Roberto Calvi: God's Banker

At half past seven on the morning of Friday the 18th of June, 1982, a postal clerk crossing Blackfriars Bridge in central London looked over the rail and saw a body hanging from the scaffolding of the bridge below. The man was sixty-two years old, wearing a grey suit, and the suit's pockets held five orange bricks and the equivalent of about fourteen thousand US dollars in three currencies. His feet were a few inches above the surface of the Thames, which was retreating at low tide. His name, on the false Italian passport found in his jacket, was Gian Roberto Calvini. His real name was Roberto Calvi, and three days earlier he had been the chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, the second-largest private bank in Italy.

Calvi had joined Banco Ambrosiano in 1947 as a clerk, become general manager in 1971, and chairman in 1975. The Italian press called him il banchiere di Dio — God's Banker — because Banco Ambrosiano did much of its offshore business through the Istituto per le Opere di Religione, better known as the Vatican Bank. In 1978 the Bank of Italy completed an investigation that found several billion lire had been moved abroad illegally through Ambrosiano's foreign subsidiaries. In 1981 Calvi was tried, given a four-year suspended sentence, and fined nineteen point eight million dollars for having transferred twenty-seven million dollars out of Italy in violation of currency laws. He served a few weeks in Lodi prison, attempted suicide there with barbiturates, and was released on bail. He kept his job at the bank.

On the 5th of June 1982, Calvi sent a letter to Pope John Paul II. He warned that the imminent collapse of Banco Ambrosiano would "provoke a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions in which the Church will suffer the gravest damage". When the bank's books were finally opened, the missing money came to between seven hundred million and one and a half billion dollars, much of it routed through Vatican Bank shell companies in Panama, Liechtenstein and Luxembourg. In 1984 the Vatican Bank, while admitting no legal liability, paid two hundred and twenty-four million dollars to a hundred and twenty Ambrosiano creditors, calling the payment a "recognition of moral involvement".

Calvi did not stay to face it. On the 10th of June he left his Rome apartment, travelled to Venice, and chartered a private aircraft that took him to London via Zürich. On the 17th of June, the day before his body was found, the Bank of Italy stripped him of his post at Banco Ambrosiano. That same day his personal secretary, Graziella Corrocher, threw herself out of a fifth-floor window at the bank's Milan headquarters. She left a note condemning him for what he had done to the bank and its staff. Her death was ruled a suicide.

The first London inquest, in July 1982, returned a verdict of suicide. The Calvi family hired George Carman, QC, and a second inquest the following July returned an open verdict — the court could not decide. In 1991 the family commissioned the investigation firm Kroll Associates. The Kroll case manager, Jeff Katz, in turn hired the former Home Office forensic scientist Angela Gallop. Gallop examined Calvi's shoes. The bridge scaffolding was rusted and freshly painted in places where someone climbing it would have left traces. The shoes had no rust on them and no paint. Calvi had not walked on the scaffolding. The body was exhumed in December 1998. A German forensic team in October 2002 confirmed Gallop's conclusion: the neck injuries were inconsistent with hanging, and Calvi had never handled the bricks in his own pockets. The likely scenario, reconstructed by Katz, was that Calvi had been suffocated, transported to the bridge by boat at high tide, and tied to the scaffolding from the water before the tide went out and exposed him.

The choice of bridge, like everything else about Calvi, traced back to the Italian masonic lodge Propaganda Due. Calvi was a member. The lodge's master, Licio Gelli, called the inner brotherhood frati neri — black friars. Blackfriars Bridge took its name from the medieval Dominican monastery on the north bank.

In 2003 the City of London Police reopened the case as a murder inquiry. Witnesses inside the Italian justice system filled in pieces. The Sicilian Mafia pentito Francesco Marino Mannoia testified in 1991 that Calvi had been killed on a contract because the bank's collapse had cost the Mafia laundered money. Francesco Di Carlo, a Cosa Nostra member who had lived in London, denied being the killer when he flipped in 1996 but admitted that the Mafia boss Giuseppe Calò had asked him to do it. Italian prosecutors eventually charged five people with the murder: Calò, the Sardinian businessman Flavio Carboni, Carboni's Austrian girlfriend Manuela Kleinszig, the Banda della Magliana mobster Ernesto Diotallevi, and Calvi's driver Silvano Vittor. The trial opened in October 2005 in a fortified courtroom inside Rome's Rebibbia prison and ran for twenty months. On the 6th of June 2007, Judge Mario Lucio d'Andria threw out all the charges for insufficient evidence — but the same ruling stated, on the record, that Calvi had been murdered, not killed himself. The acquittals were upheld by the Court of Appeals in 2010 and confirmed by the Court of Cassation in November 2011.

When the family insurer Unione Italiana finally paid out on Calvi's ten-million-dollar life policy, the underwriters cited the 2002 forensic report as proving the death had been a homicide rather than a suicide. About half of the settlement went to creditors who had funded the family's twenty-year fight to prove a court ruling that everyone in Rome had already accepted: Roberto Calvi did not kill himself, and no one will ever be convicted of killing him.