Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [72]
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