Authors: Rupert Cornwell
He was depressed by his strange lodgings in a city far from home. To the end Calvi had insisted to his family that all would be well; but now there could be no concealing the disaster he had brought upon himself. To his wife and children, the last who had faith, the truth would finally have to be revealed. The miraculous agreement that would save him—if indeed that was the reason for Calvi's furtive presence in London—was now out of the question, for Ambrosiano's board had stripped him of any power to negotiate. And although it is not known how, Calvi surely learnt from someone of what had happened in Milan that afternoon.
The inner despair of the man must have been immense. And so was it completely beyond possibility that he took advantage of Vittor's absence from the room to escape, walking south from Chelsea Cloisters until he reached the river, and then turning leftwards along its bank until Blackfriars? None of this, of course, satisfactorily explains the stones and the rope. But such a reconstruction is no more implausible than the elaborate theory of the motor launch, chartered and manned by expert criminals, slipping on a night tide under Blackfriars bridge and hanging Calvi's body from the scaffolding— leaving no trace of violence.
If it was a strange way to commit suicide, it was an equally odd method of murder. Moreover, the suggestion that Calvi was killed in such a way as to look like suicide may be countered by the argument that perhaps it was a suicide dressed up as murder. For Calvi had prepared a 4 billion lire ($3 million) policy on his life in favour of his family. Insurance companies do not often pay in the case of suicide.
Many months after the event, investigators in both Italy and England seemed little closer to solving the conundrum, with no great immediate prospect that they would. Silvano Vittor and Flavio Carboni, the two most obvious suspects, had been under interrogation in Italy since autumn 1982. But the formal charges against them, in direct connection with Calvi's death, did not extend beyond organizing the banker's illegal flight abroad. The choice remained between a perfect murder and a most unusual suicide.
But on March 29, 1983, Latin imagination and Anglo-Saxon phlegm were at least partly reconciled. Lord Chief Justice Lane ordered that the July 23 verdict be quashed, on the grounds that the coroner had improperly rushed through so complicated a case in a single session, and had inadmissibly leant upon the jury to avoid returning an open verdict. Furthermore, it was wrong that Flavio Carboni, the most important witness, had not been called to give evidence. The Calvi family had won a first concrete victory, and a new inquest would be held later in 1983 to attempt to elucidate the baffling mystery of Roberto Calvi's death.
If the chairman
of Banco Ambrosiano had few friends in his life, he had fewer still after his gruesome death. Usually, when a prominent figure dies in Italy, the obituary columns are filled with the condolences of those who knew and worked with him. Quite fortuitously, a strike prevented Italian newspapers from being published on either Saturday June 19 or Sunday June 20. And so the country had to rely on radio and television alone to learn that the missing Calvi had been found dead, hanging beneath a bridge in London.
Only on the Monday could the papers proclaim the news in banner headlines. But the
Corriere,
the paper Calvi partly owned, and the voice of the Milanese
bourgeoisie
to which—however uneasily—he belonged, carried just one four-line notice. It was placed by Goffredo Manfredi, the Roman builder who had joined Ambrosiano's board earlier in the year, and who had been one of the three directors to side with Calvi when it voted against him a fortnight earlier. The next day, two more appeared. One was from Marino Mariani, a small shareholder who had stayed with Ambrosiano to the end. He remembered Calvi's "hardworking and talented" life. The other came from the family of Umberto Ortolani, Gelli's lieutenant in the P-2 but on much warmer personal terms with Calvi than was Gelli. And that was all.
The politicians who had received much from Calvi'were silent. Even before the last Ambrosiano board meeting and Calvi's death, Banca del Gottardo in Lugano announced that he was being removed from its board. Former colleagues at the bank insisted that Calvi alone had known what had gone on. A scapegoat for the disaster was to hand. Calvi could be blamed for everything, and as quickly as possible forgotten. Even the Vatican, through those elusive "reliable sources" who profess to speak for it at awkward moments, was letting it be known that it was "extraneous" to the Ambrosiano crisis, underlining that its shareholding was just 1.6 per cent. But just how reliable those sources truly were, was to be proved in a matter of hours.
For on the morning of Monday June 21, the economic and financial weekly
Il Mondo
carried a remarkably detailed account of the events of the previous week in Milan, and the visit
in extremis
to the IOR by Leemans and Rosone. Above all it identified the colossal loans advanced by Ambrosiano's affiliates in Peru and Nicaragua to companies controlled by the IOR, and revealed the existence not only of the letters of comfort, but also of Calvi's own earlier letter absolving the Vatican bank from responsibility. The scandal of which Leemans had warned Marcinkus just four days earlier was out in the open, in all its tawdry splendour.
Events were now to move at an astonishing pace. Whatever may be said of the authorities' legalistic approach to Ambrosiano before, they now acted with lightning speed. Vincenzo Desario was in charge of Banco Ambrosiano for hardly 24 hours. By the weekend three permanent commissioners had been named. Technically the central bank had a fortnight to choose, but the risk of political meddling and the urgency of Ambrosiano's plight meant that no time could be lost.
The three made an oddly contrasting, but nicely complementary group during the 46 days of life left for Banco Ambrosiano. Youngest of them, at just 42, was Alberto Bertoni, Professor of Corporate economics at Milan's Bocconi university, an expert in accounting, and, as the following weeks were to prove, an indefatigable optimist. Giovanni Arduino was different, a courteous commercial banker of an older school, with a distinguished career at Credito Italiano stretching back to 1936, primarily on the international side. To him fell the ticklish task of dealing with the 250 foreign banks desperate to recover their money from the stricken Ambrosiano. But most senior and most redoubtable of the three was Antonino Occhiuto, a stocky 70-year-old Neapolitan who until the Ambrosiano affair thought he had seen all there was to see of the dark face of Italian banking.
Occhiuto belonged to Baffi's generation at the Bank of Italy, a stickler for discipline. "A law, even if it's a bit mad, must be obeyed or else you have anarchy," he once typically remarked. At the central bank he had been head of the vigilance department between 1969 and 1976, the predecessor of the unfortunate Sarcinelli. As one who had handled the death-throes of Sindona, he knew more about collapsing financial card castles than almost anyone.
From the first, it was obvious that the bank would take some saving. Only Bertoni, mindful of the valuable Italian assets of the Ambrosiano group believed that the line could be held. Occhiuto was the gloomiest, feeling privately that the old Ambrosiano board should not have asked for the Bank of Italy to take over on June 17, but applied directly to go into liquidation. Nor was Arduino hopeful, but he felt that something could be saved. But what all three instantly realized, as had Leemans a week earlier, was that salvation lay only in agreement with the IOR.
For despite the soothing reassurances issued daily by the commissioners, an old-fashioned run on the bank was under way. The confidence of depositors, and of the Italian and foreign banks who had lent money to Ambrosiano, had all but disappeared when Calvi vanished from Italy on June 12. His death and the placing of the bank in the commissioners' hands destroyed it completely. Everyone wanted their money back.
And as the commissioners and Ambrosiano's staff juggled desperately to meet the claims as they fell due, Occhiuto and Arduino sought an appointment with the IOR. Marcinkus stalled, but finally on July 2 the encounter took place. With the difference only of the shorter patience of the commissioners it was to be a repeat of the vain efforts of Leemans and Rosone to sway Marcinkus, Mennini and De Stroebel a fortnight before. Predictably, no detailed information about the IOR's overall finances was forthcoming. Occhiuto turned to the letters of comfort. The debts were the Vatican bank's, he insisted, and it had to help. Marcinkus replied that the letters of comfort had been issued
after
the debts had been contracted, as a favour to Calvi. Then he produced the standard trump card, the disclaimer from Calvi.
Occhiuto, however, was not one to be easily persuaded. As far as he was concerned, the "counter-letter" simply proved that the IOR had collaborated with Ambrosiano's chairman in perpetuating a fraud. Not only that, but the absolving letter was in Calvi's capacity as chairman of Ambrosiano Overseas in Nassau, of which Marcinkus had been a director. And what about the letter, dated October 26 1981, from the IOR giving Calvi full powers of attorney for the debts to Lima and Managua?
Arduino then tried a gentler approach. For two weeks, he told Marcinkus, he had given no formal confirmation to creditor banks pressing for payment that the IOR was involved, despite the reports in Italy. He had spoken merely of "an important debtor through various affiliates". But from Monday July 5, the IOR's name would be on the desk of every foreign bank in London, Paris and New York.
Marcinkus gave a resigned shrug. "Too bad," he said. Well then, Arduino retorted, "All I can say is that I'm awfully sorry. For this bloody mess is your responsibility."
The meeting ended, and with it, to all intents and purposes, hopes of a peaceful solution to the Ambrosiano crisis. The commissioners were to have other contacts with the IOR, but with similar lack of success. What exactly happened inside the Vatican during that fortnight between the final detonation of the Ambrosiano crisis, and the blunt refusal to help on July 2 can only be guessed at: the Holy See is not generous with information. One must presume, however, that Marcinkus had managed to satisfy Cardinal Casaroli, and through him the Pope himself, that the IOR was guilty only of naivety, that it had been deceived by Calvi. That line of argument, indeed, was to remain basically the same through the stormy months ahead.
Ironically, some believe that Ambrosiano could perhaps have been saved for much less than the full $1,287 million outstanding. If $300 or $400 million had been available to satisfy creditors, that might have been enough to restore confidence—had it been provided at once. Instead, confident of its case, the Vatican played for time, with the habit born of a long contemplation of eternity.
Only on July 13 did it announce appointment of its own three "wise men", to examine relations between the IOR and Ambrosiano. The three were Philippe de Week, a recent chairman of UBS, one of the largest Swiss banks, Joseph Brennan, from the Emigrant Savings Bank of New York, and Carlo Cerutti, a senior executive at STET, the Italian state telecommunications company, as well as a trusted financial counsellor of Popes since Pius XII. The decision was unprecedented and was partly the consequence of something hardly less unusual—a Christian Democrat Minister who spoke out against the Vatican.
One reason, perhaps, why the Vatican had escaped comparatively lightly in the Sindona affair, was that the Government was firmly in the hands of sympathetic Christian Democrats. This time, however, things were different. Spadolini, a Republican not a Christian Democrat, was Prime Minister. Andreatta, meanwhile, had watched Ambrosiano with growing concern since his arrival as Treasury Minister in October 1980. But not even his visit to the Vatican to warn about Calvi in April 1981 had produced much effect. And that July 2, as the commissioners were receiving their decisive rebuff, Andreatta made a Parliamentary statement on the affair. The IOR, he declared, had in some instances been Calvi's business partner. The Italian Government was therefore expecting "a clear acceptance of its responsibility". Such forthrightness was typical of Andreatta; at around this time he seriously considered going to see the Pope in person about the IOR's behaviour. Ambrosiano, however, was rapidly moving beyond deliverance.
The run on deposits was growing worse, and the bank alone could no longer cope. At that point the commissioners took two crucial decisions. On July 5, following the peremptory refusal by the IOR, the Milan parent bank stopped helping its affiliates to meet their own debts as they fell due. The enfeebled children were left to die, and they did so rapidly. On July 16 Ambrosiano Overseas in Nassau had its banking licence suspended, after failing to repay $8 million due that month.
A week earlier the board of Ambrosiano Holding of Luxembourg met for the last time, to vote to place the company under special administration. For Ruggero Mozzana, the 79-year-old predecessor of Calvi at Banco Ambrosiano itself, the occasion was understandably heart-breaking: "I've been alive too long," he said in tears. "Why are
you
crying," replied Carlo Olgiati, still on the Luxembourg board: "You don't have to worry, you're too old to go to prison."