God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

by Gerald Posner

  22 Galli, Finanza bianca, 72–73; see also Thomas and Morgan-Witts, Pontiff, 146.

  23 Simoni and Turone, Il caffè di Sindona, 34–35.

  24 The Nogara-created SNIA Viscosa textile conglomerate—for which Sindona did some legal work—bought 10 percent of BPF. And another 10 percent stake went to a Sindona friend, Tito Carnelutti, who owned the Banque de Financement of Geneva. See generally Martin, Rich Church, Poor Church, 59; and Tosches, Power on Earth, 44–45.

  25 Cornwell, God’s Banker, 38; DiFonzo, St. Peter’s Banker, 37–38. Sindona also aggressively utilized the confidentiality shield of the attorney-client privilege to protect his clients’ identity in deals.

  26 Simoni and Turone, Il caffè di Sindona, 34–35; DiFonzo, St. Peter’s Banker, 38–42; as for Di Jorio’s role, see Lai, Finanze vaticane, 38–39.

  27 Tosches, Power on Earth, 47.

  28 The two Liechtenstein firms were Ravoxr A.G. and Tuxanr A.G. See generally DiFonzo, St. Peter’s Banker, 56–57; Martin, Rich Church, Poor Church, 59.

  29 “Italy: Beating the Cycle,” Time.

  30 Simoni and Turone, Il caffè di Sindona, 33.

  31 Tosches, Power on Earth, 60–61.

  32 Ibid., 53.

  33 Ibid., 118; Simoni and Turone, Il caffè di Sindona, 3536.

  34 The tales of Sindona’s sponsorship by a Mafia cartel are oft repeated if unproven. In Larry Gurwin’s The Calvi Affair, Vito Genovese, representing all Sicilian mob families, picked Sindona to run a black-market produce business during the last few years of World War II, giving him the seed money to establish his career as an attorney while simultaneously indebting Sindona forever to the Mafia (page 10). Paul Williams, in The Vatican Exposed, even tied in the church, asserting that Sindona was introduced to Genovese by the archbishop of Messina (page 104). While clerics have been involved with the mob—four Franciscan monks were convicted in 1962 as made members of the Sicilian Mafia, and the prior of Rome’s St. Angelo’s Cathedral was convicted in 1978 of laundering ransom money for his Mafia family—there is no credible evidence linking any of the criminal clerics to Sindona. In 1972, Jack Begon, an ABC stringer in Rome, filed a story that in 1957 Sindona attended a summit meeting with leading Mafiosi in the penthouse of Palermo’s Hotel et des Palmes. Supposedly joining him were mob luminaries including Lucky Luciano, Joseph Bonanno, Carmine Galante, and representatives of the Genovese, Lucchese, and Gambino families. At that meeting, according to Begon, the mob bosses gave the young attorney “total control over the profits of the heroin trade for investment in Europe and the Americas.” Begon claimed that the following year some unidentified Mafiosi kidnapped and interrogated him to discover his sources. After an investigation, Italian authorities ultimately charged Begon with faking his own kidnapping and also embezzling $5,000 from ABC. A Rome court cleared him of any criminal liability but most journalists who have studied Begon’s story dismiss it as unsubstantiated. Nick Tosches, Power on Earth, is typical in dubbing it “fanciful” and an “apocryphal history.” Still, other authors—including Luigi DiFonzo in St. Peter’s Banker and Malachi Martin in Rich Church, Poor Church—have repeated the story without any caveat. In Williams’s The Vatican Exposed, the author goes so far as to list what food and wine the group ordered and says that it was the night in which “La Costra Nostra . . . came into being.”

  While both the postwar produce story and the Hotel et des Palmes tale seem false, they were circulated so widely that many people simply accepted Sindona’s link to the Mafia as an uncontested fact.

  There is an unresolved matter about Sindona and a possible underworld criminal connection. On November 1, 1967, Fred J. Douglas, a director in Interpol’s Washington, D.C., office, sent a letter to the police in Milan. It was an inquiry about four men, including Sindona and one of his trusted American executives, an accountant, Daniel Porco. The inquiry said that the men “are involved in the illegal trafficking of sedatives, stimulants and hallucinogens between Italy and the United States and other regions of Europe.” According to the Final Report of Italy’s Parliamentary Committee that ultimately investigated all civil and criminal matters that had arisen concerning Sindona, “The superintendent of Milan responded with a letter of bureaucratic style, which acknowledged a business relationship between Porco and Sindona, but concluded categorically that ‘based on the status of the investigation carried out by us, there is no evidence to say that the persons referred to, especially Porco and Sindona, are involved in drug trafficking between Italy and the USA.’ ” There is no indication the Milanese police opened a formal investigation, nor did anything more than make a few casual inquiries and rely on the truthfulness of the denials they received. (Relazioni di Commissioni Parlamentari di Inchiesti, Relazione conclusiva della Commissione parlamentare d’inchiesta sul caso Sindona e sulle responsabilità politiche ed amministrative ad esso eventualmente connesse, VIII legislatura—Doc. XXIII n. 2-sexies, Relazione conclusiva di maggioranza, relatore on. Giuseppe Azzaro, Rome, March 24, 1982, 163.)

  In the late 1970s, after Sindona’s empire had collapsed and he was jailed for financial crimes, some mobsters—like Francesco Marino Mannoia and Antonino Giuffrè—tried implicating him in drug trafficking. Those proffers were inevitably in exchange for leniency on pending charges or to deflect the investigation from the suspects that prosecutors thought were the real masterminds. In January 1982, Sindona was one of 470 men indicted in Italy in the then largest heroin smuggling case in history. But the charges against him were dismissed before the trial began, and the evidence was based solely on the account of a top mobster trying in part to buy his freedom by fingering the financier. In 1985, Sindona, from prison, bragged to author Nick Tosches, “Never did I lie down with the Mafia. . . . And never, despite their greatest efforts, blackmails, and dreams, have the prosecutors here or in America been able to produce one Mafioso to say otherwise. In all their wiretaps, not once have they heard the name of Michele Sindona mentioned.” Tosches, Power on Earth, 98, 240–42.

  Ivan Fisher, a prominent New York criminal defense lawyer, represented Sindona on an appeal in 1979–80. Fisher had by then carved out a specialty in the high-profile defense bar by representing some top drug traffickers and Italian mobsters. He had been the lead counsel in the 1973 defense of the Pizza Connection, at the time the largest heroin conspiracy. “To the extent I know a negative,” Fisher told me, “I know Sindona was not into drugs or a member of the Mafia. My information goes well beyond whatever he and I discussed. The government tried hard to connect him to the Mafia, but it wasn’t possible. He did know some of the big New York mobsters, but that is because he was like a rock star among the Italians in America. Everybody wanted to hang out with Michele. But he wasn’t one of them.” Author interview with Ivan Fisher, June 19, 2013.

  35 DiFonzo, St. Peter’s Banker, 44; Simoni and Turone, Il caffè di Sindona, 34.

  36 “Cardinal Canali Is Dead at 87; Administrative Head of Vatican,” The New York Times, August 4, 1961, 21; Grilli, La finanza vaticana in Italia, 76.

  37 Wynn, Keepers of the Keys, 47–48.

  38 Hebblethwaite, The Year of Three Popes, 15.

  39 Flamini, Pope, Premier, President, 96–98.

  40 Ibid., 97–98.

  41 Cooney, The American Pope, 278–79.

  42 Flamini, Pope, Premier, President, 168–69; Cooney, The American Pope, 278.

  43 Cardinal Siri quoted in Hebblethwaite, The Year of Three Popes, 142; see also Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 29.

  44 Flamini, Pope, Premier, President, 162–63.

  45 Victor L. Simpson, “Today’s Topic: Inside the Conclave,” Associated Press, Vatican City, P.M. cycle August 8, 1978.

  46 Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 151–52; See also Persona Humana, Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Declaration on Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics, December 29, 1975; Franco Bellegrandi, Nichitaroncalli: Controvita di un papa (Rome: Edizione Internazionali di Letteratura e Scienze, 1994; Hoffman, Anat
omy of the Vatican, 151; Author interviews with a U.S. diplomat stationed in Rome during 1975 to 1979, October 13, 2012; Author interview with an Italian priest who had worked for the Secretariat of State during Pope Paul VI’s Papacy, June 5, 2006.

  47 Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican,145–51. Sindona knew Macchi well and thought he was an ambitious and mean-spirited gatekeeper. “He talks like Mao Tse-Tung but lives like Louis XIV,” Sindona said about him. Tosches, Power on Earth, 51.

  48 Thomas and Morgan-Witts, Pontiff, 31.

  49 The other cardinals were Chicago’s Albert Meyer, St. Louis’s Joseph Ritter, Pittsburgh’s John Wright, and Boston’s Richard Cushing; Cooney, The American Pope, 280.

  50 Reese, Inside the Vatican, 84; see also Giancarlo Zizola, Quale papa? (Rome: Borla, 1977).

  51 Some controversy developed when Italian newspapers reported that the CIA had the news about the new Pope before it was announced outside the sealed conclave. That led to speculation that the CIA had bugged the Apostolic Palace. Flamini, Pope, Premier, President, 173–74.

  52 “Reign of ‘Pope of Unity’ Studded with Landmarks,” Chicago Tribune, June 4, 1963, 8; Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 28.

  53 Wynn, Keepers of the Keys, 126–27.

  54 “Reign of ‘Pope of Unity’ Studded with Landmarks,” Chicago Tribune, 8.

  55 Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 30.

  56 In 1966, Paul built a roof garden on top of the Apostolic Palace, with direct access from his apartment. That meant he no longer had to walk through the more public Vatican gardens when he wanted to get fresh air. “Faceliftng Due on Papal Palace,” AP, Vatican City, July 10, 1966.

  57 Lewin, “The Finances of the Vatican,” 193; Peter Hebblethwaite, Paul VI: The First Modern Pope (London: HarperCollins, 1993). See also Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 169.

  58 Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 52.

  59 Ibid., 164–65.

  60 “Vatican’s Budget Is Vetoed by Pope,” The New York Times, January 23, 1975. The New York Times reported about Paul VI, “He is known to take a personal interest in budgetary matters. He made a reputation as a top administrator while Archbishop of Milan.”

  61 David S. McLellan and Robert McLellan, “The 1963 Italian Elections,” The Western Political Quarterly 17, no. 4 (December 1964): 671–89.

  62 Martin, Rich Church, Poor Church, 53; Lo Bello, The Vatican Empire, 112.

  63 “Italy: Hens Nesting on Rocks,” Time, September 19, 1969; DiFonzo, St. Peter’s Banker, 59–64.

  64 See generally Tosches, Power on Earth, 53–55.

  65 Robert C. Doty, “Italian Collector’s Treasures Include 2 American Companies,” The New York Times, August 16, 1964, F1; see DiFonzo, St. Peter’s Banker, 74, and Martin, Rich Church, Poor Church, 59.

  66 Moneyrex’s legal name was Euro-Market Money Brokers, S.p.A. It was incorporated in Liechtenstein by Sindona’s Luxembourg-based holding company, Fasco. See generally Raw, The Moneychangers, 58, and Tosches, Power on Earth, 139, 145; Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the Case of Sindona and Responsibilities and the Political and Administrative Connected To It, 41.

  67 Gianni Simoni and Giuliano Turone, Il caffè di Sindona: Un finanzieri d’avventura tra politica, Vaticano e mafia (Milan: Garzanti Libri, 2009), 35, 162; Raw, The Moneychangers, 66–67, 331.

  68 Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the Case of Sindona and Responsibilities and the Political and Administrative Connected To It, n. 204, and June 23, 1981, n. 315, 26; DiFonzo, St. Peter’s Banker, 75–84.

  69 Two of his most profitable banks turned out to be Milan’s Banca Unione and Sicily’s Messina Banca. Tosches, Power on Earth, 118; Simoni and Turone, Il caffè di Sindona, 35–36.

  70 Banca Unione is typical of how enmeshed Sindona was with the Vatican. The church had been an equal partner with a publishing company, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. The IOR provided the financing for Sindona to buy the bank. The church retained a 20 percent stake. Luigi Mennini was the bank’s executive director and also a member of the board. Mennini was also on the board of Sindona’s Finabank and Banca Privata Finanziaria. Tosches, Power on Earth, 118; Raw, The Moneychangers, 56–57.

  71 Spada quoted in Raw, The Moneychangers, 57.

  72 Hoffman, Anatomy of the Vatican, 189; Gurwin, The Calvi Affair, 12.

  73 Ginder in Our Sunday Visitor, quoted in Gollin, Worldly Goods, 6. In 1969, Ginder was arrested for possession of child porn and sentenced to ten years of probation. After he published a book in 1976 in which he excoriated the church’s doctrines on sexuality, he was evicted from the priesthood. Two years later, 1978, he was arrested, tried, and convicted of sodomizing two underage boys. He was sentenced to four years in prison. “5 Pittsburgh Priests Went to Prison,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, February 28, 2004.

  74 “Italy: Beating the Cycle,” Time.

  75 Business Week, Part 2, referring to an article “Italy: A Sicilian Financier” (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), 928; Fortune, Volume 88 (New York: Time Inc., 1973), 174; Doty, “Italian Collector’s Treasures Include 2 American Companies,” F1; Nick Tosches, The Nick Tosches Reader (Boston: Da Capo, 2000), 257. A few years later, in 1969, Time said about Sindona that “no one has done more to shake the country’s old financial structure,” and that his “financial empire [that] spans three continents” helped him “leap from obscurity to international prominence.” “Italy: Hens Nesting on Rocks.”

  76 “Watergate’s Landlord,” The Economist, June 16, 1973, 105–6.

  77 DiFonzi, St. Peter’s Banker, 68–69. For the fullest biography of Gelli, see Gianfranco Piazzesi, Gelli: La carriera di un eroe di questa Italia (Milan: Garzanti Libri, 1983).

  78 Even fewer knew that after Mussolini’s fall in July 1943, the fascist Gelli had become a liaison officer with the SS. He later told author Charles Raw that his only choice was either to work with the SS or be sent to a German prison camp. He was detained and released four times by Allied forces, suspected on each occasion of having collaborated with the Nazis. Somehow, he ended up working with American counterintelligence, and later went on to assist Italy’s postwar intelligence services. Willan, The Last Supper, 118–19; Raw, The Moneychangers, 140; Gurwin, The Calvi Affair, 50–51.

  79 Some accounts list 962 names and others 953. Henry Tanner, “Italian Elite Embroiled in Scandal,” The New York Times, May 24, 1981, 1, and Willan, The Last Supper, 15. Gelli chose “Propaganda” as the name for his lodge since it had been the same name used for a lodge by Giuseppe Mazzini, one of the heroes of the 1848 Italian revolution that led to a unified national government.

  80 Memo, “Cossiga Orders Study of CIA-Terrorism Links,” Ref: AU2307110890 Paris, Source ROME ANSA in English, Approved for Release May 1998, pages 0089-0091, released pursuant to a Freedom of Information and Privacy request to the CIA.

  81 Victor L. Simpson, “Scandal in Italian Masonic Lodge Clouds Movement Long Criticized by the Church,” Associated Press, A.M. cycle, May 27, 1981.

  82 In introducing the Anti-Masonic Law of 1925, Mussolini said that Freemasonry was “a danger to the peace and quietude of the State.” 1948 Official Proceedings, Grand Lodge of Missouri, The Grand Lodge of Ancient Free and Accepted Masons of the State of Missouri, The One Hundred Twenty-Seventh Annual Communication, St. Louis, September 28–30, 12c–13c, available at http://issuu.com/momason/docs/gl_proceedings_1948.

  83 Simpson, “Scandal in Italian Masonic Lodge Clouds Movement Long Criticized by the Church”; Willan, The Last Supper, 118.

  84 Ibid., 120.

  85 Hearings Before the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, House of Representatives, 1976.

  86 Tosches, Power on Earth, 167. In an interview with author Nick Tosches, Sindona recounted meeting Gelli in 1974. But it was almost certainly a decade earlier according to P2 documentation seized by Italian authorities.

  87 Although Sindona said he turned down the offer of a P2 membership card, and that he and Gelli were only political allies, when Italian authorities seized P2�
�s records, they found Sindona’s entry, #1612, in the ledger. Some others listed in the P2 files claimed they were not in fact members, but investigators determined the documents to be accurate. Tosches, Power on Earth, 169; Willan, The Last Supper, Notes on Text.

  According to DiFonzo in St. Peter’s Banker (65–71), “There is no way to be sure how the oath [was] read or how it was taken because Gelli quite often would change the ceremony and the oath to fit his own moods.” Still, DiFonzo spends four pages setting forth a version of what the ceremony might have looked like, complete with KKK-like black hoods, pictures of Hitler, Mussolini, and Perón, live serpents, a blood oath, and a pagan rite during which Sindona swore loyalty to Gelli and P2 under threat of death. While it seems certain that Sindona was in fact a P2 member, and some inductees did go through a jazzed-up Masonic ceremony, there is no evidence that Sindona ever underwent one.

  88 Clyde H. Farnsworth, “Sindona’s Empire: Sharp Trading, Big Losses,” The New York Times, September 30, 1974, 57.

  89 Tosches, Power on Earth, 168–69.

  90 Lo Bello, The Vatican Empire, 90–97; see also Martin, The Final Conclave, 26–27.

  91 Martin, The Final Conclave, 27.

  92 Lo Bello, The Vatican Empire, 94–96.

  93 See generally ibid., 100–104. Montecatini had merged with the Edison Company in 1966 to become Montedison.

  94 “Finance: Diversification at the Vatican,” Time, January 25, 1971; Lewin, “The Finances of the Vatican,” 194; see also Horne, “How the Vatican Manages Its Money,” 34; Martin, Rich Church, Poor Church, 65.

  95 This was a title often given to the Black Nobles, and before the Second Vatican Council it was the Papal Chamberlains of the Sword and Cape (Cameriere di spada e cappa); John Hooper, “Luigi Mennini: Shadow over the Vatican,” The Guardian, August 14, 1997, 14.