A convicted Mafioso and four other people went on trial today accused of the 1982 killing in London of Roberto Calvi, known as "God's Banker" because of his ties to the Vatican.
Roberto Calvi
Calvi's body was found dangling from a noose under London's Blackfriars Bridge in 1982, bricks and $15,000 in cash stuffed in his pockets.
Calvi's death sent shockwaves across Italy and cast a shadow over the Vatican. The case remains shrouded in mystery almost a quarter of a century on.
Calvi's Banco Ambrosiano had collapsed shortly before his death in what was at the time Italy's largest private banking failure. His death was at first ruled a suicide.
Rome prosecutors now say that the Mafia killed Calvi for stealing money from them as well as from Licio Gelli, former head of a secret masonic lodge tied to the Italian business and political elite.
They say tests on Calvi's body show he never touched the bricks in his pockets and was hanged after being killed.
Convicted mobster Pippo Calo, once known as the Mafia's "treasurer" because he looked after much of its accounts, listened to the proceedings via teleconference from a prison.
He was shown on a monitor in the courtroom, looking calm and wearing a dark jacket, his hands folded in his lap.
In a court document seen by Reuters, prosecutors say Calo, 74, ordered the murder. Calvi was "asphyxiated by strangulation and hanged in London under Blackfriars Bridge, on the Thames, in such a way as to simulate suicide."
The other defendants are Sardinian financier Flavio Carboni, his Austrian former girlfriend Manuela Kleinszig, businessman and alleged Rome crime boss Ernesto Diotallevi and Calvi's former bodyguard, Silvano Vittor.
"There is no, absolutely no proof of any kind," said Carboni, the only defendant in the courtroom.