fraud proceeding from his 1972 takeover of the Franklin National Bank. Although released on bond, he was required to remain in New York. Sindona instead staged his own kidnapping and fled in disguise to Italy. When arrested three months later, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.
When I met him in the Otisville prison visiting room, the grey-haired financier appeared frail and nervous. After asking me to buy him a vanilla ice cream, we began the one-hour interview. He came right to the point, saying that he had only done what Pope Paul VI had instructed him to do: shift the Vatican’s Italian assets to tax-free offshore havens. When I asked him about the formerly anonymous entities, some of which had been found to have the code-names “Suprafin,” “Zitropo,” and “Manic,” he said that they themselves were merely vehicles to hide the transfers of money. It was, as he described it, purely a money laundering scheme, which he said was “legal” because the Vatican was sovereign. With the help of Calvi, the money had been deposited in dozens of letter-box companies, which then borrowed against them from the Banco Ambrosiano and sent the proceeds to other offshore entities.
If so, why couldn’t the funds be recovered? Sindona answered that the Vatican, again with Calvi’s help, had used these funds to make “questionable investments.” As an example, he cited the Vatican’s attempt to buy control of Rizzoli, which owned Italy’s largest newspaper, the Corriere della Sera . “I don’t know how much was lost,” he said; by that time, Sindona said, he was no longer advising the Vatican.
He claimed to know nothing about Calvi’s death, but added, as I was leaving the room, that he might have a similar fate ifhe was ever sent back to Italy. It was the last time I saw Sindona. On September 25, 1984, he was extradited to Italy, and on March 18, 1986, he died in a prison in Rome from a dose of cyanide in his coffee, a death ruled a suicide.
IV.
When Calvi was arrested the year before his death in Milan, it was on a questionable technicality about an incident that had occurred a decade earlier. His bank had arranged legal currency transfers in 1971 that were held by a magistrate to violate a retroactive 1976 foreign-exchange law. Along with Calvi, six other former and present executives of the Banco Ambrosiano were arrested. Mass arrests of bankers by magistrates on technical offenses had by the 1980s become common in Italy. Because Calvi spent two months in Lodi prison, on getting out, he was determined to pay whatever was needed to be paid to get political protection against future imprisonment. “It is a question of surviving in a climate that is becoming like a religious war,” he said in a newspaper interview. “It is an atmosphere that favors every sort of barbarism.”
The person who offered Calvi such protection in this “religious war” was Licio Gelli. A mattress-spring manufacturer and poet from Arezzo, Gelli claimed to run a powerful web of influence in the form of a Masonic lodge in Rome called Propagandi Due, or P-2. This secret society, according to a sixty-four-volume investigation by a commission of the Italian Parliament, included forty-three members of Parliament, forty-eight generals, the heads of Italy’s intelligence service, the top magistrates in the judiciary system, the civil servants running various state-owned enterprises (including the energy company ENI), key bank regulators, and leading businessmen.
The report concluded that P-2 was a veritable “state withina state.” The commission had come to these conclusions largely based on the files of Gelli and his close associates, but most of those named in them denied any such membership in Gelli’s secret lodge. Nor did P-2 ever hold meetings or conduct ordinary Masonic business, as is prescribed by Freemasonry. Whether any of powerful individuals were actually members of P-2 or whether the
When I met him in the Otisville prison visiting room, the grey-haired financier appeared frail and nervous. After asking me to buy him a vanilla ice cream, we began the one-hour interview. He came right to the point, saying that he had only done what Pope Paul VI had instructed him to do: shift the Vatican’s Italian assets to tax-free offshore havens. When I asked him about the formerly anonymous entities, some of which had been found to have the code-names “Suprafin,” “Zitropo,” and “Manic,” he said that they themselves were merely vehicles to hide the transfers of money. It was, as he described it, purely a money laundering scheme, which he said was “legal” because the Vatican was sovereign. With the help of Calvi, the money had been deposited in dozens of letter-box companies, which then borrowed against them from the Banco Ambrosiano and sent the proceeds to other offshore entities.
If so, why couldn’t the funds be recovered? Sindona answered that the Vatican, again with Calvi’s help, had used these funds to make “questionable investments.” As an example, he cited the Vatican’s attempt to buy control of Rizzoli, which owned Italy’s largest newspaper, the Corriere della Sera . “I don’t know how much was lost,” he said; by that time, Sindona said, he was no longer advising the Vatican.
He claimed to know nothing about Calvi’s death, but added, as I was leaving the room, that he might have a similar fate ifhe was ever sent back to Italy. It was the last time I saw Sindona. On September 25, 1984, he was extradited to Italy, and on March 18, 1986, he died in a prison in Rome from a dose of cyanide in his coffee, a death ruled a suicide.
IV.
When Calvi was arrested the year before his death in Milan, it was on a questionable technicality about an incident that had occurred a decade earlier. His bank had arranged legal currency transfers in 1971 that were held by a magistrate to violate a retroactive 1976 foreign-exchange law. Along with Calvi, six other former and present executives of the Banco Ambrosiano were arrested. Mass arrests of bankers by magistrates on technical offenses had by the 1980s become common in Italy. Because Calvi spent two months in Lodi prison, on getting out, he was determined to pay whatever was needed to be paid to get political protection against future imprisonment. “It is a question of surviving in a climate that is becoming like a religious war,” he said in a newspaper interview. “It is an atmosphere that favors every sort of barbarism.”
The person who offered Calvi such protection in this “religious war” was Licio Gelli. A mattress-spring manufacturer and poet from Arezzo, Gelli claimed to run a powerful web of influence in the form of a Masonic lodge in Rome called Propagandi Due, or P-2. This secret society, according to a sixty-four-volume investigation by a commission of the Italian Parliament, included forty-three members of Parliament, forty-eight generals, the heads of Italy’s intelligence service, the top magistrates in the judiciary system, the civil servants running various state-owned enterprises (including the energy company ENI), key bank regulators, and leading businessmen.
The report concluded that P-2 was a veritable “state withina state.” The commission had come to these conclusions largely based on the files of Gelli and his close associates, but most of those named in them denied any such membership in Gelli’s secret lodge. Nor did P-2 ever hold meetings or conduct ordinary Masonic business, as is prescribed by Freemasonry. Whether any of powerful individuals were actually members of P-2 or whether the
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