Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  The Catholic Church has extensive property holdings in Ireland and the United Kingdom. Follieri’s development plan with Helios would add new gems to his crown. He was getting information from Antonio Mainiero in the Vatican, whom he promised to set up as an officer of his branch company in Rome. And Monsignor Carrù from Clergy was feeding the fax requests. According to Melanie Bonvicino, “I told the Helios people, ‘Put him on an allowance, cover his approvable expenses so he does not go out of pocket.’ Like you do with actors who have drug problems. There’s no magic to what Raffaello did. He worked all the time, very hard. When he traveled he was always meeting people. People are money. Sit with the right person, get your picture taken, find the next person. It was like [the movie] American Gigolo, dating a starlet, meeting people, but Raffaello was picking up tabs … He was always looking for business.”

  When Bonvicino reached Rome, Raffaello Follieri was short of cash. Monsignor Carrù was hectoring him for money. We need their support, Raffaello told her. A cradle Catholic with her own issues about the church, Bonvicino wondered why church officials had tolerated Raffaello’s extravagant promotion of himself in alliance with the Vatican. The reality she found was the Vatican’s involvement in the selling of U.S. church properties. Business is business. People are money. Into her purview that day in Rome came Monsignor Carrù, a small man in his early sixties whose effeminate mannerisms seemed out of sync with his deep, low voice of furbo, meaning clever, calculating, a legendary trait. Carrù seemed to her furbo personified.

  Raffaello told her they needed Carrù’s information to succeed with Helios.

  Monsignor Carrù explained he was about to leave on holiday. The trio went to a restaurant, La Rosetta. “Carrù knew a lot,” continues Bonvicino. “I think Carrù was tipped off. It was one last milking of the cow. The priest had wine. I paid for the lunch. He gave me a blessing after the meal.” The next day they met him in Vatican City. She withdrew $1,000 worth of euros on her ATM card and gave it to Monsignor Carrù along with her personal check for $9,000 (on which she wrote donation), which he cashed an hour later at the Vatican Bank.

  Bonvicino and Follieri flew back to New York, then to London, where Helios was intent on raising 100 million euros for developing church properties in Ireland and the UK. Melanie told Raffaello to stay in London, duck the celebrity lights until he could repay his debts, hire a lawyer, negotiate with the federal authorities in Manhattan, and try to avoid being arrested.

  But the heart is a merciless magnet. In the meltdown with Hathaway, the cell calls and text messages flying across continents and time zones pulled Raffaello back without a defense attorney to prepare the way. He wanted his Annie. She was on tour for the movie Get Smart as their fraught dialogue played out. Caring for her dog at the Trump Tower apartment, he had no clue his lover was cooperating with the FBI. So were the two American monsignors, Hodge and Tomashek, among others in his employ. On June 24, 2008, Raffaello was asleep in his boxer shorts at his mother’s flat when the FBI rang at 6:00 a.m. They arrested him for fraud and money laundering. His father, Pasquale, was back in Italy. In Raffaello’s safe, the FBI agents found the letter from Cardinal Castrillón and “the smoking gun” letter from Sodano, as Agent Cacioppi calls it.

  “The investigation started because he was in the press constantly and he made a great catch,” opines Melanie Bonvicino. Indeed, the Vatican’s true role was obscured in the media’s juicy coverage of Follieri’s spectacular meltdown with his movie star sweetheart. As he sat behind bars, with a $21 million bail he could not meet because the U.S. Attorney’s office deemed him a flight risk, Follieri had no U.S. passport nor the stroke in Rome to negotiate an extradition so that he might serve time in Italy. He pleaded guilty to fourteen counts of wire fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy on October 23, 2008. He forfeited $2.4 million, jewelry, and twelve watches.

  “We believe Studio Sodano [Andrea’s corporate name] took in fraudulently earned money,” Cacioppi told me. And Antonio Mainiero and Carrù? “We considered these people unindicted coconspirators. The relevant part from Italy is that we presumed this was bribe money paid to the little functionary [Mainiero] and to this secretary Carrù. We did not need to put those people on the stand. We did get intimations from the State Department that they were not inclined to talk with us. As a matter of resource allocation it was not worth trying to get them.” Cacioppi went on to investigate Bernard Madoff.

  With Follieri sentenced to fifty-four months, questions hover. What did Mainiero do with the $387,300? Did Cardinal Sodano share in the proceeds? Were the incoming funds allocated to the Congregation for the Clergy, or any other Vatican departments? Did the Vatican Bank play a role? How does the Congregation for the Clergy safeguard information when the number-three man—Monsignor Carrù—was put in his job by Sodano and serviced an operator like Follieri? Do Vatican officials profit from property sales in many dioceses? Does the Vatican profit from church sales in other countries? Did the Vatican Bank engage in money laundering?

  Despite the bad publicity Carrù took from the press coverage, on July 20, 2009, Pope Benedict installed him as archaeological superintendent of the catacombs, “an important task entrusted to a scholar with great experience,” according to an archbishop at the Pontifical Council for Culture.24 Perhaps the new post was an elevation of duties, though the image of Giovanni Carrù prowling the ancient tunnels where Christians hid from Roman authority suggests a soft-glove demotion to make Cardinal Sodano nod with furbo of his own. Carrù was not the safest man in Vatican City to handle sensitive real estate information. Still, it took a year after Follieri’s arrest before Carrù was removed from the Congregation for the Clergy.

  Follieri was indeed a big catch for the Justice Department in the national media, but the greater corruption was at the Vatican. Burkle’s people realized Raffaello was off the charts when he leased a private jet for $62,000 to make the quick hop from Los Angeles to Las Vegas instead of taking a commercial flight for a few hundred dollars. Why did the Sodanos get involved with him in the first place? Any number of real estate agents would have profited from unique access to Clergy property files, though Andrea’s greed would have become an issue. The Sodano scheme went sour because Follieri lost his grip on reality. When he crashed, at least $800,000 was tucked away in Italy.

  CODA

  “What Raffaello did in four and a half years takes a lifetime for some people,” asserts Melanie Bonvicino. “He put together a business that ended up making money for Burkle, and would have made serious money for Helios. In the end everybody ditched him. But the Vatican let this man run wild. Why?”

  As Raffaello sat in a federal prison, abandoned by Anne, his parents back in Italy, Melanie Bonvicino made occasional visits. He owed her $131,000 for a blizzard of work at the back end, she says. They were never romantically involved. “But,” she adds with a trace of sympathy, “I actually do care about him.”

  CHAPTER 6

  THE CASE OF THE MISSING MILLIONS

  As the Boston vigil protesters dug in, Peter Borré culled advice from sympathetic canon lawyers and drafted an appeal that he sent in early 2005 to the Congregation for the Clergy. His goal was to halt the suppression order, to undo Bishop Lennon’s handiwork. Archbishop O’Malley wanted the protesters to vacate the parishes, but for the prelate who had publicly confessed his agony over the parish closings—asking God to take him on the worst days—calling the cops seemed out of character. His religious order was founded by Francis of Assisi. Having cops arrest people for occupying pews could be a body blow to area Catholics already steeped in bad news about the church.

  As solidarity grew among people in those empty churches, the culture of resistance drew on Catholicism as a tissue of values. The sacred spaces became arenas of family and community reimagined. On Friday nights at St. Frances Cabrini in Scituate, the parish near the sea, the seven-year-old Arnold triplets—Christian, Scott, and Sean—scampered down the aisle in their slippers, knelt before the altar, and l
ay down in their sleeping bags.1 Jon and Maryellen Rodgers, leaders of the vigil in Scituate, were mapping plans for a civil lawsuit to wrest ownership of St. Frances Cabrini from the archdiocese.

  “We believe that we control the assets and the liabilities of the parish property,” an archdiocesan spokesman explained to the town newspaper. “The Archbishop understands the anger and pain people are feeling.”2

  The civil lawsuit failed. The vigil continued.

  At St. James in Wellesley, which sat on eight acres worth $14 million, vigil leader Suzanne Hurley evinced a rough pragmatism: “Once churches close, the towns can send tax bills to the archdiocese.” Hurley had children aged eleven and seven when the 2004 vigil began. She was well paid as an assistant to a corporate CEO. Four years later, sitting in a quiet pew of the once-bustling church, with a handful of women preparing for a Council of Parishes gathering, Hurley cited an independent contractor’s study which concluded that St. James was the parish best suited for growth in its geographic cluster. “We determined that no church in the cluster should close. It’s like being voted off the island in Survivor,” she said. “This parish sits on land donated by the Maffei family. They paid $25,000 for the marble altar. Kay Maffei, ninety-two, went to court. She wanted to keep the church open.”

  The state’s Supreme Judicial Court denied standing for the case.

  For O’Malley, the cost of defending the archdiocese in legal challenges was another expense layered into the protracted dispute. The chancery had to keep utilities working to maintain insurance; drawing down the cash reserves in a given parish, while the parish no longer paid an assessment, meant losing money at both ends.

  In lieu of Sunday Mass, the parish had Communion services for which sympathetic priests in open parishes provided them consecrated wafers. “I am a lapsed Catholic,” Hurley reflected one chilly night with Christmas three weeks off. “I feel attached to this place”—she gestured toward the stained-glass windows. “I had been a lector at Mass, but it wasn’t until this parish that I heard the words differently, and it gave me a sense of ownership about faith. I’ve become jaded. My kids are well past their First Communion. I listened to my son ask, ‘What’s a pedophile?’ I’m not concerned about something happening to my children, but I could not ask them to look up to me if I ran from this church. My father-in-law goes to Mass at his church, then comes to our vigil. I consider these services as legitimate as the Mass. I was hurt by the injustice of the Reconfiguration process. I remember sleeping in the choir loft, the first time. My husband said, ‘I’ve had enough. I will never walk my daughter down this aisle.’ … It takes a toll.” The moral premise of the vigil, the human investment in sacred space, had its own logic. “I feel I can raise my children as good Catholics or good Christians.”3

  As the vigil movement gained momentum in 2005, Peter Borré’s strategy with Cynthia Deysher on the Council of Parishes was to play for time, expect a loss at Clergy, and plan an appeal at the Apostolic Signatura, the Vatican high court; in the meantime, the parishioners occupying churches would keep the issue in the news. Sympathetic lawyers were exploring other strategies, but Borré knew that even in liberal Massachusetts an intrachurch dispute was a legal long shot, given the Constitution’s guarantee for freedom of religion.

  Borré was prepared at his own expense to spend time in Rome to see if just a few high church officials could grasp that each week in which a given group of parishioners kept their vigil meant lost Sunday collections, no taxes to the archbishop, continued expenses for the archdiocese, and the potential of losing good Catholics who wanted the sacraments in their home churches. O’Malley was losing money on each occupied parish. But Borré and the vigil members were clear-eyed about Vatican tribunals. The church legal system was not democratic. Bishops governed as princes. The pope as supreme arbiter of canon law could intervene in any proceeding; however, that rarely happened. Making the system work for protesting laypeople was one tall order.

  For Mary Beth Borré, the biggest surprise was watching her husband “take on the role of a Don Quixote,” as he headed out on an exotic journey against the odds. “It seemed a natural progression of the fight he chose to wage,” she said later. “Peter is a natural entrepreneur. His greatest strength lies in seeing opportunity where others do not and being able to take advantage of the vacuum.” Those traits ill fit the character of Cervantes’s chivalrous madman on horseback. Still, Peter Borré, toughened by years in the oil industry, had never embarked on anything so remotely idealistic. The search for a point where faith and justice might meet had become a quest that, somehow, appealed to him.

  He drew encouragement from the 2004 bankruptcy filings by the dioceses of Portland, Spokane, and Tucson. Canon lawyers were divided on the proprietary rights of bishops, but everyone realized that the bishops wanted to keep those diocesan parishes from being lumped into the assets that plaintiff lawyers were trying to recover in the mass-settlement cases for victim survivors. If parishes were off-limits in a diocese grappling with bankruptcy, how could the Suppression decrees in Boston—the bishop seizing parish assets—be valid?

  As the Congregation for the Clergy’s Third Office reviewed the appeals from the vigil parishes, the priests in Greater Boston were jolted by the news that the archdiocese was cutting back on benefits from the clergy pension fund. A priest leaked to New York Times reporter Mary Williams Walsh an internal report from the archdiocese’s financial consultant, Towers Perrin. Between 1986 and 2002, “the archdiocese made no contributions” to the clergy pension fund, wrote Walsh. “Twice a year, at Christmas and at Easter, the archdiocese has held fund-raising drives in the parishes for priests’ retirements, raising about $4.5 million a year. But for many years the archdiocese has used that money to fill other needs.” The archdiocese was freezing pensions at $1,889 a month and “has sold church-owned real estate to the priests’ pension fund to raise cash.”4

  The pension fund had money before the decade plus six years in which the annual donations were channeled elsewhere—enough, at the front end, such that it earned $1.5 million in interest on a $15 million loan to the archdiocese for the $85 million victims’ settlement in 2003. But with $134.4 million in assets on hand at the close of the 2003 fiscal year, the retirement fund needed $204.7 million to meet its projected commitments, a $60.3 million shortfall. “I think we are all very perplexed as to how the archdiocese accumulated such a large unfunded pension liability, because parishioners have been giving for years,” Cynthia Deysher told the Globe. “Now it has come out that they never put the money in for sixteen years. That is fraudulent.”5

  Peter Borré calculated that if the $4.5 million yearly inflow for the Clergy Retirement Trust, starting in 1986, had been invested conservatively in a balanced portfolio of stocks and bonds, at an assumed annual return of 5 percent, more than $140 million would have accumulated by the close of fiscal year 2002. In whatever fashion Cardinal Law had used the $4.5 million yearly donations, Borré considered the diversion a gross violation of trust.

  The archdiocesan Pilot then reported that the Christmas and Easter donations went to the Clergy Benefit Trust, “which provides for the needs of priests including … the Clergy Retirement and Disability [Trust] and the Clergy Medical/Hospitalization [Trust].” The chancellor, or chief financial officer, was a layman named David Smith. Smith explained that most of the funds went for yearly medical costs. He put the onus on parishes for not sending enough money downtown, a subtle gambit of shifting blame to pastors for not collecting more from the pews: “The billing [to the parishes] has never caught up with the cost, because the cost keeps going up. There is a reluctance to put a burden on the parishes, so premiums have been raised slower than the cost.” The Pilot offered more explanation:

  Smith explained that the collections were never intended to be used exclusively for retirement benefits. “I have gone back to check what we said and could not find a single [communication] that said ‘only for retired priests,’ ” he said. Smith maintain
ed that the collections were used appropriately. “Every dollar that was collected was used exclusively for the needs of priests, and a great deal of it went to the needs of retired priests,” he said …

  The collections were not needed for the retirement fund because returns from investments in the booming stock market provided the plan with sufficient funds.6

  Smith was more forthcoming while under oath in a June 2002 civil deposition, after the archdiocese pulled back from agreeing to a settlement with the first wave of eighty-six victims of John Geoghan. (The cases settled that fall before the much larger victims’ group.) Plaintiff lawyers Mitchell Garabedian and William H. Gordon were focused on Cardinal Law and his Finance Council. Bill Gordon asked the questions; he zeroed in on funding streams. “I’m not a trustee,” Smith stated, “but essentially the Clergy Benefit Trust is for medical and ultimately retirement benefits for clergy.”

  Is there a separate trust called the Clergy Medical Trust, then?

  Clergy Medical and Hospitalization Trust is essentially, it is another trust, it is a separate legal vehicle. It is essentially the checkbook that pays those medical bills.