So Who Did Kill Calvi?, Sunday Herald [Rome], June 10, 2007

So Who Did Kill Calvi?

Sunday Herald [Rome]
June 10, 2007

http://www.sundayherald.com/international/shinternational/display.var.1460519.0.0.php

When ‘God’s banker’ was found hanged under London’s Blackfriars Bridge 25 years ago, it led to ‘a web of financial and political intrigue’. Last week, Philip Willan was in court in Rome as five people were found not guilty of the crime. Which leaves the question...

One Of the defence lawyers, Pierpaolo Dell'Anno, kissed his mobile phone, looking nervous. It was a superstitious gesture, auguring good luck. Moments later, the verdict was read out: all five defendants on trial for the murder of Roberto Calvi had been acquitted.

Dell'Anno's client, Ernesto Diotallevi, let out a cry of delight as he punched the air and turned to embrace his sons and his lawyer. A thick-set man wearing a blue suit and open-necked shirt, it was the first time that Diotallevi had shown his face in court since the trial began 20 months ago. It was the kind of face you wouldn't want to argue with, and there were tears in the eyes.

Diotallevi is a Rome businessman, reputed to have had links to organised crime and a flourishing business as a loan shark at the time of Calvi's death. When the Milanese banker left Italy in secret in June 1982, he travelled on a false passport in the name of Gianroberto Calvini. It was allegedly provided for him by Diotallevi.

Diotallevi had a busy financial relationship with the principal suspect in the murder, the Sardinian businessman Flavio Carboni, who organised Calvi's ill-fated trip to London and was with him during the last days of his life. Diotallevi met Carboni in Switzerland shortly before Calvi's death, and had received a payment of $530,000 from him a month earlier; enough to arouse suspicion that he was a participant in the murder plot.

The suspicious payment was actually for a consignment of stolen treasury bonds and nothing to do with the murder, both men's lawyers insisted in court. Dell'Anno's defence tactics were pragmatic and effective. Any witness appearing in the "bunker" courtroom of the Rebibbia prison complex on the outskirts of Rome was liable to be asked: "Did you know my client? Do you know of his involvement in any crime? Do you know anything about his involvement in the Calvi murder?" And the answer would come, over and again: "No. No. No."

Roberto Calvi was found hanged from scaffolding under Blackfriars Bridge in London on the morning of June 18, 1982. The pockets of his light-grey suit were stuffed with bricks and another had been pushed down the crotch of his trousers. A quarter of a century later his death remains a mystery. But though the prosecution failed to prove its case, the trial has been useful in illuminating the complex web of financial and political intrigue that enveloped Calvi's last days.

The verdict read out last Wednesday made one thing clear: the court believed Calvi had been murdered. Manuela Kleinszig, Carboni's Austrian girlfriend, who appears to have blundered into the saga by accident, was acquitted because she had not committed the crime. Her four co-defendants - who included an imprisoned mafia boss, Giuseppe "Pippo" Calo and a Trieste-based contraband smuggler named Silvano Vittor - were acquitted because the evidence of their guilt was insufficient or contradictory. Somebody had therefore murdered Calvi, even if it wasn't them.

A major obstacle to solving the Calvi mystery was a London coroner's hasty conclusion that the banker had committed suicide. His ruling was overturned a year later, in 1983, and replaced with an open verdict, but by then the crucial early days of the investigation were over and had produced lacklustre results.

The quality of that City of London investigation was an important theme at the Rome trial. The public prosecutor, Luca Tescaroli, argued that Calvi had been murdered on the orders of Pippo Calo to punish him for embezzling Cosa Nostra funds and to prevent him from blackmailing accomplices in the Italian business and political worlds, in the anti-communist P2 masonic lodge and at the Vatican bank.

And he viewed the shortcomings of the initial investigation in a sinister light. The "negligence, suspect omissions, culpable delays and anomalies" of the first investigation amounted to "an authentic cover-up", Tescaroli told the court.

His view was supported by the testimony of Detective Superintendent Trevor Smith, a City Police officer who began re-examining the case in 2002. Smith rattled off a catalogue of errors and omissions that had prevented the early inquiry from making headway.

Investigators had failed to take fingerprints from the Blackfriars Bridge scaffolding or from the objects found on Calvi's body. They had failed to search premises or investigate bank accounts associated with the banker's death. They had failed to investigate international travel by Italian citizens in the period around his death, or explore alternative theories as to how his body arrived at the scaffolding.

"The post-mortem was very short and not of the type I would have expected in a suspicious death," Smith told the court. "There seemed to be a rush to judgement, to the conclusion that it was suicide."

The key to an understanding of Calvi's death lies in the complex political background to his work as a banker in cold war Italy. That information, to be fair to the City Police investigators, was never adequately shared with them by their Italian colleagues.

Calvi had joined the P2 masonic lodge in August 1975 and found himself at the heart of a corrupt power structure that constituted a "state within the state". In return for political favours - such as help in getting round restrictions on the export of currency - P2 expected him to finance friendly political parties, buy control of the country's leading newspaper and fund a global campaign against communism.

The Vatican bank, headed by Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, was a natural ally in the anti-communist struggle. Calvi's Banco Ambrosiano had been founded by a priest and was Italy's premier "Catholic" bank. The partnership between Calvi and Marcinkus enabled both to evade regulatory oversight and funnel money into offshore companies where it became available for discreet political operations, such as funding the anti-communist Solidarity trade union in Poland. Calvi's ties to the Vatican would earn him the sobriquet "God's banker".

Tescaroli painted a grim portrait of Calvi's Italy in his summing up speech. It was a country in the grip of terrorist and mafia violence and characterised by collusion between political power and organised crime. The pope had recently been shot, and on the wider stage, Solidarity had been outlawed in Poland.

Against this backdrop Calvi fled Italy, on a mission to save his bank from imminent bankruptcy. Documents found later in his briefcase showed he was attempting to blackmail the Vatican, among others, in his bid to relieve the financial pressure on the Ambrosiano.

A letter addressed to Pope John Paul II, dated June 5, 1982, warned that he might be induced to reveal his sensitive activities on behalf of the church. "Many would like to know from me whether I supplied arms and other equipment to certain South American regimes to help them fight our common enemies, and whether I supplied funds to Solidarity or arms and funds to other organisations of Eastern countries."

One of the most impressive of the prosecution witnesses was Antonino Giuffre, a mafia boss arrested in 2002 who claimed to have first-hand information on the murder plot from a member of his own mafia family who had participated in it. Calvi and Marcinkus had been involved in laundering Cosa Nostra's drug money, he told the court, and Carboni had played the classic traitor's role in a typical mafia murder. He had first won the confidence of the intended victim and then delivered him, unsuspecting, into the hands of his assassins.

Where the prosecution case unravelled was in the discussions of the mafia alliances and enmities that underpinned the plot. Calo told the court he would never have turned to the disgraced mafia boss and Naples Camorra chieftain who allegedly executed the murder. If he had ever looked for them, he said, it would have been to kill them, and in any case he had plenty of reliable hitmen of his own.

It was here, in this endless evocation of a tortuous criminal history, that the prosecution probably lost the jurors, and lost the case.

Prosecutor Tescaroli said he would have to read the written explanation of the verdict, which the judges are expected to produce within three months, before deciding whether or not to mount an appeal. The initial failure of the prosecution hypothesis could open the case to alternative interpretations, some of which emerged during the course of the trial.

One possible lead is the role of the Slaughter and May solicitor Colin McFadyean, whose business card was found in Calvi's pocket. McFadyean told police he did not know Calvi and had no idea how he had acquired his card. He was never called to give evidence at either London inquest and City Police neglected to pass on the card.

But Calvi's son Carlo now believes that McFadyean was just the sort of person his father needed to meet in London if he was to find the money he needed to stave off bankruptcy. And with a background in naval intelligence and high level contacts with Italian businessmen, he appeared singularly well-qualified to address the Milanese banker's concerns.

Investigators may also wish to consider an affidavit by the American businessman Terence Byrne, a director of the arms company Allivane International, who suggested the Banco Ambrosiano collapsed because of its secret involvement in underwriting arms exports to Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Tescaroli has reportedly been engaged for some time on a second investigation into individuals suspected of carrying out or ordering the crime. Among the suspects identified by the Italian press is Licio Gelli, the venerable master of the once powerful P2 lodge. Former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was once a member, as well as being a business partner of Flavio Carboni in some of his real estate projects in Sardinia.

When I visited the prosecutor's office some weeks ago, a large manila envelope was visible on one of the desks. It appeared the right size to contain an audio tape and bore the letters "Gelli L".

"I can say absolutely nothing about that," Tescaroli said at the time.

Carlo Calvi was philosophical about the outcome of the trial. Speaking on the phone from Canada, he said: "I think it was the best we could have expected under the circumstances. An acquittal for lack of evidence, I can live with that."

But the banker's son was not optimistic that the second investigation would make much progress after the failure of the first part of the case in court. Mafia witnesses should be used only to confirm very specific points, he said, otherwise one risked generating confusion. "I supported Tescaroli's case, but my position was never exactly the same as his," he said. "It's obviously disappointing, but we live to fight another day."