The article on the BBC website reports that:
" 'God's banker' found
hanged
The body of a top Italian banker has been found hanging from
Blackfriars Bridge in London.
Known as God's banker for his links
with the Vatican, 62-year-old Roberto Calvi was the chairman of Banco Ambrosiano
in Milan and a central figure in a complex web of international fraud and
intrigue.
He had been missing for the last
nine days before his body was discovered by a passer-by hanging from scaffolding
on a riverside walk under the bridge.
Police are treating the death as
suicide.
Jail sentence
Mr Calvi became chairman of Banco
Ambrosiano, now Italy's largest private bank, in 1975 and built up a vast
financial empire.
In 1978, a report by the Bank of
Italy on Ambrosiano concluded that several billion lire had been illegally
exported.
In May 1981, Mr Calvi was arrested,
found guilty, and sentenced to four years' imprisonment, but released pending an
appeal. During his short spell in jail he attempted suicide.
Mr Calvi was due to appear in an
Italian court next week to appeal against this conviction.
Later this month he was to be tried
for alleged fraud involving property deals with Sicilian banker Michele Sindona,
who is himself serving 25 years in America over the collapse of the Franklin
National Bank in New York in 1974.
The Vatican is directly linked to
Mr Calvi by Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the Pope's bodyguard, a governor of the
Vatican and head of the Vatican bank which has a shareholding in
Ambrosiano.
Missing millions
Now Ambrosiano is on the verge of
collapse amid press reports that investigators found a £400m "hole" in its
accounts. Last week the bank's executive board decided to strip Mr Calvi of his
authority.
The Italian Treasury dissolved the
bank's administration and the Bank of Italy is now a temporary
commissioner.
Mr Calvi fled to Venice nine days
ago after shaving his moustache to avoid being recognised.
From there it seems he hired a
private plane to take him to London.
The day before he was found dead,
his secretary committed suicide in Milan by jumping off the fourth floor of the
bank's headquarters.
Teresa Corrocher, aged 55, left an
angry suicide note condemning her boss for the damage she said he had done to
Ambrosiano and its employees."
The Guardian website reported on 12th May 2012 that"
"Mafia boss breaks silence over
Roberto Calvi killing
Godfather turned supergrass accused
of murder of 'God's banker' claims case will never be solved.
One month before the 30th
anniversary of one of London's most enduring murder mysteries, the mafia
godfather at the heart of the case has spoken for the first time about why he
believes the real killers of Italian financier Roberto Calvi will never be
brought to justice.
Calvi, dubbed "God's banker"
because of his work with the Vatican, was found hanging from scaffolding beneath
Blackfriars bridge in London on 18 June 1982. Bricks had been stuffed in his
pockets and he had more than £10,000 in cash on him. In the months before his
death he had been accused of stealing millions being laundered on behalf of the
mafia.
His death was originally ruled a
suicide but later judged to be murder. In July 1991, Francesco "Frankie the
Strangler" Di Carlo, a mafia godfather who had lived in England since the late
1970s, was named as Calvi's killer by a supergrass. Di Carlo has since become a
supergrass himself.
Speaking from the small town in
central Italy where he now lives, Di Carlo related how he first came to hear
that he had been accused of Calvi's murder.
"I was in university – that's what
I called the prisons in England. We were all in the association room watching
television when the news came on that the killer of Calvi was Francesco Di
Carlo. All the prisoners and guards looked over and stared. I just shrugged my
shoulders and said that they must be talking about someone else with the same
name as me."
Di Carlo seemed a likely suspect.
He had arrived in the UK in the 1970s, relocating shortly after being linked to
the murders of two Sicilian police officers.
He bought businesses and a palatial
home but soon came under the watchful eye of British customs, who believed he
had moved in order to oversee the Cosa Nostra's operations in the UK. Between
1980 and 1985 customs officers allegedly linked him to at least a dozen
multimillion pound drug hauls, only a handful of which were
intercepted.
In 1985 Palermo's flying squad
attempted to extradite Di Carlo to Italy in connection with an earlier case.
Within weeks of the request, the deputy head of the squad and a commissioner in
charge of tracking down fugitives had both been shot dead.
Di Carlo was eventually linked to
an attempt to smuggle £60m worth of heroin to Canada through London and was
found guilty at a five-month trial at the Old Bailey, although he claims to have
been the victim of a conspiracy.
The police officers escorting him
to court each morning told how, as they were led from the cells, Di Carlo's
co-defendants would bow and kiss his hand as they passed him, standard protocol
for greeting a senior godfather figure.
Although Di Carlo denies killing
Calvi, he admits that he and his mafia colleagues wanted him dead and that his
boss had attempted to contact him to carry out the hit.
"I was in Rome and received a phone
call from a friend in Sicily telling me that a certain high-ranking mafia member
had just been killed. I will never forget the date because of this: it was 16
June 1982 – two days before Calvi was murdered. The friend told me that Pippo
Calò [known as the "mafia's cashier"] was trying to get hold of me because he
needed me to do something for him. In the hierarchy of Cosa Nostra, he was a
general, I was a colonel, so he was a little higher up, my
superior.
"While I finally spoke to Pippo, he
told me not to worry, that the problem had been taken care of. That's a code we
use in the Cosa Nostra. We never talk about killing someone. We say they have
been taken care of.
"Calvi was naming names. No one had
any trust in him any more. He owed a lot of money. His friends had all distanced
themselves. Everyone wanted to get rid of him. He had been arrested and he had
started to talk. Then he had tried to kill himself by cutting his wrists. He was
released, but knew he could be rearrested at any time. He was weak, he was a
broken man.
"I was not the one who hanged
Calvi. One day I may write the full story, but the real killers will never be
brought to justice because they are being protected by the Italian state, by
members of the P2 masonic lodge. They have massive power. They are made up of a
mixture of politicians, bank presidents, the military, top security and so on.
This is a case that they continue to open and close again and again but it will
never be resolved. The higher you go, the less evidence you will
find."
Di Carlo became disillusioned with
the direction the organisation was taking, deciding to become a
supergrass.
"My grandfather was the first to be
in the Cosa Nostra and the rest of my family followed. Back then the system was
different. We were a guarantee for people who had no justice, we were there for
the defence of the weak.
"We were not against the state, we
were a state within the state. We had solicitors, doctors, ministers. We would
get the politicians elected and we would command them. And we made a comfortable
living. There were rules. You could not kill women or children or innocents. You
could not kill journalists because they were just doing their
job.
"If you wanted to kill someone,
there had to be a reason. They had to be harming the organisation. You could
kill a policeman because he was lying about you, but not for doing his job. You
kill one, another comes along, so what have you achieved?
Nothing.
"But then things started to change.
Drug trafficking came in and made people very rich. People had too much money
and power. The scruples were lost. Magistrates were being bombed along with
women and children. It wasn't Cosa Nostra any more, it was Cosa Monster. I
didn't want to be a part of that so I decided to turn. My life now is very
different, very quiet, but I am happy.""