Accusations of Drug, Art Smuggling : Odyssey Takes Priest Outside Law, the Church

The most tangible legacy of Father Lorenzo Zorza’s two decades as a missionary is a small patch of concrete near the Consolata Society mission in Somerset, N.J.

On this site, the Consolata fathers had weekly sales of used clothes and furniture to benefit their African missions. Lorenzo’s task: to supervise the lay people who ran the rummage sale.

But the priest had a bigger idea: to transform the site into “Consolata Village,” a tourist attraction with music, food, rides, a gift shop and a copy of the Trevi Fountain. Zorza had the concrete fountain base poured before telling the other priests of his plans.

“We said, ‘Hold it, this isn’t our kind of thing,’ ” Father Reno Aiardi recalls.

That incident 15 years ago was the first of many attempts by Zorza to mix piety and profit. His explanation at the time--I was only trying to help--would become a refrain as he lurched from scrape to scrape: in 1982, when he was arrested for art smuggling; in 1987, when he was arrested for trying to sell stolen property and this spring, when he was accused of being a bag man for an international drug ring.

Two Scandals

After Zorza’s April 6 arrest in Italy on the drug charge, published reports linked him to two of Italy’s biggest postwar financial and political scandals: the collapse of Milan’s Banco Ambrosiano and the right-wing “P-2” conspiracy to undermine Italy’s constitutional government.

In a prison interview broadcast on the syndicated television program, “A Current Affair,” Zorza maintained his innocence. He said he was guilty of drug charges only by “association or interpretation.”

But he admitted that his ministry, such as it was, had failed.

“I had all kinds of dreams . . . and everything . . . vanished,” he said in heavily accented English. “The reason is, I could never lean on anything that was organized. It’s easy to drive a car on a highway or to walk on a trail someone made, but when you have to make your own trail, you don’t know what’s there.”

Zorza’s odyssey began March 24, 1941, in a village in northern Italy near the Yugoslav border. The youngest of nine children, he began studying for the priesthood at age 11; at 24, he was ordained.

Zorza was assigned by the Consolatas to Somerset, where he impressed other priests with his ambition and willingness to work.

Known for Helpfulness

“The son of a gun is amazing,” Aiardi says. “If someone had car trouble in the middle of the night, he’d say, ‘I’ll go get him.’ If you told him, ‘There’s this family that needs a little something,’ he’d be the first one to jump in the truck and bring it to them.”

But Zorza soon became restless, Aiardi says. In the mid-1970s he moved out, saying he wanted to raise money for missionary friends in Brazil.

“I was taking a different direction,” Zorza later explained. But a conversation secretly recorded in 1982 indicated it may have been a crooked one.

In a meeting with a journalist posing as a shady art dealer, Zorza’s partner described the priest’s Brazilian initiative as an opportunity for profit, not charity. “You can make more money in this than paintings,” he promised.

Over the years, Zorza’s fund-raising operations changed names and locations, but “it was never clear to us what he was doing,” Aiardi recalls. “Even when I’d ask him personally, ‘Larry, what the heck are you doing?’ he’d pass over it.”

Role at U.N.

Zorza, who had become an American citizen, became a volunteer at the Vatican’s mission to the United Nations in 1978. His role soon expanded, although he was neither a diplomat nor a paid employee. By 1982, he was the fourth-ranking staffer.

As usual, Zorza was always available: driving nuns to the store, representing the mission at Italian-American community functions, picking up officials at the airport.

He made contacts, including Francesco Pazienza, an Italian financier later charged in the Ambrosiano collapse and convicted in the 1980 bombing of a Bologna train station that killed 85 people.

Europeo, an Italian magazine, says Zorza, Pazienza and a third man offered $4.5 million for an island in the Caribbean nation of Antigua to create their own state, with stamps, currency and liberal tax laws. But the deal fell through when Antigua refused to cede sovereignty over the island, the magazine said.

Prominent Parish

During this period, Zorza lived in the rectory of St. Agnes Church on East 43rd Street, one of the most prominent parishes in the New York archdiocese. Although not officially on the staff, he said Mass, heard confessions and performed marriages. He boasted that one of his most beloved parishioners was Greta Garbo.

But one of Zorza’s new friends led him into a trap.

Peter Watson, a journalist posing as an art dealer, was told that Zorza was a diplomat with contacts at airports in New York and Rome who would be willing to smuggle contraband art.

When they met, Watson--who was working with the Customs Service--asked Zorza if he had brought in much before. The priest nodded.

“Small things are better,” he told Watson. “Jewelry is good; you have jewelry?”

When Watson asked, “You have brought in jewelry?” Zorza answered, “Yes.”

After the meeting, Watson was told Zorza would carry two paintings to New York from Rome for $8,000. A week later, Zorza arrived at Kennedy Airport. With Customs agents secretly watching, he declared only a bottle of wine, some books and family heirlooms.

When he was arrested the next day, Zorza fainted. En route to his arraignment, he told a Customs agent, “I have to say Mass at 5 o’clock.”

Deluge of Support

Zorza pleaded guilty. But before sentencing, the priest’s supporters deluged the prosecutor with phone calls, the judge with letters. A typical plea came from Thomas L. Cassidy, managing director of First Boston Corp., who wrote:

“I know of no person who has a greater concern for his fellow man, to the detriment of his own personal interest. I cannot conceive of Father Zorza doing anything illegal or immoral. . . .”

Although several months earlier he had tried to sell Sotheby’s a piece of forged pottery--Judge Robert Ward said Zorza “may not be as knowledgeable and sophisticated as others” in the case. Pronouncing it “unlikely that such conduct would be repeated,” he sentenced Zorza to three years probation.

Zorza said it was all a mistake. “I did it sincerely to help somebody, and now I am terribly sorry. . . . I have learned a lot.”

But outside the courtroom, Watson wrote in his book, “The Caravaggio Conspiracy,” “the weeping suddenly stopped and he laughed and joked with his lawyer about the way they had beaten the system.”

Zorza was banished from the U.N. Mission and St. Agnes. He stopped visiting Somerset and refused his order’s offers of a new assignment, including one in Africa.

Ignored Punishment

Although his rights to say Mass and administer other sacraments were not renewed by the archdiocese at the end of 1985, Zorza continued to say Mass at various locations, including a Catholic women’s home on West 44th Street.

Those who met Zorza noted his shabby dress--stained, frayed jackets, torn pants, scuffed shoes.

He once came into a Theater District restaurant run by another priest. He was trying to sell watches with a drawing of Christ on the face. A cross formed the minute and hour hands.

At roughly the same time, according to Italian newspaper accounts, the ragged priest became interested in the Banco Ambrosiano collapse. The papers, citing American police files that were turned over to Italian judges, say Zorza hired a private investigator to reconstruct the bank money’s route to South America.

When Roberto Calvi, the head of the bank, was found hanged from a bridge in London in 1982, Zorza contacted his family to offer his services, according to Calvi’s son, Carlo.

Zorza allegedly knew Caesar (Tall Guy) Bonventre, a Sicilian-born member of New York’s Bonanno crime family. After pieces of Bonventre’s body were found stuffed in a glue vat, Zorza “was seriously worried about his own life,” the investigator said.

Meanwhile, Zorza apparently had time for more mundane matters. In the summer of 1987, he and another man walked into a Manhattan theater ticket agency and tried to sell $40,000 worth of tickets to “Les Miserables.”

Employees immediately recognized the tickets--they had been stolen from the same office six months earlier. They told the men to come back later and then called the police.

After his arrest, Zorza said he was only helping friends who “never told me the full story about the tickets.”

“I made two mistakes in my life, and I’m learning from this,” he said. “I don’t want to, but I’m going to have to stop doing favors for people.”

That was Aug. 21. On Aug. 9, Zorza had met two women at Newark Airport who had flown in from Rome. Federal agents suspect they were carrying heroin.

The next morning, the priest spoke with Michael Bernardo, a partner in the latest of a series of Zorza’s businesses, Fashion Brokerage International Trading on 5th Avenue, and a reputed member of the Italian Mafia.

“There is a big close-out of suits in the area of Camden and Philadelphia,” Zorza said. “Do you want to talk with them?”

“Yes, if it’s nighttime,” Bernardo said. Although federal agents monitoring the conversation insist “suits” meant “drugs,” Zorza claims that he was brokering a sale of discounted suits.

When Zorza was arrested in Rome in April, it appeared that he would be extradited to the United States to face charges that could put him in prison for the rest of his life.

But his lawyer--Frank Rubino, who also represents Panama’s Gen. Manuel Noriega--says that Zorza has since been questioned by Italian judges in connection with Banco Ambrosiano, Calvi’s death and Mafia art swindles and that it is now unclear whether Italy will surrender him.

Zorza, meanwhile, claims to be at peace.

“Everything that happens is good, is grace, even if you have to suffer,” he said in the television interview. “I’ve never been so serene in my life.”