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God's Banker: All 5 Charged in Roberto Calvi's Murder
Via NY Transfer News Collective All the News that Doesn't Fit
Channel 4 News - Snowmail (UK) - Jun 6, 2007
http://www.channel4.com
25 Years Later...
Five acquitted in "God's Banker" Murder Trial
He was found hanging from a London bridge, his pockets stuffed with
bricks and banknotes. Now after 25 years, his death is still a mystery.
All five defendants charged with Roberto Calvi's murder were today
acquitted by a Rome jury.
It's thought that Mr Calvi, who was known as God's Banker because of
his links with the Vatican, had been laundering money for the Mafia -
and when an Italian bank collapsed, mobsters had him killed because
they thought he'd betray them.
The Guardian - Jun 6, 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/italy/story/0,,2096878,00.html
Five cleared of Calvi murder
by Mark Oliver and agencies
A court in Rome today cleared all five defendants accused of murdering
"God's banker" Roberto Calvi, whose body was found 25 years ago hanging
under London's Blackfriars bridge.
Judges at the high-security court said there was not enough evidence to
convict the five of murder. The ruling follows a 20-month trial of four
men and one woman, and means that one of the world's most mysterious
cases remains unsolved.
The 62-year-old's body was found hanging from a rope attached to
scaffolding under the bridge on June 1982, with rocks and several
thousand pounds of cash in three currencies stuffed in his suit pockets.
A first inquest in London returned a verdict of suicide, but Calvi's
family - particularly his widow Carla and his son Carlo, a banker in
Canada - were convinced he had been lured to the UK to be killed by the
Mafia.
The five who have been cleared - who were originally charged in 2003 -
are Giuseppe "Pippo" Calo, a mafia money launderer, businessmen Ernesto
Diotallevi and Flavio Carboni, Calvi's driver and bodyguard Silvano
Vittor, and Mr Carboni's Austrian ex-girlfriend Manuela Kleinszig.
None of the defendants was in the courtroom on the outskirts of Rome
when the judge read the verdicts, reached after one and a half days of
deliberation.
The prosecution had earlier called for Ms Kleinszig to be cleared
saying there was insufficient evidence against her, but prosecutors had
sought life sentences for the four men.
Calo is already in prison, after being convicted in the 1980s of mafia
charges unconnected to Calvi. Explaining today's verdict, one of Calo's
lawyers, Massimo Amoroso, said: "The evidence was rather weak."
The body of Calvi, who was 62 when he died, was found hanging from a
rope attached to scaffolding under Blackfriars bridge in June 1982,
with bricks and several thousand pounds of cash in three currencies
stuffed in his suit.
The prosecution contended that Calvi was taken to the scaffolding in a
boat and was probably still alive but unconscious when a noose was
placed around his neck.
A first inquest in London returned a verdict of suicide, but Calvi's
family were convinced he had been lured to the UK to be killed by the
mafia.
Calvi was the chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, one of Italy's largest
banks, which had close links to the Vatican's internal bank. He fled to
London as the bank collapsed with debts of £800m and an investigation
got under way in Italy.
The prosecutors argued that Calvi's killing was ordered because he was
holding on to millions of pounds of Mafia money, which he had been
asked to launder.
There were also concerns Calvi might talk about the Mafia because of
the pressure he was under due to the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano.
Today the judges rejected the prosecution theory, though it will not be
clear why until they later publish their reasoning.
The investigator Jeff Katz, who was hired by the banker's family in
1991 to look into his death, said it was likely that senior figures in
the Italian establishment had escaped prosecution.
"The problem is that the people who probably actually ordered the death
of Calvi are not in the dock - but to get to those people might be very
difficult indeed," he said, speaking before today's verdict.
"You could have spent a very long time and not actually got there -
you're talking about the Italian state and political and religious
institutions."
Mr Katz spent three years on the case, reconstructing the circumstances
of Calvi's death and uncovering evidence that he could not have
committed suicide.
He showed that Calvi's shoes would have had flecks of rust and paint
from the scaffolding below Blackfriars Bridge if he had shimmied there
by himself; no such traces were found by police.
The initial investigation of Calvi's death by the City of London police
has been criticised because officers decided in the first 24 hours that
it was a case of suicide.
Today, a spokeswoman for the force said: "City of London police has
worked closely with the Italian authorities since 2003 to bring this
case to a successful conclusion.
"It is disappointing for Roberto Calvi's family in particular that
those responsible for his murder have still not faced justice."
The Independent - Jun 7, 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article2621811.ece
Calvi murder: The Mystery of God's Banker
It was a trial which promised to solve the 25-year old case of Roberto
Calvi, who was found hanged under Blackfriars Bridge. But yesterday a
judge acquitted all five defendants.
By Peter Popham and Philip Willan in Rome and Robert Verkaik
Twenty-five years after the event, the trial of the alleged killers of
Roberto Calvi has ended with the sensational acquittal of all five
defendants: a Sardinian property dealer and his mistress, a Mafia
accountant already serving life for other offences, a Roman loan shark
and the banker's one-time bodyguard, all are absolved.
Yet it would be a mistake to say we are back at square one. In the
snail-like progress of this case since that day in June 1982 when the
Italian banker was found at the end of a rope under Blackfriars Bridge,
there has been a major step forward. Evidence strong enough to convict
the five was missing, decided Judge Mario Lucio d'Andria. But there is
no longer much room for doubt that Roberto Calvi was murdered.
It was a Daily Express postal clerk on his way to work on 21 June 1982
who, glancing over the parapet of the embankment, noticed the length of
orange nylon rope lashed to a scaffolding pole under the bridge; and
then in horror and disbelief the head and besuited body of the banker,
hanged by the neck from the scaffolding, his feet just trailing in the
filthy water.
Calvi was wearing an expensive grey suit and handmade shoes and had
more than £7,000 in various currencies in his pockets. Yet the City of
London police rushed through the investigation of a death they seemed
determined to record as the sad but unimportant suicide of a foreign
tramp. For all his astronomical debts and legal nightmares, Roberto
Calvi was no tramp. Nor, we can now be sure, was he a suicide.
A cold, shy, stubborn man from the mountains north of Milan, Calvi in
his prime was one of the most brilliant bankers in Italy, rising
rapidly through the ranks of the private Banco Ambrosiano, which had
been founded by a priest and had long had close relations with the
Vatican's bank, the Istituto per le Opere di Religione or IOR. Despite
the murder trial that finished yesterday, the true nature and extent of
those relations has never been clearly explained; the man who could
have spilt the beans if he had wished to, the American archbishop, Paul
Marcinkus, who ran it during the crucial years, died aged 85 shortly
before he could give evidence. Yet there are many close observers of
the hermetic worlds of Italian politics, business and organised crime
who believe his secret dealings with the IOR - an offshore bank
conveniently located in Vatican City, in the heart of Rome - were one
of the key factors that led Calvi to his grotesque death.
For all his brilliance, Calvi landed in desperate trouble. As well as
co-operating closely with the Vatican's bankers, he also got into bed
with the Sicilian Mafia, setting up a network of offshore shell
companies which enabled them to launder the proceeds of the heroin
trade. Additionally he became a member of P2, the secret Masonic lodge
to which hundreds of Italian politicians, businessmen, secret service
agents, policemen, civil servants and others belonged, and which became
a sort of state within the Italian state, manipulating the direction of
the country from a strong right-wing position, exerting a profound but
long undetected influence on government decision-making.
The Vatican, the Mafia, P2; three drastically diverse worlds, linked by
the fact that Italy was, throughout the Cold War, a key frontline
player in East-West relations; possessor of the biggest Communist Party
in western Europe (which, thanks to the efforts of the United States,
was kept out of power until a decade ago). According to one of the more
persuasive theories swirling around the Calvi case, the Milanese banker
became a pivotal player not only in the laundering of Mafia money, but
in the secret channelling of large sums from the Vatican to the the
struggle of the trade union Solidarity against Poland's communist
government. It was a struggle which, since the accession to the papacy
of the Polish cardinal Karol Wojtyla in 1978, had become a matter of
vital importance for the Vatican; it was also close to the heart of the
Reagan administration in Washington. That other switch of funds in the
Cold War, from illicit sales of arms to Iran to funding the Contras in
Nicaragua, which became public in 1987, revealed to the world at large
the vital importance to the secret services of untraceable funds -
hence the temptation to cultivate close relations with organised crime.
Calvi, it is claimed, was a central figure in this other, more obscure
finance campaign, which unlike the Iran-Contras affair was successfully
kept under wraps.
Calvi was one of the men who knew a lot about a lot. For years he
handled the affairs of his highly disparate clients with flair,
rewarding them with fat rates of interest, managing the illegal funding
of political parties, playing midwife to secret arms deals, laundering
Mafia profits. But the key to the high-rolling success of such deals -
his network of offshore shell companies - was also the cause of his
downfall.
The man who later boasted that he taught Calvi all he knew about tax
havens, the Sicilian financier Michele Sindona, was reckless in a way
that Calvi had never been. The two became ever more closely tied by
secret financial favours - but when an American bank Sindona
controlled, the Franklin National Bank of New York, collapsed in 1974,
Calvi refused to bail him out to the extent Sindona believed he
deserved. He began putting pressure on Calvi to give more, pressure
that yielded a poisonous publicity campaign against Calvi, prompting
the Bank of Italy to send in its inspectors.
In 1978 the Bank of Italy concluded that Calvi's Banco Ambrosiano had
exported several billion lira illegally, prompting a criminal
investigation. The Banco Ambrosiano was suddenly in meltdown, and
Roberto Calvi's nightmare was under way. On 20 May 1981, finance police
officers rang Calvi's doorbell at dawn, with the news that the banker
was under arrest and would be taken to prison for interrogation.
Inside, he attempted suicide.
He was convicted of currency law violation and given a suspended
four-year sentence. But his troubles were only beginning. The bank, it
was revealed, was hundreds of millions of dollars in debt. In terror of
being imprisoned again, fearful also that mafiosi to whom he owed
hundreds of millions would now take their revenge, in June 1982 Calvi
went on the run.
Why he ended up in London remains obscure to this day. Escorted by two
of the men yesterday acquitted of his murder, Flavio Carboni, a playboy
and property developer, and Silvano Vittor, a smuggler based in Trieste
who acted as his bodyguard, he left Italy under a false identity,
travelling by speedboat to Yugoslavia, from there to Austria and by
private plane to Britain. In London, he checked into a cheap
residential hotel, the Chelsea Cloisters, and remained incommunicado.
Evidence that has emerged since Calvi's death indicates he was trying
to stave off ruin by threatening to reveal awkward secrets of the
Vatican and other big Ambrosiano clients if they did not bail him out.
For six years after he died, the official view was that he had killed
himself. He certainly had good reason to - the day before his death he
had been stripped of his chairmanship in the bank, and his private
secretary had jumped to her death. But his son Carlo began his campaign
to prove that his father had been murdered, and at a trial for
insurance purposes in 1988 the judge agreed with him. In the late 1990s
new forensic methods were applied to the now ageing evidence and the
results reinforced the murder theory. In October 2005 the murder trial
got under way.
Held in a fortified courtroom next to a jail on the outskirts of Rome,
the proceedings dragged on for a year and a half. The chief prosecutor,
Luca Tescaroli, claimed that the four men accused had lured Calvi to
London, where he had been handed over to his assassins - members of
Italian organised crime. Carboni, a Sardinian businessman with links to
former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, now imprisoned Mafia boss
Pippo Calo, former contraband smuggler Vittor, and Roman loan-shark
Ernesto Diotallevi, conspired together to murder Calvi, the prosecutor
claimed. The group wanted to punish the banker for losing money
belonging to the Cosa Nostra and to prevent him from blackmailing
former accomplices in the Vatican, the P2 masonic lodge and Italian
political parties.
According to a Mafia supergrass, Calo engaged an assassin called
Francesco di Carlo to carry out the murder. But the allegation may have
been an attempt to divert attention away from the true culprits.
Some of the most powerful prosecution evidence came from the Mafia
turncoat Antonino Giuffre. He accused Carboni of playing the traitor's
role in a classic Mafia murder conspiracy: first gaining the victim's
confidence and then delivering him for execution. Members of his own
Mafia family had participated in the plot, Giuffre claimed.
The Mafia accountant, Calo, accused of ordering the killing to punish
Calvi for embezzling Cosa Nostra's funds, and who had followed the
trial by video link from the maximum security prison where he is
serving life for other Mafia crimes, told the court that he would never
have turned to the criminals allegedly responsible for strangling Calvi
because they were in rival organisations or banned in disgrace from
Cosa Nostra. And in any case, he told the court, there were plenty of
hitman at his disposal.
The judged ordered the acquittal of four defendants for lack of proof;
the fifth, Carboni's girlfriend, was given a full acquittal. Only one
of the defendants was in court to hear the verdict, Ernesto Diotallevi,
the loan shark. Luca Tescaroli, the prosecutor, said he would have to
read the written explanation of the verdict that the judges must
produce over the next three months before deciding whether or not to
appeal. He said it was important that the court had confirmed that
Calvi had been murdered. "The very fact of holding a trial at all after
25 years is a success," he claimed. But for those who have been
following the Calvi case the unanswered questions continue to tantalise.
Toronto Globe & mail - May 26, 2007
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070526.wcalvi0525/BNStory/International/home
The killing the Vatican would rather forget
By ERIC REGULY
I am sitting in The Bunker, a fortified courthouse in suburban Rome.
The vast courtroom, lined with cages to hold suspects or jailed
witnesses, is almost empty, save for one other journalist, a few video
operators, the prosecutor and a smattering of defence lawyers in black
robes adorned with gold tassels. Does anyone care about the dead man
called "God's Banker" any more?
Giuseppe (Pippo) Calo does. He is one of the five defendants accused of
complicity in the murder of Roberto Calvi, the chairman of Italy's
Banco Ambrosiano from 1975 until his mysterious and sensational death
in 1982.
A dapper old man, Mr. Calo makes his appearance by video link from the
Ascoli Piceno prison, where he is serving multiple life sentences. He
was the treasurer of the Cosa Nostra, the powerful Sicilian arm of the
Mafia. He was convicted of having arranged the 1984 bombing of an
express train as it entered a tunnel between Florence and Bologna.
Sixteen passengers died and 180 were wounded.
Mr. Calo says nothing; on this hot morning, he is a spectator. He
apparently does not want to miss the performance of Renato Borzone, the
lawyer for fellow defendant Flavio Carboni, the one who was closest to
Mr. Calvi. And what a performance — Mr. Borzone, tall, bearded and
slightly stooped, is magnificently Italian. His arms are constantly in
motion, his voice rising and falling dramatically as he protests the
innocence of his client (he and his client maintain that Mr. Calvi
committed suicide). At one point, he shouts as he pounds his hands on
the table, startling the otherwise bored jurors.
My Italian is not good enough to grasp the subtleties of his arguments
— but his cast of characters is familiar. Mr. Borzone mentions Paul
Marcinkus, the American archbishop who was head of the Vatican Bank
(part-owner of Ambrosiano) when Mr. Calvi died; Opus Dei, the powerful
conservative group within the Roman Catholic Church; Mr. Calvi's son
Carlo, who lives in Montreal; Mr. Calo and other Mafiosi, and P2
(Propaganda Due), the secretive Masonic lodge that counted among its
members Mr. Calvi, Archbishop Marcinkus and the young Silvio
Berlusconi, the property developer and budding media magnate who would
later become Italy's prime minister.
Indeed, the story of Mr. Calvi's death and the subsequent collapse of
Ambrosiano, then Italy's largest private bank and the one favoured by
the Vatican because of its Catholic heritage, is filled with some of
the most powerful and notorious rogues, criminals, businessmen and
politicians in modern Italian and European history.
The investigations and court trials have shed light, but only some, on
a secret power network that evidently used Mr. Calvi and his bank to
finance Italian political parties, anti-communist activities in Central
America and support for Poland's Vatican-backed Solidarity movement.
Along the way, fortunes went missing and debts piled up. So did the
bodies.
Two pairs of underwear
Roberto Calvi was found swinging from the scaffolding under London's
Blackfriars Bridge on June 18, 1982. An orange rope was around his
neck. His feet were in the water. He was wearing an expensive grey suit
and, bizarrely, two pairs of underwear. Bricks and stones were found in
his pocket and in his crotch. He was carrying the equivalent of £7,370
in various currencies.
Initially, the London police identified the 62-year-old Italian as Gian
Roberto Calvini, the name on the passport he was carrying, but a leak
allowed the Roman press to report the man was in fact Roberto Calvi,
the banker who had gone missing in Italy a few days earlier. Already,
the case was a sensation in the Italian press. The day before Mr.
Calvi's body was discovered, his personal secretary, Grazziella
Corracher, had killed herself by jumping out of a window at
Ambrosiano's Milan headquarters. The note she left behind read: "May
Calvi be double-cursed for the damage he has caused to the bank and its
employees."
A London inquest concluded quickly — too quickly, as it turned out —
that Mr. Calvi also had taken his own life.
The Italians never believed the suicide theory. They knew that he was
in trouble, that his world was collapsing around him, that certain
forces might have found him more valuable dead than alive.
If he wanted to commit suicide, why not do it in Milan instead of
concocting a new identity and fleeing the country? Why would he
humiliate himself by ramming a brick down his pants? Why would he shave
off his mustache shortly before he was found hanging?
Mr. Calvi's problems first became public four years before his death,
when Bank of Italy inspectors accused him and Ambrosiano of violating
exchange controls. A year later, the prosecutor who had taken on the
case was murdered. A few months after that, a Milan lawyer was
murdered. The lawyer was the liquidator of a bank controlled by Michele
Sindona, the Mafia-linked financier from Sicily who had done business
with Mr. Calvi (and was later convicted of having the liquidator
liquidated).
In 1980, Italian magistrates investigating Ambrosiano withdrew Mr.
Calvi's passport. He got it back, only to be arrested a year later for
violating Italian currency-export controls. He was sentenced to four
years in prison and released on bail. The day before he died — six days
after he had fled Italy — the Ambrosiano board revoked his powers as
chairman and called in the Bank of Italy.
By then Mr. Calvi was in London in the company of Flavio Carboni, the
Sardinian "businessman" who was one of his closest associates and is
now accused in his death as well as another defendant, Silvano Vittor,
a smuggler from Trieste hired by Mr. Carboni to spirit the banker out
of the country. They and their three co-accused may or may not be found
guilty of arranging, or participating directly in, his murder — the
verdicts are due next month. But even if they are, the Calvi case will
continue to be shrouded in mystery. That's because far greater forces
than the unholy five may have crushed Mr. Calvi and his bank.
The faithful son
Carlo Calvo is 53, and has lived in Canada since 1977, the year he
joined the Principal Group, a now-defunct financial services company in
Edmonton. (His father had Canadian investments, including a plaza in
Calgary and a big ranch west of Edmonton.)
He now lives in Montreal, where his mother, Clara, died last year, and
manages his family's money, part of which came from his father's life
insurance. The rest of his time is devoted to investigating his
father's death, which he never believed was a suicide. "They have the
right defendants, but the wrong motives," he says.
According to Carlo Calvi, his father was not a criminal; he was a good
man who was trapped by forces and events beyond his control. His death,
his son says, was arranged for "political reasons." As the head of the
bank favoured by the Italian government and the Vatican, Mr. Calvi knew
too much about the "illegal financing of political parties" and the "P2
connections" and "investments that had to be hidden."
Mr. Calvi says his father was silenced in the same way that Mino
Pecorelli was silenced — by assassination. Mr. Pecorelli was an
investigative journalist gunned down in 1979 after he reported a string
of politically embarrassing scoops. In Italy, it is widely believed
that government officials wanted him out of the way (former prime
minister Giulio Andreotti was convicted of playing a role in the death,
but was later acquitted). "This is a copy of Mino Pecorelli," Mr. Calvi
argues.
British journalist Philip Willan, whose book about the case, The Last
Supper, has just been published, and American private investigator Jeff
Katz, who has worked for Carlo Calvi, have similar views. Both say it's
important to put the Calvi death into historical context.
In the late 1970s and into the early 1980s, when Ambrosiano was at the
height of it power, Italy was on the front lines of the Cold War. The
Italian Communist Party was a major force and the fear among the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization countries was that Italy was never more
than one (possibly rigged) election away from a Soviet-backed leftist
takeover. Western governments, the Vatican and the P2 Masonic Lodge —
effectively a shadow government made up of senior politicians,
businessmen, journalists and religious leaders — was adamantly
anti-Communist. The P2, led by Licio Gelli, who is still alive, invited
Mr. Calvi to join, presumably to exploit Ambrosiano's banking network
in its ideological quest against communism.
At the same time, Ronald Reagan's Republicans were financing a covert
war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and Pope John Paul II was
supporting Poland's Solidarity movement, led by Lech Walesa. All these
anti-communist efforts required financing. Big corporations used
Ambrosiano to funnel money to non-communist political parties.
Conveniently, Ambrosiano had a string of offshore banks.
Mr. Katz, who is chief executive officer of the London corporate
investigations firm Bishop International, says Mr. Calvi was at the
vortex of the three main elements of Italian power — the Mafia, the
Vatican and the puppet masters behind top Italian politicians — through
his association with Mr. Sindona, Archbishop Marcinkus and P2's Mr.
Gelli.
For a while, the associations obviously proved beneficial to Mr. Calvi
and his associates orbiting the bank. At a certain point, the benefit
ended. It's known that vast sums of money vanished. Just before he
died, Mr. Calvi was trying to find $300-million (U.S.) to pay to the
Vatican Bank. When Ambrosiano collapsed after he died, $1.3-billion
(U.S.) was missing from its accounts.
One credible theory is that the bank was used to launder Mafia money.
The prosecutor in the current trial, Luca Tescaroli, says Mr. Calvi was
murdered because he had embezzled Cosa Nostra funds and to prevent him
from blackmailing his accomplices in politics, in the P2 and at the
Vatican Bank. In short, he probably knew too much about too many people
in high places, and could make life difficult for them. "The people who
had the most to lose were the people in the political power
structures," according to Mr. Katz.
Mr. Willan, whose book offers a fascinating glimpse into Italy of the
Calvi era, agrees that the banker became too dangerous; he had enough
knowledge of illegal activities to make him a potential blackmailer to
be feared. "He was a man who knew too much and was involved in
sensitive financial transactions of the Cold War," he says. "It's like
Murder on the Orient Express — they all put the dagger in him."
What really happened
Roberto Calvi died 25 years ago next month, and it was only last year
that the case was officially reclassified as a homicide investigation.
The initial suicide verdict, according to Mr. Calvi and Mr. Katz, was
the result of botched police work — for example, investigators failed
to preserve the knot on the rope used on Mr. Calvi, and no fingerprints
were taken from the scaffolding from which he was hung. Also, no one
looked into whether a boat had been stolen or rented to take the doomed
man to the north arch of Blackfriars Bridge.
In 1991, Carlo Calvi hired Mr. Katz to help determine what had happened
to his father. The private investigators went over the forensic
evidence. The original scaffolding was found and reassembled. A man Mr.
Calvi's size and wearing a pair of his shoes shimmied across the
scaffolding to where the body was found. After they had dried out
(remember, Mr. Calvi's feet were in the water), the shoes were examined
and found to have specks of rust and paint — unlike the shoes the
banker actually wore, which bore no evidence of such contact.
The conclusion: He didn't climb out on the scaffolding — someone put
him there.
Of the five suspects, Pippo Calo, the former Cosa Nostra treasurer,
will die in prison even if the verdict goes his way. Flavio Carboni,
the Sardinian who accompanied Mr. Calvi to London with Silvano Vittor,
the smuggler, must take some satisfaction in knowing his lawyer, the
animated Renato Borzone, has been particularly aggressive. Ernesto
Diotallevi, the Roman with alleged ties to the city's criminal gangs
and business links to Mr. Carboni, has yet to be seen in court. Ditto
Manuela Kleinszig, who was Mr. Carboni's mistress in the early 1980s.
Dozens of other potential witness are dead — from old age, murders and
suicides.
Liceo Gelli, the former P2 boss, was sentenced to 12 years for fraud in
connection with the Ambrosiano collapse. Until recently, he was under
house arrest in the Tuscan villa where he still lives.
Archbishop Marcinkus, the former head of the Vatican Bank, went into
comfortable retirement in Arizona and died last year at 84. Attempts to
implicate him in the collapse of Ambrosiano were thrown out by the
courts on jurisdiction grounds.
Michele Sindona, the Sicilian P2 member who taught Mr. Calvi how to set
up offshore banks, committed suicide in prison in 1986.
Mr. Willan says it's hard to tell whether the murder trial will result
in convictions. Over all, he has found the trial "somewhat
disappointing" because key questions have been answered only partly, or
not at all. "Like, who actually put the noose around Calvi's neck and
what exactly were the sensitive financing activities he was up to."
Whatever happens, Carlo Calvi vows to keep investigating his father's
death. He wants to open his research, which fills two full rooms in his
Montreal house, to the public and perhaps write a book. The research is
bound to be a dream come true for fans of conspiracy theories and
stories of the dark side of the Cold War.
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God's Banker: All 5 Charged in Roberto Calvi's Murder
Via NY Transfer News Collective All the News that Doesn't Fit
Channel 4 News - Snowmail (UK) - Jun 6, 2007
http://www.channel4.com
25 Years Later...
Five acquitted in "God's Banker" Murder Trial
He was found hanging from a London bridge, his pockets stuffed with
bricks and banknotes. Now after 25 years, his death is still a mystery.
All five defendants charged with Roberto Calvi's murder were today
acquitted by a Rome jury.
It's thought that Mr Calvi, who was known as God's Banker because of
his links with the Vatican, had been laundering money for the Mafia -
and when an Italian bank collapsed, mobsters had him killed because
they thought he'd betray them.
The Guardian - Jun 6, 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/italy/story/0,,2096878,00.html
Five cleared of Calvi murder
by Mark Oliver and agencies
A court in Rome today cleared all five defendants accused of murdering
"God's banker" Roberto Calvi, whose body was found 25 years ago hanging
under London's Blackfriars bridge.
Judges at the high-security court said there was not enough evidence to
convict the five of murder. The ruling follows a 20-month trial of four
men and one woman, and means that one of the world's most mysterious
cases remains unsolved.
The 62-year-old's body was found hanging from a rope attached to
scaffolding under the bridge on June 1982, with rocks and several
thousand pounds of cash in three currencies stuffed in his suit pockets.
A first inquest in London returned a verdict of suicide, but Calvi's
family - particularly his widow Carla and his son Carlo, a banker in
Canada - were convinced he had been lured to the UK to be killed by the
Mafia.
The five who have been cleared - who were originally charged in 2003 -
are Giuseppe "Pippo" Calo, a mafia money launderer, businessmen Ernesto
Diotallevi and Flavio Carboni, Calvi's driver and bodyguard Silvano
Vittor, and Mr Carboni's Austrian ex-girlfriend Manuela Kleinszig.
None of the defendants was in the courtroom on the outskirts of Rome
when the judge read the verdicts, reached after one and a half days of
deliberation.
The prosecution had earlier called for Ms Kleinszig to be cleared
saying there was insufficient evidence against her, but prosecutors had
sought life sentences for the four men.
Calo is already in prison, after being convicted in the 1980s of mafia
charges unconnected to Calvi. Explaining today's verdict, one of Calo's
lawyers, Massimo Amoroso, said: "The evidence was rather weak."
The body of Calvi, who was 62 when he died, was found hanging from a
rope attached to scaffolding under Blackfriars bridge in June 1982,
with bricks and several thousand pounds of cash in three currencies
stuffed in his suit.
The prosecution contended that Calvi was taken to the scaffolding in a
boat and was probably still alive but unconscious when a noose was
placed around his neck.
A first inquest in London returned a verdict of suicide, but Calvi's
family were convinced he had been lured to the UK to be killed by the
mafia.
Calvi was the chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, one of Italy's largest
banks, which had close links to the Vatican's internal bank. He fled to
London as the bank collapsed with debts of £800m and an investigation
got under way in Italy.
The prosecutors argued that Calvi's killing was ordered because he was
holding on to millions of pounds of Mafia money, which he had been
asked to launder.
There were also concerns Calvi might talk about the Mafia because of
the pressure he was under due to the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano.
Today the judges rejected the prosecution theory, though it will not be
clear why until they later publish their reasoning.
The investigator Jeff Katz, who was hired by the banker's family in
1991 to look into his death, said it was likely that senior figures in
the Italian establishment had escaped prosecution.
"The problem is that the people who probably actually ordered the death
of Calvi are not in the dock - but to get to those people might be very
difficult indeed," he said, speaking before today's verdict.
"You could have spent a very long time and not actually got there -
you're talking about the Italian state and political and religious
institutions."
Mr Katz spent three years on the case, reconstructing the circumstances
of Calvi's death and uncovering evidence that he could not have
committed suicide.
He showed that Calvi's shoes would have had flecks of rust and paint
from the scaffolding below Blackfriars Bridge if he had shimmied there
by himself; no such traces were found by police.
The initial investigation of Calvi's death by the City of London police
has been criticised because officers decided in the first 24 hours that
it was a case of suicide.
Today, a spokeswoman for the force said: "City of London police has
worked closely with the Italian authorities since 2003 to bring this
case to a successful conclusion.
"It is disappointing for Roberto Calvi's family in particular that
those responsible for his murder have still not faced justice."
The Independent - Jun 7, 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article2621811.ece
Calvi murder: The Mystery of God's Banker
It was a trial which promised to solve the 25-year old case of Roberto
Calvi, who was found hanged under Blackfriars Bridge. But yesterday a
judge acquitted all five defendants.
By Peter Popham and Philip Willan in Rome and Robert Verkaik
Twenty-five years after the event, the trial of the alleged killers of
Roberto Calvi has ended with the sensational acquittal of all five
defendants: a Sardinian property dealer and his mistress, a Mafia
accountant already serving life for other offences, a Roman loan shark
and the banker's one-time bodyguard, all are absolved.
Yet it would be a mistake to say we are back at square one. In the
snail-like progress of this case since that day in June 1982 when the
Italian banker was found at the end of a rope under Blackfriars Bridge,
there has been a major step forward. Evidence strong enough to convict
the five was missing, decided Judge Mario Lucio d'Andria. But there is
no longer much room for doubt that Roberto Calvi was murdered.
It was a Daily Express postal clerk on his way to work on 21 June 1982
who, glancing over the parapet of the embankment, noticed the length of
orange nylon rope lashed to a scaffolding pole under the bridge; and
then in horror and disbelief the head and besuited body of the banker,
hanged by the neck from the scaffolding, his feet just trailing in the
filthy water.
Calvi was wearing an expensive grey suit and handmade shoes and had
more than £7,000 in various currencies in his pockets. Yet the City of
London police rushed through the investigation of a death they seemed
determined to record as the sad but unimportant suicide of a foreign
tramp. For all his astronomical debts and legal nightmares, Roberto
Calvi was no tramp. Nor, we can now be sure, was he a suicide.
A cold, shy, stubborn man from the mountains north of Milan, Calvi in
his prime was one of the most brilliant bankers in Italy, rising
rapidly through the ranks of the private Banco Ambrosiano, which had
been founded by a priest and had long had close relations with the
Vatican's bank, the Istituto per le Opere di Religione or IOR. Despite
the murder trial that finished yesterday, the true nature and extent of
those relations has never been clearly explained; the man who could
have spilt the beans if he had wished to, the American archbishop, Paul
Marcinkus, who ran it during the crucial years, died aged 85 shortly
before he could give evidence. Yet there are many close observers of
the hermetic worlds of Italian politics, business and organised crime
who believe his secret dealings with the IOR - an offshore bank
conveniently located in Vatican City, in the heart of Rome - were one
of the key factors that led Calvi to his grotesque death.
For all his brilliance, Calvi landed in desperate trouble. As well as
co-operating closely with the Vatican's bankers, he also got into bed
with the Sicilian Mafia, setting up a network of offshore shell
companies which enabled them to launder the proceeds of the heroin
trade. Additionally he became a member of P2, the secret Masonic lodge
to which hundreds of Italian politicians, businessmen, secret service
agents, policemen, civil servants and others belonged, and which became
a sort of state within the Italian state, manipulating the direction of
the country from a strong right-wing position, exerting a profound but
long undetected influence on government decision-making.
The Vatican, the Mafia, P2; three drastically diverse worlds, linked by
the fact that Italy was, throughout the Cold War, a key frontline
player in East-West relations; possessor of the biggest Communist Party
in western Europe (which, thanks to the efforts of the United States,
was kept out of power until a decade ago). According to one of the more
persuasive theories swirling around the Calvi case, the Milanese banker
became a pivotal player not only in the laundering of Mafia money, but
in the secret channelling of large sums from the Vatican to the the
struggle of the trade union Solidarity against Poland's communist
government. It was a struggle which, since the accession to the papacy
of the Polish cardinal Karol Wojtyla in 1978, had become a matter of
vital importance for the Vatican; it was also close to the heart of the
Reagan administration in Washington. That other switch of funds in the
Cold War, from illicit sales of arms to Iran to funding the Contras in
Nicaragua, which became public in 1987, revealed to the world at large
the vital importance to the secret services of untraceable funds -
hence the temptation to cultivate close relations with organised crime.
Calvi, it is claimed, was a central figure in this other, more obscure
finance campaign, which unlike the Iran-Contras affair was successfully
kept under wraps.
Calvi was one of the men who knew a lot about a lot. For years he
handled the affairs of his highly disparate clients with flair,
rewarding them with fat rates of interest, managing the illegal funding
of political parties, playing midwife to secret arms deals, laundering
Mafia profits. But the key to the high-rolling success of such deals -
his network of offshore shell companies - was also the cause of his
downfall.
The man who later boasted that he taught Calvi all he knew about tax
havens, the Sicilian financier Michele Sindona, was reckless in a way
that Calvi had never been. The two became ever more closely tied by
secret financial favours - but when an American bank Sindona
controlled, the Franklin National Bank of New York, collapsed in 1974,
Calvi refused to bail him out to the extent Sindona believed he
deserved. He began putting pressure on Calvi to give more, pressure
that yielded a poisonous publicity campaign against Calvi, prompting
the Bank of Italy to send in its inspectors.
In 1978 the Bank of Italy concluded that Calvi's Banco Ambrosiano had
exported several billion lira illegally, prompting a criminal
investigation. The Banco Ambrosiano was suddenly in meltdown, and
Roberto Calvi's nightmare was under way. On 20 May 1981, finance police
officers rang Calvi's doorbell at dawn, with the news that the banker
was under arrest and would be taken to prison for interrogation.
Inside, he attempted suicide.
He was convicted of currency law violation and given a suspended
four-year sentence. But his troubles were only beginning. The bank, it
was revealed, was hundreds of millions of dollars in debt. In terror of
being imprisoned again, fearful also that mafiosi to whom he owed
hundreds of millions would now take their revenge, in June 1982 Calvi
went on the run.
Why he ended up in London remains obscure to this day. Escorted by two
of the men yesterday acquitted of his murder, Flavio Carboni, a playboy
and property developer, and Silvano Vittor, a smuggler based in Trieste
who acted as his bodyguard, he left Italy under a false identity,
travelling by speedboat to Yugoslavia, from there to Austria and by
private plane to Britain. In London, he checked into a cheap
residential hotel, the Chelsea Cloisters, and remained incommunicado.
Evidence that has emerged since Calvi's death indicates he was trying
to stave off ruin by threatening to reveal awkward secrets of the
Vatican and other big Ambrosiano clients if they did not bail him out.
For six years after he died, the official view was that he had killed
himself. He certainly had good reason to - the day before his death he
had been stripped of his chairmanship in the bank, and his private
secretary had jumped to her death. But his son Carlo began his campaign
to prove that his father had been murdered, and at a trial for
insurance purposes in 1988 the judge agreed with him. In the late 1990s
new forensic methods were applied to the now ageing evidence and the
results reinforced the murder theory. In October 2005 the murder trial
got under way.
Held in a fortified courtroom next to a jail on the outskirts of Rome,
the proceedings dragged on for a year and a half. The chief prosecutor,
Luca Tescaroli, claimed that the four men accused had lured Calvi to
London, where he had been handed over to his assassins - members of
Italian organised crime. Carboni, a Sardinian businessman with links to
former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, now imprisoned Mafia boss
Pippo Calo, former contraband smuggler Vittor, and Roman loan-shark
Ernesto Diotallevi, conspired together to murder Calvi, the prosecutor
claimed. The group wanted to punish the banker for losing money
belonging to the Cosa Nostra and to prevent him from blackmailing
former accomplices in the Vatican, the P2 masonic lodge and Italian
political parties.
According to a Mafia supergrass, Calo engaged an assassin called
Francesco di Carlo to carry out the murder. But the allegation may have
been an attempt to divert attention away from the true culprits.
Some of the most powerful prosecution evidence came from the Mafia
turncoat Antonino Giuffre. He accused Carboni of playing the traitor's
role in a classic Mafia murder conspiracy: first gaining the victim's
confidence and then delivering him for execution. Members of his own
Mafia family had participated in the plot, Giuffre claimed.
The Mafia accountant, Calo, accused of ordering the killing to punish
Calvi for embezzling Cosa Nostra's funds, and who had followed the
trial by video link from the maximum security prison where he is
serving life for other Mafia crimes, told the court that he would never
have turned to the criminals allegedly responsible for strangling Calvi
because they were in rival organisations or banned in disgrace from
Cosa Nostra. And in any case, he told the court, there were plenty of
hitman at his disposal.
The judged ordered the acquittal of four defendants for lack of proof;
the fifth, Carboni's girlfriend, was given a full acquittal. Only one
of the defendants was in court to hear the verdict, Ernesto Diotallevi,
the loan shark. Luca Tescaroli, the prosecutor, said he would have to
read the written explanation of the verdict that the judges must
produce over the next three months before deciding whether or not to
appeal. He said it was important that the court had confirmed that
Calvi had been murdered. "The very fact of holding a trial at all after
25 years is a success," he claimed. But for those who have been
following the Calvi case the unanswered questions continue to tantalise.
Toronto Globe & mail - May 26, 2007
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070526.wcalvi0525/BNStory/International/home
The killing the Vatican would rather forget
By ERIC REGULY
I am sitting in The Bunker, a fortified courthouse in suburban Rome.
The vast courtroom, lined with cages to hold suspects or jailed
witnesses, is almost empty, save for one other journalist, a few video
operators, the prosecutor and a smattering of defence lawyers in black
robes adorned with gold tassels. Does anyone care about the dead man
called "God's Banker" any more?
Giuseppe (Pippo) Calo does. He is one of the five defendants accused of
complicity in the murder of Roberto Calvi, the chairman of Italy's
Banco Ambrosiano from 1975 until his mysterious and sensational death
in 1982.
A dapper old man, Mr. Calo makes his appearance by video link from the
Ascoli Piceno prison, where he is serving multiple life sentences. He
was the treasurer of the Cosa Nostra, the powerful Sicilian arm of the
Mafia. He was convicted of having arranged the 1984 bombing of an
express train as it entered a tunnel between Florence and Bologna.
Sixteen passengers died and 180 were wounded.
Mr. Calo says nothing; on this hot morning, he is a spectator. He
apparently does not want to miss the performance of Renato Borzone, the
lawyer for fellow defendant Flavio Carboni, the one who was closest to
Mr. Calvi. And what a performance — Mr. Borzone, tall, bearded and
slightly stooped, is magnificently Italian. His arms are constantly in
motion, his voice rising and falling dramatically as he protests the
innocence of his client (he and his client maintain that Mr. Calvi
committed suicide). At one point, he shouts as he pounds his hands on
the table, startling the otherwise bored jurors.
My Italian is not good enough to grasp the subtleties of his arguments
— but his cast of characters is familiar. Mr. Borzone mentions Paul
Marcinkus, the American archbishop who was head of the Vatican Bank
(part-owner of Ambrosiano) when Mr. Calvi died; Opus Dei, the powerful
conservative group within the Roman Catholic Church; Mr. Calvi's son
Carlo, who lives in Montreal; Mr. Calo and other Mafiosi, and P2
(Propaganda Due), the secretive Masonic lodge that counted among its
members Mr. Calvi, Archbishop Marcinkus and the young Silvio
Berlusconi, the property developer and budding media magnate who would
later become Italy's prime minister.
Indeed, the story of Mr. Calvi's death and the subsequent collapse of
Ambrosiano, then Italy's largest private bank and the one favoured by
the Vatican because of its Catholic heritage, is filled with some of
the most powerful and notorious rogues, criminals, businessmen and
politicians in modern Italian and European history.
The investigations and court trials have shed light, but only some, on
a secret power network that evidently used Mr. Calvi and his bank to
finance Italian political parties, anti-communist activities in Central
America and support for Poland's Vatican-backed Solidarity movement.
Along the way, fortunes went missing and debts piled up. So did the
bodies.
Two pairs of underwear
Roberto Calvi was found swinging from the scaffolding under London's
Blackfriars Bridge on June 18, 1982. An orange rope was around his
neck. His feet were in the water. He was wearing an expensive grey suit
and, bizarrely, two pairs of underwear. Bricks and stones were found in
his pocket and in his crotch. He was carrying the equivalent of £7,370
in various currencies.
Initially, the London police identified the 62-year-old Italian as Gian
Roberto Calvini, the name on the passport he was carrying, but a leak
allowed the Roman press to report the man was in fact Roberto Calvi,
the banker who had gone missing in Italy a few days earlier. Already,
the case was a sensation in the Italian press. The day before Mr.
Calvi's body was discovered, his personal secretary, Grazziella
Corracher, had killed herself by jumping out of a window at
Ambrosiano's Milan headquarters. The note she left behind read: "May
Calvi be double-cursed for the damage he has caused to the bank and its
employees."
A London inquest concluded quickly — too quickly, as it turned out —
that Mr. Calvi also had taken his own life.
The Italians never believed the suicide theory. They knew that he was
in trouble, that his world was collapsing around him, that certain
forces might have found him more valuable dead than alive.
If he wanted to commit suicide, why not do it in Milan instead of
concocting a new identity and fleeing the country? Why would he
humiliate himself by ramming a brick down his pants? Why would he shave
off his mustache shortly before he was found hanging?
Mr. Calvi's problems first became public four years before his death,
when Bank of Italy inspectors accused him and Ambrosiano of violating
exchange controls. A year later, the prosecutor who had taken on the
case was murdered. A few months after that, a Milan lawyer was
murdered. The lawyer was the liquidator of a bank controlled by Michele
Sindona, the Mafia-linked financier from Sicily who had done business
with Mr. Calvi (and was later convicted of having the liquidator
liquidated).
In 1980, Italian magistrates investigating Ambrosiano withdrew Mr.
Calvi's passport. He got it back, only to be arrested a year later for
violating Italian currency-export controls. He was sentenced to four
years in prison and released on bail. The day before he died — six days
after he had fled Italy — the Ambrosiano board revoked his powers as
chairman and called in the Bank of Italy.
By then Mr. Calvi was in London in the company of Flavio Carboni, the
Sardinian "businessman" who was one of his closest associates and is
now accused in his death as well as another defendant, Silvano Vittor,
a smuggler from Trieste hired by Mr. Carboni to spirit the banker out
of the country. They and their three co-accused may or may not be found
guilty of arranging, or participating directly in, his murder — the
verdicts are due next month. But even if they are, the Calvi case will
continue to be shrouded in mystery. That's because far greater forces
than the unholy five may have crushed Mr. Calvi and his bank.
The faithful son
Carlo Calvo is 53, and has lived in Canada since 1977, the year he
joined the Principal Group, a now-defunct financial services company in
Edmonton. (His father had Canadian investments, including a plaza in
Calgary and a big ranch west of Edmonton.)
He now lives in Montreal, where his mother, Clara, died last year, and
manages his family's money, part of which came from his father's life
insurance. The rest of his time is devoted to investigating his
father's death, which he never believed was a suicide. "They have the
right defendants, but the wrong motives," he says.
According to Carlo Calvi, his father was not a criminal; he was a good
man who was trapped by forces and events beyond his control. His death,
his son says, was arranged for "political reasons." As the head of the
bank favoured by the Italian government and the Vatican, Mr. Calvi knew
too much about the "illegal financing of political parties" and the "P2
connections" and "investments that had to be hidden."
Mr. Calvi says his father was silenced in the same way that Mino
Pecorelli was silenced — by assassination. Mr. Pecorelli was an
investigative journalist gunned down in 1979 after he reported a string
of politically embarrassing scoops. In Italy, it is widely believed
that government officials wanted him out of the way (former prime
minister Giulio Andreotti was convicted of playing a role in the death,
but was later acquitted). "This is a copy of Mino Pecorelli," Mr. Calvi
argues.
British journalist Philip Willan, whose book about the case, The Last
Supper, has just been published, and American private investigator Jeff
Katz, who has worked for Carlo Calvi, have similar views. Both say it's
important to put the Calvi death into historical context.
In the late 1970s and into the early 1980s, when Ambrosiano was at the
height of it power, Italy was on the front lines of the Cold War. The
Italian Communist Party was a major force and the fear among the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization countries was that Italy was never more
than one (possibly rigged) election away from a Soviet-backed leftist
takeover. Western governments, the Vatican and the P2 Masonic Lodge —
effectively a shadow government made up of senior politicians,
businessmen, journalists and religious leaders — was adamantly
anti-Communist. The P2, led by Licio Gelli, who is still alive, invited
Mr. Calvi to join, presumably to exploit Ambrosiano's banking network
in its ideological quest against communism.
At the same time, Ronald Reagan's Republicans were financing a covert
war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and Pope John Paul II was
supporting Poland's Solidarity movement, led by Lech Walesa. All these
anti-communist efforts required financing. Big corporations used
Ambrosiano to funnel money to non-communist political parties.
Conveniently, Ambrosiano had a string of offshore banks.
Mr. Katz, who is chief executive officer of the London corporate
investigations firm Bishop International, says Mr. Calvi was at the
vortex of the three main elements of Italian power — the Mafia, the
Vatican and the puppet masters behind top Italian politicians — through
his association with Mr. Sindona, Archbishop Marcinkus and P2's Mr.
Gelli.
For a while, the associations obviously proved beneficial to Mr. Calvi
and his associates orbiting the bank. At a certain point, the benefit
ended. It's known that vast sums of money vanished. Just before he
died, Mr. Calvi was trying to find $300-million (U.S.) to pay to the
Vatican Bank. When Ambrosiano collapsed after he died, $1.3-billion
(U.S.) was missing from its accounts.
One credible theory is that the bank was used to launder Mafia money.
The prosecutor in the current trial, Luca Tescaroli, says Mr. Calvi was
murdered because he had embezzled Cosa Nostra funds and to prevent him
from blackmailing his accomplices in politics, in the P2 and at the
Vatican Bank. In short, he probably knew too much about too many people
in high places, and could make life difficult for them. "The people who
had the most to lose were the people in the political power
structures," according to Mr. Katz.
Mr. Willan, whose book offers a fascinating glimpse into Italy of the
Calvi era, agrees that the banker became too dangerous; he had enough
knowledge of illegal activities to make him a potential blackmailer to
be feared. "He was a man who knew too much and was involved in
sensitive financial transactions of the Cold War," he says. "It's like
Murder on the Orient Express — they all put the dagger in him."
What really happened
Roberto Calvi died 25 years ago next month, and it was only last year
that the case was officially reclassified as a homicide investigation.
The initial suicide verdict, according to Mr. Calvi and Mr. Katz, was
the result of botched police work — for example, investigators failed
to preserve the knot on the rope used on Mr. Calvi, and no fingerprints
were taken from the scaffolding from which he was hung. Also, no one
looked into whether a boat had been stolen or rented to take the doomed
man to the north arch of Blackfriars Bridge.
In 1991, Carlo Calvi hired Mr. Katz to help determine what had happened
to his father. The private investigators went over the forensic
evidence. The original scaffolding was found and reassembled. A man Mr.
Calvi's size and wearing a pair of his shoes shimmied across the
scaffolding to where the body was found. After they had dried out
(remember, Mr. Calvi's feet were in the water), the shoes were examined
and found to have specks of rust and paint — unlike the shoes the
banker actually wore, which bore no evidence of such contact.
The conclusion: He didn't climb out on the scaffolding — someone put
him there.
Of the five suspects, Pippo Calo, the former Cosa Nostra treasurer,
will die in prison even if the verdict goes his way. Flavio Carboni,
the Sardinian who accompanied Mr. Calvi to London with Silvano Vittor,
the smuggler, must take some satisfaction in knowing his lawyer, the
animated Renato Borzone, has been particularly aggressive. Ernesto
Diotallevi, the Roman with alleged ties to the city's criminal gangs
and business links to Mr. Carboni, has yet to be seen in court. Ditto
Manuela Kleinszig, who was Mr. Carboni's mistress in the early 1980s.
Dozens of other potential witness are dead — from old age, murders and
suicides.
Liceo Gelli, the former P2 boss, was sentenced to 12 years for fraud in
connection with the Ambrosiano collapse. Until recently, he was under
house arrest in the Tuscan villa where he still lives.
Archbishop Marcinkus, the former head of the Vatican Bank, went into
comfortable retirement in Arizona and died last year at 84. Attempts to
implicate him in the collapse of Ambrosiano were thrown out by the
courts on jurisdiction grounds.
Michele Sindona, the Sicilian P2 member who taught Mr. Calvi how to set
up offshore banks, committed suicide in prison in 1986.
Mr. Willan says it's hard to tell whether the murder trial will result
in convictions. Over all, he has found the trial "somewhat
disappointing" because key questions have been answered only partly, or
not at all. "Like, who actually put the noose around Calvi's neck and
what exactly were the sensitive financing activities he was up to."
Whatever happens, Carlo Calvi vows to keep investigating his father's
death. He wants to open his research, which fills two full rooms in his
Montreal house, to the public and perhaps write a book. The research is
bound to be a dream come true for fans of conspiracy theories and
stories of the dark side of the Cold War.
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