Given the spotlight on the church’s finances, it would have seemed natural for Marcinkus to pull away from Calvi and Sindona. But he did the opposite. December 1980 marked the first time in several years that Marcinkus approved the Vatican Bank’s purchase of another $65 million in promissory notes issued by some of the Ambrosiano’s offshore companies.85
And incredibly, as for Sindona’s request made through his Italian attorney for Vatican assistance, Marcinkus agreed to help. The bishop also lobbied two cardinals, Giuseppe Caprio and Sergio Guerri—both familiar with Sindona from his APSA dealings—to testify that Sindona was a stalwart, decent, and hardworking businessman. They agreed.86 Sindona’s legal team was so pleased that on January 24, lead counsel Marvin Frankel informed Judge Thomas Griesa that the high-ranking church trio would testify.87 Frankel said that under the policies of the city-state, the clerics could not appear in person at the New York trial. Griesa allowed their testimony to be videotaped at the American embassy in Rome on February 1.88
The Vatican’s new Secretary of State, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, was enraged when he learned about it.89 He knew that supporting Sindona would be a public relations nightmare. Casaroli banned the three clerics from making the depositions.
When Frankel arrived at the Vatican to prepare Marcinkus, Caprio, and Guerri for their testimony, they informed him that they had no choice but to decline. Frankel pressed hard to change their minds. Marcinkus spoke for the trio, unswerving in his no.90
Sindona, upon hearing about the reversal, told Frankel that “the Vatican has abandoned me.”91 He blamed Marcinkus for the change, not knowing that Marcinkus had battled Casaroli over the ban, at one stage threatening to still go public for Sindona.92
What Casaroli did next is disclosed here for the first time. He was so upset with Marcinkus that he asked a close aide, Monsignor Luigi Celata—now an archbishop—to enlist the help of General Giuseppe Santovito, Italy’s Military and Security Service chief, to obtain compromising information about Marcinkus. Santovito appointed Francesco Pazienza, an ambitious young intelligence officer, to the matter.93 Pazienza did not uncover any straightforward blackmail. But in Switzerland, he unearthed documents that revealed how Marcinkus was the conduit for funneling church money to key conservative politicians. It would create a firestorm in the Italian press and add to the pressure for Marcinkus to resign.94
Instead of handing the information to Casaroli, Pazienza decided that Marcinkus was a more important Vatican power broker than the Secretary of State. “So I arranged a meeting with Marcinkus,” Pazienza revealed to the author. “I knew he loved power. He would not want to lose it.”95
“I have been hired to fuck you,” Pazienza told the IOR chief. Marcinkus did not show any visible sign of surprise.
“What do you intend to do?” Marcinkus asked.
“Nothing.”96
Pazienza got what he wanted: a bond of loyalty.
While Marcinkus had dodged a possible bullet with Pazienza, Casaroli had demonstrated his power by prevailing in the standoff over the Sindona character testimony. In withdrawing Marcinkus and the cardinals from the witness list, Frankel informed Judge Griesa that his trip to the Vatican was a “catastrophe.”97
The day before the trial got under way, on February 6, the U.S. Attorney’s office asked for a closed hearing in the judge’s chambers. There the FBI presented the evidence that instead of being ferried around blindfolded by kidnappers in New York and New Jersey, Sindona had engineered his own disappearance and spent it in Europe, mostly Sicily.98 The fake abduction was intended to generate sympathy, but it had turned into a tragi-comedy. The Sicilian mobsters who afforded him safe haven decided they could make more money by extorting information from him and threatening his family.99 The bullet wound was the result of a deliberate shot from an Italian doctor, Joseph Miceli Crimi, who knew where to aim the gun so it inflicted the least damage.100 When the gangsters had released Sindona, they swore him to silence lest his wife and children became targets.101
The judge later called it “the blackest day of my life in a courthouse.” He revoked the $3 million bail. A dozen federal marshals descended on the courtroom and hustled Sindona to jail.102
The trial started on February 7, 1980. Sindona’s ex-friend and Franklin colleague, Carlo Bordoni, was the prosecution’s star witness.103 And the government used evidence of the fake kidnapping to demonstrate to the jury a “consciousness of guilt.”104 Much of the testimony and legal arguments centered on financial minutiae. Although no one from the Vatican was on trial, and the indictment did not list the IOR as an unindicted co-conspirator, the lead prosecutor, John Kenney, repeatedly linked the Vatican Bank to the case. He told the court that the IOR had worked with Sindona to help “prominent Italian depositors” engage in financial dealings “which would not comply with the religious tenets of the Vatican or the Roman Catholic Church.”105
The end of the trial could not come quickly enough for Marcinkus. It took seven weeks for the case to go to the sequestered jury. The six men and six women deliberated for six days before reaching a verdict: guilty on sixty-five counts of fraud, misappropriation of bank funds, and perjury.106
In June, two days before he was to be sentenced, Sindona—who said later that the verdict made him “believe only in injustice . . . the government is the real Mafia”—slashed one wrist and took a pharmaceutical cocktail he had somehow smuggled into prison (a mixture of digitalis, a heart stimulant; Darvon, a painkiller; and Librium, an antianxiety medication).107 But he was quickly resuscitated, and after a few days in the hospital the judge ordered him to appear for his sentencing.108 Griesa meted out the maximum to the unrepentant defendant, four twenty-five-year sentences to be served concurrently.109
Sindona soon got more bad news. The FBI was hunting for a low-level American hoodlum, forty-five-year-old William Arico. The charge: being the hit man in the 1979 execution-style murder of Giorgio Ambrosoli, the Milanese magistrate who had been investigating Sindona. The break came through an unlikely source, Henry Hill. He was a convicted extortionist later made famous in Nicholas Pileggi’s book Wiseguy, and played by Ray Liotta in Martin Scorsese’s 1990 film Goodfellas.110 At the time of Ambrosoli’s murder, Hill and his family were only months away from entering the U.S. witness protection program.111 The gangster told the FBI that during the mid-1970s he had served time at a federal prison with two New York Gambino-connected hoodlums, Billy “The Exterminator” Arico, and a convicted heroin trafficker, Robert Venetucci. In the fall of 1978, according to Hill, after all three were released and living near one another on Long Island, Hill sold Arico five pistols and a machine gun with a silencer. “The Exterminator” bragged that Sindona hired him for a contract murder in Italy. Hill next ran into Arico in 1979, just after Ambrosoli was killed in Milan. Arico pointed to an Italian newspaper clipping about the murder and bragged: “This is the fellow I whacked out over there.”112
The FBI did not then know that since 1978 Sindona had been Venetucci’s silent partner in Ace Pizza, a cheese and olive oil importing company in Queens.113 Venetucci had hired Arico after Sindona asked him to handle his problem with Ambrosoli. At Sindona’s direction, his son was wiring money from the Union Bank of Switzerland to Ace Pizza’s account at New York’s Bank Leumi (some investigators suspected that was how Venetucci got the $40,000 he paid Arico).114,III
At the time the FBI got the tip from Hill, Arico was serving a four-year sentence on an unrelated jewelry heist in Manhattan’s diamond district. But before the bureau questioned him, Arico escaped from New York’s Rikers Island in June 1980, the same month Sindona was sentenced on the Franklin case.116 It was two years before the FBI ran him to ground in Philadelphia.117
When the Arico news went public, the Italians insisted Sindona be extradited to stand trial for Ambrosoli’s murder. But under the existing U.S.-Italy extradition treaty, Sindona had to finish at least five years of his jail sentence for his American conviction.118
• • •
Three months after Sindona’s sentencing, Luca Mucci, the Italian prosecutor in charge of the Ambrosiano investigation, ordered Calvi to surrender his passport. Mucci based his decision on a fresh June 12, 1980, report from the Guardia di Finanza that concluded Calvi likely violated currency laws, falsified bank records, and even committed fraud.119
Calvi reached out to Marcinkus for help. Much of his work at the Ambrosiano had been in partnership with the IOR. He thought the two of them could fend off the prosecutors. But Marcinkus and the IOR had their own problems. On February 5, 1981, Milan prosecutors had stunned the Vatican by arresting Luigi Mennini, the bank’s long-serving chief administrator, and Marcinkus’s most trusted deputy.120 The seventy-one-year-old Mennini had served as the IOR’s director at Sindona’s Banca Unione, and prosecutors thought he might be complicit in illegal currency trading there.121 Mennini was an iconic figure inside the Vatican, having been hand-selected in 1930 by Bernardino Nogara.122 And in 1967, when Henri de Maillardoz left as the chief layman at the IOR, Mennini took his position.
Italian police had arrested Mennini when he left the Vatican after work one day. John Paul II and Marcinkus raised a howl. After spending a few weeks in jail, Mennini was given “provisional liberty.”123
The arrest caused great concern at the Vatican. Were former or current IOR officials so involved with Sindona that they may have broken the law? What trouble could Sindona cause when he was extradited to Italy to stand trial over charges similar to those brought against Mennini?
No one outside of a few executives knew what was going on inside the secretive IOR. Marcinkus had developed a defense: Mennini was a political target for leftists as payback for all the church’s work over the years on behalf of the Christian Democrats. That sounded reasonable since a left-leaning coalition was in power. Combined with Mennini’s proclamations of innocence, it was enough to calm jittery nerves in the Vatican.
Since Marcinkus was consumed with his own problems, Calvi sought help elsewhere. He again turned to Licio Gelli. But the P2 chief, who had earned millions by working his extensive contacts for Sindona and Calvi, was himself about to come undone. The break came in February 1981. Two Italian magistrates were investigating whether the Mafia had helped Sindona during his fake kidnapping. They noticed that when Sindona was in Palermo, Joseph Miceli Crimi, the financier’s physician, had taken a two-day trip to the small northern village of Arezzo, a six-hundred-mile journey. The magistrates questioned Dr. Crimi, who claimed the trip was because he had had a toothache and his dentist lived there. But the investigators were skeptical. Crimi ultimately admitted he went to Arezzo to visit Licio Gelli. “Gelli is my Masonic brother,” the physician confessed. “And a close friend of Michele Sindona.”124
The magistrates applied for a search warrant for Gelli’s villa and an office he maintained at a local textile factory.125 One of Gelli’s nicknames was Il Cartofilo (the Paper Lover), a tribute to his obsessive collection and organization of paperwork.126 Although the search of his house yielded nothing, when the police executed the warrant at his office on March 17, 1981, they discovered a brown leather attaché inside a safe.127 It contained a treasure trove of documents and membership applications detailing 953 of P2’s members and its convoluted activities.128 There were thirty-two sealed manila envelopes with photocopies of bank transfers and cash receipts attached to names of ranking politicians, judges, and private industry titans. In the seized files police found inciminating information about oil bribes and the state-run petroleum agency, arms discussions with Argentine military officers, illegal payments to political parties, and tax evasion by top businessmen.129 One of the folders was labeled Roberto Calvi and detailed the many times Gelli had intervened to derail official investigations into the Ambrosiano chairman.130 And the police discovered a cache of startling photographs, including embarrassing ones of prominent Italians.131 The investigators ultimately concluded that Gelli had obtained many of the most salacious pictures from P2’s intelligence members. Most were never used as blackmail, but Gelli seemed a compulsive collector of information that one day might prove useful.132 One of the photos was of a naked Pope John Paul II sunning himself by a pool. The police did not then know that Gelli had sometimes shown that photo to others, using it as an example of how poor the personal security was around the Pontiff: “If it’s possible to take these pictures of the Pope, imagine how easy it is to shoot him.”133
Gelli got a tip about the search warrant too late to empty his safe, but before customs had received an all points bulletin to detain him, he fled to Uruguay via Switzerland on an Argentine passport.134 Umberto Ortolani, Gelli’s deputy, who was also involved as a middleman for many Sindona and Marcinkus money transfers, fled to Brazil.135
The public was stunned when the names of the P2 members were released that May. The list was a who’s-who of leading businessmen, prominent judges and prosecutors, top-ranking military and intelligence officers, and respected journalists (one of the less well-known names was Silvio Berlusconi, the founder of a new television channel, and later three times a Prime Minister). A report from the investigating magistrate to Prime Minister Arnaldo Forlani concluded, “P-2 is a secret sect that has combined business and politics with the intention of destroying the constitutional order of the country and of transforming the parliamentary system into a presidential system.”136 Authorities had also found evidence of P2’s role in right-wing terror plots.137 It had not helped that three cabinet ministers, including the country’s Attorney General, were P2 members. Speculation was rampant that there were more P2 members than those whose names were seized in Gelli’s files. Many thought that Marcinkus was part of P2, disguised with a secret code name. Three years earlier L’Osservatore Politico, a muckraking weekly, named Marcinkus—with 120 cardinals, bishops, and influential monsignors—as Freemasons. Marcinkus later denied any role in P2 member or that he was a Mason: “I don’t even know what a lodge looks like. . . . I was brought up to believe it was a mortal sin.”138,IV
The days when Calvi could reach out to Gelli and his P2 colleagues were over. An aggressive new investigating magistrate was now in charge of the criminal probe. Only the Vatican might be able to help the Ambrosiano banker retain his power. Calvi was about to test the limits of his relationship with the church.
* * *
I. Sindona had been treated by several psychiatrists for more than a decade, and was at different times prescribed a combination of anti–depressant/psychotic/anxiety medications. Side effects caused him to stop taking some antipsychotics. He also had at times a dependence on narcotic painkillers, and then laxatives to counter the constipating effects of the opiates. Although none of his psychiatrists ever disclosed the clinical diagnosis, business colleagues and some family members speculated it might have been bipolar disorder. Some of his worst business decisions coincided with stretches of little sleep but tremendous energy, what psychiatrists consider the manifestations of the manic phase of that mental illness.67
II. Ten weeks later, on February 21, at Claridge’s Hotel in London, the full Cisalpine board met with Garner and another accountant: the directors approved financial statements that confirmed that the IOR owed Cisalpine $228 million. Only Calvi and Marcinkus knew that was not true, but neither objected. The Coopers & Lybrand accountants submitted a management letter stating in part: “It is our understanding that none of the directors of Cisalpine, other than Bishop Marcinkus, are aware of the current financial condition of this entity.” Marcinkus evidently objected to being listed as the sole official with full knowledge of what was taking place at the IOR. Garner modified the letter to say instead that the full information was “only available to a very limited number of individuals in the Vatican.”84
III. Sindona’s son, Nino, then a thirty-five-year-old businessman who had worked with his father, demonstrated the extent to which the Sindona family detested Ambrosoli, in a contemporaneous interview with journalist Luigi DiFonzo. In discussing the deceased Ambrosol
i, Nino said: “I have no compassion for the fucking guy. [He] deserves to die—and this is not enough for a son-of-a-bitch like him. I’m sorry he dies without suffering. Let’s make sure on this point . . . Ambrosoli doesn’t deserve to be on this earth.” (Nino Sindona refused requests by the author for an interview.)115
IV. The journalist behind the story of the Freemason-Vatican connection, Carmine “Mino” Pecorelli, was shot to death the following year by a hit man armed with a silencer-equipped pistol. Sixteen years later, Giulio Andreotti, the seven-time Italian Prime Minister, went on trial along with dozens of top mobsters for ordering Pecorelli’s murder to cover up a pending bribery story. When Andreotti, a devout Catholic and daily-Mass attendee, was later acquitted of all charges, a Vatican spokesman, Joaquín Navarro-Valls, issued a statement that John Paul II learned of the verdict with “satisfaction.”139
23
“You Have to Kill the Pope”
On Wednesday afternoon, May 13, 1981, Pope John Paul II was standing in an open-air car circling St. Peter’s Square as he greeted some ten thousand worshippers. He shook hands, held and kissed babies and small children, and smiled and waved at the throngs. At about 5:20, there were several loud pops near the Vatican’s large bronze gate. Some people, even those in the Pope’s small entourage, thought it was firecrackers or the backfire of a nearby car. But a few police and security personnel recognized them instantly as gunshots. They looked to the sixty-year-old Pope. A small red stain appeared on his crisp, white cassock and started to spread. His hands had flown up toward his face. Then he fell backward into the arms of his private secretary, Father Stanislaw Dziwisz, and his chamberlain, Angelo Gugel.
God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Page 40