The Last Supper (14 page)

The blackmail operation got into full swing on 3 August 1979, more than a year after the Moro kidnap. Sindona disappeared from New York; his secretary received a phone call from a man speaking in English with an Italian accent, saying that he had been kidnapped. The anti-communist Sicilian financier was in the hands of a strangely named ‘Proletarian Subversive
Group for a Better Justice’, who were intensely interested in the misdemeanours of his associates in the Italian political and business establishments. The nature of their interest was made clear at the end of August when Sindona’s lawyer received a first letter from his client outlining his plight. ‘Clearly they have overestimated me here and they think I know “everything” about “everyone” and that I have elements and documents of such importance as to implicate important people,’ Sindona wrote. ‘Besides, the people implicated haven’t lifted a finger to defend me and I don’t feel in any way morally inclined to protect them.’

A second letter reached Guzzi’s office in Rome on 12 September and spelled out the kidnappers’ demands even more clearly. ‘1. List of 500 – Provide names: 10 are enough provided they are high-profile individuals from finance and politics. 2. The names of foreign companies . . . owned by or available to people connected to the Christian Democrat party and associated movements of funds. 3. The same for the PSI and the PSDI [Italian Social Democrat party]. 4. Payments made, with money drawn from Sindona’s Italian or foreign banks, to political parties and political personalities. [...] 7. False balance sheets deposited with the bank by important (publicly quoted) companies in order to obtain loans.’ Item 9 concerned irregular operations carried out with Sindona’s help on behalf of some of Italy’s leading financiers and corporations and the Vatican.
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The message was clear to anyone who had enjoyed Sindona’s financial favours: someone, and it wasn’t very clear who, was threatening to go public with their guilty secrets.

In the course of time the identity of that someone also became clear. On 9 October police arrested a
mafioso
named Vincenzo Spatola as he attempted to deliver a message from the ‘kidnappers’ to Rodolfo Guzzi: Sindona, it would turn out, was not in the hands of left-wing revolutionaries but staying as a guest of Cosa Nostra friends in Sicily. Even
more strangely, by his own admission his visit to Sicily was connected to a far-fetched plan to organize a secession, separating the conservative, mafia-dominated island from an increasingly communist-oriented Italian mainland. Even some of his mafia hosts were sceptical of the workability of the plan but a number of witnesses have since given detailed accounts of what was afoot. It is possible that the secession plan itself was a message to Sindona’s previous political backers rather than a practical reality.

By his own account, Sindona’s secession plot had the backing of Cosa Nostra and international freemasonry, and those who accompanied him on the enterprise were indeed
mafiosi
and freemasons. To what extent he believed he had the support of the United States for his project remains unclear. In 1980 Sindona was held in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, awaiting sentencing on charges of fraudulent bankruptcy. In his account to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, Sindona claimed that had the secessionist coup been successful Sicily would have been offered to the government of the United States as a Mediterranean naval base. He also claimed that the United States had backed a similar project in which he had been personally involved in 1972; the apparent re-run in 1979 may have served above all as a reminder of past complicities.

However slim the prospects of success, the plot does appear to have led to practical steps being taken on the ground. According to one witness, Licio Gelli, the P2 master himself, travelled to Sicily to confabulate with the plotters but advised them against going ahead with the plan. In 1997, Angelo Siino, a state’s witness once known as ‘the mafia’s minister of public works’, described his participation at a meal with some of the plotters in evidence given to the Palermo court at that time trying Giulio Andreotti for alleged complicity with Cosa Nostra. ‘Approaching the others I heard Gelli say it was madness what Michele – Michele was Sindona – wanted to
do, that they absolutely could not trust the Americans, that the Americans could not be trusted because once they had achieved their purpose they would leave everyone in the lurch,’ Siino told the court in a deposition delivered on 17 December 1997.

Siino said Sindona had assured him the secession plot had the backing of international freemasonry and, in particular, of American freemasons. ‘I only heard one thing about foreign intervention . . . I heard it from the mouth of Sindona himself. He said an American aircraft carrier was cruising off the coast of Palermo and that there was a ship full of men ready to give military assistance to this coup.’ The ship, he claimed, had come all the way from Argentina and the men were commanded by Count Edgardo Sogno, a second world war resistance hero and staunch anti-communist with a long curriculum in American-backed coup plots.

Siino said the plotters had obtained the agreement of a number of ferry captains to blockade the Straits of Messina when the coup went ahead and other conspirators were going to plant devices on communication towers overlooking the straits in order to cut all radio and television links between Sicily and the mainland. Siino had enquired whether the technician responsible for carrying out this last task was fully trustworthy and was assured by a fellow plotter that ‘if he wasn’t reliable we would make him so, in other words he was prepared to kill him’.

Fanciful though the coup plot may seem, it was not out of character for Sindona, who had been actively involved in anti-communist activities for many years. His links to high-powered American anti-communists went back a long way. Richard Nixon he met in the 1960s, when the future president was practising law in New York. Over convivial lunches the two saw eye to eye on the future of Italy and ‘the need for the United States to help prevent the Mediterranean region from falling into enemy hands’, according to Sindona’s biographer
Nick Tosches. ‘Nixon said he agreed with this view of Italy’s strategic nature and with the desirability of supporting the democratic parties, the friends of the United States, in Italy,’ Tosches quotes Sindona as saying.
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There is considerable evidence to show that Sindona’s anti-communism moved well beyond the theoretical stage of lunchtime discussions with a lawyer named Nixon. John McCaffery, the Hambros Bank representative in Italy – the Special Operations Executive veteran with the highly politicized conception of business – was unequivocal in an affidavit sworn in Ireland on 3 February 1981. ‘Sindona is anti-communist, pro-American and planned a coup d’état in Italy in 1972,’ he affirmed. ‘It was intended to install a pro-American and capitalist government. I too participated in this project.’ Both men had meetings with senior officers in the Italian armed forces, McCaffery said, and Sindona held meetings of his own ‘with members of the CIA and high-ranking officials at the US embassy’.
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McCaffery had been more guarded in another affidavit he had sworn five years earlier and which he provided to Sindona’s lawyers to help them resist efforts to obtain his extradition from the United States to Italy. ‘This man had undoubtedly spoken to members of the police and the armed forces about the dreadful state of the country and the direction it was taking. Any responsible and patriotic person who had the opportunity to do so would have done it,’ he had stated in 1976. Sindona was a sincere patriot who was prepared to sacrifice much for the good of his country and a sincere admirer of the American way of life, McCaffery had said. ‘As a successful businessman and an open supporter of capitalism and free enterprise, Mr Sindona was an obvious target for elimination for elements of the Italian left.’ If he were returned to Italy, read the affidavit, Sindona would not be given a fair trial.
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Numerous other sources, less well disposed towards Sindona, have spoken of the Sicilian financier’s involvement in
coup plotting in the early 1970s. Roberto Cavallaro, a participant in the
Rosa dei Venti
[Compass Rose] conspiracy, told magistrates he had learned of Sindona’s role from a fellow conspirator, Giancarlo De Marchi. ‘De Marchi told me that the previous April (1973) in conjunction with Andreotti’s trip to America and Japan there was to have been a coup d’état and that Andreotti had delayed his return by 12 hours to allow it to happen. Leading the attempt was allegedly Andreotti himself, financed by Sindona and supported by the American General Johnson,’ Cavallaro said. Cavallaro, a right-wing trade unionist who was able to canvass military officers’ opinions by posing as a magistrate in the military justice system, said the conspirators had withdrawn from the plot at the last minute because they feared Andreotti wanted to seize power for himself, ‘dealing a blow to the right and one to the left, sorting out the extremes once and for all’.
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The global reach of Sindona’s anti-communism becomes apparent from the testimony of Carlo Bordoni, a money trader who worked for Sindona’s banks before falling out with him. When asked by a Manhattan district attorney where Sindona might have disappeared to in 1979 he came up with a list of countries where Sindona had been involved in politico-financial operations, which included Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Taiwan and Greece. In Greece, Bordoni said, Sindona had been active in financing the regime of the colonels. And of the Sindona-backed coup attempt in Italy, he observed: ‘To understand the purpose of the coup d’état you have to remember the relations that Sindona had established in the United States with President Nixon, with the ambassador to Italy John Volpe . . . and with David Kennedy, the former treasury secretary and chairman of Fasco, Sindona’s holding company.’
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If the Sicilian secession project had little prospect of success – some witnesses have suggested that the Americans were no longer interested because the threat of Moro’s ‘historic compromise’ with the Communists had receded by 1979 – the
recovery of Sindona’s missing money may have been a more realistic objective. Several mafia
pentiti
(‘repentants’) have suggested that Cosa Nostra organized the Sicilian trip and attendant blackmail exercise because it wanted to recover funds it had entrusted to the troubled financier and to ensure it was first in line for reimbursement. Sindona was accompanied on his visit to Sicily by John Gambino, the representative of a powerful American crime family: an indication of the priority given to the bizarre scheme by the US mafia. Sindona’s ostensible kidnap by left-wing extremists would have the added benefit of arousing sympathy for him in America and masking the spurious nature of the blackmail campaign. The
pentito
Gaspare Mutolo told Palermo prosecutors in 1993 that the mafia bosses Pippo Calò, Stefano Bontate and the man who would later become the Sicilian mafia’s ‘boss of bosses’, Salvatore ‘Totò’ Riina, had all invested large sums of money with Sindona. ‘Sindona’s business started to go wrong and the Palermo people demanded the restitution of their money,’ Mutolo said. ‘That’s why in 1979 Sindona was forced to return to Italy to report on his conduct and to recover the necessary funds.’ To achieve that, he said, Sindona intended to use the ‘list of 500’ for blackmail purposes.

There is little doubt that Andreotti was high on the list of his blackmail targets. Angelo Siino told the Palermo court in 1997 that he overheard Sindona as he spoke in exasperated tones from a payphone to an unidentified interlocutor: ‘Giulio, you can’t do this to me!’ His assumption that Sindona was speaking to Andreotti was confirmed by a fellow conspirator. ‘He made me understand that Sindona had documents that were very, but very compromising, that could cause embarrassment to the Hon. Andreotti,’ Siino said. According to his associate, Giacomo Vitale, a
mafioso
and freemason, Sindona had come back to Italy with the intention of blackmailing Andreotti.

Numerous mafia witnesses have spoken of Sindona’s role in laundering money for Cosa Nostra. Francesco Marino
Mannoia, for example, told the Andreotti mafia trial on 4 November 1996 that Cosa Nostra had invested large sums, derived from drug trafficking, in the Vatican bank and in Sindona’s banks. ‘Most of the heroin was sent to the United States, to John Gambino,’ Marino Mannoia said. Through Gambino, Sindona and other bosses, he alleged, large sums were invested in hotels, land and financial companies in Florida and on the island of Aruba. To give an idea of the amount of money flowing through Cosa Nostra’s hands, Marino Mannoia explained that he had worked for a number of mafia bosses but for one alone, Stefano Bontate, he had helped to refine more than 1,000 kilograms of heroin at a time when a kilo would fetch between $130,000 and $150,000 on the American market. Bontate’s quota could therefore have been worth up to $150 million. According to Mannoia, Pippo Calò and other mafia bosses had chosen Licio Gelli as their money-laundering channel, while Bontate and John Gambino had opted for Sindona’s financial services. (Gelli denies his own part in this allegation.) Mannoia began cooperating with the authorities in 1989. The very next day his mother, sister and aunt were murdered by the mafia.

Elements of Mannoia’s account have been confirmed by another mafia witness, Antonino Giuffrè, whose decision to collaborate is much more recent and whose experience of Cosa Nostra at a high level stretches beyond the turn of the century. Giuffrè is a particularly important witness in the Calvi case because of the confidential relations he enjoyed with top mafia bosses over many years and because he claims that one of his own followers was personally involved in the plot to kill Calvi. Speaking to the court by video link from a secret location, Giuffrè confirmed vital elements of the prosecution case when he gave evidence to the Calvi murder trial in Rome on 14 December 2005. His evidence is related in more detail in
Chapter 9
.

Sindona had been a key figure in the mafia’s financial affairs, he explained, and had been instrumental in introducing Calvi
to the organized crime community. ‘Pippo Calò was introduced to Roberto Calvi by Michele Sindona, who came originally from Messina,’ Giuffrè explained. ‘Sindona was one of the most important people from Cosa Nostra’s economic point of view. At a certain point he began to have financial problems, and problems with the justice authorities in Italy and America.’ Sindona then sponsored Calvi, who took over his role in laundering the massive amounts of money being generated for Cosa Nostra by the drug trade in the 1970s and early 1980s, he said. A triangular relationship developed, Giuffrè claimed, between Cosa Nostra, P2 and Marcinkus. ‘A large portion of the drug trade was controlled by Cosa Nostra and a flourishing refinery business developed in Sicily. Roberto Calvi became one of the most important points of reference for Cosa Nostra.’ Sindona himself, who always denied allegations that he was in contact with the mafia, was actually a ‘man of honour’, who had been formally inducted into the secret association, Giuffrè claimed.