The Last Supper (45 page)

Carboni had effectively dragged Berlusconi into a business environment where he was rubbing shoulders with representatives of the mafia and the Rome underworld. Berlusconi may not have been too surprised; like Carboni and Calvi himself, he appears to have cultivated personal relations that touched all levels of society. Berlusconi joined the P2 masonic lodge in January 1978, presented by his journalist friend Roberto Gervaso and receiving membership card no. 1816. He appears to have enjoyed favourable treatment by P2-controlled banks in the early part of his career. It would be strange therefore if the same P2 connection had not worked in his favour in his dealings with the Banco Ambrosiano. It would seem not, however, if we are to believe what Berlusconi told the Milan prosecutor Pierluigi Dell’Osso on 27 August 1982. ‘I never had any business relationship with the late Roberto Calvi,’ he told Dell’Osso. He had met Calvi twice at dinner and each time he had called on him two weeks later in his office because Calvi had expressed an interest in having a business relationship with his group, Berlusconi said. Calvi was cordial and said he would like to number him among his customers, but nothing ever came of it. The last time he had seen Calvi, a few months previously, it had been to discuss his interest in purchasing the profitable TV listings magazine
TV Sorrisi e
Canzoni,
which was 52 per cent owned by Calvi’s holding company La Centrale. The magazine was part of the Rizzoli Group and Berlusconi had already discussed the matter with the Rizzoli director general, Bruno Tassan Din. Tassan Din had told him the magazine was owned by an offshore company and had suggested he discuss it with Calvi – possibly the same discussions that gave rise to the secret service report saying Berlusconi was negotiating to buy a 10.2 per cent stake in Rizzoli. ‘The meeting took place in Calvi’s office,’ Berlusconi said. ‘He received me rather coldly and told me brusquely to discuss it again directly with Tassan Din and [Angelo] Rizzoli, who were in charge of the group, as he didn’t intend to be responsible for it.’

The testimony of some of the individuals who were close to Calvi in the latter part of his life suggests the reality may have been somewhat different. A memorandum written by Francesco Pazienza in August 1982 describes the ‘asphyxiating insistence’ with which Carboni asked to be introduced to Calvi. ‘One day he presented himself with a man who he said was one of the closest collaborators of Silvio Berlusconi and they told me that a very fruitful dialogue could be arranged between Calvi and Berlusconi,’ Pazienza wrote. There was no lack of interest on Berlusconi’s side, according to this account. Pazienza’s version is confirmed by the testimony of Flavio Carboni, delivered before Milan magistrates in the course of a judicial confrontation with Pellicani on 17 May 1984. Carboni said he had told Calvi of the unhappy experience of his business partnership with Berlusconi and the money that Berlusconi still allegedly owed him. ‘Calvi told me literally that things had gone well for me, because Berlusconi was a rogue and had previously called on him in Gelli’s name asking him for a loan of 20 billion lire. When Calvi asked him what guarantees he could count on, Berlusconi had said he didn’t need guarantees since he came in Gelli’s name,’ Carboni said. When Calvi objected that that was irrelevant, Berlusconi had allegedly exclaimed: ‘So, you
couldn’t care less! You’ll see what happens to you.’ Carboni said Calvi had told him later that he had received a series of anonymous threatening phone calls to the effect that it was the last time that he could permit himself the luxury of playing jokes like that on people belonging to the group that supported him. ‘Calvi concluded the confidence by saying that on that occasion he had not allowed himself to be intimidated and had not given way,’ Carboni said.

Pellicani confirmed the gist of Carboni’s account, saying he had already told him much the same thing although in more general terms. ‘On the occasion of a trip that Berlusconi made with me and Carboni on his private plane from Milan to Rome, the former mentioned that he had had a meeting with Calvi for business reasons and added that the man had struck him as very determined and with a hard heart [literally: with a hair in his heart], a phrase that I think I remember verbatim.’ Pellicani said the episode had occurred shortly after the publication of the P2 membership lists in 1981.

Berlusconi was close to the leaders of the dominant political parties from the late 1970s, as well as to Licio Gelli. He was close to Flaminio Piccoli, the secretary of the Christian Democrat party who had latched Pazienza on to Calvi’s coat-tails, and he was a personal friend of Bettino Craxi, the powerful and unscrupulous secretary of the PSI. Recent investigations have indicated that the Banco Ambrosiano and the clandestine international financial channels of the PSI may have contributed to the original financing of Berlusconi’s business endeavours, a matter still largely shrouded in mystery.

In 1976 the Banco Ambrosiano’s Nassau subsidiary Cisalpine Overseas Bank bought a 16 per cent stake in another Nassau-registered company, Capitalfin International Ltd, a financial consortium that had been set up five years earlier by ENI, the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, the chemicals company Montedison and IFI, a holding company of the Fiat Group. Capitalfin was not a good investment for Calvi, but it had
a stake in a Berlusconi company called Fininvest Ltd Grand Cayman, and it was clearly taken on for political reasons. It wasn’t a bad deal for Gelli and Ortolani, as they shared a $1.2 million commission on the transaction. Questioned by Rome investigators in August 2004, Geoffrey Robinson, a Touche Ross accountant who worked on the liquidation of the Banco Ambrosiano Holding in Luxembourg, had this to say of the investment decision: ‘The reasons for this share purchase can only be understood in the light of the Italian political situation at the time, since the operation made no sense in itself; it was a bit like throwing money out the window.’ BA Holding had made another investment in a Fininvest-related company in the early 1970s, Robinson said. Both the Italian national oil company ENI and the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro were strongly influenced by the PSI and P2, so it was natural that Capitalfin should be too. The chairman was BNL chairman Alberto Ferrari, a suspected member of P2, and another of the directors was Gianfranco Graziadei, his BNL colleague and alleged ‘brother’ in P2. ENI was represented on the board by its vice-president, Leonardo Di Donna, another alleged freemason from P2.

Carlo Calvi also highlighted this connection when he was questioned by the Rome magistrates in 2002. His father had told him in the early 1970s that Capitalfin represented interests close to Craxi and the PSI and that it had been funded by passing money from the BNL to the Cisalpine in Nassau, the Banco Ambrosiano in Managua, the Panamanian company Belrosa and thence from Capitalfin to the final beneficiaries; unbeatable discretion! ‘On one occasion around 1973–74, while we were in our rented house at North Point in the Bahamas . . . my father referred to the fact that among the beneficiaries of the BNL loans that I have just mentioned there were also companies in the Fininvest Group,’ he said.

The discretion of these warm-water financial channels may also have been used for the kinds of delicate international operations that may have put Roberto Calvi’s life at
risk. Calvi was doing a favour to his Socialist/P2 friends in BNL and ENI by buying a stake in the financially troubled Capitalfin. In 1974 Capitalfin partnered with a white Russian shipping magnate, Boris Vlasov, to buy control of a British shipping and shipbroking company, Shipping Industrial Holdings (SIH), which numbered Exxon among its favoured customers. Vlasov, who was based in Monte Carlo and had strong ties to the Italian business world, was interested in the SIH fleet and was prepared to leave the shipbroking and insurance activities of the London group to his Capitalfin partners. Capitalfin duly purchased these, which became known as H. Clarkson Holdings, with disastrous results. At this point the Ambrosiano agreed to perform another favour for ENI, purchasing 80 per cent of Clarkson from Capitalfin and agreeing to hold it in a fiduciary capacity on behalf of ENI. A confidential memo on the operation says: ‘Remember to use Ciso [Cisalpine Overseas/BAOL], Nassau, as clearing bank for all financial movements among the interested parties.’ Calvi clearly considered the affair important and sensitive. ‘My father had a stack of documents this high on Clarkson’s in his Bahamas safe,’ Carlo Calvi told me, indicating a two-inch pile with his fingers. ‘What is not clear is why ENI’s stake could not be held openly.’
⁶
One, perhaps banal, explanation is that rival oil companies might not have wanted to use Clarkson’s shipbroking or insurance services if they had known a competitor controlled the company.

There is reason to believe, however, that the secrecy surrounding the operation may have been intended to conceal an even more sensitive reality. A director of H. Clarkson Holdings since 1975 was Sir Patrick Reilly, a British ambassador to Moscow in the 1950s. During the Second World War, Reilly had worked at the Ministry of Economic Warfare, where he met the future SOE chief Charles Hambro, whose bank would later be an important SIH shareholder, and he had
then moved on to become personal assistant to the head of the Secret Intelligence Service, Brigadier Stewart Menzies. During the Cold War a lot could be done with a shipping company controlled by an anti-communist Russian. A mortgage taken out on one of Clarkson’s vessels in 1977 suggests it may have been used in a rather buccaneering role. The mortgage agreement between Clarkson and Citibank recites: ‘Short particulars of the Property Mortgaged or Charged: Sixty-four shares in the British vessel “Clarkspey” (“the Vessel”) registered at the Port of London under official number 377268 and in her boats, guns, ammunition, small arms, and appurtenances.’

Sir Patrick Reilly left many of his papers to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, with the idea that they should be made available to researchers. The library has unilaterally restricted access to a significant portion of the papers, in apparent contradiction of its role as a disseminator of knowledge, citing the terms of the UK’s Privacy Act. The documents I was allowed to consult at the library were not enough to form a clear idea as to whether the censorship related to simple libel issues or commercial secrecy or whether it was in some way connected to national security and the history of the Cold War. Documents written by Reilly in connection with a planned history of Clarkson’s touch on some of the issues he clearly considered sensitive. To tell the true story in full of the SIH takeover would be hurtful to some individuals and ‘could involve legal proceedings with Hambros, to whom it would surely be very damaging’, Reilly observed.

It could of course be just a coincidence that Calvi’s path kept crossing those of other secret influence-brokers during the hottest years of the Cold War. In any event, his flirtation with Capitalfin cost him a $33 million loss, which he buried in the labyrinth of his offshore companies. One good turn deserves another, and in the second half of 1978 ENI offshore financial institutions lent the Banco Ambrosiano Holding in Luxembourg a total of $140 million. It was just this kind of
back-scratching that kept Calvi afloat when he should already have been bankrupt and which, he clearly believed, might buoy him up for ever.

Unfortunately for Calvi that would not be the case. The members of his secret power network deserted him in his hour of need, if they didn’t actually conspire together to murder him. Roberto Calvi had achieved power through conspiracy and almost certainly died by it. The mafia may indeed have killed him to punish him for embezzling its funds, as the Rome murder trial endeavoured to prove, but Calvi unquestionably had enemies who were more powerful and more dangerous. His threatened revelations, if they had gone ahead, could have seriously damaged the reputation of the Vatican, upset the mechanisms of political corruption in Italy and disrupted a wider network of secret global power. Any one of those interest groups, or all of them acting in concert, could have decided that Calvi had to die.

The mysteries of the Calvi case continue to interrogate the present and the future. In 1994 and again in 2001 Silvio Berlusconi, whose wealth and power had its roots in the same P2 system that promoted Calvi’s career, became prime minister of Italy. Just as the Calvi case has not been fully clarified in court, so the true nature and significance of P2 remains to be understood. Perhaps the real key to Calvi’s death was his participation in a clandestine mechanism for the international projection of state power, and his threat to go public with that knowledge. The story would have been messy: of corruption, violence, impunity, in short the exercise of unaccountable power. It was understandable how the system came about, in the emergency circumstances of an undeclared global war, but the aberrations it produced betrayed the western values that Calvi’s cold warriors ostensibly defended. In the renewed emergency created by the real threat of Islamic fundamentalism
similar mechanisms will be working overtime once again. The challenge for western democracies is to understand what happened in the past so that they can develop appropriate forms of oversight and curb the worst abuses. The seeds of the hatred that animates the fundamentalist warriors of today were in part sown by the Machiavellian machinations of the warriors of yesterday and an immoral short-cut to victory may actually lead to long-term defeat.

Perhaps this would have been Calvi’s message if he had finally blown the whistle on the secret western power network he had served behind the scenes. If he had ever really contemplated defecting to the East, as Felipe Turover suggested, no one knows for sure with whom he was negotiating. On 2 June 1982 the Banco Ambrosiano received a telex from the International Department of the Exterbank in Budapest seeking an appointment with Calvi for two of its officials. ‘We are pleased to inform you that Mr Caspar Gaspar, deputy president, accompanied by Mr Laszlo Csuros, regional manager, will be staying in Milano and would like to pay a visit to your bank on Friday 25 June. Please cable convenient time for appointment and name of your gentlemen who will receive them.’ Perhaps they just wanted to discuss trade finance. By the time the Hungarian gentlemen were due to visit Milan Roberto Calvi would be dead.