Roberto Calvi, ”God’s banker”, the Italian financier whose body was found hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London more than 20 years ago, was murdered by the Mafia for mishandling its money, according to prosecutors charged with investigating one of Europe’s most opaque criminal mysteries.
Three men and a woman have been told they could now be tried for the 1982 killing, their lawyers said yesterday. Court-appointed forensic experts concluded that Calvi was not, as often previously assumed, murdered elsewhere and then suspended below the bridge.
According to extracts from a report they prepared, to be published today in the news magazine L’Espresso, he died by being hanged under the bridge from a boat.
The death of Calvi — originally deemed to be suicide — has confounded amateur detectives and inspired conspiracy theorists for a generation.
As the circumstances surrounding it emerged, it became clear the Milanese banker was at the centre of a web of sensationally improbable connections linking his bank, the Banco Ambrosiano, not just to Cosa Nostra, but also to the Vatican’s financial arm, the Institute for the Works of Religion, or IOR; offshore tax havens; cold war politics; and an influential rogue Masonic lodge, known as P2.
Arguably, the most historically significant finding of the investigation by the Rome prosecutors is that these connections did, as many had long claimed, have a direct bearing on the financier’s death.
They concluded that the mafia acted not only in its own interests, but also to ensure that Calvi could not blackmail ”politico-institutional figures and [representatives] of freemasonry, the P2 lodge, and the IOR with whom he had invested substantial sums of money, some of it from Cosa Nostra and Italian public corporations”. The prosecutors said that the Milanese banker’s death was ”directly linked” to transfers of $1.3-billion — the size of the ”hole” found in Banco Ambrosiano’s books when it collapsed, shortly before its president’s death.
However, they also stated that the Mafia recovered the money it had entrusted to Calvi ”in part or in whole” before murdering him. It emerged yesterday that the prosecutors closed their investigation 10 days ago. At least 10 people, apart from the four named, are known to have been implicated in the report, but their names have not been divulged even to the judges who must now decide whether to proceed with a trial.
Pippo Calo, a Mafia boss who has been in prison since 1985, is accused in the report of ordering Calvi’s murder. Ernesto Diotallevi, a businessman, is said to have acted as the link between Calo and two other people — Flavio Carboni and his then companion, an Austrian woman, Manuela Kleinszig — who travelled with Calvi to Britain after he jumped bail in Italy. All three are identified as having played an active role in the killing.
Their lawyers, who have 20 days to challenge the prosecutors’ demand for indictments, sprang to their defence. Carboni’s counsel, Renato Borzone, said there was a ”total absence of evidence to show Calvi was killed”. The accusations rested on unsound testimony from mafia informers. Kleinzsig’s lawyer, Ersilia Barracca, said: ”I am convinced it was suicide. In any case, my client, who was only 22 at the time, had no involvement.”
Last year, a panel of courtappointed forensic experts concluded that Calvi had been murdered. After re-examining his body, which was exhumed in 1998, they were reported to have been unable to find injuries normal associated with death by hanging. The banker’s family has long claimed he was murdered.
Suspicion even fell on the Vatican after it emerged that Calvi had worked with the head of IOR, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, to channel funds into a network of secret offshore account. Following the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano, the Vatican’s bank agreed to pay $250-million to its creditors but denied any wrongdoing.
Calvi was also involved with members of the P2, who helped secure him vital official assistance in return for bribes that laid him open to blackmail. Licio Gelli, now 82, the lodge’s master, was given an eight-year sentence for his role in the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano, which he is serving under house arrest.
At his villa, Gelli said: ”It is not up to us to deliver judgements. Only God will be able to tell the truth.” – Guardian Unlimited Â