Word: sindona
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Gray-haired, pale and immaculate in his neatly pressed prison uniform, Michele Sindona, 62, retains an aura of the multimillionaire banker and financial genius. Now serving a 25-year term in upstate New York for bank fraud in connection with the 1974 collapse of the Franklin National Bank, Sindona was for years a financial adviser to the Vatican. Though he still insists that he was framed in the Franklin affair by powerful Italian state banking interests who would not produce documents that would clear him, he readily admits to being deeply involved in the events that led to the downfall...
...Sindona contends that he first met Calvi, then a junior executive with Banco Ambrosiano, around 1967. The two agreed that Calvi would act as inside man in a plan to gain eventual control over the bank and make it international...
...Says Sindona: "Our goal was to buy control in Banco Ambrosiano." Sindona says that he first introduced Calvi to Archbishop Paul Marcinkus in 1971, the year the priest became president of the Vatican bank. Sindona strongly denies that he paid Calvi and Marcinkus a $6.5 million commission as part of a business deal in the early 1970s, as has been widely reported. Says Sindona: "I did give $6.5 million to Calvi, much more than that, but that was to buy shares of Ambrosiano and other stocks. None went to Marcinkus unless Calvi gave it to him." Sindona insists that Marcinkus...
...Says Sindona: "He used the money [I.O.R. earned] to impress the Pope, to promote himself. With me he had every opportunity to propose a deal, to make personal money...
With me he never even brought up the possibility." But Sindona believed Marcinkus was "incompetent" in choosing Vatican investments. "He is a good bodyguard," quipped Sindona, "but no banker...