Query:
The first
Calvi Mystery: Was his death suicide or murder?
Circumstances:
On June 11, 1982, Roberto Calvi, the chairman of the
Banco Ambrosiano, vanished from Italy with a black briefcase
full of documents. One week later, his body was found
hanging from an orange noose under Blackfriar's Bridge
in London; his feet submerged in the swirling waters
of the Thames. Five bricks were stuffed into his clothing.
The black bag was gone. $1.2 billion was also missing
from bank's subsidiaries in the Bahamas, Nicaragua,
Peru, and Luxembourg, and the Vatican, which had made
Calvi "God's Banker" was threatened with a
one-half billion dollars loss it could not repay. The
first coroner's jury in London held that Calvi had hung
himself from Blackfriar's Bridge. But the verdict was
quashed and a second jury declared it was unable to
decide between murder and suicide.
The circumstances
of his death defied a simple explanation. The London
river police cut down his body from scaffolding under
the bridge on the morning of June 19,1982. They found
seven large bricks stuffed in the pockets and fly of
the deceased. He was wearing a light weight grey suit,
had an expensive Patek Phillippe watch on his wrist
and about $14,000 in Swiss francs, British pounds and
Italian Lire in his wallet. The watch and money suggested
he was not a victim of any common robbery. He also had
in his pockets four pair of eye-glasses and a bogus
Italian passport in the name of "Gian Roberto Calvino,"
which was close enough to his name for him to be identified
as Italy's fugitive banker.
Professor
Frederick Keith Simpson, one of England's most experienced
pathologist, conducted the autopsy. He found no river
water in his lungs. The cause of death was asphyxia
by hanging. Since his neck had not suffered the kind
of injury that would have occurred in a free-fall, he
determined that Calvi could not have dropped more than
2 feet before his fall was broken by the water. There
was no medical evidence whatsoever of foul play such
as marks on the arms to indicate he had been restrained,
puncture marks on to indicated he had been injected
with a drug and no traces of suspicious chemicals in
his stomach of drugs (other than the residue of a sleeping
pill he had taken the previous night).
Other non-medical
clues, however, made the possibility of suicide more
problematic. The Patek Phillippe watch established the
time of death. Though
finely-crafted, it was not water-proof. Its hands had
stopped at 1:52. While the watch could have stopped
for reasons other than water damage, the water marks
on the face of it, when taken together with the dropping
level of the tide that night at Blackfriar's bridge,
established the latest time at which his body could
have been suspended from the scaffolding. After 2:30
am, the level of the water in the Thames at Blackfriar's
bridge would not have been high enough to have reached
Calvi's wrist (as was calculated from the length of
the rope he was hanging by when he was found), so he
must have been hanging before then. But he could not
have hung himself before 1 a.m. because the river level
then would have been above his mouth (and there was
no river water in his body). So, if he committed suicide,
it he could only have been between 1:00 and 2:30 a.m.
But suicide during these hours, if possible at all,
would require extraordinary activities from a sixty-two
year old man, who was over-weight and suffered from
vertigo. Despite the darkness, he would have had to
find the scaffolding from the walkway along the river,
which, since it was nearly submerged, could be seen
only by leaning over the parapet wall at a strategic
point. He would also have to have found in the dark
the bricks (which were identified as coming from a construction
site about a block away) and the rope to hang himself.
Next, he would have to had hoisted himself over the
parapet on the bridge and climbed twelve feet down a
nearly vertical iron ladder to the level of the temporary
scaffolding. He then would have to step across the two
and one-half feet gap onto the scaffolding's rusty poles,
which were arranged like monkey-bars in a children's
playground, and edge his way about 8 feet along them
to tie the rope to the eyelet. After that, he would
to shimmy down to the next level of the scaffolding
(otherwise the drop from the higher level would have
resulted in tell-tale neck damage). Finally, after having
put the bricks in his pockets and pants fly, and his
head in the noose, he would have had to ease himself
into the swirling water three feet below by clutching
onto the poles (again, avoiding a free fall).
While such an acrobatic maneuver is possible, it would
presumably leave some traces such as rust under his
fingernails, splinters or abrasions on his hands, tears
in his suit. "The long and short of it is we do not
know how Calvi's body got onto the end of that rope,"
Deputy Superintendent John White explained to me. "We
don't even know how he got from his hotel, four and
one half miles away, to Blackfriar's Bridge."
After discovering the body, the London police had spent
6 weeks canvassing taxi drivers and other potential
witnesses. They could not find, however, anyone in London
who had seen him that night. Nor could they find in
London any witness to his activities during the three
days he had been in London prior to his death. He had
arrived in London on June 15 in a chartered plane under
a false name and checked into a $30 a night suite in
the Chelsea Cloisters, a second-rate residential hotel
in the Chelsea section of London. When the police searched
the apartment after his death, they found his personal
belongings-- including his toilet kit-- neatly packed
inside two locked suitcases, as if they were waiting
to be picked up by someone, but no other trace of his
stay there. No hotel employee recalled seeing Calvi
leave. During these London days, he was, as White put
it, "the invisible man."
Calvi had been smuggled to London by a conspiracy that
involved arranging three false identities, eight separate
private plane flight around Europe, a speed boat, four
different cars and 14 temporary residences including
The Baur Au Lac and Holiday Inn in Zurich, the Amstel
in Amsterdam, the George in Edinburgh and the Hilton,
Sheraton and Chelsea in London. The conspirators included
Flavio Carboni, a Sardenian contractor, Silvano Vittor,
a cigarette smuggler and their girl friends, the Austrian
sisters Manuela and Micheala Klienszig. Carboni arranged
for Calvi to have an itinerary that took him in the
middle of the night from Rome to Venice by plane, then
to Trieste by car, where a motor boat sped him to an
abandoned pier in Yugoslavia, from which a car took
him to a chalet in Austria and then to the Innsbruck
airport, where he boarded a private jet, and disguised
as a Fiat executive, flew to England. Silvano Vittor
was Calvi's bodyguard both during his stay and at the
Chelsea Cloister. The Klienzig sisters had a less defined
role. Before they could be questioned by the London
police, they had all left London: Carboni, using a pseudonym,
had gone to Scotland where he a chartered jet took him
to Switzerland; Vittor, also using a pseudonym, took
an early morning commercial flight to Vienna and the
Klienszig sisters, later that morning, flew in a private
plane to Austria They then remet in Zurich (where Carboni
had in his Swiss Bank account $11 million he had received
recently from Calvi.) They all denied seeing Calvi the
night he disappeared.
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Answer ( From Kroll Associates)
Carlo Calvi, Calvi's only son, was studying for his
doctorate in economics at George Washington University
in Washington D.C., when his father died,. He kew that
his father had arranged in the weeks before his death
new body guards and an armored limousine, kept a pistol
in his drawer and retained Carboni, who had underworld
connections, $19 million to protect him. He needed more
closure to the mystery than the London police could
provide. What was at stake for him was not merely the
$5 million insurance policy which would not be paid
in a suicide but, as he put it to me, the "honor of
the Calvi family." In 1989, he hired the corporate detectives
Kroll Associates to re-investigate was it even possible
for his father to have committed suicide under the Blackfriar
Bridge.
After locating, authenticating and re-assembling the
original scaffolding Calvi had hung from, forensic experts
retained by Kroll conducted a simple experiment. They
had a stand-in for Calvi— same size and weight— walk
the possible routes along the scaffolding poles that
Calvi would have to walk if he tied the rope and hung
himself. The stand-in wore pairs of Calvi's hand-made
loafers that were similar to the one he had on when
he was found, After each trial, these shoes were then
put in water for the same time Calvi's shoes had been
submerged, and then microscopically examined by a forensic
chemist, who had worked in the London police laboratory
for 18 years. In each case, he found thatthe soles of
the stand-in's shoes had picked up yellow paint smears
that matched those on the scaffolding poles. Given the
pressure of the shoe on the narrow pole, he concluded
such tell-tale traces were "unavoidable." Yet, when
he examined the soles of the shoes Calvi had actually
worn that day with a microscope, he found no traces
of yellow pain on the soles. Since there was no way
he could have hung himself except to have walked on
the scaffolding, Kroll concluded "Someone else had to
have tied him to the scaffolding and killed him."
Kroll then made some dediuctions on how Calvi could
have been murdered. Since he couldn't have been forced,
alive, onto the scaffolding, without leaving signs of
struggle or signs on his shoes, the detectives deduced
he must have been was strangled elsewhere, where he
could be caught by surprise. They suggested Calvi's
body could have been transported to the scaffolding
in a small boat, where the rope was tied to his neck,
and, weighed down by bricks so he wouldn't float horizontally,
he was put into the water.
Second Mystery: If Murder, Who Are
the Suspects
Four Clues:
1) Re: The Socialist Party.
When Calvi had been jailed in Lodi Prison for 42 days
in 1981 in the medieval Lodi prison on a technical charge
of evading currency exporting rules, he had summoned
these Magistrates to his cell in the dead of night and
volunteered information about what was one of Italy's
most taboo-- and dangerous subjects: the funding of
political parties. He limited his disclosures to an
ambiguous $21 million loan to the Socialist Party but
added, tantalizingly, that, if he had the "research
opportunity" he could furnish more "precise" documentation.
The extent of the potential damage was explained to
me in 1989 by the former finance director of ENI, Florio
Fiorini (who was himself arrested in 1992). He had met
with Calvi the night he disappeared Milan with his black
briefcase to discuss an eleventh hour rescue with ENI
funds of the Banco Ambrosiano. He had been given this
urgent assignment by his superiors at ENI. They would
deny it later, but, according to Fiorini, they were
acutely concern about the growing pressure on Calvi.
Most of the money that Calvi had been using in his off-shore
activities came from ENI (It was ENI deposits that had
been siphoned through the Bellatrix ghost into the P-2
accounts). Even of greater concern, according to Fiorini,
Calvi had intimate knowledge of the subterranean channels
through which ENI, and other state-owned enterprises,
put money into the "black accounts" of politicians of
the major parties. The previously-discussed protection
account was merely one of many such routes. Fiorini
surmised from his conversations with Calvi that he might
have records bearing on other aspects of the bank's
liaison with ENI. How incendiary this information could
be was demonstrated in February 1993 when, within days
after Calvi's bribe was confirmed, criminal charges
were lodged against the Justice Minister, Claudio Martelli
and ex-Prime Minister, Bettino Craxi.
2) Re: The P-2 Lodge
Juerg Heer, who had been executive director of the
credit section of Zurich's Rothschild Bank when it acted
as intermediary in Calvi's abortive take over of the
Rizzoli Group, claimed to have paid Calvi's kill fee.
The Rizzoli deal was Calvi's last deal, which he himself
described it as "his undoing" just days before vanishing.
Although Heer's name appears fleetingly in the bank's
correspondence about Rizzoli, his relevance to the Calvi
Affair emerged only after he was abruptly fired by the
Rothschild Bank in July 1992. Accused by the Rothschild
Bank of exceeding his authority in arranging bad loans,
he was for imprisoned for two months, and, adding insult
to injury, then sued by his former employer to recover
its losses. Heer retaliated in late November by airing
the Rothschild Bank's dirty laundry in public, asserting
he "was part of a criminal system." As the vendetta
escalated, he dredged up sensitive details about Calvi's
Rizzoli deal. As the intermediary, the Rothschild Bank
had acted to shielded the true principals, including
one of the most intriguing conspirators in Europe, Licio
Gelli-- a self-styled poet whose machinations were subsequently
documented in a 64 volume investigation by a Commission
of the Italian Parliament. Gelli's power proceeded from
the secret Masonic Lodge in Rome, Propagandi Due, or
P-2, as it was called, of which he was Grand Master.
Among the 900 elite members he had enrolled, were 43
members of Parliament, 48 generals, the heads of Italy's
secret intelligence service, the top magistrates in
the judiciary system, the civil servants running various
state-owned enterprises (including ENI), key bank regulators
and leading businessmen-- a veritable . The Parliamentary
Commission described it as a "state within a state."
Unlike other freemason lodges, it did not hold meetings
or conduct ordinary Masonic business. Whatever its supposed
purpose, it had become by the time Calvi had enrolled
in it in 1980, a clearing-house through which businessmen
could buy political protection from government officials--
with Gelli acting as go-between, deal-maker and record-keeper.
In this Rizzoli deal, Gelli, together with other P-2
associates (including the managing director of Rizzoli)
had parked a controlling block of its shares at the
Rothschild Bank. Calvi then had his banks lend $142
million to a "ghost" corporate shell in Panama called
Bellatrix which deposited it at the Rothschild Bank
to buy the shares. As a crucial part of the arrangement,
Bellatrix paid an artificially high price for the Rizzoli
shares-- about ten times their market value-- to generate
a windfall profit for the P-2 organizers of this deal.
This huge inflow of money from the Panamian "ghost"
occasioned frightening concern at the Rothschild Bank.
According to Heer, a Rothschild director told him, "we
have to find a solution or I will end up in Lake Zurich."
The solution they found was to temporarily put the
Bellatrix money into two accounts at the bank-- called
Zirka and Reciota-- under a discrete fiduciary. But,
within days, it was release into other numbered accounts
controlled by Gelli and his P-2 associates. So the $142
million borrowed by Calvi disappeared into P-2 havens--
destined for unknown uses.
The problem, as it turned out, was that Calvi did not
receive the permission he needed from Italian authorities
for the Banco Ambrosiano's Luxembourg subsidiary to
take control of Rizzoli. On the contrary, Italian law
was changed so as to make the transfer impossible, which
meant, as far as Calvi was concerned, the Rizzoli deal
had not been technically consummated. So, in theory,
the $142 million that the P-2 men had, still belonged
to his bank. According to his personal assistant, Calvi
regarded this money as a "reserve fund," and had been
pressing the P-2 men to return control of this money
in 1982-- without success. And, by that June, with his
"ghosts" having no way to repay their debt, this money
was the difference between ruin and temporary salvation
and Calvi headed for Zurich-- a destination he never
reached. Shortly after Calvi's body was found, Heer
carried out a "secret operation" at the request of one
of Gelli's associate. Heer estimated that about $5 million
drawn from Gelli's account in Geneva, which he identified
as part of the missing Bellatrix funds, was packed in
a suitcase and delivered to him at the Rothschild Bank.
He also received one-half of a $100 bill. Following
his instructions, he gave the suitcase to two strangers
who later arrived at the bank with the matching half
of the bill, and who left with the money in an armored
limousine. Subsequently, he learned from a "family member"
of Gelli's that this money had been used to pay for
Calvi's murder.
Banking records produced in the various investigations
of the bankruptcy confirmed that most of the Bellatrix
money, diverted through the Rothschild Bank, went to
Gelli and his P-2 associates. Gelli, in fact, had been
arrested in Geneva that September making a withdrawal
of $55 million from his account (and, after first escaping
and then being re-arrested, he was sentenced to 18 ½
years in prison for contributing to the fraudulent bankruptcy
of the Banco Ambrosiano).
3) Re: The Mafia
In July 1991, Francesco Mannoia, a Mafia "supergrasse,"
whose entire family had been killed since he began cooperating
with the authorities, told the Rome Public Prosecutor
that he had learned from a colleague in Sicily that
Calvi had been strangled by Franco Di Carlo on orders
from a Mafia boss in Rome, Pippo Calo. Di Carlo, who
had been residing in London in 1982, was serving out
a 25 year sentence in a British prison on a narcotics
conviction. Although he denied the allegation, Kroll
investigators ferreted out a credit slip that had been
impounded in the narcotics investigation of him that
showed that $100,000 had been deposited in his account
at Barclay's Bank on June 16, 1982-- one day before
Calvi disappeared.
4) re: The Vatican* In May 1988, Judge Mario Almerighi,
a pipe-smoking Italian Sherlock Holmes, in the process
of preparing the case against a gang of importers of
hashish and heroin, found among the material that had
been seized in a police raid, correspondence addressed
to one of the highest officials in the Vatican Curia--
the Secretary of State of the Vatican, Cardinal Agostino
Casaroli. Two of the letters asked the Vatican for 1.5
billion lire (or about $1 million) to reimburse the
drug smuggler for funds he had advanced to Flavio Carboni
to acquire documents written by Calvi. When he checked
with postal authorities, he found, to his astonishment,
that both letters had been sent by registered mail and
signed for by an official in the Cardinal's office.
As he probed deeper into this affair, and interrogated
those involved, he discovered that the documents in
question had come from the black briefcase Calvi had
taken with him to London. Carboni had delivered documents
to a Vatican Bishop who had given him checks drawn on
his account at the Institute For Religious Works (Instituto
per le Opere di Religione), known by its Italian initials
as the IOR, the Vatican's central--and only-- bank.
Tracing the Bishop's checks through the IOR and other
banks, he determined that Carboni had received at least
3 billion lire (about $2 million); "All of it was Vatican
money," he explained to me. A memorandum he found further
suggested that the Vatican had been willing to pay $40
million for other Calvi documents-- which Carboni had
not delivered.
Calvi's black bag had not found in Calvi's locked
room in the Chelsea Cloisters so presumably Calvi took
it with him the night he died. No one admitted seeing
it afterwards until it dramatically resurfaced on Italian
television on April 1,1986, along with Carboni and Vittor,
who vouched for its authenticity. * Even though Vatican
officials insisted that the Bishop had acted without
their approval in paying for these documents with IOR
funds, Judge Almerighi found in the documents he had
retrieved, enormous potential for extortion. One letter
that Carboni admitted that he had delivered to the bishop
had been written by Calvi to Pope John Paul II six days
before Calvi fled Italy. Calvi called "his High Holiness"
his "last hope", and asked his urgent help. He explained:
"It was I who took on the heavy burden of remedying
the errors and mistakes made by the present and former
representatives of the IOR" and "providing financial
aid to many countries and politico-religious associations
on the instructions of authoritative representatives
of the Vatican."
In the context of the ongoing litigation over the
financial responsibility for the Banco Ambrosiano's
missing $1.2 billion, the putative activities described
in this letter had serious implications for the Vatican
bank, and its head, American-born Archbishop Paul Casimir
Marcinkus, who had also been a director of the Banco
Ambrosiano Overseas in the Bahamas, In these twin positions,
Marcinkus greatly expanded the IOR's banking business
with the Banco Ambrosiano. Since the Vatican is a sovereign
state, and the IOR exempt from Italian banking supervision,
Calvi took advantage of its privileged status to transfer
money from Italy to his bank's subsidiaries abroad.
After a four year odyssey of following Calvi's briefcase,
Judge Almerighi concluded, like Agatha Christie's Murder
on the Nile, multiple suspects were guilty. He recommended
to two fellow magistrates in the Rome Tribuna they prosecute
Franco Di Carlo and Pippo Calo, the Mafia men who allegedly
contracted for the murder, Flavio Carboni, who delivered
Calvi to London, and Licio Gelli, who allegedly paid
the kill fee.
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