Roberto Calvi

Roberto Calvi (1982)

Roberto Calvi (born April 13, 1920 in Milan , † June 17, 1982 in London ) was an Italian banker. Most recently he was president of Banco Ambrosiano , the majority of which belonged to the Vatican bank Istituto per le Opere di Religione (IOR) and was involved in the laundering of drug money in Italy and South America as well as in other secret financial transactions of the Vatican , the Mafia , the secret box Propaganda Due (P2 ) and various political parties . Because of his close relationship with the IOR, Calvi has been referred to as “God's banker”, especially in the media.

Calvi's career as “God's banker” was marked by a rapid rise, close ties to the Vatican, funds that flowed to the ruling political parties and financial collapse with subsequent desperate attempts to save himself by blackmailing Vatican dignitaries and politicians. In this respect , too, his career was similar to that of Michele Sindona , the other disgraced “banker of God” who was suspected of having done money laundering for the Cosa Nostra as early as the 1970s .

Calvi was found hanged on Blackfriars Bridge in the City of London in 1982 . According to the Italian public prosecutor's office, he was murdered by the Sicilian mafia .

Life

Roberto Calvi's father worked at Banca Commerciale Italiana , one of the largest banks in Italy, and soon became a manager there. After the Second World War , Roberto initially worked in the same bank, but switched to Banco Ambrosiano in 1947 . He was promoted by Michele Sindona , a leading partner, Paul Marcinkus , director of the Vatican Bank from 1971, and, thanks to the good relations of his father, also by Carlo Alessandro Canesi, one of the senior executives and future director general. Since 1957 he has been carrying out financial transactions and money laundering of drug money on a large scale for various groups of the Mafia . He was since 1958 with Giovanni Battista Montini, later Pope Paul VI. , friends. In 1963 he was head of the foreign department and deputy general manager under Canesi. From 1968 onwards, Calvi began shifting large sums of money between his bank, the Vatican Bank (which was not subject to any state control) and various Swiss banks. In 1971 he became General Manager and in 1974 President of Banco Ambrosiano. He kept the appearance of an extremely serious businessman. From 1971 at the latest he took part in meetings of the secret lodge Propaganda Due and managed considerable assets for Licio Gelli and other members of the lodge.

From mid-1971, the Banco Ambrosiano set up branches and letterbox companies in numerous offshore financial centers . He founded a subsidiary in Luxembourg , which opened branches in Zurich , the Bahamas , Panama and other financial havens and tax havens. Huge amounts of money of unknown origin poured into the bank. The Sicilian Cosa Nostra laundered part of its income from prostitution , heroin and arms trafficking in its banking network. And the Colombian Medellín cartel was also laundering money from the cocaine trade there, partly with the support of senior officials from the Vatican Bank.

In April 1974, Sindona lost large parts of its assets in a stock market crash , which resulted in the Franklin Bank , which is in Sindona's possession, having to file for bankruptcy. This, in turn, led their creditors to charge Sindona with fraudulent bankruptcy . In this context, it became public for the first time that Calvi was also responsible for losses of around 40 million US dollars that the Vatican Bank suffered in this crash. Since then, the media have repeatedly speculated about the connections between the mafia and the Vatican's money flows. At the end of 1981 Ambrosiano was the largest private bank in Italy.

After the beginning of the pontificate of John Paul II , with the help of Calvis, considerable funds from the Vatican and the CIA were transferred to Poland via the Banco Ambrosiano in the late 1970s in order to benefit Solidarność there. Support from other dissidents in the Eastern bloc was also suspected (but not confirmed) .

Banco Ambrosiano scandal

In the course of investigations by the Banca d'Italia into illegal foreign exchange transactions, which had revealed the first irregularities as early as 1977, it was found in 1981 that Calvi had transferred more than 27 billion lire abroad without authorization. For this he received a four-year prison sentence in July 1981 for bank and currency offenses in the first instance. After attempting suicide, he was able to exchange detention for house arrest. During his time in custody and until his trial was resumed, he had made numerous suggestions to lawyers and journalists that he had information that would shake the Italian party system. In fact, he only gave one crucial indication of an illegal $ 21 million loan to the Socialist Party. In autumn he was allowed to return to the helm of Banco Ambrosiano. A “letter of comfort” from IOR boss Archbishop Marcinkus is seen by the banking world as security for further loans worth millions.

Almost two years later, the Vatican bank transferred IOR "voluntarily" and without an official acknowledgment of guilt, 240 million dollars to the Ambrosiano Bank, in order to calm its angry creditors, who felt cheated by Marcinkus' "letter of comfort". The public prosecutor's office in Rome never executed an arrest warrant for Marcinkus, although the investigations found that large sums of money had been transferred to bogus companies and bogus branches abroad with Marcinkus' knowledge. The Vatican sent him to the desert in Arizona. Calvi's business partner Michele Sindona was found dead with cyanide poisoning in his prison cell on March 20, 1986 . The bank collapsed in 1987, and the Vatican reported around $ 3 billion as bad debts.

Escape and murder

On June 10, 1982, Calvi fled Italy after the Banco Ambrosiano, which he still ran as president, had to file for bankruptcy. The bank's debt is estimated at between $ 700 million and $ 1.2 billion, depending on the source.

On June 13, 1982, Calvi moved into a hotel room in Chelsea . He was found hanged on June 18, 1982 in the City of London under the bridge of the "Black Monks" , as the Dominicans (English. Black friars) are called in England. The hands of his non-waterproof Patek Philippe wristwatch had stopped at 1:52 o'clock. Calvi's 120-pound body was waist-deep in the Thames, the pockets of his suit bulging with bricks and lumps of cement. His death was initially classified as a suicide by the British judiciary .

On the same day that Calvi's body was found, his secretary Graziella Corrocher fell to her death from a window in the bank in Milan.

The body was exhumed in 1992, and by the late 1990s, new forensic methods became increasingly clearer that Calvi had been murdered. Two decades after his death, a team of experts - including Bernd Brinkmann , German professor of forensic medicine - reconstructed the last minutes of Calvi's life. In April 2002 it was confirmed that, contrary to the initial assumptions, Calvi had not taken his own life, but had actually been "suicide" (in Italian, the word for "committing suicide" can be used to describe such cases) transitive verb reshape). The Italian public prosecutor then resumed the proceedings.

Process and consequences

On October 6, 2005, the trial of the murder of Roberto Calvi began at the gates of Rome in a courthouse that had been converted into a fortress. The process should take a year and a half. The Mafia boss Pippo Calò and four other people were accused of murdering Calvi. On June 6, 2007, all five of the defendants were acquitted, four of them for lack of evidence. The theses of the prosecution in this case were based on the testimony of a “ Pentito ”: Thereafter, Calvi managed the drug funds for the Corleonesi in the same way as Michele Sindona had done for the Inzerillo - Gambino- Patola- Bontade group and he became also murdered for proving to be unreliable.

Both Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi belonged to Freemason Lodge P2 (also known as "Propaganda Due" or "Propaganda 2"). In March 1981, when Milan examining magistrates were investigating Michele Sindona's fake kidnapping, they discovered in the office of the master of the chair , Licio Gelli , a list of 962 members of the P2, on which, in addition to Calvi and Sindona, the entire leadership of the secret services, 44 MPs, senior military officials, judges, police officers, senior businessmen, bankers and journalists were found.

For the public prosecutors Maria Monteleone and Luca Tescaroli, the reports left no doubt that Calvi was hanged. Of particular interest was Flavio Carboni, who for decades had been a dazzling representative of the Italian business and glamor world with good connections to politics and contacts to the Mafia. Calvi had to die, so prosecutor Tescaroli,

" because he embezzled or speculated mafia funds ;
so that even after the impending collapse of Banco Ambrosiano, its customers and business partners would remain safe and their profitable business could continue ;
to prevent Calvi from carrying out his threat to blackmail political leaders and high Vatican dignitaries . "

After the investigation, the Italian public prosecutor came to the conclusion that the murder was committed by the Sicilian mafia.

However, the judges acquitted all five defendants for lack of evidence, with four of the acquittals being second class. Prosecutor Tescaroli had demanded life imprisonment for the men, but overall he was satisfied and declared that after 25 years it was already a success that “the trial had actually taken place”.

Shortly before his death, Calvi is said to have said: "If something happens to me, the Pope must resign."

Movies

1990: The Godfather - Part III . - The film is based in part on the book In God's Name ( In the name of God? ) By David Yallop . The figure of Frederick Keinszig was based on Roberto Calvi; that of Archbishop Gilday to Paul Marcinkus.
2002: I Banchieri di Dio: Il caso Calvi (roughly: “God's Bankers: The Calvi Case”), directed by Giuseppe Ferrara, Italy.
2008: Il Divo - La Spettacolare Vita Di Giulio Andreotti Director: Paolo Sorrentino, Italy 2008

literature

Heribert Blondiau, Udo Gümpel: The Vatican justifies the means: murder of God's banker . Patmos, Düsseldorf 2002, ISBN 3-491-72417-1 .
Rupert Cornwell: God's Banker: The Life and Death of Roberto Calvi . Victor Gollancz, London 1983, ISBN 0-575-03351-7 .
Larry Gurwin: The Calvi Affair: Death of a Banker . Macmillan, London 1983, ISBN 0-333-35321-8 .
Alessandro Silj: Crime, Politics, Democracy in Italy . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-518-11911-7 .
Philip Willan: The Last Supper: The Mafia, the Masons and the killing of Roberto Calvi . Constable & Robinson, London 2007, ISBN 1-84529-296-0 .
David Yallop: In the Name of God ?: The mysterious death of the 33-day Pope Johannes Paul I. Droemer Knaur, Munich 1984, ISBN 3-426-26160-X .
John Dickie: Cosa Nostra - The History of the Mafia . S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 978-3-596-17106-4 .