Light to be Thrown on
Murky Death of Italian Banker Calvi
Agence France Presse
International News
November 10, 1998
ROME - The body of Roberto Calvi, the powerful Italian banker found hanging under a London bridge in 1982, will be exhumed in December to determine if he was murdered or committed suicide, judicial sources said Tuesday.
Public prosecutors set December 16 as the date for the exhumation of Calvi, whose murky death 16 years ago apparently sent shivers through banking high society, the mafia, the Vatican and Italy's freemasons' lodge, Propaganda Due (P2).
An autopsy will be performed after his remains are exhumed from a cemetery in the northern industrial city of Milan.
Calvi fled Italy after the country's largest private bank, Banco Ambrosiano, went bankrupt under his chairmanship with debts around 700 million dollars.
He was later found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in central London.
A British coroner's report that year showed he had hanged himself, but Calvi's family in 1992 forced an inquiry into his mysterious death after gathering evidence suggesting he was hunted down by the mafia.
Five years later, prosecutors in Rome implicated a top Sicilian mobster, Pippo Calo, in Calvi's death.
Calo, already behind bars for 12 years on other charges, was accused of contracting the killing along with another Italian banker, Flavio Carboni, whose lawyers requested the exhumation of Calvi's body.
The year of Calvi's death, Carboni was arrested in Switzerland and sentenced to 15 years in prison for his part in the Banco Ambrosiano collapse. He has now been freed provisionally.
The bank's close links to the Vatican Bank earned Calvi the epithet "God's Banker."
He was also a friend of the former grand master of P2 lodge, Licio Gelli, who in October was extradited to Italy from France where he had fled after being sentenced to 12 years over the Banco Ambrosiano collapse.
Two other men, Ernesto
Diotallevi and mafia financial banker Francesco Di Carlo, are
also accused of taking part in Calvi's assassination, but none of
the total four defendants have yet gone to trial.
Further Reading:
St. Peter's Squared - Roberto Calvi and the P2 Masonic Lodge Conspiracy
