Un mismo carácter

Despite the wretched likeness of their endings, the Rizzoli story has a romantic quality which that of Calvi lacks entirely. Angelo Rizzoli, the founder of a dynasty he boasted would be eternal, built up his publishing fortune from the humblest of origins. Brought up in an orphanage, at the age of nineteen he was running a tiny printing press, turning out labels for crates of fruit. By the 1960s he was the most powerful publisher in Italy, a legacy which passed first to his son Andrea, and then to his grandson Angelo junior. To the end of his life, the old man never forgot the lessons of his youth: "My children have had the misfortune to be born rich," he would tell friends. But even in his most sober musings Angelo Rizzoli cannot have imagined that a fortune worth over $100 million could be largely destroyed by his heirs in the space of just a decade.

The fatal step was one which was supposed to seal the Rizzolis' success—the acquisition of the venerable Corriere in 1974. Founded a century before, the paper was presently owned by the Crespi family, the oil magnate Angelo Moratti, and the Agnellis, masters of the Fiat car company, and the leading industrial family of Italy. "A dream held by three generations of my family has come true,"

proclaimed the young Angelo on July 17, 1974, the day Rizzoli took over after paying 44 billion lire for the privilege. The size of the mistake was soon plain.

The Rizzolis, of course, were neither the first nor the last industrialists in Italy or elsewhere to have been beguiled by the prospect of owning a newspaper. But the Corriere soon revealed itself as a particularly bad buy. That first year of 1974, it lost 12 billion lire, and the Rizzoli company did not possess the management expertise to push through the changes required. Within a year the deficit, and the cost of financing the borrowings for buying the Corriere in the first place had driven the young Angelo and his finance director of eighteen months, Bruno Tassan Din, to do the rounds of the banks asking for money.

The two made a curious pair: Angelo Rizzoli, corpulent and slow speaking, was the brooding heir; part playboy, part over-conscious of the responsibility his birth had thrust upon him. Tassan Din on the other hand, with his thick mane of grey hair and aquiline features, had arrived at Rizzoli with the reputation of a financial magician. His quick tongue was matched by a natural cunning. Later he was to be portrayed as the malign, scheming adventurer who brought Rizzoli to disaster; sometimes he would be described as being Rasputin to the uncertain, ingenuous Tsar Angelo.

In the summer of 1975 they both received an unpleasant surprise: the big State banks would not lend them money. Suspicion gradually turned into certainty as to the reason: that the Corriere of the day was showing rather too little respect for the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, the two dominant parties of the establishment, and political patrons of the public sector banks. Providence, however, was to place a saviour to hand, in the person of Umberto Ortolani.

If the unctuously intimidating Gelli was Calvi's bridge to the P-2, Umberto Ortolani was to perform that function for Rizzoli. Angelo's father, Andrea, had used Ortolani as a consultant for his

business ventures in South America, where the latter already had interests of his own in the local right-wing press. Andrea Rizzoli put Ortolani in touch with his son and Tassan Din, and through him the two met Licio Gelli. Gelli's own banking contacts within the rapidly expanding P-2 did the rest.

Money, previously so hard to find, now miraculously arrived, both from Banco Ambrosiano, and from other banks of whom senior executives were later shown to be involved with the P-2. Thus began the three-way relationship between Calvi, Rizzoli and the P-2 which was to run through the rest of Calvi's life. "Ambrosiano was a tap for us," Tassan Din recalled, when it was all over, years later.

But the partnership between bank and publisher rapidly surpassed that of ordinary lender and borrower.

With the backing of Ambrosiano, Rizzoli launched itself into a headlong expansion, as if growth alone could burst the skin of financial difficulties.

Tassan Din was authorized to purchase an insurance company, Savoia, and then two small banks. One of them, Banca Mercantile of Florence, was later sold to Ambrosiano after a bewildering string of transactions in which the IOR again would figure as a passive partner.

In March 1976 Calvi, by then chairman of Ambrosiano, co-opted Andrea Rizzoli on to his bank's board. The appointment was recognition not so much of the close banking relationship between them, as of the fact that—unknown to the other board members—Rizzoli had temporarily become the largest shareholder of Ambrosiano. In return for his financial largesse, Calvi was using the Rizzoli name to conceal the true ownership of a block of Ambrosiano shares, held before by a Swiss front company called Locafid. Locafid, in turn, was run by his own Banca del Gottardo.j Rizzoli's

involvement was short-lived, for the shares quickly disappeared into the fastness of Panama. But once again the "fiduciary" technique was at work; and Rizzoli, so heavily indebted to Ambrosiano, was an ideal candidate for the role.

But the real attraction of the publishers lay elsewhere. In Italy, perhaps more than anywhere, ownership of a newspaper was an essential part of the struggle between the competing interest groups and factions. From its columns, friends could be favoured and rivals denigrated; the owner himself would be presented in the best possible light. Subtle or less subtle hints might be dropped,

incomprehensible for the general reader, but crystal clear for those to whom the message was addressed.

Visible ownership was, of course, hardly to Calvi's taste. Far better to exert influence from the wings of the stage, through provision of the funds which Rizzoli so badly needed. But that he relished such a role behind the publishing group and the Corriere, can hardly be doubted.

In the mid-1970s control of a newspaper was a subtle status symbol. It would place him on equivalent footing to the Agnellis who ran La Stampa of Turin, second only to the Corriere in terms of sales, or Montedison which had brought II Messaggero in Rome. La Nazione in Florence, and II Resto del Carlino in Bologna were owned by Attilio Monti, an oil magnate. Years before a far more potent oil industrialist

*See shareholding list of 1973, Appendix.

Enrico Mattei of ENI, even launched his own paper, II Giorno, in Milan.

Calvi was thus in excellent company, and in any case his fame was beginning to spread. In 1974 Giovanni Leone, the then President of the Republic, made him a Cavaliere del Lavoro, a distant

equivalent of a British knighthood, for his services to the economy. Calvi, however, would rarely use the title.

Even Giovanni Agnelli, then President of Confindustria, the Italian employers association as well as chairman of Fiat, expressed a curiosity to meet this new leader of Milanese finance. A dinner was duly arranged; it was a quintessentially Italian occasion, discreet and non-committal, at which these two representatives of such different traditions, the cosmopolitan, patrician industrialist and the shy and devious Catholic banker, could size each other up. The evening would later be described as

"hallucinating".

Aimless small talk was punctuated by frequent silences. Calvi only talked easily about his experiences in Russia. Oddly, he and Agnelli were near contemporaries who had served in the Soviet campaign at much the same time. But the two had little else in common. At last the dinner ended, after which Agnelli remarked of Calvi with effortless dismissal: "But how can anyone go through their life looking at the point of their shoes?"

As always, Calvi was not of the real establishment. He gave huge sums to the Bocconi

university, to the prestigious Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, and wanted to become a director of the Cini Foundation, the eminent cultural body in Venice. He would pay the membership fee for the club;

but then would not cross its threshold. The encounter with Agnelli was an illustration of how in the presence of the truly well-born and well-connected, he could be dazzled and discomforted. Even within the orbit of Ambrosiano itself, he was not immune to such considerations. Years earlier he had asked Alessandro Cordero di Montezemolo, bearer of one of Italy's most aristocratic family names, to be chief executive of La Centrale. The experience was short-lived, as di Montezemolo rapidly disagreed with Calvi. "I'm not going to go around blindfolded," he is said to have emphasized, when Calvi predictably tried to circumscribe his freedom of action.

Di Montezemolo resigned, and today is chairman of a large firm of insurance brokers in New York. Had Calvi been prepared to tolerate a few such robust critics, he would probably not have met the end he did. But it was already too late to change his ways.

Throughout his life Calvi would rarely seek the counsel of an impartial outsider. "When two people know a secret, it's not a secret anymore," was one of his favourite aphorisms. Opposition would be seen as evidence of conspiracy to overthrow him. One of the few who did attempt resistance was Luigi Agostoni, deputy general manager of Ambrosiano and a director until he resigned in October 1975. His departure did cause some people to wonder. But for the rest, the board was subservience itself. In any case it did not seem to matter much then, as Calvi and the P-2 enfolded Rizzoli in their coils.

Most of the remaining independence of the publishing group disappeared in the summer of 1977, on the occasion of a capital increase from 5 billion lire to 25.5 billion lire. The provision of new funds was vital, both to keep pace with Rizzoli's expanding debts, and in some measure to offset the harm caused by the Government's delay in permitting an increase in the cover price of newspapers.

Ostensibly the entire sum was put up by the family, to leave it in 91 per cent command of the group.

The truth was somewhat different.

Rizzoli's true financial position, and the real identity of its owner were to remain mysteries until

almost the end of this story, obscured respectively by a string of scarcely intelligible balance sheets and a screen of front companies and trustees. In effect, however, the family had lost control.

The money the Rizzolis used to subscribe to the capital increase was put up by Banco Ambrosiano; it went in good measure belatedly to complete payment for the 33 per cent of the

Corriere they had acquired from the Agnellis back in 1974. In return, moreover, Calvi insisted that 80 per cent of Rizzoli's capital be lodged with Banco Ambrosiano as security for the loan. Later this majority interest in the publishers appeared to have been passed on by Calvi to the IOR, under one or other of the circuitous transactions they were then elaborating. As a result control of Italy's most important paper for a long spell may—theoretically at least—have been in the hands of the Vatican.

The entire arrangement, Tassan Din has since stated, was orchestrated by Ortolani, who naturally would receive a handsome commission for his pains.

But there were other and more visible consequences of the new balance of power. Ortolani joined Rizzoli's board, as did Calvi's trusted Gennaro Zanfagna, who had been involved with the birth of Suprafin back in 1971. Piero Ottone, the independent-minded editor of the Corriere, who had so disturbed the Christian Democrats, would depart, to be replaced by his deputy, Franco Di Bella. Four years later, in 1981, Di Bella in his turn would be compelled to resign. The records maintained that he had been a paid-up member of the P-2 since October 10, 1978.

For Tassan Din, on the other hand, the successful conclusion of the capital increase was the signal to embark upon a hectic shopping expedition. Rizzoli, with the financial support of Ambrosiano, bought newspapers left and right, often with an eye on the political favours that might be purchased too. The group launched new publications of its own, notably L'Occhio, supposed to be Italy's mass selling equivalent of the Daily Mirror, but which lost money from the start. Rizzoli invested much in the burgeoning Italian private television of the day, and planned ventures in Malta and beyond. For with Calvi's money and Ortolani's guidance, Tassan Din enlarged Rizzoli's Latin American interests, notably in Argentina.

Everyone could count themselves satisfied. Tassan Din could theorize about turning Rizzoli into a global communications conglomerate; the inroads of the political parties into the Italian media were fostered, while in the end, Gelli and Calvi exerted unsuspected control. Expansion, however, brought above all an expansion of losses. By 1980 Rizzoli's financial disarray was such that end-of- month salary payments were occasionally in doubt up to the last day, while Tassan Din would in time become as tireless an advocate of retrenchment as he once had been of growth.