The Last Supper (3 page)

In 1983 the United States Central Intelligence Agency commissioned a guide to guerrilla warfare that was intended to channel the aggression of the anti-communist Nicaraguan Contras in their battle against the Sandinistas. The 90-page war primer,
Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare
, was published in Spanish and gave tips on ‘neutralizing’ Nicaraguan officials and ‘implicit and explicit terror’. An early edition of what became known in the press as the CIA’s assassination manual contained the words: ‘If possible, professional criminals will be hired to carry out selective jobs.’ Those words could equally well have been applied to the moral morass of cold war Italy. Professional criminals from a variety of regional crime syndicates would play an important role in the personal drama of Roberto Calvi.

Some 23 years after Calvi’s death, in October 2005, five people finally went on trial in Rome for his murder. The defendants were Giuseppe ‘Pippo’ Calò, Flavio Carboni, Ernesto Diotallevi, Silvano Vittor and Manuela Kleinszig.
Prosecutors who brought the case to trial say the banker was killed by members of Cosa Nostra because he had lost or embezzled funds entrusted to him for laundering by the mob. But the banker’s capacity and willingness to blackmail politicians, freemasons and the Vatican itself also played a role in his death, they alleged. And it is the wider conspiracy involving the higher echelons of power that sheds most light on the enduring mystery of his death.

Piecing together the fragments of the mosaic has not been easy. Two decades on, many of the tesserae are missing and those that can be found have broken edges, abraded by failing memories and wilful deceptions, but the overall picture can now be clearly delineated. The death of a secretive, reclusive and somewhat unpopular banker may seem a small thing of itself, but the Calvi murder opens up a vast panorama on to the true nature of recent Italian history and how the Cold War was fought over this beautiful but divided land. The lessons that spring from it remain relevant to this day, as western democracies grapple with an implacable new enemy, many of the seeds of whose hatred were buried in that recent past.

The death of Pope John Paul II in April 2005 caused an astonishing public outpouring of grief and affection. The media hailed him as ‘John Paul the Great’ and the massive crowds that paid tribute to him in St Peter’s Square chanted ‘
Santo subito’
– ‘Make him a saint now’. But John Paul’s pontificate was confronted almost from the beginning by the repercussions of the Banco Ambrosiano scandal and his handling of it did little to enhance his reputation, or that of the church. Twenty years on, as Catholics celebrated the two-thousandth anniversary of the birth of Jesus Christ, John Paul found himself presiding over one of the most discredited of human institutions. Repeated financial scandals in Italy, coupled with the global scandal of sexual abuse by priests, had reduced the standing of the Catholic church to a nadir
for modern times. Such scandals were particularly difficult to deal with for the church. As an institution committed to living and preaching a message of moral excellence, the ethical failings of its members were particularly damaging. Scandal was of itself potentially ruinous, so lies, deception and obfuscation were justified as the lesser of the possible evils. Cover-up rather than confession and penitence would be the response, allowing ills to fester and making the final scandal, when it could no longer be contained, all the more devastating. Catholic dioceses faced bankruptcy because the church had failed to tackle the moral betrayals of paedophile priests and the Vatican bank itself risked financial ruin for its failure to rein in the piratical business practices of men like Roberto Calvi, who acted on its behalf and cloaked their actions in its apparent respectability.

The discredit that clung to the church in the last quarter of the twentieth century may go some way to explain the success of a book like
The Da Vinci Code.
Ambiguously presented as fact-based fiction, Dan Brown’s tale was eagerly devoured by millions of readers ready to assume the worst about the Roman Catholic church. Lies, deception and murder appeared only too natural in the context of a church clinging to its prerogatives of spiritual and temporal power. The shock troops of Opus Dei, ready to shed their own and others’ blood in the service of their cause, may come across as a grotesque caricature, but not such as to put off Mr Brown’s enthusiastic readers.

In many ways the Calvi case emerges today as a real life ‘Da Vinci Code’: a fiendishly complex plot, a struggle for power, skulduggery in the Vatican and ruthless individuals who do not baulk at murder. The real Opus Dei, with its secrecy, conservative values and attachment to material wealth, plays a key role in the story. As in Mr Brown’s fictional construct, clues of difficult interpretation have been widely scattered and have taken investigators years to piece together and to
interpret. Our guides to the Calvi case are not an American professor of religious symbology but a cast of extraordinary crooks and charlatans beside whom Mr Brown’s fictional characters pale into banality. They have an extraordinary tale to tell.

Roberto Calvi had good reason to look worried as he left the downmarket apartment in Chelsea Cloisters on the evening of Thursday, 17 June 1982. The man known for his cold stare and lack of social graces was looking particularly ill-at-ease as he travelled down in the lift in the company of two Italian-speaking men. For the first time in his adult life he had shaved off his moustache, though witnesses diverge as to when he had done this and whether he had removed it completely.

His destination on that evening was the fashionable San Lorenzo restaurant in Knightsbridge, a short distance by road from the barracks-like residence where he had spent an unhappy three days, but an entire world away in social terms. It was just the kind of place he had been trying to avoid, frequented by well-heeled and well-connected Italians, some of whom might recognize him. But a new witness, tracked down by Italian investigators some 20 years after the event, places him in that luxury restaurant on that fateful night.

We don’t know for sure who his dinner companions were. The new witness, a waiter who was serving tables in the restaurant at the time, says Calvi was in a group of four or five people. He identified photographs of two of the banker’s travelling companions as people whom he had seen in the restaurant at about that time. And he identified Umberto Ortolani, a
Catholic financier and member of the P2 masonic lodge, with whom Calvi had an intense business relationship, as a regular customer at San Lorenzo’s.

Another witness, who provided information to investigators from the finance police just months after Calvi’s death, had the Banco Ambrosiano chairman at dinner that evening at an unknown location in the company of a playboy drug-dealer. The man with whom Calvi ate his last supper, according to this account, was someone whose connections ranged from European aristocrats and antiques-collecting aesthetes to fascist terrorists and underworld thugs. The cocaine trafficker’s role in the Calvi affair, ignored by the first generation of investigators in Britain and Italy, became increasingly significant as investigations progressed.

If Calvi’s visit to London made any sense, it was as an opportunity to meet important new contacts or long-standing associates who could help him resolve his pressing financial problems. Blackmail was on the conversation menu as a desperate Calvi played his last cards in a dangerous game. Former accomplices might be induced to come to his aid if he threatened to reveal the illegal or immoral activities they had participated in together. Calvi was convinced of it, and it was a key part of his survival strategy.

We don’t know how the discussions went. No one has spoken of raised voices or a memorable dispute at Calvi’s table. But we can imagine the scene: one of his dinner companions leans over and speaks to him in hushed tones of the dangers he faces – a subject to which he was always receptive. The police, or mafia assassins, are on his trail, the diner says, and he must leave the country at once. A boat is waiting for him on the river Thames. It will take him downstream to the Port of London, where a larger ship awaits that will carry him abroad, to South America, where he has connections and extensive business interests. Calvi must leave immediately, in the clothes that he stands up in, his apparently solicitous
companion says. Someone else will return to Chelsea Cloisters to collect his luggage. How could he anticipate an unscheduled stop hard against the scaffolding under Blackfriars Bridge and the sudden noose slipped over his head?

Calvi was no saint and it is unlikely he would have given himself up willingly to be slaughtered, yet there is no evidence that he ever offered resistance, called for help, or fought back against his assassins. The last days of his life appear to have been part of a long, slow process of betrayal that came to a head in a final, dramatic meeting with his assassins over dinner at an upmarket Italian restaurant. At that moment he may have begun to suspect that his potential saviours were actually his executioners, but it was too late to change course.

If Jesus Christ was not present at the table, the interests of the church he founded certainly were. Not for nothing was Calvi known as ‘God’s banker’. He had represented the financial interests of the Roman Catholic church around the globe, acting as
un uomo di fiducia
(a man of trust) in some of its most secret and sensitive activities. One of the primary objects of Calvi’s blackmail in those last days was the Vatican, the very institution he had served with such devotion over decades. As a motive for murder, there was much more than ‘thirty pieces of silver’ at stake. And if Judas was not sitting at the San Lorenzo table with him, he was probably somewhere in the vicinity. For this is a tale of betrayal of trust: by Calvi, who was threatening to breach his duty of confidentiality as a banker and his oath of silence as a freemason, and by certain of his travelling companions, who were – allegedly – preparing to deliver him for execution.

Anthony Huntley’s encounter with the news was early and distressing. At 7.30 a.m. on an overcast Friday morning, he was on the walkway under the north arch of Blackfriars Bridge, one of three wide road bridges that span the Thames between the City of London and the borough of Southwark. As he walked along, the
Daily Express
postal clerk was tall enough to glance over the parapet and see the body of a man hanging by the neck from scaffolding above the mud-coloured river. The day was 18 June 1982 and the waves caused by his macabre discovery would reverberate through the world’s media for decades to come.

‘I looked over the parapet wall, down towards the river and saw a bald head with white tufts of hair over the ears,’ Huntley said in a statement made to the City of London Police five days later. ‘This didn’t really register at first but on taking a second and longer look, I saw there was a complete body hanging by the neck from a length of orange string that was tied to the top horizontal scaffolding tube on the east side of the construction of scaffolding poles.’ Huntley told police the man was dressed in a two-piece light grey suit and was without a tie. ‘I couldn’t see what footwear he had on because his feet were dangling in the water which was up to his ankle bones.’

Huntley was so stunned by what he had seen that after walking past he stopped on a balcony that projects over the Thames and looked back to confirm that it was real. He
arrived at the
Daily Express
office looking pale and shaken and it was one of his colleagues, Stephen Pullen, who made the first 999 call to alert the police. The two men then returned to Blackfriars Bridge to speak to the police and to make sure that the shocking sight of the hanged man had not been an illusion after all.

One of the first police officers on the scene was PC John Palmer of the City of London Police, an independent police force responsible for investigating crimes that take place in the City, London’s financial district. While expert in tackling financial crime, the City Police is unaccustomed to investigating crimes of violence, but the autonomous force declined to seek the assistance of their more experienced colleagues in the Metropolitan Police, whose writ runs throughout the rest of Greater London.

‘The man . . . had a length of yellow coloured cord tied in a slip knot around his neck and this cord was tied to the scaffolding about three feet above his head,’ Palmer recalled in a statement made the following day. ‘About a further three feet of the same cord was trailing downwards from the knot.’ The tide was on the ebb and the man’s feet were just touching the water by the time the body was removed by Thames River Police, a division of the Metropolitan Police, and taken on a police launch the short distance upstream to Waterloo Pier. ‘A search was made of the man’s clothing and during the search, apart from personal belongings, several pieces of masonry were found,’ PC Palmer’s account continued. ‘[A] half brick was found in his trousers under the fly, [a] half brick was found in his right-hand jacket pocket, two stones were in his right-hand trouser pocket and one stone was found in his left-hand trouser pocket.’ Further searches revealed that the man was carrying about £7,370 of cash, mainly in foreign currencies; a first indication that he was an individual of some wealth.

The body was subsequently taken to Milton Court mortuary where it was stripped. Palmer reported: ‘With the assistance of
a mortuary attendant, I took the man’s fingerprints and noted that the man had been wearing a grey two-piece suit (made by Maffioli), a white vest and undershorts, black socks and black casual shoes.’ Though PC Palmer does not mention it in his statement, the dead man was actually wearing two pairs of underpants, a second anomaly after the bricks in his pockets and against his crotch. The officer also noticed ‘scuff marks’ on the man’s shins, marks that were later determined to have occurred after his death – perhaps caused as the inert body was dragged over rough ground by his assassins, or simply from rough handling by police.