God's Banker (26 page)

De Benedetti went away to mull over the proposal. The challenge and the potential rewards were tempting; many believed that he was losing interest in Olivetti, and superficially Ambrosiano still seemed a sound investment. The drawback lay in having to work alongside Calvi for a certain period, for the two instinctively were rivals, temperamentally as different as could be. Eventually De Benedetti concluded that the prize was worth the risk, and terms were agreed. He would pay 50 billion lire for a million shares in the bank. With two per cent of its capital, he would be Ambrosiano's largest single declared Italian shareholder.

Andreatta, the Treasury Minister, upon learning with no small surprise of the deal, remarked laconically that "the ways of capitalism are strange". Ciampi at the Bank of Italy was more enthusiastic. De Benedetti with his entrepreneurial drive and above-board methods might succeed where the central bank had long failed, in throwing light on the hidden foreign parts of Ambrosiano. Ciampi still felt the bank was safe—as the success of that summer's 240 billion lire capital-raising operation seemed to confirm. If De Benedetti wanted to empire-build, then the central bank would not stand in his way.

The public announcement of the deal came as a bombshell. Calvi's motives were obvious enough: the arrival of De Benedetti, after the
Agnellis of Fiat, Italy's best-known businessman, would give sorely needed lustre to Ambrosiano's image at home and abroad. It might even encourage foreign banks to resume lending to the bank—and thus permit the still secret overseas edifice to be shored up. But De Benedetti? What was he about? Was he planning to abandon Olivetti, or was he seeking backdoor control of the
Corriere
? Some of Milan's wiser bankers and brokers were privately dismayed. Too much smoke had swirled around Ambrosiano for there to be no fire; De Benedetti was risking his reputation, they felt—perhaps more besides. One thing was certain: that he would be no sleeping partner and sooner more probably than later the two would be at logger­heads. After just three days that judgement was to be vindicated.

On Saturday, November 21, De Benedetti arrived at Calvi's Drezzo home for a pre-arranged working lunch. He saw at once that his host had been transformed. Calvi seemed to him like a frightened animal, searching to escape the light. Clearly someone or something had warned him off the association with De Benedetti. Calvi nervously told his new deputy chairman that he would have to wait before becoming operational, international reaction would have to be gauged. "What international reaction?" enquired De Benedetti, somewhat mystified. "International financial reaction," Calvi answered.

"But there's no problem there," De Benedetti assured him, refer­ring to an article in the
Financial Times
which pointed out that his entry could only improve Ambrosiano's reputation. No, it wasn't just
financial
reaction, Calvi said guardedly. Were there political prob­lems then? No, came the reply, there were other reasons, "factors of international consensus".

At that stage De Benedetti thought the Mafia, or the P-2, were involved. In any case there was little point continuing there and then, so a new meeting was arranged for the following week. In the meantime De Benedetti asked for an office at Ambrosiano, a secret­ary, together with annual reports and balance sheets of the bank and its various affiliates. None of these requests was granted: indeed, an Italian journalist who rang Ambrosiano asking for De Benedetti was told that no-one of that name was employed by the bank.

As De Benedetti was to put it in a seven-page letter to Calvi on

December 13 setting out his complaints, he encountered "a wall of rubber" everywhere he turned. Every demand for information was either fobbed off or ignored. The initial understanding was not being maintained, and Calvi seemed personally to be doing his utmost to minimize the importance of the deal. Particularly objectionable, De Benedetti wrote, had been an "incredible" public statement by Pazienza, speaking in the name of the bank itself, and intimating that the secret services could be useful in clinching business deals.

Quite clearly the P-2 and whatever other forces were manipulating Calvi (again, he told De Benedetti hispolitical patrons were Andreotti, Piccoli and Craxi) were signalling that De Benedetti's presence within Ambrosiano was intolerable. As the events of November 21 showed, Calvi too had been told unequivocally that he had made a mistake, and a grave one.

De Benedetti once asked Calvi about his relations with Gelli. The reply was that the two had not seen each other for ages, although Calvi understood that in hiding the P-2 grandmaster had undergone facial plastic surgery, to avoid identification and enable him to return to Italy. In fact Gelli was in frequent contact with the banker, directly and through the intermediary of Tassan Din at Rizzoli.

But De Benedetti too was made quickly aware of the shadowy presence of the lodge. Just before his first Ambrosiano board meeting on December 6, Calvi took him on one side in the corridor. "You be careful," he said, "the P-2 is preparing a dossier on you." But there was no material, De Benedetti protested, he had never had anything to do with the lodge (indeed established private industry in Northern Italy was one of the few areas of national life uncontaminated by the P-2). But Calvi insisted: "I just advise you to take care, because I know."

As the new deputy chairman persisted in his efforts to do his job properly, the warnings became cruder. Someone giving the name of "Ortolani" made several vaguely menacing calls to De Benedetti's home in Geneva, where his family lived. Then at Olivetti's headquar­ters at Ivrea he received a letter postmarked in Geneva setting out physical threats against himself and his children. In the style of the Mafia, the latter were referred to as "little jewels".

Thereafter, his relations with Calvi steadily worsened. De Be­nedetti sent Calvi letter after letter complaining of his treatment, and took to insisting that his objections be recorded in the official minutes of executive committee meetings. And as information was withheld, De Benedetti's suspicions about Ambrosiano grew. For if Calvi was behaving so strangely, then he must have something serious to hide, quite distinct from the P-2.

Two other worrying signals reached De Benedetti. First, he read the 1978 Bank of Italy report which had foreseen the causes of Ambrosiano's future downfall. It was three years old, but the com­plaints of Padalino and his fellow inspectors about Calvi's refusal to supply information might have been his own. Second, the first real word was emerging about massive problems at Banco Andino.

That Christmas Angelo Rizzoli told De Benedetti that the Peru bank could be facing potential losses of $600 million. Later Rizzoli was to say that he had first got wind of the danger from Rosone, who since Calvi's imprisonment the previous May had been thrust into contact with the bank's most delicate affairs. But long before that Gelli himself had told Rizzoli that Banco Andino was engaged in some "extremely risky" ventures. Almost certainly, knowledge of the Achilles heel of Calvi in Latin America was one of Gelli's most potent weapons to blackmail the banker.

In any case De Benedetti was alarmed enough to send Olivetti's chief representative in Venezuela, Paolo Venturini, down to Lima to take a first hand look. His telex back flatly contradicted the bland assurances of Calvi that Andino was a thriving and active bank. Rather, reported Venturini, it wasn't a bank at all, but a specially authorized financial company dealing exclusively in foreign business. The offices were the top four floors of a new office block, but none of its employees seemed to be doing anything.

De Benedetti became genuinely scared. He finally secured a balance sheet of Banco Andino, showing that its loan portfolio had jumped from nothing to $800 million in just twelve months—but with no explanation of how so remarkable an increase had been achieved in the unremarkable Latin American economy of the time, or of what the money was being used for. De Benedetti raised the matter with Calvi. But the chairman gave the familiar assurance: "Don't worry, it's all in the hands of the
sottane nere."
("The black cassocks", i.e. the Vatican.) "The guarantees are fine."

There was to be no more time for De Benedetti to discover that these "guarantees" were merely the worthless letters of comfort, grudgingly issued by the IOR a few months earlier. For Calvi had decided that this inquisitive, forceful deputy chairman, who seemed the incarnation of both the Consob and the Bank of Italy inside his very boardroom, had to be ejected, and fast.

On January 12, De Benedetti sought to penetrate the ultimate sanctuary, by demanding immediate details of just how the "approv­al" required for the foreign shareholders was granted, and a copy of the register of shareholders as well as the 1978 report by the Bank of Italy. Three days later he was brusquely informed that he would not be approved as deputy chairman that spring at the annual meeting (further proof, incidentally, of how Calvi controlled Ambrosiano).

After some hasty haggling, terms were agreed. De Benedetti would sell back his shares for the price he paid for them, plus interest and the placement of 27 billion lire of shares in the portfolio of one of his companies. On January 22 the formal announcement of his departure was made, to no-one's great surprise; rumours of profound divisions between them had been rife for a fortnight. Four days later the long-aspiring Orazio Bagnasco was co-opted on to Ambrosiano's board as the new deputy chairman alongside Rosone, after paying an identical price to De Benedetti for a similar two per cent sharehold­ing.

So what can one make of this brief, tumultuous marriage between "lay" and Catholic finance? De Benedetti was criticized subsequently for his behaviour, chiefly on the grounds that he managed to leave with a profit a ship that was to sink with all hands only five months later. To which he retorted that the circumstances of his departure should have been warning, clear enough for those with eyes to see, of the perilous state of Ambrosiano. His own feeling that January 22 was of disaster narrowly avoided. His mistake, he later admitted, was to have been tempted by Calvi in the first place. The same day De Benedetti wrote at length to Ciampi at the Bank of Italy, explaining his decision and the way in which he had been prevented from doing his job at all.

The entire episode only added to Ciampi's apprehensions about Ambrosiano; once again the authorities wondered whether to place the bank in the hands of commissioners, but decided against it. Might not De Benedetti simply have lost an ill-judged powerplay? Instead the central bank multiplied its demands for information, and its insistence that the Rizzoli shareholding be sold.

The harassed Calvi was also under simultaneous attack from Rossi. After waiting in vain on January 19 for Calvi to attend a scheduled meeting to discuss Ambrosiano's bourse quotation, the Consob chairman in his exasperation began the procedure for having Ambro­siano listed in any event. Calvi was horrified, but there was little to be done. A week later, just after the appointment of Bagnasco, he capitulated. On January 28 he travelled to Consob's headquarters in Rome to seal the surrender. Ambrosiano would be quoted as soon as possible on the main market, and the longstanding "clause of ap­proval" for new shareholders would be abolished. In due course the first public list ever of Ambrosiano's main shareholders would also be disclosed.

Whatever judgement is made about Calvi, his life at this time must have been agony. Previous "friends" at the Vatican and the Roman political world were deserting him; at best indifferent, at worst openly manoeuvring to replace him. The pressures of the Bank of Italy, the nagging of the Consob, the pestering of Gelli, Pazienza and the like, the multiplying judicial investigations by magistrates in Milan and Rome, all had to be juggled into some kind of order. Everyone wanted money, promising protection that proved wanting, or solu­tions to the financial problems that were straws which snapped at the clutching. In the background loomed the appeal, the possibility it might fail, followed by the certainty of four years in a prison per­haps even less accommodating than Lodi.

The liaison with De Benedetti stands out because it was a choice made by Calvi alone, as the pressure upon him to reverse it demons­trates. Did Calvi imagine that he could use De Benedetti briefly and then discard him; that the presence of De Benedetti would somehow placate his enemies in the "lay" establishment, on the left and in the Milan magistrature which he had convinced himself was an instru­ment of the Communist Party? Or was it one genuine moment of sincerity, when Calvi in his contorted way sought to convey that he wanted to have done with everything, and save the bank he had created from a disaster he knew could not be far away? We shall never know. But if such a moment existed, it was short-lived. For Calvi, as that November day in Drezzo showed, was no longer in command. The pattern was not to change with the arrival of Bagnasco.

Carlo De Benedetti's
departure, though rued by some within Ambrosiano, marked the speedy return of the bank to its appointed place within Italy's political firmament. Orazio Bagnasco was on excellent terms with Giulio Andreotti—the Christian Democrat most expert in the ways of the Church, and the politician whom Calvi held most in awe, even fear. Also, Bagnasco himself was well regarded by the Vatican ("Yes, I know some cardinals and bishops," he once coyly told an interviewer). There was small doubt that he was the chosen successor to the ever more compromised Calvi when he entered Banco Ambrosiano that January 26; Calvi was aware of all this, of course, but he was too weak to put up much opposition.