Italy: "God's Banker" exhumed
01 January 1999
Italian police have exhumed the body of Roberto Calvi from the family vault in Drezzo, near Lake Como, for the fourth time, under orders from the Rome judge Otello Lupacchini. This follows revelations by Mafia pentiti (informers) that Calvi was the victim of an alliance between the Mafia, the Neapolitan Camorra and the Roman underworld Magliana Band for borrowing, losing and failing to pay back Mafia funds. The claims led to magistrates filing murder conspiracy charges against Flavio Carboni, who accompanied Calvi on his last journey from Milan to London. The latest exhumation was attended by the late banker's son Carlo. Following the autopsy, which will not be concluded until late March, he said that pathologists had found previously undetected signs of bruises on his wrists and different sets of DNA imprints on his underwear, which increased suspicion that his father had been murdered. He believes that politicians who opposed his father's plans for restructuring Banco Ambrosiano to meet requests by the Bank of Italy, particularly Giulio Andreotti the plan's main opponent, were responsible for his father's death.
The prosecution case claims that Carboni was part of a plot which included Pippo Calo, who was instrumental in running the Mafia's financial affairs, to deliver Calvi to Francesco Di Carlo, the Mafia's man in London. Di Carlo then commissioned Vicenzo Casillo, to carry out the murder. Calvi was allegedly strangled, taken down the Thames in a boat, and hanged from scaffolding under Blackfriars Bridge. Di Carlo, however, claims that he was not in the country at the time, and Casillo has never testified because he died in a car bombing less than a year after the Calvi murder.
Calvi had developed wide ranging business associations with powerful characters and institutions, notably Licio Gelli, Venerable Master of the P2 masonic lodge. He was linked to the Vatican, through the Institute for Religious Works (IOR) and its main exponent Archbishop Paul Marcinkus. Marcinkus was charged as an "accessory to fraudulent bankruptcy" after the exposure of Banco Ambrosiano's corrupt business empire, which included several dummy accounts and businesses in Europe, South America and in Central American tax havens. The bank eventually crashed with debts of ú892 million, despite Calvi struggling to keep it afloat by seeking assistance from a number of increasingly unlikely sources.
Calvi feared for his life during his last months as Banco Ambrosiano's situation deteriorated and his erstwhile allies distanced themselves from him. He expressed these fears to his family and arranged for them to leave Italy. In an interview in La Stampa on 15 June 1982, a few weeks before his death, he issued veiled threats: "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."
Explanations of Calvi's death pivot around the conflict between those who point to suicide, brought about by failure and depression but dressed up as a murder for the benefit of Calvi's family, and those who point to a murderous conspiracy involving many possible combinations of actors who had the ability and interest to ensure Calvi's disappearance.
Different inquests have brought contrasting verdicts, including a first one in London ruling that he had committed suicide, a second one issuing an open verdict, and a civil court which decided that he had been murdered. Likewise, pathologists have reached opposite conclusions on the case; Professor Keith Simpson, a leading British pathologist, was responsible for a post-mortem examination, concluding that there was "no cause for suspicion of foul play", whereas Antonio Fornari, director of the Pavia University legal medicine institute, said that Calvi had been strangled from behind. The three previous exhumations have failed to uncover important evidence, but Calvi's family and the prosecutors lay their faith in technical improvements and new lines of inquiry to p