Letter from Rome: Did the Holy See, wittingly or unwittingly, via its collaboration with the ill-fated Banco Ambrosiano once buy arms for the IRA?
This astonishing allegation is just one of the many unanswered questions raised by a new book, The Last Supper, written by Rome-based journalist Philip Willan, on the life and mysterious death of Roberto Calvi, oft referred to as "God's Banker", who was found dead, hanging from scaffolding under Blackfriars Bridge, London on June 18th, 1982.
The Calvi death remains an unsolved mystery. As he struggled to save his bankruptcy-threatened bank (it eventually collapsed in 1982 owing an estimated $1.3 billion) was he threatening to spill the beans on some of his most delicate banking "operations"? Did the Ambrosiano, at the request of the Vatican, help fund the Polish trade union movement, Solidarnosc? What exactly was the Vatican's relationship with Banco Ambrosiano?
Had the network of offshore companies set up by Calvi been used by organised crime to launder the proceeds of the heroin trade and were the Mafiosi now looking for their money? Did the bank help fund the purchase of arms for the late Saddam Hussein in Iraq? Did the bank supply funds to most of the leading Italian political parties of the day?
Via his membership of Licio Gelli's outlawed masonic lodge, P2, had Calvi put together a network of dangerous and ultimately fatal "working relationships"?
Twenty-five years on, the Calvi murder is still occupying the courts. Just two weeks ago, a court in Rome acquitted five people charged with Calvi's murder. Those cleared were Mafia boss Giuseppe "Pippo" Calò; the businessmen Ernesto Diotallevi and Flavio Carboni; Calvi's driver and bodyguard in his last days, Silvano Vittor; and Flavio Carboni's Austrian girlfriend Manuela Kleinszig.
So, the Calvi death retains its rightful place in Italy's Fame Hall of Unsolved Mystery. Who, if anyone, killed Calvi? Who decided to blow up Bologna train station, killing 85, in August 1980? Who was behind Ali Agca's attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II in May 1981? Why, on the evening of June 27th, 1980, did an Itavia DC 9 plane, on an internal flight from Bologna to Palermo, drop like a stone from the sky, crashing into the sea near the Sicilian island of Ustica, killing all 81 on board?
The list goes on, there are plenty of other such mysteries but what they all have in common is that no one has been found responsible for horrendous crimes.
The Calvi investigation did not get off to a good start. Initially, London police concluded that Calvi had committed suicide. In his book, Willan points out that at the recent Rome trial, the most damaging criticism of the original inquiry came from another police officer, Det Supt Trevor Smith, who had been asked to carry out a fresh examination of the case in July 2002.
Smith found a "catalogue of errors and omissions" - the knot in Calvi's noose had not been preserved; fingerprints were not taken from either the scaffolding or items found on his body; there was no investigation of international travel by Italian citizens around the time of Calvi's death; no bank accounts associated with Calvi were checked; his body was not photographed before removal from the scaffolding; bricks found in Calvi's pockets and down his fly (why would a person bent on suicide want to stick a brick down his fly?) were removed; perhaps worst of all, investigative activity was suspended for almost a month pending the outcome of the first inquest (which reached a verdict of suicide on July 23rd, 1982).
Was this all just shoddy police work or proof of a masonic plot? Officially, even if Italian public opinion had other ideas, Calvi's death remained a "suicide" until 1988 when a Milan civil court ruled he had been murdered and that, therefore, his life insurer was obliged to pay the four billion lira (€2 million) owed on his life policy.
Willan's book contains myriad possible explanations for Calvi's death, explanations largely based on the evidence of a "cast of extraordinary crooks and charlatans" beside whom the protagonists in Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, he writes, "pale into banality".
And the IRA connection? Here, we need to reach for a generous pinch of salt. Willan recalls a 1986 interview given to Italian news weekly, L'Espressoby Francesco Pazienza, another of the "rogues' gallery", a former secret services agent, former consultant and lobbyist for Calvi and someone currently in prison for his role in the fraudulent collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano. Pazienza recalls: "The company Erin SA, controlled by the Vatican, owed the Ambrosiano more than $60 million in 1981. Well, in mid-1981, the German secret services and the CIA received a report from the English security services asking them to investigate the purchase of strategic material by a well-known German arms dealer, material that was destined for the IRA. The report referred to a "Panamanian company, considered close to Catholic circles and probably the Vatican, named Erin SA".
Willan then asks if "the Vatican had been buying arms for a terrorist organisation?" Yet another of the unanswered questions raised by this fascinating book, one which takes the reader on a disturbing ride through 25 years of plots, counter-plots and conspiracy theories linked to the worlds of organised crime and high finance.
The Last Supper , by Philip Willan, is published by Robinson (London).