purpose of the visit was another, Ledl said: Calvi wanted to know how the Austrian had succeeded in cutting his links with the Vatican after playing such a delicate role on its behalf. Ledl had a ‘reinsurance policy’, he said, which involved Vatican documents commissioning the sensitive financial operations in which he had been involved. ‘Calvi, even if he didn’t say so openly, made me understand that obtaining copies of such documents, which constituted the proof of involvement by the Vatican in a colossal operation of forgery and fraud . . . meant saving his life and obtaining help from Marcinkus,’ Ledl told Prosecutor Giorgio Della Lucia when interviewed by him in Milan’s San Vittore prison on 22 January 1988. Ledl, who had taken his wife’s surname – Zant – for security reasons, declined to hand over the documents. He told Calvi he had given his word of honour to Cardinal Giovanni Benelli that he would not use or even refer to the documents. Calvi told him he was planning to fly to Spain and from there to South America. Ledl described his meeting with an anxious and frightened Calvi in a second deposition to Milan magistrates, in February 1988: ‘He told me that if he could obtain a copy
of documents proving a giant illegal operation carried out by the Vatican and involving Marcinkus he would in some sense have been able to neutralize the aforementioned Marcinkus.’

Ledl claimed in his depositions that both the Vatican and the Bank of Italy had been complicit in this fraud plan and were prepared to pay 65 per cent of the face value of the counterfeit blue chip stocks ordered via Ledl from Cosa Nostra in America. Those involved on the Vatican side were Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, an eminent biblical scholar, veteran of the first world war and the Vatican’s leading cold war strategist, another Frenchman Cardinal Jean Villot, Archbishop Marcinkus, and the then Monsignor Giovanni Benelli. Ledl later described the background to the fraud in a memoir of his adventures in the netherworld between Cosa Nostra and the curia called
On Behalf of the Vatican
: ‘Tisserant explained that both the Vatican and the Italian state were in a precarious financial situation. The fiscal demands of the Italian government had created such serious problems for the Pontifical State that it could barely remain economically on its feet. And as a result of the continual strikes and of inflation Italy’s public accounts were in a disastrous state. Both, therefore, had urgent need of financial assistance.’ Ledl hints that the US government may have given its tacit assent, making the fraud a kind of clandestine low-cost funding operation for the US’s cold war allies. Part of the first consignment of counterfeit shares were to be lodged at the Banco di Roma, part at the Bank of Italy, and the rest at the IOR, Ledl claimed in his memoir.
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