The Last Supper (42 page)

That there was a certain tension surrounding the proceedings became evident when the second prosecutor who had participated in the investigation, Maria Monteleone, announced she was dropping out at the start of the trial for ‘personal reasons’. She was replaced as substitute prosecutor by an older male colleague who seldom attended and almost never spoke. The remaining prosecutor, Luca Tescaroli, sometimes gave the impression of being outnumbered and outgunned by the team of aggressive lawyers representing the defendants. Charged with tracking down and summonsing witnesses, continuing a parallel investigation into unresolved aspects of the case and preparing his own cross-examinations, the young magistrate from north-east Italy – aged 40 when the trial began – appeared to have little visible assistance from the organs of the state that one might have expected to be supporting him. His task was immense. He had a complex tale to tell, through witnesses called out of chronological order and handicapped by physiologically failing memories or an understandable desire to forget. Before the court had finished hearing the prosecution’s witnesses it discovered that 25 on the list were no longer living, while others proved untraceable or simply refused to attend. Witnesses resident abroad could not be compelled and those living in Italy frequently invoked ill-health. Comprehension was made more difficult by the chaotic state of the documentary evidence, made available to defence lawyers on DVD. Faded photocopies, frequent repetitions and the inclusion of irrelevant bureaucratic material served to bury the truth under the mountain of paperwork generated in more than two decades of investigation.

Judge D’Andria was determined to set a cracking pace, and showed himself to be even-handed, authoritarian and highly intolerant of time-wasting. In contrast, Tescaroli proceeded through the evidence with slow, at times exasperatingly slow, deliberation, earning himself the nickname ‘the sloth’ from his opponents on the defence benches. One reluctant witness
was scathing of his oratorial style and the sometimes soporific tone of his voice. ‘I’d send him to work as a postman,’ he said during a pause in the proceedings.

The trial gave an opportunity finally to clarify some of the forensic aspects pertaining to Calvi’s death. Calvi’s body was subjected to three autopsies, the first by Professor Simpson in London, a second in Milan after its return to Italy and a third in 1998, when it was exhumed from the family tomb in the village cemetery at Drezzo. On this occasion one of the experts was the anthropologist Luigi Capasso, who had previously honed his skills on the 5,000-year-old remains of ‘Oetzi the Iceman’, whose mummified body had emerged from a shrinking Alpine glacier in 1991. Experts called by the prosecutor and the Calvi family say their findings confirm the hypothesis that Calvi was murdered, a conclusion naturally contested by the defendants’ forensic experts. Professor Capasso examined the microscopic traces of material deposited under Calvi’s fingernails and failed to find the elements that should have been there if he had committed suicide: rust from the scaffolding poles and brick and limestone dust from the bricks and stones found in Calvi’s pockets. ‘Under our fingernails we have a record of all our activities lasting for about three months,’ Capasso told me during a pause in the trial. ‘We found traces of serpentine stone coming from another site under Calvi’s fingernails, but no traces of brick, limestone, or basalt from the bricks he was supposed to have handled. Murder is the only reasonable explanation. This is the scientific evidence, but why did the experts who worked on this before us not study it?’
¹

Professor Berndt Brinkmann, the head of forensic medicine at the university of Munster and leader of one of the prosecutor’s teams of forensic experts, confirmed the murder analysis. The failure to find traces of rust or paint from the scaffolding on Calvi’s hands and the soles of his shoes demonstrated that he could not have climbed along the scaffolding under his
own steam, Brinkmann told the court. Brinkmann’s team had examined Calvi’s clothes in detail and found that one of his fly buttons had been knocked off and the cloth damaged by the violence with which one of the stones was thrust on top of his genitals. Other experts testified later that the stone appeared to have been inserted through the flies, and therefore most likely by a third party. If Calvi had done it himself, they said, he would simply have sucked in his stomach and pushed the stone down the front of his trousers. Traces of hydrocarbons compatible with the varnish of a boat had been found in the seat and calf area of Calvi’s trousers, Brinkmann added, indicating that he had probably sat in a boat. There were serious omissions in Professor Simpson’s autopsy, Brinkmann said, to such an extent that he had to wonder whether the autopsy had really been carried out by the eminent pathologist at all. Brinkmann placed the time of death at between 2.45 a.m. and 3.30 a.m. and said Calvi’s body had not been submerged more than 26 cm up his lower leg.
²

Professor Angela Gallop, a British forensic scientist hired by the Calvi family, confirmed Brinkmann’s murder hypothesis but contradicted him on a number of details. Professor Gallop, who set the time of death at between 2.10 a.m. and 3.05 a.m., said there was evidence that Calvi’s shirt, vest and underpants had been submerged in the Thames, which had come up to the level of his waist. She acknowledged that there had been planks on the scaffolding, which would have been under water until 3 a.m., and if Calvi had walked along them after that time then the absence of rust or paint on his shoes would cease to be significant. An experiment using some of Calvi’s clothes and with a stone stuffed down a volunteer’s crotch showed that the stone moved around and left scratch marks on the man’s legs, as well as making it very difficult to clamber down a ladder, she said. ‘The problem we all had was that the original investigation was not very thorough,’ Gallop told the court. ‘I understand from the river police
that it would have been perfectly possible to put the nose of a boat into the scaffolding on the ebb tide. The evidence shows suicide was improbable.’

Despite the best will of Judge D’Andria, the court’s progress in the early months was slow, sometimes pursuing apparent irrelevancies in exasperating detail, or grappling with witnesses who were unable or unwilling to remember. The defence strategy of Ernesto Diotallevi’s combative lawyer, Pierpaolo Dell’Anno, proved particularly effective. ‘Do you know my client? Do you know of his involvement in any crime? Do you know if he was involved in the Calvi murder?’ he would ask. The answer would come, over and again: ‘No.’ And the prosecution’s case was not helped by the poor quality of many of its police and expert witnesses. Many seemed to have an incomplete knowledge of the overall story, passing responsibility for particular areas of research to other colleagues, who in their turn would plead ignorance as well.

Sometimes the witnesses were illuminating, however, going even beyond the prosecutor’s intentions. One such case was the testimony of Renato Squatriti, an elderly antiquarian who had been a partner of Sergio Vaccari in the London Restoration Centre in Westbourne Grove. Vaccari had joined the business as a sleeping partner, taking care of the accounts and the administration. Elegant and sophisticated, he had left his father’s printing business in Milan because he was afraid of the Red Brigades, Squatriti said. The two had worked together for seven or eight months, until one day Vaccari had come to the office drugged to the eyeballs, and Squatriti had decided to put an end to the relationship. Vaccari was of right-wing views and a braggart, Squatriti said. ‘He boasted of belonging to [Stefano Delle Chiaie’s right-wing] Avanguardia Nazionale, to P2, to [a non-existent] P4. He was a lion in appearance and a rabbit in reality.’

Squatriti became concerned at whispered conversations over the telephone and gentlemen of unsettling appearance who came to look for Vaccari at the Restoration Centre. ‘The work I did depended on total trust. I did work for the Queen, for Sotheby’s and Christie’s,’ he said. Squatriti went on to identify photographs of people he had seen in contact with Vaccari, some of whom were looking for him insistently after he and Vaccari had parted ways. Vaccari had offered to give him his new address, but Squatriti decided he preferred not to know. The names of the people in contact with Vaccari, he said, were Domenico Balducci, a Magliana Band loan-shark who was murdered in Rome in September 1981, Giulio Di Carlo, a Cosa Nostra member and brother of Francesco Di Carlo, and Giuseppe Bellinghieri, the drug trafficker. Two men with Sicilian accents had come to the London Restoration Centre asking for Vaccari not long before his death. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll find him,’ they had said, in a less than reassuring manner. Vaccari may have sensed that he was in serious trouble and was planning to leave London, Squatriti said. He had seen him for the last time on the afternoon of the day he was killed. ‘He walked up to me with an ice-cream cone in his hand – it was summer – and he told me he would be leaving the next day to follow the sun.’

Squatriti’s testimony touched on one of the most sensitive aspects of the ongoing secret investigation. With an associate, Vaccari was known to have rented apartments in a block of flats at 92 Moscow Road for use as ‘safe houses’. When police visited one of the flats they found it had been ‘wiped down’ to remove fingerprints. ‘Roberto Calvi could have been murdered there,’ a British investigator told me. ‘It had clearly been wiped down. You don’t do that unless something fairly heinous has happened there.’ Suspicions of Vaccari’s role in the Calvi murder have also increased with the discovery that he was looking to hire or purchase a boat at about the time
Calvi visited London. ‘We know he visited the London Boat Show,’ another investigator said.

Of all the five defendants, the one who followed proceedings most assiduously was Pippo Calò. The mafia’s former ‘ambassador’ to Rome did not have many competing claims on his time: he was serving a life sentence in prison already. The most serious crime of which he had been convicted – and for which he consistently denies responsibility – was a terrorist train bombing two days before Christmas 1984. Sixteen people were killed and 180 injured when a remote-controlled bomb ripped through a train as it entered a tunnel between Florence and Bologna. The era of military coups and the ‘strategy of tension’ had come to an end by this time, so the significance of the bombing remained indecipherable. Prosecutors argued that it was the joint work of the mafia, the Camorra, right-wing terrorists and members of the Magliana Band, all of them groups with which Calò had personal contact. The atrocity was interpreted as an attempt to distract attention from an increasingly incisive investigation into the activities of Cosa Nostra in Sicily based on the testimony of the historic supergrass Tommaso Buscetta. If it wasn’t intended to bring about a military coup, it could have been a way of reminding organs of the state of previous complicities. Calò was convicted after police found explosives and remote control devices similar to those used in the bombing at a country house he owned and after the court heard evidence that his organization had commissioned such devices from a German technician with connections in the Rome underworld. Given the suspicion that Calvi could have been involved in funding the Bologna bombing, it is significant that one of his suspected murderers should carry such a grave terrorist offence on his criminal record.

Calò was punctiliously polite in his contacts with the court, asking the judge’s permission to rebut allegations against him
whenever mafia witnesses mentioned his name. This sometimes resulted in angry exchanges with his accusers, with Calò invoking his devotion to Cosa Nostra’s archaic moral code. It was inconceivable that he had ever had contact with certain
pentiti
, he insisted, because they were notorious for their sexual immorality or for their contacts with the police. For a man accused of more than 70 murders, the unforgivable crime, it would appear, was for a
mafioso
to take a mistress.

Calò insisted on appearing in court in person for his cross-examination, travelling from his prison at Ascoli Piceno to mount an impassioned rebuttal of the charges against him. He appeared in court on 10 October 2006, elegant in an open-necked blue shirt and blazer and accompanied by five prison guards in their distinctive pale blue berets. The determination with which he rejected the most serious charges against him was perhaps surprising for someone already serving multiple life sentences, but his defence was somewhat cramped by the rigorous rules that he imposed upon himself. He had chosen to disassociate himself from Cosa Nostra, he told the court – following the example of terrorists disillusioned by the armed struggle – but he would not volunteer information that might damage former associates. As a result, he attempted to mount a paradoxical self-defence that made use of the earlier testimony of
pentiti
, where it suited his purposes, while damning them as liars when they accused him.

‘Do you know if the mafia exists?’ Prosecutor Tescaroli asked him. ‘I don’t know what the mafia is,’ Calò replied. ‘Cosa Nostra is something else. I have acknowledged I belonged to it, but this mafia I know nothing about.’ Despite being a member of the illegal organization, he had not engaged in crime himself, Calò said, with the possible exception of a 5 million lire flutter on the cigarette smuggling business in the mid 1970s. Above all, he had not been involved in the Christmas 1984 train bombing, or in the mafia bombings that killed judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992.
He had been living as a tranquil pensioner in Rome at the time of Calvi’s death, he insisted. ‘There are two accusations I can’t rid myself of: that I was the mafia’s treasurer and the head of the Magliana Band. I have been dragging them behind me for the last 20 years.’ Calò said he was tired of being accused by the
pentiti
, who were simply trying to ingratiate themselves with the prosecutors. ‘I know I’ll die in prison, but I can’t accept it. I can’t accept these accusations on the bomb massacres.’

Calò’s archaic moral code emerged clearly during his cross-examination. He had fallen out with the historic
pentito
Tommaso Buscetta over the latter’s sexual immorality. The man had had the gall to turn up at Calò’s home in Rome accompanied by a Brazilian woman whom he presented as his wife, but who wasn’t. And all these Magliana Band
pentiti
who claimed to have known him: it was inconceivable he would have had anything to do with people who used drugs all day and frequented prostitutes!