God's Banker (31 page)

Some bore incomprehensible figures, one was a torn out page, No. 47/48, of Calvi's address book, with various names under the letter "F": Rino Formica, the Socialist Finance Minister, Alberto Ferrari once of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro and the P-2, and Hilary Franco from the Vatican, were just three of them.

There was the Washington address of his wife and son, and— inexplicably—the business card of a prominent City solicitor, who told the police he'd never met Calvi in his life. The body was suspended from a yard-long nylon rope, fastened at the neck by a simple noose, and to the scaffolding by two half hitch knots.

Nothing was to hand in the London police or Interpol records to suggest who the victim might be, so the city of London police wired off to their opposite numbers in Rome for help. Fuxa meanwhile went to the City of London police, in whose jurisdiction Blackfriars bridge fell, and a glance at the photo in the falsified passport heightened his own suspicions further. When he saw photos of the corpse, the suspicions became virtual certainties. But the last doubts were re­moved by the laconic answer from Rome: "You've got our banker."

At 4 a.m. the next morning Domenico Sica, the magistrate investi­gating Calvi's disappearance, arrived from Rome with senior police officers aboard a special military aircraft. But before that, and formal identification of the corpse by Leone Calvi, the dead man's brother, those most closely involved in Italy had decided for themselves. Rosone was watching the late Friday night news. "They only said the body
might
be . . . but I knew."

The delicacy of the case was evident, and the police trod with suitable care. William Whitelaw, the Home Secretary, was given a briefing, and the investigations went on much longer than would have been the case in a clear-cut suicide. For although the City of London police tended to assume from the beginning that Calvi took his own life, the peculiarities were endless.

In Italy public opinion was convinced that it was a case of murder. Calvi, after all, was "God's banker", with a special relationship with the Vatican—indeed, indication of just how special was emerging every day at home. Ambrosiano had been the greatest banking disaster anywhere since 1945. Its chairman had been a member of the P-2, and were there not "masonic" trimmings to his death—the stones in the pockets, the choice of the bridge of Blackfriars (also, of course, the name of a British lodge), and the washing of Calvi's feet by the river tide? There is even a "Blackfriars" lodge, number 3,722, in the "List of Lodges Masonic", the official register of European freemasonry. Rumours abounded that Ambrosiano was involved in Latin American arms trading. The Falklands war had just ended, and might it not be significant that the bridge was painted pale blue and white, Argentina's national colours?

Finally the inquest was fixed for July 23, more than five weeks after the discovery of Calvi's body. A jury was duly appointed. The hearing finished only at 10 p.m., but the final verdict was as the police had maintained. Dr David Paul, the coroner, emphasized to the jurors that to return an open verdict would be an evasion of their responsibi­lities; a majority, probably anxious to be home and rid of this ghoulish Italian mystery, wearily concluded that on the basis of the barrage of evidence they had heard, suicide by strangulation was the cause of death. But was it
really
suicide?

By and large Italians have much respect for the English legal system, encrusted with the ritual of centuries and, unlike their own, tradi­tionally free of political interference. This time, however, it was the object of incredulity and even derision. How could it be, everyone in Italy and more than a few in Britain wondered, that in so obviously complex a case, so much of whose background was beyond understanding in London, the court chose to ignore the safer option of an open verdict? Dark talk of a cover-up did the rounds, of how the jurors had somehow been "nobbled".

More serious perhaps was the degree of incomprehension between the British and Italian authorities. The London police officers on the case did not conceal their frustration at the conditions under which they had to operate within Italy, and the scant co-operation, especial­ly in Rome. Particularly irritating was the inability to interrogate directly suspects and witnesses; under the Italian system, this job is done by magistrates.

Faced with such hurdles, it would not be surprising if the London police were sometimes tempted to wash their hands of the whole messy affair. In fact the investigation continued, although by early in the New Year the unexplored leads had dwindled to next to nothing.

Long before that, however, the Calvi family, deeply distressed and unbelieving of the suicide verdict, opened their own campaign to have it overturned. As summer turned into autumn and winter, his widow and son in Washington let hardly a week go by without publicly insisting that Calvi had been murdered.

Magistrates, journalists and the Italian parliamentary commission probing the P-2 affair, paid visits to the US. Every one produced fresh, sensational allegations. Clara Calvi named the politicians, likely and less likely, who her husband said had received money from himself or Ambrosiano. She spoke of his private desperation at the Vatican's refusal to bail him out in the last year, and the attempts he recounted of how he had tried to enlist the Opus Dei to replace the IOR. She accused the Bank of Italy of secretly aiding, and then betraying, Ambrosiano, and told of her meetings with Andreotti, Craxi and Piccoli to try and secure their intercession. The denials and retaliatory lawsuits flew thick and fast; but few, it seemed, could escape the vengeful wrath of this frail, tiny woman with her bright gipsy clothes, and her delicate face beneath a bouffant of wispy blonde hair. Few too could be completely unimpressed by the resolute way in which she fought her cause. If the reliability of her principal source, her husband, was much to be questioned, especially in those final twelve months of his life, it was hard to doubt that she was at least faithfully relaying what she had been told. And whatever the variations, her theme remained constant: that her husband would not, could not, and had not committed suicide.

Nor is there any denying that the murder theory has stronger foundations than mere fantasizing and obsession with conspiracies, real or imagined, of which Italians are so often accused. Reasons, both subjective and objective, exist for believing that Calvi could not have taken his own life.

In the first place relatives and friends have testified that he suffered from vertigo and could not have managed to climb 25 feet down a ladder from the embankment parapet, and then clamber across the scaffolding to the point of his death. Then again, where did the banker find the stones, and above all the rope with which Calvi is supposed to have hanged himself? Why should he have gone to Blackfriars bridge, five miles from Chelsea Cloisters? He had in his room enough barbiturates to kill himself quite painlessly. In any case, Calvi had never mentioned suicide to his family at any stage, right up to the end. On the contrary, he was convinced that not only he himself, but also his wife and children were in physical danger.

In a rare interview*, just before he vanished from Italy in early June, Calvi set out his fears. The climate was that of "a religious war", he declared. "Now it's almost the order of the day to attack me,

*LaStampa
, June 15, 1982.

and in this sort of atmosphere, any barbarity is possible. A lot of people have a lot to answer for in this affair. I'm not sure who, but sooner or later it'll come out."

This in turn leads to the key question: just who was threatening Calvi? Of whom was he so frightened? For if he was murdered, it was surely to silence him for ever. Those last two sentences above may even be taken as the thinnest of warnings that Calvi was readying himself to tell all. Carlo Calvi has, moreover, sworn under affidavit that his father had told him that he planned to speak out at the appeal hearings, due four days after he died. And with Banco Ambrosiano by that stage in ruins, Calvi would have had little left to lose.

Broadly, Calvi's fears appear to have sprung from four quarters. The first derived from the magistrates in Milan, those front line troops of an imagined assault mounted by the Communist Left, and who were implacably uncovering the truth about his affairs. But it is obviously preposterous to suppose they had anything to do with his death.

His second constant, obsessive, source of worry was the Vatican— and the consequences of the obscure but momentous power struggle that his search for agreement with the Opus Dei is supposed to have detonated between "Left" and "Right" within the Holy See and beyond. Clara Calvi maintained* that her husband's murder was sponsored by the anti-Opus Dei faction, alarmed at the consequences for the Vatican's carefully nurtured dealings with Communist East­ern Europe. Calvi would tell his lawyers that he had channelled $50 million to Solidarity; and that there was more to follow. "If the whole thing comes out," he would say, "it'll be enough to start the Third World War."

At this point, Calvi's death would become an ingredient in the rivalry between East and West; it could even seem connected with the attempt to kill the Pope, alleged to have been mounted by Bulgaria and the KGB.

The third, more prosaic, shadow of violence was cast by Carboni, his confidant and associate for the last six months. Carboni's under­world connections were not unknown to Calvi, who had paid him $20 million, including that $14 million almost extorted from his bank in

*
La Stampa,
October 7,1982.

Nassau. One of these connections had been killed when shooting at Rosone, deputy chairman of Ambrosiano, on April 27. Calvi in that last interview maintained that the attack was a warning for his bank and himself: Rosone later insisted that Calvi himself had organized the ambush. Either way, however, the odour of crude physical threat was heavy in the air.

The fourth and last basic origin of Calvi's fear was perhaps the least tangible, but most potent of all. It stretched from Gelli, with whom Calvi had long done his utmost to avoid contact, through the now disbanded P-2 freemasons' lodge and the Italian secret services into Latin America and international freemasonry, arms trafficking and right-wing terrorism. London, as a string of arrests since the late 1970s has proved, is a favourite refuge of Italy's neo-fascist extremists.

Sindona, that other bankrupt Italian financier, who believed him­self a martyr, claimed—for what it was worth—that "left-wing South American freemasons" were responsible. Somewhere in this mosaic must have lain those "factors of international consensus" which so troubled Calvi in his short-lived dealings with Carlo De Benedetti.

Of course, none of these ingredients, probably partly real and partly the product of Calvi's tortured and tortuous mind, can be kept separate. He was, after all, convinced that Carboni was influential within freemasonry and within some quarters of the Vatican. Gelli and Ortolani too were points where the normally antagonistic forces of Catholicism and masonry overlapped. They are all pieces in a kaleidoscope which can be shaken into endlessly tantalizing theories—some of quite numbing implication.

There remained, moreover, one last mystifying circumstance, the disappearance of the briefcase from which Calvi was never separated. Many documents were apparently burnt that Sunday in Klagenfurt, but other papers must have gone with Calvi to London. Like the key to the room in Chelsea Cloisters, and the rest of his address book, they were never recovered. Did they depart on the private plane chartered by Kunz which travelled from Geneva to Gatwick and back on the evening of June 18?* Did Calvi destroy his most sensitive papers himself, or was their destruction the completion of the cover- up which began with his murder?

*
Sunday Times,
November 14,1982.

But the arguments for a suicide, however unlikely the method, could not be wholly dismissed. In the first place, neither the first autopsy in London, nor a second one carried out in Italy, revealed any trace of violence upon Calvi's body, or that drugs had been administered to make him unconscious. The medical evidence at the first hearing in July was decisive in securing the suicide verdict. In March 1983 three Italian forensic experts concluded, on the basis of the exhaustive examination, that it was "probable", although by no means certain, that Calvi had taken his own life.

Furthermore, if Calvi was murdered, not one firm clue has emerged of the identity of his assassins. Police appeals for help from anyone who might have heard or seen something suspicious either around Blackfriars bridge or on the river that night drew no response. Admittedly, that area of London is almost completely deserted in the small hours. The fact remained that nobody came forward.

Moreover, the circumstantial evidence in favour of suicide was considerable, at least no less than the grounds for believing in ritual masonic executions. That afternoon Banco Ambrosiano, to which Calvi had given the best 35 years of his life, had to all intents and purposes collapsed. His secretary had killed herself, leaving behind her bitter imprecation against him. He was a fugitive from justice, whose appeal against imprisonment was to be heard in just four days' time. Calvi and Ambrosiano, moreover, figured in no less than 32 lawsuits back in Italy. The events of that June 17 in Milan would have done little to improve the chances of his appeal being upheld, and of his escaping four crushing years in prison.