| ON THE orders of a Rome judge, Italian police will today exhume the body of Roberto Calvi, the Mafia-linked financier who was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London 16 years ago, in a new attempt to establish whether he committed suicide or was murdered.
Calvi's son Carlo, a banker who lives in Montreal, yesterday said he would be present when his father's coffin is removed from the family vault in the village of Drezzo, 60 miles from Milan, near Lake Como. Signor Calvi said pathologists would begin examining the remains tomorrow.
He said he had agreed to the exhumation because he was convinced that new evidence from Mafia supergrasses (pentiti) showed that his father had not taken his own life - as concluded at the time - but had been killed because he knew too much about the Mafia's money-laundering schemes and its links with the Vatican.
Calvi, known as "God's banker" because of his close ties with the Vatican, was also a member of the illegal P2 masonic lodge, which involved leading members of the Italian establishment. He was placed under house arrest and charged with fraud after the collapse in June 1982 of the Banco Ambrosiano, of which he was chairman.
The bank, which crashed with debts of $1.5 billion (£892 million), had been involved with the Vatican Bank, properly known as the Institute for Religious Works. Calvi fled to London, where he allegedly tried in vain to persuade Italian Mafia contacts to help to rescue the failed bank.
The first inquest into his death, by a London coroner, concluded that he had become suicidal after failing to salvage the bank from the wreckage of the scandal, and had hanged himself in his grey suit (but tieless) from Blackfriars Bridge on June 18, 1982, after stuffing his pockets and the front of his trousers with 12lb of bricks. The coroner detected no sign of violence.
Subsequent inquests in Milan concluded that murder could not be ruled out. Last year Rome prosecutors investigating unconnected Mafia activities as part of a crackdown on organised crime said they had new evidence to show Calvi had been killed, and asked for his remains to be exhumed. The focus of the new investigations is Flavio Carboni, a Sardinian mafioso, who has admitted being in London with Calvi, and who was subsequently jailed for
selling the contents of Calvi's briefcase to a Czech bishop, Pavel Hnilica.
Monsignor Hnilica admitted using the Vatican Bank's funds to buy the Calvi papers, but said he had done so because Carboni had promised they would help to clear the Vatican of blame for the Banco Ambrosiano scandal.
The papers have since gone missing. Press reports say they related to money-laundering activities, and to Calvi's links with Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the Chicago-born head of the Vatican Bank (now in retirement), Michele Sindona, a financier who was jailed for fraud in 1980 but was poisoned while in prison, and Licio Gelli, the extreme right-wing Grand Master of P2. This summer Signor Gelli escaped to France while awaiting an appeal against a
criminal conviction but has since been extradited back to Italy.
According to police, Mafia pentiti have claimed that Carboni was part of the plot to kill Calvi, together with Pippo Calo, the former financial brains of the Mafia, nicknamed "The Cashier", who is in jail; Vicenzo Casillo, a Naples Mafia boss, now dead; and Francesco Di Carlo, better known as "Frankie the Strangler", who is alleged to have kidnapped Calvi at his flat in Chelsea, strangled him on a boat moored on the Thames, and then hanged
him from scaffolding under Blackfriars Bridge. Di Carlo has confirmed to police that Calvi was murdered, but denies he was the killer.
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