Authors: Rupert Cornwell
Whatever the "institution" destined to receive 50 per cent of the publishing group, it was no longer prepared to do so. Instead, the 10.2 per cent that would constitute the nominally controlling syndicate with Angelo Rizzoli was placed in the hands of Tassan Din. As for the remaining 40 per cent, Calvi had no option but to take that on himself, if the scheme, and with it prospects of Rizzoli's survival, were to be preserved.
On Easter Sunday, April 19, Tassan Din took the agreement first to Naples for signature by Angelo Rizzoli, who was spending the holiday at Capri; and then to Calvi at his villa at Drezzo. The momentous accord occupied just a single sheet of paper.
La Centrale, Ambrosiano's merchant banking arm, would acquire 40 per cent of Rizzoli for 116 billion lire. With this money, Angelo Rizzoli would repay Calvi the debt he had incurred to carry out Rizzoli's previous capital increase in 1977 (and thus retrieve the 80 per cent of the group's shares mortgaged through the IOR), and subscribe his share of the new one. In all, 150 billion lire of fresh capital would go to Rizzoli. Meanwhile La Centrale's foray into the publishing world would cost it the colossal sum of 176 billion lire: the price agreed with Angelo Rizzoli, plus 60 billion lire to cover its own portion of the forthcoming capital increase.
The stealth with which the deal had been executed was vintage Calvi. The first Leemans, who was after all La Centrale's managing director, heard about it was on April 22: "Do you know we're buying Rizzoli," exclaimed an executive at La Centrale, bursting into his office brandishing a news agency flash conveying announcement of the agreement by Angelo Rizzoli that day. Leemans rang Calvi in amazement: "Oh yes," came the reply, "I forgot to tell you. I was going to." It was only the following Sunday that Calvi gave Leemans and Roberto Rosone, Ambrosiano's general manager for Italy, a fuller version of events.
Calvi was relaxed and unperturbed, notwithstanding the unflattering comments aroused by the announcement. He was after all a banker of doubtful repute, under investigation for currency offences and apparently linked to the P-2 (although the membership lists had not been made public, the Zilletti affair made it more than likely that Calvi and Gelli were no strangers). What, it was asked, was he doing buying virtual control of Italy's most important paper? And was not such a transaction forbidden, after the Bank of Italy directive preventing banks moving into areas unrelated to finance? Rosone and Leemans were most worried about the cost. La Centrale would have to borrow the money to finance the deal, at a cost to itself of almost 40 billion lire a year in interest payments alone, they observed.
Not to worry, Calvi reassured them. Half a dozen potential buyers for the 40 per cent stake were already waiting: and in two or three months La Centrale would have sold out with a tidy profit. In any event, he had already secured the prior agreement of the Bank of Italy, the Treasury Minister and the party leaders in Rome. Maybe, Calvi was merely relaying assurances he had been given by Gelli (or Tassan Din), that the
Corriere
transaction would cause no problems.
Maybe he was telling a plain lie. Possibly, however, Calvi did have a prepared solution. For at about the time the Rizzoli purchase was going through, he arranged for $143 million to be transferred from Banco Andino in Lima to Bellatrix, one of the little Panamanian companies. From there the money—by coincidence or otherwise exactly equal to the price paid by La Centrale—was directed into two Zurich accounts, bearing the names of Zirka and Recioto. Was this to enable control of Rizzoli to be swiftly transferred outside Italy, just like control of Banco Ambrosiano itself?
But the question was rapidly to become academic, for, far from abating, public debate intensified about Ambrosiano, about its mysterious appendages abroad, and its impenetrable ownership. Political objections also mounted, a sign of unease among the parties that the mouthpiece represented by the
Corriere
might be passing into hostile hands, at a moment, moreover, when early general elections seemed possible. Nor were the Treasury Minister or the central bank giving any sign they had accepted the arrangement— indeed rather the opposite.
Calvi himself must have secretly foreseen the worst. For as he signed the agreement he asked Tassan Din quietly: "If I do sign, do you think I'll avoid going to prison?"
*Bruno
Tassan Din, in an interview to
La Stampa
, February
16, 1983.
The knell for
Calvi was not long in sounding. The magistrate d'Ambrosio had swiftly concluded that the evidence against him, strengthened now by the contents of Gelli's files at Arezzo, warranted formal charges. Shortly after 7.30 a.m. on the morning of May 20, a detachment of
Guardia di Finanza
officials arrived at Calvi's flat in Via Frua in central Milan to place him under arrest. Four hours later he was in a prison cell in Lodi, twenty miles south of the city. There he was to spend the next two months, the most crushing of his life.
But the sombre early-morning round-up extended beyond Calvi. A clutch of other leading financiers, also held to be involved in the suspect transactions in Toro and Credito Varesino followed him behind bars. Calvi was arrested in his capacity as chairman of La Centrale; into Lodi and three other prisons in the Lombardy region disappeared four other Centrale directors past and present, including Antonio Tonello, chairman of both Toro and Credito Varesino. Two more were only allowed to remain at liberty because of their advanced age. They were Massimo Spada (who the previous October had been arrested on charges connected with Sindona) and Carlo Canesi, Calvi's first mentor at Ambrosiano. Canesi, indeed, was to die during Calvi's trial, at the age of 87.
Two other figures at the pinnacle of Milanese finance were also imprisoned. They were Carlo Bonomi (the son of the redoubtable Anna Bonomi) and Giorgio Cigliana, respectively chairman and general manager of Invest, the Bonomi group company, which was alleged to have abetted Calvi in some of the share dealings. Even though Calvi's own arrest had been half-expected, and the spectacle of financiers in handcuffs was nothing new, the implications of the magistrate's initiative left not just Milan, but Italy, aghast. It was as if a scimitar had decapitated two of the most powerful financial groups in the country, and had sliced deeply into its largest publishing empire. Nor were the day's excitements over.
Later that evening those other two Milan magistrates, Turone and Colombo, gave clearance for the Government to publish the P-2 membership lists, whose contents had in any case been abundantly ventilated by the newspapers. As the litany of names rolled on, from Calvi to Rizzoli to Di Bella to Tassan Din, the agreement between La Centrale and Rizzoli—and much else besides—began to make clearer, and most disturbing, sense.
Some at the
Corriere
were still able to joke acidly about their plight ("We've got 40 per cent of our owners in prison, and the other 60 per cent in the P-2"), but the paper was devastated. Several of its best-known journalists departed, and Di Bella the editor, after an initial attempt to brazen things out, was forced to resign shortly afterwards. So too was Arnaldo Forlani the Prime Minister, in whose Government, it had been revealed, were two alleged members of the lodge of Licio Gelli. He was to be replaced by Giovanni Spadolini, leader of the tiny Republican party, and Italy's first Prime Minister in 36 years who was not a Christian Democrat. Catholic politics, as well as Catholic finance, were on the retreat.
But the consequences for Calvi were gravest of all. On that May 20, he was destroyed.
Ironically the charges themselves were almost the least serious part of his predicament. "Of all the things I'm supposed to have done, why did they bother with those share deals?", he remarked sadly to his family later. And indeed, compared to the involvement with Gelli and Ortolani, and to his difficulties abroad, the currency offences were of little import—if offences they really were.
For some still maintain that Calvi had not created a surplus abroad, but had been forced to settle a loss, brought about by a fall on the Milan stock market, and the very great rise in the value of the Swiss franc against the lira. He himself believed the real blame lay with the IOR, in Calvi's eyes the true recipient of the surplus.
Indisputably, however, imprisonment dislodged the cornerstones of the elaborate edifice he had constructed. The tenuous props to his reputation were pulled away. The Vatican was at last to realize the enormity of the mess it had helped create. From that time on its backing for Calvi was tepid and grudging. The political support he thought he had secured proved insufficient; while both foreign banks and those within the Ambrosiano group who knew the truth (or suspected it) lost faith. Most immediately destructive was the psychological impact of jail.
For anyone to find themselves suddenly under lock and key and at the orders of others is, at the least, a jarring experience. For the aloof and private Calvi, accustomed to the unquestioning obedience of others, the shield of bodyguards and armour-plated cars, the shock was terrible. Prison crushed his spirit, making him even more morbid and suspicious than before. At Ambrosiano people would try to make light of it, talking of the chairman
in pensione
, but for the rest of his days Calvi could never talk easily of the experience.
By Italian standards Lodi is a fairly comfortable prison. Even so, Calvi for the first week there found himself sharing a cell with three petty delinquents who would play cards and have the radio on constantly, preventing him from resting. A visitor early on found him "completely submissive", meekly obeying the commands of guards half or a third of his age, red-eyed from lack of sleep.
Calvi's ordeal was hardly less upsetting for his wife and family, whose faith in his powers until then had been undented. Clara Calvi cast desperately around for ways to help her husband. At Ambrosiano itself she found surprisingly little sympathy. But at this point a strange benefactor appeared—the first of the unappealing figures who crowd the final year of Calvi's life.
Francesco Pazienza was a financial soldier of fortune, working either on his own account or on hire for others. Trained as a doctor, he gave up medicine for the greater rewards of the "international consultant". He was what the French aptly called a
brasseur d'affaires.
Pazienza was young, only in his mid-thirties, but he spoke four languages, and vaunted contacts with the Italian secret services, the CIA and Italian politicians. Disconcertingly, he could mix charm with a brutal aggressiveness. Above all Pazienza seems to have had a sharp eye for human weakness, and a remarkable ability to win people's confidence on only slight acquaintance. Calvi, with his doubts, his fascination with the secret world and his conviction that concealed, rather than open, power was what counted, was a perfect target.
The two appear to have met at an IMF meeting in Washington, where Pazienza was with a group of American bankers. By March 1981 they were in regular contact. Calvi gave him the title of "international adviser" to Ambrosiano. He also entrusted Pazienza with a supremely important task—the one which could solve all his difficulties. Pazienza was to find a buyer for the assets held by the IOR-backed Panama and Liechtenstein companies, above all the controlling interest in Banco Ambrosiano itself. The proceeds would enable the debts to be repaid, and the whole sorry tangle resolved.
Obviously, Calvi's arrest had abruptly halted these plans. But Pazienza then approached Clara Calvi in her hour of desperation. The day after her husband had been sent to Lodi, Pazienza telephoned to assure her that he was mobilizing his political contacts to help Calvi. But she would have to go to Rome. Clara Calvi has told how she accompanied Pazienza on a private jet down to the capital to put her case in person to the three politicians whom Calvi always claimed were his sponsors: Giulio Andreotti, the Christian Democrat party president Flaminio Piccoli, and Bettino Craxi, the leader of the Socialists.
Her argument was simple: her husband had provided much financial assistance to both parties: could not they now do something to help remove his troubles with the judiciary? The politicians made no promises, but said they would do what they could. In the weeks ahead Craxi and Piccoli did speak out in Parliament and elsewhere in favour of Calvi, to some effect. But they must have suspected already that the banker was
bruciato,
as the Italians graphically put it, "burnt out". With the P-2 intrigue laid bare, how far could they risk exposing themselves in favour of a man who for years had represented the financial arm of Gelli's lodge? The Vatican appears to have been reaching the same conclusion.
From 400 miles' distance in Rome, Banco Ambrosiano had until recently looked a more reliable proposition than it did from close at hand in Milan. But the P-2 affair, the clamour created by Calvi's open involvement with Rizzoli, and the unending rumours had begun to prise open even the Vatican's well-sealed eyes. Later the Holy See claimed that it was utterly deceived over the nature of its business dealings with Calvi; but the IOR knew full well at the least that these were close and substantial. There had been an additional warning that spring as well. Andreatta, the Treasury Minister, who had read the Bank of Italy report, went to the Vatican to urge it to cut loose from Calvi before it was too late.
What became of this episode is not clear. Although there is little doubt the visit took place, Marcinkus would claim that no-one told him about it. But debate over the complexities of the IOR's relations with Ambrosiano was about to be eclipsed by an infinitely more serious matter: the attempt on the life of the Pope on the warm Wednesday afternoon of May 13,1981, which came within an ace of succeeding.
Those to whom Andreatta had conveyed his apprehensions were suddenly faced with the prospect of a Church without rudder, as its ruler, in whose hands all power was concentrated, fought with death. Financial decisions, which in any event would have gestated slowly, must simply have been pigeonholed.
Seven days after John Paul II was so nearly assassinated, Calvi was arrested. In the weeks that followed, Marcinkus was pressed by his family, on the grounds that much of the sum held to have been illegally exported had gone to a company owned by the IOR. Calvi's son Carlo telephoned Marcinkus several times to plead for the IOR to admit involvement, on the grounds that this would have considerably reduced the gravity of the case against his father. The problem was that the Banca del Gottardo in Lugano, through which the deals had been channelled, was bound by Swiss banking secrecy regulations. The IOR would have to volunteer the information itself.
Marcinkus however refused to help. "If we do, it's not only the IOR and the Vatican's image which will suffer," he told Carlo. "You'll lose as well, for our problems are your problems too." The reply was enigmatic. Did it mean that the worldly archbishop already knew all about the massive fraud, to be publicly displayed only a year later? Or was it simply to observe that for the IOR to intervene would merely show to what extent Ambrosiano had sheltered behind it?
Another episode indicates just how fervid was the Vatican's desire to keep its name out of the trial. One day his wife Clara and daughter Anna went to visit Calvi in prison at Lodi. They were driven there by Alessandro Mennini, the physical symbol of Ambrosiano's entwinement with the IOR, and a family friend of the children. Calvi was tired and fearful. He begged his family to see Marcinkus and Luigi
Mennini and insist that they help him out. Anna took notes of what her father told them, under the heading: "This trial is called IOR." Since February he had been pressing the Vatican bank, he said, but to no avail. It was now up to the family to try.
As they left the prison, Anna showed one of the sheets to Alessandro Mennini. Horrified, Mennini tried to wrench the paper from her hands: "You must never say this name (IOR), not even in the confessional box." Clara Calvi then snatched the papers herself and sat on them in the car to prevent anyone taking them. But, she has recounted, she never did go to see Marcinkus and Mennini's father.
Gradually the first impact of imprisonment lessened, especially after intercession by Pazienza and the prison chaplain saw him moved to a single cell. And from there, almost incredibly, Calvi began to take in hand again the reins of Ambrosiano. He alone knew all the secrets of the bank; and without his guidance Olgiati, the general manager, Rosone and Leoni in Milan were hard-pressed to cope. But the fears of these three were growing as foreign banks started to sever the lifeline of funds for Ambrosiano's foreign subsidiaries. After Calvi's arrest Midland Bank, for example, dropped a planned $25 million loan it was organizing for Banco Andino in Lima. Others just declined to renew credits as they fell due for repayment.
Most ominous of all, Banca del Gottardo in Lugano, through which much of the original web had been spun, indicated that it was no longer willing to continue its role in the clandestine foreign operations about which it knew so much. This was now taken over gradually by Ambrosiano Services in Luxembourg.
After a preliminary hearing on May 29, Milan's financial trial of the century began in earnest on June 10. Public interest was so great that the proceedings, originally intended for the Italian equivalent of a magistrates court, were shifted to the main courtroom of Milan's Central Assizes, complete with the special iron barred cage along one side where defendants in major terrorist and Mafia trials of recent years had been housed. Financiers, however, were deemed less of a public menace. Calvi and his fellow defendants were permitted to sit without handcuffs, on ordinary benches.