Authors: Rupert Cornwell
By the end the lodge had been identified as a clearing house for
almost every scandal to have shaken Italy in the last fifteen years. In
that sense, at least, Gelli was the ideal destabilizer, beloved of secret
services everywhere. But his greatest skill was the accumulation of
information. As an excellent biographer has written: "It certainly
hasn't been Gelli who invented intrigue and conspiracy (in Italian
public life). His contribution to Italy's progressive degradation is
different. Gelli increased the level of national corruption. He perfected and made widespread the use of the photocopy and the spool
of tape. The exploitation of secret documents and tape recordings of
private conversations have now become almost daily weapons in the
political struggle.
"*
Possession of such material was the cement of his power over his
acolytes, and his ability to blackmail them if necessary. In this skill
Gelli was undeniably brilliant
—
even if the lingering mediocrity of the
man has made many believe (not least for their self-respect) that the
truly guiding hand behind the P-2 must have belonged to another. For
Gelli was marketing illusions. The main appeal to the bulk of the
members of his lodge was the apparent short cut it offered to powers,
riches and the best jobs; and for such an advantage, surrender of
secret information to the grandmaster must have seemed a reasonable price to pay.
In that sense, the P-2 was simply an extreme manifestation of the
basic instinct of every Italian. In a land where the state is rarely
powerful, neutral or efficient, the safest means of personal advancement are recommendation and knowing the right people. The other
side of this coin is gullibility, a quality which Calvi also possessed. For
so ardent a believer in the merits of the back door, the P-2 was a
perfect means of discreet access to the inner circuits of power.
Then there was Ortolani, and his Vatican connections. For the
blood of the Milanese Curia ran in the veins of Ambrosiano, and its
backing was something he could not afford to lose. Later Ortolani
and his family seem to have grown into some of the few personal
friends that Calvi could claim; but in professional terms Ortolani was
to constitute the perfect bridge between the two historically rival
bodies with whom Calvi allied himself, the Church and freemasonry.
Thus the way ahead looked clear and Calvi the pupil was over the
years between 1969 and 1974 to develop gradually into Sindona's peer
and then his natural successor. At the beginning of 1971, Calvi earned
*Gianfranco Piazzesi: Gelli, Garzanti, 1983.
the key promotion to the rank of
direttore generate,
or general
manager.
His
power in his bank would soon be complete.
Carlo
Canesi had already decided to step down as chairman at the
end
of
1971. For a while, disturbed at the involvement of Calvi with Sindona's increasingly controversial ventures, Canesi is said to have
toyed with the idea of bringing in an outsider as Ambrosiano's new
chairman. But Calvi had by now made himself indispensable.
In the end a compromise emerged. Ruggiero Mozzana, already 69,
would succeed Canesi, while Calvi would take on the additional
duties of
amministratore delegato,
or managing director. Although he
was not to move into the chairman's office until 1975, the reins of
power were in effect already his.
Upon his appointment as general manager, Calvi had wasted no
time in putting his plans into effect. The Americas beckoned, and like
Christopher Columbus in 1492, his first landfall in the new world was
the Bahamas. The explorer had come ashore at the island of Salvador. Calvi's goal, however, was Nassau, by then one
of
the hottest
offshore centres in international banking
—
and, equally important,
governed by a code of banking secrecy to rival that of Switzerland.
A
subsidiary in the Bahamas, therefore, would not only fit in with
Calvi's preferred image as an internationally-minded banker, determined to broaden Ambrosiano it would also later permit
him
to
conduct his most sensitive business safe from the prying
eyes of
the
Italian monetary authorities.
Calvi, at the head of a small group of foreign department executives
from
Ambrosiano, arrived for the first time in
Nassau from the
chilly Milanese winter in January 1971
.
Sindona later claimed the idea
was his, but
scores
of
international banks, most of them
American,
were already
established there; if only, in many cases,
with a shiny
nameplate
and a couple of secretaries minding the telex
machine. The
offshore, or Eurodollar,
market was booming and
Nassau, with its
agreeable climate,
tempting banking legislation and
common time
zone with New York, was an
ideal centre for booking
such transactions.
The face of the city's old
colonial
centre was changing. Queen
Victoria's statue
still guarded
Parliament Square, but along Bay
Street the vibrant calypso clubs were giving way to glossy, hushed
new bank premises. The Caribbean evidently suited Calvi, but it
made little impact on his polite but distant demeanour. "He was
terrible formal and austere, just not what you imagine an Italian to be
like," someone who met him personally on that first visit would
remember. The judgement was apt; years before in Milan some who
knew the rising young banker had dubbed Calvi the "Prussian" for
his remote efficiency.
Within two months Ambrosiano's beachhead in the new world, the
Cisalpine bank of Nassau, was duly registered, and opened for
business the following May. As its manager, Calvi chose a Swiss-born
expatriate newly arrived from New York called Pierre Siegenthaler.
In his early 30s, Siegenthaler was an Olympic-class yachtsman with
some banking experience in the US, and some accounts have it that
he was recommended to Calvi by Sindona. Siegenthaler had a taste
for Gucci shoes and gold watches (but a habit in the early days of
bicycling to work in a pair of jeans). In fact, though, he was to be the
discreet executor of many of Calvi's most private schemes in the
decade ahead.
The new bank was capitalized at $2.5 million, and initially operated
from Siegenthaler's home. But that did not prevent it attracting over
$200 million of deposits, largely from elsewhere within the Ambrosiano group, in a very short time. Calvi in the meantime was making
other arrangements for a long stay. Early on he rented a villa for his
regular winter visits to the Bahamas, but before long he had secured a
residence at the exclusive Lyford Cay complex on the western tip of
New Providence island, from which unauthorized visitors were barred by a private police force.
A founding shareholder of the Cisalpine Overseas bank was the
IOR, the Vatican bank. And one of the early visitors to the rented
villa, joking with Calvi and his wife and discussing water-skiing with
his two teenage children was the IOR's new chairman and, since
August 5 1971, a director of Ambrosiano's subsidiary in Nassau—
Archbishop Paul Marcinkus.
The initial and
enduring impact of Marcinkus is physical. To talk
to, he can be expansive or peremptory, charming—but occasionally
brutal. But what lingers in the mind is the sheer bulk of the man, six
foot three in his socks and built like the natural athlete he is. The
impression is curiously heightened by the slight stoop he has now
acquired—to which the weight of the Banco Ambrosiano scandal has
undoubtedly contributed. In the days when he guarded Popes on
their foreign travels, he would seem affable, wisecracking but vaguely
menacing; a streetwise, sharp-eyed American who by accident had
found himself in the closeted, insulated world of the Vatican. His
recreations today, tennis and above all golf, are those of the self-
made American business executive. His swing—at least in the days
before notoriety prevented him getting out on to the course for a
round—had something of the style of the late Tony Lema, "Champagne Tony", who won the British Open in 1962, and whom Marcinkus would remember with affection.
Yet this incongruous man of the Church, in some ways the most
important figure in this story after Calvi himself, won the confidence
of two Popes, Paul VI and the Polish-born John Paul II.
His origins were far more modest than those of Calvi. Paul Casimir
Marcinkus was born on January 15 1922 in the tough Chicago suburb
of Cicero, one of five children of Mykolas Marcinkus, an emigrant
from Lithuania who found work as a window-cleaner. His early years
were those of prohibition and gang wars. A1 Capone was one of the
city's more noted products of that era.
But at the Roman Catholic grammar school of St Anthony's,
Marcinkus was a brighter-than-average pupil, and, of course, sports-
mad. It was a complete surprise to his classmates when he decided to
study for the priesthood. In 1947 he was ordained, and three years
later he left for Rome to study canon law at the city's Gregorian
University. His intention was to return to Chicago, but in his own
words, "I just got trapped."* A temporary summer stint at the
Vatican's secretariat of State so impressed his superiors that he was
taken on permanently.
His drive, and ability to get things done soon won him an important
admirer, Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, a high Curia official
who would be appointed Cardinal Archbishop of Milan in 1954. Nine
years later Montini returned to Rome, as Pope Paul VI. Marcinkus,
in the meantime, was to serve as a Vatican diplomat in Bolivia and
Canada, but it was his managerial and administrative prowess which
really attracted attention. He also had the talent of being the right
man in the right place. Paul VI was the first Pope to travel the world,
but his first trip, to Jerusalem in 1964, proved so badly organized that
in future he enlisted the services of Marcinkus—first as St Peter's own
American-style advance man, and then as unofficial bodyguard and
aide. In 1965 Marcinkus acted as interpreter when Pope Paul met
President Lyndon Johnson in New York. In the Philippines in 1970 he
helped save the Pope from attack by a knife-wielding Bolivian artist.