New look at 'God's banker' case

LONDON - Italian magistrates are to reopen a murder investigation into the death of Roberto Calvi, the banker at the heart of a scandal involving the Vatican, freemasonry and the Mafia, who was found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London in June 1982.

The Calvi case was one of the great criminal mysteries of modern times. In the 20 years since his death, it has never been established whether he was murdered or committed suicide after his Banco Ambrosiano collapsed in a US$1.2 billion bankruptcy.

The new investigation is the result of a fresh post-mortem of Calvi's body, after its third exhumation since a London coroner's court gave an open verdict a year after his death.

Using technology said not to have been available earlier, experts found marks on the neck that were "compatible with strangulation". In addition, no dust was found under his fingernails from the bricks and stones found in Calvi's pockets and trousers when the body was removed from the bridge. Nor was there any trace on his shoe soles of zinc from the scaffolding which if the suicide theory is correct Calvi must have climbed before hanging himself.

At the time the bricks were widely seen as connected with Calvi's membership of the secret P-2 Masonic lodge.

But Carlo Calvi, who has long fought to prove his father was murdered, told Il Messaggero newspaper at the weekend: "I've always believed that the stones were there to hold the body under water as the river tide rose."

The Calvi family has never accepted the suicide theory. "He didn't want to hurt us, and in the last stages of his life he often told us that people wanted to kill him," Carlo Calvi said.

If it was murder, the most likely candidate has always been the Mafia, rather than the Vatican, international Freemasonry or Italian politicians desperate to silence him.

In 1997, Rome prosecutors implicated various Mafia members, as well as Flavio Carboni, the Sardinian businessman who arranged Calvi's flight to London.

In March Carboni won a court order banning a film on the Calvi affair, God's Bankers, on the grounds it libellously depicted him as the organiser of Calvi's death.

- INDEPENDENT