Authors: Rupert Cornwell
Bastogi, however, was a very different story. Once again, Ham-
bro's and Ambrosiano were at Sindona's side. On September 10,
after heavy prior buying of Bastogi shares on the Milan market, a
consortium organized by Sindona launched Italy's first ever contested
takeover bid; it offered 2,800 lire per share for a minimum of 33 per
cent of Bastogi, 1,000 lire more than the going market price. Milanese
finance was electrified, and the moment made history. But Sindona
had grievously miscalculated. The authorities, already uneasy at his
methods and motives, had been alarmed by the La Centrale affair.
Now the "lay" financial establishment of Italy made common cause
against him. In the vanguard of the opposition were the Bank of Italy,
and a shadowy, elusive figure called Enrico Cuccia.
Ecclesiastical imagery runs strong in Italy, whether Catholic or
"lay". Cuccia could not be more strongly identified with the latter
camp. But as managing director of Mediobanca, the publicly-owned
investment bank, Cuccia had earned the nickname of the "high
priest" of Italian finance, dispensing blessing or disfavour on every
major mooted project. In the case of Bastogi, his disfavour was icy,
and the big "lay" banks like Banca Commerciale followed Cuccia's
lead.
Hostile buying steadily forced Bastogi's share price up and above
the level offered by Sindona's consortium, and the bid was doomed.
Hambro's were called sternly to heel by the central bank. Within a
year, and further alarmed by a central bank report on Sindona's
Banca Privata Finanziaria, the London merchant bank had severed
every link with the Sicilian.
The failure of the Bastogi bid was a turning point for Sindona. His
interest in Italy dwindled, and increasingly he directed his charm and
plausibility further afield, to the United States. Many of his interests
passed to Roberto Calvi. Sindona will crop up again frequently in this
tale. It is instead now time to examine another formative influence on
the rising Roberto Calvi, that strange brand of freemasonry practised
by Licio Gelli.
Calvi and the
P-2 were made for each other. Exactly when his
liaison began with Licio Gelli and Umberto Ortolani, those two
master illusionists of a nation peerless in the art, is open to question.
Some trace it to a supper at the end of either 1969 or 1970 held in
Rome, at which a co-operation pact was sealed among the four guests
said to have been present: Sindona and his protege Calvi, Gelli and
Ortolani. Sindona himself claims, however, that he did not introduce
Calvi to Gelli until three or four years later. Another version maintains that Ambrosiano's chairman was initiated into the P-2 at a
ceremony in Zurich in August 1975, and yet another that the deed
was done in Italy, in the back seat of a Mercedes, for a fee of 500,000
lire. The membership lists made public later showed only that Calvi
had paid his dues since the start of 1977.
Such obscurity is in any case entirely fitting. Throughout his life
Calvi was convinced that unofficial, hidden centres of power were
those which mattered. The devious was always preferable to the
clear-cut, and later in his career he would strenuously recommend to
friends the reading of Mario Puzo's novel,
The Godfather,
if they
really wished to understand the ways of the world. Calvi's world was
one where clandestine protection and promotion were desirable, if
not essential. Sindona's own history proved the usefulness of such as
Gelli and Ortolani, expert at picking their way along the treacherous
paths of the
sottobosco
, or undergrowth of Italian political life, where
determining alliances and decisions were often made and taken.
Gelli's vehicle was a freemasons' lodge called Propaganda-2, or P-2
for short, a perverse and malign variant of an already mysterious
growth. For non-practitioners, freemasonry everywhere conveys a
vaguely sinister odour, but Italian history has seen to it that there the
movement has a peculiarly underground character. When freemasonry originated in Italy, some 250 years ago, the temporal power
of the Church in Rome perceived it as a potential focal point for
insurrection by nationalists and anti-clericals. As early as 1738 Pope
Clement XII described freemasonry as "Satan's synagogue". The
fears, moreover, were well-grounded; prominent masons like Garibaldi and Carducci played an essential part in the unification of Italy
and the overthrow of the Papal states. The movement attracted
people determined to modernize and liberalize the State, and cut
back the influence of the Church. In the wake of his settlement with
the Vatican in 1929, Mussolini outlawed anti-Catholic lodges. But
after the war Catholic and non-Catholic lodges alike were unmolested, subject of course to the constraints of the 1948 constitution
of Italy, which forbade secret societies. However a secret society was
exactly what Gelli was fostering.
The P-2 originated in the late nineteenth century, so named to
distinguish it from the existing (and by masonic standards) open
Propaganda lodge, based in Turin. From the outset it was an
anomaly, conceived as a special lodge for masons in particularly
delicate or important positions. Accordingly, it dispensed with elaborate initiation ceremonies, and handed exceptional discretionary
powers to its Venerable Master. He could decide who would be
enrolled, and he alone would know the full list of members. Not
surprisingly, when the P-2 scandal washed over Italy in the spring of
1981, many of those whose names featured on the lists of 962
members claimed, with likely justification, that they had no idea of
who else was in the lodge, and indeed that they were unaware of
having joined it at all.
For those very reasons, it was the perfect instrument for Gelli; an
organization nominally affiliated to Italy's Grand Orient rite with its
20,000 members, but in practice ripe to be diverted to any end. For
many decades the P-2 had languished. But under Gelli, who seems to
have become organizing secretary in 1971, and
Maestro Venerabile
in
May 1975, it revived with a vengeance.
Italy, it must be recorded with honesty, albeit bemusement, has
produced few more remarkable individuals this century than Licio
Gelli. He was not even twenty when he took part in Mussolini's
"volunteer" expedition to help Franco win the Spanish Civil War. In
the War, he saw action in the Albanian campaign before fighting the
Allies as they advanced up Italy from 1943 onwards. But having
fought with the Fascists he deftly changed sides to help the Communist partisans rid his native Pistoia province, just west of Florence, of
the grip of Mussolini's short-lived Repubblica Sociale Italiana. In the
process, of course, he saved his own skin.
Thereafter he was to spend much of his life abroad, notably in Latin
America, where he became a personal friend of Juan Peron, the
Argentine dictator. But all the while he was developing his business
interests in Italy, accumulating a considerable fortune. For a while he
was a senior executive of the Permaflex mattress company, before
leaving to help set up a textile company, Gio-Le, which thrived,
thanks in particular to a lucrative import contract from Rumania.
Much more important, however, were the contacts and friends he was
cultivating on both sides of the Atlantic, and his lifelong passion for
the garnering of other people's secrets.
One friend in particular was to become important. He was a
Roman lawyer called Umberto Ortolani, with extensive business
interests in Latin America, including his own bank, Banco Financeiro, in the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo. Ortolani, who was to
become Gelli's most trusted lieutenant in the P-2, was as wise as
anyone in the ways of political Rome, and especially where those
ways crossed those of the Vatican in its midst. His connections there
were excellent, and included the Holy See's new financial adviser,
Michele Sindona. They also extended to Uruguay, where Ortolani
held the quaint, but not entirely empty, title of honorary ambassador
of the Order of the Knights of Malta, not to be underestimated as an
agent serving world-wide Catholicism.
What the ultimate goal of the P-2 was, perhaps only Gelli knew. He
would describe himself as "part Garibaldi, part Cagliostro", the
latter a reference to the Italian adventurer-cum-charlatan who
charmed half Europe in the late eighteenth century, founding at
every stop a Masonic lodge of his own "Egyptian order", said to
possess undreamt of secret powers. Nor do we know whom Gelli was
serving; the CIA, the KGB and the Italian secret services have been
variously identified as his employers. Ultimately, perhaps, he was
only working for himself, cajoling or intimidating others into accepting his nostrums. And many believed him.
At the end the P-2's membership lists read like a state within the
state, full of top officials from Italy's discredited former secret
services, senior army officers, naval admirals and commanders of the
country's several police forces; as well as some leading public sector
industrialists, bankers like Calvi, journalists, publishers and a handful of politicians. Gelli would hold court three days a week in rooms
127, 128 and 129 of the Excelsior Hotel on the Via Veneto. The
hotel's staff were trained to see that visitors' paths did not cross; to
make doubly sure the suite had two separate entrances, so that a
caller arriving would not see a visitor departing.
Aspiring members of P-2 would be told to present themselves for
initiation in a dark suit. Gelli would wear a blue apron trimmed in
red; a masonic triangle would be around his neck, and he would wear
a black cloak. For the ceremony itself, the initiate would take off his
jacket, roll up his trousers to the knees. Then he would kneel for Gelli
to lay the ritual sword on his shoulder.
The slant of the P-2 was broadly anti-Communist and right-wing.
Attempted coups, more or less serious, were more than one between
1960 and 1975 in Italy, and several of those said to have been involved
were to feature in Gelli's motley army. There are numerous pointers
too that the P-2 may have had a hand in right-wing terrorist outrages
dotting recent Italian history, from the so-called "strategy of tension"
which emerged in the late 1960s to the Bologna station bombing of
August 1980. The aim, presumably, to soften up public opinion for
takeover by a more authoritarian regime. But it is not certain that
Gelli himself seriously entertained such designs; the tenuous structure of the P-2 would have militated against them in any case.
Equally possibly, the grandmaster's business was power, whose manipulation became an end in itself. Gelli and Ortolani gave the lodge
Latin American dimensions, and entry to regimes there broadly
sharing their own philosophies. Sindona was to contribute the wealth
of his Italo-American contacts, and Calvi, quite simply, money.