VIII. That same year the Banco di Sicilia’s president was arrested and charged with fraud. Over eight years, he had hired about a hundred relatives, some of whom had never shown up for a single day of work. The public did not know that the IOR had a controlling stake in the bank.105
IX. Another new tax—15 percent of the interest earned on individual bank accounts—brought a surge of deposits to the Vatican Bank. Even under Nogara, the IOR had profited by assisting wealthy Italians avoid taxes and currency regulations with so-called in nero (in black) transfers. Sindona noted that “most people confuse hiding and laundering.” Money moved in nero was all right, Sindona later told author Nick Tosches, since it “belongs to respectable people . . . [and is] legitimately accounted wealth.” The church moved in nero only “for the purpose of avoiding taxes.” On the other hand, “dirty money is money made through crime.” The church’s intermediary in nero role was lucrative, up to a commission of 10 percent of principal. Much of the money moved was for Black Nobles, their personal friends, and leading Christian Democrats.110
15
“You Can’t Run the Church on Hail Marys”
During this frenzied stretch of work, Sindona had a fateful meeting with Paul Casimir Marcinkus, a Catholic priest.1 Two years older than Sindona, the six-foot-three American-born Marcinkus seemed more like a football lineman than a low-ranking clerical bureaucrat assigned to the Secretary of State’s office. The youngest of four sons of Lithuanian working-class immigrants (his father was a window washer), he grew up in Cicero, a rough Chicago suburb best known as Al Capone’s hometown.2 Marcinkus later recalled, “We were poor. . . . This was [the] time of the Depression. I had twenty-five cents a day for food and travel to school, and I was always figuring out ways to make it stretch so I could afford a ball game or take in a movie.”3 The family was one of the few without a car.4 A solid student and competitive athlete, he surprised most of his friends when at eighteen he entered St. Mary of the Lake, a seminary in Mundelein, Illinois.5 He had been thinking “this was the kind of life I’d like” since he was thirteen.6
Although America was soon at war with the Nazis and Japanese, his seminary enrollment gave him an automatic draft exemption.7 He studied theology for four years and philosophy for another three before his ordination as a priest in 1947. After two years of pastoral work at St. Christina’s, a working-class Chicago parish, he later said he “must have shown some proclivity for the law” since he was moved to the matrimonial tribunal in the diocese’s chancery office.8 Within a year he went to Rome to study canon law at the Gregorian University.9 It was a career move made by ambitious priests who hoped someday to have a shot at becoming a bishop.I Marcinkus joined the English Section of the Secretariat of State in 1952, earning $90 a month plus room and board. He earned a doctorate in divinity the following year.11 In 1954, after graduating from the Vatican’s diplomatic school, he was dispatched for assignments in Bolivia and Canada. His energetic work in both postings won the admiration of his superiors and he was promoted to monsignor.12 In 1959, he returned to Rome and what he later described as “rather mundane” work in the Secretary of State’s office.13
His colleagues thought the gruff Marcinkus was quintessentially American. Most of them had never been to America, but there was little doubt from all they had read and the movies they had seen that Paul Marcinkus was the epitome of whatever that meant. When he drank whiskey he did not hide the bottle when a senior cleric walked into the room. He smoked cigars and did not ask permission before lighting one. A large borrowed Chevrolet was his trademark as he navigated the chaotic Roman traffic, offering to take a visiting group of pilgrims to Castel Gandolfo or a few kids to a local soccer match. A rough-and-tumble amateur sportsman who enjoyed boxing and tennis, he had founded the Vatican’s first baseball team, and starred on its intramural rugby squad.14 He was also an avid golfer—with a reputed five handicap—and one of the few priests who could talk his way into playing a round at the SGI-owned luxury country club, Oligata Romana.15 (He later told a journalist that he “loved physical work because it got the badness out of me.”)16
Full of energy, he talked as loudly and as animatedly as any native Italian.17 Some at the Vatican found him amusing and his lack of piety refreshing. But most disliked his apparent lack of self-doubt. His love of sports was thought by many to be inappropriate for a Vatican-based prelate.18 They bristled whenever he told newcomers, “just call me Chink for short” (in Italian, his surname was pronounced Mar-chink-us). When they discovered that he liked reading Westerns, it fit with the caricature they had of him, and made it easier to dismiss the perennially tan Marcinkus as a cowboy priest who would likely soon be back in America.19
Marcinkus knew that he was hard to miss. A Chicago Tribune reporter who knew him said he “possessed the tact of a trailer truck.”20 But Marcinkus had decided when he first arrived in Rome not to change his style. He observed that in the Vatican, “with Italians you have to be careful. It’s kind of Oriental. . . . There is subterfuge.”21 Inside the Curia, he was wise to the pitfall of falling into the back-and-forth gossip that often derailed promising careers. “I don’t want to work like a Hoover, pick up dirt, pass it on.”22 He thought that Vatican City was like a “village of washerwomen” who spent every day “squeezing all the old dirt out. In normal life people get away and have other interests, but here what else is there to talk about?”23
It did not take Marcinkus long to learn that the Curia was a bureaucratic nightmare. “The way they do things around here,” he later said, “annoys me at times. You can send a memo and not get an answer for months. Your memo just gets ignored. That’s the way they deal with things: ignore them and hope they just go away on their own.”24 The Italians considered him naive.
“The careerists were in awe of him,” said Peter Murphy, years later the Deputy Chief of Mission for the U.S. embassy to the Vatican. Murphy, who became a good friend with Marcinkus, recalled, “He was so unlike any Italian. They just didn’t know what to make of him. Even his sense of humor rubbed them the wrong way, they were so serious.”25
Marcinkus got his first break in 1962 when John XXIII picked him as an interpreter for a visit to the Vatican by America’s Catholic First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy.26 The Pope and the First Lady mostly spoke French during their thirty-two-minute meeting, but Marcinkus used the opportunity to ingratiate himself with some of the U.S. clerics who had traveled with Mrs. Kennedy, including Scranton’s influential Archbishop Martin O’Connor and the future cardinal of New York Edward Egan. The U.S. delegation left Rome with a good impression of the gregarious young priest. And John XXIII—who had himself been criticized for so sharply breaking from the stiff formality of Pius—liked the brash American.
Marcinkus had picked a good time to make an impression on the Pope. John XXIII’s Second Vatican Council was about to begin that October. Some three hundred American bishops—most unfamiliar with Rome—would soon arrive. Ernest Primeau, an American bishop living in Rome, recommended to the Pope that the young American monsignor with a reputation for orderliness and punctuality be put in charge of helping the U.S. bishops.27 Pope John agreed and made Marcinkus a one-person service bureau.28 Soon, he was everywhere, flitting around Vatican City from dawn until late at night. Marcinkus did everything for the bishops, keeping minutes for key meetings, arranging flights, smoothing out problems during their long stay, tending to them like a five-star-hotel concierge. By the time the Second Vatican Council finished, almost all U.S bishops knew him and had a good impression. They left Rome trading their personal favorite stories of “the Pope’s man.”29
His status was much grander than would have been expected if someone knew only his lowly rank in the Secretary of State’s office. That alone irked many contemporaries. One of them leaked to Italian newspapers gossip that Marcinkus was pocketing money from a charter business that handled the travel for most of the bishops at the Council, as well as for groups of pilgrims. Marcinkus went out of his way to den
y it. “I didn’t want to see all our cardinals and bishops getting fleeced by all these airlines, so I got ahold of this friend who ran pilgrim deals. . . . I didn’t make anything out of it.”30 After four years in Rome, Pope John understood how rumors in the Curia developed from the tiniest germ of truth. He dismissed the reports as baseless.31
Marcinkus’s ascent as a can-do administrator was not derailed when John died in 1963. Giovanni Montini had been friends with Marcinkus since the early 1950s when they were stationed in Rome.32 Both then served in the Secretary of State’s office. Marcinkus was a newly arrived junior priest and Montini a monsignor then directing the Vatican’s refugee programs. “I used to see him [Montini] walking around the grounds,” Marcinkus later told a reporter from the Chicago Tribune, “and I’d give him a lift in my car.”33 Marcinkus had made an impression on Montini. The future Pope, who at first found him overbearing, admired his organizational skills, hard work, and take-charge attitude.34
On the day Montini was elected Pope, all the clerics in the Secretary of State’s office paid respects to him. When it was Marcinkus’s turn to kneel before the Pontiff and kiss his ring, the new Pope greeted him affectionately and said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”35 Marcinkus became his private secretary for English affairs.36 In 1964, after a chaotic trip to Jerusalem, Paul VI promoted Marcinkus to the honorary grade of Domestic Prelate and christened him as his advance man for other Eucharistic Congresses (they traveled eventually to nine cities on five continents).37 Marcinkus was aggressive when it came to protecting the Pope while ensuring that the trip went well. In India, when police tried blocking him from following the Pope onto an altar platform, he lifted one of them to the side so he could stay astride Paul VI. At the airport tarmac in Bogotá, when Archbishop Giovanni Benelli, the Deputy Secretary of State, arrived and questioned some security arrangements at the last moment, Marcinkus shut him down in front of the entire Papal delegation.38 It earned him the lasting enmity of Benelli, a powerful Curial official.39 (Years later in Britain, Anglican officials almost banned Marcinkus from the Canterbury Cathedral after a contentious argument over the extent of protective services.)40 But his talent was more than organizing the logistics and watching out for the Pope’s safety. On each trip, local church officials fought to see who would sit closest to the Pontiff, and each submitted long lists of contributors and friends with whom they insisted the Pope meet. A prelate told Marcinkus he was the “only man I know who will say no to a cardinal.”41 That made him irreplaceable.42 It also earned him, as he later recalled, “an enemy or two among our own people.”43
Papal watchers soon noticed that at the Vatican, every time an English-speaking dignitary had a Papal audience—from Chicago Mayor Richard Daley to Martin Luther King Jr. to British Prime Minister Harold Wilson to Robert Kennedy—Marcinkus was there.44
In his roles as private interpreter and advance man, Marcinkus had earned a place inside the Pope’s inner circle. Marcinkus realized he was more than a literal translator. Paul trusted that when they met with American politicians such as Richard Nixon or Hubert Humphrey, Marcinkus knew what was important to emphasize.45
In the following year, 1965, Marcinkus accompanied the Pope for a much anticipated visit to the United States, the first ever North American visit by a Pontiff.46 He was again the translator when Paul VI met Lyndon Johnson in a suite at New York’s Waldorf Towers.47 In 1966, the Pope dispatched Marcinkus back to the U.S. so he could deliver a Papal letter to LBJ at his Texas ranch. It carried Paul VI’s unsuccessful plea that Johnson stop bombing North Vietnam and that America unilaterally declare a cease-fire.48
When Cardinal Spellman died on December 2, 1967, Marcinkus let it be widely known in the Curia that he had wealthy patrons in Chicago and New York. Spellman had been an incredible fundraiser.49 Some leading American clerics disliked that the U.S. church’s main strength in Rome was its ability to raise money, and thought it was insulting that Italian clerics nicknamed Spellman “Moneybags.”50 But the Italian-dominated Curia needed American dollars. The U.S. economy was growing at a robust 10 percent a year. In Europe, the postwar expansion was winding down. National economies were struggling under fast rising inflation. Many in the Vatican admired the American model. Even without Spellman’s contributions, U.S. Catholics were far and away the largest contributors.
Marcinkus heralded from the largest American diocese, and he had good relationships with every key cardinal in the United States. Two weeks after Spellman’s death the Pope transferred Marcinkus from the Secretary of State’s office to the Vatican Bank. Soon after that he became the secretary to the three-cardinal Commission of Vigilance that oversaw the IOR.51
Marcinkus was a financial neophyte. He later tried to downplay that. He told one journalist he had spent several days picking up tips by visiting banks in New York and Chicago. “That was it. What kind of training you need?”52 To another he claimed to have taken several weeks of business administration classes at Harvard.53 There is no evidence he ever took any.54 He later admitted, “I didn’t do a course because I didn’t have any time.”55
As for the history of the IOR and Special Administration, Marcinkus figured that he did not need to know it since Mennini and de Strobel—the “technicians” as he called them—had worked there for decades and could answer any questions.56 He bought some books about international banking and business. After he talked to the two senior IOR laymen for some additional background, he told Chicago’s Cardinal John Cody that from 1940 on “[the IOR] has been a gravy train.”57 His new bank colleagues were not so sure he was the right choice. One noted that he “couldn’t even read a balance sheet.”58
Marcinkus met Sindona only a month after his promotion. It took Sindona little time to discover that the monsignor’s widespread reputation as frank and outspoken was well deserved.
Marcinkus asked Sindona what he thought about Mennini and de Strobel. Without waiting for an answer, Marcinkus volunteered that he thought little of them. He surprised Sindona by saying if he ran the IOR he might start his tenure by dismissing Mennini. Sindona thought that Mennini—who had been with the IOR since its inception—was “the only competent man there.”59 He told Marcinkus that he greatly underestimated the talent of those laymen.60 In subsequent meetings Sindona concluded that it was in fact Marcinkus who was in over his head, inept in financial matters, yet had the “pretensions to be a financier.”61
“He was not very smart,” Sindona told a reporter years later, “[and he] thought a free meal in a good restaurant was a big deal.”62 Marcinkus’s borderline incompetence was made only worse by his unrestrained overconfidence on matters about which he knew nothing.63 But since Marcinkus had the unconditional backing of the Pope, Sindona had no choice but to learn as best he could to live with the American monsignor.
• • •
At the same time that Marcinkus arrived at the IOR, another newcomer appeared on the periphery of the church’s financial web, someone who would prove every bit as important as Sindona. At first glance Roberto Calvi seemed just another smart Milanese banker. But Calvi’s ambition was grander, his focus sharper, and his persistence unyielding. He would win over Sindona and every key official in the Vatican Bank, even the newcomer Marcinkus.
Calvi, the eldest of four children from a middle-class Milanese family, was born in 1920, a month before Sindona. His father was a midlevel BCI bank manager. Calvi studied economics at Bocconi University before joining an aristocratic cavalry unit in which he served honorably on the Eastern Front during the war.64 After the Germans occupied northern Italy in 1943, he went to work as a clerk for a small BCI branch in Bari.65 Although not blessed with Sindona’s charm, he was as determined to become a banking titan.
In 1946, Calvi thought he might have a better chance of reaching his goal if he worked at a Catholic bank. Friends at Catholic Action helped him land a job at the “bank of priests,” Milan’s Ambrosiano, which had been founded in 1896 to counter the influence of lay banks.66 Monsignor Giu
seppe Tovini, the Ambrosiano’s founder, had named it after St. Ambrose, the city’s patron saint.67 Its bylaws required that anyone opening an account should first produce a baptismal certificate (that let in Protestants but barred Jews).68 Only “good Catholics” could work there, although obtaining a letter of recommendation from a parish priest normally sufficed. Tovini—beatified in 1998 by Pope John Paul II—required that the bank’s work be “moral and pious” and that its profits be distributed “for charitable purposes and Catholic schools.”69 (Through the 1980s, every annual report expressly thanked “Divine Providence” for guiding the bank to greater profits.)70
When the twenty-six-year-old Calvi joined the staid Ambrosiano, the bank managed the investment portfolios of most Catholic religious orders. His colleagues thought Calvi a humorless workaholic who wore formal dark suits and matching fedoras to appear he held a more important post than he did.71 And the prematurely bald, mustached man was socially awkward. But his reserved appearance and personality made him popular with the bank’s many conservative clients.72 Having refined his school-taught French and German, he soon handled many of its Swiss, German, and French customers.73
In 1956, when Sindona and Montini had celebrated the end of communist control at Milan’s largest trade union, Calvi toasted his own appointment as a joint manager at the Ambrosiano. Although it was only a midlevel position, it marked a milestone. It was the highest rank his father had achieved over a fifty-two-year career. Two years later, one of the Ambrosiano’s senior executives, Carlo Alessandro Canesi, became Calvi’s mentor and promoted him as his private deputy.74
In 1960, while Sindona and the Vatican were negotiating the terms of their joint venture in Banca Privata Finanziaria (BPF), the forty-year-old Calvi was devising a way to bypass Italy’s ban on banks offering mutual funds. Calvi encouraged the Ambrosiano to take stakes in a Swiss bank and two in Luxembourg, through which he devised a rudimentary mutual fund, offering Italian investors the opportunity to invest in foreign stock funds.75 A smashing success, the Ambrosiano had the market pretty much to itself. With the exception of a couple of Vatican-owned institutions, other Italian banks did not follow with competing products for nearly a decade.76 Calvi was ecstatic.77 When Canesi became the Ambrosiano’s chairman in 1963, he promoted the forty-five-year-old Calvi to the post of direttore centrale, making him one of the bank’s six most powerful officers.78 Calvi did not try hiding his ambition. “He lived for power,” another longtime colleague, Roberto Rosone, recalled. “There was only one woman for him, and that was power.”79
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