Ruling on ‘God’s banker’ murder

ROME - As the cardinals go into conclave today, a Rome judge will begin delivering his verdict on the murder of Roberto Calvi, the banker whose spectacular financial collapse cast a shadow over the early years of the pontificate of Pope John Paul II.

Judge Orlando Villoni must decide if there is enough evidence to justify a full trial for four defendants charged with conspiring to murder Calvi and suspending his body from scaffolding under Blackfriars Bridge in London in what appeared to be a macabre symbolic warning to the controversial banker's associates.

The body of the man known as "God's banker" for his close financial relationship with the Vatican was found on June 18, 1982, by a postal clerk on his way to work at the Daily Express.

The mystery of his death, his feet dangling in the Thames and his pockets stuffed with bricks, has baffled investigators for more than 20 years.

The preliminary hearing has taken just over a year to hear evidence about the complex intrigue that accompanied Calvi to his death.

As chairman of the Banco Ambrosiano, a bank founded by a priest, with close links to the diocese of Milan and to the Vatican's Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), Calvi had embarked on an apparently suicidal series of foreign investments that left his bank with debts of some 800 million.

His flight to London in the company of a Sardinian property developer with close links to the secret services took place against an alarming backdrop of blackmail and conspiracy that brought senior prelates into uncomfortably close contact with Mafia hoods and the rogue freemasons of the P2 lodge.

The American head of the IOR, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, was at one time confined within the Vatican to avoid arrest by Milan prosecutors wanting to try him for his alleged role in the Ambrosiano bankruptcy.

Villoni is expected to rule on whether the prosecution has presented a sufficiently convincing case that Flavio Carboni, the Sardinian businessman, deliberately lured Calvi to his death and that the murder was carried out on the orders of Pippo Calo, a senior Mafia boss responsible for Cosa Nostra's finances who was allegedly peeved at the incompetent way Calvi had laundered his organisation's money.

The two other defendants are Carboni's then girlfriend, Manuela Kleinszig, and a Rome underworld boss, Ernesto Diotallevi.

Further revelations are expected, however, from a parallel investigation, the subjects and content of which have remained highly secret.

Charles Raw, the author of The Moneychangers, an in-depth examination of the Ambrosiano affair, said the relationship between the Ambrosiano and the IOR had enabled the Vatican to cover up some of its more embarrassing investments in Italy, in companies with labour problems that might have led to trade union demonstrations in front of St Peter's.

- INDEPENDENT