The Annals of Unsolved Crime (9 page)

I next went to Rome to speak to Italian investigators.
What was clear from their investigation was that Calvi had co-conspirators in getting to London. Italian authorities had established that he had used three false identities, eight separate private-plane flights around Europe, a speedboat, four different cars, and fourteen temporary residences in getting into Britain. He had gone from Rome to Venice by plane, then to Trieste by car, where someone smuggled him in a speedboat to Yugoslavia. From there, a car had driven him to a mountain retreat in Austria, and then, on June 15, disguised as a Fiat executive, he had flown from a small airport in Austria to London in a leased jet. The facilitator of this incredibly complex escape was Flavio Carboni, a well-connected Sardinian businessman. Calvi had previously used Carboni to fix problems, and when he learned he was about to be arrested for bank fraud, he asked Carboni to arrange his escape from Italy. To this end, he had given him access to about $19 million in numbered accounts. Carboni then employed Silvano Vittor, a cigarette smuggler, to be Calvi’s bodyguard and driver. He also had two strikingly beautiful Austrian sisters, Manuela and Michaela Klienszig, help arrange the logistics.

Once in London, Carboni and the Klienszig sisters stayed at a deluxe hotel, but Calvi and Vittor checked into an inexpensive suite at a second-rate residential hotel, the Chelsea Cloisters. Calvi used the alias “Calvino.” It was the last place any witness saw him on June 18. When policed searched the suite the next day, Vittor was gone. All police found in the suite was Calvi’s personal belongings, including his toilet kit and sleeping pills, neatly packed inside two locked suitcases, as if they were waiting to be picked up by someone. His black attaché case was missing, however. Despite an intense search, Scotland Yard could not find a single hotel employee, taxi driver, or other witness to Calvi’s movements that night (or, for that matter, in the three days he had been in London prior to his death). During these London days, he was “the invisible man,”
as Police Deputy Superintendent White told me. “We don’t even know how he got from his hotel, four and one half miles away, to Blackfriars Bridge. And we do not know how Calvi’s body got onto the end of that rope.”

Although the coroner’s jury did not find direct evidence of murder, Carlo Calvi, Calvi’s only son, was convinced, as he told me, “my father did not commit suicide.” He was also determined to prove it to the insurer Unione Italiana, which could avoid a $10-million payment if the death was in fact by suicide. In 1989, he hired Kroll Associates, one of the world’s leading private-detective agencies, to reinvestigate the case. Kroll, with Carlo Calvi’s permission, gave me access to their meticulous reconstruction of the crime. After locating, authenticating, and reassembling the original scaffolding that Calvi had been hanged from, Kroll’s forensic experts conducted a reenactment in which a movie stuntman was retained as a standin for Calvi. He was roughly the same size and weight, and he walked all the possible routes along the scaffolding poles that Calvi would have to walk if he had indeed tied the rope and hanged himself. The standin wore exact copies of the handmade loafers Calvi wore that night. These shoes were then put in water for the same time that Calvi’s shoes had been submerged, and then microscopically examined by a former London police laboratory chemist. On every route, the chemist found that the soles of the standin’s shoes had picked up yellow paint smears that matched those on the scaffolding poles. Given Calvi’s weight, and the pressure of the shoe on the narrow pole, he concluded that such telltale traces were unavoidable. Yet, when he microscopically examined the soles of the shoes Calvi had actually worn, he found no traces of yellow paint on the soles. Since there was no way Calvi could have hanged himself except by walking on the scaffolding, this investigation concluded that “Someone else had to have tied him to the scaffolding and killed him.”

The reconstruction convinced me that this was indeed a murder, but the final proof came in December 1998, when a Rome court authorized the exhumation of Calvi’s corpse, which had been buried for sixteen years. His bones and other remains were reexamined by a panel of forensic experts, who concluded that the injuries to his neck were inconsistent with self-hanging, and that therefore he had most likely been murdered. If so, it was a murder disguised to look like a suicide.

But who killed Calvi?

II.

It was not difficult to find a motive for silencing Calvi. For those who ruled the world of money, Calvi’s death in June 1982 closed a Pandora’s box of troubles. Not only was $1.2 billion of Calvi’s bank’s money missing, but through a subsidiary in Luxembourg, Calvi had been acting for the sovereign state of the Vatican. His departure from Italy on June 11, 1982, had caused a panic. It reached Italy’s top monetary authorities while they were aboard a military jet en route to Brussels to face the grim prospect of a devaluation of the lira—the fifth in three years. Whatever might happen to the lira in Brussels that day, the concern of these men was now focused on the missing banker. The collapse of Calvi’s bank, the second-largest private bank in Italy, was now practically unavoidable, and this, in turn, could seriously undermine the credibility of the entire Italian banking system. One of the officials on the plane, Mario Sarcinelli, the director general of the Treasury Ministry, also had a special interest in the Calvi case. It had almost destroyed his career three years earlier, when, as the deputy director of the Bank of Italy, he had begun an investigation into the Banco Ambrosiano. Before he could complete it, police arrived at the palatial headquarters of the Bank of Italy in Rome and arrested him
on what he called “trumped up charges.” He was accused of withholding information and confined to a dungeon in the Regina Coeli prison in Rome. Finally, after ten days, he was freed on condition that he leave the Bank of Italy, and this ended Sarcinelli’s investigation.

Two other specially chartered jets took to the air on June 11. The first of these planes had been chartered in Luxembourg to go to Milan. It carried secret documents that up to this time had been seen only by Calvi and his top deputy. They were hand-delivered to Michel Leemans, Calvi’s trusted deputy at the investment banking unit of Banco Ambrosiano, who subsequently told me that the documents identified the true owner of a group of anonymous companies that held the mystery block of Banco Ambrosiano stock that had stymied Sarcinelli’s investigators four years earlier.

The other chartered plane was an Alitalia Boeing 727 carrying Pope John Paul II to Geneva, Switzerland. Accompanying the pope on this flight was Archbishop Paul Casimir Marcinkus, the president of the Vatican’s bank, which was called the Istituto per le Opere di Religione (Institute for Religious Works). For the past week, Calvi’s deputies at the Banco Ambrosiano had been desperately trying to reach Marcinkus because Calvi had made him a director of the Banco Ambrosiano subsidiary in the Bahamas that had served as a staging post for the international operations of the Banco Ambrosiano. The son of an immigrant window-washer, Marcinkus had come to the Vatican in 1950 as a twenty-eight-year-old student priest and had never left. He quickly rose through the ranks of the bureaucracy to become the right hand of first Pope Paul and then Pope John Paul II. Three months before Calvi’s disappearance, the pope had stood by Marcinkus’ side at a meeting of the fifteen Cardinals on the Commission for Vatican Finances. When questions were raised about the Vatican’s faltering income and rising deficits, the pope had held his hand up to Marcinkus and replied
“If you have any problems—ask [him], he’ll know how to solve them.” The cardinals also had no doubts about Marcinkus’ loyalty to the pope: he had, as one cardinal remarked, “the fidelity of a Saint Bernard.”

When Marcinkus returned with the pope from Geneva, according to Leemans, he immediately asked for a meeting with Leemans, who was now in charge of the faltering Banco Ambrosiano. Leemans said that he then showed Marcinkus two documents that he had been sent from Luxembourg on the chartered jet. Marcinkus, according to Leemans, acknowledged that they were “letters of patronage,” signed by his deputy and initialed by him. They clearly identified the Vatican Bank as the owner of the key anonymous companies through which the Vatican had incurred huge debts. Leemans explained that the Banco Ambrosiano Group would be forced into bankruptcy in a matter of hours unless these debts were repaid by the Vatican.

Leemans said that the archbishop replied that the Vatican recognized no debt to the Banco Ambrosiano. He dismissed the letters of patronage as legally meaningless because he held a trump card—a “counter-letter,” signed by Calvi, which released the Vatican from any responsibility proceeding from his initialing of the “letters of patronage.” As far as he was concerned, initialing these letters was merely a personal mistake on his part. “I did it purely as an act of friendship to Calvi,” he told Leemans. “I realize that I will have to pay personally for that error of judgment.”

Leemans could not accept this explanation at face value. He did not believe that these letters of patronage, which involved the Vatican in a debt exceeding one billion dollars, had been simply dashed out by Marcinkus as a token of friendship. Moreover, before these letters had been issued, Marcinkus had sent his deputy to Lugano, Switzerland, to see secret records held in a bank vault—a vault to which the Vatican held one key
and the Banco Ambrosiano the other. These records confirmed that the Vatican’s bank was listed as the owner of record of the companies in question. They also showed that these companies held as their main asset over 10 percent of the shares of the Banco Ambrosiano. If that were true, Leemans reasoned, the archbishop had an interest in issuing the letters that went beyond personal friendship with Calvi.

But the Vatican was a sovereign state that did not have to answer to any authority other than the pope. It could only be sued in a court in the Vatican with the permission of the pope. If Marcinkus stood his ground and insisted that the letters, and whatever other evidence turned up, proceeded from his personal errors and naivety, the Vatican could not be held legally responsible for the huge debt. Seeing that there was no practical way around the stonewall erected by Marcinkus, Leemans suggested that they work together to prevent the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano with all the attendant public revelations. Specifically, he proposed raising a loan on the world market for the Vatican bank that would be used to save the Banco Ambrosiano.

The archbishop, calculating that the interest for such a loan would amount to more than a hundred million dollars per year, according to Leemans, said, “We just don’t have that kind of money.”

As soon as he left the gates of the Vatican, Leemans placed a telephone call to Milan that interrupted the tense Board of Directors meeting of the Banco Ambrosiano. “Call in Grandmother,” Leemans said, which was the prearranged signal to ask the Bank of Italy to take over the bank. It was the last meeting that the Board of Directors ever held. Trading in its shares was immediately suspended. The eight-six-year-old bank, founded by priests in Milan, had expired.

While the stunned employees of the bank milled around, a grey-haired woman plummeted from the executive office on
the top floor to her death on the pavement below. Amidst the commotion, the acting president interrupted a press briefing to announce, “Calvi’s secretary just killed herself.” Graziela Corrocher not only had been Calvi’s secretary since he had become head of the bank; she was the only other person at the bank who knew his full calendar of appointments and meetings. She left behind a note scrawled in red that cursed Calvi.

Later that evening at an office on the Avenue des Citronniers in Monte Carlo, the employee on duty received a phone call ordering him to immediately close down what had been the European headquarters of Banco Ambrosiano Overseas in the Bahamas. His eleven years of night duty in this lonely room had consisted mainly of typing cryptic telephone messages from Milan into a telex machine, which had been specially constructed so that, unlike standard machines, it did not produce any copy of its messages on paper. There was also no paper trail of the work done here which, unbeknownst to him or the other employee of this branch office, had resulted in transferring more than $1.2 billion borrowed by the Banco Ambrosiano and its subsidiaries from banks around the world to anonymous corporations in Panama and Liechtenstein.

III.

By this time, the corpse of Calvi had been cut down from under Blackfriars Bridge in London, and the Italian counsel in London had cabled Rome, “They have our banker.” This ended the search for Calvi, but there was a greater mystery: the whereabouts of the money.

The trail of the money, which began at the Banco Ambrosiano in Milan and then passed through its subsidiary in Monte Carlo, led to Panama. The money had been transferred there, and at other offshore banking centers, to anonymous
corporations. Although records indicated that they were owned by the Vatican, the Vatican denied that it controlled their financial activities. Indeed, the precise relationship between these shadowy companies and the Vatican was known by no more than three persons at the Banco Ambrosiano. They were Carlo Canesi, who had made the original arrangements with the Vatican in the late 1960s; Calvi, who was his assistant and successor; and possibly Graziela Corrocher, the personal secretary for both men. And all three of them were now dead. Nor could any documents be found, except for the two ambiguous “letters of patronage” in the bank’s records, which were disputed by the Vatican. The problem was that Calvi had left Italy with a black attaché case full of key documents, but it had not been recovered in London.

If the answer to the mystery could not be found in Milan or London, it might be found in the Vatican, a technically sovereign state occupying some 108 acres in the heart of Rome. In 1983, through banking contacts I had made while writing an unrelated article for the
Institutional Investor
, I arranged an interview with the one person likely to know about the Calvi affair, Archbishop Marcinkus. Although it had been unprecedented for an archbishop of the Vatican Curia to sit on the board of directors of a private bank, Marcinkus had traveled to the Bahamas for bank meetings. He explained at our first meeting that he had done so to educate himself in banking because “extraordinary times called for extraordinary measures.” He was a giant of a man, standing six feet four inches tall, with huge hands that toyed with objects as he spoke. Since he was an American, there was no need for a translator. Early in the interview, he pointed out that despite its priceless works of art, and its valuable property in Italy in the form of churches, the Vatican had a financial problem that dated back over two centuries.