The Supreme Court of Italy did well to
finally quash the extraordinary warrant to arrest Archbishop
Paul Casimir Marcinkus, the head of the Vatican bank and
the second most powerful man in the Vatican after the pope,
on charges that he had been a principal conspirator in an
international banking scandal that has never been resolved.
I met with Monseigneur Marcinkus at the height of the crises
in 1983, in his office below the Pope's apartment, behind
the walls of the Vatican, and, from the story he told, became
convinced that such an arrest not only would violate the
sovereignty of the Holy See, but, by making him the scapegoat,
divert from what had really happened.
The entire tangle of intrigue began to
unravel five years ago in June when a well-dressed
corpse was found hanging by a red nylon noose from scaffolding
under Blackfriars Bridge in London. His pants were stuffed
with large bricks, his feet washed by the Thames--in what
seemed to be a masonic ritual murder or suicide (The Coroner's
Jury was never unable to decide which it was). He was Roberto
Calvi, the chairman of the twenty billion dollar Banco Ambrosiano
in Milan, and who had vanished from Rome three 3 days earlier,
and was, even as he dangled from the bridge in London, the
object of a manhunt by Italian authorities. His personal
assistant, Graziela Corrocher, had plunged to her death
from a high window in the bank's headquarters leaving a
note behind cursing the missing banker. As soon as the Italian
counsel identified the corpse, he cabled Rome "They have
our banker." But $1.2 billion of his bank's money was also
missing.
Government investigators traced the
missing funds to a one-room branch office of a Bahamian
subsidiary of the bank on the Avenue Des Citronniers in
Monte Carlo. The mysterious transfer orders, which moved
billions from Europe and South American subsidiaries to
letter-box companies in Panama, had been typed out over
a telex machine that had been specially constructed to leave
no duplicate copy or other trace of the transaction. And
the machine's operator, within a few hours of Calvi's death,
had been ordered to close the office--and leave.
Then, documents recovered from a vault
in the principality of Luxembourg revealed, to the astonishment
of Italian banking authorities, that the Panamian companies
which had received the money were secretly owned by the
Vatican through Marcinkus' bank, "The Institute For Religious
Work."
In theory, these dummy companies, through
a maze of subsidiaries, had borrowed the $1.4 billion from
the Banco Ambrosiano's subsidiaries, which through back-to-back
loans had borrowed the money from banks in Europe. What
these companies had done with the money, among other things,
was to buy a controlling block of stock in the very bank
that was arranging the loans, Banco Ambrosiano, and one
of the most politically-powerful media empires in Italy,
Rizzoli. Both of these companies were now insolvent ( because
of the scandal in the case of the Banco Ambrosiano), and
there was no way that the dummy Panamian companies could
repay the loans. In fact, when the value of the stock was
subtracted from the loans, at least $900 million had disappeared.
If the Vatican really owned--and controlled--
these Panamian shell companies, it might appear that it
had used them to attain secret control over strategic banking
and media corporations in Italy-- and, under the assumption
they were untraceable, didn't repay their loans. But the
Vatican insisted that their ownership was only nominal,
and Calvi and others used its name for their own purposes.
Archbishop Marcinkus claimed that he had made a mistake,
out of his personal; naivety, in signing documents, obligating
the Vatican to repay the loans (though other Vatican officials
had in fact signed the documents).
Aside from taking personal blame-- which
answered none of the questions of who had responsibility
for the missing billion-- Archbishop Marcinkus flatly refused
to speak to Italian authorities. And there was no way he
could be subpoenaed from his sanctuary in the Vatican. The
only people outside the Vatican who could explain why the
bank had arranged these massive transfers, Calvi and Corricher,
were dead.
When I met with the Archbishop Marcinkus--
a 6 foot 3 inch giant of a man--I found him an unlikely
banker. The son of an immigrant window washer in Cicero,
Illinois, he had come to the Vatican in l950 as a 28 year
old student priest, and, because of his size and loyalty,
became a bodyguard to Pope Paul, who had organized the bank.
He had a very different version of the
"mess", as he called it, then what the world press was presenting
as the "Calvi Thriller." As he explained it, the "mess"
proceeded from a century-old financial problem. It was money.
Contrary to myth, the Vatican had insufficient resources
to pay for all the needs of modern life--pensions for its
nuns, hospital care for its employees, multi-language press
and radio operations, re-training its Swiss Guard to cope
with world tourists, and international travel for its Nuncios
and other ambassadors. (All it got from Italy was free telephone
privileges-- which helped). "You can't run the church on
hail marys alone", the Archbishop pointed out-- nor can
a city state be run entirely by payer. Yet where was the
money to come from? The Vatican had no taxing authority.
The sale of stamps and museum admissions hardly paid the
running expenses of its great museum. And the diocese around
the world, although they may had cash surplus, did not pay
tribute to the Vatican (not in money--at least).
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