God's Banker Page 3

  Roberto Calvi came from what today would be called a normal white collar background. He was born in Milan on April 13 1920, the son of an employee in the legal department of Banca Commerciale. But his origins were partly from the Valtellina, a long Alpine valley just south of the Swiss border. There was something of the dour cunning of the mountain man in Calvi's own character. With little doubt the young Calvi saw from early on his future in banking or finance. After studying book-keeping, he enrolled in 1939 at the prestigious Bocconi university of Milan, in the faculty of economics and commerce. Friends at that time remember him as an assiduous student, but little more. His only extra-curricular activity seems to have been helping with the review published by the University's Fascist associ­ation.

  But war prevented him from taking a degree, something which probably contributed to his later lack of self-confidence. In 1940 Mussolini brought Italy into the fighting, and by the summer of 1941 was promising Hitler the despatch of Italian soldiers to join the Germans on the Russian front. At the age of 22 Calvi enlisted. He chose, however, not the most popular Fascist destination of the Air Force, but the Novara lancers, the cavalry regiment with a tradi­tionally aristocratic flavour. After a three month crash training course, Calvi that autumn left Verona as a second lieutenant on the long train journey for Russia.

  The young man was quick to show himself a most competent soldier, thorough and dedicated. He was only just into his twenties, "but he seemed like a man ten years older", a fellow officer who encountered him at Verona would recall. Calvi was long in Russia and performed well. During the appalling conditions of the with­drawal, when supply lines were non-existent and the cavalrymen were forced to slaughter their horses to stay alive, Calvi earned much gratitude. On one occasion, he later recounted, he managed to trick some peasants out of horses of their own, by promising them large sums of money which never materialized. Probably he helped in this way to save Italian lives, but it was also an early example of financial fraud. More generally, in his quiet yet forceful way, he was displaying the self-control and resourcefulness in the face of adversity which were to remain such prominent qualities until almost the end of his life.

  Long afterwards Calvi would talk at length about his Russian experiences, as if to escape the harsh present reality for a simpler past. In another small way, too, Russia left its mark. Calvi never drank much, but one of his favourite spirits was iced vodka.

  By 1944 he was back in Italy—and in that ingenious way of his, Calvi was taking his precautions. Those were treacherous times, as the line of liberation moved gradually northward. Calvi would afterwards maintain that he went everywhere with two party membership cards. One was of what remained of the Fascist party; the other was one of the first issued by the Italian Socialist party as it regrouped after Mussolini's downfall, it bore the number 43. You never knew who you might run into.

  Soon, though, the young ex-cavalryman had his first job. It was in his father's bank, the Banca Commerciale. But instead of Milan, Calvi joined its branch in the southern city of Bari. After a couple of years he left. Some have since claimed that he was advised to go after the discovery of an accounting irregularity, but there is no evidence to support this suggestion. Rather, as an ambitious and determined young man he seems to have decided that the prospects for rapid advancement in the enormous and state-controlled Banca Commer­ciale were dim. Calvi returned to a Milan that was starting to rebuild after the devastations of the war. Toscanini was back conducting at La Scala after a self-imposed exile under Fascism, providing the most vivid symbol of the city's desire for a fresh start.

  Calvi's arrival at Banco Ambrosiano appears to have been for­tuitous. The story goes that his father one day ran into Carlo Alessandro Canesi, a senior manager at the bank, who was on the lookout for promising young recruits. Roberto Calvi's name inevit­ably came up and he was quickly taken on. The support of Canesi, who in 1965 was to succeed Duke Tommaso Gallarati Scotti as Ambrosiano's chairman, was crucial to Calvi's rapid advancement thereafter. As Canesi rose, so did Calvi in his wake. He served variously in the foreign department, as Canesi's personal assistant, and in the loans department.

  The two men were in some respects opposites. Canesi was outgoing and gregarious, with a profound feel for Milan and the Milanese. "Crafty, but a gentleman, who ended up knowing everyone and their secrets too", is how he has been described. Calvi, on the other hand, was already showing the secretiveness and shyness which ever marked him. But he was young, a hard worker, eager to learn and bright—and in the Ambrosiano of those years such a combination of qualities was uncommon.

  Just how Calvi from his modest origins could have made his way to the very pinnacle of Ambrosiano has often been asked. The answer is probably simple—that he had precious few challengers. The bank was unadventurous, content enough with its status as a prosperous but middling Catholic institution; with few pretentions outside Milan, let alone internationally. In that sense it was wide open for one with Calvi's combination of ambition and discretion. Ambrosiano, more­over, was privately owned, belonging to but not dictated to by its shareholders, and given to promotion from within. This removed the risk of an appointee from outside, as might easily be the case, particularly in a public sector bank. For Calvi, the wholehearted backing of Canesi, clearly himself destined for the top, was in all likelihood enough. That he was never a seriously practising Catholic did not much matter.

  Just when he began to conceive the projects that were to bring his downfall is not clear. It was Canesi, though, who set about broaden­ing Ambrosiano's horizon, and his protege needed no second bid­ding. In the mid-1950s Calvi had the then novel idea of Ambrosiano underwriting an issue of bonds by the Marelli industrial group. A little later he launched Inter Italia, the first Italian mutual fund. By the early 1960s, Ambrosiano was stretching its ambitions further. Canesi had become managing director, and the total of the bank's branches had risen to over 50. More important, Ambrosiano had made its first foreign acquisition, the Banca del Gottardo, just across the border in Lugano, Switzerland. At around that time too the bank joined an international consultancy arrangement with private banks from six other West European countries. Within Italy Ambrosiano and two other leading privately-owned banks, Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura and Banca d'America e d'ltalia had set up a medium- term credit institute called Interbanca.

  More and more, his was the guiding hand in these deals, all of which offer clues to his later design of creating a merchant bank or French-style banque d'affaires, along the lines of Paribas or Suez, which would not only take deposits but hold interests in industry and finance as well. In the meantime the rising young executive had in 1952 married a slight, attractive girl called Clara Canetti, whom he had met at the Adriatic resort of Rimini. The following year she bore him a son, and in 1959 a daughter. Throughout his life Calvi was devoted to his family; indeed, outside Ambrosiano they were almost his only interest.

  By the mid-1950s Italy's postwar "economic miracle" was in full swing, and Milan was at its heart. Rome might be Italy's capital, but, as was often said, the title belonged morally to Milan. With mem­bership of the Common Market, the tide of Italian affairs was running in favour of the North, by temperament and history closer to the European mainstream, and more receptive to ideas and trends from outside.

  The city was completing the job of reconstruction, and money and creativity abounded. Even Milan's two football teams were doing their share to enhance its prestige, winning various European trophies. By present standards inflation scarcely existed, and as Italian exports multiplied the lira was proving itself one of the world's soundest currencies. In Rome, the Government felt sufficiently emboldened to allow banks greater freedom abroad, and capital restrictions were cautiously lifted. Italy was emerging from its chrysa­lis, and so was Ambrosiano.

  In 1963 the bank established in Luxembourg a holding company called Compendium, which was in time to be rechristened Banco Ambrosiano Holding (BAH). Canesi duly became chairman, a
nd at the age of 45 Roberto Calvi won key promotion to the rank of direttore centrale, in the command centre of the bank, and only a rung or two below the main board itself.

  There was little doubt that he would climb still higher. Courteous and able, quick to grasp ideas and unfailingly discreet, Calvi was a skilled banker, by now determined to launch Banco Ambrosiano as a real force in international finance. His workload was considerable, yet still he found time to study French and English, two languages of which a working knowledge was essential if he was to project himself and his bank beyond Italy's frontiers. This on its own might have been enough to place him comfortably ahead of potential rivals within Ambrosiano. But Calvi had the ear of the chairman too. The com­bination seems to have been irresistible.

  Nevertheless, certain traits in Calvi's character were already being noticed. People from outside the bank who had to deal with him would complain of his obsessive secrecy, the way he would claim to be familiar with something when quite plainly he wasn't. From early on, to lie was second nature for him. Then there was that hermetic barrier which Calvi would sometimes erect between himself and the world, incomunicabilita as the inelegant Italian word has it. Worse still, for all his endeavours and progress, Calvi had still failed to win accept­ance by the Milanese banking community which really mattered. Human relations, as always, were his weak point. For Banca Com- merciale or Credito Italiano, the other leading "lay" bank of the city, Calvi was and would remain an alien body, a pariah from the other side of the fence, an odd and suspect mixture of ambition and reticence. Bankers, like everyone else, are wary of potential rivals they cannot properly fathom. Just who was this man, who at no point in his career would ever genuinely enjoy the social occasions that sprinkle a banker's working life?

  A sense of insecurity and inferiority is a recurring theme of recollections about the Calvi of those years. His comparatively modest origins, the failure to complete his degree course at the Bocconi were surely factors. In April 1982, at the last shareholders' meeting of Ambrosiano, he spoke with pride of the way he had risen to the top, unaided by connections of wealth or birth. Throughout his extraordinary career, shyness and secretiveness fought with the desire for social recognition. But if he would never dazzle in con­versation in the salotti where the inbred Milanese financial world assembled to exchange gossip, then the bank, by the mid-1960s growing at between ten and twenty per cent a year, would speak for him. Its results would make up for any lack of sophistication on the part of the man himself.

  From then on, moreover, Calvi would see the world as full of predators, from whom both he and the bank must be protected. Financial Milan has always been a mirror of political Italy, made up of competing interest groups, and complex and sometimes short-lived alliances, where today's friend might become tomorrow's foe. The possibility of an unwelcome foray against Ambrosiano had worried Canesi before Calvi, for the bank's fragmented structure of owner­ship made it peculiarly vulnerable to such a threat, whatever the cover given by the clausola di gradimento. One early precaution was an exchange of shareholdings with Kredietbank of Luxembourg, which would be Ambrosiano's second largest declared shareholder when the end came.

  But a more determining influence on Calvi's future was a Sicilian tax lawyer who was making something of a reputation for himself in Milan. His name was Michele Sindona, and he seemed to have conveniently to hand the answers to some of Calvi's problems.

  CHAPTER THREE Sindona

  "I was ten years ahead of Calvi," Sindona will now boast to anyone coming to benefit from the stream of highly selective reminiscences he dispenses from the Federal prison of Otisville, two hours' drive upstate from New York city. As he talks, the still beautifully mani­cured hands expertly and abstractedly turn out piles of little paper boats, folded according to the ancient Japanese skill of origami. In fact, just eight years at the end were to separate the collapse of his own transatlantic financial card-castle from the debacle of Banco Ambrosiano. But when his path first crossed with that of Calvi, in 1967 or 1968, Sindona was approaching the height of his powers.

  The war experiences of the two, almost exact contemporaries, could hardly have differed more. While Calvi was performing with some distinction in the Russian snows, Sindona was still in his native Sicily, illegally trafficking in grain, with the benign acquiescence of the Allied Military Government on the island. During this period were born Sindona's links with the US. There too he gave his first proof of his innate skill in dealing with the Church, and learnt to become a formidable poker player. These disparate traits were to remain hallmarks of his career.

  But Sindona's basic early training was in taxes; first at university and then, when the tide of war had shifted north in Italy, to work at a tax practice in Messina, the biggest city close to his birthplace at the small town of Patti, some 50 miles to the west. But for so clever and ambitious a young man, with the heady taste of wealth and real power imparted by contact with the occupying forces, Messina would never be enough.

  Just after the War's end, Sindona trod the traditional migrant's path northwards to Milan, then as now the real financial centre of Italy. By coincidence, the young Calvi was at about the same time himself returning from Bari in the south to Milan. But if the latter's ascent at Ambrosiano was to be painstaking and at first little noticed, Sindona's progress was more eye-catching. His fortune was to be put in touch with Raoul Biasi, a mild-mannered accountant, but bien introdotto, "well introduced", as the Italians say, in some Milanese financial circles which mattered. Sindona so impressed Biasi that they became partners. Through Biasi, he met Ernesto Moizzi, owner of a small bank called Banca Privata Finanziaria. As its name would indicate, its merits for appreciative clients included an ability to conduct delicate financial transactions without asking too many questions. And one of these clients was Franco Marinotti, chairman of Snia Viscosa, then Italy's largest textile company.

  Sindona swiftly earned the gratitude of both. Moizzi was im­pressed, if a trifle disconcerted, by how the accountant could nimbly resolve the tax difficulties of valued customers. Marinotti reaped the benefits of the American contacts Sindona had cultivated since his Sicilian days to sell some textile patents in the United States. In return, Marinotti helped Sindona achieve another crucial goal—that of winning the confidence of the Vatican, and its bank, the IOR.

  Sindona made his move in 1958 when, with the help of an introduc­tion from a distant relative and the recommendation of Marinotti, he arranged a meeting with a Roman aristocrat named Massimo Spada, then in charge of the IOR.

  It was to prove one of the decisive turning points of this story. For from that encounter there gradually but directly developed first Sindona's own intimate relationship with the Vatican, and then that of his successor Roberto Calvi. Sindona was to establish himself as the indispensable standby as the Holy See embarked ten years later on a radical shift in its investments, out of Italian industry into financial shareholdings and assets, many of them outside the country. Through the Vatican also, the Sicilian would make the acquaintance of many who counted in the Rome of those times including, it would seem, various Christian Democrat politicians, traditionally close to the Church. Then there were other new friends, like Umberto Ortolani a typical creature of the Roman political undergrowth with excellent connections in the Vatican and Latin America; and his remarkable associate Licio Gelli, a most unusual freemason with ambitions equal to Sindona's own.

  But it was in Milan where the powers of Sindona were most visible. A place on Snia's board marked the esteem in which Marinotti held him, while in 1961 he gained control of Moizzi's Banca Privata Finanziaria. The technique was one Sindona and Calvi were to employ throughout their careers. The vehicle for the acquisition was a shadowy front company called Cofina, his partners Marinotti, and the lOR.

  At the same time, and if anything with still greater discretion, he was busy on behalf of Italo-American financiers, some of a distinct Mafia odour, keen to further their Italian interests. In fact, as earl
y as 1967 the American police were seeking details of Sindona as a possible suspect in a drugs ring between Italy and the United States. The Italian authorities replied that they could unearth no evidence of that. But this is how Giuseppe Parlato, the Milan police commission­er of the day, described Sindona in early 1968. He was, wrote Parlato, "at the head of a network of specialist legal practices, backed up by teams of lawyers, accountants, trustees and technical experts". All that, and his own bank as well. By then Sindona had a Rome office at 94, Via Veneto, where he was—as Parlato drily noted—"keenly sought out by leading business figures and in particular by American citizens".

  Even the alert, ambitious Calvi can hardly have been aware of these transatlantic exchanges. But quite clearly Sindona was some­one worth knowing. And most fortunately a means of access was to hand, in the person of Giuliano Magnoni, whom Calvi knew from his university days at the Bocconi, and whose son in the meantime had married Sindona's daughter. Magnoni duly arranged a meeting, in 1967 or 1968.

  Calvi can only have been enthralled by Sindona. The two had some characteristics in common. Their backgrounds were similarly mod­est. In the status-conscious Milan of the day, both had a fierce desire to overcome such limitations; and both had designs which stretched well beyond Italy. Already the Sicilian was weaving the tapestry of shell companies, foreign front operations and trusteeships which would further his attempt to build an unchallengeable conglomerate of finance. To the task he brought formidable talents which Calvi shared: a memory of steel, a swift imagination and the capacity to keep a secret—or omerta, to use the word the Sicilian Mafia has given to the world.

  But Sindona combined these qualities with others that the intro­verted man from Ambrosiano knew he lacked: a gift for communicat­ing, an electrical ability to charm and persuade people, a quicksilver sparkle and humour which even now survives the dull routine of an American prison. In those respects Calvi and Sindona were opposites; the closed man of the North and the hypnotically fluent Southerner. Only with the utmost difficulty would Sindona lure Calvi out of the fastness of Banco Ambrosiano for those plush lunches where Milanese bankers and financiers would exchange gossip and sketch their plans.