Free God's Banker by Rupert Cornwell Page A

in a giant counterfeit stock deal sponsored by the Mafia. Then came Sindona, and then Calvi.
    *The Vatican Connection, Richard Hammer, 1982.
     
    "The IOR is not a speculative organization, and I'm not a specula­tor," Marcinkus declared in a rare interview* after Ambrosiano lay in ruins, in the autumn of 1982. "But can you live in this world without worrying about money? Even the Church has to see to the financial needs of its dependencies." God had to make an accommodation with Mammon; or in other words, and to repeat a celebrated Mar­cinkus dictum: "You can't run the Church on Hail Marys."
    The argument over whether Marcinkus was quite as innocent a victim as he proclaimed in his dealings with Calvi would continue long after the demise of Ambrosiano. It is unlikely that Calvi had already conceived the perverted use to which that partnership was to be put, but its components were by 1971 in place. Apart from the IOR, Compendium in Luxembourg was well placed to exploit the lax banking laws of the Grand Duchy. Just over the Swiss border in Lugano, there was Banca del Gottardo, with emanations, through its Ultrafin associates, in Zurich and New York. In Nassau, Cisalpine was starting to feel its way. Then there were the shell companies, the indirect subsidiaries which compliant lawyers would set up, never to be mentioned on any balance sheet. One such, established in Luxem­bourg at this time or a little later, was called Manic S. A.—a singularly apt name in the light of what was to follow. Manic, under the titular control of the IOR, was to rise later from its obscurity with a vengeance.
    But the time had now come to develop Ambrosiano within Italy, and events seemed to play remarkably into Calvi's hands. Following the failure of the Bastogi takeover that autumn of 1971, Sindona had resolved to pull out of Italy. The controlling interest in La Centrale held by Hambro's was of no strategic value, and the London bank was in any event anxious to break with the Sicilian. Calvi, on the other hand, signalled his willingness to buy.
    In November 1971 Hambro's sold its La Centrale stake, with 37 per cent of the voting stock, to Compendium in Luxembourg. With La Centrale, Calvi had the company which would handle his subsequent investments in Italy.
    * Il Sabato, November 1982.
     
CHAPTER SIX Empire Building
     
     
    At the start of the 1970s, the Milan stock market was tiny and unregulated, even more so than today. As a theatre for speculation and financial manipulation it was perfect. The fewness of the com­panies quoted—never more than 150—meant that it was the smallest of fry when set alongside Paris, Amsterdam or Frankfurt, to say nothing of the London stock exchange or Wall Street. Rules of disclosure were minimal, and consolidated accounts were but a gleam in the eye of idealistic EEC officials in Brussels.
    With comparatively small outlay, an imaginative and unprincipled financier could do much as he pleased, puffing up a share price on which to build paper pyramids of wealth. Reputations were made, and in Italy, as everywhere, there were those gullible enough to be convinced by them. Greed and fear, the dominant emotions in financial markets anywhere, were allowed play without hindrance. Nor did it seem that serious. Credit was easy, and OPEC's awakening of 1973 was still in the future. If the stock market was not fulfilling its theoretical function of providing venture capital, that did not seem to matter either. For Italy in the previous decade had achieved the fastest growth of any industrial nation except Japan.
    And it was with truly Japanese diligence and inscrutability that Calvi set about realizing his goal of turning Ambrosiano into an Italian merchant bank. Throughout his life he would remain a strangely one-dimensional figure. Socially, he might not have existed, his culture was small, his life by most standards grey. These gaps his wife would try to fill, in her self-imposed mission of making Calvi