by Peter Robb
In 1971 Sindona was poised now for his biggest coup of all. He wanted control of Italy’s two biggest holding companies, the bastions of old money in Italy. He wanted to merge them and simultaneously take over one of Italy’s biggest banks. The governor of the Bank of Italy later remarked that if Sindona’s programme had been realized, it would have created … perhaps the biggest financial group in Europe. It would have given Sindona, the friends’ banker, total dominance of the creaky Italian financial system. In August 1971 he won control of the first holding company, the Centrale. The august figures of Italian capitalism were immediately shunted off the board and replaced with Sindona’s men, one of them the still obscure Roberto Calvi, the banker who would shortly outdo even his mentor Sindona and end his life hanging under Blackfriars bridge in London. At the eleventh hour, the alarmed Italian financial establishment, after years of connivance with Sindona, blocked his bid for control. The Bank of Italy blocked his takeover bids for Bastogi, the second holding company, and for the national agricultural bank and ordered an inspection of the other Sindona banks. Sindona was days from making a public offer for the second holding company, with the approval of the entire financial media, when the Bank of Italy blocked that takeover too and thus Sindona’s grand design.
Yet when his inspectors found huge illegalities in Sindona’s banks and urged that their administrators be sacked, the governor of the Bank of Italy did nothing. Sindona was a very powerful man. He had major international banks on his side, he had the support of the DC and the Vatican. He was stronger than the Bank of Italy. The decision not to take disciplinary measures derived … from a political judgement about the Bank of Italy’s capacity to administer the coup de grace to Sindona, decided a parliamentary committee many years later. And he’d just bought in 1972 the eighteenth-biggest bank in the USA, the very profitable Franklin National Bank, with money, it turned out later, not his own, and gone to live in New York. The Bank of Italy vaguely hoped his absence might improve the behaviour of his Italian banks. Other banks began to sniff danger, though. Hambros precipitately severed its links with Sindona and others followed.
As Sindona’s establishment allies began to abandon him, he speculated ever more wildly on the financial markets and at the same time strengthened his ties with the DC in Italy. In April 1973 he took three hundred and fifty million dollars out of his banks in Milan to finance new expansion. By the end of July the two banks were insolvent. He speculated heavily and secretly against the lira. Having made all the money he could from this, he helped and advised the Bank of Italy and the Italian government to recover from the mysterious run on the lira. In December of that year Giulio Andreotti, the prime minister, ignored the warnings of the Italian ambassador in Washington and spoke at a gala banquet offered by the generically identified Italo-American community in New York and hailed Sindona publicly as the saviour of the lira.
Sindona was buying support from the DC with huge gifts and loans to the party. He gave two and a half million dollars to Fanfani, another past and future DC prime minister with a powerful base in Sicily. Meanwhile he made a series of blunders on the stock exchange and the currency and commodities markets. In the summer of 1974, Sindona’s financial crisis became Italy’s. Germany was in alarm. ITALY MANOEUVRES ON THE EDGE OF THE ABYSS, headlined the Frankfurter Zeitung. DANCING ON THE BRINK, said Die Welt, and FIVE MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT. So was France. ITALY ON THE VERGE OF BANKRUPTCY, said Le Monde, and Le Figaro conducted an AUTOPSY OF BANKRUPTCY ITALIAN STYLE. Sindona merged his two Milan banks as the Banca Privata Italiana. The Franklin National Bank was now in trouble in America, and two German banks tied to Sindona went under. When the Italian treasury minister put a veto on further recapitalization of the holding company Sindona had created to save his fortunes, it was more or less the end. A few days apart in October 1974, both the Banca Privata Italiana and the Franklin National were declared bankrupt. Days before the Franklin collapse the federal reserve bank had lent Sindona one point seven billion dollars to save it. It was the biggest bank failure in American history. Two arrest warrants were issued in Milan for fraud. Sindona fled to Hong Kong and then Taiwan. On the advice of David Kennedy, Nixon’s treasury secretary, he returned to the United States, where he was arrested and released on three million dollars bail. He withdrew to his vast suite in the Pierre Hotel, ever the optimist, to plan his comeback.
As a bankrupt facing criminal charges on two continents, Sindona was now something of a pariah in the world of international finance, and a grave embarrassment to his former political friends. The main thing he had going for him at this point, he realized, was his capacity to be an even worse embarrassment. On one frantic summer day in Rome just before the crash, a yellow envelope containing Sindona’s list of five hundred, the names of Italy’s most distinguished secret capital exporters, had been passed around like a hot potato among the heads of the Bank of Italy and the Bank of Rome. Nobody dared open it, fearing it would have revealed the entire Italian business establishment as lawbreakers, and it disappeared again. It’d been a foretaste. Sindona had cost Italy something near four billion US dollars, in 1995 money.
He’d also cost the Vatican a lot of money. Most importantly of all, from his own immediate point of view, he’d lost his friends in Sicily an awful lot of money, proceeds of their heroin sales in the US. The late Claire Sterling wrote that by 1979 Cosa Nostra’s people were sending somewhere around a billion dollars yearly from America to Palermo by way of Switzerland, Liechtenstein, London, Caracas and the Cayman Islands. The drug money was now gone, billions of dollars of it. Sindona believed in 1979 that if he could get back into business, through one political-financial salvage plan or another, have another throw of the dice, he could conjure back the lost billions.
He’d also lost money for Licio Gelli, an extremely shadowy figure with thirty-nine listings in the index of The True History, a person who’d begun adult life in the fascist secret services and gone on to involvement with right-wing terrorism, international arms trafficking, the mafia and the Vatican. Gelli would be arrested in 1981 as leader of a secret masonic lodge called the P2. The members of the P2 included a large piece of the Italian judicial, political, military and secret service establishment, and it was believed to be planning a military coup in Italy. Sindona had been Gelli’s financial advisor as well as Cosa Nostra’s. Sindona … was an intimate of the impenetrably mysterious Licio Gelli. The two of them juggled astronomical sums together, wrote Claire Sterling, who didn’t usually let a little international criminal intrigue get the better of her.
In all these quarters, only the hope of recovering lost money was restraining vengeful anger. And all Sindona had now to help him recover was his secrets. It was time for blackmail.
* * *
IN ITALY, the government had appointed a receiver to wind up the affairs of Sindona’s bank. This was a thankless task, given Sindona’s deviousness. There’d been, for instance, parallel accounts kept, and Sindona’s people had managed to remove or shred most of the real accounts. The receiver, Giorgio Ambrosoli, was an energetic, meticulous and stubborn man, however. The job was a challenge. The lack of enthusiasm for clearing up the Sindona mystery on the part of certain public officials was worrying, and the isolation in which Ambrosoli increasingly worked, the lack of support, almost fearsome, but the receiver treated these too as challenges of another kind. Soon he was flying around Europe, from bank to bank in the Sindona constellation. Geneva, Zurich, Basle, Hamburg, Luxembourg, Paris. He found that though the money which flowed from Sindona’s Italian banks to these was registered as deposits, and therefore assets of the banks in Italy, in fact it flowed on, in the name of these foreign banks, into a series of companies set up in tax havens around the world, all of which turned out to belong to Sindona. Ambrosoli’s great coup was to get his hands, in a lightning action in October 1975, on the shares of a Sindona company called Fasco A.G., whose head office was in Liechtenstein. Fasco was the mother company, the Russian doll that contained thr
ee hundred other companies, which in their turn contained companies that contained companies … In exile Sindona was enraged by the Fasco discovery. There was a flurry of legal actions and press interviews. He sent a message to Ambrosoli from his suite in the Hotel Pierre. Vengeance is sweeter when it comes from afar.
Though in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, Sindona was not yet quite all alone. Giulio Andreotti still found time among the pressures of affairs of state to think of a friend in need. On page 427 of The True History of Italy I found that in November 1973, a year before the crash, Sindona’s son-in-law, who was also the director of his banks, had written to prime minister Andreotti about the strategy our group wishes to pursue in Italy and permitting himself to call the prime minister a sincere friend and a formidable expert with whom to agree on … the most important decisions. On the same page of The True History I saw that in late 1976, in the most difficult moment of my life, Sindona himself had written to the Illustrious and dear prime minister, as Andreotti was again by then, to thank him for his renewed expression of esteem and the interest you have shown in my affairs. Coming from a bankrupt awaiting criminal trial in the United States and Italy to a head of government, this was a little startling. The letter became even odder further on, as Sindona explained how he would defend himself legally and politically. He wrote, I shall be forced against my will to present … the real reasons for the arrest warrant … with appropriate documentation … It sounded almost threatening. Andreotti was already doing a lot to help Sindona. A month after becoming prime minister again in August 1976 he’d had a visit from two types later linked to the mafia and the P2, a lawyer and an ex-priest turned businessman, members, as they described themselves, of the Italo-American community. They wanted Andreotti’s help in preventing or delaying Sindona’s extradition to Italy. The prime minister spoke privately with them for nearly an hour and the members of the Italo-American community emerged delighted and told Sindona’s lawyer on the way back to the hotel that Andreotti had promised his total attention. Then they went straight to call on Licio Gelli. Gelli blamed the communists for Sindona’s misfortunes. The communists hate Michele Sindona because he’s anticommunist and has always supported free enterprise …
The first concrete sign of Andreotti’s total attention for Sindona’s problems was a salvage attempt soon after the visit from the two Italo-Americans. It was followed by another more ambitious effort in 1978. Both heavily involved Licio Gelli and the P2. Beyond that there were glimpses. Andreotti’s factotum, the deputy minister Franco Evangelisti, met at least once with Sindona when he was on the run, a chance meeting, when he was buying toy soldiers at F.A.O. Schwarz, just near the Hotel Pierre. The prime minister himself met Sindona in New York in 1976 and 1977, according to the FBI. Andreotti denied it. Nevertheless, in the months of national trauma when the DC president and former prime minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped and murdered, Andreotti was amazingly accessible to Sindona’s people. Between 1978 and 1980 there were at least a dozen meetings recorded between Andreotti and Sindona’s lawyer in the prime minister’s office. Moro in his days awaiting death found time to think and write about Andreotti’s relations with Sindona, how he’d insisted on appearing as Sindona’s guest of honour at the New York banquet, despite the appalled urgings of the Italian ambassador and Moro himself. The salvage effort promoted by Andreotti in 1978 failed in the end because it was resisted by the leading banks and above all by Italy’s most powerful financier, the wily old Enrico Cuccia, and the stubborn and incorruptible Giorgio Ambrosoli, who was determined to trace the sources of Sindona’s money.
In the very last days of 1978, Giorgio Ambrosoli began to receive threatening phone calls, a dozen in as many days. Could be a madman, Ambrosoli noted at first in his diary. The anonymous caller persisted. He sounded well informed. He said Ambrosoli hadn’t told the truth about Sindona. Ambrosoli recorded the conversations.
UNKNOWN CALLER: They’re pointing the finger at you. I’m in Rome and they’re pointing the finger, because you’re not cooperating …
AMBROSOLI: But who are they?
UNKNOWN CALLER: The Big Boss.
AMBROSOLI: Who’s the Big Boss?
UNKNOWN CALLER: You understand me. The Big Boss and the little boss, everyone is blaming you … You’re a nice guy, I’d be sorry … The Big One, you understand? Yes or no?
AMBROSOLI: I imagine the big one is Sindona.
UNKNOWN CALLER: No, it’s Andreotti!
AMBROSOLI: Who? Andreotti!
UNKNOWN CALLER: Right. He called and said he had everything taken care of, but it’s all your fault … so watch out …
On January 12 Ambrosoli received his last call.
UNKNOWN CALLER: Good morning. Tried to be smart the other day? You recorded the call.
AMBROSOLI: Who told you that?
UNKNOWN CALLER: It’s my business who told me. I wanted to save you but from now on I’m not saving you any longer.
AMBROSOLI: Not saving me any longer?
UNKNOWN CALLER: I’m not saving you any longer because you only deserve to die shot down like a fuckwit. You’re a fuckwit and a bastard!
One night Ambrosoli’s youngest son Betò, aged seven, woke and heard his father come home from work at almost one in the morning. The child heard his parents listening to a recording of a voice shouting We’ll kill you like a dog! We’ll kill you like a bastard! When Ambrosoli realized his son knew of the threat, he explained soothingly as he put the child to bed, They’ll never do it because we know who they are … The financier Cuccia too, the other obstacle to a Sindona salvage, was receiving threats. His house had been attacked, his children followed. Trusting nobody, he refused to speak. Then Ambrosoli found Sindona had got hold of a copy of the highly secret and devastating confidential report he’d just made, detailing his findings on the operations of Sindona’s bank.
Ninety-nine criminal charges of fraud, perjury and misappropriation of funds were filed against Sindona in the US over the collapse of the Franklin National Bank. The March day in 1979 that Sindona was charged in New York, the journalist Mino Pecorelli was murdered in Rome, just after being persuaded not to print an article on Andreotti’s role in another financial scandal. Four days later the director of the Bank of Italy who’d most vigorously opposed Sindona’s rehabilitation effort was arrested and the bank’s governor was presented with a sub poena. The Bank of Italy was the one Italian institution people still respected. And three and a half months later, in July 1979, the fearless and determined Giorgio Ambrosoli was shot dead one night in front of his home in Milan by the UNKNOWN CALLER, an American mafioso. The man who ordered the killing was Michele Sindona. The governor of the Bank of Italy came to Ambrosoli’s funeral, and a few judges and magistrates, but from the government which had appointed and abandoned him, and the state in whose service he’d been murdered, there was no one.
On the second of August, three weeks after Ambrosoli’s assassination, Michele Sindona skipped his three million dollar bail and disappeared. He walked out of the Hotel Pierre in an improbable chicken-skin mask, wig, shades and false beard and his secretary received a call from communist terrorist kidnappers. Sindona was actually on his way to Palermo. The chicken skin started lifting at the airport, due to heavy sweating in the summer heat, but Sindona got to Sicily nevertheless with the friends from the New York Gambino family who’d organized the trip. The friends never left his side. They were joined by people from Gelli’s P2, though not, it seemed, from the third of Sindona’s big losers, the Vatican. The Vatican’s IOR had covered a loan of nearly one and a half billion dollars of nineteen-seventies money which, Claire Sterling wrote, had simply disappeared after passing through Panamanian banks owned by Sindona, Licio Gelli and the Vatican itself. Sindona spent seventy days in Sicily, living in a mafia villa outside Palermo, conferring for hours and hours with the bosses, moving around without too much trouble in John Gambino’s black Mercedes. It was with Gambino, who’d flown over from New York, that Sindona had dined
at the Charleston. What they talked about over their own pasta con le sarde and their own involtini di pesce spada was presumably the purpose of Sindona’s visit.
The purpose was expressed in faked kidnappers’ threats to extort from Sindona the list of five hundred capital exporters and their foreign bank accounts, the names of Sindona’s foreign companies whose funds were available to the DC and the socialists, the records of Sindona’s payments to politicians and his irregular operations for such clients as the Vatican and the Agnellis of Fiat. Messages went out to those concerned and a meeting was arranged in Vienna to negotiate Sindona’s release. Then a banal case of service as usual by the Italian post office had consequences that would be, for Cosa Nostra and Italy, really quite unimaginable. It opened up Giovanni Falcone’s very first mafia investigation, revealing what he’d later describe as an enormous new reality to decipher, a dazzling glimpse of the connections between drugs and real estate, Italy and America, mafia and politics. A letter of instructions posted in Milan failed to reach Sindona’s lawyer in Rome in time for the meeting in Vienna. The lawyer was told by phone that a courier was coming with a copy of the instructions. The phone was tapped and the courier intercepted. The whole thing aborted. Sindona and Gambino flew back to New York and Sindona told the FBI the kidnappers had let him go.