Authors: Philip Willan
After seven weeks in prison Calvi had begun to show signs of cracking under the strain. On the morning of 9 July his cell mates woke to find he had attempted suicide, swallowing an overdose of sleeping pills and slashing his right wrist; for Calvi was left-handed. The cut was superficial, however, and he was soon out of danger, after having his stomach pumped. More dangerous for his long-term survival was what he had done a week earlier. On 2 July Calvi had informed the magistrates working on his case that he was ready to cooperate with them. Three magistrates arrived at Lodi at 10 p.m. and continued questioning him until three in the morning. Among the topics
Calvi said he was willing to discuss were the role of the P2 lodge, his relations with the Vatican and his illegal funding of the Italian Socialist party (PSI). In exchange, he explained, he would like to be released from jail. The magistrates took his testimony but declined to release him.
One of the sensitive topics the troubled banker had touched on was his relationship with Umberto Ortolani, the financial brains of the P2 organization. ‘Ortolani claimed to have friends in all sorts of circles, even on an international level, in particular in London freemasonry,’ Calvi said. Calvi gradually came to realize that Ortolani also had high-level contacts in the church and that he and Licio Gelli could provide Calvi with the kinds of political, financial and bureaucratic protection that he needed. ‘In this context he led me to understand that there could be advantages to be derived from financial interventions on behalf of the political parties,’ he said. He went on to describe how he had provided the PSI with a discreet payment of $21 million via a Montevideo bank, Bafisud, owned by Ortolani. The money was intended to enable the party to reduce its official debt to the Banco Ambrosiano.
Calvi’s revelations and his suicide attempt had several immediate effects. Socialist politicians sprang to his defence in parliament, accusing the Milan magistrates of damaging the economy and mounting a ‘judicial persecution’ of Calvi. At the same time Calvi was privately warned by Giuseppe Prisco, a lawyer on the Banco Ambrosiano board, to stop talking if he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in prison. Prisco’s message, relayed to him by his wife, said the Socialists had already destroyed all the evidence of what he was alleging. Most importantly for the longer term, Calvi had shown the politicians they could no longer rely on him for his silence. Calvi rapidly withdrew his cooperation with the magistrates and retracted his initial statement.
As an insider with access to information on the secret funding of political parties, a full confession by the Banco
Ambrosiano chief could have launched what came to be known as the
Mani Pulite
(Clean Hands) corruption investigation a decade ahead of time. Between 1992 and 1994 prosecutors in 70 cities ordered the arrest of 5,000 people and began legal proceedings against 12,000 suspects in a traumatic national corruption inquiry also known as
Tangentopoli
(Bribesville). The name was apt because in many sectors of business life the payment of bribes to politicians was the norm, rather than the exception. One economist estimated that bribes were costing the Italian economy 10 trillion lire (more than £3 billion) a year. Michele Sindona certainly considered that Calvi had opened a delicate chapter when he had started to talk about his payments to the PSI. Blackmailing the political parties was like signing his own death warrant, Sindona told his biographer Nick Tosches. ‘Those documents had to be destroyed, and Calvi with them.’
4
The experience of prison also put a strain on Calvi’s relations with the Vatican. During his currency trial Calvi maintained to his friends and family that the operations that had got him into trouble had not been undertaken on his own account but on behalf of the Vatican. If the Vatican would only own up to it and publicly acknowledge its responsibilities his judicial troubles would be over.
Matters came to a head when Calvi’s family, accompanied by Alessandro Mennini, a Banco Ambrosiano employee whose father Luigi was managing director of the IOR, went to visit him in prison. The episode has been described by Calvi’s widow, Clara, in her unpublished memoir: ‘They allowed us in after searching us and we found Roberto at the end of a corridor, in a corner; he almost didn’t have the courage to look at us for the humiliation, and was crying.’ Calvi explained his dilemma to his daughter, who took notes on loose leaves of paper. He had been beseeching the IOR to recognize its responsibilities since February, he said. It was true that he could speak out publicly during the trial, but that would be a
violation of professional secrecy and he would be finished as a banker if he did.
Anna wrote the words ‘This trial is called IOR’ on a sheet of paper and showed it to Alessandro Mennini outside the prison, as her father had instructed her to do. The young man flew into a fury, telling Anna: ‘That name should not be spoken, even in confession’ and attempting to seize the piece of paper from her. The row took place in the Calvis’ car, with Clara proving too quick for Mennini: she grabbed back the paper and sat on top of it. A long and fruitful relationship with the Vatican was coming to a bitter end and things would only get worse over the following months.
There is little doubt that the experience of prison, and the actions Calvi took while incarcerated, would condition his behaviour during the last year of his life. A colleague who worked with him at the time noticed the visible difference: ‘He came back from prison in Lodi a very frightened man. The experience must have been devastating. He was even more closed, always looking over his shoulder,’ this colleague told me, speaking on condition of anonymity. ‘The experience had softened him. In a way he was more human. He appeared grateful to the people who remained close to him and, for the first time, was capable of saying a kind word.’ But the trauma also bore a cost: ‘He was prepared to listen to anyone who said they could help him to avoid going back to jail.’
5
Calvi’s fear of a return to jail could well have been used by those who were aware of it to induce his sudden flight abroad, setting him off on the ill-fated journey that led him to Blackfriars Bridge. Eligio Paoli told the finance police in July 1983 that shortly before his disappearance Calvi had been alerted to the existence of a warrant for his arrest by Licio Gelli and had subsequently been shown a false warrant to convince him to flee. But court documents not previously brought to light show that Calvi may genuinely have been about to come under investigation on suspicion of involvement in the gravest act of terrorism perpetrated in Italy since the end of the Second World War.
The purpose of the bomb that exploded in the second-class waiting room at Bologna railway station at 10.25 a.m. on 2 August 1980, killing 85 people and injuring 200, remains obscure to this day. Two right-wing extremists are serving life sentences for the massacre but their guilt remains a subject of controversy. Calvi’s connection to the Bologna railway station bombing, whether well-founded or not, was generated by a now discredited supergrass, whose well-informed but misleading testimony to Bologna magistrates did much to confuse the initial judicial investigation into the atrocity. The witness, Elio Ciolini, combined personal knowledge of many of the protagonists of the story with a febrile imagination. His embroidery on an initially plausible story served to
discredit both him and all the elements of his account, and followed a classic disinformation strategy seen in many of Italy’s terrorism inquiries.
The first steps towards the possible issuing of a real arrest warrant for Calvi had been taken by Bologna Judge Aldo Gentile on 11 June 1982 when he sent a telegram to a Milan prosecutor asking for Calvi’s contact details. Sent at 12.45 p.m., it read: ‘Please be so good as to transmit with the maximum urgency the complete identity details and address and telephone number of Calvi Roberto for the purposes of the investigation currently being conducted by this office for the attack on the Bologna railway station 2 August 1980.’ The episode was later recalled by Orlando Gotelli, a sergeant in the finance police, in a letter to Gherardo Colombo, one of Milan’s leading public prosecutors and the recipient of the original request. Dated 22 October 1984, the letter reminded Colombo of Gentile’s request in the context of the bomb investigation. ‘It was a Friday and Calvi, it later emerged, had disappeared either the day before or the very same day,’ Gotelli wrote. ‘The press has never reported such a charge involving Calvi: is it possible that judicial secrecy has been so rigorous on this occasion?’
Gotelli, who had been involved in police investigations into the affairs of Michele Sindona, went on to suggest two possible interpretations: ‘Calvi was in some way involved in the bombing and his flight was the result of a tip-off about a warrant for his arrest. In this case his “suicide/murder” could also be connected to the above (one can reasonably suppose that, already prostrate from his previous misadventures, he was the weak link in the chain).’ Alternatively, he surmised, Calvi was not involved in the bombing ‘but he had been dragged into it deliberately to induce him to flee Italy or for other purposes!!’
Implication in the Bologna massacre would certainly have terrorized the already nervous Calvi and could well have
induced him to seek refuge abroad. Based purely on the unreliable word of Elio Ciolini, the idea would appear to be little more than fanciful; but Ciolini’s words fit into a pattern that makes the allegation less easy to dismiss. Real or presumed involvement in such a sinister event would have put Calvi in a state of the highest anxiety, making him frightened and pliable for those who already had designs on his future.
If the finance police’s informant Eligio Paoli comes across as a colourful and at times perplexing witness, Elio Ciolini is one of the largest of the larger-than-life supergrasses who have animated and distorted Italy’s recent judicial history. Even though he has been thoroughly discredited as a witness, Ciolini’s network of personal contacts – and the consequences for Calvi of his claims – still justify a close examination of his words.
Linked variously to the secret services of Britain, France, Israel, Italy and even of Brazil, Ciolini entered the tale in late 1981, from a cell in the Swiss prison of Champ-Dollon. He had been incarcerated two years previously for fraudulently extracting large sums of protection money from an American woman, after convincing her that the Israeli secret services intended to kill her and her husband, an arms dealer, for selling arms to Israel’s Middle Eastern enemies. Ciolini’s get-out-of-jail card was information about the Bologna bombing, which he now offered to Italian investigators. Exploiting a genuine knowledge of right-wing political extremism, Ciolini concocted a story that implicated plausible suspects in a plausible political scenario, two elements that the investigators were still anxiously groping for. His story implicated international terrorists, from France and Germany, in a scenario that closely resembled that being put forward at around the same time by Licio Gelli and senior officers in the Italian secret services who were members of Gelli’s P2 lodge. Some of those officers, in conjunction with the businessman Francesco Pazienza – Calvi’s guide and counsellor in the last year of his
life – would even go so far as to plant false evidence to bolster the international connection to the bombing.
Ciolini’s gradually evolving account, backed up by documents that subsequently proved to be forgeries, suggested that the Bologna bombing on 2 August 1980 had been carried out to distract attention from a major financial operation, the secret purchase of a controlling stake in the publicly owned Montedison chemicals company, that had been under way at the time; the purchase was being made by members of the Trilateral Commission, a discussion group linking members of the political and business elites of the United States, Europe and Japan. The commission was founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller, chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, which his family controlled. Without the distraction, Ciolini suggested, politicians and public opinion might have been mobilized against the deal. The terrorist atrocity had, he alleged, been commissioned by Licio Gelli from the right-wing extremist Stefano Delle Chiaie following a meeting of a secret Monte Carlo lodge, a masonic organization containing much of Italy’s political and business elite and destined to replace the P2 lodge as a new centre of occult power. According to Ciolini, present at the meeting on 11 April 1980 had been Calvi, Gelli, the oil magnate Attilio Monti and Umberto Ortolani, the financial brains behind P2. In subsequent testimony Ciolini added further names including those of the Fiat chairman Gianni Agnelli, Giulio Andreotti, the Bank of Italy governor Carlo Azeglio Ciampi and Armando Corona, a leading Sardinian freemason. The presence of the latter group, he said, had been revealed to him by Federico Federici, a Florentine lawyer and member of both the P2 and Monte Carlo lodges, with whom he had been in business.
The Monte Carlo lodge, with its administrative headquarters in the offices of the Locadi estate agency at Rue St Charles 2, does appear to have existed in reality and a number of second-string Italian masons have admitted to membership.
But Ciolini’s description of it as an offshoot of the powerful Trilateral Commission frequented by some of the highest-ranking figures in Italian society has never been proven. Nor has its alleged role in the Bologna bombing.
What gave Ciolini’s claims plausibility, before he elaborated on them excessively and then retracted, was the Tuscan fraudster’s first-hand knowledge of international right-wing extremism. He appears to have been in personal contact with Stefano Delle Chiaie, who led the extremist organization Avanguardia Nazionale (National Vanguard), and whom he met in the pursuit of business ventures in Latin America; he was able to supply investigators with details of Delle Chiaie’s activities on behalf of the Bolivian interior ministry, his aliases and his network of associates. Ciolini claimed that Delle Chiaie agreed to carry out Gelli’s request for an Italian ‘distraction’, enlisting the help of the French extremist Olivier Danet and the Germans Karl Heinz Hoffman and Joachim Fiebelkorn.