Authors: David Yallop
Calvi was aware that the letter had been sent and was equally aware that it had the approval of his general manager and deputy chairman Roberto Rosone. He discussed with his close friend and fellow P2 member, Flavio Carboni, the threat that Rosone’s attempts to clean up the bank were posing.
The range of Carboni’s friends and contacts was wide. It included such men as the two rulers of Rome’s underworld, Danilo Abbruciati and Ernesto Diotavelli.
On the morning of April 27th, 1982, Rosone left his apartment at a few minutes before 8.00 a.m. Fortunately for Rosone, he happened to live directly above a branch of Ambrosiano which, like all Italian banks, is protected on a 24-hour basis by armed guards. As Rosone emerged into the street a man approached and began firing. Wounded in the legs, Rosone collapsed to the ground. The armed bank guards retaliated. Moments later the assailant was also laid out on the pavement. Dead. His name was Danilo Abbruciati.
The day after the attempted murder of Rosone, April 28th, Flavio Carboni paid the surviving leader of the Rome underworld 530,000 dollars. The job had been botched but Calvi was a man who honoured his debts with other people’s money.
Calvi, who undoubtedly had ordered the assassination of his own deputy chairman, was quickly at the bedside of his wounded
colleague, complete with the statutory bunch of flowers. ‘Madonna! What a world of madmen. They want to frighten us, Roberto, so that they can get their hands on a Group worth 20,000 billion lire.’
In May 1982 the screws began to tighten on Calvi. Consob, the Milan Stock Market Regulatory Agency, finally forced him to list his shares publicly on the Milan Stock Exchange. Such a listing would necessitate an independent audit of the Bank’s books.
Roberto Calvi’s wife Clara has stated under oath that earlier that year in a private audience with Pope John Paul II, Calvi had discussed the problem of the billion dollar debt the Vatican had incurred very largely through the efforts of Calvi, Gelli, Ortolani and Marcinkus. The Pope allegedly made Calvi a promise. ‘If you can extricate the Vatican from this debt you can have full control of rebuilding our finances.’
If this offer was indeed made then His Holiness was obviously seeking more of the same. It was to be business as usual for ever and ever with no Amen.
The Pope and Calvi were only two of many beginning to show real concern about the fortune in dollars that had poured into the Vatican-owned off-shore companies. On May 31st, 1982, the Bank of Italy wrote to Calvi and his board of directors in Milan. They demanded that the board give a full account of foreign lending by the Banco Ambrosiano Group. The board of directors, in a pitifully late show of resistance to Calvi, voted 11 to 3 to comply with the central bank’s demand.
Licio Gelli, who had secretly returned from Argentina to Europe on May 10th, was another making demands on Calvi. Gelli was in the market for more Exocet missiles to help his adopted country in their Falklands war with Great Britain. With the bulk of Argentina’s foreign assets frozen and an official arms embargo operating, Gelli was obliged to turn to the black market arms dealers, who displayed some scepticism about Gelli’s ability to pay what he was offering for the deadly missiles. He was offering four million dollars per missile, with a minimum order of twenty. At six times the official price there was considerable interest in the order, subject to Gelli raising the necessary money. He was well known to the arms dealers as a man who in the past had purchased radar equipment, planes, guns, tanks and the original Exocets on behalf of Argentina. Now he was in need of at least 80 million dollars and the need was urgent. The war in the Falklands hung in the balance.
Thus, Calvi, already juggling the needs of Pope John Paul II, his
Mafia clientele, his irate shareholders, the Consob watchdogs on the Milan Stock Exchange, a recalcitrant board of directors and an incompetent assassin who had succeeded in getting himself killed, yet again found Gelli with his hand out.
Calvi saw only two avenues of survival. Either the Vatican had to help him fill the ever-growing hole that was appearing in the Bank’s assets or Gelli, the Puppet Master, must yet again demonstrate that he still controlled the Italian power structure and save his P2 paymaster from ruin.
Calvi discussed the options with Flavio Carboni, who continued secretly to run tape on their conversations.
It is clear from Calvi’s remarks that he considered the Vatican Bank should fill the huge hole in Banco Ambrosiano if for no other reason than that they were the main beneficiaries of the missing millions and further that they were legally obligated. Calvi observed: ‘The Vatican should honour its commitments by selling part of the wealth controlled by the IOR. It is an enormous patrimony. I estimate it to be 10 billion dollars. To help the Ambrosiano the IOR could start to sell in chunks of a billion at a time.’
If any layman in the world should have known the worth of the Vatican that man should have been Roberto Calvi. He was privy to virtually all of its financial secrets. For over a decade he had been
the
man to whom the Vatican had turned in financial matters. I have previously noted that at the time Albino Luciani became Pope in 1978 the wealth controlled by both sections of APSA and the Vatican Bank was conservatively in the region of three billion dollars. Now in early 1982 the highly conservative Roberto Calvi placed the patrimony of the IOR alone at 10 billion dollars.
It is clear that as 1982 progressed the man who is mistakenly known to the world as ‘God’s Banker’ had a multitude of problems, the majority of them self-created. ‘God’s Thief’ would be a more appropriate title for this man who stole millions on behalf of the Vatican and P2. Since the late 1960s there has been only one man who deserves the sobriquet of ‘God’s Banker’ and that is Archbishop Paul Marcinkus.
In spite of the formidable range of problems confronting him at the time, problems that were only partly known to me, Roberto Calvi was initially calm when I interviewed him by telephone during the evening of June 9th, 1982. The interview had been arranged by an intermediary whom Calvi trusted. It covered a wide range of subjects. Through my interpreter, I began to question Calvi closely about the Banca Cattolica del Veneto transaction. He had been told that I was writing a book
about the Vatican and when I mentioned the bank in Venice he asked what the central subject of the book was. I told him, ‘It’s a book on the life of Pope John Paul I, Papa Luciani.’
Calvi’s manner suddenly underwent a complete change. The calmness and control vanished, to be replaced with a torrent of loud remarks. His voice became excited and very emotional. My interpreter began to translate the stream of words for me.
‘Who has sent you against me? Who has told you to do this thing? Always I pay. Always I pay. How do you know Gelli? What do you want? How much do you want?’
I protested that I had never met Licio Geili. Calvi had barely stopped to listen to me before he began again.
‘Whoever you are, you will not write this book. I can tell you nothing. Do not call me again. Ever.’
Eight days later the body of Roberto Calvi was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in the City of London.
Within days a hole was discovered in Banco Ambrosiano Milan. A 1.3 billion dollar hole.
The central purpose of my investigation has been the death of another man, Albino Luciani. Villot, Calvi, Marcinkus, Sindona, Gelli, Cody: one of these men was at the very heart of the conspiracy that resulted in the murder of Luciani. Before you, the reader, consider your verdict, let us take one final look at these men.
Cardinal Jean Villot, whom Albino Luciani had decided to remove from office, retained his position as Secretary of State upon the election of Karol Wojtyla. He also retained his many other posts including the control of the vital financial section, the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See, APSA. It was APSA that took the role of bride in the Sindona/Vatican marriage. Archbishop Marcinkus has frequently been castigated for bringing Sindona inside Vatican City. He bears no responsibility for that act. The decision was taken by Pope Paul, Monsignor Macchi, Umberto Ortolani and the gentlemen of the APSA, including, naturally, its head, Cardinal Villot. If Luciani had lived, then Villot’s removal from the Secretariat of State would also have meant his automatic removal from the APSA. It is this organization with its immense portfolio of investments, not Marcinkus’s Vatican Bank, that is recognized as a central bank by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Bank of International Settlement in Basle. It is a section that has much to hide, dating back to its deep involvement with Sindona.
At the time of Luciani’s election, Villot had only a short while to
live. He was a sick, tired man who by September 1978 knew he was seriously ill. He died less than six months after Luciani on March 9th, 1979. His death, according to the Vatican, was due to ‘bilateral bronchial pneumonia attacks with complications, circulatory collapse, renal and hepatic insufficiency’. It was known that he had wanted to retire but it was also known he wished to determine his successor, and the man he had in mind was not Benelli. If Benelli discovered the scandal of the APSA section he would undoubtedly alert the new Pope. This, combined with the other changes that Villot knew Luciani was about to make, created a powerful motive. If he was at the heart of any conspiracy to murder Luciani the motive would have been the future direction of the Church. On the testimony of three Vatican witnesses, Villot considered the changes that were about to be implemented ‘a betrayal of Paul’s will. A triumph for the restoration’. He feared that they would take the Church back to pre-Vatican Council II. That his fear was invalid is not relevant. Villot felt it and felt it profoundly. He was also bitterly opposed to Luciani’s plan to modify the Roman Catholic Church’s position on birth control, which would have permitted Catholics throughout the world to use the contraceptive pill. With Paul VI, the creator of
Humanae Vitae,
barely dead, Villot was watching at close range the destruction of an edict he had many times publicly supported. Did Villot conclude that the greater good of the Church would be served with Luciani’s death?
His behaviour after the Pope’s death was either that of a man who was responsible for or deeply involved in that death, or of a man suffering a severe moral crisis. He destroyed evidence. He lied. He imposed a vow of silence on members of the Papal household. He rushed through an embalming before a majority of the cardinals were in Rome, let alone consulted. If Villot is blameless with regard to Luciani’s death, then he most certainly materially assisted whoever was responsible. His actions and statements ensured that someone got away with murder. He himself clearly had a motive; it is also clear he had opportunity. In addition, by dint of his position as Camerlengo, he had virtually total control over immediate subsequent events or, as in the refusal to perform an official autopsy, non-events.
It may well be that the various illegal actions perpetrated by Villot after the discovery of Albino Luciani’s body were motivated by what Villot considered the paramount factor, the greater good of the Catholic Church, if he saw clear evidence of murder, clear proof that Albino Luciani did not die a natural death. Many would contend that his subsequent actions were to protect the Church. Even given that
rationale, I would still contend that morally he would appear to have been in need of help.
Cardinal John Cody, another of the men Luciani had been determined to remove from office, retained his position as Cardinal of Chicago upon the election of Albino Luciani’s successor Karol Wojtyla. In his book,
The Making of The Popes,
Father Andrew Greeley observes:
Cardinal Cody parlayed his past financial contributions to Poland (and some new contributions, according to Chicago sources), the size of the Polish population in Chicago, and his alleged friendship with the Pope, into a successful counter offensive against his enemies. John Paul II, according to what the Cardinal told visitors in early December [1978], offered him a job in Rome, which he declined. The Pope, the Cardinal intimated, indicated the matter was closed.
My own research confirms this. Further, the financial contributions Cody subsequently made to the Vatican and which were secretly funnelled into Poland, were part of a much larger operation that Marcinkus and Calvi undertook on behalf of Pope John Paul II.
Cardinal Cody continued to be a lavish donor of gifts. In October 1979 Pope John Paul II visited the USA. When he arrived at O’Hare airport in Chicago he was met by Cardinal Cody who thrust a small wooden box into the Pope’s hands as ‘a personal gift’. Inside the box were 50,000 dollars. No one would deny the Cardinal the right to give the Pope a gift but, apart from the crassness of the gesture, the question this act raises is, where did the money come from? Was it from diocesan funds? Was it from funds exclusively controlled by Cody? From exactly what source had 50,000 dollars so mysteriously appeared?
Within a year of this incident, the United States Government had mounted an official but secret investigation into Cody. US attorneys began to probe allegations that Cardinal Cody had illegally diverted up to one million dollars of Church funds to his life-long friend Helen Wilson. They also began to investigate a variety of other allegations including that he had commingled personal and Church funds, that he had paid Helen Wilson a secret salary over many years, that he had improperly awarded her pension benefits, that he had bought for her a 90,000 dollar home in Florida. That all of this had been done allegedly with Church funds which are tax exempt, made it a Government issue.
In view of the highly sensitive political implications of such an investigation, the fact that the Government initiated the enquiry is indicative of the very strong prima facie case that existed. The investigation began in September 1980.