God's Banker (30 page)

Rosone produced a new draft motion requesting the Bank of Italy to step in; but Bagnasco remained adamant. He would agree to nothing until he had had more time to study the true situation of the bank. Meanwhile Botta, the head of the foreign department warned that unless Banco Andino received $15 million to repay a loan by the end of June, the group would be thrown into default by other creditors. Finally the vote was taken. By nine votes to nil, and the abstention of Bagnasco, the board of Banco Ambrosiano voted to dissolve itself. Hardly had the news begun to clatter out on wire service printers just after 6 p.m. than the Bank of Italy activated its contingency plan.

The most senior of the team of inspectors in Milan, Vincenzo Desario, was named provisional commissioner. Only hours later he was telexing all the foreign and Italian banks which had dealt with Ambrosiano, pleading for their "widest possible" co-operation, and promising that the regular administration of Ambrosiano would be guaranteed. Nothing however would again be regular or normal in the affairs of the bank.

Every one of Ambrosiano's 4,200 employees must have been bewil­dered and fearful at the upheavals of the week. None more so than Graziella Corrocher, the 55-year-old personal secretary of Calvi, and before that of the previous chairman Mozzana. She was a spinster who had given her life to the bank. In recent weeks she had been worried not only by the ill health of her sister, but at the evident irritability and dissatisfaction of Calvi himself. Not even with his personal secretary could he form a relationship of trust and warmth. Towards the end, he would complain to his lawyers about her performance; maybe in some obscure way he saw Corrocher too as part of the great conspiracy against him.

Shortly after the directors had agreed to ask the Bank of Italy to take over, she took a red felt-tipped pen and wrote a short note. She apologized for what she intended to do. Her work with Calvi though had been miserable. How much coldness she had endured, how little satisfaction Corrocher had derived from her work; "I stand by the decision taken by the board," she wrote, "but I cannot stand by Calvi any longer. . . what a disgrace, to have run away. May he be cursed a thousand times for the harm he has done to everyone at the bank, and to the image of the group we were once so proud of."

Then, just before 7 p.m., she climbed on to the windowsill of her fourth-floor office and threw herself to her death. Her body landed
with a thump on the ramp leading down to Ambrosiano's under­ground garage in the inside courtyard. Rosone was talking to a journalist on the phone, telling what had happened that day. The caller heard a din in the background, and Rosone broke off the conversation. Then he returned to the phone. "My God," he said, "Calvi's secretary's just killed herself."

Some have been tempted to see Corrocher's death as murder, not suicide, that she did not jump, but was pushed to her death. The motive, presumably, that she should not divulge the secrets she must have known. But to have devised a suicide note of such despairing intensity would surely have taxed the most cynical assassin. In that overcharged moment, it was more probably a gruesome, but melo­dramatically fitting, end to a day when the last illusions died. Or at least it
seemed
the end.

Roberto Calvi never
did return to Italy. Perhaps, in his initial relief at successful escape to Klagenfurt, he really thought he could. His family in Washington had already learnt of his flight; both from Pazienza, who mysteriously visited London briefly on Friday June 11 before taking the Concorde back to New York on the morning of Saturday June 12, and from Giorgio Gregori, their lawyer in Rome. On her father's instructions, Anna relayed on Calvi's reassurances to his wife and son, telling them to go as planned on a trip to Los Angeles.

That weekend the participants in the last journey gathered at the house of the Kleinszig sisters. Vittor drove up from Trieste, while Carboni flew in from Rome. Calvi spent the weekend making phone calls and burning documents he had brought with him in the fireplace in the sitting room. It is not known whom else he telephoned from Klagenfurt, or what were the documents he destroyed. Presumably they related to his links with the Vatican and the P-2. Maybe he was still in touch with the IOR, or trying to mobilize what allies he had left, in a final attempt to save Ambrosiano. But his room for manoeuvre was fast vanishing. That Sunday his disappearance was on the front page of Italian newspapers: by Monday it was news all over Europe.

Roberto Calvi was now the most sought after man in Europe and his last four days of life were to be spent dodging furtively, under a transparent alias, halfway across Europe. Not least of the riddles of this period is why, if Calvi had to run, he did not go to join his family in America—or travel to South America, a traditional refuge for runaway Italians, and where he had such strong connections, both business and political. Perhaps he was unable to face his family, and present them with conclusive evidence of his failure; perhaps inter­mittently he still was able to persuade himself that salvation was possible; perhaps he was no longer physically free to decide. We do not know. It is impossible to be sure.

True to his love of the shadows, Calvi travelled mostly by night. Late in the evening of the Sunday, June 13, he and Vittor left Klagenfurt for the drive across the mountains to Innsbruck, where they arrived at dawn on Monday. Carboni himself that day travelled on to Zurich, where he was joined by Ernesto Diotallevi, his underworld associate who is believed to have procured the false passport for Calvi.

Calvi, however, did not stay in Innsbruck long. He and Carboni agreed that their next rendezvous would be at Bregenz, a small town close to the border with Switzerland and West Germany, on the shores of Lake Constance. There Calvi spent the night of Monday, June 14, and there he met Hans Kunz, the Swiss businessman and friend of Carboni, and who was to be the main organizer of the last stage of the journey to London.

The decision to go to London may have been in doubt right up to the last moment. That night Calvi called his daughter telling her that Kunz was arranging a flat for her in Zurich, adding cryptically that perhaps he would be coming to join her. In the event he was not to see Anna again, nor was she to have the promised flat.

The following morning, of Tuesday June 15, Calvi and Vittor abruptly returned to Innsbruck. The banker still seemed in good humour; again we do not know whom he spoke to by phone, or what promises he received. He can hardly have been unaware, however, of developments in Italy, above all the savage run on Ambrosiano's shares. As his daughter travelled to a hotel in Zurich, waiting for Kunz or his wife to get in touch, and as Leemans and Rosone in Milan prepared for their fateful trip to the IOR in Rome, Calvi left for London.

Accompanied by Vittor, he travelled in a private jet, which had been arranged by the Swiss businessman. The pilot of the plane was told his two passengers were executives of the Fiat motor company. At sunset that Tuesday evening the plane touched down at Gatwick airport. Calvi's false passport aroused no suspicions at Gatwick's immigration controls. Together with Vittor, he went straight to the lodgings Kunz had arranged for them at Chelsea Cloisters in Sloane Avenue. Vittor, both guardian and Calvi's last bodyguard, signed in for both of them, and they were assigned apartment 881.

Foreigners are often misled by its name, for Chelsea Cloisters is no romantic, luxurious hideaway in bohemian Chelsea, but a vast bar­racks like building, containing innumerable apartments and small rooms for short- or longer-term letting. Here, in the anonymous circumstances of the fugitive, the man who until a few months earlier had been Italy's most powerful private banker was to spend the last two days of his life.

Calvi's mood changed to match his new surroundings. He became, Vittor said, agitated, depressed, and again frightened. Most of Wednesday he spent in the room stretched on the bed, staring at the television, or making phone calls. Vittor, whenever he went out, had to call him every twenty minutes. During the day, Carboni arrived with the Keinszig sisters from Zurich via Amsterdam, and booked into the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane. From there he phoned Calvi, who protested strongly about the conditions under which he had to live, demanding to move somewhere else. The two met that evening, with Vittor, in Hyde Park, and Carboni promised to make new arrangements. It was, he maintains, the last time he saw Calvi alive.

But why London? As far as can be established Calvi contacted none of his previous business associates in the city, neither De Savary, nor others in the banking world, with whom the Calvis were on friendly terms after that visit to London in February 1981. Calvi's knowledge of London was that of the occasional business visitor; his command of English was adequate but no more. True, Pazienza had been in London a few days earlier; but practised antennae in the City had picked up no signal of unusual activity indicating that the improbable deal, to sell the Panamanian shares in Ambrosiano for $ 1,000 million or more, was nearing completion.

Perhaps the key lay in the shadowy "
Loggia di Londra
", a "Lon­don Lodge" of freemasons of which Calvi would sometimes cryptical­ly admit membership. Those to whom he spoke of it gained the impression that Gelli had put him in touch with it; Calvi would imply that it was of enormous financial influence and had helped him in many of his dealings. The "
Loggia di Londra"
would fit in with Calvi's love of secret clubs and cabals, with his preference for the back rather than the front door. The fact, however, was that Calvi was rarely financially active in London—Ambrosiano did not even have a representative office in what is, after all, Europe's financial capital.

Conceivably, London was chosen because it was so huge a metro­polis, where identity checks were minimal. A fugitive could easily go to ground, and connecting flights abounded to every corner of the world. What can be said is that if there did exist a premeditated plan, then the arrangements devised by Carboni and his fellows, and their behaviour, bore little sign of it. Rather, a nervous improvisation was the order of the day.

Early on Thursday June 17 Carboni appears to have made a call from the Hilton to Wilfredo Vitalone, a Rome lawyer enlisted by himself and Pazienza to help persuade Italian magistrates to take a gentler line towards the banker. Afterwards he spoke to Calvi himself by telephone and then checked out of the hotel.

Carboni then contacted an English acquaintance called William Morris, a local Government officer from West London, whose Italian wife was aunt to Carboni's mistress of many years. Morris insisted he had previously met Carboni just twice, while on holiday in Italy. And so, as the Kleinszigs spent that Thursday shopping, the Sardinian enlisted his help to find more satisfactory lodgings for his unhappy charge.

For all the while Calvi was becoming more restless and depressed. At some point on June 16 or 17 (the accounts of Carboni and Vittor differed) he shaved off the thin moustache he had always worn. He spent the whole of Thursday in his room, his only contact with the outside world, apart from his faithful Vittor, the telephone. Even his family, to whom he had seemed cheerful in the days before, noticed the change. In one of the last conversations with his wife, he was still talking of the "wonderful thing" that was going to change their existence. But that Thursday morning he spoke three times with his daughter Anna in Zurich, insisting on the danger she faced, and that she should leave Europe for the US: "Something really important is happening, and today and tomorrow all hell is going to break loose."

Anna booked a flight the next day from Zurich to New York, and her father called again to tell her that the Kunz would provide the money required to buy the ticket. He added he would be in touch the following morning to make sure she was on her way. Early on Friday the Swiss businessman's wife arrived at the hotel to give Anna 50,000 Swiss francs in cash. By that time, of course, her father was dead.

The state of Calvi's mind that last afternoon can only be guessed at. It is hard to believe that he did not learn of the tumult in Milan: the removal by Ambrosiano's board of his power to sign documents, which banished what hopes there were of the rescue deal, the decision to place Banco Ambrosiano in the hands of the Bank of Italy, and finally the death of his secretary Corrocher. And it is inconceivable that in one way or another they did not bear on what was to happen that night. Back in Italy, the events at Banco Ambrosiano's head­quarters (though not those within the Vatican earlier) were the top item on the evening news at 8 p.m., or 7 p.m. London time.

Only later was Carboni, who had meanwhile booked into the Sheraton Hotel near Morris's home, back in touch with Calvi and Vittor at Chelsea Cloisters, saying he was on his way at last. Not until about 11 p.m. did he arrive in Sloane Avenue. But instead of going up to Calvi's room, he asked Vittor to come down. They then left, to collect the Kleinszig girls, who had long been waiting in a nearby bar. Both assert that from that moment, they never saw Calvi again. Vittor's version was that Calvi earlier had refused to go down and meet Carboni. When he returned to the apartment, after leaving Carboni and the girls, he found it locked and empty. Calvi had left on the last journey of his life. After having himself let into the room by a porter, Vittor spent an anxious night before taking the first flight the next day for Vienna. The Kleinszig sisters also left for Austria.

Carboni, however, seems to have been much less perturbed. On the next morning, Friday, he took Morris's 21-year-old daughter Odette to lunch in Chelsea, and then suggested they went to call on a "friend" of his who was staying at Chelsea Cloisters. There was of course no-one, since Calvi was dead and Vittor already out of the country. The two then went back to Morris's home in Heston, close to London airport. The next day, for reasons unexplained, Carboni and Odette caught a plane to Edinburgh, from Gatwick, not Heathrow. They stayed in Edinburgh just 24 hours, before Carboni completed his erratic European odyssey by taking a private plane to Austria on the Sunday morning. He was arrested in a villa close to Lugano at the end of July.

At any given time, there are between 70,000 and 80,000 Italian citizens in the greater London area, under the jurisdiction of Italy's consul general in London. Problems with the police are inevitable. Once a fortnight on average he receives notification that one of them has been arrested, or worse. And so it was on Friday, June 18. But Teodoro Fuxa, the consul, swiftly suspected that something really important could be afoot.

At 10.30 that morning came a call from the City Police. The body of a man with an Italian passport, in the name of Calvini, had been found three hours earlier hanging from scaffolding under the North side of Blackfriars bridge. Fuxa had read the Italian papers, and the similarity of the name with that of the banker missing for almost a week was enough to make him curious. Even more curious, had he known of them, were the detailed circumstances of the death.

The alarm was given by an unsuspecting City clerk walking to work along the embankment. Tall enough to see over the parapet, he noticed to his horror a corpse dangling from the second rung, and quickly gave the alarm. The body was cut down by the River Police.

The soggy Italian passport bore the name of Gian Roberto Calvini. The pockets of the expensive-looking suit contained the equivalent of almost £7,400 in cash, but chiefly in dollars and Swiss francs. There was just £47 in sterling, and only 58,000 Italian lire. The police also discovered two watches on the body; a badly corroded wrist watch which had stopped at 1.52 a.m., and a pocket watch which had run until 5.49 a.m. In the pockets, and stuffed down the trousers, were lumps of stone weighing over ten pounds to act as ballast, plus various slips of paper.