From The Sunday Times 14 March
John Follain, Rome
<snip>:
This Tuesday four people, including a former friend of Calvi’s and a notorious mafia boss, will stand trial in a Roman courtroom for the murder of a man known as “God’s banker”, so-called because of his links with the Vatican. Two British women are expected to appear as witnesses. Among the chilling evidence that will be heard is that Calvi was probably still alive when he was hanged from scaffolding under Blackfriars Bridge in London shortly after midnight on June 18, 1982, and may have taken up to an hour to die. The official verdict by a British coroner was suicide but an inquiry the following year ended with an open verdict. British and Italian police, magistrates, forensic scientists, toxicologists and a host of other consultants have since picked through the original findings and witness testimony, and have scrutinised both the scaffolding and Calvi’s clothes. Three autopsies analysed the dirt under his fingernails for traces of dust from 11lb of bricks stuffed into his pockets. His neck has been scanned for bone lesions and his body examined for bruises. Detective Superintendent Trevor Smith, of the City of London police, who has been supporting the Italian investigation, said: “We have been applying 21st-century forensic and investigative techniques to a 21-year-old crime.”
The conclusion of Luca Tescaroli and Maria Monteleone, the Italian prosecutors, is that the banker’s death was no suicide. Files obtained by The Sunday Times show that they believe the mafia bosses ordered the killing of Calvi, the sacked chairman of the failing Banco Ambrosiano, because he withheld millions of dollars in profits from them. His death brought down a financial house of cards as Ambrosiano collapsed in one of Italy’s biggest post-war banking scandals. Flavio Carboni, a Sardinian businessman, and Pippo “The Cashier” Calo, a leading figure in the Sicilian mafia and a convicted killer, are accused of conspiring to lure the 62-year-old banker to London. On trial with them are Ernesto Diotallevi, a senior figure in Rome’s underworld, and Manuela Kleinszig, an Austrian citizen who, at the time, was a girlfriend of Carboni. All deny any wrongdoing. According to the latest reconstruction by court-appointed forensic scientists, Calvi met his killers at his flat in Chelsea, west London, at about 10pm on June 17. The secretive banker often travelled with as many as a dozen bodyguards, but it is clear that he trusted his visitors. It was a fatal error. Calvi was taken to the Thames. Bruises on his arms and right wrist and marks on the soles of his shoes suggest that he fought back when he was attacked either on the edge of the river or on a boat as it approached Blackfriars Bridge. The forensic report describes two versions of what happened next: either the team of killers drugged him or applied “a slow, steady pressure”, almost strangling him. The men then stuffed the bricks into his pockets and down the front of his trousers, together with $15,000 in cash. Calvi was still alive — but probably unconscious — when a noose was placed around his neck and the orange rope tied to a ring on scaffolding under the bridge. They then moved the boat away and the weight of the body and the bricks, combined with the river’s current, tightened the noose. As the water swirled around his legs, reaching halfway up his calves, Calvi took anything from 30 to 60 minutes to die.
In the months leading up to the trial, investigators have focused on the possible role of two British women. Odette Jones, 42, of west London, has been questioned by City of London police on suspicion that she committed perjury in her evidence to protect Carboni. She initially said that she had accompanied Carboni to Gatwick airport on the evening of Calvi’s death. Investigators say that in her latest testimony to City of London police she denied making the trip. She then said that she could not remember the events and was scared of Carboni at the time. Jones’s evidence could help to establish Carboni’s role, as other witnesses have testified that he handed Calvi’s briefcase to an acquaintance at Gatwick who had flown in on a private jet. The briefcase, believed to contain the banker’s most precious documents, has never been found.*** The second woman is Caroline Whitby-Jones, 43, who in the years leading up to Calvi’s death was the girlfriend of Sergio Vaccari, an antiques dealer believed to have been one of his murderers. She now lives in Florence. Vaccari was murdered three months after Calvi’s death, reportedly after he threatened to name the banker’s killers.
Investigators said last week that they had seized diaries and telephone books belonging to Whitby-Jones dating back to the early 1980s. They are focusing on a trip by the couple to Sicily in 1981, during which Vaccari may, without her knowledge, have met mafia bosses. For Calvi’s family, the trial will tell only part of the story. Calvi’s son Carlo, who has hired private investigators at his own expense to bolster the judicial inquiries, believes that they have yet to seek out the “untouchables” who benefited from his father’s death. “The mafia did not act alone,” said Carlo Calvi, who lives in Montreal. “My father was eliminated by politicians because his position had become untenable. He was going to have to defend himself and reveal the activities of the Vatican bank.” He points to the Rome findings that the mafia’s aim in murdering Calvi was not only to punish him for his misuse of its funds, but also to prevent him trying to blackmail politicians, the clandestine P2 masonic group and the Institute for Religious Works — better known as the Vatican bank. Calvi had been sacked as chairman on June 17, 1982 after failing to account for debts to shell companies in Latin America controlled by the Vatican bank. The Vatican insisted that he pay back at least £154m. Several attempts have been made to penetrate the Vatican and determine the exact nature of its links with Calvi, but Italian and American investigators were refused permission to question Paul Marcinkus, then president of the Vatican’s bank. Calcara, who has co-operated with Sicilian investigators for the past three years, testified that a year before Calvi’s murder he travelled from Sicily to Rome to deliver two suitcases containing $6.5m to Marcinkus and an unnamed cardinal. “The mafia did not act alone,” said Carlo Calvi, who lives in Montreal. “My father was eliminated by politicians because his position had become untenable. He was going to have to defend himself and reveal the activities of the Vatican bank.” Calcara, who has co-operated with Sicilian investigators for the past three years, testified that a year before Calvi’s murder he travelled from Sicily to Rome to deliver two suitcases containing $6.5m to Marcinkus and an unnamed cardinal. Rome prosecutors are hoping that they will able to question Marcinkus, who is now 80 and takes masses in Phoenix, Arizona. But he still has the protection of a Vatican state diplomatic passport and there are fears that he may never talk.
<snip>
From:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-1037246,00.html *** This is an inaccuracy. The suitcase was found in London in 1991 and was reported to contain all the codes to identify bank account holders of the $70 million that City of London police discovered in the Bahamas last month that had been laundered by the P2 Lodge via Florida in 1982. Also relatives of the Singer and Abraham families related to Calvi who had infiltrated UK and European politics.
Re:“The mafia did not act alone,” said Carlo Calvi, who lives in Montreal. “My father was eliminated by politicians because his position had become untenable. He was going to have to defend himself and reveal the activities of the Vatican bank.”
And
Carlo Calvi has omitted to mention that his father had other children living in the UK at the time who were part of a paedophile sex ring that had infiltrated the IRA and blackmailed Thatcher into giving them immunity from proseuction. Calvi's renegade son Henry Singer had been thrown out of the UK army for sex offences, drug dealing, extortion and money laundering. Henry Singer's own illegitimate son, known as David Logan, was one of six arrested by Ghanaian police on January 7 for a £80 million coke bust:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=1218295Henry Singer had served jail time in a special unit for sex offenders and later became involved with UK based IRA terrorists responsible for the Regent's Park bombing. He subsequently got off by doing a plea bargain to testify to Thatcher's involvement in attempting to stage a coup d'etat in the UK when Ronald Reagan was president.
In the summer of 2000, just after Shrub was chosen to be the BFEE official presidential candidate, Henry Singer was instrumental in Blair taking the UN Head of Military Intelligence as hostage.
Cardinal Marcincus was granted partial immunity from prosecution by President George H Bush in a deal struck while he was Veep to RR because George Bush Junior had been busted in a paedophile brothel in London in the summer of 1982 and Marcinkus threatened to expose him. The brothel was managed by one 'Didier Garnier' who subsequently spent a fortune trying to erase all traces of the criminal conviction that resulted from being charged with vice offences. He is now the owner of Le Colombier restaurant in Chelsea's Doverhouse Street, South West London.
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