Dark Mysteries of the Vatican

CHAPTER 6

The Mystery of the Pope’s Banker

On June 21, 1982, a postal clerk on his way to work in London glanced over “the parapet of the embankment of Blackfriars Bridge and noticed orange nylon rope lashed to a scaffolding pole under the bridge.” Hanging from it was the body of a man, “suavely dressed in his own topcoat and expensive Patek Philippe watch on his wrist, loafers by the same firm were on his feet… In his wallet were about 10,000 pounds sterling, Swiss francs and Italian lira. Stuffed into the pockets and down his flies were bricks and stones that the police believed came from a nearby building site.

“The presence of the money and the watch appeared to rule out a mercenary murder. At the same time, a coroner found no marks on Calvi’s body indicating he had [not] been the object of violence before his death, no syringe marks to suggest he had been drugged, and no drugs in his system besides the residue of the single sleeping pill he had taken the night before.” A coroner’s jury filed a verdict of suicide.

Because this ruling made no sense to Calvi’s widow, son and daughter, “they challenged the original inquest. A second one, held in London in 1983,…[ruled] it was impossible to say whether Calvi had killed himself or been killed by others. Yet Carlo Calvi, the banker’s only son, who was studying for a doctorate at Washington ’s Georgetown University when his father died, refused to give in…So in 1989 he hired a firm of private detectives to take the forensic investigation further than had the London Police.

“Kroll Associates located the scaffolding poles from which Calvi had been suspended, reassembled them exactly as they had been under Blackfriars Bridge, and then had a stand-in for Calvi, of the same height and weight, take the route that Calvi would have to have taken if he really had ended his own life at the end of the orange rope.

“The detectives were not interested in the factors that had already convinced Carlo Calvi that his father could not possibly have killed himself this way. Roberto Calvi was 62 when he died, overweight, and a chronic sufferer from vertigo. In the pitch darkness he would have had to spot the scaffolding under the bridge, practically submerged in the high tide, stuff his pockets and trouser flies with bricks, clamber over a stone parapet and down a 12 ft-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, because both inquests noted that there was minimal damage to the neck, indicating he had not dropped a long way.”

Kroll Associates was “not interested in what was probable,” noted an account of the case by London ’s The Independent, “only in what was unavoidable.” “They had their Calvi stand-in wear the same kind of loafers the banker was wearing when he died, then maneuver his way onto the scaffolding by the various possible routes: after which the shoes were soaked in water for the same length of time as Calvi’s.

“Each time the test was tried, microscopic examination of the shoes by a forensic chemist picked up traces of the yellow paint with which the scaffolding poles were stained. Because the shoes Calvi was wearing when he died betrayed no such traces, Kroll concluded, ‘Someone else had to have tied him to the scaffolding and killed him.’

“As a result of Carlo Calvi’s long campaign to clear his father from the dishonor of suicide, in September 2003 City of London Police reopened the case as a murder inquiry. Detective Superintendent Trevor Smith asserted, ‘We have been applying 21st century forensics and investigative techniques to a twenty-one-year-old crime.’”

The murder investigation would lead police, the general public, and Catholics into the modern manifestation of the two-thousand-year-old religion symbolized by the Vatican and, at the same time, unravel the mysterious life of the victim.

A cold, shy, stubborn man from the mountains north of Milan, Roberto Calvi in his prime was one of the most brilliant bankers in Italy. He had risen rapidly in the ranks of the private Banco Ambrosiano, which had been founded by a priest and had long had close relations with the Vatican’s bank, Istituto per le Opere di Religione.

“For all his brilliance,” wrote journalists Peter Popham and Philip Willan in Rome and Robert Verkaik for the Annotico Report in June 2007, “Calvi landed in desperate trouble. As well as co-operating closely with the Vatican ’s bankers, he also got into bed with the Sicilian Mafia, setting up a network of offshore shell companies which enabled them to launder the proceeds of the heroin trade.”

Calvi was a “member of P2, the secret Masonic lodge to which hundreds of Italian politicians, businessmen, secret service agents, policemen, civil servants” and high officials of the Vatican belonged, that Pope John Paul I had been determined to drive from the Holy See.

The Roman Catholic Church and Freemasonry had long been at loggerheads. The first public written attack on Masons was made on April 28, 1738, by Pope Clement XII in his decree In eminenti. “The principal objections to Freemasonry were: that it was open to men of all religions; that oaths were taken; that Masons denied clerical authority, and that Masons met in secret. Clement banned Masonic membership by Catholics and directed ‘Inquisitors of Heretical Depravity’ to take action against Catholics who became Masons or assisted Freemasonry in any way. He ordered excommunication as punishment for those who defied his ban.”

In an address by Pope Pius IX, Multiplices inter, on September 25, 1865, the pontiff renewed condemnation of Freemasonry and other secret societies. In it, he accused Masonic associations of conspiracy against the Church, God, and society. He attributed revolutions and uprisings to Masonic activities, and denounced Masonry’s secret oaths and clandestine meetings.

On February 15, 1882, Leo XIII’s encyclical Etsi nos referred to a “pernicious sect” at war with Jesus Christ. Two years later in Humanum genus (April 20, 1884), the most vicious attack on Freemasonry of any papal pronouncements stated, “The Masonic sect produces fruits that are pernicious and of the bitterest savor.” It went on to say that “Freemasonry’s goal was the destruction of the Roman Catholic Church, and that Freemasonry and the Roman Catholic Church were adversaries.” It further stated that “many Freemasons were unaware of the ultimate goals of Freemasonry and should not be considered partners in the criminal acts perpetrated by Freemasonry. He also condemned the naturalism of Freemasonry, by which is meant the belief that ‘human nature and human reason ought in all things to be mistress and guide.’ American Masonic leader Albert Pike stated that this encyclical was a “declaration of war, and the signal for a crusade, against the rights of man.”

In the 1917 Code of Canon Law, the Church incorporated the attitude of many previous papal encyclicals into statutory law. In Canon 2335 of the 1917 Code, the Church held that “those who joined a Masonic sect, or other societies of the same sort, plot against the Church” incurred excommunication.

On November 26, 1983, the same year that the church adopted a new Canon of Church Law, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said that “the Church’s negative position on Masonic associations”…remained unaltered, since the principles had always been regarded as irreconcilable with the Church.” It stated, “Catholics enrolled in masonic associations are involved in serious sin and may not approach holy communion.”

By 1978, the Masonic group P2 “had become a sort of state within the Italian state, manipulating the direction of the country from a strong right-wing position, exerting a profound but long undetected influence on government decision making. The Vatican, the Mafia, P2; three drastically diverse worlds, linked by the fact that Italy was, throughout the Cold War a key frontline player in East-West relations, and possessor of the biggest Communist Party in Western Europe.

“According to one of the more persuasive theories swirling around the Calvi case,” noted authors Peter Popham, Philip Willan, and Robert Verkaik, “the Milanese banker became a pivotal player not only in the laundering of Mafia money but in the secret channeling of large sums from the Vatican to the struggle of the Polish trade union Solidarity against Poland’s Communist government.”

“Since the accession to the papacy of the Polish cardinal Karol Wojtylła in 1978, [aiding Solidarity] had become a matter of vital importance for the Vatican.” As the successor to St. Peter, who had been crucified upside down by the tyranny that was the Roman Empire, Pope John Paul II had begun a personal crusade to break the tyrannical stranglehold of the Soviet Union on his native Poland by showing that the Polish trade union Solidarity had the support of the Pope.

The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had once been asked if he was worried about what Pope Pius XII might have to say about aggression by the Red Army. Stalin had cynically replied, “How many divisions does the pope have?”

John Paul II planned to show Stalin’s successor that Pope John Paul II did not need troops. His weapons were words-and money.

“Founded in 1942 to invest and increase the funds given to the Holy See for religious works, the [Istituto per le Opere di Religione] I.O.R.,…better known as the Vatican bank,” was similar to any other international commercial bank. Located in the “medieval tower of Sixtus V,…it accepted savings and checking accounts, transferred funds in and out of the Vatican, and made investments. Depositors had to be in some way connected with the Vatican. The list of those eligible included members of the Curia (the Pope had a personal account, No. 16/16), the 729 permanent residents of Vatican City, and a small group of clergymen and laymen doing regular business with the Vatican.” As Time magazine noted, “No others need apply.”

Laundering Vatican money through Latin America, mostly in Panama, in order to provide millions to the Solidarity movement, the Vatican also helped the Central Intelligence Agency to channel money to anti-communist groups, such as the Contras in Nicaragua. The Vatican ’s main conduit was Banco Ambrosiano, Italy ’s largest privately owned bank. Its chairman Roberto Calvi, shuffled money between his vaults and the IOR.

Known as God’s banker, Calvi was “one of the men who knew a lot about a lot,” noted authors Popham, Willan, and Verkaik. For years Calvi “handled the affairs of his highly disparate clients with flair, rewarding them with fat rates of interest, managing the illegal funding of political parties, playing the midwife to secret arms deals, and laundering Mafia profits.” Key to the high-rolling success of such deals was his network of offshore shell companies.

“A man who later boasted that he taught Calvi all he knew about tax havens, the Sicilian financier Michele Sindona was reckless in a way that Calvi had never been. The two became ever more closely tied by secret financial favors-but when an American bank Sindona controlled, Franklin National Bank of New York, collapsed in 1974, Calvi refused to bail him out to the extent Sindona believed he deserved. He began putting pressure on Calvi to give more, pressure that soon yielded negative publicity about Calvi, prompting the Bank of Italy to send in inspectors.

“In 1978 the Bank of Italy had concluded that Calvi’s Banco Ambrosiano had exported several billion lire illegally, prompting a criminal investigation. The Banco Ambrosiano was suddenly in meltdown, and Roberto Calvi’s nightmare was under way. On May 20, 1981, finance police officers rang Calvi’s doorbell at dawn with the news that the banker was under arrest and would be taken to prison. Inside, he attempted suicide.

“Convicted of currency law violation, Calvi was given a suspended four-year sentence. But his troubles were only beginning.” The bank, it was revealed, “was hundreds of millions of dollars in debt. In terror of being imprisoned again, fearful also that mafiosi to whom he owed hundreds of millions would take their revenge, he went on the run. Escorted by…Flavio Carboni, a playboy and property developer, and Silvano Vittor, a smuggler based in Trieste who acted as his bodyguard, he left Italy under a false identity, traveling by speedboat to Yugoslavia, from there to Austria and by private plane to Britain. In London, he checked into a cheap residential hotel, the Chelsea Cloisters, and remained incommunicado.”

Subsequent investigations indicated that Calvi was “lured to London, where he had been handed over to…members of Italian organized crime. Carboni, a Sardinian businessman with links to former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi; imprisoned Mafia boss Pippo Calo; former contraband smuggler Vittor; and Roman loan shark Ernesto Diotallevi conspired together to murder Calvi…to punish him for losing money that belonged to the Cosa Nostra and to prevent him from blackmailing former accomplices in the Vatican, the P2 Masonic lodge and Italian political parties. According to a Mafia informant, Calo engaged an assassin called Francesco di Carlo to carry out the murder… Mafia turncoat Antonino Giuffre…accused Carboni of playing the traitor’s role in a classic Mafia murder conspiracy: first gaining Calvi’s confidence and then delivering him for execution… The Mafia accountant, Calo, accused of ordering the killing to punish Calvi for embezzling Cosa Nostra’s funds,” said later that “he would never have turned to the men [responsible]…for strangling Calvi if he knew they were in rival organizations or were banned in disgrace from Cosa Nostra.” At trial, the judge ordered the acquittal of four defendants for lack of proof.

Before Mafia assassins tracked down Roberto Calvi, God’s banker placed the worth of the Vatican Bank to be in excess of $10 billion. In May 1981, the Italian police raided the home of P2 Grand Master Licio Gelli and found a list of P2 Masons that included names of fifty-two members of the Italian government. Investigators tracing transactions between dummy corporations and Swiss bank accounts set up by Calvi followed the flow of money to P2 and found that the Solidarity movement had gotten more than $100 million.

Assistance to the anti-communists in Poland by Pope John Paul II that went far beyond words and moral support did not go unnoticed in the Kremlin.