The Last Supper (5 page)

White does concede that the bricks in Calvi’s pockets are ‘unaccountable’ but adds: ‘one must not speculate as to their presence’. ‘To conclude, although the general Italian opinion is that Calvi was murdered . . . there is certainly no evidence at the present time to support this, although we are quite naturally looking at all aspects of the case.’

Tensions and misunderstandings between the British and Italian authorities would obstruct the investigation for years. A report filed by one of the Italian police officers who visited London on 21 June gives a flavour of the prevailing atmosphere of mistrust. ‘I should say immediately that the presence of the undersigned was not very welcome to the British police which limited itself to a formal collaboration, providing very little information from time to time and often only at
the explicit request of the writer,’ complained Maresciallo [Sergeant] Francesco Rosato.

A rush to judgement by the City Police, who are not accustomed to investigating murders anyway, a rushed postmortem by Professor Simpson, and a rushed original inquest all contributed to get the British investigation off to a bad start. The original inquest, presided over by the City of London coroner, Dr David Paul, was crammed into a single day on Friday 23 July 1982, five weeks after Calvi’s death. One of the reasons it was later quashed was the breakneck speed at which Dr Paul conducted the proceedings, pausing only 20 minutes for lunch and winding things up at 10 p.m.

‘Of course it would have been much better if he had chosen one of the other bridges above Chelsea; apart from any other considerations, this inquest would have been heard in somebody else’s court and you and I would not have been here at 10 past 8 at night,’ Dr Paul joked to the jurors towards the end of the day – somewhat prejudging their verdict in the process. ‘But he did choose Blackfriars.’

The coroner was also criticized for suggesting that an open verdict, in the event that the jury could not agree on murder or suicide, ‘may seem like a super open door to scuttle through if you are in any difficulty about returning another verdict’. Such steering of the jury was irregular, an appeal court judge would later rule. In the end the jury did not take the ‘easy’ way out, returning a majority verdict of suicide after deliberating for just under an hour.

Dr Paul concluded: ‘I therefore record that the jury find that Roberto Calvi, a male of 62 years, of Via Frua 9, Milan, Italy, was certified dead at Waterloo Pier, London on Friday 18th June 1982, the cause of death being asphyxia due to hanging, and that he killed himself.’ These were momentous words and the last three would go a long way to postponing the solution of the Calvi riddle, still not fully puzzled out after more than 20 years. Just as most Italians were convinced that Calvi
had been killed, many of them were also sure that the court’s verdict of suicide was the result of a deliberate cover-up on the part of the British authorities.

Roberto Calvi was a desperate man when he decided to flee Italy in June 1982. His bank was in financial trouble, he had serious legal problems and he had to find $300 million with which to pay the Vatican bank by the end of the month. He needed to put pressure on associates and on the beneficiaries of the Banco Ambrosiano’s ‘special’ services if he was to raise the money that would enable him to meet the debt repayment deadline of 30 June. The contents of his black leather briefcase, from which he never normally allowed himself to be parted, would be crucial in achieving that: the papers it contained held the details of the most important and sensitive of his financial operations. Skilfully used, they constituted a formidable instrument of blackmail. According to the prosecutors of those eventually charged with his murder, the potential victims of that blackmail were, first, his former accomplices in politics and government, second, the heads of the secret P2 masonic lodge of which he was a member, and, third, the Vatican bank, the Institute for the Works of Religion, usually known by its Italian acronym as the IOR.

For the past year, Calvi had been on bail pending an appeal against his conviction for violations of Italy’s laws on exporting currency. The appeal hearing was due to begin at the end of June. His passport had been withdrawn by Milan prosecutors pending the appeal hearing, so a legitimate departure was impossible. The bare details of his itinerary are as
follows. Smuggled over the border into Yugoslavia on a speedboat from the north-eastern port of Trieste, he travelled on a false passport to Austria and from there flew to London. He left Italy on 11 June and arrived in England four days later, spending the last days of his life in the sporadic company of four people.

The man who had helped him arrange his escape and who had been advising him in recent months was Flavio Carboni, a flamboyant Sardinian businessman, a man who liked to boast to associates that he worked for the secret services and who habitually carried a handgun. His other male companion was Silvano Vittor, a smuggler based in Trieste who had been hired by Carboni to spirit the banker out of the country on board his powerful speedboat
L’Uragano
(The Hurricane), and to act subsequently as Calvi’s companion and bodyguard. But as well as trafficking in jeans and contraband cigarettes between Italy and Yugoslavia, Vittor rounded out his income by acting as a police informant. He had been recruited by the finance police, a militarized police force with special responsibility for financial, tax and customs matters, in June 1980 and given the codename ‘Umago’, from the name of his birthplace. The choice of Trieste as Calvi’s point of exit was no coincidence; the cold war frontier city, disputed between Italy and Yugoslavia at the end of the Second World War, was Vittor’s base of operations but it had also been an important financial centre for Carboni, who registered numerous companies there to take advantage of its special tax status.

Calvi’s other two travelling companions were women, and not Italian but Austrian. The blonde Kleinszig sisters, in their early twenties, could be relied upon to be loyal and discreet. Manuela was Carboni’s mistress and her sister Michaela was with Vittor, who was the father of her baby daughter. Both men enjoyed living the high life and both were married to somebody else.

Carboni had arranged for Calvi and Vittor to stay in a two-room apartment at Chelsea Cloisters, a massive barrack-like
residence of private flats near Sloane Square. They arrived in London on the evening of Tuesday, 15 June.

An early opportunity to crack the Calvi case came in January 1983, just six months after the banker’s death, when another informant of the Trieste finance police provided potentially vital clues apparently drawn from the group of people who had accompanied him to London. Instead of following up the information and sharing it with the British authorities, Italian investigators appeared determined to discourage the source from cooperating with them. Later in 1983 the finance police revealed his true identity to a Trieste prosecutor and he was promptly arrested as an accessory to Calvi’s flight, a charge he was later able to disprove. The man’s name was Eligio Paoli. A friend of Vittor’s and an underworld informant of the Italian secret services, he was known as source ‘Podgora’ to the finance police. His information was at times contradictory and confusing and sometimes it was downright wrong. But there were good reasons for taking Paoli seriously. For one thing, he was in contact with several of the protagonists of Calvi’s last journey, and for another, by the autumn of 1983 he had shown himself capable of accurately predicting future events.

In October 1982 Licio Gelli, the venerable master of the P2 masonic lodge, and Flavio Carboni, the man who guided Calvi on his journey to London, were both in prison in Switzerland awaiting possible extradition to Italy. Gelli had been arrested in Geneva on 13 September as he attempted to withdraw $55 million from the Union Bank of Switzerland. He was wanted by Milan magistrates who had discovered the P2 membership lists in a raid on his home and office on 17 March of the previous year. The 962 names were drawn from Italy’s business, political and military elite and constituted a secret state within the state. One thing in particular united them: hostility
to communism and a determination to thwart the electoral ambitions of the Italian Communist party (PCI). The finance police was well represented, with 37 members including the service’s overall commander.

On 29 October 1982 Paoli informed his finance police handlers that a plan was underfoot to organize the escape of Gelli and Carboni from their Swiss prison. The operation would make use of helicopters and was likely to take place on a holiday and during a period of recreation when prisoners were allowed out of their cells to exercise. The subsequent extradition of Carboni to Italy did nothing to change the plan for Gelli’s rescue, Paoli informed the finance police the following month. His information does not appear to have been particularly welcome. Paoli claimed the tip-off was passed to prime minister Bettino Craxi who allegedly dismissed it as a pack of lies.

On 9 September 1983, almost a year after Paoli predicted it would happen, Licio Gelli escaped from the maximum-security prison of Champ-Dollon. He was not sprung by helicopter but less dramatically smuggled out of prison by a guard whom he had suborned. He did use a helicopter later, however, to make good his escape from the south of France. ‘One evening the director of the prison accompanied me to my cell in the infirmary and told me that in Switzerland it was not a crime to escape from prison,’ Gelli recalled 22 years later. ‘One night, at midnight, I found all the doors open and I just went out. I didn’t pay anyone anything,’ he said, stretching credulity to the limit. ‘If it had been necessary to give anyone as much as a slap, I wouldn’t have left.’
¹
In reality Gelli was driven out of the prison hiding under a blanket in the back of a guard’s van. He left his pyjamas stuffed with paper tissues in his bed to simulate the presence of a body. An abandoned rope and hook, and a hole cut in the external wire fence, gave the impression that Gelli had escaped over the walls, while a hypodermic syringe and cotton-wool pad impregnated with
ether were left in his cell, hinting he might have been seized against his will. A helicopter pilot who flew him out of a small private airport near Annecy said he didn’t get a good view of the passenger’s face: Gelli kept his hand in front of it feigning toothache.

The Swiss authorities had also been informed of the escape plan; their reaction, like Craxi’s, was that the information was totally unfounded.

Craxi’s lack of enthusiasm for Paoli’s divinatory capabilities is understandable. One of the Italian politicians whom Gelli most admired, his Italian Socialist party (PSI) was in fierce competition with the PCI. As a left-wing party firmly rooted in the western camp, it was an ideal instrument for cold war anti-communist operations, contributed several of its leading members to P2, and was a major recipient of the Banco Ambrosiano’s largesse.

Paoli’s first reference to the Calvi case was recorded by the finance police on 7 January 1983. The report is a curious blend of fact, error and distortion, but introduces for the first time a character who, investigators now believe, may have played a crucial role in organizing Calvi’s murder. He is presented by Paoli as a London-based Italian named Volpi. Paoli was unsure of the name, and in fact he got it wrong, along with the details of the man’s death: killed in his room in the ‘Celsea Cristal Center’ residence shortly after Calvi’s murder. But there were some intriguing details that Paoli got right and which would have justified treating his claims with the utmost attention.

The man whose name Paoli had difficulty in remembering was an international drug-dealer called Sergio Vaccari. ‘Volpi was allegedly killed because he knew all about the facts connected to Calvi’s last hours,’ the report said, and his death was ‘made to look like suicide’. It wasn’t: Vaccari
died from multiple stab wounds; the death that was made to look like suicide was Calvi’s. The report continued: ‘The person concerned was in contact with Pier Luigi Torri and the world of international finance. The source pointed out that the individual concerned was also involved in drug trafficking.’ Paoli also observed, quite rightly, that this information could form the basis for a fuller reconstruction of the circumstances surrounding Calvi’s death. Torri was a man who had been involved in a banking scandal in London and was suspected of laundering money for the mafia. Flavio Carboni’s office diary records a visit from a ‘Sig. Torri’ at 16.05 on 19 April 1982.

Vaccari, a wealthy playboy whose family had owned a printing works in Milan, financed his high-rolling life in London by trading in drugs and pornography. He had the brilliant idea of importing cocaine in hollowed-out
panettoni
, an industrially produced type of Italian cake traditionally consumed at Christmas. It may have helped that the cakes normally came with a small bag of icing sugar to sprinkle over the top, and that British customs did not routinely inspect imported foodstuffs. Vaccari’s day job was that of an antiques dealer and he was a partner with other Italians in the London Restoration Centre, a money-losing operation that had to be kept afloat with periodic injections of funds from Italy.

Vaccari was found stabbed to death in the sitting room of his flat in Holland Park by his cleaning lady on the morning of 16 September 1982. Police photos show a grisly scene: his body is slumped on a pale-coloured sofa that has been extensively smeared with blood. He had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest and face, blood had drenched his shirt and pooled behind his head. The grimace on his upturned face and sightless eyes testify to the horror of his final minutes. Rumours spread among his acquaintances that he had been tortured by having his teeth pulled out with a pair of pliers. It didn’t encourage witnesses to come forward.

Police believe Vaccari was killed at about 8 p.m. on the previous evening. He had recently returned from Rome with a consignment of cocaine and a set of electronic scales was set up and switched on ready for business. The lights in his luxuriously furnished ground-floor flat were switched on and the curtains were drawn. Understandably concerned about his personal safety – Vaccari kept a swordstick in the hall and owned a handgun – he had evidently let his murderers in because he recognized and trusted them. He appears to have been struck on the head from behind and then pinioned by one assailant while another struck him repeatedly with a knife.