God's Banker (5 page)

The city was completing the job of reconstruction, and money and
creativity abounded. Even Milan's two football teams were doing
their share to enhance its prestige, winning various European
trophies. By present standards inflation scarcely existed, and as
Italian exports multiplied the lira was proving itself one of the world's
soundest currencies. In Rome, the Government felt sufficiently
emboldened to allow banks greater freedom abroad, and capital
restrictions were cautiously lifted. Italy was emerging from its chrysa­lis, and so was Ambrosiano.

In 1963 the bank established in Luxembourg a holding company
called Compendium, which was in time to be rechristened Banco
Ambrosiano Holding (BAH). Canesi duly became chairman, and at
the age of 45 Roberto Calvi won key promotion to the rank of
direttore centrale,
in the command centre of the bank, and only a rung
or two below the main board itself.

There was little doubt that he would climb still higher. Courteous
and able, quick to grasp ideas and unfailingly discreet, Calvi was a
skilled banker, by now determined to launch Banco Ambrosiano as a
real force in international finance. His workload was considerable,
yet still he found time to study French and English, two languages of
which a working knowledge was essential if he was to project himself
and his bank beyond Italy's frontiers. This on its own might have been
enough to place him comfortably ahead of potential rivals within
Ambrosiano. But Calvi had the ear of the chairman too. The com­bination seems to have been irresistible.

Nevertheless, certain traits in Calvi's character were already being
noticed. People from outside the bank who had to deal with him
would complain of his obsessive secrecy, the way he would claim to be
familiar with something when quite plainly he wasn't. From early on,
to lie was second nature for him. Then there was that hermetic barrier
which Calvi would sometimes erect between himself and the world,
incomunicabilita
as the inelegant Italian word has it. Worse still, for
all his endeavours and progress, Calvi had still failed to win accept­ance by the Milanese banking community which really mattered.
Human relations, as always, were his weak point. For Banca Com-
merciale or Credito Italiano, the other leading "lay" bank of the city,
Calvi was and would remain an alien body, a pariah from the other
side of the fence, an odd and suspect mixture of ambition and
reticence. Bankers, like everyone else, are wary of potential rivals
they cannot properly fathom. Just who was this man, who at no point
in his career would ever genuinely enjoy the social occasions that
sprinkle a banker's working life?

A sense of insecurity and inferiority is a recurring theme of
recollections about the Calvi of those years. His comparatively
modest origins, the failure to complete his degree course at the
Bocconi were surely factors. In April 1982, at the last shareholders'
meeting of Ambrosiano, he spoke with pride of the way he had risen
to the top, unaided by connections of wealth or birth. Throughout his
extraordinary career, shyness and secretiveness fought with the
desire for social recognition. But if he would never dazzle in con­versation in the
salotti
where the inbred Milanese financial world
assembled to exchange gossip, then the bank, by the mid-1960s
growing at between ten and twenty per cent a year, would speak for
him. Its results would make up for any lack of sophistication on the
part of the man himself.

From then on, moreover, Calvi would see the world as full of
predators, from whom both he and the bank must be protected.
Financial Milan has always been a mirror of political Italy, made up of
competing interest groups, and complex and sometimes short-lived
alliances, where today's friend might become tomorrow's foe. The
possibility of an unwelcome foray against Ambrosiano had worried
Canesi before Calvi, for the bank's fragmented structure of owner­ship made it peculiarly vulnerable to such a threat, whatever the
cover given by the
clausola di gradimento.
One early precaution was
an exchange of shareholdings with Kredietbank of Luxembourg,
which would be Ambrosiano's second largest declared shareholder
when the end came.

But a more determining influence on Calvi's future was a Sicilian
tax lawyer who was making something of a reputation for himself in
Milan. His name was Michele Sindona, and he seemed to have
conveniently to hand the answers to some of Calvi's problems.

"I
was ten
years ahead of Calvi," Sindona will now boast to anyone
coming to benefit from the stream of highly selective reminiscences
he dispenses from the Federal prison of Otisville, two hours' drive
upstate from New York city.
As
he talks, the still beautifully mani­cured hands expertly and abstractedly turn out piles of little paper
boats, folded according to the ancient Japanese skill of
origami.
In
fact, just eight years at the end were to separate the collapse of his
own transatlantic financial card-castle from the debacle of Banco
Ambrosiano. But when his path first crossed with that of Calvi, in
1967 or 1968, Sindona was approaching the height of his powers.

The war experiences of the two, almost exact contemporaries,
could hardly have differed more. While Calvi was performing with
some distinction in the Russian snows, Sindona was still in his native
Sicily, illegally trafficking in grain, with the benign acquiescence of
the Allied Military Government on the island. During this period
were born Sindona's links with the
US.
There too he gave his first
proof of his innate skill in dealing with the Church, and learnt to
become a formidable poker player. These disparate traits were to
remain hallmarks of his career.

But
Sindona's basic early training
was
in taxes; first at university
and then,
when
the tide of war had shifted north in
Italy,
to work at
a
tax practice in
Messina,
the biggest
city
close to
his
birthplace at the
small
town of Patti, some 50 miles to the west. But for
so clever and
ambitious
a
young man, with the heady taste of wealth
and
real power
imparted by contact with the occupying forces, Messina would never
be enough.

Just after the War's end, Sindona trod the traditional migrant's
path northwards to Milan, then as now the real financial centre of
Italy. By coincidence, the young Calvi was at about the same time
himself returning from Bari in the south to Milan. But if the latter's
ascent at Ambrosiano was to be painstaking and at first little noticed,
Sindona's progress was more eye-catching. His fortune was to be put
in touch with Raoul Biasi, a mild-mannered accountant, but
bien
introdotto,
"well introduced", as the Italians say, in some Milanese
financial circles which mattered. Sindona so impressed Biasi that they
became partners. Through Biasi, he met Ernesto Moizzi, owner of a
small bank called Banca Privata Finanziaria. As its name would
indicate, its merits for appreciative clients included an ability to
conduct delicate financial transactions without asking too many
questions. And one of these clients was Franco Marinotti, chairman
of Snia Viscosa, then Italy's largest textile company.

Sindona swiftly earned the gratitude of both. Moizzi was im­pressed, if a trifle disconcerted, by how the accountant could nimbly
resolve the tax difficulties of valued customers. Marinotti reaped the
benefits of the American contacts Sindona had cultivated since his
Sicilian days to sell some textile patents in the United States. In
return, Marinotti helped Sindona achieve another crucial goal—that
of winning the confidence of the Vatican, and its bank, the IOR.

Sindona made his move in 1958 when, with the help of an introduc­tion from a distant relative and the recommendation of Marinotti, he
arranged a meeting with a Roman aristocrat named Massimo Spada,
then in charge of the IOR.

It was to prove one of the decisive turning points of this story. For
from that encounter there gradually but directly developed first
Sindona's own intimate relationship with the Vatican, and then that
of his successor Roberto Calvi. Sindona was to establish himself as
the indispensable standby as the Holy See embarked ten years later
on a radical shift in its investments, out of Italian industry into
financial shareholdings and assets, many of them outside the country.
Through the Vatican also, the Sicilian would make the acquaintance
of many who counted in the Rome of those times including, it would
seem, various Christian Democrat politicians, traditionally close to
the Church. Then there were other new friends, like Umberto
Ortolani a typical creature of the Roman political undergrowth with
excellent connections in the Vatican and Latin America; and his
remarkable associate Licio Gelli, a most unusual freemason with
ambitions equal to Sindona's own.

But it was in Milan where the powers of Sindona were most visible.
A place on Snia's board marked the esteem in which Marinotti held
him, while in 1961 he gained control of Moizzi's Banca Privata
Finanziaria. The technique was one Sindona and Calvi were to
employ throughout their careers. The vehicle for the acquisition was
a shadowy front company called Cofina, his partners Marinotti, and
the lOR.

At the same time, and if anything with still greater discretion, he
was busy on behalf of Italo-American financiers, some of a distinct
Mafia odour, keen to further their Italian interests. In fact, as early as
1967 the American police were seeking details of Sindona as a
possible suspect in a drugs ring between Italy and the United States.
The Italian authorities replied that they could unearth no evidence of
that. But this is how Giuseppe Parlato, the Milan police commission­er of the day, described Sindona in early 1968. He was, wrote Parlato,
"at the head of a network of specialist legal practices, backed up by
teams of lawyers, accountants, trustees and technical experts". All
that, and his own bank as well. By then Sindona had a Rome office at
94, Via Veneto, where he was—as Parlato drily noted—"keenly
sought out by leading business figures and in particular by American
citizens".