God's Bankers

A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

Gerald Posner

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781439109861
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

A deeply reported, New York Times bestselling exposé of the money and the clerics-turned-financiers at the heart of the Vatican—the world's biggest, most powerful religious institution—from an acclaimed journalist with "exhaustive research techniques" ( The New York Times ). From a master chronicler of legal and financial misconduct, a magnificent investigation nine years in the making, God's Bankers traces the political intrigue of the Catholic Church in "a meticulous work that cracks wide open the Vatican's legendary, enabling secrecy" ( Kirkus Reviews ). Decidedly not about faith, belief in God, or religious doctrine, this book is about the church's accumulation of wealth and its byzantine financial entanglements across the world. Told through 200 years of prelates, bishops, cardinals, and the Popes who oversee it all, Gerald Posner uncovers an eyebrow-raising account of money and power in one of the world's most influential organizations. God's Bankers has it all: a revelatory and astounding saga marked by poisoned business titans, murdered prosecutors, and mysterious deaths written off as suicides; a carnival of characters from Popes and cardinals, financiers and mobsters, kings and prime ministers; and a set of moral and political circumstances that clarify not only the church's aims and ambitions, but reflect the larger tensions of more recent history. And Posner even looks to the future to surmise if Pope Francis can succeed where all his predecessors failed: to overcome the resistance to change in the Vatican's Machiavellian inner court and to rein in the excesses of its seemingly uncontrollable financial quagmire. "As exciting as a mystery thriller" ( Providence Journal ), this book reveals with extraordinary precision how the Vatican has evolved from a foundation of faith to a corporation of extreme wealth and power.

1

Murder in London

London, June 18, 1982, 7:30 a.m. Anthony Huntley, a young postal clerk at the Daily Express, was walking to work along the footpath under Blackfriars Bridge. His daily commute had become so routine that he paid little attention to the bridge’s distinctive pale blue and white wrought iron arches. But a yellowish orange rope tied to a pipe at the far end of the north arch caught his attention. Curious, he leaned over the parapet and froze. A body hung from the rope, a thick knot tied around its neck. The dead man’s eyes were partially open. The river lapped at his feet. Huntley rubbed his eyes in disbelief and then walked to a nearby terrace with an unobstructed view over the Thames: he wanted to confirm what he had seen. The shock of his grisly discovery sank in.¹ By the time Huntley made his way to his newspaper office, he was pale and felt ill. He was so distressed that a colleague had to make the emergency call to Scotland Yard.²

In thirty minutes the Thames River Police anchored one of their boats beneath Blackfriars’ Number One arch. There they got a close-up of the dead man. He appeared to be about sixty, average height, slightly overweight, and his receding hair was dyed jet black. His expensive gray suit was lumpy and distorted. After cutting him down, they laid the body on the boat deck. It was then they discovered the reason his suit was so misshapen. He had stones stuffed in his trouser pockets, and half a brick inside his jacket and another half crammed in his pants.³ The River Police thought it a likely suicide. They took no crime scene photos before moving the body to nearby Waterloo Pier, where murder squad detectives were waiting.⁴

There the first pictures were taken of the corpse and clothing. The stones and brick weighed nearly twelve pounds. The name in his Italian passport was Gian Roberto Calvini.⁵ He had $13,700 in British, Swiss, and Italian currency. The $15,000 gold Patek Philippe on his wrist had stopped at 1:52 a.m. and a pocket watch was frozen at 5:49 a.m. Sandwiched between the rocks in his pockets were two wallets, a ring, cuff links, some papers, four eyeglasses, three eyeglass cases, a few photographs, and a pencil.⁶ Among the papers was an address book page with the contact details for a former official at the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro; Italy’s Socialist Finance Minister; a prominent London solicitor; and Monsignor Hilary Franco, who held the honorary title of Prelate of the Pope.⁷ Police never found the rest of the book.

A city coroner arrived at 9:30, two hours after the body’s discovery, and took it to London’s Milton Court morgue.⁸ There they stripped the corpse, took his fingerprints, and prepared for an autopsy. Their notes reflect that the dead man oddly wore two pairs of underwear.⁹

London police quickly learned from the Italian embassy that the passport was a fake. And it took only a day to discover the false name was simply a variation of the dead man’s real one: he was sixty-two-year-old Italian banker Roberto Calvi, chairman and managing director of Milan’s Banco Ambrosiano, one of Italy’s largest private banks. He had been missing for a week. A judge there had issued a fugitive warrant because Calvi had jumped bail pending the appeal of a criminal fraud conviction the previous year.

A Roman magistrate and four Italian detectives flew to London to help British police cobble together a personal dossier.¹⁰ Calvi had risen from a middle-class family to become the chief of the Ambrosiano. He had turned a sleepy provincial bank into an aggressive international merchant bank. The magistrate informed his British counterpart that Calvi was no ordinary banker. He was involved with some of Italy’s greatest power brokers in a secret Masonic lodge and he was a confidant of the Vatican’s top moneymen.¹¹

Despite his criminal conviction, the Ambrosiano’s board had allowed him to remain at the helm of the bank. Although Calvi publicly promised to rescue his financial empire and restore its reputation, he knew that the Ambrosiano was near collapse under the weight of enormous debts and bad investments.¹² The bank’s board of directors had fired him only the day before his body swung from Blackfriars.¹³

The police began patching together how Calvi ended up in London. His odyssey had begun a week earlier when he had flown from Rome to Venice. From there he went by car to Trieste, where a fishing trawler took him on the short journey across the Gulf of Trieste to the tiny Yugoslavian fishing village of Muggia.¹⁴ The moment he left Italy’s territorial waters he became a fugitive. From Muggia, an Italian smuggler arranged for him to be driven overnight to Austria, where he shuttled between several cities for a few days before boarding a private charter in Innsbruck for a flight to London. He spent the last three days of his life in flat 881, a tiny room at the Chelsea Cloisters, a dreary guesthouse in the capital’s posh South Kensington district.¹⁵

The number of unanswered questions grew as the investigation continued. They were not even certain how Calvi got to Blackfriars. It was four and a half miles from his guesthouse. On a walk he would have passed half a dozen other bridges, any of which would have been just as suitable for a flashy suicide. Calvi was well known for his entourage of bodyguards. But British investigators found none. Nor could they locate a black briefcase supposedly crammed with sensitive documents.¹⁶ Calvi’s waistcoat was buttoned incorrectly, which friends and family told the police was out of character for the compulsive banker.¹⁷ He had shaved his trademark mustache the day before his death, but police interpreted that not as a sign of a suicidal man but evidence that he was altering his appearance to successfully stay on the run.¹⁸

Two men had been with Calvi in London. Silvano Vittor, a small-time smuggler, had flown with him on the charter. The other, Flavio Carboni, was a flashy Sardinian with diverse business interests and much rumored mob connections.¹⁹ They had fled London before detectives could interview them.

The police had also to cope with a flood of false sightings. Many thought they had seen Calvi in his final days, everywhere from the Tower of London to a sex parlor to a nightclub in the company of a cocaine trafficker.²⁰

Police soon confirmed that Calvi had a $3 million life insurance policy that named his family as the only beneficiaries.²¹ In his spartan hotel room investigators found a bottle of barbiturates, more than enough for a painless suicide. But toxicology reports revealed no trace of any drug. When police interviewed Calvi’s wife, Clara, she said that in one recent telephone call he told her, “I don’t trust the people I’m with anymore.”²² Anna, Calvi’s daughter, told the inspectors that she had spoken to her father three times the day before he died. He seemed agitated and urged her to leave her Zurich home and join her mother in Washington, D.C. “Something really important is happening, and today and tomorrow all hell is going to break loose.”²³

Another complication was that Calvi suffered from mild vertigo. The police calculated that he had to be acrobatic to reach his hanging spot. It required climbing over the parapet, descending a narrow twenty-five-foot ladder attached to the side of the bridge, rolling over a three-foot gap in construction scaffolding, and then tying one end of the rope around a pipe and the other around his throat, all the while balancing himself with twelve pounds of rocks and a brick crammed into his pockets, suit, and crotch. Not likely, thought the lead detective.²⁴ Moreover, the police matched the stones to a construction site some three hundred yards east of the Thames. Calvi would have had to pick up the rocks there and return to Blackfriars before putting them into his clothing. But lab tests found no residue on his hands. Also, since the ladder he would have descended was heavily rusted, police expected some trace on his hands, suit, or polished dress shoes. There was none.

The London coroner, Dr. David Paul, expressed no doubts that the cause of death was suicide. He relied on the opinion of Professor Keith Simpson, the dean of British medical examiners, who had performed the autopsy.²⁵ A month after Calvi’s body was found, an inquest was held in the Coroner’s Court. Paul presented the details of the police investigation and autopsy to a nine-person jury. Simpson testified that in his postmortem exam he found no signs of foul play and “there was no evidence to suggest that the hanging was other than a self-suspension in the absence of marks of violence.”²⁶ Thirty-seven others testified, mostly police officers.²⁷ Calvi’s brother, Lorenzo, surprised the inquest with a written statement that revealed that Roberto had tried killing himself a year earlier. Carboni and Vittor, the duo with Calvi in London, refused to return to England but submitted affidavits. When they last saw Calvi late on the night he died, he was relaxed. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Police would not discover for another decade that Carboni had left London with Calvi’s briefcase packed with important documents.²⁸

Paul admitted that it was difficult for Calvi to kill himself at Blackfriars. But it would have been just as tough for someone to murder him and leave no trace evidence or injuries on the body.²⁹ Paul took ten hours to set forth his case. He allowed only a twenty-minute lunch break. It was Friday evening and the jury seemed restless to go home. But the coroner insisted they start deliberations.

The six men and three women reported back in under an hour. They were having trouble reaching a verdict. Dr. Paul instructed them that their decision did not have to be unanimous. Seven of nine jurors would suffice for a verdict.³⁰ After another hour, at 10 p.m., they returned with a majority finding that Calvi had killed himself.³¹

The Calvi family instantly rejected the finding.³² Clara told an Italian newspaper that her husband was murdered and his death was connected to “ferocious struggles for power in the Vatican.”³³ Some questioned whether she was motivated by money in pushing a murder theory since Calvi’s life insurance was voided if he killed himself.³⁴ But the Calvis were not the only ones skeptical about the suicide ruling. Italian investigators who had assisted the British police believed there was foul play.³⁵ And businessmen and government officials who knew Calvi were startled by the finding. “Why bother to go to London to do that,” a senior bank director said. The British and Italian press were unanimous that the British inquest seemed a surprisingly incompetent rush to judgment.³⁶ That verdict would probably have been greeted with even greater derision had it then been public knowledge that only days before his death Calvi had written a personal letter—part confessional, part a plea for help—to Pope John Paul II.³⁷ In the letter, Ca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Preface
• 1. Murder in London
• 2. The Last Pope King
• 3. Enter the Black Nobles
• 4. “Merely a Palace, Not a State”
• 5. An Unholy Alliance
• 6. “The Pope Banker”
• 7. Prelude to War
• 8. A Policy of Silence
• 9. The Blacklist
• 10. Blood Money
• 11. A Nazi Spy in the Vatican?
• 12. The Ratline
• 13. “He’s No Pope”
• 14. The Men of Confidence
• 15. “You Can’t Run the Church on Hail Marys”
• 16. Operation Fraulein
• 17. ‘Il Crack Sindona’
• 18. The Battle of Two Scorpions
• 19. “A Psychopathic Paranoid”
• 20. The Year of Three Popes
• 21. The Backdoor Deal
• 22. “The Vatican Has Abandoned Me”
• 23. “You Have to Kill the Pope”
• 24. “Tell Your Father to Be Quiet”
• 25. “Protect the Source”
• 26. “A Heck of a Lot of Money”
• 27. “I’ve Been Poisoned”
• 28. White Finance
• 29. Suitcases of Cash
• 30. Burying the Trail on Nazi Gold
• 31. “A Criminal Underground in the Priesthood”
• 32. “His Inbox Was a Disaster”
• 33. The Kingmaker Becomes King
• 34. “As Flat as Stale Beer”
• 35. Chasing the White List
• 36. The World Has Changed
• 37. The Powerbroker
• 38. The Butler
• 39. A Vote of No Confidence
• 40. “A Time Bomb”
• 41. The Swiss James Bond
• 42. “The People’s Pope”
• 43. “Back from the Dead”
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About Gerald Posner
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Index
• Illustration Credits
• Copyright