Part 6 of 6: In God's Name....By Benefit of Murder- Business as Usual

In Gods Name
By David Yallop
By Benefit of Murder 

– Business as Usual 

When voting in the Conclave to select a successor to Albino Luciani began on Sunday, October 15th, 1978, the Holy Ghost was noticeably absent. A long, bitter struggle, principally between the supporters of Siri and Benelli, was the predominant theme of the first day’s voting. Whoever had been responsible for the murder of Luciani very nearly found themselves faced with the task of ensuring that a second Pope should suddenly die. During the course of eight ballots over two days, Cardinal Giovanni Benelli came within a handful of votes of winning. If Benelli had been elected there is no doubt whatsoever that many of the courses of action Luciani had determined upon would have been carried out. Cody would have been removed. Villot would have been replaced. Marcinkus, de Strobel and Mennini would have been thrown out of the Vatican Bank. 

But Benelli fell nine votes short and the eventual winner, a compromise candidate, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, bears little resemblance to Albino Luciani. Wojtyla has given countless demonstrations that all he has in common with his predecessor is the Papal name John Paul. 

Despite the efforts of Benelli, Felici and others, the Papacy of John Paul II has been a case of business as usual. The business has benefited immeasurably not only from the murder of Albino Luciani, but also from the murders that have followed that strange, lonely death in the Vatican in September 1978. 

Upon his election the current Pope learned of the changes that Luciani had proposed making. He was advised of the various consultations that his predecessor had had on a variety of problems. The fiscal information collected by Benelli, Felici, members of APSA and others on behalf of Luciani was made available to Wojtyla. He was shown the evidence that had led Luciani to conclude that Cardinal Cody of Chicago should be replaced. He was shown the evidence that indicated that Freemasonry had infiltrated the Vatican. He was advised of Luciani’s dialogue with the US State Department and the planned meeting with the Congressional Committee on Population and Birth Control. Villot also made the new Pope fully conversant with Albino Luciani’s attitude on birth control. In short Pope John Paul II was in the unique position to bring all Luciani’s plans to fruition. Not one of Luciani’s proposed changes became a reality. Whoever had murdered the Pope had not murdered in vain. 

Villot was again appointed Secretary of State. Cody remained in control of Chicago. Marcinkus, aided by Mennini, de Strobel and Monsignor de Bonis continued to control the Vatican Bank and continued to ensure that the criminal activities with Banco Ambrosiano flourished. Calvi and his P2 masters Gelli and Ortolani were free to continue their massive thefts and frauds under the protection of the Vatican Bank. Sindona was able, at least in the short term, to maintain his freedom in New York. Baggio did not go to Venice. The corrupt Poletti remained Cardinal Vicar of Rome. 

Many millions of words have been written since the election of Karol Wojtyla in attempts to analyze and understand what manner of man he is. He is the kind of man who could allow men like Villot, Cody, Marcinkus, Mennini, de Strobel, de Bonis and Poletti to remain in office. There can be no defence on the grounds of ignorance. Marcinkus is directly answerable to the Pope and for the Pope to be unaware of the degree of guilt that clings to Marcinkus defies belief. With regard to Cody, His Holiness was made aware of the full facts in October 1978 by Cardinals Benelli and Baggio. Wojtyla did nothing. We have a Pope who publicly berates Nicaraguan priests for their involvement in politics and simultaneously gives his blessing for large quantities of dollars to be made available, secretly and illegally, to Solidarity in Poland. It is the Papacy of double standards: one set for the Pope and another for the rest of mankind. The Papacy of John Paul II has been a triumph for the wheeler dealers, for the corrupt, for the international thieves like Calvi, Gelli and Sindona, while His Holiness has maintained a very highly-publicized image not unlike some perpetual rock and roll tour. The men behind the tarmac-kissing star are ensuring that it is business as usual and takings at the box office over the past five years have boomed. It is to be regretted that the severely moralizing speeches of His Holiness cannot presumably be heard backstage. 

As I have recorded earlier, after the election of Luciani Bishop Paul Marcinkus cautioned his colleagues in the Vatican Bank and Roberto Calvi in Buenos Aires: ‘Remember that this Pope has different ideas from the previous one and that many things will be changing here.’ 

With the election of Wojtyla it was straight back to the values of Paul VI, with interest. With regard to the infiltration of the Vatican by Freemasons, for example, the Vatican, though not the current Pope, has not only taken on board a variety of Masons from a variety of Lodges but it has also acquired its own in-house version. Its name is Opus Dei – God’s Work. 

On July 25th, Albino Luciani had written on Opus Dei in Il Gazzettino, the Venetian newspaper. His remarks were confined to a short history of the movement and some of the organization’s aspirations towards lay spirituality. With regard to the more controversial aspects of Opus Dei either Luciani was ignorant of them, which is unlikely, or was yet again displaying his own quiet discretion. 

With the election of Karol Wojtyla quiet discretion has become a rare commodity. His espousal of Opus Dei is well documented. In view of the fact that this Catholic sect shares many views and values with the corrupt P2 and that Opus Dei is now a force to be reckoned with inside Vatican City, a few basic details should be recorded. 

Opus Dei is a Roman Catholic organization of international dimensions. Though its actual membership is relatively small (estimates vary between 60,000 and 80,000), its influence is vast. It is a secret society, something which is strictly forbidden by the Church. Opus Dei denies that it is a secret organization but refuses to make its membership list available. It was founded by a Spanish priest, Monsignor Josemaria Escriva, in 1928. It is to the extreme right wing of the Catholic Church, a political fact that has ensured that the organization has attracted enemies as well as members. Its members are composed of a small percentage of priests, about 5 per cent, and lay persons of either sex. Though people from many walks of life can be found among its members, it seeks to attract those from the upper reaches of the professional classes, including students and graduates who are aspiring to executive status. Dr John Roche, an Oxford University lecturer and former member of Opus Dei, describes it as ‘sinister, secretive and Orwellian’. It may be that its members’ preoccupation with self-mortification is the cause for much of the news media hostility that has been directed towards the sect. Certainly the idea of flogging yourself on your bare back and wearing strips of metal with inward-pointing prongs around the thigh for the greater glory of God might prove difficult for the majority of people in the latter part of the twentieth century to accept. No one, however, should doubt the total sincerity of the Opus Dei membership. They are equally devoted to a task of wider significance: the takeover of the Roman Catholic Church. That should be a cause of the greatest concern not only to Roman Catholics but to everybody. Undoubtedly there are aspects to admire within this secret society. Albino Luciani eloquently praised some of the basic spiritual concepts. He was discreetly silent on the issues of self-mortification and the far more potent Fascist political philosophy. Under Pope John Paul II Opus Dei has flourished. If the present Pope is not a member of Opus Dei, he is to its adherents everything they could wish a Pope to be. One of his first acts after his election was to go to the tomb of the founder of Opus Dei and pray. Subsequently he has granted the sect the status of a personal prelature, a significant step on the journey to Cardinal Cody land, where one becomes answerable only to Rome and God. 

This organization has, according to its own claims, members working in over 600 newspapers, reviews and scientific publications, scattered around the world. It has members in over fifty radio and television stations. In the 1960s three of its members were in the Spanish dictator Franco’s Cabinet, creating Spain’s ‘economic miracle’. The head of the huge Rumasa conglomerate in Spain, José Mateos, is a member of Opus Dei; he is also currently on the run after building a network of corruption similar to that of the Calvi empire, as recently revealed. * Opus Dei is massively wealthy. Until recently, when it changed hands, anyone walking into an Augustus Barnett wine store in England was putting money into Opus Dei. 

José Mateos, known as Spain’s richest man, funnelled millions into Opus Dei. A considerable amount of this money came from illegal deals with Calvi, perpetrated in both Spain and Argentina. P2 paymaster and Opus Dei paymaster: could this be what the Church means when it talks of God moving in mysterious ways? 

Since the death of Albino Luciani and his succession by Karol Wojtyla, the Italian Solution that was applied to the problem of an honest Pope has been frequently applied to the problems that have confronted Marcinkus, Sindona, Calvi and Gelli. The litany of murder and mayhem perpetrated to mask plundering on an unimaginable scale makes grim reading. It also serves as powerful evidence after the deed to confirm that Albino Luciani was murdered. 

Roberto Calvi, Licio Gelli and Umberto Ortolani did not return to Italy while Luciani reigned as Pope. Calvi eventually returned in late October after the election of Karol Wojtyla. Gelli and Ortolani continued to monitor events from Uruguay. Was the fact that the three men stayed in a variety of South American cities just mere coincidence? Did their business discussions really need to continue from August to October? Was it really necessary for either Gelli or Ortolani to insist on staying close to Calvi throughout September 1978? Did it really take all that time to meet important officials to discuss opening new branches of Banco Ambrosiano? 

The breathing space gained for the P2 paymaster by Luciani’s death looked like being of a temporary nature after Calvi’s meeting with Bank of Italy Inspector Giulio Padalino on October 30th in Milan. Again Calvi, with his eyes focused firmly upon his shoes, declined to give straight answers to a variety of questions. On November 17th, the Bank of Italy inspection of Banco Ambrosiano was completed. 

Despite the fraudulent letter from Marcinkus and his Vatican Bank colleagues concerning the ownership of Suprafin, despite the lies and evasions of Roberto Calvi, despite the help of his protector Licio Gelli, the central bank inspectors concluded in a very lengthy report that a great deal was rotten in the state of Calvi’s empire. 

From South America and using his own special code name, Gelli telephoned Calvi at his private residence. For Calvi, wallowing ever deeper in a mire of Mafia/Vatican/P2 dealings, the news was bad. 

Within days of Inspector Giulio Padalino handing in his report to the Head of Vigilance of the Bank of Italy, Mario Sarcinelli, a copy of the full report was in Gelli’s hands in Buenos Aires. Not from Sarcinelli or Padalino but by courtesy of the P2 network. Gelli advised Calvi that the report was about to be sent from the Bank of Italy to the Milan magistrates and specifically to the man Gelli had predicted in September, Judge Emilio Alessandrini. 

Again Calvi was teetering on the edge of exposure and total ruin. Emilio Alessandrini could not be bought. Highly talented and courageous, he represented for Calvi, Marcinkus, Gelli and also Sindona a very serious threat. If he pursued this investigation with his customary vigour then Calvi was certainly finished, Marcinkus would be exposed, Gelli would have lost the crock of gold that the continuing thefts from Ambrosiano represented and Sindona would be confronted with the most powerful argument yet for his immediate extradition from the United States. 

By early January 1979 the financial circles of Milan were yet again preoccupied with rumours about The Knight, Roberto Calvi. Judge Emilio Alessandrini, having carefully studied a summary of the 500-page report compiled by the Bank of Italy, ordered Lt-Colonel Cresta, the commander of the Milan tax police, to send his men into the ‘priests’ bank’. The brief was to check point by point the many criminal irregularities that were detailed in the report. No one outside official circles had access to the report, no one, that is, apart from Calvi and Gelli. 

On January 21st L’Espresso commented on the rumours that were flying around the city, including the alarming news that Calvi and his entire board of directors were about to be arrested and that Calvi’s passport was about to be withdrawn. Something had to be done quickly before the general public created a run on Banco Ambrosiano. 

On the morning of January 29th Alessandrini kissed his wife goodbye, then drove his young son to school. Having dropped the boy he began to drive to his office. A few seconds before 8.30 a.m. he stopped at the traffic lights on via Muratori. He was still gazing at the red light when five men approached his car and began firing bullets into his body. 

Later in the day a group of left-wing terrorists called Prima Linea claimed responsibility for the murder. The group also left a leaflet about the murder in a telephone booth in Milan Central Station. Neither the phone call nor the leaflet gave any clear reason for the murder. 

Why would an extreme left-wing group cold-bloodedly murder a judge who was nationally known for his investigations into right-wing terrorism? Emilio Alessandrini was one of the leading investigators into the Piazza Fontana bombing, which was acknowledged to be a right-wing atrocity. Why would Prima Linea murder a man who was clearly attempting, through legal and proper channels, what they, in theory, would most applaud – to bring right-wing criminal elements to task for their acts? 

Groups such as Prima Linea and the Red Brigades do not merely kill and maim to political and ideological order. They are guns for hire. The links, for example, between the Red Brigades and the Naples Camorra (local Mafia) are well documented. 

At the time of writing, five men who have already confessed to the murder of Alessandrini are standing trial. Their evidence concerning the actual murder is full of detail, but when it comes to the motive their evidence raises more questions than it answers. 

Marco Donat Cattin, the second man who opened fire on the trapped, unarmed and helpless judge, observed: ‘We waited for the newspapers to come out with reports of the attack and we found in the magistrate’s obituaries the motives to justify the attack.’ Three days after the murder on the afternoon of February 1st, Roberto Calvi was enjoying a drink at a Milan cocktail party. The conversation inevitably turned to the recent outrage. Calvi promptly attempted to elicit sympathy, not for Signora Alessandrini and her fatherless children, but for himself: ‘It really is such a shame. Only the day before this happened Alessandrini had told me that he was taking no further action and that he was going to have the case filed.’ 

The murder of Luciani had given Marcinkus, Calvi, Sindona and their P2 friends a momentary breathing space. Now the murder of Emilio Alessandrini bought them further time. The investigation initiated by Judge Alessandrini continued, but at a snail’s pace. 

In the Bank of Italy, Mario Sarcinelli was acutely aware of the lack of momentum. Sarcinelli and the Governor of the Bank, Paolo Baffi, were determined that the long, complex investigation which had been carried out during the previous year would not be a wasted exercise. 

In February 1979 Mario Sarcinelli summoned Calvi to the Bank of Italy. Calvi was questioned closely about Suprafin, about the Ambrosiano relationship with the IOR, about the Nassau branch and about who precisely owned Banco Ambrosiano. With Alessandrini dead Calvi was a new man, or rather his old self. The eyes were again ice cold. Licio Gelli’s protection had inspired an even greater degree of arrogance than normal. He flatly refused to answer Sarcinelli’s questions, but the encounter left Calvi in no doubt that the Bank of Italy investigation had not been inhibited by the latest murder. 

Again he discussed his problems with Gelli, who reassured him the matter would be dealt with. Before that problem was resolved there was, however, another matter causing the Masons of P2 considerable concern. This was the problem posed by the lawyer journalist Mino Pecorelli. Among Pecorelli’s many activities was that of editor of an unusual weekly emanating from the agency referred to earlier, OP. 

OP has been variously described as ‘muck-raking’ and ‘scandalistic’. It was both. It was also accurate. Throughout the 1970s it acquired and subsequently printed an astonishing number of exposés and allegations on Italian corruption. It became required reading for anyone who was interested in knowing exactly who was robbing whom. Despite the stringent laws on libel in Italy it led a charmed life. Pecorelli clearly had access to the most highly sensitive information. Italian journalists frequently went into print with OP-inspired articles. Privately they tried to ascertain who was behind this news agency which was clearly above the law, but OP remained a mysterious organism. Pecorelli sister Rosita alleged during a television interview that the news agency OP was financed by Prime Minister Andreotti. 

In the early 1970s the name of Michele Sindona was frequently linked with OP. Pecorelli obviously had sources working within the Italian Secret Service, but his major contacts were inside an organization more powerful and indeed more secret than such official Government agencies. Mino Pecorelli was a member of P2 and it was from this illegal Masonic Lodge that he derived much of the information that set the Italian news media buzzing. At one Lodge meeting Licio Gelli invited members to contribute documents and information which would be passed on to OP. The prime function of OP during this period was therefore to further Gelli’s ambitions and the aims of P2. 

In mid-1978, however, Pecorelli decided upon a little private enterprise. He obtained information about one of the biggest thefts in Italian financial history. The mastermind behind the theft was Licio Gelli. In the early 1970s the scheme was responsible for robbing Italy of 2.5 billion dollars in oil tax revenue. In Italy, the same petroleum product is used to heat property as to drive diesel trucks. The oil for heating is dyed to distinguish it from that used for vehicles and is taxed at a rate fifty times lower than the diesel fuel. It was a situation ready-made for a criminal like Gelli. Under his guidance oil magnate Bruno Musselli, a P2 member, doctored the dyes. Head of the Finance Police, General Raffaele Giudice, a P2 member, falsified the paperwork to ensure that all the fuel was taxed at the lower rate. The fuel was then sold to petrol outlets which paid the conspirators at the higher rate. The profits were then transferred, thanks to P2 member Michele Sindona, through the Vatican Bank to a series of secret accounts at Sindona’s Swiss bank, Finabank. Licio Gelli became a familiar sight walking through the Saint Anna gate with large suitcases containing billions of stolen lire. 

General Giudice was appointed head of the Finance Police by Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, a close friend of Licio Gelli. This particular appointment had been made after Cardinal Poletti, Cardinal Vicar of Rome, had written to the Prime Minister strongly recommending Giudice for the post. Poletti, it will be recalled, was one of the men Albino Luciani had planned to remove from Rome. The Vatican link with this scandal was unknown to Pecorelli, but he had learned enough about this gigantic theft from the State to begin the publication of small titbits of information. A deputation that included Christian Democrat Senator Claudio Vitalone, Judge Carlo Testi and General Donato lo Prete of the Finance Police bought his silence. The articles on the scandal ceased. 

Realizing that more money could be obtained by such dubious techniques, Pecorelli began to write about the Masons. His issue of early September 1978, containing the names of over one hundred Vatican Masons, had been a warning shot across Gelli’s bows. The fact that a copy arrived on the desk of Albino Luciani who, having carefully checked it, began to act upon the information, was the supreme irony for Licio Gelli, who was already acutely aware of the threat Luciani posed to his paymaster Roberto Calvi. 

With Luciani dead, Gelli attempted to deal with Pecorelli. He bribed him. Inevitably Pecorelli demanded more money for his silence. Gelli refused to pay. Pecorelli published the first of what he promised would be a series of articles. It revealed that Gelli, the pillar of extreme right-wing Fascism, had spied for the Communists during the war and had continued to work for them afterwards. Pecorelli, having now embraced the mantle of a fearless investigative journalist, promised his readers he would reveal everything about P2. For good measure he revealed that Licio Gelli, former Nazi, ex-Fascist and late Communist, also had very strong links with the CIA. By revealing so much of the truth, Pecorelli’s colleagues in P2 concluded that he had betrayed them. 

On March 20th Gelli telephoned Pecorelli at his Rome office. He suggested a peace talk over dinner the following day. ‘If that is convenient.’ It was. During the course of the conversation Pecorelli mentioned that he would be working late at the office that evening but dinner on the following day would be possible. It was a dinner that Pecorelli never ate. 

Mino Pecorelli left his office in via Orazio at 9.15 p.m. and headed towards his car parked a short distance away. The two bullets that killed him as he sat in his car were fired from within his mouth, a classic Sicilian Mafia gesture of sasso in bocca, a rock in the mouth of a dead man to demonstrate he will talk no more. 

Unable to have dinner with his old friend, Licio Gelli passed the time by opening up his secret files of P2 members and writing ‘deceased’ alongside the entry for Mino Pecorelli. No one has ever ‘claimed’ responsibility for Pecorelli’s murder but in 1983 Antonio Viezzer, at one time a high-ranking officer in SID, Italy’s Secret Service, was arrested and charged on suspicion of involvement in the killing of Pecorelli. Antonio Viezzer was a member of P2. 

A few days before Pecorelli was silenced for ever, one of the men he had named on the list of Vatican Masons, Cardinal Jean Villot, preceded him to the grave. He died still holding the vast array of official titles that had been his during Luciani’s brief reign. For a man who, if not a party to the criminal conspiracy to murder Albino Luciani, most certainly gave that conspiracy vital aid, Villot’s own death, with its various stages described in a series of well-documented medical reports, serves as a curious contrast to that of Luciani, who ‘died like a flower in the night’. 

While the Vatican buried its late Secretary of State, the battle for a little temporal purification continued across the Tiber. The Head of Vigilance of the Bank of Italy, Mario Sarcinelli, and his Governor Paolo Baffi were by now demanding swift action on the Calvi investigation. They insisted that there was more than sufficient evidence to justify immediate arrest. Clearly Gelli and Calvi agreed with them. 

On March 25th, 1979 the arrests were made – but not of Roberto Calvi and his colleagues. The men arrested were Sarcinelli and Baffi. Rome magistrate Judge Mario Alibrandi, a man of known right-wing sympathies, granted Baffi bail because of his age, 67 years. Sarcinelli was less fortunate and was thrown into prison. The charges against the two men, of failing to disclose knowledge of a crime, were clearly specious and after two weeks Sarcinelli was granted bail. The charges, however, would hang over both him and Baffi until January 1980 when it was admitted that they were totally false and without a shred of justification. In the interim the magistrate refused to lift his order which barred Sarcinelli from returning to his position as Head of Vigilance at the Bank for a year. With this action P2 had effectively drawn the teeth of the Bank of Italy. Paolo Baffi, the shocked and distressed Governor of the Bank, resigned in September 1979. The demonstration of the power Calvi and his criminal associates had convinced Baffi that he and his men were fighting a force that was far greater than any wielded by the Bank of Italy. Between the scandal of Sarcinelli’s wrongful imprisonment and Baffi’s resignation, Baffi and his staff were given an ultimate demonstration of just how powerful were the forces ranged against them. The demonstration occurred in Milan. It was organized and paid for by Michele Sindona. 

While Calvi and his friends were coping in their own particular way with their problems in Italy, their fellow P2 member, Michele Sindona, was getting his fair share in New York. Sindona had finally beaten the attempts to have him extradited to Italy, but the manner of his victory brought him little comfort. 

On March 9th, 1979 the Justice Department indicted Sindona and charged him with 99 counts of fraud, perjury and misappropriation of bank funds. The charges stemmed directly from the collapse of the Franklin National Bank. Sindona, having posted a 3 million dollar bond, was granted bail upon the condition that he presented himself daily to the US Marshal’s office. 

In the first week of July 1979 a Federal Court Judge ruled that Sindona could not be extradited to Italy to face bank fraud charges because he was soon to face similar charges in the United States. The extradition treaty between Italy and the United States had a double jeopardy clause. Assistant District Attorney John Kenney commented that the US Government intended to send Sindona back to Italy after the case against him in the United States had been completed. 

Kenney, still alive despite the 100,000 dollar contract that had been put out by Sindona’s colleagues, owed his continuing survival to one fact alone. In Italy, to kill a judge or prosecuting counsel is often an effective ploy in persuading the authorities to slow down a prosecution. The Alessandrini murder is an excellent example. In the United States, such a murder would have precisely the opposite effect. A 100,000 dollar fee was very tempting but the professionals knew that Kenney’s murder would result not only in a ruthless pursuit of the killer but also a vigorous acceleration of the prosecution against Sindona. 

With Sindona confronting the reality of a New York trial with the tenacious Kenney prosecuting, he decided to use the Italian Solution on another man who was causing him an even greater degree of discomfort: Giorgio Ambrosoli.

On September 29th, 1974, the attorney Giorgio Ambrosoli was appointed the liquidator of Sindona’s Banca Privata Italiana. As previously recorded, Banca Privata had been created by Sindona in July 1974 when he merged two of his banks, Banca Unione and Banca Privata Finanziaria – one large bent bank to replace two medium-sized bent banks. By 1979 no man knew more about Sindona’s crooked dealings than Giorgio Ambrosoli. Appointed liquidator by the Treasury Ministry and the Governor of the Bank of Italy, Ambrosoli had begun the nightmare task of unravelling the affairs of a modern Machiavelli. As early as March 21st, 1975 the cautious and careful Ambrosoli, in a secret report to Italy’s Solicitor General, showed he was convinced of the criminality of Sindona’s activities. The evidence he had studied at that date satisfied him that far from the bankruptcy being caused merely by bad business practices, Sindona and the management running his banks in early 1974 ‘wanted the February operations to create the circumstances for bankruptcy’. It had been a coldly planned looting. 

Giorgio Ambrosoli was a most courageous man. At about the same time that he was advising the Solicitor General of his preliminary findings, he confided some of his inner feelings to his wife. ‘Whatever happens, I’ll certainly pay a high price for taking this job. But I knew that before taking it on and I’m not complaining. It has been a unique chance for me to do something for the country . . . Obviously I’m making enemies for myself.’ 

Slowly and methodically Ambrosoli began to make sense of what Sindona had deliberately made senseless. The parking of shares, the buy-backs, the dazzling transfers through the myriad of companies. While Sindona was talking to USA university students of his dreams of cosmic capitalism, the quiet, circumspect Milanese lawyer was establishing beyond all doubt that Sindona was corrupt to his highly manicured fingertips. 

In 1977 Ambrosoli was approached by Rome lawyer Rodolfo Guzzi with a complicated offer to buy Banca Privata out of bankruptcy. Ambrosoli discovered that Guzzi was working on behalf of Michele Sindona. He declined the offer despite the fact that at least two Christian Democrat Ministers supported it. 

The power Sindona still wielded can be gauged from this Ministerial support. Ambrosoli was given a further illustration of that power when the Governor of the Bank of Italy told him of the pressure being exerted by Franco Evangelisti, Prime Minister Andreotti’s right-hand man, who was urging the Bank of Italy to arrive at a typically Italian solution. He wanted Governor Baffi to authorize the central bank to cover Sindona’s debts. Baffi bravely refused. The Ambrosoli investigation went on. 

Ambrosoli continued to come across references in the mountain of papers he was diligently working his way through to ‘the 500’; other references made it clear that these 500 people were the super exporters on the black market. The men and women who, with the aid of Sindona and the Vatican Bank, had poured currency out of Italy illegally. The actual list of names might continue to elude Ambrosoli but very little else did. He ascertained that a large number of public organizations, respectable institutions like the insurance giant INPDAI, placed their funds at Sindona’s banks for a lower rate of interest than was generally current – 8 per cent rather than 13 per cent. They received, however, a secret interest rate that went directly and privately into the pockets of the directors of INPDAI and the other august companies. 

Ambrosoli identified many of the devices that Sindona had used to export money illegally, including buying dollars at higher than the market rate with the balance paid to a foreign account in London, Switzerland or the USA. 

Ambrosoli began to compile his own list of guilty names. It never reached 500 – Michele Sindona saw to that – but it reached 77 names and included those trusted men of the Vatican, Massimo Spada and Luigi Mennini. The liquidator collated irrefutable evidence of Vatican Bank complicity in many of Sindona’s crimes. Throughout the entire period of his work on behalf of the Bank of Italy this man, working virtually single-handed, was subjected to the range of Sindona behaviour. Sindona brought actions alleging embezzlement against Ambrosoli. Then the actions would be dropped to be replaced by a different approach from Sindona’s son-in-law, Pier Sandro Magnoni, inviting Ambrosoli to become President of Sindona’s new bank, ‘once you have settled this tiring business of the bankruptcies’. 

Sindona’s P2 infiltration of those whom Ambrosoli considered he could trust was so total that Magnoni was able to quote verbatim a passage from a secret report compiled by Ambrosoli that had been officially seen by only a handful of bank officials. 

By March 1979 Ambrosoli was able to put a figure on the size of Il Crack Sindona as far as Banca Privata was concerned. The loss was 257 billion lire. Also by March 1979 Ambrosoli had been subjected to a series of threatening phone calls. The callers always had Italian/American accents. 

The threats and the insults grew in intensity from late 1978. The callers varied their tactics from tempting Ambrosoli with offers of vast amounts of money to outright threats. It was made quite clear on whose behalf the calls were being made. ‘Why don’t you go and see Sindona in the States? As a friend,’ said one caller with a heavy American accent. Ambrosoli declined the invitation and began taping the phone calls. He told his friends and colleagues of the calls. Eventually he played one of the tape recordings to one of Sindona’s lawyers. A few days later the next call came. ‘You dirty bastard. Think you’ve been clever taping the calls, eh?’ The Sindona lawyer was later to admit that after hearing the tape he had immediately called Sindona in New York. 

On April 10th, 1979 Sindona confronted another man he considered an enemy, Enrico Cuccia, managing director of Mediobanca, a publicly-owned investment bank. Sindona’s assessment was accurate. Cuccia had thwarted the Sindona takeover of Bastogi in 1972. He had arrived at the conclusion long before many others that Sindona was a megalomaniac crook. During their April 1979 meeting Cuccia was given ample evidence to justify the conclusion he had arrived at nearly eight years earlier. What had prompted Cuccia’s visit to New York was a series of phone calls that he had been receiving from men with American/Italian accents. These calls, like those to Ambrosoli, were of a threatening nature. While Ambrosoli chose to stay with his work in Milan, Cuccia elected to confront Sindona. 

Sindona made a number of demands. One was that Cuccia should have the Italian arrest warrant withdrawn – the fact that in his absence he had been sentenced to three-and-a-half years’ imprisonment in 1976 Sindona brushed aside as a trivial point. Sindona further demanded that Cuccia should find 257 billion lire and bail out Banca Privata. For good measure he also demanded that Cuccia should find even more money to provide for the Sindona family. Apart from making the gracious gesture of allowing Signor Cuccia to continue to live, it is unclear what Sindona was offering in return. 

During the course of this extraordinary conversation Sindona, perhaps by way of demonstrating Cuccia’s very real danger, introduced the subject of Giorgio Ambrosoli. ‘That damned liquidator of my Bank is harming me and therefore I want to have him killed. I will make him disappear in such a way that he leaves no trace.’ This is the reality of Mafia mentality. Al Pacino and well-cut suits, lovable children and doting fathers is the fantasy world of Mafia. The reality is men like Michele Sindona. 

These threats were uttered less than one month after Sindona had been indicted on 99 counts. The same mentality which concluded that the extradition proceedings would vanish if Assistant District Attorney John Kenney were murdered was at work again. If Ambrosoli could be silenced, the criminal charges would presumably dribble away like the morning mist. A mind which functions with such perverted reasoning could plan to kill a Pope without hesitating. 

Enrico Cuccia left the meeting unimpressed. In October 1979 a bomb exploded under the front door of Cuccia’s flat in Milan. Luckily no one was injured. Giorgio Ambrosoli was less fortunate. 

It was apparent to all parties concerned with the forthcoming trial of Sindona that the evidence of Giorgio Ambrosoli was of paramount importance. On June 9th, 1979, the Judge who had been appointed to try the Sindona case, Thomas Griesa, arranged for Ambrosoli to swear a deposition in Milan. 

By that date the man who was given a 100,000 dollar contract to kill Giorgio Ambrosoli had been in the Hotel Splendido, Milan for 24 hours. He was booked in as Robert McGovern. He was also known as ‘Billy the Exterminator’. His real name is William Arico. At the first class hotel, less than 50 metres from Milan Central Station, Arico dined with the five men who were to assist him with the murder. His two main accomplices were Charles Arico, his son, and Rocky Messina. Their weapons included an M11 machine gun, specially fitted with a silencer, and five P28 revolvers. Arico hired a Fiat car and began to stalk Ambrosoli. 

The request to take a detailed and lengthy statement from Ambrosoli had initially been made by Sindona’s lawyers. They had hoped to demonstrate the absurdity of the charges with which their client stood accused in New York. Their awakening which began on the morning of July 9th was rude in the extreme. Four years of work, over 100,000 sheets of carefully, meticulously prepared notes plus the mind of an exceptionally gifted lawyer began quietly to reveal the appalling truth in front of a cluster of American lawyers, two special marshals representing New York Judge Griesa and the Italian Judge Giovanni Galati. 

When the court adjourned after the first day’s hearing, Sindona’s lawyers could easily be identified as they left. They were the men with worried faces. 

With Arico trailing him, the oblivious Ambrosoli went on to another meeting. This was with the deputy superintendent of the Palermo police force and head of that city’s CID, Boris Giuliano. The subject was the same as the one on which Ambrosoli had been testifying all day – Michele Sindona. Giuseppe Di Cristina, a Mafia enforcer employed by the families Gambino, Inzerillo and Spatola, had been murdered in Palermo in May 1978. On his body Giuliano had discovered cheques and other documents which indicated that Sindona had been recycling the proceeds from heroin sales through the Vatican Bank to his Amincor Bank in Switzerland. Having compared notes on their separate investigations the two men agreed to have a fuller meeting once Ambrosoli had finished his testimony to the US lawyers. 

Later that day, Ambrosoli was still not finished with Sindona. He had a long telephone conversation with Lt-Colonel Antonio Varisco, Head of the Security Service in Rome. The subject was the matter Varisco was currently investigating, P2. 

On July 10th, as his deposition continued, Ambrosoli dropped one of a large number of bombshells. Detailing how Banca Cattolica del Veneto had changed hands and how Pacchetti had been unloaded by Sindona to Calvi, Ambrosoli stated that Sindona had paid a ‘brokerage fee of 6.5 million dollars to a Milanese banker and an American bishop.’ 

On July 11th Ambrosoli completed his deposition. It was agreed that he would return the following day and sign the record of his testimony and that the week after he would be available for questioning and clarification of his evidence by the US prosecutors and Sindona’s lawyers. 

Shortly before midnight on the 11th, Ambrosoli arrived outside his apartment. From the window his wife waved. They were about to have a belated dinner. As Ambrosoli moved towards his door Arico and two of his aides appeared from the shadows. The question came out of the darkness. 

‘Giorgio Ambrosoli?’

‘Si.’ 

Arico aimed at point blank range and at least four bullets from a P38 entered the lawyer’s chest. He died instantly. 

By 6 a.m. Arico was in Switzerland. One hundred thousand dollars was transferred from a Sindona account at Calvi’s Banca del Gottardo into an account Arico had under the name of Robert McGovern at the Crédit Suisse in Geneva. The account number is 415851-22-1. 

On July 13th, 1979, less than forty-eight hours after the murder of Giorgio Ambrosoli, Lt-Colonel Antonio Varisco was being driven in a white BMW along the Lungotevere Arnaldo da Brescia in Rome. It was 8.30 a.m. A white Fiat 128 pulled alongside. A sawn-off shotgun appeared through its window. Four shots were fired and the Lt-Colonel and his chauffeur were dead. One hour later the Red Brigades ‘claimed’ responsibility. 

On July 21st, 1979, Boris Giuliano went into the Lux Bar in Via Francesco Paolo Di Biasi in Palermo for a morning coffee. The time was 8.05 a.m. Having drunk his coffee he moved towards the cash desk to pay. A man approached and fired six shots into Giuliano. The cafe was crowded at the time. Subsequent police questioning established that no one had seen anything. No one had heard anything. Boris Giuliano’s position was taken by Giuseppe Impallomeni, a member of P2. 

Not even the members of the Red Brigades ‘claimed’, falsely or otherwise, the responsibility for the murders of Giorgio Ambrosoli and Boris Giuliano. When news of the murder of Ambrosoli was flashed to New York, Michele Sindona, the man who had paid to have the liquidator taken care of by an exterminator, responded in typical fashion. ‘No one must link me with this act of cowardice and I will take decisive legal action against anyone who does.’ 

Two years earlier during an interview with Il Fiorino Sindona had made a far more significant statement. Talking of the ‘plot that exists against me’, he had listed the leaders who in Sindona’s mind included Giorgio Ambrosoli. Sindona observed: ‘There are many who should be afraid . . . I repeat, there are very many.’ 

Giorgio Ambrosoli did not die in vain. His many years of work plus the unsigned deposition were to prove powerful aids for the prosecution during the forthcoming trial of Michele Sindona. 

The Milanese banker and the American bishop referred to in Ambrosoli’s sworn deposition were quickly identified as Calvi and Bishop Paul Marcinkus. Marcinkus was to deny flatly receiving such a commission. Ambrosoli was most certainly not the kind of man to make such an accusation without overwhelming proof. With regard to the veracity of statements made by Bishop Marcinkus, it will be recalled that shortly after the Sindona crash he denied ever having met Sindona. 

Who were the main beneficiaries of this series of appalling and inhuman crimes? The list begins to have a familiar ring: Marcinkus, Calvi, Sindona, Gelli and Ortolani. 

In Milan the terror after the series of murders was most discernible in the Palace of Justice. Men who had worked alongside Ambrosoli suddenly found difficulty in remembering that they had assisted him during his investigation of Sindona’s affairs. Judge Luca Mucci, who had taken over the criminal investigation after Alessandrini’s murder, moved into the continuing investigation so slowly that spectators might have thought he had been turned to stone. An initial evaluation of the Bank of Italy’s investigation into Banco Ambrosiano astonishingly concluded that Calvi’s explanations were perfectly acceptable. This at least was the view of the Finance Police. 

Padalino, the Bank of Italy official who had actually headed the 1978 probe, found himself frequently summoned to Milan where he was confronted by doubting magistrates. As the summer of 1979 wore on, Padalino was threatened and harassed by elements of the Milan judiciary. He was warned that his report on Ambrosiano amounted to a libel. Gelli’s P2 and Sindona’s Mafia were reducing the concepts of justice to a depravity. 

An example of just how powerful the Calvi/Gelli axis was can be gauged from events that occurred in Nicaragua at about the time of Emilio Alessandrini’s murder in January 1979. Calvi had opened a branch of his empire in Managua in September 1977. The bank was called Ambrosiano Group Banco Comercial. Its official function was ‘conducting international commercial transactions’. Its actual function was to move from the Nassau branch, with director Bishop Paul Marcinkus’s approval, a large amount of the evidence that would reveal the fraudulent and criminal devices used in the share pushing/acquisition of the Milan parent bank. Nicaragua removed the evidence even farther from the eyes of the Bank of Italy. As always there was a price to be paid. Gelli had smoothed the way with introductions to Nicaragua’s dictator Anastasio Somoza. After several million dollars had been dropped into the dictator’s pocket, he announced that it would be an excellent idea for Calvi to open a branch in his country. One of the side benefits for Calvi was the acquisition of a Nicaraguan diplomatic passport, something he retained to the end of his life. 

Calvi and Gelli appraised the political situation in Nicaragua with its growing possibility of Sandinistan rebel rule in the not too distant future. These men, who had carried both Fascist and Partisan membership papers during the Second World War, had not changed a lifetime’s habit of being double-faced or, in banking terms, prudent. Calvi gave equally large amounts of money to the rebels – some went to buy grain, some went to buy arms. 

Early in 1979 the left-wing takeover of Nicaragua became a reality. Like many left-wing takeovers before, this one promptly nationalized all foreign banks – with one exception: the Ambrosiano Group Banco Comercial continued to trade under Roberto Calvi. Even left-wing idealists, it would seem, have a price. 

In New York with a large array of his Italian enemies silenced either permanently or temporarily, Michele Sindona decided towards the end of July 1979 that he would after all return to Italy. Illegally. The fact that he was on a 3 million dollar bail in New York and had to report daily to the Marshal’s office, and that he had already been sentenced to three-and-a-half years’ imprisonment in Italy and was wanted on further charges, might appear good reason not to return. Sindona’s solution was simplicity itself. With the aid of his Mafia associates in New York and Sicily he arranged his own ‘kidnap’. 

The reasons Sindona had for a secret return to his native land included his need to marshal maximum support for his forthcoming New York trial. Sindona took the view that a great many people owed him favours. He now wished to collect. To persuade his Italian friends and colleagues to repay him Sindona was prepared to play the one ace he still held. He would name the 500. 

The list of 500 major Italian exporters of black currency had proved elusive to Italian authorities during the past ten years. A number of investigators apart from Giorgio Ambrosoli were continually stumbling over references to the list of 500, which allegedly includes the names of many of the most powerful men in Italy. It has become the Holy Grail of Italian finance but the list is not merely legendary. It exists. Sindona and Gelli certainly have copies of it, and Calvi had one too. Sindona believed that the threat to make the mysterious names public would be sufficient to effect his complete rehabilitation in Italian society. The prison sentence would be quashed, all other outstanding charges against him would be dropped, he would reacquire his Italian banks and the New York Court would be confronted by a man who would claim that he was the victim of wicked conspiracies, probably Communist inspired. An array of very respectable people would testify that Michele Sindona was not only a very much wronged man, but also the world’s most brilliant banker, a man who personified good, clean, healthy capitalism. All of this would be achieved by the use of a technique of which Sindona had frequently boasted to Carlo Bordoni he was a master – blackmail. 

Later Sindona would claim there was another reason for his trip. He will insist to anyone who cares to listen to him today, that it was to overthrow the Italian Government in Sicily and declare the island an independent State. According to Sindona, he would then offer Sicily to the USA as the fifty first State of the Union in exchange for all criminal charges he faced in the USA being dropped. Sindona asserts that the plan would have succeeded except for the fact that, after the Mafia had arranged a phoney kidnap, they proceeded to carry out a real one. Fantasies and delusions such as this are laughable until one remembers that good honest men like Giorgio Ambrosoli did not die laughing. 

The madness of Michele Sindona is perhaps nowhere more clearly revealed than in the fine detail of this plan. Sindona asserts that the Gambino family was fully prepared to give up its heroin factories in Sicily, a murderous industry that was bringing in profits to the Gambino, Inzerillo and Spatola families estimated by the Italian authorities at 600 million dollars minimum a year. In exchange for this public-spirited action, the Gambino family would be given control of the trade in oranges and Rosario Spatola would be allowed to build a casino in Palermo. 

Sindona duly vanished from the streets of New York during the afternoon of August 2nd, 1979. He was clearly going to be extremely busy if Sicily was to be annexed and a deal with the President of the United States was to be effected before the trial, which was scheduled to begin on September 10th. Carrying a false passport in the name of Joseph Bonamico (Italian for good friend) and accompanied by Anthony Caruso, Sindona, wearing glasses, a white wig and false moustache and beard, boarded TWA flight 740 to Vienna at Kennedy Airport. The farce, complete with ransom demands to a variety of people from ‘kidnappers’ calling themselves the ‘Proletarian Committee for the Eversion [sic] of an Improved Justice’ continued until October 16th when an ‘emotionally exhausted and physically weak’ Sindona with a healing bullet wound in the thigh, telephoned one of his New York lawyers from a phone booth on the corner of 42nd Street and Tenth Avenue in Manhattan. 

By any standards his trip had been less than an overwhelming success. Sicily had not become part of the Union. Many of Sindona’s former friends remained just that, former friends. The list of 500, despite all threats, had not been revealed and Sindona would in the near future face additional charges of perjury, bail-jumping and arranging a false kidnap. The main gain for Sindona appears to have been 30 billion lire. This sum was paid by Roberto Calvi after the kindly Licio Gelli had interceded yet again on Sindona’s behalf. It was paid to Sindona’s ‘kidnappers’ from a Calvi-owned bank, the Banca del Gottardo, in Switzerland. In theory the sum was paid to Mafioso Rosano Spatola, for the ‘release’ of Sindona – an Italian version of the three-card trick. 

The main conspirators, apart from Sindona himself, were Anthony Caruso, Joseph Macaluso, Johnny Gambino, Rosano Spatola, Vincenzo Spatola and Joseph Miceli Crimi. The Italian authorities established that Rosario Spatola, who could normally be found wandering about the lines of cement mixers at the large construction company he owned in Palermo, had been in New York at precisely the time that Sindona had vanished. Asked the reason for his visit he replied, ‘Family business’. 

Sindona’s trial on the massive array of charges arising from the collapse of the Franklin Bank finally began in early February 1980. Immediately before it started the Vatican gave clear indication that the Roman Catholic Church at least was going to stand by its former financial adviser. 

Cardinal Giuseppe Caprio, Cardinal Sergio Guerri and Bishop Paul Marcinkus had agreed to a defence counsel request that they help Sindona’s case by swearing depositions on video-tape. Intrigued by what these devout men might say about Sindona, the prosecution had raised no objection to this unusual gambit. It is normal for witnesses to have their statements tested on oath, in courtroom, in front of judge and jury. For the men from the Vatican, trial judge Thomas Griesa waived this consideration and instructed Sindona’s lawyers to fly to Rome on Friday February 1st. The understanding was that the deposition would be taken the following day and the lawyers would report back to the Judge on the Monday. Their report, contained within the trial transcripts of United States of America v. Michele Sindona, makes extraordinary reading. 

At the last minute, or more exactly four hours before the depositions were to be sworn, Secretary of State Cardinal Casaroli intervened. There would be no depositions. ‘They would create a disruptive precedent. There has been so much unfortunate publicity about these depositions. We are very unhappy about the fact that the American Government does not give diplomatic recognition to the Vatican.’ The sophisticated New York lawyers were still in a state of disbelief when they reported to Judge Griesa. At 11.00 a.m. on the Saturday morning, Cardinal Guerri’s secretary, Monsignor Blanchard, had telephoned the American Embassy to confirm that the cardinals and Marcinkus would be there at 4 p.m. A few minutes later he had called back to say Casaroli had withdrawn them from the arena. He was asked about his earlier call. The Monsignor promptly denied making any earlier call. He compounded that lie with another when he told the Embassy the ‘American judge knows all about this’. 

The bemused Embassy official, unaccustomed to such a graphic display of Vatican dishonesty, set about contacting Cardinal Guerri direct. When she eventually located His Eminence, he confessed that he did not know if he was coming to swear a deposition or not. In the event he did not. Guerri, Caprio and Marcinkus all assured the American lawyers that their depositions would have been full of praise for Michele Sindona – that was not their difficulty. The problem had arisen when Cardinal Casaroli saw the appalling implications. If the jury found Sindona guilty, then three high prelates of the Roman Catholic Church would in effect be branded as liars. Further, to allow the three to testify, even through voluntary depositions, would open a Vatican gate through which would come pouring every Italian magistrate demanding the same co-operation. That would lead to a breach of the Lateran Treaty which granted a cardinal complete immunity from arrest in Italy. The next step would be a very unwelcome light shining on Vatican Incorporated. 

Casaroli had shrewdly saved the Vatican at the eleventh hour. What the American lawyers did not know was that in doing so he had actually overridden a decision taken by the Pope. John Paul II had happily agreed to the request that Marcinkus and the others should tell the world how highly they regarded Michele Sindona. 

On March 27th, 1980, Michele Sindona was found guilty on 65 counts, including fraud, conspiracy, perjury, false bank statements, and misappropriation of bank funds. He was imprisoned in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, Manhattan, to await sentence. 

On May 13th, two days before he was due to be sentenced, Sindona attempted to commit suicide. He slashed his wrists superficially, but more significantly consumed a quantity of digitalis. Acting on Grand Master Gelli’s advice, Sindona had carried with him everywhere for many years, a lethal dose of digitalis. Gelli had advised not only Sindona, but other top P2 members always to carry the drug. It was P2’s insurance against members being forced to reveal details of the organization. 

How such a quantity of the drug had been brought into the prison remains a mystery. Sindona has apparently claimed to have it sewn into the lining of a suit for years. To smuggle digitalis into his prison would have been a far more difficult feat than to get it into the Papal Apartments in September 1978.

Initially it appeared that Sindona would die, particularly as the doctors were at a loss to know what drug he had taken, but the dose was inadequate. Having eventually established that it was digitalis, they were able to administer an antidote. Sindona made a full recovery and on June 13th, 1980 was sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment and fined over 200,000 dollars. Carlo Bordoni, who had been the main prosecution witness against Sindona, received a seven-year prison sentence and a 20,000 dollar fine. Sindona was subsequently found guilty of arranging his own false kidnap and sentenced to a further two-and-a-half years. Also found guilty of conspiring with him and assisting him in bail-jumping were Anthony Caruso and Joseph Macaluso. Both were sentenced to five years’ imprisonment.

While these events were unfolding in New York, Sindona’s P2 comrades Calvi and Gelli were continuing business as usual on the other side of the Atlantic. By 1979, Roberto Calvi was seeking protection in all directions: a private army of eight bodyguards; twenty-four-hour guards for Calvi, his family, his Milan, Rome and Drezzo homes; armour-plated Alfa Romeos with bullet-proof tyres. These manifestations of the master thief’s personal fears were costing the shareholders of Ambrosiano over one million dollars a year. No one in Italy, including the President or the Prime Minister, was as well protected. He sought protection from political parties of every shade or colour – the Christian Democrats, the Socialists, the Communists, all were illegally bank-rolled by Calvi. He had the protection of Gelli’s P2 and his Mafia associates, but both of these were two-edged swords which could be used against him. 

The illegally purchased shares in Banco Ambrosiano were concealed in Panamanian companies beyond the jurisdiction of the Bank of Italy, but always the fear for Calvi was the possibility that officialdom would discover this aspect of his many criminal activities. First the Nassau branch had been used to bury the illegal transactions. When the Bank of Italy came within an ace of proving what they suspected, Calvi moved the axis of the fraud to Nicaragua. Then in 1979 he moved much of the central activity that governed the fraud even further away, to Peru. On October 11th, 1979 Banco Ambrosiano Andino opened its doors in Lima. Shortly afterwards the majority of the loans that had been extended to the shell Panamanian and Liechtenstein companies were transferred to Peru. These small shell companies, many with a nominal capital of a mere 10,000 dollars, continued to proliferate. Eventually there would be seventeen. The majority were owned by a Luxembourg company aptly named Manic SA which in turn was owned by the Vatican Bank.

If the international banks queueing up over the years to lend Calvi millions upon millions of dollars had carried out even elementary homework, Calvi would have been exposed years before he suffered his ultimate fate. It is true that the Bank of Italy 1978 report on Banco Ambrosiano was highly confidential and not freely available. That was still the position when I obtained it in 1981. If one author can obtain such a report, so presumably can the Midland, Lloyds, National Westminster or any of the other 250 banks scattered throughout the world who were taken in by Calvi, who had stolen our money. These bankers have a much-vaunted reputation for shrewdness and astuteness, yet they believed the doctored accounts Calvi showed them. The statements he made assuring them that the vast loans were to finance Italian exports were accepted. Did no one check? Did no one subsequently monitor? That over 450 million dollars should be loaned by the international banks, not to another bank, but to a mere holding company called Banco Ambrosiano Holdings, based in Luxembourg – a company manifestly unsupported by any central bank – is a savage condemnation of the lending practices of the interbank market. 

The men who sit on the boards of these lending banks should be made to answer to their shareholders and to all who have accounts with them. It is not pleasant to reflect that some of us in Great Britain undoubtedly financed the purchase of Exocet missiles for Argentina, missiles that were used to kill so many men during the Falklands war. Yet there is no doubt that this evil chain did occur. Calvi diverted millions of dollars to Licio Gelli, who in turn used some of that money to purchase Exocets for Argentina. Investing in the future is fine, but investing to ensure that your own kith and kin have no future is another matter. Doubtless the men who negotiated these huge loans to Calvi would claim that at the time it looked like very good business. 

Just how obscene this particular transaction was can only be appreciated when one is aware that this money was diverted to Gelli and Ortolani through a Panamanian company owned by the Vatican. 

The company in question, Bellatrix, was controlled by Marcinkus at the Vatican Bank but created by a trinity of P2 members, Gelli, Ortolani and Bruno Tassan Din, managing director and financial strategist to the giant Rizzoli publishing group. These Masons milked the Ambrosiano cow of 184 million dollars. The capital of Bellatrix? Ten thousand dollars. The vast non-returnable loan was secured on paper against a large helping of Rizzoli shares. Rizzoli was jointly owned by P2 and the Vatican. The value placed on the Rizzoli shares far exceeded their real worth. 

Astolfine, yet another of the Panamanian companies owned by the Vatican was able, on a capital of 10,000 dollars, to run up debts of 486 million dollars. Its security? A large helping of grossly overvalued Banco Ambrosiano shares. 

With business practices of this order capitalism need have no fear that it will be ultimately destroyed by Marxism. All Marxists have to do is to sit back and wait for capitalism to self-destruct automatically. 

It is understandable that ENI, one of the biggest conglomerates in the world, should suddenly start lending Calvi money; that this huge state-owned oil company should suddenly start functioning as a bank and lend to instead of borrow from Banco Ambrosiano Holdings in Luxembourg – the Chairman of ENI, Giorgio Mazzanti, and the head of its financial department, Leonardo di Donna, are both members of P2. To date no P2 members have been discovered in the higher reaches of the many international banks which continuously poured millions of dollars down Calvi’s throat between 1978 and 1980. 

When the man in the street in London, Paris, New York, Copenhagen, Tokyo, Ottawa, Sydney and Wellington curses the high rate of his bank charges he should tilt his hat at the ghost of Roberto Calvi and at the ever elusive Licio Gelli and Umberto Ortolani. He should also spare a thought for Vatican City. When we pay our high bank charges we are helping to pick up their tab. 

Incontrovertible evidence that the Vatican owns these mysterious Panamanian companies reaches back to 1971, to the time when Calvi and Sindona put Bishop Paul Marcinkus on the board of Calvi’s section in Nassau. 

In Milan, during 1979, the magistrate Luca Mucci spasmodically questioned Calvi. Calvi would study his shoes or the floor intently, mutter about his need to preserve banking secrecy, discuss Inter Milan’s chances of winning their next football match and leave an outmanoeuvred judge. 

By the end of 1979 the financial exposure of the Vatican-owned front companies that Calvi controlled was in excess of 500 million dollars. Fortunately the intercosmic banking fantasies of Sindona had not yet become a reality. There were still financial situations Calvi could not control. The dollar began to rise against the lira. Ambrosiano’s assets, such as they were, consisted very largely of lira-denominated shares. The game became frenetic. Just to keep up with the fraud required demented juggling, particularly when the running costs included 30 billion lire for buying the Venice newspaper Il Gazzettino to keep the Christian Democrats happy, and ‘lending’ the Rome daily Paese Sera 20 billion lire to keep the Communists content. Everyone had their hands out and it always seemed that the man with the biggest hands was Licio Gelli. 

In January 1980 Banco Ambrosiano de America del Sud opened its doors in Buenos Aires. There was practically no banking activity but it was this arm of the Calvi empire which helped finance Argentinian purchases of Exocet missiles. It also provided funds for arms purchases by other South American regimes. 

In July 1980 Judge Luca Mucci felt sufficiently impressed by the investigation that the Guardia di Finanza, the financial police, had carried out in the wake of the Bank of Italy 1978 enquiry, to order Calvi to surrender his passport and to warn the banker that he would be facing criminal charges. It was a small step forward in the name of justice. 

It took a smart step backwards when a few months later Calvi obtained his passport back again through the good offices of Gelli. The Grand Master was less inclined to intercede when Massimo Spada, late of the Vatican Bank and currently Chairman of Banca Cattolica del Veneto, was arrested and charged with involvement of a criminal nature in Il Crack Sindona. Next to feel the handcuffs, at least momentarily, was Luigi Mennini, still active in the Vatican Bank, on similar charges. 

As the net began to draw tighter around Calvi, despite the valiant efforts of Gelli to corrupt all and sundry, the Milanese banker’s hopes of continuing to plunder relied very largely on Marcinkus. The game was becoming much rougher and without the constant co-operation of the Vatican Bank, concealment of Calvi’s crimes would cease. It had always been so but in the past the pressure on the Vatican had been minimal; now with the arrest of Mennini the pressure intensified. Calvi began to fear that, despite the massive amounts of money he had channelled into the hands of Bishop Paul Marcinkus, the time might be fast approaching when the man across the Tiber might withdraw his active support and leave Calvi alone and highly vulnerable. 

Early in 1981 Treasury Minister Beniamino Andreatta, who had been promoted to the post the previous October, concluded that the Vatican should withdraw its support immediately. He had studied the 1978 Bank of Italy report at length and felt compelled to make an attempt to protect the Church. He went to the Vatican and spoke at length to Foreign Minister Cardinal Casaroli. He outlined the entire situation. He urged the Vatican to break all links with Banco Ambrosiano before it was too late. The advice was ignored. Marcinkus would claim later that he had no knowledge of this meeting. In any event, if the devout Catholic Andreatta had been aware of the full facts, he would have known that it was an impossibility for the Vatican to sever the links. It actually owned Banco Ambrosiano. Through the array of Panamanian and Liechtenstein companies, it had acquired control of over 16 per cent of Banco Ambrosiano. With the rest of the shares in the bank so widely scattered among small shareholders, that gave the Vatican a controlling interest. 

At noon on March 2nd 1981 the Vatican Press Office released a document that puzzled many. Issued without explanation, it reminded all Catholics of the Canon Laws covering Freemasons and stressed the fact that the present code ‘forbids Catholics under pain of excommunication from joining Masonic or similar associations’. No one could understand the timing. Roman Catholics had been subjected to automatic excommunication if they became Freemasons since 1738. Why remind them in early March 1981? The answer was not long in coming and indicates that the intelligence-gathering network of the Church is at least as efficient as Licio Gelli’s. The Vatican statement did not explain how all the good Catholics who featured on the membership list of P2 could have their names expunged from the records before the Italian authorities discovered them. For P2 member Calvi, this apparently insurmountable problem was to have disastrous consequences. 

When public exposure finally came, it was ironically through Calvi’s association with his protector Licio Gelli. Italian magistrates in 1981 were still attempting to clarify the facts concerning Sindona’s self-arranged kidnap. On March 17th police raided Gelli’s palatial villa in Arezzo and his office at the Gio-Le textile factory. They sought links of Gelli’s involvement in Sindona’s surprise trip to his homeland. What they found was a Pandora’s box of scandal. In Gelli’s safe they discovered a list of the 962 members of P2. They also found dossiers and secret Government reports. 

The list of P2 members was a veritable Who’s Who of Italy. The armed forces were heavily represented with over fifty generals and admirals. The Government of the day was there with two Cabinet Ministers, as were industrialists, journalists (including the Editor of Corriere Della Sera and several of his senior staff), 36 parliamentarians, pop stars, pundits, and police officers. It was a State within a State. Many have said that Gelli was planning to take over Italy. They are wrong. He had taken over Italy. Of the Grand Master himself there was no sign. The arrangements for the police raid had been top secret, which translated meant: only tell trusted police officers and Licio Gelli. He had fled to South America. 

The ensuing scandal brought down the Italian Government and gave considerable momentum to the Milan magistrate’s investigation of Calvi. Judge Mucci was replaced by Gerardo d’Ambrosio. It had been over two years since the murder of Judge Emilio Alessandrini; two years of procrastination. Now with a new investigating judge, helped by the compromising documents found in Gelli’s safe, within two months Calvi was arrested and placed in a prison cell in Lodi. 

Now was the time for all good friends to come to the aid of the man who had so often helped other parties. In the weeks following Calvi’s arrest, Bettino Craxi, the leader of the Socialist party, and Flaminio Piccoli, the president of the Christian Democrats, got to their feet in Parliament and made pleasant remarks about Calvi and his Bank. The Vatican stayed silent. Demonstrably its entire attention was focused on a far graver situation. Seven days before Calvi’s arrest, Pope John Paul II had his near fatal meeting in St Peter’s Square with Mehmet Ali Agca. 

While much of the world prayed that the Pope would survive, Roberto Calvi in his prison cell was totally preoccupied with what seemed to him an infinitely more important problem: his own survival. Through his family he began to press Marcinkus to admit publicly that over the years he had been standing side by side with Calvi in the kitchen as they cooked the books. 

After many futile telephone calls, Calvi’s son Carlo finally got through to Marcinkus. He pleaded with the Bishop that the gravity of his father’s position would be greatly reduced if the Vatican Bank admitted its involvement. The deals had been channelled through Calvi’s Banca del Gottardo in Lugano which could not reveal the truth because of the very stringent Swiss banking regulations, but the Vatican Bank was its own master. It could volunteer information. Marcinkus, however, had no intention of publicly accepting responsibility. He told Calvi’s son: ‘If we do, it’s not only the IOR and the Vatican’s image which will suffer. You’ll lose as well, for our problems are your problems too.’ 

Indeed they were. The two banks were completely interlocked. They had been for years. Bishop Marcinkus was in a bind. To tell the truth would bring down on the Vatican the wrath of Italy. The alternative was to leave Calvi unsupported in the hope that the Vatican’s deep and continuing involvement would remain secret and that after Calvi’s trial it would be a case of business as usual. Bishop Marcinkus took the latter course. Undoubtedly this decision was based on the fact that, of all the crimes perpetrated by Calvi, the charges he now faced involved only two of his illegal transactions, when Calvi had sold himself shares in Toro and Credito Varesino that he already happened to own, at vastly inflated prices. This had involved illegally exported currency out of Italy and that was the offence the Milan magistrates were hoping would enable them to convict Calvi. Marcinkus reasoned that if everyone kept calm the game could continue. Calvi, sitting in Lodi prison, was unimpressed by the messages from his sanguine partner in the Vatican. International bankers shook their heads in disbelief as Calvi continued to run Banco Ambrosiano from inside prison. 

On July 7th, the Italian Government charged Michele Sindona with ordering the murder of Giorgio Ambrosoli. Calvi’s reaction to the news was particularly interesting. He tried to commit suicide the following evening. He swallowed a quantity of barbiturates and slashed his wrists. He later explained his reasons: ‘Because of a kind of lucid desperation. Because there was not a trace of justice in all that was being done against me. And I am not talking about the trial.’ If, of course, he had really wanted to end his life, he had merely to obtain the quantity of digitalis recommended by Gelli by having it smuggled into prison. His trial judges were unimpressed. 

On July 20th he was sentenced to four years imprisonment and a fine of 16 billion lire. His lawyers immediately lodged an appeal and he was freed on bail. Within a week of his release, the board of Banco Ambrosiano unanimously reconfirmed him as chairman of the bank and gave him a standing ovation. The international bankers again shook their heads in disbelief. As Marcinkus had predicted, it was indeed business as usual. P2 was a continuing power. The Bank of Italy allowed Calvi to return. The Italian Government made no move to end the extraordinary spectacle of a man convicted of banking offences running one of the country’s biggest banks.

One banker did raise objections. Ambrosiano’s general manager Roberto Rosone pleaded with the Bank of Italy to approve the removal of Calvi and replace him with the previous chairman, Ruggiero Mozzana. The Bank of Italy, with its eyes still firmly fixed on the power of P2 and the political muscle that Calvi had bought over the years, declined to intervene. 

The second threat to Calvi’s banking empire came from Peru and Nicaragua. To counter it, Calvi enlisted the help of Marcinkus. The Bishop had declined to give Calvi any support, public or private, during his trial but he was now about to give him every assistance to ensure that the criminal fraud perpetrated by both men should remain secret. 

During the time of Calvi’s trial the Vatican announced that Pope John Paul II had appointed a commission of fifteen cardinals to study the finances of the Roman Catholic Church. The function of the commission was to recommend improvements that would increase Vatican revenue. 

Bishop Paul Marcinkus was not included as a member of the commission but he obviously felt that as head of the Vatican Bank he could nevertheless make a powerful contribution to the vexed question of Vatican finances. He held a number of secret meetings with the convicted Calvi which resulted in the Vatican Bank officially admitting an increase in its outstanding debts of nearly one billion dollars. This was the sum that was owed to the Calvi banks in Peru and Nicaragua, as a result of their having loaned on Calvi’s instructions hundreds of millions of dollars to Bellatrix, Astolfine, etc. Peru and Nicaragua, in spite of being Calvi subsidiaries, were finally displaying a little independence. The securities backing these enormous loans were negligible. 

Peru and Nicaragua wanted greater cover. Who picked up the bill in the event of a default? Who exactly owned these mysterious Panamanian companies? Who had borrowed so much with so little? The gentlemen from Peru were particularly anxious, having loaned some 900 million dollars. 

At this stage, in August 1981, Calvi and Marcinkus perpetrated their biggest fraud. The documents would become known as ‘letters of comfort’. They offer no comfort to any Roman Catholic; no reassurance to any who believe in the moral integrity of the Vatican. The letters were written on the headed paper of the Instituto per le Opere di Religione, Vatican City and were dated September 1st, 1981. They were addressed to Banco Ambrosiano Andino in Lima, Peru and Ambrosiano Group Banco Comercial in Nicaragua. On the instructions of Bishop Paul Marcinkus, they were signed by Luigi Mennini and Pellegrino De Strobel. They read: Gentlemen: This is to confirm that we directly or indirectly control the following entries:

Gentlemen: 
This is to confirm that we directly or indirectly control the following entries: 
Manic SA Luxembourg 
Astolfine SA Panama 
Nordeurop Establishment, Liechtenstein 
UTC United Trading Corporation, Panama 
Erin SA Panama 
Bellatrix SA Panama 
Belrosa SA Panama 
Starfield SA Panama 

We also confirm our awareness of their indebtedness towards yourself as of June 10, 1981 as per attached statement of accounts. 

The attached accounts showed that the ‘indebtedness’ to the Lima branch alone was 907 million dollars.

The directors in Nicaragua and Peru relaxed. They had now clear admission that the massive debts were the responsibility of the Vatican Bank. The Holy Roman Catholic Church was the guarantor. No banker could wish for a better security. There was just one small problem. The directors in Peru and Nicaragua knew only half of the story. There was another letter. This one was from Roberto Calvi to the Vatican Bank, dated August 27th, 1981. It was safely in Marcinkus’s hands before he acknowledged that the Vatican Bank was liable for the debts of one billion dollars. Calvi’s letter made a formal request for the letters of comfort in which the Vatican would admit that it owned the Luxembourg, Liechtenstein and Panamanian companies. This admission, Calvi assured the Vatican, ‘would entail no liabilities for the IOR.’ His letter concluded with a paragraph confirming that whatever happened the Vatican Bank would ‘suffer no future damage or loss’. Hence the Vatican Bank was secretly absolved from debts to which it was about to admit. 

For Calvi’s secret letter to Marcinkus to have any legal validity, its existence and precise contents would have had to be revealed to the directors in Peru and Nicaragua. Further, the arrangement between Calvi and Marcinkus would have had to be agreed upon by the majority of the directors in Milan. Moreover, to have been a legal agreement, it would have been essential for the contents of both letters to have been public knowledge to all the shareholders of Banco Ambrosiano, including the many small shareholders in the Milan area. 

The two letters and the agreement between Calvi and Marcinkus constitute a clear case of criminal fraud by both men. That all of this should have transpired on the third anniversary of the election of Albino Luciani to the Papacy adds to the obscenity. Luciani, a man committed and dedicated to the elimination of corruption within the Vatican, had been succeeded by Pope John Paul II, a man who wholeheartedly approved of Bishop Paul Marcinkus. 

This appalling effrontery grew when on September 28th, 1981, the third anniversary of Luciani’s death, Marcinkus was promoted by the Pope. It was announced that he had been appointed ProPresident of the Pontifical Commission for the State of Vatican City. This virtually made him Governor of Vatican City. He still retained his position as head of the Vatican Bank and the new post gave him automatic elevation to Archbishop. 

Through his Lithuanian origins, his continual espousal, in fiscal terms, of Poland’s needs and his close proximity to the Pope because of his role as personal bodyguard and overseer of all security on foreign trips, Marcinkus had discovered in the person of Karol Wojtyla the most powerful protector a Vatican employee could have. Sindona, Calvi and others like them are, according to the Vatican, wicked men who have deceived naive, trusting priests. Either Marcinkus has misled, lied to and suppressed the truth from Pope John Paul II since October 1978, or the present Pope also stands indicted. 

While Karol Wojtyla displays remarkable charisma and tells the world that a man who looks at his wife with desire could well be committing adultery of the heart, Marcinkus has continued to seduce many of the world’s bankers. While the Pope from Krakow demonstrates his preoccupation with maintaining the Roman Catholic status quo by his declarations that divorced Roman Catholics who had remarried could only be given Holy Communion if they totally abstained from sexual relationships with their married partners, the Pope’s bankers have shown themselves to be less fastidious about whom they sleep with. While Pope John Paul II has justified the Roman Catholic Church’s continuing treatment of women as second class citizens with assertions such as ‘Mary, the mother of God, was not among the Apostles at the Last Supper’, the men from Vatican Incorporated have continued to display a more liberated attitude: they will steal and embezzle from either sex. 

In the years since the election of Wojtyla, Licio Gelli, the unbeliever, has continued to demonstrate his own power and charisma. None would call him God’s representative but many would continue to jump when the Puppet Master tugged the string. 

From the sanctuary of his home in the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo, Licio Gelli remained in contact with Calvi. Still pulling that particular string, still extorting huge amounts of money from the banker, he would frequently telephone when Calvi was at his villa in Drezzo. His wife Clara and his daughter Anna have confirmed that the number was known only to Gelli and Umberto Ortolani – a P2 hotline. Gelli would never give his name when the Calvi family would ask who was calling. It was always the special codename: ‘Luciani’. 

Why would the Grand Master of P2 ascribe to himself Albino Luciani’s name – a name Gelli had used since 1978 when contacting Calvi? Was it a constant reminder of a certain event? A constant threat that this master blackmailer might reveal details of that event unless the money kept pouring into Gelli’s bank accounts? Undoubtedly the money did continue to flow to Gelli. Right until the end, Calvi was still paying Gelli off. With the Grand Master disgraced and in hiding in South America, wanted by the Italian authorities on a variety of charges, his protection of Calvi was limited. Why then the millions of dollars that each mention of the name ‘Luciani’ sent pouring into Gelli’s pocket? Calvi personally estimated that Gelli and Ortolani eventually were worth over 500 million dollars each. 

Months before the P2 scandal broke, when the Grand Master was still in Italy, Calvi was clearly attempting to break all links with Gelli. Why did Calvi avoid the phone calls? Tell his family to say he was ill or was not there? From the accounts of the Calvi family Gelli, the insatiable collector of secrets and information, had a frightening hold over Roberto Calvi. What was the ultimate secret that Gelli knew which sent Calvi into fits of perspiring terror at the mere mention of Gelli’s name? 

Gelli’s hold on Calvi continued until the end of the banker’s life. When he whistled Calvi danced. Late in 1981 Carlo De Benedetti, chief executive of Olivetti, became deputy chairman of Banco Ambrosiano at Calvi’s request. It gave his Bank’s tattered public image a healthy injection of respectability. In Uruguay Gelli and Ortolani heard the news with alarm. An honest deputy chairman was not consistent with their plans to continue the plunder of Banco Ambrosiano. ‘Luciani’ picked up his telephone and dialled the private number at the Drezzo villa. Having persuaded De Benedetti to join his bank, Calvi then made life impossible for the man from Olivetti. ‘You must take the greatest care,’ he said to Benedetti. ‘The P2 is preparing a dossier on you. I advise you to take care, because I know.’ Little more than a month later De Benedetti had left. 

A long letter of complaint, complete with highly detailed appendices, from a group of Milanese shareholders in Banco Ambrosiano was sent to John Paul II. The letter, dated January 12th, 1982, was a slashing attack on the Bank. It set out the links between Marcinkus, Calvi, Gelli and Ortolani. The shareholders were particularly distressed that the previously staid Catholic Ambrosiano and the Vatican Bank had bred such an unholy alliance. As the troubled Catholics of Milan observed: 

The IOR is not only a shareholder in the Banco Ambrosiano. It is an associate and partner of Roberto Calvi. It is revealed by a growing number of court cases that Calvi stands today astride one of the main crossroads of the most degenerate Freemasonry (P2) and of Mafia circles, as a result of inheriting Sindona’s mantle. This has been done once again with the involvement of people generously nurtured and cared for by the Vatican, such as Ortolani, who moves between the Vatican and powerful groups in the international underworld. 

Being a partner of Calvi means being a partner of Gelli and Ortolani, given that both guide and influence him strongly. The Vatican is therefore, whether it likes it or not, through its association with Calvi also an active partner of Gelli and Ortolani. 

The letter contained an appeal to Pope John Paul II for help and guidance. Though the Pope speaks many languages, including Italian, the Milanese thoughtfully had the letter translated into Polish and also took steps to ensure that neither the Curia in general nor Villot’s replacement Casaroli should prevent the letter reaching the Pope. In any event the letter was ignored. The Milanese shareholders were not even graced with a formal acknowledgment. 

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. 

In January 1981 the Federal Grand Jury served a number of subpoenas on Cody, demanding to see his financial records. If Cody was as pure as the driven snow, his subsequent behaviour is unaccountable. Only the Cardinal, his lawyers and one or two very close confidants knew of the investigation and subpoenas. Cody kept the developments from the people of Chicago, from the Apostolic Delegate in Washington and from the Vatican. He also refused to comply with the Government requests to hand over the diocesan financial records. For an ordinary citizen to decline to co-operate would have meant prison but Cody, who is on record as declaring, ‘I don’t run the country but I do run Chicago’, demonstrated that the boast was not an empty one. 

In September 1981, when the Chicago Sun Times broke the story, Cody had still not complied with the subpoenas. The Sun Times had been conducting its own investigation of the Cardinal for nearly two years. It proceeded to give its readers chapter and verse on a large array of allegedly appalling crimes committed by Cody. 

The Cardinal refused to produce a shred of evidence that would have rebutted the wide variety of charges and attempted instead to rally behind him the 2,440,000 Catholics of the city with the assertion: ‘This is not an attack on me. It is an attack on the entire Church.’ 

Many responded to this totally fallacious statement. Many did not. The massive damage to the image and reputation of the Roman Catholic Church which Albino Luciani had rightly foreseen was now a reality. The city was divided. Initially it is clear that the majority supported Cody but, as the months dragged by, one fundamental fact began to sink in. Cody had still not complied with the Government subpoenas. His own close supporters began to demand that he obey the Government. His initial response through his lawyers had been, ‘I am only answerable to God and Rome.’ It was a concept that he took to the grave. In April 1982, with the Government still waiting for answers, Cardinal Cody died. Notwithstanding that he had a long history of illness, Cody’s body, unlike Albino Luciani’s, was subject to an autopsy. His death had been caused by ‘severe coronary artery disease’. 

He had left a final message to be read out after his death. It contained no proof of his innocence with regard to the very serious charges that he had faced. It contained instead that arrogance which had been such a feature of his entire life. ‘I forgive my enemies but God will not.’ 

With the tyrannical despot Cody dead, there had been immediate speculation about his successor. A name frequently mentioned was that of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, citizen of Cicero, Chicago, who was currently drowning in scandal in Italy. The US Church hierarchy demurred and advised the Vatican that to give Chicago to Marcinkus, ‘would be more of the same’. In the event the position went to Archbishop Joseph Bernardin of Cincinnati who promised an immediate Church investigation into L’Affaire Cody. 

The Government announced that it was closing its own enquiry and the Federal Grand Jury investigation was terminated without any charges being brought. In view of the fact that the man who had been accused was dead, there was little alternative. 

In December 1982, Bernardin issued a two-page pastoral letter to Chicago’s Catholics. The letter was not supported with any documentary evidence. Bernardin concluded that a probe of Cody’s finances showed no wrong-doing, that he may have unfairly awarded a pension to Helen Wilson, that he ‘did not always follow preferred accounting procedures’. More significantly, accountants whom Bernardin had employed, refused to certify the ‘accuracy of the estimated receipt and expenditure figures’ though they found the figures ‘within an acceptable range of reasonableness for the purposes of the inquiry’. The reason the accountants refused to certify the records was because, as Bernardin admitted, some of the financial records of the archdiocese could not be located and, ‘if they were subsequently to become available, then the conclusions might require reevaluation’. Nearly two years later, those financial records are still missing. 

The despotic, arrogant Cody clearly had a motive, and a powerful one, to involve himself in a conspiracy to murder Albino Luciani. A question mark may remain with regard to his financial corruption. There can be no doubt that Cody suffered from acute paranoia. If he was a paranoid psychotic it is entirely consistent that he would have sought to solve his problems, real or imagined, in a violent manner. Clearly if any Pope was going to remove Cody from Chicago it would be over his dead body – either Cody’s or the Pope’s. Through his many early years in Rome and then during his numerous visits, Cody had succeeded in ingratiating himself with two future Popes, Pacelli and Montini, and he had built up a large network of friends and informants. That this man could put two fingers in the air to Pope Paul VI is an indication of his power. The many cash gifts, not only to Poland but to favoured members of the Roman Curia, also consolidated a peculiar brand of loyalty. Cody had his own Mafia or P2 planted deep within Vatican City – men with constant access to the Papal Apartments. 

Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the third of the men Albino Luciani had been determined to remove from office, retained his position as head of the Vatican Bank upon the election of Karol Wojtyla. Indeed, as previously recorded, he has been promoted to Archbishop and given even greater power. For a man who observed upon his initial appointment to the Vatican Bank, ‘my only previous financial experience is handling the Sunday collection’, Marcinkus has come a long way. He has far greater claim to the title of ‘God’s Banker’ than either of his two former close friends and business associates, Roberto Calvi and Michele Sindona. He can also justly claim to have brought the Roman Catholic Church into greater disrepute than any other priest in modern times. 

It is abundantly clear that in the mid-1970s Calvi and Marcinkus devised a scheme that spawned a multitude of crimes. It is equally clear that the Panamanian and other off-shore companies the Vatican owned, and still own, were run for the mutual benefit of Banco Ambrosiano and the Vatican Bank. 

The Vatican has claimed since Calvi’s death that the first it knew of the off-shore companies and its ownership of them was in August 1981. This is yet another Vatican lie. Documentary evidence established that, as early as 1978, Bishop Marcinkus was actively ensuring that the fact that these companies were owned by the Vatican was suppressed. As for the Vatican’s lack of knowledge of the companies it owned, one example will suffice. UTC, United Trading Corporation of Panama, is one of the companies referred to in the letters of comfort, a company that the Vatican now claims it knew nothing about until shortly before the notorious letters were written by Marcinkus. Documentation dated November 21st, 1974, duly signed by Vatican Bank officials, requests that Calvi’s Banca del Gottardo arrange on behalf of the Vatican Bank the formation of a company called United Trading Corporation. 

For Calvi the illegal scheme had many virtues. And what did the Vatican Bank gain? It gained money. Vast amounts of it. Calvi bought his own shares, from himself; at greatly inflated prices, but on paper these shares were legally owned, and still are legally owned, by the Panamanian companies who, in turn, are owned by the Vatican. Calvi duly turned over the annual dividend on the huge block of shares to their rightful owners, the Vatican Bank. The sum involved varied over the years but averages out annually at 2 million dollars. 

That was but the tip of the iceberg. More substantial gains can be traced. For example, in 1980 the Vatican Bank sold 2 million shares in a Rome-based international construction company called Vianini. The shares were sold to a small Panamanian company called Laramie. It was the first stage of a deal in which it was planned that the Vatican would sell to Laramie 6 million shares in Vianini. The price of the shares was grossly inflated. The first 2 million cost Laramie 20 million dollars. Laramie is yet another of the companies owned by the Vatican. It might be considered a futile exercise to sell yourself your own shares at an inflated figure. It becomes less futile if you are using someone else’s money, as Calvi had demonstrated over the years. The 20 million dollars to pay for the shares came from Roberto Calvi. And the Vatican Bank kept the shares it already owned and the 20 million dollars as well. Further, it did not and never has owned 6 million shares in Vianini. Its maximum stake in the company has never been more than 3 million shares. It was with schemes like this that Calvi paid off Marcinkus. 

In March 1982, Archbishop Marcinkus granted a rare interview. It was given to the Italian weekly Panorama. His comments about Roberto Calvi are particularly illuminating, coming as they did just eight months after Calvi had been fined 13.7 million dollars and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment, and only seven months after the Vatican and Marcinkus discovered (if we believe the Vatican version) that Calvi had stolen over a billion dollars and left the Vatican to pay the bill.

Calvi merits our trust. This I have no reason to doubt. We have no intention of ceding the Banco Ambrosiano shares in our possession: and furthermore, we have other investments in this group, for example in the Banca Cattolica, which are going very well. 

It is on a par with that other eulogy given by Marcinkus to the USA Government attorneys and the men from the FBI, who were investigating the alleged involvement of Marcinkus in a billion dollar counterfeit bond swindle in April 1973. On that occasion, it may be remembered, Marcinkus was extolling the virtues of a man he now claims to have hardly ever met, a man who, for his part, insists, ‘We met many many times over the course of the years in which we did business together. Marcinkus was my partner in two banks.’ That man is Michele Sindona who, apart from his many other crimes, is responsible for the biggest single banking disaster in United States history, a man whom Marcinkus considered to be ‘well ahead of his time as far as banking matters are concerned’. 

It may be argued on behalf of Marcinkus that his observation was made a year before Il Crack Sindona. In 1980, six years after the Sindona crash, Marcinkus was ready to testify on behalf of Sindona and was only stopped by the intervention of Cardinal Casaroli, who felt obliged to overrule Pope John Paul II. 

Today, there is only one reason why Marcinkus has not been further elevated to cardinal. Despite the massive world-wide disgrace that his activities have brought upon the Vatican and Roman Catholicism, Karol Wojtyla was still going ahead with plans to give the man from Cicero a red hat. Again, only the insistence of Casaroli saved the day. It would seem the Pope takes a more tolerant view of sins perpetrated behind a bank counter than he does of sins perpetrated in bed. 

With regard to the murder of Albino Luciani, Marcinkus had the motive and the opportunity. One of the many functions he performed for Paul VI was that of the role of personal Papal bodyguard and security adviser. As such his knowledge of the security arrangements, such as they were, was unsurpassed. Exactly why the President of the IOR was wandering around the Vatican City shortly after 6.30 a.m. on the morning on which Albino Luciani was discovered dead had yet to be established. Research indicates that Marcinkus could not normally be found near the bank premises at such an early hour. Unlike Villot he did not live inside the Vatican walls but at the Villa Stritch in Rome. Marcinkus brought many facets to his work in the Vatican Bank; not least were elements of his early childhood in Al Capone’s Cicero. ‘How are your gangster friends in Chicago, Paul?’ was a running joke in the early 1970s. It was heard less after Sindona’s trial. It is not heard at all after the Calvi débâcle. 

If not actively involved in the conspiracy to murder Albino Luciani it is possible that Marcinkus acted as a catalyst, wittingly or unwittingly. Many years ago an English king cried out, ‘Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?’ and soon after, the Roman Catholic Church had a martyr in the person of Thomas à Becket. There is no doubt that Marcinkus conveyed in full his fears on the new Papacy to Roberto Calvi. There is equally no doubt that Albino Luciani was about to remove Marcinkus from the Vatican Bank and cut off all links with Banco Ambrosiano. Did the fears that Marcinkus expressed not only to Calvi but to others about this new Pope provoke the course of events that, on the morning of September 29th, left Bishop Marcinkus open-mouthed and stunned when a Swiss Guard told him the Pope was dead? 

Michele Sindona is often incorrectly referred to as ‘God’s Banker’. A more accurate label would be ‘God’s Speculator’. At the time of Albino Luciani’s murder, Sindona was fighting an extradition order served by the Italian Government. He was also wanted for questioning in regard to a wide variety of financial crimes in a number of other countries. By September 1978 the likelihood of the United States authorities initiating criminal proceedings against him, with regard to the Franklin Bank collapse, was becoming more of a certainty daily. These proceedings would save him from extradition but would place him in immediate jeopardy in the United States. The one remaining ace he could hope to play was dependent on Vatican co-operation. Sindona reasoned that if Bishop Marcinkus, Cardinal Guerri and Cardinal Caprio gave evidence on his behalf; a jury would be very heavily influenced by statements from three such august people. With Albino Luciani as Pope, the possibility of any Vatican testimony, let alone favourable testimony, did not exist. 

Sindona, as a member of both the Mafia and P2, had not only the motive and opportunity for murder but, as has been amply demonstrated, he also had the capacity. He was a man deranged enough to believe that if an Assistant District Attorney were murdered his troubles in the United States would be at an end – a man deranged enough to believe that if he ordered the murder of Giorgio Ambrosoli his Italian problems would vanish. Such a man clearly had the capacity to remove an honest, reforming Pope. 

Sindona remains a man very much in demand. There is the three-and-a-half-year prison sentence already passed on him in Italy. There is the continuing American investigation into the helicopter attempt in January 1981 to rescue him from his United States prison. There is the July 1981 Italian Government indictment charging him with having ordered the murder of Giorgio Ambrosoli. Also named in that arrest warrant are his son Nino Sindona and his son-in-law Pier Sandro Magnoni. There is the January 1982 indictment from Palermo, Sicily in which he and 65 members of the Gambino, Inzerillo and Spatola Mafia families were charged with operating a 600 million dollar per year heroin trade between Sicily and the United States. There are the further Sicilian indictments which charge Sindona with illegal possession of arms, fraud, using a false passport and violating currency regulations. Then there are the further indictments issued by the Italian government in July 1982 charging Sindona and others, including the Vatican’s Massimo Spada and Luigi Mennini, with a long list of criminal offences connected with the fraudulent bankruptcy of Banca Privata Italiana. It is only fitting that the prosecution’s case with regard to these last alleged offences be based, very largely, on the valiant work of the murdered Giorgio Ambrosoli. No words of mine could describe so exactly what manner of man Sindona is and what manner of family he has spawned, as those uttered by his son Nino Sindona. He was talking on tape with the writer Luigi di Fonzo. (The tape is now with the New York prosecutor’s office.) The long interview took place during the evening of March 18th and the early hours of March 19th, 1983. 

My father admitted to me that it was Arico . . . who committed the murder. * They were threatening Ambrosoli and it was effective for a while. Billy Arico was sent to Milan by Venetucci [a heroin smuggler and alleged member of the Gambino family] at my father’s request, and was supposed to shoot at Ambrosoli, but not kill him. Arico committed the murder . . . Ambrosoli’s family do not deserve any pity. I have no compassion for the fucking guy and this is not enough for a son of a bitch like him. I’m sorry he died without suffering. Let’s make sure on this point. I’m never going to condemn my father because Ambrosoli doesn’t deserve to be on this earth . . . My father has gone through enough. Now it’s time our enemies go through something. Griesa, Kenney, it’s their turn to suffer. Not my father again, not us. We have done nothing . . . To obtain justice there could be no crime that I would be afraid of committing. People like Kenney, Griesa, they could die of the worst pain, and for me it would be only a case for a big champagne celebration. I believe in justifiable homicide. 

Thomas Griesa was the trial judge in the United States v. Sindona. John Kenney was the chief prosecutor. Luigi di Fonzo asked Nino Sindona how he could justify murder. 

I could justify it in about a second and a half. Like I could justify political murder in a second and a half. Let’s assume I want to kill Judge Griesa. For me it’s self defence . . . because he committed the enormous crime of putting my father in jail for life. And there is no chance of a retrial as long as Judge Griesa is alive. So by killing him we will obtain a chance for a re-trial. So self defence. 

Clearly for people like Michele Sindona and his son to murder a Pope who stood in their way would be ‘self defence’. 

Roberto Calvi. It was once said by Lenin: ‘Give a capitalist enough rope and he will hang himself.’ Clearly the first coroner’s jury that considered the death of Calvi agreed with Lenin. It returned a verdict of suicide. The fact that the hearing was compressed into a day, that witnesses were missing, that witnesses committed sustained perjury, and very little of the highly relevant background evidence was presented did not appear to disturb the Coroner. In Italy the verdict was greeted with incredulity. In 1983 a second Coroner’s jury got nearer the truth when it returned an open verdict on the man who had been found hanging appropriately next to a sewer outlet. 

I am in no doubt that Calvi was ‘suicided’ by his P2 friends – yet another example of the very high risks that are attendant if one pursues a career in Italian banking. Hours before Calvi died, his secretary in Milan, Graziella Corrocher, was ‘suicided’ from a fourth floor window at the Banco Ambrosiano headquarters in Milan. Her ‘death note’, which showered curses on Roberto Calvi, was discovered by Roberto Rosone, still walking with the aid of sticks after the attempt on his life. A few months later on October 2nd, 1982, Giuseppe Dellacha, an executive at the bank, was also ‘suicided’ from a window in the Milan headquarters. Calvi’s widow, Clara, is on record as laying the blame for her husband’s death at the bronze doors of the Vatican: ‘The Vatican had my husband killed to hide the bankruptcy of the Vatican Bank.’ 

If it did, and it is not a view I share, then it would perhaps be poetic justice. The case against Roberto Calvi with regard to his direct involvement in the death of Albino Luciani is strong. Very strong. 

Calvi was engaged in the progressive, continuing theft of over one billion dollars, a theft that would have been completely exposed if Luciani had lived. That exposure would have occurred in 1978. With Luciani dead, Calvi was free to continue his colossal and frightening array of crimes. Over 400 million dollars of the money that has apparently vanished in a Panamanian triangle was borrowed by Calvi from the world’s banks after the death of Albino Luciani. 

Calvi advised everyone to read The Godfather because, as he used to say, ‘Then you will understand the ways of the world.’ It was certainly the way of the world he inhabited. 

Until the end of his life he was laundering money for the Mafia, the role he had inherited from Michele Sindona. He was also recycling money for P2. These functions were carried out with the assistance of the Vatican Bank, with money moving from Banco Ambrosiano into a Vatican account in Italy, then on to Banco Gottardo or UBS in Switzerland. He laundered money from kidnappings, drugs sales, arms deals, bank raids, hold-ups, thefts of jewellery and works of art. His criminal contacts ranged from what is known as High Mafia to ordinary, run-of-the-mill murderers, through to right wing terrorist organizations. 

The 1.3 billion dollar hole in Banco Ambrosiano was not only created by the fraudulent purchase of shares in Calvi’s own bank. Many millions went to sustain Gelli and Ortolani. Fifty-five million dollars, for example, were diverted by Calvi from Peru to a numbered account at UBS Zürich. The owner of that account is Licio Gelli. Another 30 million dollars were diverted into Swiss accounts owned by Calvi’s close friend Flavio Carboni. 

In early 1982 Calvi transferred direct from the mother bank in Milan 470 million dollars to Peru. He then gave his secretary an air ticket to Monte Carlo and a pile of Telex messages. The messages duly sent from Monte Carlo moved the money into a variety of Swiss numbered accounts. 

The Italian political parties of Christian Democrats, Communists and Socialists were not the only political factions to have a bite at the golden apple. Millions were given at Gelli’s direct instructions to the military regimes which then controlled Argentina, and still control Uruguay and Paraguay. Money stolen by Calvi was used by the Argentine military junta to purchase Exocet missiles from the French; Calvi’s bank in Peru assisted in that deal. Millions went secretly and illegally to aid Solidarity in Poland. This particular transaction was a mix of money that Calvi had stolen and Vatican bank funds collected from the Catholic faithful. Calvi often talked about these transactions to trusted friends. They included Carboni who, like all good Masons, was secretly running a tape recorder: 

Marcinkus must watch out for Casaroli, who is head of the group that opposes him. If Casaroli should meet one of those financiers in New York who are working for Marcinkus, sending money to Solidarity, the Vatican would collapse. Or even if Casaroli should find just one of those pieces of paper that I know of – Goodbye Marcinkus. Goodbye Wojtyla. Goodbye Solidarity. The last operation would be enough, the one for 20 million dollars. I’ve also told Andreotti but it’s not clear which side he is on. If things in Italy go a certain way, the Vatican will have to hire a building in Washington behind the Pentagon. A far cry from St Peter’s. 

The total amount that was secretly and illegally funnelled on behalf of the Vatican to Solidarity was in excess of one hundred million dollars. Many who hold the strongest sympathies with Solidarity might well applaud such action. To interfere in such a manner, however, with the affairs of another country creates a dangerous precedent. Why not a hundred million funnelled secretly to the IRA to kill and maim on the British mainland? A billion dollars to the Sandinistas to blow up a few skyscrapers in New York, Chicago and San Francisco? Playing God, even for a Pope, can be a dangerous occupation. For Karol Wojtyla publicly to upbraid Nicaraguan priests for participating in politics while he interferes in such a profound manner with the affairs of Poland is breathtaking hypocrisy. 

We have no temporal goods to exchange, no economic interests to discuss. Our possibilities for intervention are specific and limited and of a special character. They do not interfere with the purely temporal, technical and political affairs, which are matters for your governments. 

Thus spoke Albino Luciani to the Diplomatic Corps accredited to the Vatican. It is clear that the man who has succeeded him takes precisely the opposite point of view. 

With regard to the murder of Albino Luciani, Roberto Calvi had the motive, the opportunity and undoubtedly, like Michele Sindona, the capacity. 

Before Luciani’s murder, Calvi associates in P2 had demonstrated their capacity to kill with a variety of appalling bomb outrages. Their ability to kill a specific subject was demonstrated with the murder of Vittorio Occorsio. After the death of the Pope, murder and mayhem began to match the tempo of the gigantic thefts in which Calvi was indulging. The fact that Emilio Alessandrini, Mino Pecorelli, Giorgio Ambrosoli, Antonio Varisco and Boris Giuliano are all dead, is the most telling evidence of the kind of company that Roberto Calvi kept. The fact that the Governor of the Bank of Italy and one of his most trusted colleagues could be falsely charged, that Sarcinelli was forced to endure two weeks of imprisonment, that for years men who knew the truth were frightened to act, is a demonstration of the terrifying power at the command of Calvi: power that came from many sources including Licio Gelli, Grand Master of P2. 

Licio Gelli was the Puppet Master with a few thousand strings from which to select. Strings appear to have led everywhere: to the heart of the Vatican, to the White House, to Presidential palaces in a wide range of countries. It was Gelli who gave his singular advice to senior P2 members that they should always carry a fatal dose of digitalis. A lethal dose will cause, to use a lay term, a heart attack. Any subsequent examination by a doctor that is merely external, will confirm that death has been caused by a myocardial infarction. The drug is odourless and is impossible to trace unless an autopsy is performed. 

Why did Licio Gelli use such a strange codename, ‘Luciani’, whenever he called his P2 paymaster on the special hotline? Was mere mention of the name enough to send the millions upon millions flowing from Calvi into Gelli’s various bank accounts? 

According to the members of Calvi’s family, he attributed all his problems to ‘the priests’. He made it clear which priests he had in mind – those in the Vatican. In September 1978 one priest in particular represented to Roberto Calvi the greatest threat with which he had ever been confronted. Calvi was with Gelli and Ortolani in South America in August 1978, planning new schemes. Can anyone really believe that Gelli and Ortolani would have merely shrugged their shoulders when Calvi told them that Albino Luciani was about to take a course of action that would mean the party was over?

The murder of a magistrate or a judge or a policeman could be effected openly. The death would remain a mystery or be blamed on one of the many terrorist organizations then rampaging throughout Italy. But the murder of a Pope to cover up what was ultimately a billion dollar theft would have to be achieved by stealth. It would have to arouse as little concern as possible. For the murder to achieve its aim, the death would have to appear natural. 

The cost, no matter how high, in bribes, contracts, fees or commissions, was irrelevant. If the object of the Pope’s death was to protect and sustain Roberto Calvi while he continued to steal millions, then there was a virtual well of truth to draw upon. The problem of deputy chairman Roberto Rosone, which Calvi discussed at great length with fellow Mason Carboni, was intended to be resolved with the contract murder of Rosone. He lived, but Carboni still paid 530,000 dollars, the day after the attack, to the surviving gangster Ernesto Diotavelli. Half a million for a deputy chairman. How much for a Pope? When you have an entire bank at your disposal? 

After the death of Roberto Calvi, the most pertinent obituary came from Mario Sarcinelli, one of the many who had personally experienced the powers upon which Calvi could call. ‘He began as a servant, then became a master, only to become the servant of other masters later on.’ Calvi’s ultimate master was the man I believe to be at the very heart of the conspiracy to murder Albino Luciani. Licio Gelli. 

This book has already recorded many instances of the power and influence that Gelli has exerted. At the time of Albino Luciani’s death in September 1978, Licio Gelli, to all practical purposes, ran Italy. His access to any person or any place within the Vatican City State was unrivalled. The fact that he was in South America at the time of Luciani’s death is no alibi in the conventional legal sense. Sindona was enjoying an early evening dry Martini in New York at the precise moment that Giorgio Ambrosoli was murdered by William Arico in Milan. That arrangement will not save Sindona if the Italian authorities ever manage to have him extradited from the USA. 

The Puppet Master, who uses the secret codename ‘Luciani’, continues to give impressive demonstrations that he is a man of extraordinary influence. In 1979 Gelli and Ortolani began working to bring about a political reconciliation between Christian Democrat leader and former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti and the Socialist leader Bettino Craxi. The exposure of nearly one thousand P2 members in 1981 slowed down these delicate negotiations. They have now flowered. At the time of writing the Prime Minister of Italy is Bettino Craxi, the Foreign Minister, Giulio Andreotti. Both men have much for which to thank Licio Gelli. 

On April 8th, 1980, Gelli wrote from Italy to Phillip Guarino, a senior member of the Republican Party National Committee, which at the time was concentrating all its efforts on getting Ronald Reagan elected President. Gelli wrote: ‘If you think it might be useful for something favourable to your Presidential candidate to be published in Italy, send me some material and I’ll get it published in one of the papers here.’ 

Without any knowledge of the power that Gelli wielded it might seem a curious offer. How could a man who officially owned no newspapers guarantee a favourable mention and sympathetic coverage for Reagan? The answer was a consortium of P2 members plus the Vatican-controlled Rizzoli, the massive publishing group, with interests stretching as far as Buenos Aires. Among the many magazines and newspapers was Corriere Della Sera, Italy’s most prestigious newspaper. Other P2 members were planted throughout the television, radio and newspaper media of the country. The favourable comments about Ronald Reagan, carefully placed by Licio Gelli, duly appeared in Italy. 

In January 1981, Licio Gelli was an honoured guest at the Presidential inauguration. Guarino later ruefully observed, ‘He had a better seat than I did.’ 

In May 1981, after the discovery of the list of nearly one thousand members of P2 that included several current Cabinet Ministers had led to the collapse of the Italian Government, Gelli continued his exercise of power from a variety of South American bases. An indication that Gelli was far from being a spent force can be seen in the movement of 95 million dollars by Calvi from Banco Ambrosiano to the Panamanian company of Bellatrix, one of the P2-controlled shell companies. This transfer, via a number of exotic routes including Rothschild in Zürich, Rothschild in Guernsey and the Banque Nationale de Paris in Panama, sprayed money in the most unlikely directions, including some 20 million dollars into Ansbacher & Co, a small merchant bank in Dublin. 

One year later, in May 1982, with the Falklands war at its height, Licio Gelli, a man in hiding, on the run, wanted on countless charges, calmly came to Europe to help his Argentinian friends. The original Exocet missiles which Gelli had purchased for the junta had proved themselves to be a devastating weapon. As previously recorded, Gelli came to buy more. He stayed with Ortolani at a villa at Cap Ferrat and began secret negotiations not only with a variety of arms dealers but also with Aerospatiale, the makers of the missile. British Intelligence became aware of these negotiations and alerted their counterparts in the Italian Secret Service who promptly began to descend on the Cap Ferrat villa. They were prevented from getting to Gelli by the DST, the French Secret Service, who blatantly prevented all attempts to arrest Gelli. That is an example of the power of Licio Gelli. 

While negotiating with a variety of potential Exocet suppliers, Gelli was also in daily contact with Calvi. The two Freemasons still had so much in common. By the second week of June 1982 Calvi, like Gelli, was also a man on the run. With his Ambrosiano empire on the verge of collapse he had illegally left Italy, first travelling to Austria and subsequently to London. He and Gelli once again had a deep mutual need for each other. Calvi needed protection from the Italian authorities, Gelli needed many millions for the Exocet purchase. My research indicates that the French were planning to find a way round the arms sales embargo then operating against Argentina. The missiles would find their way to Argentina via Peru. French technicians were standing by to be flown out to modify the Exocets for the Argentinian Air Force. 

For Gelli and Calvi their priorities clashed fatally. The war would not wait while the Puppet Master pulled his Italian strings. Calvi, at Gelli’s suggestion, travelled to London and to his death. He was ‘suicided’ on June 17th, 1982, the same day that General Galtieri was replaced as President of Argentina by General Bignone. Argentina had lost the war. Calvi’s P2 colleagues considered that by failing to divert money promptly for the Exocets he had contributed to that defeat. 

In August 1982, the Argentinian junta secretly decided to recommence hostilities against the British forces guarding the Falklands. They considered that a quantity of Exocets could bring them victory and the islands. 

This time Gelli dealt with a former officer of the Italian Secret Service, Colonel Massimo Pugliese, a member of P2. Again British Intelligence learned of the proposed deal. They ensured it aborted. 

During the same month, August 1982, Gelli was encountering a problem with one of his secret bank accounts in Switzerland. It was not performing to order. Every time that Gelli, in South America, attempted to transfer money, the UBS in Geneva declined to comply with the instructions. Gelli was advised that he would have to appear at the bank personally. 

Using a false Argentinian passport, he flew to Madrid and then to Geneva on September 13th, 1982. He presented his false documentation and was advised there would be a short delay. Minutes later he was arrested. He had walked into a carefully prepared trap. The account had been frozen at the request of the Italian Government who had been advised by the Swiss of the real identity of the account holder. 

The account had been created for Gelli by Roberto Calvi. Into it the Milanese banker had poured over 100 million dollars. At the time of his arrest Gelli was attempting to have the 55 million dollars remaining in the account transferred to Uruguay. 

Extradition proceedings began immediately, with Gelli singing the same song that had previously been chanted by Sindona and Calvi. ‘I am a victim of political persecution. It is a plot of the left.’ While Swiss magistrates considered the issues, Licio Gelli was held in one of Switzerland’s maximum security prisons, Champ Dollon. Extradition proceedings involving any member of P2, as this book has already established, tend to be protracted. Gelli was still in Champ Dollon in the summer of 1983. 

With Italy about to face another General Election in June, the parliamentary commission which had been investigating P2 was suspended. The Christian Democrat party fielded at least five P2 members at the election. Signorina Tina Anselmi, who had been chairman of the commission, was asked her views on P2 after two years’ intensive study of the secret society. She said: 

P2 is by no means dead. It still has power. It is working in the institutions. It is moving in society. It has money, means and instruments still at its disposal. It still has fully operative power centres in South America. It is also still able to condition, at least in part, Italian political life. 

The evidence overwhelmingly confirms the validity of Signorina Anselmi’s statements. When news of Gelli’s arrest became known in Argentina, Admiral Emilio Massera, a member of the ruling junta, remarked, ‘Signoi Gelli has rendered invaluable service to Argentina. This country has much to thank him for and will forever be in his debt.’ 

Admiral Massera, like General Carlos Suarez Mason, the First Army commander, like the organizer of the Argentine Death Squads, José Lope Rega, is a member of the Argentine section of P2. In Uruguay P2 membership includes the former Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, General Gregorio Alvarez. 

If anyone in Italy or elsewhere considered that Tina Anselmi was merely attempting to score political points before an election they must have received a jolt on August 10th, 1983. Champ Dollon had one prisoner fewer than the day before. Licio Gelli had escaped. The Swiss authorities, attempting to cover their deep embarrassment, are now in the process of laying the entire blame at the feet of one corrupt guard, Umberto Cerdana, who officially took a derisory bribe of just over £6,000 from Gelli. * If any reader of this book believes that Gelli escaped from Switzerland with the help of only one prison guard, they also probably believe that Albino Luciani died a natural death. A guard takes the equivalent of four months’ salary for an act that could now give him a prison sentence of seven-and-a-half years? 

Nine days after Gelli’s escape the Swiss authorities approved the extradition request from Italy. The trouble was that there was no Gelli to extradite. Driven first to France by his son in a hired BMW, the pair were transported by an unwitting helicopter pilot to Monte Carlo. The excuse given to the pilot for diverting from Nice and landing at Monte Carlo was that Gelli was in urgent need of dental treatment. Via a yacht belonging to Francesco Pazienza, a man who claims to have been a good friend of the late Roberto Calvi, Gelli continued his search for a good dentist in Uruguay, where at the time of writing he sits still pulling strings from a ranch a few miles north of Montevideo. He is wanted in many countries, accused of many crimes, but the mass of information that he has so diligently acquired over the years ensures that he continues to be protected. 

The Italian election in June 1983 resulted in Signor Bettino Craxi, one of the many beneficiaries of Calvi’s largesse, becoming Prime Minister. Told of Gelli’s escape he said: ‘The flight of Gelli confirms that the Grand Master has a network of powerful friends.’ 

If, and it is indeed a very large if, Licio Gelli is ever handed over alive to the Italian Government, he faces a variety of criminal charges. They include the following: extortion, blackmail, drug smuggling, arms smuggling, conspiracy to overthrow the legal Government, political espionage, military espionage, illegal possession of State secrets, involvement with a series of bomb outrages including the Bologna Station attack in which 84 people died. 

The chain that link by link leads from a murdered Pope to Bishop Paul Marcinkus to Roberto Calvi to Umberto Ortolani and Licio Gelli is strong. For circumstantial evidence to succeed it must be strong, must sustain the closest scrutiny before a jury can bring in a verdict of ‘guilty’. No jury confronted with the evidence contained in this book could return a verdict of ‘death by natural causes’. No judge, no coroner in the world, would accept such a verdict on this evidence. That is beyond all argument. No evidence exists to indicate that Albino Luciani’s death was the result of an accident. We are left with murder. Not, in my view, by person or persons unknown, but by persons all too well known, with, at the heart of the conspiracy, Licio Gelli. Gelli was a man who happened to number among his P2 members the brother of Cardinal Sebastiano Baggio, Francesco. His meetings with the powerful and famous included audiences with Pope Paul VI. Gelli was a man whose close friends included Cardinal Paolo Bertoli. Gelli’s closest P2 adviser, Umberto Ortolani, knew his way around Vatican City better than many cardinals. Ortolani, with his drawer full of Vatican honours and awards, was so close to the nerve centre of Vatican power that his was the villa, and he the host, at the pre-Conclave secret meeting that finalized strategy and brought about the election of Paul VI. It was Ortolani who conceived the idea of the multi-million dollar sale of the Vatican interests in Società Generale Immobiliare, Ceramiche Pozzi and Condotte d’Acqua. Ortolani was the P2 marriage broker, joining as partners the Mafioso and fellow P2 member Michele Sindona and Pope Paul VI. He collected vast commissions from one and Papal honours from the other. Gelli was also that collector of curious knowledge and information, including photographs of Pope John Paul II completely nude next to his swimming pool. When Gelli showed these snapshots to senior Socialist Party politician Vanni Nistico he remarked, ‘Look at the problems the secret services have. If it’s possible to take these pictures of the Pope, imagine how easy it is to shoot him.’ Indeed. Or poison his predecessor. 

And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said unto them, It is written. 

My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves. 

Matthew 21:12/13 

Albino Luciani had a dream. He dreamt of a Roman Catholic Church which would truly respond to the needs of its people on vital issues such as birth control. He dreamt of a Church which would dispense with the wealth, power and prestige that it had acquired through Vatican Incorporated; of a Church which would get out of the market place and reject the moneylenders where the message of Christ had become tainted; of a Church that would once again rely upon what has always been its greatest asset, its source of true power, its greatest claim to a unique prestige: the Gospel. 

By the evening of September 28th, 1978, Albino Luciani had taken the first steps towards the realization of his extraordinary dream. At 9.30 p.m. he closed his bedroom door and the dream ended. 

In Italy now, there is talk of making Albino Luciani a Saint. Already petitions of many thousands of signatures have been collected. Ultimately if this man who was ‘a poor man, accustomed to small things and silence’ is beatified, it would be more than fitting. On September 28th, 1978 he was martyred for his beliefs. Confronted with a man like Albino Luciani, with the problems his continuing presence would pose, the Italian Solution was applied. The decision that the Pope must die was taken and God’s Candidate was murdered. 

a short epilogue and postscript start at page 228 on the scroll at the link and source of this work
http://docshare04.docshare.tips/files/24043/240435065.pdf

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