In God's Name (54 page)

In January 1981 the Federal Grand Jury served a number of subpoenas on Cody, demanding to see his financial records. If Cody was as pure as the driven snow, his subsequent behaviour is unaccountable. Only the Cardinal, his lawyers and one or two very close confidants knew of the investigation and subpoenas. Cody kept the developments from the people of Chicago, from the Apostolic Delegate in Washington and from the Vatican. He also refused to comply with the Government requests to hand over the diocesan financial records. For an ordinary citizen to decline to co-operate would have meant prison but Cody, who is on record as declaring, ‘I don’t run the country but I do run Chicago’, demonstrated that the boast was not an empty one.

In September 1981, when the
Chicago Sun Times
broke the story, Cody had still not complied with the subpoenas. The
Sun Times
had been conducting its own investigation of the Cardinal for nearly two years. It proceeded to give its readers chapter and verse on a large array of allegedly appalling crimes committed by Cody.

The Cardinal refused to produce a shred of evidence that would have rebutted the wide variety of charges and attempted instead to rally behind him the 2,440,000 Catholics of the city with the assertion: ‘This is not an attack on me. It is an attack on the entire Church.’

Many responded to this totally fallacious statement. Many did not. The massive damage to the image and reputation of the Roman Catholic Church which Albino Luciani had rightly foreseen was now a reality. The city was divided. Initially it is clear that the majority supported Cody but, as the months dragged by, one fundamental fact began to sink in. Cody had still not complied with the Government subpoenas. His own close supporters began to demand that he obey the Government. His initial response through his lawyers had been, ‘I am only answerable to God and Rome.’ It was a concept that he took to the grave. In April 1982, with the Government still waiting for answers, Cardinal Cody died. Notwithstanding that he had a long history of illness, Cody’s body, unlike Albino Luciani’s, was subject to an autopsy. His death had been caused by ‘severe coronary artery disease’.

He had left a final message to be read out after his death. It contained no proof of his innocence with regard to the very serious
charges that he had faced. It contained instead that arrogance which had been such a feature of his entire life. ‘I forgive my enemies but God will not.’

With the tyrannical despot Cody dead, there had been immediate speculation about his successor. A name frequently mentioned was that of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, citizen of Cicero, Chicago, who was currently drowning in scandal in Italy. The US Church hierarchy demurred and advised the Vatican that to give Chicago to Marcinkus, ‘would be more of the same’. In the event the position went to Archbishop Joseph Bernardin of Cincinatti who promised an immediate Church investigation into L’Affaire Cody.

The Government announced that it was closing its own enquiry and the Federal Grand Jury investigation was terminated without any charges being brought. In view of the fact that the man who had been accused was dead, there was little alternative.

In December 1982, Bernardin issued a two-page pastoral letter to Chicago’s Catholics. The letter was not supported with any documentary evidence. Bernardin concluded that a probe of Cody’s finances showed no wrong-doing, that he may have unfairly awarded a pension to Helen Wilson, that he ‘did not always follow preferred accounting procedures’. More significantly, accountants whom Bernardin had employed, refused to certify the ‘accuracy of the estimated receipt and expenditure figures’ though they found the figures ‘within an acceptable range of reasonableness for the purposes of the inquiry’. The reason the accountants refused to certify the records was because, as Bernardin admitted, some of the financial records of the archdiocese could not be located and, ‘if they were subsequently to become available, then the conclusions might require reevaluation’. Nearly two years later, those financial records are still missing.

The despotic, arrogant Cody clearly had a motive, and a powerful one, to involve himself in a conspiracy to murder Albino Luciani. A question mark may remain with regard to his financial corruption. There can be no doubt that Cody suffered from acute paranoia. If he was a paranoid psychotic it is entirely consistent that he would have sought to solve his problems, real or imagined, in a violent manner. Clearly if any Pope was going to remove Cody from Chicago it would be over his dead body – either Cody’s or the Pope’s. Through his many early years in Rome and then during his numerous visits, Cody had succeeded in ingratiating himself with two future Popes, Pacelli and Montini, and he had built up a large network of friends and informants.
That this man could put two fingers in the air to Pope Paul VI is an indication of his power. The many cash gifts, not only to Poland but to favoured members of the Roman Curia, also consolidated a peculiar brand of loyalty. Cody had his own Mafia or P2 planted deep within Vatican City – men with constant access to the Papal Apartments.

Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the third of the men Albino Luciani had been determined to remove from office, retained his position as head of the Vatican Bank upon the election of Karol Wojtyla. Indeed, as previously recorded, he has been promoted to Archbishop and given even greater power. For a man who observed upon his initial appointment to the Vatican Bank, ‘my only previous financial experience is handling the Sunday collection’, Marcinkus has come a long way. He has far greater claim to the title of ‘God’s Banker’ than either of his two former close friends and business associates, Roberto Calvi and Michele Sindona. He can also justly claim to have brought the Roman Catholic Church into greater disrepute than any other priest in modern times.

It is abundantly clear that in the mid-1970s Calvi and Marcinkus devised a scheme that spawned a multitude of crimes. It is equally clear that the Panamanian and other off-shore companies the Vatican owned, and still own, were run for the mutual benefit of Banco Ambrosiano and the Vatican Bank.

The Vatican has claimed since Calvi’s death that the first it knew of the off-shore companies and its ownership of them was in August 1981. This is yet another Vatican lie. Documentary evidence established that, as early as 1978, Bishop Marcinkus was actively ensuring that the fact that these companies were owned by the Vatican was suppressed. As for the Vatican’s lack of knowledge of the companies it owned, one example will suffice. UTC, United Trading Corporation of Panama, is one of the companies referred to in the letters of comfort, a company that the Vatican now claims it knew nothing about until shortly before the notorious letters were written by Marcinkus. Documentation dated November 21st, 1974, duly signed by Vatican Bank officials, requests that Calvi’s Banca del Gottardo arrange on behalf of the Vatican Bank the formation of a company called United Trading Corporation.

For Calvi the illegal scheme had many virtues. And what did the Vatican Bank gain? It gained money. Vast amounts of it. Calvi bought his own shares, from himself; at greatly inflated prices, but on paper these shares were legally owned,
and still are legally owned,
by the Panamanian companies who, in turn, are owned by the Vatican. Calvi
duly turned over the annual dividend on the huge block of shares to their rightful owners, the Vatican Bank. The sum involved varied over the years but averages out annually at 2 million dollars.

That was but the tip of the iceberg. More substantial gains can be traced. For example, in 1980 the Vatican Bank sold 2 million shares in a Rome-based international construction company called Vianini. The shares were sold to a small Panamanian company called Laramie. It was the first stage of a deal in which it was planned that the Vatican would sell to Laramie 6 million shares in Vianini. The price of the shares was grossly inflated. The first 2 million cost Laramie 20 million dollars. Laramie is yet another of the companies owned by the Vatican. It might be considered a futile exercise to sell yourself your own shares at an inflated figure. It becomes less futile if you are using someone else’s money, as Calvi had demonstrated over the years. The 20 million dollars to pay for the shares came from Roberto Calvi. And the Vatican Bank kept the shares it already owned and the 20 million dollars as well. Further, it did not and never has owned 6 million shares in Vianini. Its maximum stake in the company has never been more than 3 million shares. It was with schemes like this that Calvi paid off Marcinkus.

In March 1982, Archbishop Marcinkus granted a rare interview. It was given to the Italian weekly
Panorama.
His comments about Roberto Calvi are particularly illuminating, coming as they did just eight months after Calvi had been fined 13.7 million dollars and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment, and only seven months after the Vatican and Marcinkus discovered (if we believe the Vatican version) that Calvi had stolen over a billion dollars and left the Vatican to pay the bill.

Calvi merits our trust. This I have no reason to doubt. We have no intention of ceding the Banco Ambrosiano shares in our possession: and furthermore, we have other investments in this group, for example in the Banca Cattolica, which are going very well.

It is on a par with that other eulogy given by Marcinkus to the USA Government attorneys and the men from the FBI, who were investigating the alleged involvement of Marcinkus in a billion dollar counterfeit bond swindle in April 1973. On that occasion, it may be remembered, Marcinkus was extolling the virtues of a man he now claims to have hardly ever met, a man who, for his part, insists, ‘We
met many many times over the course of the years in which we did business together. Marcinkus was my partner in two banks.’ That man is Michele Sindona who, apart from his many other crimes, is responsible for the biggest single banking disaster in United States history, a man whom Marcinkus considered to be ‘well ahead of his time as far as banking matters are concerned’.

It may be argued on behalf of Marcinkus that his observation was made a year before Il Crack Sindona. In 1980, six years after the Sindona crash, Marcinkus was ready to testify on behalf of Sindona and was only stopped by the intervention of Cardinal Casaroli, who felt obliged to overrule Pope John Paul II.

Today, there is only one reason why Marcinkus has not been further elevated to cardinal. Despite the massive world-wide disgrace that his activities have brought upon the Vatican and Roman Catholicism, Karol Wojtyla was still going ahead with plans to give the man from Cicero a red hat. Again, only the insistence of Casaroli saved the day. It would seem the Pope takes a more tolerant view of sins perpetrated behind a bank counter than he does of sins perpetrated in bed.

With regard to the murder of Albino Luciani, Marcinkus had the motive and the opportunity. One of the many functions he performed for Paul VI was that of the role of personal Papal bodyguard and security adviser. As such his knowledge of the security arrangements, such as they were, was unsurpassed. Exactly why the President of the IOR was wandering around the Vatican City shortly after 6.30 a.m. on the morning on which Albino Luciani was discovered dead had yet to be established. Research indicates that Marcinkus could not normally be found near the bank premises at such an early hour. Unlike Villot he did not live inside the Vatican walls but at the Villa Stritch in Rome. Marcinkus brought many facets to his work in the Vatican Bank; not least were elements of his early childhood in Al Capone’s Cicero. ‘How are your gangster friends in Chicago, Paul?’ was a running joke in the early 1970s. It was heard less after Sindona’s trial. It is not heard at all after the Calvi débâcle.

If not actively involved in the conspiracy to murder Albino Luciani it is possible that Marcinkus acted as a catalyst, wittingly or unwittingly. Many years ago an English king cried out, ‘Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?’ and soon after, the Roman Catholic Church had a martyr in the person of Thomas à Becket. There is no doubt that Marcinkus conveyed in full his fears on the new Papacy to Roberto Calvi. There is equally no doubt that Albino Luciani was about to remove Marcinkus from the Vatican Bank and cut off all links
with Banco Ambrosiano. Did the fears that Marcinkus expressed not only to Calvi but to others about this new Pope provoke the course of events that, on the morning of September 29th, left Bishop Marcinkus open-mouthed and stunned when a Swiss Guard told him the Pope was dead?

Michele Sindona is often incorrectly referred to as ‘God’s Banker’. A more accurate label would be ‘God’s Speculator’. At the time of Albino Luciani’s murder, Sindona was fighting an extradition order served by the Italian Government. He was also wanted for questioning in regard to a wide variety of financial crimes in a number of other countries. By September 1978 the likelihood of the United States authorities initiating criminal proceedings against him, with regard to the Franklin Bank collapse, was becoming more of a certainty daily. These proceedings would save him from extradition but would place him in immediate jeopardy in the United States. The one remaining ace he could hope to play was dependent on Vatican co-operation. Sindona reasoned that if Bishop Marcinkus, Cardinal Guerri and Cardinal Caprio gave evidence on his behalf; a jury would be very heavily influenced by statements from three such august people. With Albino Luciani as Pope, the possibility of any Vatican testimony, let alone favourable testimony, did not exist.

Sindona, as a member of both the Mafia and P2, had not only the motive and opportunity for murder but, as has been amply demonstrated, he also had the capacity. He was a man deranged enough to believe that if an Assistant District Attorney were murdered his troubles in the United States would be at an end – a man deranged enough to believe that if he ordered the murder of Giorgio Ambrosoli his Italian problems would vanish. Such a man clearly had the capacity to remove an honest, reforming Pope.