The Last Supper (41 page)

In 1982, the year of Calvi’s death, City Police Detective Philip Cuthbert was found guilty at the Old Bailey of taking up to £80,000 in bribes to secure bail, overlook past convictions and not gather evidence against eight men charged with a 1977 robbery at the City branch of Williams & Glyn’s Bank – a partner with the Banco Ambrosiano in the Inter Alpha Group. Cuthbert, a freemason, was sentenced to three years in prison.
⁹

One of the severest critics of the original City Police investigation was a City Police officer himself. Detective Superintendent Trevor Smith, an officer with previous experience in the Metropolitan Police, was asked to begin a reexamination of the case in July 2002. He found a catalogue of errors and omissions that had seriously undermined the early phases of the inquiry and which he listed to devastating effect
in testimony to the Rome murder trial. As well as failing to preserve the knot attaching the rope to the scaffolding, his colleagues had failed to fingerprint items found on Calvi’s body or take fingerprints from the scaffolding; failed to search premises or investigate bank accounts associated with Calvi’s death; failed to investigate international travel by Italian citizens in the period around his death; failed to explore alternative theories as to how Calvi’s body arrived at the scaffolding. The body and the crime scene had been mishandled from the start. The body was not photographed before its removal from the scaffolding and it was not searched under controlled conditions at the morgue but at Waterloo Pier, where the bricks in Calvi’s pockets and down his fly were removed and his jacket wrongly buttoned up to be photographed. Particularly damaging was the decision of the original head of the inquiry, Detective Chief Superintendent Barry Tarbun, to suspend most investigative activity for almost a month pending the outcome of the first inquest. An investigation of rentals and thefts from Thames boatyards was not done until ten years later, and then only by private detectives hired by the Calvi family.

‘The post-mortem was very short and not of the type I would have expected in the case of a suspicious death,’ Smith told the court in Rome. ‘There seemed to be a rush to judgment, to the conclusion that it was a suicide.’ A draft report listing the death as ‘fatal incident/suicide’ had been drawn up very early on, Smith said, and officers had briefed Professor Simpson, the pathologist, that Calvi’s death was a probable suicide, influencing the outcome of his examination. Flavio Carboni claimed he arrived in London from Amsterdam on 16 June but no effort was made to corroborate his story at the time. When Smith attempted to do so himself 20 years later, he found flight documentation from that time had been destroyed. And his colleagues had failed to follow up on Odette Morris’s and Carboni’s account of their Gatwick visit on 18 June, allowing
a significant change to their stories to pass with no investigative reaction.
¹⁰

Smith’s catalogue of his force’s blunders – at least 20 – was depressing news for his City Police colleagues. But it also made depressing hearing for the five defendants, raising the question as to whether they had been protected by a masonically influenced British police. Carboni’s lawyer, Renato Borzone, was particularly savage, worrying at Smith’s evidence on the controversial trip to Gatwick in particular and accusing the City Police of submitting inaccurate written evidence to the court on the historical background to Calvi’s death. ‘Historically false information has been presented to the court by this man, who has come here to pontificate to us about the omissions of his colleagues,’ Borzone said, in a fiery exchange with the prosecutor at the end of Smith’s two-day deposition. Judge Mario D’Andria apologized to the City policeman for the intemperate performances as he dismissed him at the end of the hearing. Borzone snapped back: ‘
I
do
not
apologize.’ ‘He obviously didn’t like what I said,’ Smith commented afterwards.

A number of mafia
pentiti
have accused two men of being the killers of Roberto Calvi: Vincenzo Casillo, a Camorra boss with ties to the Magliana Band and the secret services, and Francesco Di Carlo. Casillo, who had also been in contact with Francesco Pazienza, was killed in Rome when a bomb went off underneath his car on 29 January 1983, seven months after Calvi’s death. His girlfriend, Giovanna Materazzo, a nightclub dancer known in the underworld as ‘
Pesca Vellutata
’ (Velvet Peach), was killed by Camorra assassins shortly afterwards on the assumption that she knew too many of her lover’s secrets.

Di Carlo was accused of strangling Calvi by the leading
pentito
Francesco Marino Mannoia. Di Carlo had acted on the instructions of Pippo Calò to punish Calvi for having
embezzled money belonging to Licio Gelli and Cosa Nostra, Mannoia said, and he repeated the gist of his accusations to the Rome murder trial by video link from a secret location in the United States.

Francesco Di Carlo had an explanation for everything. An influential mafia boss who had been close to ‘boss of bosses’ Totò Riina, Di Carlo had been suspended from Cosa Nostra for stealing a consignment of drugs and had moved to England in 1979. Di Carlo claims his suspension was the result of his refusal to play ‘Judas’ in a murder plot targeting his drug trafficking partners Leonardo Caruana and Pasquale Cuntrera, who operated profitably out of Venezuela and Canada. He had been successful in business, acquiring a hotel, a travel agency, a currency exchange and a wine bar. But his most profitable activity was heroin trafficking, conducted under the cover of running an antiques business. In 1985 he was arrested after the seizure in Southampton of 37 kilos of heroin concealed in a consignment of furniture destined for the United States and he was sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment. Eleven years later he was extradited to serve the rest of his sentence in Italy and immediately began collaborating with the authorities. His evidence was valuable for an ongoing investigation into the alleged mafia ties of Silvio Berlusconi and his close Sicilian associate Marcello Dell’Utri, a fact that may have taken the edge off judicial curiosity about his suspected involvement in the Calvi murder. Dell’Utri was sentenced in 2004 to nine years imprisonment for complicity with Cosa Nostra, which he is currently appealing; the investigation into Berlusconi was shelved. Di Carlo was nothing if not well-connected, a fact that may have saved his life on a number of occasions. His indiscretion over the missing drug shipment would normally have been punished by death.

It was true, Di Carlo told the court, that Pippo Calò had been looking for him in June 1982 to ask a favour of him, but this was before the days of mobile phones and he wasn’t
able to make contact. Some time later he ran into him in Italy and Calò reassured him that the problem had been taken care of. ‘He told me that he had resolved everything with the Neapolitans.’

Unfortunately for Di Carlo, police investigators discovered that the London-based
mafioso
had received a significant payment from a mafia colleague just four days before Calvi’s death. On 14 June $100,000 was transferred to his account at Barclays Bank from an account belonging to Alfonso Caruana at the Discount Bank Overseas in Lugano. It was credited to his account as £56,802 on 16 June. That same day – the day Flavio Carboni briefly visited Amsterdam – the same Caruana account transferred $50,000 to an account at the DBO in Amsterdam. Di Carlo told investigators that Caruana sent him the money because he intended to buy a house in the UK and didn’t have a bank account there. Di Carlo passed the money on to him a few days later. Inconveniently for the credibility of his explanation, Di Carlo put a similar amount of money – £40,000 – on deposit for a year with Barclays just over a month later, on 19 July 1982. Being a successful businessman accustomed to handling large sums of money, it is of course possible that the two transactions were unrelated. Di Carlo’s complex explanations of his movements at this time and the reasons why Calò was unable to get hold of him were delivered to the court from behind a protective screen and seemed less than wholly convincing. In 2006 he remained a potential suspect, but no charges had, as yet, been laid against him.

The notion that Casillo had been drafted in to replace Di Carlo raised a whole new can of worms for the prosecution. Casillo was number two in a Camorra faction that was at that time at war with Cosa Nostra, as well as with rival Camorra gangs. Was it believable then that he could be recruited to perform such an important task by his Cosa Nostra enemies? Hours of contradictory testimony were expended on the shifting kaleidoscope of alliance and enmity in the world of
organized crime at the time and on the mercurial loyalties of Casillo himself. If it didn’t seem to be clarifying the question of who really murdered Roberto Calvi, it did give the court a crash course in the traditions and folklore of the criminal underworld.

The City Police may have underperformed in its response to the Calvi case, but the Italian judicial authorities fared little better. The suicide and then ‘open’ verdicts of the London coroners initially provided their colleagues in Italy with an excuse to skirt round the murder issue. And the detailed information provided by Eligio Paoli to the finance police in Trieste, highlighting the alleged role of Sergio Vaccari in the affair, does not appear to have been passed on to British investigators. The political, financial and historical background is essential if one is to understand Calvi’s death; it was in Italy and it remained there, at least for the first 20 years. A succession of Rome and Milan magistrates attempted to probe the case in good faith, while others of their colleagues sat on the Pandora’s box.

The murder hypothesis first gained official recognition in Italy in 1988, when a civil court in Milan ruled that Calvi’s life insurer, Assicurazioni Generali, was obliged to pay his family under the terms of their contract. The policy, for a total of 4 billion lire, would have been invalidated if the banker had taken his own life. Though Calvi had good reason for feeling suicidal on 17 June 1982, the court said, the evidence for murder was more persuasive. The court organized the reconstruction of the scaffolding under Blackfriars Bridge and employed a stuntman of Calvi’s stature to test the feasibility of his suicide under the light and tide conditions prevailing at the presumed time of his death. It concluded that it was
most likely that Calvi was brought to the scaffolding by other people on a boat and strangled before being suspended from it. The court observed that a large supply of medicinal drugs had been found in the banker’s luggage, which would have allowed him to commit suicide in the relative comfort of his room. ‘The hypothesis of aggression . . . must therefore be considered the most probable and plausible,’ the judges ruled. Calvi, for insurance purposes at least, had been murdered.

New forensic evidence strengthening the murder hypothesis, and the arrival of an energetic young prosecutor, Luca Tescaroli, paved the way for the reopening of the case in July 2003. Potential witnesses were forgetting or dying – Walter Beneforti, for example, died one day before he was due to be questioned by the prosecutor – so time was running out for a meaningful judicial process. Eventually five people would be charged with complicity in the murder of Roberto Calvi, having acted in conjunction with Cosa Nostra and the Camorra. Their motive, the prosecutors said, had been to punish Calvi for embezzling Cosa Nostra’s funds, ensure their own impunity and protect the profits derived from the Banco Ambrosiano’s money-laundering activities, as well as to prevent Calvi from blackmailing his former accomplices in politics, freemasonry and at the IOR.

The trial of the five defendants got under way in a fortified courtroom on the outskirts of Rome on 6 October 2005, more than 23 years after Calvi’s death. There were five television cameras, half a dozen photographers and about 20 reporters on hand to witness the start of what was inevitably billed as one of the ‘trials of the century’. Proceedings in the ‘bunker courtroom’ of Rebibbia prison offered a unique and perhaps last opportunity to clarify one of the enduring mysteries of recent Italian history. Two judges and 12 jurors wearing tricolour sashes would have to pick their way through months of evidence evoking a largely vanished era when criminal and terrorist groups were a law unto themselves, when Italy was
partly governed by occult forces and when the Cold War provided an ideal excuse for the secret exercise of unaccountable power. Calvi had been at the heart of that system and his threat to go public with what he knew could well have been the key to his murder. But would the court proceedings make sense of the story?

Flavio Carboni arrived punctually, looking a little nervous. Pippo Calò, the mafia boss, was connected to the court by video link from his prison at Ascoli Piceno. His image appeared on television screens distributed around the edges of the courtroom. Thin and with a white beard, he looked relaxed, as a practised veteran of such affairs; he was already serving life imprisonment for a terrorist bombing – the only defendant in custody at the time – and had several other ongoing trials making claims on his attention. Silvano Vittor, Manuela Kleinszig and Ernesto Diotallevi were absent, the last two evidently determined to boycott the court proceedings, and under no obligation to attend. The press would soon melt away too, with the exception of two RAI documentary teams; the Italian public had tired of the Calvi story, the events had occurred more than two decades ago, and there was a constant risk that what appeared to be new ‘revelations’ from the court had actually been reported on years before. There was one single member of the public sitting in splendid isolation in the gallery at the back of the court, a long, high-ceilinged shoebox of a room with cages, once intended for the defendants in terrorism trials, lining the sides and the words ‘The law is equal for everyone’ on display in front of the judge’s bench. Few non-professional observers would make the pilgrimage to Rebibbia, with the occasional school or university party the only, rare representatives of the public. It was perhaps understandable. The large modern prison in a scruffy north-eastern suburb of Rome is an intimidating place at the best of times, and all the more so with its armed guards at the gate and on duty in the courtroom.