God's Banker (38 page)

The two weeks of hearings produced no conclusive new evidence bearing directly on how the chairman of Banco Ambrosiano met his end. But they provided a wealth of extra detail on the circumstances leading up to it, including such trivia as the correct combination required to open the numerical lock of Calvi's overnight case: it was 0-0-0-0. More serious, many of the grey, and still darker, aspects of the affair, left unexplored in a single day's inquest of July 23, 1982, were given a thorough airing. Those most responsible were Dr Arthur Davies, the mediculous and most inquisitive Coroner, and Mr George Carman QC, engaged by the Calvi family in their campaign to demonstrate that the banker had been murdered.

First, Mr Carman concentrated on showing how difficult it would have been for Calvi to have committed suicide in such a place. The banker was 62 years old, portly and cumbersome. He would have to climb over a parapet and down a ladder, then clamber across a scaffolding and fasten the rope—all the while weighed down by ten pounds of stones. Professor Keith Simpson, the chief pathologist at Guy's Hospital, was obliged to concede that it would have been easier for Calvi to have been taken by professional criminals to the spot in a boat, and his body then suspended from the scaffolding.

Professor Simpson, whose forensic evidence was so important in securing the first suicide verdict, maintained that he had found no trace of drugs or foul play during his original autopsy. He reiterated that the medical evidence was consistent with suicide by hanging. But he admitted that Calvi could have been immobilized, or made unconscious, by a drug which left no trace, such as ethyl chloride, or a curare-based drug of the kind used in abdominal surgery.

Furthermore, Mr Carman demonstrated how the night entrance to Chelsea Cloisers was effectively unguarded, so that Calvi could have been taken from the building by other people, without being noticed. Donald Bartlett of the Thames River Police, who had taken down Calvi's corpse on the morning of June 18, confirmed that it would have been simple, when the Thames tide was high, for an experienced boatman to take a small craft in under the bridge, and from it hang a body to the scaffolding. But in the absence of hard confirmatory evidence, these remained hypotheses; possibilities but no more.

The second avenue explored by the inquest was the behaviour, on occasion bizarre to say the least, of those who accompanied Calvi in his flight. Sustained questioning exposed discrepancies and contra­dictions between the testimony of the Kleinszig sisters and of Vittor, and earlier statements made by himself and Carboni to magistrates in Italy. There were also curious lapses of memory about important episodes during that last week of the banker's life. The exact timing of movements during the most crucial period of all on the Thursday night, between Vittor's leaving Calvi in apartment 881 at Chelsea Cloisters at roughly 11 p.m., and his return between an hour and two hours later to find Calvi gone, remained unclear.

Few seriously believed that Carboni and Vittor, neither of them English speakers or familiar with London, actually carried out a murder as skilful and well planned as that which the questioning of Mr Carman was intimating. But, as he put it to the court on June 15: "I have never sought to suggest that if Calvi was murdered, Carboni was physically involved. Whether he was aware of it is another matter entirely." So was Calvi left unguarded deliberately, at a pre-arranged moment? On the other hand, if that was so, then there has been not one firm pointer to the identity of the third party (or rather parties) who intervened at that point to set their murder plot, complete with masonic ritual, into motion.

There was also the question of Carboni's peculiar return on June 20 to Austria, via Edinburgh; and then his meeting the following day in Zurich with Vittor. Was this to work out an agreed version of events before Vittor turned himself over to the Italian police in Trieste on June 23? And if so, why?

The key was still Carboni. Only he could tell exactly why he went to London, and on whose, if anyone's, behalf he was engaged. Only Carboni, moreover, could explain the payments made by him before and after Calvi's death: including one of $100,000 into the Swiss account of his mistress, Laura Concas, niece of the wife of Morris; and another, far larger, of $530,000 in favour of his underworld acquaintance Ernesto Diotallevi, whom he had seen in Zurich shortly before leaving for London on June 16. For what services was that money paid? Diotallevi, who had been on the run for many months, was another whom police and magistrates were particularly anxious to question.

But Carboni was not there; and in his absence the questions raised by the second inquest outnumbered the answers. Maybe the balance of probability had shifted away from suicide and a little closer to that of murder. But of certainty there was none. The verdict of the coroner, given at 4 p.m. on Monday June 27,1983, was an open one: as it had to be, and as it should have been at the first inquest eleven months earlier. Italy, it is often said, is a country where everything is possible. That judgement remained as true of the death of Roberto Calvi as it was of his extraordinary life.

On the afternoon
of Friday February
17, 1984
a group of sober- suited men left the Hotel des Bergues in Geneva, well satisfied with the outcome of their discussions. Less than
24
hours later, and some 600 miles away to the south in the graceful Renaissance setting of Villa Madama on a pineclad hillside overlooking Rome, Bettino Craxi, the first Socialist Prime Minister of modern Italy sat down with Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, the Vatican's Secretary of State for a solemn ceremony. That afternoon they signed into effect a new Concordat governing relations between the two States, 55 years after Mussolini and Pope Pius XI had concluded the first such agreement in
1929.

For all their different character, the two events were most closely connected. The meeting in Geneva was the culmination of a search which had begun a year and a half earlier, for agreement between the Vatican, the Italian authorities and 120 foreign creditor banks on a settlement of the debts left by Banco Ambrosiano. And for many months it had been clear that without such a settlement, the new Concordat which had been under negotiation for almost a decade, could not be ratified.

Often during 1983 it had seemed that an understanding would be impossible. The joint commission of experts representing Italy and the Vatican, set up on Christmas Eve 1982, worked through most of the subsequent year. Its six members, three from each side, travelled to Luxembourg, Nassau, Latin America and beyond, to sift through the records of the dealings between the IOR and the foreign sub­sidiaries of the Ambrosiano of Roberto Calvi. In the autumn they presented their conclusions. But these brought little enlightenment.

The dispute which had sealed the collapse of Ambrosiano in June 1982 remained. The three Italian members of the commission were convinced that the Vatican bank was a knowing accomplice to fraud. But the representatives of the Holy See insisted as all along, that the lOR and Marcinkus had in their naivety been tricked, and could not be held responsible for the
debacle.

Gradually however it became clear that even the secret work of the commission was merely elegant camouflage for real negotiations taking place elsewhere.

A settlement was in everyone's interest. The Vatican might affect studied unconcern; in fact it wanted at all costs to close the affair, to protect its relations with Italy and to prevent further embarrassing details of its financial behaviour being aired in court actions which were growing steadily more probable. The creditor banks quite simply wanted their money back—or as much of it as possible. For its part, the Italian Government was as keen to remove a lingering irritant in its own financial dealings abroad as it was to force the Vatican to honour its own obligations.

As 1983 wore on, contacts intensified between the main interested parties: the liquidators of the old Ambrosiano, Pasquale Chiomenti, a wise old Italian lawyer trusted by all parties, emissaries from the creditor banks, as well as representatives of Touche Ross, the London accounting firm which now managed Ambrosiano Holding of Luxembourg, and as such was seeking to trace the money dissipated by Calvi. In the background, both the Bank of Italy and the Vatican authorities monitored proceedings intently.

The pieces in the settlement jigsaw gradually fell into place. To raise money, the Vatican sold its interest in the Vianini construction group for $41 million. Next, Ambrosiano Luxembourg disposed of its controlling interest in Banca del Gottardo for $144 million to the Sumitomo Bank of Japan. These proceeds too would help towards the overall settlement. Most important of all, the IOR consented to provide $250 million as its contribution to a lasting peace treaty. The Vatican would emphasise that the payment, which would have to be raised in large measure by an international loan, did not amount to an admission of responsibility. For most interested onlookers however, it was precisely that.

And so, that February day in the Hotel des Bergues, agreement in principle was sealed. Ratification was still required from the 88 main creditor banks of Ambrosiano Luxembourg, and from 32 other smaller creditors of banks in the Ambrosiano group, most notably Ambrosiano Overseas in Nassau and Banco Andino in Lima. The procedure might take two months or more; but at that late stage, few were likely to cavil.

In all Touche Ross would have up to $475 million available. The "group of 88", which had fought so hard for recompense, would see its efforts rewarded by repayment of 70 per cent or more of the money its members had so injudiciously lent to Calvi's Luxembourg holding company. Smaller sums would go to the minor creditors, and to the liquidators in Milan. In return, the foreign banks would drop all outstanding lawsuits against the Italian authorities, Nuovo Banco Ambrosiano—and against the IOR. Lending to Italian borrowers, in so far as it had been disturbed by the Calvi scandal, would be resumed normally.

But even this laborious settlement threw no light on the ultimate destination of much of the vanished money. The search would probably continue for years, with little guarantee of success. Nor would the Vatican do much to help. After a meeting in March, which estimated that the budget deficit for 1984 of the Holy See might reach an unprecedented $32 million, the cardinals who superintended its finances stated cryptically that the role of the IOR in the Ambrosiano affair would be explained "in due time". As a synonym for "never", the phrase was as polite as any other.

But the puzzle over the money, even the hints of entanglement in global conspiracy, are mere stepping stones towards the mystery at the heart of this story: Roberto Calvi himself.

The modest son of a modest bank official in Milan had brought about, if not entirely singlehanded, at least principally by his own endeavours the greatest bank scandal in living memory. He had exposed the ease with which a natural deceiver could exploit the opportunities offered by the international banking system, and how that deception could be maintained for so long. Indeed in May 1983 the leading central banks had revised their own "Concordat" of eight years before—a revision specifically designed to eliminate the uncer­tain division of responsibilities exposed by the Ambrosiano crisis.

The career of Calvi had laid bare the extent to which the ingrown ways of the government of Italy had become aberrant; and how expensive such aberrations could be. The financial cost, to be met in the end by the ordinary taxpayer, would run into many hundreds of billions of lire. The politicians also perhaps paid a price. By suitable irony, the open verdict at the second inquest in London was delivered at almost the very moment that the Christian Democrat politicians in Rome were learning of their worst ever defeat in 38 years of power at the general election of June 26 and 27—a defeat to which the scandal of Calvi and Ambrosiano had probably contributed. Then there were other, less quantifiable considerations.

One was the subtle damage that the exploits of Calvi may have inflicted upon the status of Italy in international financial markets, between summer 1982 and the spring of 1984 when settlement with the creditor banks was reached. Another was the wider impact of the Ambrosiano affair upon the Bank of Italy.

The argument would extend well beyond whether a host of foreign banks should have an error of lending judgement made good. Just how deeply the central bank had been marked by the story of Roberto Calvi, only time would reveal. Sureness of touch, self-confidence and prestige are qualities difficult to measure. For'a while, and in foreign eyes at least, the Bank of Italy perhaps lost a little of all three.

In retrospect, the "Bank of Italy affair" of 1979 would stand out even more vividly as the most miserable episode (at least to one who was not Italian) in a miserable tale. It had neither the gruesome fascination of Calvi's end, nor the baroque seediness of the way in which $1,287 million vanished. But rarely before or since has the dark underside of Italian life been so vividly illustrated. It was easy, when all was done, to argue that the central bank should have acted more vigorously and far sooner to cut short Calvi's enterprise—certainly after his conviction in 1981. But that was to ignore the pressures, unspoken but in Italy no less real for that, upon it. And, in the end, it
was
the central bank which finally exposed Calvi. Perhaps the knock­out should have been a clean blow in an early round, rather than a messy affair at the end of the fight; but a knockout none the less it was.