For those who believe in the concept of effective crime-stopping financial regulation have only to look at the smallest independent city-state in the world, Vatican City. The tiny oligarchy is surrounded by Italy and ruled by the Pope. It also has its own bank. If you can't trust the Vatican Bank, whom can you trust?
The answer is no one.
A domino dance of Murder, three "Suicides" and two Bank Collapses
Roberto Calvi, chairman of Milan-based Banco Ambrosiano, was found hanging by the neck under Black Friars Bridge in London on June 17, 1982.
Banco Ambrosiano had just collapsed, and London authorities deemed his suspicious death a suicide. On the very same day Calvi's trusted executive secretary Graziella Corrocher, age 55, leaped to her death in his Milan Office from a fourth-floor window. Three months later his Banco Ambrosiano, board director Giuseppe Delta Cha also leaped to his death from the fourth-floor window. Three suicided Bankers for the Vatican IOR.
Shortly afterwards on June 22, 1983, Vatican City teenage resident, Emanuela Orlandi, age 15, goes missing forever whilst on her way to flute lessons outside the Holy City. Her father worked for the Bank of Vatican and Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, President of the Vatican Bank.
Bank customer Gambino Crime family Paul Castellano was murdered at Sparks Steak House at 5:38pm in Manhattan on December 16, 1985.
Franklin National Bank Chairman and customer of Roberto Clavi, Michele Sindano, was murdered by cyanide poison cappuccino on March 22, 1986.
These six disappearance-murder-suicides book-end the murder of Pope John Paul I on September 28, 1978 as well as the Black Ops-Wet Ops murder of DCI William Colby on April 27, 1996.
Italy separately indicted Archbishop Paul Marcinkus for financial crimes related to Banco Ambrosiano's collapse. He hid in the Vatican for six years during the papacy of John Paul II. The Vatican eventually got Italy to drop the charges.
The Vatican Bank IOR paid a $250 million settlement to the defrauded depositors of Banco Ambrosiano in "recognition of moral involvement." Archbishop Marcinkus reportedly later said that he raided the Vatican pension fund to come up with the money. Marcinkus returned to the United States in 1990 and retired to Sun City, Arizona, where he died in 2006 at the age of 84.
