Free God's Banker by Rupert Cornwell

complete with clerical tellers, seem as dingy as the courtyard of Sixtus V, through which it is approached. Marcinkus' own office is more like a comfort­able smoke-filled study.
    The IOR is best seen as an "offshore" merchant bank in the heart of Italy, serving the universal Church—and, it has long been said, not a few favoured Italians as well. The anomaly of the Vatican, a sovereign state subject to neither exchange controls nor border checks with Italy, would turn it into an ideal conduit for spiriting money out of the country as the lira weakened and currency regu­lations tightened. Money deposited in an IOR account at an ordinary Italian bank, or simply brought to the IOR's counter in a suitcase, could then be sent anywhere in the world. Just how much money has left Italy by this route is unknown. The Vatican indignantly denies that any does now; in 1948, however, a Curia prelate called Monsignor Edoardo Cippico was arrested and imprisoned for having obliged Italians in this way. But that was more than twenty years before the paths of Calvi and Marcinkus crossed. The banker had far more ambitious and sophisticated designs. For the services that the IOR — wittingly or unwittingly—would render him, he was prepared to pay. And that suited the Vatican.
    No-one has seriously suggested that for all his opaque dealings with Calvi and Ambrosiano, Marcinkus was bent on self-enrichment. He lives simply, and Sindona, undoubtedly experienced in such matters, has said he was not to be bought with personal bribes.
    But the Church's growing financial needs were another matter. Marcinkus was a "team player", ready to serve its interests by every means. Now the IOR had to perform; and if its success was his own success, then so much the better. His prospects of advancement and of becoming a cardinal, would after all only be served if he could show the Pope he was as efficient a banker as he was organizer and advance man. Just how much profit the IOR earned from Calvi is unknown. What is known is that 85 per cent of its earnings are made available to the Pope, and fifteen per cent retained for administrative and other provisions. But Calvi, it must be assumed, helped them swell; and the payment of unusually high interest rates by Ambrosiano on deposits made by the IOR was just one possible way.
    The lasting appeal of the IOR for unscrupulous Italian financiers is twofold — or, less charitably, threefold. In the first place, it was an ideal, much respected, candidate for the role of fiduciary or trustee. The technique used by both Calvi and Sindona over the years was roughly comparable to football's wall-pass or "one-two". Player One, Calvi or Sindona, would transfer funds, or the shares of a company, to Player Two, the IOR. According to the instructions received from Player One, Player Two then either holds the asset in his own name, or passes it on to a pre-specified recipient, not infrequently on the other side of the Italian frontier. The IOR with one foot inside the country, and the other outside, was perfect for the role. In football, the move is supposed to split an opponent's tight defence; for Calvi it was regularly to defeat Italy's steadily tightening exchange controls. The second advantage was the IOR's secrecy and offshore status, making discovery of what was taking place particu­larly difficult. The third, less charitable, advantage was that the Vatican bank never seemed to mind.
    Indeed the IOR developed a speculator's mentality, where risk took second place to the tempting rewards on offer. It retained some holdings in Italy, such as its interests in Banco Ambrosiano and Pesenti's Italcementi, and smaller investments in bluechip industrial companies like Fiat. But scandal or near-scandal would dog its name. In the United States, the IOR was fined for an improperly documented acquisition of a stake in a company called Vetco Indus­tries. That year too, by at least one account,* it narrowly avoided being caught up