The Last Supper (35 page)

Jaimes came forward in 1993, and like so many pieces of the Calvi jigsaw his story was strange and scarcely believable. In a nutshell, Jaimes claimed that he had used his connections in the Venezuelan church to help European investors get round currency restrictions in their own countries and invest their fortunes discreetly in the US stock market. The biggest operation of this type had involved the investment of a staggering $2.2 billion in bonds on the American Stock Exchange – not the better-known New York Stock Exchange. The investment had been carried out through a Panamanian company called Hemisphere Entrepreneurs Incorporated on behalf of six parties. Five of these were tentatively identified by Jaimes as: the Opus Dei-linked Spanish sherry magnate Jose Maria Ruiz-Mateos, the Banco Ambrosiano, Roberto Calvi, the IOR, and Opus Dei itself. The sixth, it has been suggested, was Cosa Nostra in conjunction with the Camorra.

Jaimes told his story to Kroll Associates, the detective agency working for the Calvi family, to the weekly news magazine
L’Espresso
, to the City of London Police and to Rome magistrates, who promptly arrested him on suspicion
of perjury and withholding material information. The Banco Ambrosiano had been one of the financial channels that fed his offshore investment schemes, Jaimes told the magistrates, much of the money passing through the bank’s subsidiaries in Peru, Nicaragua and Beirut. Curiously, the Ambrosiano had no representative office in a major financial centre such as London – where permission to open a branch had been refused – but was present on the ground in both Beirut and Teheran, where particularly delicate types of business were the order of the day.

In his statement to the City Police, Jaimes said he was telephoned by Calvi in the early afternoon of Wednesday 16 June, with a request that he meet him at Chelsea Cloisters, which was not far from his home in Hans Place. ‘I assumed that Calvi wanted to discuss something with me in connection with the Panamanian transaction as there was no other reason for a meeting,’ he told the police. Calvi met him at reception and the two men talked for about 20 minutes in the Chelsea Cloisters entrance lobby, sitting side by side on a sofa. ‘He looked normal, had a moustache, was smiling and was well dressed and very correct in his manner, but at the same time, as always, he seemed a little timid or reserved. He did not invite me to go up to his room,’ Jaimes said. Calvi asked him how long it would take to convert part of the Panamanian investment into cash and was disappointed to learn from him that it could not be done in under several weeks. ‘He then asked me whether it would be possible to obtain a bank loan using the portfolio as security and I told him that provided the six shareholders gave their consent this would be possible and could be arranged in a few days. He seemed very pleased and greatly satisfied with my reply and said something to the effect “then the problem is solved”.’

Jaimes provided a detailed account of the financial channels involved in the Panamanian investment, including the names of Opus Dei-linked operatives whose identity he would have
been unlikely to have known if he had not been personally involved in the affair. That evening Calvi called his wife and daughter, telling both of them that something marvellous was about to happen that would solve all their problems. Both women believed that Opus Dei was the key to solving the Ambrosiano’s financial crisis and here was a financier allegedly representing Opus Dei interests who appeared to offer an answer to the banker’s prayers.

Access to the Hemisphere Entrepreneurs fund could be obtained by presenting a token, Jaimes said: half of a piece of security paper cut across in a zigzag manner with a filigree border, with the same number on the upper and lower part. A sealed envelope with five or six credit slips and Jaimes’ half token were in a safety deposit box in the Banque de Paris et Pays Bas in Geneva, the Venezuelan financier told the police. Unfortunately for his credibility, there was nothing to back up his story when Italian magistrates finally gained access to what should have been his safety deposit at the Geneva branch of Paribas, and several of the bankers and businessmen with whom he claimed to have been in contact failed to confirm his story. Had Jaimes met Calvi in an attempt to dupe him or had he never run into the Ambrosiano chairman in London at all? Had the witnesses who contradicted him lied to conceal their involvement in a highly sensitive international financial scandal? The Venezuelan, who was no stranger to scandal himself and died in poverty in Colombia in 2001, may have invented the whole story for his 15 minutes of media fame or for some more abstruse conspiratorial purpose. The fact remains, however, that he was a genuine player in the same financial game as Calvi and his story contained many elements that only a player could have known.

That afternoon Carboni arrived from Amsterdam with the Kleinszigs in tow and checked into the Hilton Hotel on Park
Lane, opposite Hyde Park; the kind of address Calvi would have been happy to operate from if he hadn’t feared recognition. Vittor and Calvi hurried over to meet them, but Calvi refused to enter the hotel and the group went for a walk in the park instead. Carboni and Calvi talked privately during the walk, about Calvi’s efforts to solve the Ambrosiano’s financial crisis and his urgent need for better accommodation. It was at this point, Carboni says, that he remembered the London connection of his Sardinian mistress: William Morris, a local government officer, and his Italian wife Fidalma. The Morrises would help Carboni in a fruitless search for a new flat for Calvi and their 21-year-old daughter would act as the Sardinian’s guide and interpreter. Later, police say, she provided him with an alibi in connection with one of the unresolved mysteries of his stay in London: the visit of a private plane to Gatwick airport on the day after Calvi’s death.

The last day of Calvi’s life began early for Carboni. At 6.59 a.m. on the Thursday he called the Rome telephone number of Wilfredo Vitalone, a lawyer who Calvi hoped would help resolve his legal problems and who was a close associate of Giulio Andreotti. At 7.46 he called Calvi in Chelsea Cloisters and at 8.13 he was on the phone to Hans Kunz’s office in Geneva; Kunz was to provide Anna with the money for her airline ticket to Washington. Calvi also was on the phone, calling his daughter, who was now in Zurich, to tell her she must leave at once for the United States, and telling her about the arrest and ‘torture’ of Pellicani – a false rumour that had increased his sense of alarm.

Later that morning the Ambrosiano board met, voting to revoke Calvi’s powers as chairman lest he be ‘induced to commit acts against his will’, to dissolve itself and to call in the Bank of Italy. The meeting ended at 5 p.m. Two hours later a reporter from
L’Espresso
was talking on the phone to Rosone when the sounds of an unfolding tragedy could be heard over the open line: muffled noises, shouts, a woman crying. ‘What’s
going on?’ the reporter asked. ‘My God, Calvi’s secretary has killed herself . . . she’s thrown herself from the window,’ came Rosone’s reply. Graziella Corrocher, a 55-year-old spinster who had given years of loyal service to Calvi and the bank, had thrown herself from a fourth-floor window into the Ambrosiano’s inner courtyard. She left a note referring to the depression for which she had been receiving treatment and expressing the hope that Calvi ‘be doubly cursed for all the harm he has done to the bank and the group, of which we were once so proud’.
³
If Calvi had spoken to someone from the bank that evening and been informed of the day’s events he would have had plenty of reason to be depressed. If he himself was not thinking of suicide, his thoughts must certainly have turned to escape.

If Calvi was not travelling to Brighton or meeting with Jaimes Berti, as Vittor maintains, he appears to have spent a lot of time waiting around in his apartment for Carboni to resolve his accommodation problem. Over the years new witnesses have come forward to fill in some of the gaps in his last day. Vittor himself changed some of the details of his story, telling Rome magistrates in December 2003 that Calvi was ready to make a move on 17 June to a luxury villa on the outskirts of Liverpool – a possible prelude to taking ship to South America? The villa setting would now be appropriate for a business meeting with two very important people, Vittor said.

A restaurant where he and the Kleinszig girls ate that day, and where the sisters spent a long time waiting, may have been Pucci Pizza, the Italian restaurant on the King’s Road frequented by Sergio Vaccari and owned by the nightclub owner Giuseppe Pucci Albanese. His restaurant was conveniently close to Chelsea Cloisters but may also have represented a point of contact between the Calvi party and criminal forces capable of organizing the banker’s physical elimination.

In 2006 another source came forward with a story placing Calvi himself in Pucci Pizza on the night of his death. The
source, a former Italian restaurant worker in London, contacted a RAI 3 current affairs programme to tell them of his meeting with Calvi on that Thursday evening. The man was visiting Pucci Pizza to discuss the offer of a job as restaurant manager. He was sitting at a table near the door when Roberto Calvi came in with a large bag and asked if he could sit down. Calvi was without his moustache – Vittor says he had shaved it off that day – and stared at the man with an intense, vacant gaze, to such an extent that he thought he might have been homosexual. Calvi wrote something on a page from his diary, tore it out, crumpled it up and left it in the ashtray. The source said he looked at the sheet after Calvi’s departure and saw it bore the name Carboni, a fact he remembered because his then employer was called Carbone. The man, who agreed to be filmed only from behind and later repeated his account to the Rome prosecutors, said he had known the mafia exile Francesco Di Carlo in London and that Di Carlo knew Pucci Albanese.

Source ‘Podgora’ told investigators in 1983 that Calvi had consumed his last supper in the company of Sergio Vaccari, who had been the last person to see him alive. Another witness who claimed to have seen Calvi in a more upmarket London restaurant than Pucci Pizza was traced by Italian magistrates in 2004. Vincenzo Mortillaro said he had seen Calvi in the chic San Lorenzo restaurant in Knightsbridge – a favourite with Princess Diana – where he worked as a waiter, a few days before the news of the banker’s death was reported in the press. He thought it had probably been on a Thursday evening. Mortillaro said Calvi was in a group of four or five people and he had seen him from a distance in another section of the restaurant. When questioned at the Calvi murder trial he repeated his claim, identifying Flavio Carboni and Michaela Kleinszig as visitors to the restaurant and telling the court he had recognized a photo of Umberto Ortolani as a regular visitor to the San Lorenzo over the years. The latter reminded
him of the American actor who starred in the television series
Magnum P.I.
The round-faced and staid-looking Ortolani, who died in 2002, would probably have been flattered to be compared to someone as glamorous as the actor Tom Sellek.

Mortillaro, who now works as a waiter in Italy, was asked why he hadn’t come forward voluntarily to offer his testimony. ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘As far as I’m concerned the information was of no use to the investigation.’ He particularly remembered a young woman in a mini-dress with curly brown hair who was with Calvi on that evening. She had visited the restaurant four or five times, spoke English with a German accent and told him on one occasion she was waiting for her sister. ‘I remember the girl made an impression on me because she was very vivacious,’ Mortillaro told the court. He recalled discussing Calvi’s visit with the other waiters after the news of the banker’s death was reported in the newspapers. Several of his colleagues at the restaurant were Sardinians from Porto Rotondo, the stamping ground of Flavio Carboni, he said.

Podgora’s report of 5 July 1983 said Vittor had seen the people who had collected Calvi from his apartment on the evening of his death. ‘These had been sent by Gelli and Carboni, who were in London,’ Eligio Paoli told his handlers.

If Vittor, as he insists, did not see the people with whom Calvi left Chelsea Cloisters, another witness, who was first traced by Calvi family investigators in 1989, said that
he
did. Cecil Coomber, a South African painter who was a long-term resident of Chelsea Cloisters, said two men speaking Italian had knocked on the door of his eighth-floor flat on that Thursday evening. Some time later he and a friend had seen them again as they waited to go down in the lift. This time – it was around 10 p.m. – the two men were in the company of a third man whom Coomber was later able to identify as Calvi. Coomber told Italian investigators he had been struck by Calvi’s narrow, Hitler-style moustache – already shaved
off completely according to Vittor – and his penetrating gaze. The group appeared to be put out at running into Coomber and his friend and Calvi in particular looked worried. The banker was not carrying a bag, Coomber said, but one of his companions might have had a bag or overnight case in his hand. The Italians left by a back entrance to Chelsea Cloisters, while Coomber and his friend went out the front. Coomber, who had a reputation for being well up on Chelsea Cloisters gossip, said he had heard from cleaners in the building that Calvi seemed petrified during his stay, opening his door with great circumspection and even moving a desk in front of it to block access to flat 881 during the night.

Calvi’s apparently empty days were spent in similar fashion, according to Vittor. The two would get up between 8 and 9 a.m. and get ready for breakfast at an open-air bar some 200 metres from Chelsea Cloisters, Calvi normally tucking into a plate of fried eggs. They would walk back to their apartment via a newsagent, where Calvi bought the Italian financial newspaper
Il Sole 24 Ore
to keep an eye on the stock market and was upset to see that the news of his flight was on the front pages of all the Italian newspapers. Vittor picked up a copy of the
Gazzetta dello Sport
to read about the ongoing World Cup finals in Spain. He spent much of his time in the flat watching the matches on television as Italy progressed towards a final, unexpected victory; much to Calvi’s irritation, since the sound of the TV preyed on his already frayed nerves. ‘Calvi spent his time in the flat walking around in slippers, boxer shorts and a vest,’ Vittor told me. When he returned from a clothes-shopping trip with the Kleinszig girls – he had left Austria without luggage – Vittor found Calvi’s mood had changed for the worse. ‘I found him irritable, also towards me for the first time. He was more worried than ever because I had arrived late and he had no information from Flavio. He told me he needed to meet people but that he couldn’t receive important people in that place.’