Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [74]
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