—Antonio Mancini, bagman for the
Banda della Magliana, La Stampa, July 27, 2011
Calvi's death was first ruled a suicide by a coroner's jury in London. But the verdict was quickly quashed and a second jury declared it was unable to decide between murder and suicide. The investigation continued for many years. The Italian detectives remained convinced that the banker must have been killed. At the time of his demise, Calvi was sixty-two years old and overweight. He suffered from poor eyesight and pronounced vertigo. To commit suicide, he would have had to overcome impressive obstacles. As Peter Popham explained in the Guardian:
In the pitch darkness he would have had to spot the scaffolding under the bridge, practically submerged in the high tide, stuff his trousers and pockets with bricks, climb over a stone parapet and down a 12-foot-long vertical ladder, then edge his way eight feet along the scaffolding. He would then have had to gingerly lower himself to another scaffolding pole before putting his neck in the noose and throwing himself off.1
In 1998, Calvi's body was finally exhumed and a coroner determined that the man who had been known as “God's banker,” indeed, had been murdered.
THE STRANGLER SPEAKS
In the wake of this decision, Francesco “Frank the Strangler” Di Carlo, the heroin traffic manager for the Sicilian Mafia, testified that he had been approached to kill Calvi by members of the Corleonesi crime family under capo Giuseppe “Pippo” Calò, the “mob's cashier.”2 Interviewed in 2012, the notorious supergrass (British slang for “informer”) said:
I was in Rome and received a phone call from a friend in Sicily telling me that a certain high-ranking mafia member had just been killed. I will never forget the date because of this: it was 16 June 1982—two days before Calvi was murdered. The friend told me that Pippo Calò was trying to get hold of me because he needed me to do something for him. In the hierarchy of Cosa Nostra, he was a general; I was a colonel, so he was a little higher up, my superior.
While I finally spoke to Pippo, he told me not to worry, that the problem had been taken care of. That's a code we use in the Cosa Nostra. We never talk about killing someone. We say they have been taken care of.
Calvi was naming names. No one had any trust in him anymore. He owed a lot of money. His friends had all distanced themselves. Everyone wanted to get rid of him. He had been arrested and he had started to talk. Then he had tried to kill himself by cutting his wrists. He was released, but knew he could be rearrested at any time. He was weak, he was a broken man.
I was not the one who hanged Calvi. One day I may write the full story, but the real killers will never be brought to justice because they are being protected by the Italian state, by members of the P2 Masonic lodge. They have massive power. They are made up of a mixture of politicians, bank presidents, the military, top security and so on. This is a case that they continue to open and close again and again but it will never be resolved. The higher you go, the less evidence you will find.3
Di Carlo, on another occasion, said that Vincenzo Casilo and Sergio Vaccari, two members of the Camorra with ties to P2, had received the contract for Calvi's murder from Calò and Licio Gelli.4 Casilo and Vaccari were killed by a car bomb shortly after their return to Milan. In case Casilo had engaged in some pillow talk, his mistress—Giovanna Matarazzo, a nightclub dancer—was murdered in her apartment by Camorra assassins.5
THE KILLING CREW
The ordering of Calvi's death by Calò and Gelli was verified by other high-ranking mob figures, including Francesco Marino Mannoia and Luigi Giuliano, who served Stefano Bontade. The two Mafiosi testified that Ernesto Diotallevi, a leader of Banda della Magliana, also took part in the hit.6 Diotallevi, like Danilo Abbruciati, worked closely with Flavio Carboni in smuggling drugs and arranging assassinations. After the Calvi affair, Diotallevi and Carboni continued to do business with the IOR by laundering drug money through the Camillian, a religious order dedicated to serving the sick and dying.7
It was only to be expected that members of Banda della Magliana would emerge from the shadows of Blackfriars Bridge. No murder by contract group had been more useful to P2 and the commanders of Operation Gladio. The street gang from northern Rome came to the fore of organized crime in Italy with the kidnapping and murder of Italy's Prime Minister Aldo Moro, who sought to form a coalition government with Italy's Communist Party,8 and the murder of journalist Carmine Pecorelli, who published an article that made the connection between P2 and Moro's fate.9 By 1982, the Banda's hit list had come to include:
Judge Emilio Alessandrini, the Milan magistrate who initiated the probe into the activities of Calvi, the IOR, and Banco Ambrosiano;
Giorgio Ambrosoli, who presented testimony to the financial police concerning Michele Sindona's financial dealings with the Vatican and Gelli's Masonic lodge;
Lt. Col. Antonio Varisco, head of Rome's security service, who was investigating the activities and membership of P2; and
Boris Giuliano, the Palermo police deputy superintendent, who had spoken with Ambrosoli about Sindona's laundering of drug funds through the IOR.10
In addition to the killings, the Banda was responsible for detonating a bomb at the home of Enrico Cuccia, managing director of Mediobanca, who had witnessed Sindona's threat to the life of Ambrosoli, and for the attempted hit on Roberto Rosone, the deputy chairman of Banco Ambrosiano. After participating in the murder of Calvi, the gang tossed Giuseppe Della Cha, an executive at Ambrosiano, to his death from the top floor of the Milan bank. Della Cha was preparing to provide documents to Italian investigators that established the Vatican's ownership of the United Trading Corporation of Panama and the other dummy companies.11
IRREPARABLE DAMAGE
But the killings could not repair the damage caused to Operation Gladio by the Ambrosiano affairs and the obstinate Pole on the papal throne. After the publication of the P2 list on March 17, 1981, Licio Gelli was forced to flee the country. News of the generals, admirals, parliamentarians, Italian cabinet members, industrialists, police officers, secret service officials, and ecclesiastical dignitaries who belonged to P2 had been published before, most notably by Mino Pecorelli in his newsletter Osservatore Politico. Many mainstream reporters had dismissed such stories as scabrous examples of yellow journalism. For this reason, the discovery of the P2 list at Gelli's villa jolted the Italian press into an awareness of the reality of the sinister lodge and its intent to gain control of the government. The discoveries by the carabinieri became headline news throughout Italy and central Europe. The fears of the CIA came to full fruition. John Paul II's refusal to shore up the losses of the Vatican's shell companies had resulted in the exposure of P2, the raid on Stibam, and the collapse of Arnaldo Forlani's Christian Democratic government.12
This exposure prompted General Alberto Dalla Chiesa of the carabinieri to come to the realization that the Red Brigades were a puppet organization of right-wing militants, that these militants were being manipulated by P2, and that P2 fell under the command of SISMI. He also uncovered evidence that the funding for P2 and its strategy of tension was coming from a heroin pipeline that had been established between Sicily and the United States, along with a letter from Aldo Moro that mentioned the presence of “NATO guerrilla activities” on Italian soil. When Dalla Chiesa reported these findings to the prime minister, Andreotti went white in the face. His worst fears were coming true. Operation Gladio was beginning to unravel.13
On May 1, 1982, General Dalla Chiesa arrived in Palermo as the new Prefect of Sicily. Two days later, he met with Ralph Jones, the US consul, and informed him that the Gambino-Inzerillo-Spatola Mafia clan and P2 were involved in a heroin-smuggling racket netting a yearly profit in excess of $900 million.14 Word was passed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the extended Gambino crime family in New York and New Jersey were put under constant surveillance. On September 3 the general and his thirty-two-year-old wife were gunned down and killed on Via Carini by a team of six assassins.15
ON SA
CRED GROUND
One month after Calvi's death, commissioners from the Bank of Italy appeared at the IOR to confront Archbishop Marcinkus about his part in the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano. Most of the $1.75 billion remained missing and Marcinkus had issued the letter of patronage, acknowledging the Holy See's ownership of the eight dummy corporations that consumed the cash. In response to the commissioners’ questions, Marcinkus produced the counterletter, signed by Calvi, which stated that whatever happened to Banco Ambrosiano and the eight corporations mentioned in the patronage letter, the Vatican “would suffer no future damage or loss.” The Archbishop then showed the commissioners to the door, informing them that neither the Bank of Italy nor the Guardia di Finanza possessed any jurisdiction within the sanctified walls of Vatican City.16
But the Italian government maintained pressure on the Holy See for full disclosure of its involvement in the Ambrosiano affair. “The government,” said Italy's treasury minister Beniamino Andreatta after meeting with Marcinkus, “is waiting for a clear assumption of responsibility by the IOR.”17 While the waiting continued, the Italian press ran daily articles about the Vatican and its relationship with the Sicilian Mafia and P2. Rome's daily newspaper La Repubblica began to publish a cartoon strip called “The Adventures of Paul Marcinkus.”
To quiet matters, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, the Vatican's secretary of state, proposed the creation of a six-man commission to make an investigation into the Vatican's involvement in the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano: three were to be named by the Vatican and three by the Italian Ministry of the Treasury. The Italian government complied with the proposal. The results, as expected, were inconclusive. At the end of October 1982, the Vatican officials ruled that Holy Mother Church had no interest in the dummy corporations and had not been involved in the plot to drain the bank of its wealth, while the three treasury officials ruled otherwise.18
PROOF OF GUILT
Dissatisfied with the findings, Ambrosiano's creditors continued to mount pressure for a settlement, since most of the $1.75 billion had vanished within a black hole created by the Vatican's shell companies. The Italian government was left with no option save to mount a criminal investigation to determine whether the Holy See had been the culprit in a shell game that had caused the financial ruin of thousands of families throughout Italy. Documents were unearthed in the records of the Banca del Gottardo in Switzerland that the Vatican, indeed, had set up and controlled the dummy corporations to plunder the assets of the Milan bank. One, dated November 21, 1974, and signed by Vatican officials, was a request for the Swiss bank to open accounts on behalf of its newly created company: United Trading Corporation of Panama.19
Other documents found within other banks revealed more acts of fraud by the Holy See. One document showed that the IOR had received two deposits from Banco Andino of Peru on October 16, 1979. The deposits were for $69 million each. When the deposits matured in 1982, Banco Andino asked for its money back. But the Vatican Bank refused, saying that the United Trading Corporation of Panama now owned the money and the IOR had no control over it.20
Still the Pope refused to acknowledge the Vatican's ownership of the companies, for fear such an admission would reveal that the Bride of Christ was no longer pure and without blemish but had engaged in wanton acts of covetousness and greed. The impasse would have to be addressed by another decisive act.
GONE GIRL
On June 22, 1983, Emanuela Orlandi, the fifteen-year-old daughter of a Vatican employee, disappeared without a trace while on her way to her home in Vatican City from a music lesson at the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music, a building attached to the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare in the heart of Rome.21 She was last seen entering a dark gray BMW with a well-dressed man, whom witnesses said bore a striking resemblance to Enrico “Renatino” De Pedis, the acting head of Banda della Magliana.22 Investigators later discovered that the BMW belonged to Flavio Carboni.23
Two weeks later, the Orlandi family received a call from a man with a heavy American accent, who said, “We have taken the citizen Emanuela Orlandi only because she belongs to the Vatican State. We are not a revolutionary or terror organization; we have never described ourselves as such; we consider ourselves people interested only in liberating [would-be papal assassin] Ağca. The deadline is July 20.”24 He identified his organization as the Turkish Anti-Christian Liberation Front, a group unknown to Turkish intelligence. The caller said that he would leave an important message regarding the demands of his organization with the Vatican.
Several days later, Ercole Orlandi, Emanuela's father, paid a visit to Monsignor Dino Monduzzi, prefect of the Pontifical House, to see if the message had arrived. The prelate at first said no—no one within the Vatican had heard from the kidnappers. Thanks to persistent questioning by Mario Meneguzzi, Emanuela's uncle, Monsignor Monduzzi finally admitted that there had been a call and a message. “But absolutely nothing they said or wanted could be understood,” the prefect insisted.25
Between July 10 and July 19, the “American” made other calls, some directing the press to locations where they found notes and taped messages from Emanuela. On July 20, the mysterious caller contacted ANSA, Italy's national news wire service, to say, “Today is the last message before the deadline of the ultimatum expires.”26
REQUESTS DENIED
Throughout the investigation, SISDE (Italy's domestic intelligence service) found the Vatican strangely uncooperative and unwilling to share their conversations with “the American.” Vincenzo Parisi, the deputy head of SISDE, came to believe that the Holy See had shrouded the Orlandi case by a campaign of sophisticated disinformation. The messages and calls from the representative of the Turkish organization, Parisi said, were episodes of “playacting” to distract attention from the real heart of the matter.27 In his confidential report on the mysterious caller, Parisi wrote: “Foreigner, very possible of Anglo-Saxon culture; high intellectual and cultural level; familiar with the Latin tongue and, it follows, of Italian; member (or in close contact) with the ecclesiastical world; serious, ironic, precise, and orderly in composure, cold, calculating, full of himself, sure of his role and strength, sexually amorphous; has lived a long period of time in Rome, knows very well all the city zones that have something to do with his activity; well informed about Italian judicial rules and above all the logistical structure of the Vatican.”28
The SISDE official went on to write that it was “highly plausible” that the kidnapping of Emanuela was committed by someone “inside the ecclesiastical hierarchy and order,” who was closely connected to organized crime figures.29 Parisi managed to provide this profile because of an intercept that the Italian police had placed on a phone line within the Vatican after the caller demanded access to Secretary of State Casaroli. But Parisi was unable to listen to the conversations between the “American” caller and Cardinal Casaroli. The tapes, along with the intercept, mysteriously vanished from the Holy See.30
At Parisi's insistence, the carabinieri tapped the telephone of Raul Bonarelli, the second-highest-ranking officer within the Vatican's Central Office of Vigilance. In one taped conversation with other Vatican officials, Bonarelli said that he had sent boxes of documents on the Orlandi case to the office of Cardinal Casaroli. Parisi and his fellow magistrates sent requests to the Holy See asking permission to interview Casaroli, members of his staff within the Secretariat, and members of the Office of Vigilance about the content of the internal documents. All the requests were denied.31
EXTORTION ATTEMPT
At the end of July, ANSA reported, “In the Vatican, the prevailing opinion is that the people responsible for the kidnapping belong to the world of common crime and that the proposal for an exchange with Ağca is just an excuse to extort considerable sums of money [from the Vatican] in exchange for the girl to throw investigators off track.”32 The money, Judge Rosario Priori, a leading magistrate in the case, concluded, belonged to members of Banda della Magliana, who had deposited it with Marcinkus and C
alvi only to be left with a kidnapped girl as means of obtaining repayment. The judge estimated that the amount owed to the gang was in excess of $200 million.33
TESTIMONY OF TRAMPS
Years later, Antonio Mancini (“Nino the Tramp”), a bagman for De Pedis, said that his boss had arranged the kidnapping in order to recoup the millions it had lost in the collapse of Ambrosiano. “There was money that had gone missing,” Mancini told a reporter from La Stampa, “and the choice was between dropping a cardinal by the roadside or striking someone close to the pope. We chose the second option.”34 Mancini added, “What Judge Priori says about the Orlandi kidnapping is the absolute truth, what puzzles me is the figure of $200 million. Knowing the amount of money that flowed into the gang's activity and especially the money made by the ‘Testaccio’ group [the division of the Banda under De Pedis], I think that $200 million is an insufficient sum.”35
Critical insight into the possible fate of Emanuela came from Sabrina Minardi, the former lover of De Pedis and high-class call girl. Emanuela, she testified, had been kidnapped by De Pedis, who held her at an apartment on the coastal town of Torvaianica, not far from Rome. Archbishop Marcinkus, Ms. Minardi said, visited Emanuela several times while the school girl remained in captivity. The victim, she continued, was eventually killed and chopped into pieces, and the remains were cast into a cement mixer.36
In a 2010 interview with Gianluca Di Feo of L’Espresso, Ms. Minardi said that she had ongoing sexual relations with Roberto Calvi and Archbishop Marcinkus. She claimed that she had received a villa in Monte Carlo from Calvi, while Marcinkus provided a Vatican position for one of her relatives. Ms. Minardi added that she had provided Marcinkus with a steady stream of prostitutes and had delivered to him large sums of cash from De Pedis in a Louis Vuitton bag. “I left him the money,” she said, “but I kept the bag.”37
Operation Gladio Page 26