The Last Supper (38 page)

The second bore a less immediately evocative stamp showing the ‘Castle of Cerro al Volturno’ and did not have a postmark, possibly having been delivered to the bank by hand. Curiously, neither stamp had been licked and attached to the card in the normal way but both were attached by paperclip, leading the Calvi family’s lawyers to surmise that ‘the sender wanted to communicate the concept that he – the sender – didn’t use his tongue even to attach stamps’. This was before the age of DNA identification, so there was no question of the sender being worried about the possibility of leaving
DNA traces in his saliva. Calvi was in danger because of the way he was threatening to use his tongue, so the symbolic significance of the paperclips might not have been lost on him. If the postcard with a stamp evoking a bridge was indeed sent in advance of Calvi’s death it would appear to indicate that the sender was aware of his imminent fate and possibly a participant in the international conspiracy that shepherded him to Blackfriars Bridge. The insistence on the bridge theme in these various cryptic messages does seem to indicate that the means of Calvi’s death were not left to chance or improvised at the last minute. And if that reading of the messages is correct, it gives additional resonance to the symbolic elements of his hanging.

Bruno Rossini, the Calvi family lawyer at the time, recalled the distinct lack of enthusiasm among Carabinieri officers when he delivered the postcards that had arrived at the bank to them. ‘The Calvi case was very sensitive. No one wanted to deal with it,’ he told me. ‘Calvi could have been killed in a hundred ways without leaving a trace. The significance of the method they chose was this: there should be no juridical proof of murder, and in fact the first coroner said it was suicide, but at the same time all the players must understand that we have killed him.’ It was a ‘crime of power’, Rossini said, and Carboni was the character who had led Tom Thumb into the woods.
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A witness linking Calvi’s murder to freemasonry in a direct and concrete way came forward to talk in 1992. He was ideally placed to know about the subject since he was himself a banker operating very much in the same world as Roberto Calvi and he claimed – astonishingly – that he had personally delivered a suitcase containing $5 million to Calvi’s killers. He was the credit manager of Rothschild Bank AG in Zurich, where he had worked for some 20 years, and his name was Jørg Heer. Heer had fallen out with the bank, which accused him of pocketing illegal kickbacks in return for unsecured
and unapproved loans, which had caused the bank losses of $155 million. Heer retorted that he had broken the law but that he had done so on behalf of the bank and because it was bank policy, he alleged. In a series of newspaper interviews he claimed that Rothschild’s had thrived on the illegal export of currency from Italy, charging its valued Italian clients premium prices to shield them from their own country’s law.

But Heer’s most sensational claim concerned the murder of Roberto Calvi. The European edition of the Wall Street Journal (11–12 December 1992) reported: ‘He tells of receiving a phone call from an Italian whom he won’t name, but who he says was a close aide to an official of the secretive P2 Masonic Lodge. The message was short: We need your services for a “very secret” action. Mr Heer agreed, and a leather suitcase was delivered to the bank, along with an envelope containing half a dollar bill. About a week later, Mr Heer says, two men he describes only as “rather odd” arrived at the bank in an armoured Mercedes with the other half of the dollar bill. Mr Heer handed over the suitcase. Later, he says, he asked the P2 Lodge official’s aide what the whole affair had been about. He says he was told: “This money was for the killers of Calvi”.’

Heer was a little more forthcoming the following January, when a reporter from the Italian news magazine
Panorama
caught up with him in Madrid. He told basically the same story with slight modifications and more detail. The person who telephoned him, he said, was a senior aide to Licio Gelli and the half banknote used to identify the authorized recipients of the money was now a $100 bill. Looking inside the suitcase, Heer saw that it was full of $10 and $100 bills for an estimated value of around $5 million. ‘About two weeks later two people came unannounced to the bank. They were Italians, with an armoured Mercedes. They showed me the other half of the $100 bill and they left with the suitcase.’ The payment took place about five weeks after Calvi’s death, and
Heer said he learned of its true purpose a little while later from a relative of the person who had ordered the operation, who was a major client of the bank and a friend of Heer’s. His reaction? ‘I was shocked. One can do many things in life, but this was beyond the limit.’

In his interview with
Panorama
(3 January 1993), Heer revealed his detailed knowledge of Italian political corruption. It was the kind of information that gave him a sense of being ‘The King of Italy’, it was the kind of information that gave power, and it was the kind of information which he shared with a fellow banker named Roberto Calvi. ‘Several of our clients, after receiving major contracts for public works, told us to make payments to other Swiss accounts. I can’t affirm that that money went to politicians, but I suspect that it did. In short, if I made a payment, let’s say, to account Rosemarie at the UBS, I can’t know whether a prime minister was concealed behind that name.’

Heer, a homosexual aesthete, enjoyed the good life that Rothschild money brought him. He collected vintage cars and modern art, boats, fine wines and properties in Switzerland and Spain. His Zurich lawyer, Valentin Landmann, was impressed by Heer’s intelligence and the quality of his knowledge. ‘Many things Heer described came up later in Italian court proceedings, and there were no instances where it was proved that he lied,’ Landmann told me. ‘He was reliable but unbelievable; an interesting mixture.’ Landmann said Heer’s work for Rothschild’s gave him knowledge of Italy’s important industrial families, of dubious families and of politicians. Heer had even spoken of his knowledge of murders connected to business frauds in Italy, Landmann said, but the lawyer had not pressed him on the issue because it was not strictly relevant to his defence. ‘His descriptions were like Goya’s paintings, not very favourable to the people described, but very accurate. He thought about writing a book, but I never saw a manuscript,’ Landmann said. ‘He told us things that were later part of an
indictment against Andreotti. He mentioned a flat provided to a family member of the prime minister.’

Heer and Rothschild were involved in screening the ownership of a significant stake in Italy’s Rizzoli publishing group at the time it was being taken over by Calvi’s La Centrale holding company. ‘Heer had contact with Banco Ambrosiano managers,’ Landmann told me. ‘He described his dealings with the P2 Lodge, mentioned who gave the orders, and was in touch with Gelli and Ortolani.’ As a member of this inner circle it is therefore plausible that he might be trusted even with the organization’s most dangerous secrets, particularly if he was already involved in illegalities on its behalf. Why he should have chosen to go public with the story of the secret payment to Calvi’s killers remains something of a mystery however. It was perhaps simply exasperation with his former employer. The decision was taken, Landmann said, before Heer learned he was suffering from AIDS. Sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for embezzlement, Heer was released early and died in a Zurich hospice in 2001, his alleged brush with Calvi’s killers just one of the unresolved mysteries of a controversial career.

Licio Gelli, who has reportedly been under investigation for Calvi’s murder in a secret parallel inquiry about which very little has emerged, was not shy about discussing the circumstances of his ‘friend’s’ death when I visited him at Villa Wanda. ‘If I was an investigator I would want to know who took him to London and why. They will have altered his appearance, I imagine. Someone who wants to take his own life would simply open the window and throw himself down. Instead, he eludes his surveillance and walks for 10 kilometres,’ Gelli said, before moving on to highlight other anomalies in Calvi’s death. ‘All those bricks and stones that they put on him, that was stupid. You load someone with bricks if they have to sink, not if they are going to remain above water.’
Gelli also expressed scepticism about Calvi’s ability to climb out over the scaffolding in his leather-soled city shoes. ‘I think they suicided him. They induced him to leave the hotel; they will have massacred him and hanged him when he was already dead. This was a premeditated murder carried out by several people. He would have defended himself if it had been just one person, they must have been two or three.’

The P2 boss said he had always asked himself who might have been behind it but had found no answer, as Calvi did not have enemies. He did suggest that the depredation of the troubled Banco Ambrosiano by those who acquired control of it after the bankruptcy could have featured among the motives, however. ‘They bought gold as scrap for the price of scrap-iron,’ he said. Gelli said the sale of any one of the jewels in Calvi’s financial empire – the Banca del Gottardo, Banca Cattolica, Credito Varesino or Assicurazioni Savoia – would have been enough to cover the Ambrosiano’s debt. ‘If the Vatican’s letters of patronage were valid then the Banco Ambrosiano wasn’t bankrupt. They didn’t want to save the Ambrosiano. They took advantage of those days in August, when no one was around, to assume control.’ Gelli confirmed the delicate role of the Banca del Gottardo in the whole affair – ‘it was a frontier bank, with the entrance in one state and the exit in another’ – and that Calvi was threatening to reveal what he knew and what he had done on behalf of the Vatican.
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Gelli seemed unperturbed as he discussed the subject of Calvi’s death, a crime of which he has himself been accused by numerous sources. It was hard to associate this mild-mannered and inoffensive old gentleman with the trail of murder and mayhem he is reputed to have left behind him.

The cold war period left a trail of violence and mystery in the Vatican, with the violence washing around the figure even of
the pope himself. Given the several suggestions that Cardinal Eugène Tisserant was involved in financial scandals possibly related to the Cold War, it is worth returning a second time to this remarkable character. Tisserant was born in Nancy in northern France in 1884 and was ordained priest in 1907, becoming one of the few senior clergyman of his time to have participated in a cavalry charge while in holy orders. France’s anti-clerical Third Republic required all adult males to perform military service and there were no exemptions, even for priests. A gifted linguist who had already mastered Arabic, Hebrew, Ethiopian and Assyrian, his talents were later harnessed by the military intelligence service to further French colonial ambitions in Syria and Lebanon.

With the arrival of peace Tisserant returned to his biblical studies in Rome, where he was head of the Vatican library from 1930 to 1936. In that year he was appointed head of the Congregation for the Eastern Churches, a crucial position for the church’s relations with the communist world, which he would occupy for the next 23 years.

In 1962 he was charged with a delicate diplomatic mission by Pope John XXIII, a man for whose intellectual abilities he had scant regard. At a secret meeting with a representative of the Russian Orthodox church near the northern French town of Metz, he negotiated a remarkable non-aggression pact. Representatives of the Orthodox church would be allowed to participate as observers at the forthcoming Second Vatican Council in return for an undertaking that the Council would not utter any public condemnation of communism, as many of its participants would have wished. Tisserant’s counterpart in the Metz negotiations was Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad, whose meteoric rise through the Orthodox hierarchy was widely seen as confirmation that he also belonged to the KGB. It was all the more remarkable therefore, given this highly delicate background, that Nikodim should collapse and die of a heart attack in the Vatican while paying
a courtesy visit to the newly elected Pope John Paul I. Further complicating the issue was the suggestion, reported by Peter Hebblethwaite in the
National Catholic Reporter
in 1993, that Nikodim was ‘secretly a Catholic bishop, recognized by Rome with jurisdiction from Pope Paul VI throughout Russia’. Just 23 days later John Paul I would also be dead under circumstances that gave rise to suspicion. The contradictory information provided about his death by the Vatican and speculation that he would not have tolerated Archbishop Marcinkus’s continuing dalliance with Roberto Calvi and his P2 associates only served to strengthen the doubts. The Vatican’s untruthful insistence that the pope’s body had been found by his secretary, rather than a nun, added to the confusion and subsequent distrust, confirming an observation made to me by Flavio Carboni: ‘The Vatican will forgive anything, except scandal.’

If the alleged heart attacks that claimed the lives of Nikodim and
Papa Luciani
in quick succession remain open to question, there were other violent episodes involving the pope and Italy’s premier Catholic bank where the criminal intent was all too evident. On 13 May 1981 a Turkish gunman shot and seriously wounded Pope John Paul II as he toured St Peter’s Square in an open-topped jeep. Two shots from Mehmet Ali Agca’s 9mm Browning pistol struck the pope in the abdomen, in the left index finger and the right forearm. Several trials and hundreds of thousands of words of journalistic, historical and intelligence analysis have left the background to the attack shrouded in fog.

As Felipe Turover has suggested, the most obvious reading of the assassination attempt was as an Eastern Bloc response to the pope’s anti-communist activities, particularly in Poland. A number of alternative theories have been put forward that suggest a connection to the Banco Ambrosiano affair. Flavio Carboni told magistrates in 1993 that Calvi had identified the motive for the attack on the pope in the
Vatican’s anti-communist strategy, pursued in Latin America and Poland with the help of the Banco Ambrosiano.