CHAPTER 5
ITALIAN INTERVENTIONS
By the fall of 2003, with John Paul II fatigued and bloated from his treatments for Parkinson’s disease, Cardinal Sodano exerted greater power than ever in overseeing the Roman Curia. “The scandals in the United States received disproportionate attention from the media,” Sodano announced. “There are thieves in every country but it is hard to say that everyone is a thief.”1
Earlier in the year, as America prepared for war with Iraq, papal representatives sent warnings about an invasion. Condoleezza Rice, the Bush administration’s national security adviser, stated that she didn’t understand the Vatican position. As the standoff mounted between President George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein, Sodano told Italian journalists, “The Holy See is against the war; it’s a moral position. It’s certainly not a defensive war.” He added a dose of pragmatism: “We’re trying to provoke reflection not so much on whether it’s just or unjust, moral or immoral, but whether it’s worth it. From the outside we can appear idealists, and we are, but we are also realists. Is it really a good idea to irritate a billion Muslims? Not even in Afghanistan are things going well. For this reason we have to insist on asking the question if it’s a good idea to go to war.”2
Hours after the first missiles smashed down on Baghdad, John Paul denounced the war as “a defeat for reason and the gospel.”3
Rice visited the Vatican on February 8, 2005, in her new position as secretary of state and met with her counterpart, Cardinal Sodano. The Boston church closings and the bankruptcy cases of five other dioceses had become a greater issue for the Curia since Archbishop O’Malley’s 2003 meetings at the Vatican. After discussing Iraq and the Middle East, Sodano surprised Rice with a bald request: that the Bush administration intervene against a class action lawsuit that Louisville attorney William F. McMurry had filed against the Holy See in federal court in Kentucky, seeking damages for all victims of clergy sex abuse. Rice told him the Constitution prevented such a move by any administration.
Several attempts to sue the Vatican on other issues had failed under the 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. “Sodano’s decision to raise the matter with Rice suggests concern in Rome that sooner or later its immunity may give way, exposing the Vatican to potentially crippling verdicts,” wrote John L. Allen Jr. for National Catholic Reporter.4
Sodano’s ham-fisted design on diplomacy was all of a piece with his response to the abuse crisis. Realizing that dioceses were unloading assets, in many cases to pay their share of litigation, Sodano persuaded the silver-haired Cardinal Castrillón to appoint Monsignor Giovanni Carrù as undersecretary of the Congregation for the Clergy. Carrù, who began work on November 1, 2003, had specialized in catechism in the Turin diocese, in Sodano’s native Piedmont, in northern Italy. A man of warm and genial ways, Carrù was physical, putting hands on people’s cheeks, giving the affectionate hug, an effusive Italian friendliness, explains a priest well versed in Clergy’s inner workings.
Cardinal Castrillón was not pleased, this cleric explains. Castrillón felt Carrù was inflicted on him. Carrù, this source surmises, would have been happy as a bishop in his small diocese, but in his affable, simple way Carrù did what he was told. He liked to be important. The cleric describes Carrù in meetings, impatiently waiting for them to end, saying, And now we are done?—when often, no, they weren’t done, and discussions stretched on: after all, it was the Vatican. Monsignor Carrù as undersecretary led the closing prayer before they scattered for lunch.
As third in command, Carrù was a traffic manager for Clergy’s mail, faxes, and documents from the world’s dioceses, bishops, and priests who had business with the congregation. Clergy’s internal offices dealt with priestly discipline, catechetics, and patrimony, meaning property. Carrù took a special interest in the Third Office’s alienation of church property. His patron, Cardinal Sodano, took special interest in his nephew, Andrea Sodano, whose company Carrù helped with leads on church property as it came on the market.
In the long history of American Catholics bailing out the Vatican, it was perhaps inevitable that some shrewd Italian would see profit escalators in shuttered New World churches. To that end, Andrea Sodano, a structural engineer from his uncle Angelo’s hometown, Asti, had a front man who could have come out of central casting.
Enter Raffaello Follieri, with cheeks like a cherub, a tousle of brown hair, and deep, dark eyes. In November 2005, the twenty-seven-year-old Follieri was leasing a two-story $37,000-a-month apartment in Manhattan’s Olympic Tower; his foundation touted vaccinations for poor children in Latin America. Raffaello thrilled to the halo of celebrity circling his airplanes-to-everywhere romance with the movie star Anne Hathaway. Since her breakout role in The Princess Diaries, dark-haired Annie (as Raffaello called her) had made Follieri famous. The paparazzi and tabloids seized on their episodes in society. They were part of a New Year’s Eve soiree at a Dominican Republic resort with Bill and Hillary Clinton among the guests.
Every time his photograph appeared with Anne and her magic smile, Follieri knew it was good for business. The decidedly less glamorous Andrea Sodano was Follieri Group’s vice president. To call Sodano the brains of the operation would be unfair, since Follieri had the raw materials of a master salesman. But Raffaello was an amateur compared with the worldly-wise Andrea, who had the Vatican connections through his uncle.
The faxes generated from Follieri Group in New York that landed on Giovanni Carrù’s desk in the Congregation for the Clergy did not go unnoticed among other priests in the office. Gossip is the mother’s milk of bureaucracy. For Andrea and Raffaello, the information on American church properties that Carrù sent was worth the investment.
The Follieri Group website listed Raffaello as chairman-CEO and his father, Pasquale, as president. A native of Foggia, in the southern region of Puglia, Pasquale Follieri had done real estate work in Italy. His bio said he was a lawyer for two Italian banks; an expert in arbitration; a member of “the Court of Cassation” (comparable to the United States Supreme Court); an experienced journalist and a newspaper editor—but no mention of his conviction “in an Italian court [for] misappropriating more than $300,000 from a failed resort company whose assets he had been charged with overseeing,” as the Wall Street Journal would report. He appealed the conviction.5
Born in 1978 in Foggia, Raffaello had gone north, to Rome, to study at university. He lived for a time with the actress Isabella Orsini. Pasquale was having legal problems when his son dropped out of college. Raffaello founded Beauty Planet, a cosmetic supplies business with “the prestige hair and body care line Shatoosh.” The Follieri Group website said he sold the company in 2002 and joined a “London-based holding company” for oil trading and diamond mines. No mention that Beauty Planet lost money or the London company tanked.6
Raffaello made his first trip to New York at nineteen. Back in Italy, he hungered for Manhattan, to make his name in the city of cities. He met Andrea Sodano at a party in Rome. He barely had pocket change when he returned to New York in 2003, but Raffaello was fueled by rockets of ambition. Pasquale helped him establish the company. Andrea Sodano played surrogate for “the Vatican” in pitching potential investors and clients. The plan was to buy church properties below market value and develop them for lucrative resales.
When Raffaello and Andrea pulled into Washington, D.C., for the American bishops’ autumn 2005 convention, a beaming Cardinal Francis George of Chicago greeted them in the lobby of the Capitol Hill Hyatt Regency. George’s radiant delight made an impression on Joe Feuerherd, the Washington correspondent for National Catholic Reporter. Feuerherd took note of Cardinal Sodano’s nephew. Slight of build, bespectacled, about five foot ten, with salt-and-pepper hair, Andrea had a patina of worldly experience that stood out in high relief from Follieri’s effusive, youthful charm.
As it happened, Joe Feuerherd had worked in the affordable housing field earlier in his career; he knew how lenders and public agencies come together on big-ticket projects to secure funding. Many bishops have staff to manage their dioceses’ real estate holdings; some help develop housing for the elderly and low-income, sometimes under church auspices. The Conference for Catholic Facility Management is a professional association in its own right. As Follieri headed off to a Hyatt hospitality suite to welcome bishops, priests, and lay staffers, Feuerherd wondered how he got his money. Andrea Sodano, with a flip of the cell phone, had digital photographs to show of Uncle Angelo in the Vatican.7 “When Raffaello wants to meet with the bishop, they put the touch on from the Vatican and they get the meeting,” a church source told Feuerherd. “They’re about as connected as it gets.”
The Follieri Group’s website announced “contracts for the acquisition of over $100 million of church property in three U.S. cities.” Follieri’s business director wrote to a religious order:
Our intention is to purchase properties from dioceses and religious organizations, to renovate them, and if necessary, convert them to new uses, such as housing (lower, middle and upper income, depending on the area) and commercial use …
Because of the Follieri family’s deep commitment to the Catholic church and its long-standing relationship with senior members of the Vatican hierarchy, the Follieri Group understands very well the imperatives of the church and is sensitive to its needs.8
So, Feuerherd asked Follieri, do you plan to use the low-income housing tax credit at 4 percent or 9 percent? Raffaello had no idea, but cheerfully waved off his inexperience—he had staff to handle that. He’s a huckster, thought Joe Feuerherd.9 Nevertheless, his article showed restraint.
There were two initial factors motivating the company’s interest in U.S. church real estate, Raffaello Follieri told NCR. First, he said, “The [sex abuse] scandal in America [where] dioceses were paying a lot of money to pay [off] the lawsuits” would necessitate the sale of church property. Next, he said, the changing demographics of the church—from North and East to West and South and from city to suburb—mean that “a lot of the schools and churches that were full of people in the beginning” are now largely unused …
For competitive reasons the real estate industry is hyperdiscreet. Only when a deal is consummated—a process that can take months as prospective purchasers arrange financing and conduct environmental and other land and structural analysis—do sales records become public.
Even then, in some jurisdictions, religious institutions are exempt from some disclosure requirements. Dioceses and religious orders, meanwhile, are notoriously reluctant to discuss their business dealings, especially when senior Vatican officials are involved.10
“This thing smells in my opinion,” a religious order official told Feuerherd, his name withheld. “I wouldn’t get close to these people.” Translation: in the small tent of church politics, you don’t want your boss knowing you’ve scoffed at a pitchman in the person of Cardinal Sodano’s nephew.
“I have worked for the Follieri family for the past fifteen years as an engineering consultant,” Andrea Sodano told Feuerherd by e-mail. “My involvement long predates the Follieri Group’s interest in the States. The Follieri Group’s long and successful track record in real estate speaks for itself.”11
Melanie Bonvicino, a former Vogue model and a New York publicist with many celebrity clients, helped Raffaello in the start-up phase. She calls Andrea Sodano “very calculating, restrained, and absolutely gay. He looked upper class. He sits there, the nephew of the cardinal—what do you think Americans are going to think? It’s the image. Raffaello was like an actor cast in the lead of a movie. He was not particularly intellectual. He was a provincial young man from southern Italy, humble beginnings, but the accent, his good looks, and the clothes helped. He had very good manners, which goes a long way for most people. The entire business was predicated on associations, a veneer of something. He was charming, charismatic. He made people feel good … [Anne Hathaway] was reading blogs all the time. He made her dazzling, he made her interesting.”12
Richard Ortoli, a Manhattan attorney who drew up the incorporation papers, was so impressed with Raffaello Follieri that he invested close to $100,000; he let Raffaello sleep for a time in his spare room and hosted a party to launch the Follieri Group at the elite, wood-paneled University Club. As Michael Shnayerson reported in Vanity Fair, Cardinal Sodano circulated, shaking hands, smiling, his mere presence a Vatican show of support. Through Andrea Sodano, Follieri met princes of the American church to help gloss his image. Vincent Ponte, a restaurateur and TriBeCa developer took note when New York Cardinal Edward Egan gave Raffaello the grand hello in Filli Ponte restaurant. After conversations with Raffaello, Ponte invested $300,000 in the Follieri Group and lent Raffaello a white Mercedes with a driver.13
In 2004 Raffaello fell in love with the twenty-two-year-old Hathaway. She would become a bigger star as the ingenue magazine secretary in The Devil Wears Prada. Her celebrity status boosted his as he opened doors. Philanthropy was a calculated part of his plan. Although the Follieri Foundation did pay for vaccinations for children in Honduras, Raffaello in early 2005 sent a more important gift of 20,000 euros (roughly $34,000 at prevailing exchange rates) to the Congregation for the Clergy via Carrù. On March 8, 2005, Cardinal Castrillón sent a letter of thanks “for those priests who are most in need … Mons. Giovanni Carrù has spoken with me about your very successful professional activities in the building industry which you carry out with seriousness and devotion. I wish you every heartfelt success.”14
Priests who bring in donations rise in the eyes of their superiors. As Monsignor Carrù pleased Cardinal Castrillón, Raffaello Follieri had in Carrù the third-ranking undersecretary in the office with files on church properties to be sold. Carrù, a priceless insider for information on real estate that bishops and cardinals had to sell, would have his needs.
“My boyfriend is incredible in a lot of ways,” Hathaway gushed to a fashion writer. “One of the most untouched aphrodisiacs in the world is charity work. Seriously, you want a girl to be impressed, vaccinate some kids, build a house.”15 Although Raffaello and Anne did go to Honduras to inoculate poor children against hepatitis, Follieri’s public relations firm made sure the wire services got access to the right photographs. Follieri cast lines to Doug Band, the gatekeeper to Bill Clinton, suggesting he was poised to make a big donation to the Clinton Global Initiative. Soon he had a meeting with Clinton and his pal Ron Burkle, a billionaire real estate developer. Cardinal Sodano vouched for Follieri to Clinton’s office. When reached by the Wall Street Journal, Sodano’s “personal secretary [said] the cardinal declines to comment.”16
Burkle was so impressed that his private equity fund, Yucaipa Companies (board members included Clinton and Jesse Jackson), which funded inner-city supermarkets among other projects, agreed to a $100 million stake in Follieri Group LLC, to be paid in installments pegged to specific deals.
Follieri’s early purchases included an abandoned school-and-parish complex in the Camden, New Jersey, diocese. An Atlantic City pastor, Monsignor William Hodge, was “absolutely thrilled” with Follieri and soon went to work for him. The company bought a vacant lot from the Chicago archdiocese and two closed parish facilities in North Philadelphia for more than $1 million.17
In Boston, Follieri did not succeed. “He kept saying, ‘I want to buy,’ ” recalled Bill McCall, the chairman of the archdiocese’s real estate office. “To me, there was a naïveté there—I’m not sure he ever would have achieved the rezoning that he needed.”18
In the summer of 2005, flush with money from Yucaipa, Raffaello Follieri had a $480,000 salary, yet his spending was off the charts. Beyond the $37,000 monthly rent at the Olympic Tower apartment, he had an executive chef, a Trump Tower flat for his parents, his father Pasquale’s orthodontist bills, the dog-walking service, and lavish trips with Anne Hathaway. Among the celebrity-glommers to visit their rented yacht in the Mediterranean was Senator John McCain, a maverick in his own mind. Follieri siphoned off Yucaipa funds for a nonexistent office in Rome. At Follieri Group’s Park Avenue office, the receptionists were Filipina nuns. Raffaello put an altar in one room and stocked black clericals in a closet for Hodge and another monsignor on staff, George Tomashek, to wear for image enhancement on property calls.
In the weekly conference calls with Burkle’s company, Follieri escalated the requests to pay Andrea Sodano, stressing that the Vatican needed the engineering reports in order to approve the sales of church property. The Follieri-Yucaipa partnership paid more than $800,000 to that end. The Follieri office sent payments to Andrea Sodano’s office in Italy (and in some cases directly to the Vatican) by bank wire transfer. The invoices disclose a two-month flurry of payments in 2005 (the money came from Yucaipa’s investors). The Follieri-to-Sodano outlays included $75,000 on August 22, for “Engineering Services”; a September 12 invoice for $15,000 for work in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and $80,000 for Orland Park in the Chicago archdiocese; and on October 21, $70,000 for Canyon City (no state given in the invoice), another $50,000 for Orland Park, and $75,000 for unspecified “Engineering Services,” making a tidy $195,000 net on that single day. None of the invoices included a paragraph on work done.19
An FBI investigation later determined that Follieri wired $387,300 to a layman who worked as an administrator in the Vatican, one Antonio Mainiero. Mainiero’s day job was on the staff of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. His role, as the FBI determined, was to help cultivate church officials, “show the gardens of the Vatican to Follieri and his guests, and arrange for guided tours of a museum at the Vatican to make it falsely appear that Follieri’s ties to the Vatican provided him with the right of first refusal” on church properties.20 But to appear as if Follieri had a right of first refusal was an image of mutual design. Follieri’s bank wire transfers to Mainiero in the Vatican spotlight an enterprise whereby Vatican-connected operators profit off U.S. church sales. On November 2, 2005, Follieri wired Mainiero $25,000; on March 1, 2006, a wire for $140,000; on May 16, 2006, a wire for $70,000; on June 30, 2006, a wire for $52,300; and on November 17, 2006, a wire for $100,000.
On March 8, 2006—one week after the largest payment sent to Mainiero in the Vatican, $140,000—Cardinal Sodano sent a letter of complaint to Follieri. “I feel it is my duty to tell you how perturbed I am,” he wrote,
to hear that your company continues to present itself as having ties to “the Vatican,” due to the fact that my nephew, Andrea, has agreed on some occasion to provide you with professional consulting services.
I do not know how this distressing misunderstanding could have occurred, but it is necessary now to avoid such confusion in the future.
I do, therefore, appeal to your sensibility to be careful with respect to this matter. I shall accordingly inform my nephew Andrea as well as anyone else who has asked me for information regarding your firm.
I take this opportunity to send you my regards.21
The letter is clearly in response to Feuerherd’s long article of March 3 in National Catholic Reporter. In the course of sending intelligence to its government, the Vatican embassy in Washington undoubtedly alerted the secretary of state of the Holy See to unflattering news references to himself, his nephew, and the “this thing smells” quote from a religious order official. Cardinal Sodano’s natural instinct was to cover his tracks. Although Andrea was milking the business, Cardinal Sodano—having lent his sacred office to greeting the potential backers and clients at Follieri Group’s Manhattan launch—feigned ignorance. Ties to the Vatican? A “distressing misunderstanding.” How much clearer could the Follieri brochures have been on the Vatican ties, or the sales calls with Andrea in his role? But as Iago prodded Othello to his fate and then withdrew, Andrea, who lived in Italy, could readily cut bait on Raffaello.
Behind the cardinal’s underlining of “necessary … to avoid such confusion” looms the cold mien of power, warning the flamboyant Follieri sotto voce, “Be careful.” One could infer he also meant, “We won’t guard your back.” For as Raffaello Follieri trumpeted his ecclesial connections to potential investors and church sellers, his braggadocio extended to telling people he was the chief financial officer of the Vatican! As the tailwinds of Follieri’s hubris wafted back to the Apostolic Palace, Cardinal Sodano sensed trouble. Still, his letter’s ambiguous language of chastisement begs a question: why didn’t the cardinal send Follieri a cease-and-desist message? But to do that would have gored the golden calf servicing sweet meat for Andrea, Antonio Mainiero, Monsignor Carrù, if not the cardinal himself.
Four months after the cardinal’s letter, with Burkle and company feeding money into Yucaipa Follieri Investments LLC, Raffaello and Andrea flew to Brazil on a property-scouting trip. As he had done with the 20,000 euro donation to the Congregation for the Clergy, Follieri had a check for $25,000 for the archbishop of Salvador da Bahia, and a check for $85,000 for the archbishop of Rio de Janeiro. “The recipients of these donations did not know that Follieri had stolen the money to give to them,” cautions the FBI.22 Follieri and Andrea Sodano had a strategy that was impossible without Vatican help: take the American money, give some to the right bishops, get an inside track on the available real estate, buy low, sell high.
In the spring of 2007, Ron Burkle suspected he was being fleeced. He wanted to see the engineering reports. Follieri stalled. The billionaire who flew in his private jet and partied with his pal Bill Clinton demanded the documents. Follieri made a secretary stay up all night writing the reports, which he backdated and disgorged to Burkle’s people. “The reports were in Italian,” Theodore Cacioppi, an FBI agent, told me later. “Each one was about two to five pages long. None of them contained any schematics, technical drawings, diagrams, or anything that appeared to relate to engineering.” The reports putatively from Sodano “were almost worthless, did not reflect any engineering work, and were certainly not worth over $800,000.”23
Burkle’s Yucaipa Companies had their own investors, notably the New York State Common Retirement Fund, the California Teachers’ Retirement System, and the California Public Employees’ Retirement System. In June 2007, when Yucaipa sued Follieri for $1.3 million, the needle hit the balloon. Raffaello was closing in on a deal with Helios, a London-based company, to buy church properties in Europe. First he had to blunt Burkle’s legal strike. He managed to repay Yucaipa, but a June 15, 2007, Wall Street Journal piece by John R. Emshwiller on the lawsuit “got us interested in Follieri,” says FBI agent Cacioppi.
As the FBI probe began, Raffaello was bouncing checks. Hathaway paid the last four months’ rent ($148,000, excluding the chef’s salary) on the Olympic Tower lease, according to Melanie Bonvicino. Raffaello moved in with his mother at Trump Tower. He and Anne were quarreling when he flew to Rome in June 2008. He called Bonvicino, the publicist who had helped him in the start-up months and returned in the pinch. “I was doing crisis management,” she says. “The Helios deal would have put him in a situation where he’d have an opportunity to cover his debts and redeem himself professionally … When the relationship with Yucaipa blew up, Raffaello gave Burkle a pick of his properties. Burkle took the crown jewels of the portfolio. He made a very handsome profit.”
The Catholic Church has extensive property holdings in Ireland and the United Kingdom. Follieri’s development plan with Helios would add new gems to his crown. He was getting information from Antonio Mainiero in the Vatican, whom he promised to set up as an officer of his branch company in Rome. And Monsignor Carrù from Clergy was feeding the fax requests. According to Melanie Bonvicino, “I told the Helios people, ‘Put him on an allowance, cover his approvable expenses so he does not go out of pocket.’ Like you do with actors who have drug problems. There’s no magic to what Raffaello did. He worked all the time, very hard. When he traveled he was always meeting people. People are money. Sit with the right person, get your picture taken, find the next person. It was like [the movie] American Gigolo, dating a starlet, meeting people, but Raffaello was picking up tabs … He was always looking for business.”
When Bonvicino reached Rome, Raffaello Follieri was short of cash. Monsignor Carrù was hectoring him for money. We need their support, Raffaello told her. A cradle Catholic with her own issues about the church, Bonvicino wondered why church officials had tolerated Raffaello’s extravagant promotion of himself in alliance with the Vatican. The reality she found was the Vatican’s involvement in the selling of U.S. church properties. Business is business. People are money. Into her purview that day in Rome came Monsignor Carrù, a small man in his early sixties whose effeminate mannerisms seemed out of sync with his deep, low voice of furbo, meaning clever, calculating, a legendary trait. Carrù seemed to her furbo personified.
Raffaello told her they needed Carrù’s information to succeed with Helios.
Monsignor Carrù explained he was about to leave on holiday. The trio went to a restaurant, La Rosetta. “Carrù knew a lot,” continues Bonvicino. “I think Carrù was tipped off. It was one last milking of the cow. The priest had wine. I paid for the lunch. He gave me a blessing after the meal.” The next day they met him in Vatican City. She withdrew $1,000 worth of euros on her ATM card and gave it to Monsignor Carrù along with her personal check for $9,000 (on which she wrote donation), which he cashed an hour later at the Vatican Bank.
Bonvicino and Follieri flew back to New York, then to London, where Helios was intent on raising 100 million euros for developing church properties in Ireland and the UK. Melanie told Raffaello to stay in London, duck the celebrity lights until he could repay his debts, hire a lawyer, negotiate with the federal authorities in Manhattan, and try to avoid being arrested.
But the heart is a merciless magnet. In the meltdown with Hathaway, the cell calls and text messages flying across continents and time zones pulled Raffaello back without a defense attorney to prepare the way. He wanted his Annie. She was on tour for the movie Get Smart as their fraught dialogue played out. Caring for her dog at the Trump Tower apartment, he had no clue his lover was cooperating with the FBI. So were the two American monsignors, Hodge and Tomashek, among others in his employ. On June 24, 2008, Raffaello was asleep in his boxer shorts at his mother’s flat when the FBI rang at 6:00 a.m. They arrested him for fraud and money laundering. His father, Pasquale, was back in Italy. In Raffaello’s safe, the FBI agents found the letter from Cardinal Castrillón and “the smoking gun” letter from Sodano, as Agent Cacioppi calls it.
“The investigation started because he was in the press constantly and he made a great catch,” opines Melanie Bonvicino. Indeed, the Vatican’s true role was obscured in the media’s juicy coverage of Follieri’s spectacular meltdown with his movie star sweetheart. As he sat behind bars, with a $21 million bail he could not meet because the U.S. Attorney’s office deemed him a flight risk, Follieri had no U.S. passport nor the stroke in Rome to negotiate an extradition so that he might serve time in Italy. He pleaded guilty to fourteen counts of wire fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy on October 23, 2008. He forfeited $2.4 million, jewelry, and twelve watches.
“We believe Studio Sodano [Andrea’s corporate name] took in fraudulently earned money,” Cacioppi told me. And Antonio Mainiero and Carrù? “We considered these people unindicted coconspirators. The relevant part from Italy is that we presumed this was bribe money paid to the little functionary [Mainiero] and to this secretary Carrù. We did not need to put those people on the stand. We did get intimations from the State Department that they were not inclined to talk with us. As a matter of resource allocation it was not worth trying to get them.” Cacioppi went on to investigate Bernard Madoff.
With Follieri sentenced to fifty-four months, questions hover. What did Mainiero do with the $387,300? Did Cardinal Sodano share in the proceeds? Were the incoming funds allocated to the Congregation for the Clergy, or any other Vatican departments? Did the Vatican Bank play a role? How does the Congregation for the Clergy safeguard information when the number-three man—Monsignor Carrù—was put in his job by Sodano and serviced an operator like Follieri? Do Vatican officials profit from property sales in many dioceses? Does the Vatican profit from church sales in other countries? Did the Vatican Bank engage in money laundering?
Despite the bad publicity Carrù took from the press coverage, on July 20, 2009, Pope Benedict installed him as archaeological superintendent of the catacombs, “an important task entrusted to a scholar with great experience,” according to an archbishop at the Pontifical Council for Culture.24 Perhaps the new post was an elevation of duties, though the image of Giovanni Carrù prowling the ancient tunnels where Christians hid from Roman authority suggests a soft-glove demotion to make Cardinal Sodano nod with furbo of his own. Carrù was not the safest man in Vatican City to handle sensitive real estate information. Still, it took a year after Follieri’s arrest before Carrù was removed from the Congregation for the Clergy.
Follieri was indeed a big catch for the Justice Department in the national media, but the greater corruption was at the Vatican. Burkle’s people realized Raffaello was off the charts when he leased a private jet for $62,000 to make the quick hop from Los Angeles to Las Vegas instead of taking a commercial flight for a few hundred dollars. Why did the Sodanos get involved with him in the first place? Any number of real estate agents would have profited from unique access to Clergy property files, though Andrea’s greed would have become an issue. The Sodano scheme went sour because Follieri lost his grip on reality. When he crashed, at least $800,000 was tucked away in Italy.
CODA
“What Raffaello did in four and a half years takes a lifetime for some people,” asserts Melanie Bonvicino. “He put together a business that ended up making money for Burkle, and would have made serious money for Helios. In the end everybody ditched him. But the Vatican let this man run wild. Why?”
As Raffaello sat in a federal prison, abandoned by Anne, his parents back in Italy, Melanie Bonvicino made occasional visits. He owed her $131,000 for a blizzard of work at the back end, she says. They were never romantically involved. “But,” she adds with a trace of sympathy, “I actually do care about him.”