Thursday,
June 07, 2007
Calvi Murder: The Mystery of God
The
ANNOTICO Report
Roberto
Calvi in his prime was one of the most brilliant
bankers in
On
21 June 1982 Calvi was
found ,hanged by the neck from the
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
The
murder has more intrigue and speculation than any great novel.
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
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
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
A cold, shy,
stubborn man from the mountains north of
For all his
brilliance, Calvi landed in desperate trouble. As
well as co-operating closely with the
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
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
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
Evidence that has
emerged since Calvi
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
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
The Mafia
accountant, Calo, accused of ordering the killing to
punish Calvi for embezzling Cosa
Nostra
The judged
ordered the acquittal of four defendants for lack of proof; the fifth, Carboni
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Annotico
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