The Last Supper (33 page)

A Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiry into Ledl’s allegations resulted in the questioning of several Vatican officials, including Marcinkus, by FBI agents, but no clarity and no prosecutions. Tisserant had predicted to Ledl that even if things had gone wrong no one would have dreamed of accusing the Vatican of involvement in such a brazen, even mind-boggling fraud. People would have thought that the Holy See had been duped, the cardinal had predicted, and Washington would
have come to the Vatican’s aid with secret financing to cover its losses. The original agreement provided for payment of the forged shares in dollars or marks, Ledl told Prosecutor Della Lucia, but Marcinkus had subsequently tried to convince him to accept payment in lire instead. Cardinal Tisserant, who had become fond of him, advised against accepting the Italian currency ‘telling me the money came from kidnaps’.

All this may seem hard to believe, particularly for people who expect a minimal adherence by the Catholic church to the ethical code of its founder. But the allegations come from someone who claims to have been a protagonist in the events he describes. Given Calvi’s intense efforts to pressure the Vatican into helping him, his interest in Ledl’s sensitive documents would be only too plausible. A detour to Vienna to seek documentary proof of the earlier scandal would make perfect sense as Calvi embarked on his final battle for financial and personal survival.

Silvano Vittor, Calvi’s travelling companion, denies that any such meeting ever took place. After what appeared to be a momentary hesitation, he ruled it out decisively when speaking to me during a pause in the murder trial. ‘There was never any question of going to Vienna, absolutely not. There is no evidence for it whatsoever.’ Gerald Bull’s account of a journey to Brighton was also untrue, he insisted.
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What he says may well be true: Ledl was a self-confessed fraudster and may have invented the story as a way of alleviating his Italian judicial problems. On the other hand, his account of the Vatican’s financial shenanigans is backed up by an FBI inquiry and copious detail and it provided exactly the kind of blackmail material that Calvi was seeking. Vittor, Carboni and the Kleinszig sisters, the only known witnesses to Calvi’s movements, have every reason not to confirm details that would place them at the heart of an international conspiracy and aggravate their problems with Italian justice. Mario Sarcinelli, the Bank of Italy inspector who was arrested in an
intimidatory judicial operation believed to have been inspired by P2, was prepared to give credence to Ledl’s apparently unlikely Vatican scam. ‘There are many souls in the Vatican. I wouldn’t necessarily rule it out,’ he told me.
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On Monday 14 June, Calvi’s last full day in continental Europe, he and Vittor drove to Bregenz, a small Austrian town on the shores of Lake Constance not far from the Swiss border, and spent the night at the Hotel Centrale. According to Carboni, news reports of Calvi’s flight had led the banker to change his plans: he was too well known in Switzerland and it would be too dangerous to cross the border; the party would therefore travel to London. This arrangement was finalized when Carboni and Hans Kunz travelled from Zurich by car to meet Calvi and Vittor for dinner in Bregenz. Vittor’s testimony always more or less tallied with that of Carboni, and Vittor’s defence lawyers had been chosen and paid for by his wealthy Sardinian friend. Now though, when put under pressure by the new Rome prosecutors in the murder case, their stories began to diverge. It was not Calvi who opted for London but Kunz and Carboni who persuaded him to go there, telling him it would be safer than crossing into Switzerland, Vittor told the prosecutors, Luca Tescaroli and Maria Monteleone; a change of emphasis perhaps, but nonetheless significant.

In Rome, police moved to arrest Carboni’s secretary, Emilio Pellicani. Pellicani would spend a long time on remand, but testified that he was always correctly treated by the police. The news of his arrest soon filtered through to Calvi and his party, but it would be significantly distorted for Calvi’s benefit. When the banker spoke to his daughter on the last day of his life, urging her to leave at once for the United States, he passed on the news of Pellicani’s arrest. Pellicani had been brutally beaten while in custody and the same could happen to members of his family if they too were caught, he told Anna.

Tuesday 15 June: Hans Kunz made arrangements for Calvi and Vittor to fly from Innsbruck to London by private jet, booking them into a two-room apartment at Chelsea Cloisters, a huge residence on Sloane Avenue.

A sea of contradictory evidence surrounds this last move, but there is no doubt that the mysterious Swiss businessman played a key role and has never been asked to explain it. Calvi and Vittor flew to Gatwick in the afternoon aboard a Cessna Citation jet booked in Vittor’s name. An invoice for the flight, which cost £2,900, was issued by the London Airtaxi Centre Ltd. The invoice was addressed to Draycott Trading and Finance SA, a Fribourg-registered company owned by a Scottish businessman named Lovat MacDonald, but it was sent c/o the Grays Inn address of a London lawyer, Robert Sandifer Clarke. A handwritten note at the top of the invoice added the name ‘H. Kunz’ and the telephone number of a hotel in Zurich. No one seemed keen to assume direct responsibility for the operation.

MacDonald had been on the board of the Shah of Iran’s private bank and had worked for many years in the Middle Eastern country as a trader in agricultural supplies and equipment. A farmer and engineer by training, he had moved to Iran at the beginning of the 1960s to teach the mechanization of agriculture in a Foreign Office-sponsored project. While subsequently working in the country for the Ford tractor company, he had met Hans Kunz, who was a leading player in the oil industry thanks to a close relationship with the Shah’s sister. With the fall of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi’s regime MacDonald had been briefly arrested by the Khomeini government, who possibly hoped he could lead them to the Shah’s hidden financial assets. Following his release he continued to trade as a foodstuffs importer in Iran and was for a while the country’s largest supplier of grains, wheat and rice, before switching his centre of operations to Switzerland.

In Switzerland MacDonald ran into Kunz again and the two men went into business together. One joint project involved selling gambling machines to mafia-controlled casinos in the United States, a scheme that ran into financial difficulties in 1982 and required the legal assistance of a London lawyer: Robert Clarke, who had met MacDonald in his Iran days when he had visited the country on behalf of a client. Kunz had originally met Carboni through MacDonald when the Sardinian businessman had led a delegation from the Italian state energy company ENI with a view to selling ammonium phosphate to MacDonald. Since no one in the ENI party spoke adequate English, Kunz, who was a regular visitor to the Draycott offices, had been drafted in as interpreter. MacDonald didn’t warm to Carboni, especially after discovering that he habitually carried a handgun in a holster under his jacket – a necessity in Italy in those turbulent times, Carboni assured him. Kunz did, however, meeting Carboni several times in Switzerland and visiting his real estate projects in Sardinia. One source suggests he invested in property development projects with Carboni in both Italy and Spain. ‘Kunz visited Carboni twice in Sardinia,’ MacDonald told me. ‘He invited me to go but I didn’t want to be involved. He met Calvi there.’
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Such a meeting would be highly significant, and has been denied by Kunz himself, who insisted to magistrates he had not met Calvi until he and Carboni dined with him in Bregenz on the eve of Calvi’s journey to London.

Contact with individuals such as Kunz and MacDonald may have featured large in Calvi’s increasingly desperate efforts to raise money at this stage. Robert Clarke, who first met Kunz in early 1982 in connection with the troubled US business venture and then bumped into him again in Switzerland on several occasions, said he had been asked to take care of the flight and accommodation requirements of Calvi and his party by his long-term client Lovat MacDonald. It was he [Clarke], rather than Vaccari or MacDonald, who had come
up with the idea of Chelsea Cloisters, he recalled. He had been told by MacDonald that the flight was for two Fiat directors who wanted a discreet address in London at which to hold meetings. Clarke told City of London Police in June 1982: ‘Mr Kunz called me and explained that he had been asked to make the arrangements by Mr Flavio Carboni who was a very important business associate of his from Sardinia who was acting on behalf of Vatican interests, who had told him that if the arrangements had not been made the government might have fallen. Although this does not agree with what Kunz had told Mr MacDonald about the two Fiat directors.’ The threat of the Italian government falling if Calvi had lived and talked was all too real.

Clarke said he believed Calvi may have been hoping to take advantage of one of MacDonald’s borderline financial schemes to raise the money he needed to meet the Vatican’s $300 million debt repayment deadline. ‘I heard from Kunz that Calvi tried to deposit $35 million at the Zurich airport bank and was refused,’ Clarke told me. Clarke said he was told Calvi intended to come and see him in London to bank the $35 million, possibly making use of the relationship between Clarke’s law firm and the private bankers C. Hoare & Co. ‘MacDonald was involved in substantial financial projects, such as the purchase and sale of corporate debentures and treasury notes at a huge profit. MacDonald had schemes for making huge returns almost overnight, so Calvi could have made $300 million through one of MacDonald’s schemes. That would fit with why he was sent to me.’
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Clarke told me his business card had been found on Calvi’s body after the banker’s death, a fact that does not appear to have been made public before. The business card of another leading City lawyer was also present in the banker’s pocket and that too was not made public until later.

Lovat MacDonald denied that he had ever been approached by Calvi with a view to multiplying his $35 million nest egg,
but he confirmed that Kunz and Carboni had been involved together in substantial financial transactions. Kunz told him Carboni had opened a bank account at Geneva airport, depositing $1 million. A couple of weeks later Kunz had telephoned MacDonald to ask for his help. This time Carboni wanted to deposit $10 million and the bank was making difficulties. A month later he had met Kunz at a lakeside restaurant in Geneva. ‘You missed a trick, Mac,’ the Swiss businessman told him. ‘He has put $136 million in so far, and I’m getting a half a percent commission.’ MacDonald said he was peeved at the way Kunz had dragged him into the Calvi affair by using his company’s name to book Calvi’s flight and accommodation and he said he suspected his Swiss partner was more deeply embroiled in the matter than had so far emerged. ‘If there was money in it, Kunz would have been at it. His commission on the $136 million was not a bad sum for just saying hello.’ His own personal involvement in the affair had been peripheral at most, MacDonald said. The request for assistance with the booking arrangements had arrived as he was departing for a 10-day visit to Tunisia, and he had delegated the task to his company’s secretary.

MacDonald told me the nearest he had come to involvement in the oil business had been occasional trading in soya oil. Documents presented in evidence at the Rome murder trial appear to contradict this, however. One is a letter, apparently signed by Hans Kunz, on the headed paper of Draycott Trading & Finance International Ltd, Panama, and addressed to a ‘Dear Dr Carboni’. It reads: ‘We confirm our conversations of today, Sunday, September 27 1981, regarding the purchase by Draycott Panama Ltd, acting on behalf of certain refineries to be named, of 300,000 barrels per day for three years of Saudi Arabian Light crude oil through your services.’ Another is a letter to an official of the Geneva branch of the Banque Nationale de Paris instructing him to make a payment to a Mr Ihsan Khudhairy in connection with a Saudi
oil purchase. Unsigned but bearing the name ‘L. MacDonald for Draycott Trading and Finance SA’, it is dated 29 September 1981 and reads: ‘We undertake to pay to Mr Khudhairy or to his order US 6 cents per barrel delivered during the life of the contracts.’ The commitment is ‘made in strict secrecy’ and ‘not to be disclosed except to the beneficiary’.

An article in the November 1982 issue of
The Middle East
magazine makes a connection between MacDonald’s company and a particularly sensitive type of oil trading. ‘Evidence has recently come to light of further links between the Iranian regime and Israel,’ the magazine wrote. ‘West German diplomatic sources in Beirut told
The Middle East
that Israel has received substantial quantities of cheap oil from Tehran.’ Deliveries began at the most crucial time in the battle of Beirut and were brokered by a Lebanese company based in Switzerland, which was owned by a group of Shiite businessmen with ties to both Israel and the Phalange Party. ‘The group also works closely with an Italian arms dealer, Stefano Delle Chiaie, who had been based in Bolivia,’ the magazine said. ‘There was also a Swiss company involved – the Dreikot Driving and Financial Company [sic]. This belongs to the Kunz brothers (Hans and Albert) of Geneva, who were the main Swiss connections with banker Roberto Calvi (recently found hanged in London).’ The article misspells the company name and mistakenly turns a single Hans Albert Kunz into two brothers, but otherwise offers serious food for thought, particularly the alleged involvement of our old friend Stefano Delle Chiaie.

The article winds up with the financial details of the deal, which could have plausibly exploited Kunz and MacDonald’s Iranian
savoir faire.
‘On 2 August Iran signed an agreement with this group [Draycott] for the delivery of arms and ammunition worth $50 million which Israel had acquired from Syrian and Palestinian stocks in south Lebanon. In return Tehran began supplying oil at $22 a barrel, against a spot-market
price of $31 and $29. In fact the final price paid by the Israelis was $26–27, allowing $5 commission for the intermediaries.’