A Vatican scandal that refuses to go away

Bruce Johnston reports on the Mafia trials causing embarrassment to the Vatican years after the death of Roberto Calvi
LICIO GELLI, the former Grand Master of the secret P2 masonic lodge who recently eluded Italian authorities, recycled Mafia money by investing it in the Vatican's own bank, a Palermo court has learnt.
Under the direction of the controversial, now-retired Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the bank — the Institute of Religious Works (IOR) — was plunged into scandal by the spectacular 1982 crash of the connected Banco Ambrosiano.
Gelli vanished in late April of this year from his villa in Tuscany, the day before Italy's Supreme Court sentenced him to 12 years in prison for his role in the Ambrosiano collapse.
The Ambrosiano had thousands of small religious investors — many of them priests and small religious orders — and as a shareholder, the Vatican felt morally obliged to help mop up its losses, although it claimed that strictly speaking it had no responsibility in the affair. Yet it later resisted all attempts by magistrates probing the crash to deliver Mgr Marcinkus to Italian justice.
The Gelli money-laundering claim, which was made to Palermo prosecutors by Francesco Mannoia, the former chief of heroin refining with the Mafia's dominant Corleone family, comes on the heels of a Rome magistrate's order that the body of Roberto Calvi, the Ambrosiano chairman, be exhumed.
That decision was based on the conviction by investigators in the Italian capital that Calvi, also a P2 lodge member — dubbed "God's Banker" because of his Vatican ties — did not take his life as was earlier thought.
The Ambrosiano failed months after Calvi was found swinging from a noose beneath London's Blackfriars Bridge
in June 1982. Thanks largely to earlier information provided by Mannoia, Rome magistrates have developed a new line concerning Ca)vi's death, which after six years of probes has now led to an order to exhume the financier's body.
Mannoia, a confessed assassin of dozens of Mafia victims, said that Calvi had in fact been killed by the criminal organisation at the orders of its nowjailed "finance chief" Pippo Cab.
The decision had been taken, he said, in order to "repay" Calvi for failing to promptly repay tens of millions of pounds which the Mob had "invested" with him, thus creating a severe cashflow crisis considered unforgivable by Cosa Nostra.
In the evidence amassed in the new Calvi inquiry, another Mafia supergrass claims that a high-ranking Vatican finance figure took part in a meeting in Sardinia uith Flavio Carboni, a louche businessman with Mafia ties, and others, when the plot to kill the banker was hatched.
Carboni, who was with Calvi the day he died, and who helped him to escape house arrest in Italy and accompanied him to London to try to save his floundering bank, has already been convicted for selling the contents of Calvi's briefcase to a Czech bishop — seen to be embarrassing for the Vatican.
Rome magistrates now say Carboni handed Calvi over to Mafia assassins. Mannoia, nicknamed "Mozzarella", said he had been told about Gelli's money-laundering activities via the Vatican on behalf of the Mob by its late, former Godfather, Stefano Pontate.
Marmoia's claim is among evidence in the trial against Marcella Dell'Utti, the right-hand man of the troubled media tycoon, AC Milan owner and Opposition leader Silvio Berlusconi. Dell'Utri, a Sicilian, is being tried for his Mafia ties.
In his testimony to prosecutors, Mannoia said that the Mafia's chief financial figure, Pippo Cal — the only mobster with a conviction for violent Right-wing subversion — had invested part of the Corleone fortune with the Vatican bank.
Mannoia, a reliable supergrass who was once described by Palermo police chief Antonio Mangarteili as "a man who never wastes his breath", said the Gelli matter had been confirmed by a "Mafia priest".
He named him as Padre Agostino Coppola, who in secrecy had officiated at the marriage of the Mafia's present Godfather Salvatore "Toto" Riina to his wife Antonella, when the couple were on the run.
In the Dell'Utri trial, Antonio Mancini, a supergrass formerly with the "Magliana Gang", which served Pippo Cab's interests in Rome, told the court that Mr Berlusconi and Mr Carboni knew each other and had both "laundered" the Mafia's money from kidnapping and drug trafficking.