The Last Supper (40 page)

DI John White, who oversaw the controversial early stages of the investigation, insists his officers investigated the case competently and in good faith and that there is still no conclusive proof that Calvi was murdered. His recollections of the case differed significantly from those of Robert Clarke. The retired police officer said there had been no delay in gathering Clarke’s information. ‘Clarke was interviewed on the Monday. The force produced a press release and Clarke got in contact. I went to see him in his office in Gray’s Inn. It must have been the Monday or Tuesday,’ he told me.

White acknowledged that when Calvi’s body was removed from the scaffolding the knot should have been been preserved. The error had happened before he joined the case at around 7 p.m. on the first evening. He had been to meet the Italian police delegation at Heathrow airport, he recalled, and he confirmed that the two forces had been at odds from the start. ‘They wanted to take the body home with them there and then. No chance!’ The City Police had never said they thought it was a case of suicide, he pointed out, only saying there were no suspicious circumstances. ‘Up till my retirement I wasn’t aware of anything I had missed. I tried to be as balanced and honest as possible with everyone. I had nothing to hide. The Italians believed he was murdered but you have to prove it.’

If the Italians were dissatisfied with the collaboration they received from their British colleagues, the same feeling applied in reverse. British investigators felt they had not been fully briefed on the Italian political and financial background to the Calvi case. And the Italians never shared the information from Eligio Paoli about the alleged involvement of Sergio Vaccari in the murder plot. ‘The Italians never mentioned the name of Vaccari to us,’ White said. ‘I drew the Vaccari file from the Met, but I cannot recall there being any connection
between the two cases other than the informant Jennings.’ Clearly White did not recall any offer of cooperation from the Vaccari case detective David Harness, who told me his offer of help was rebuffed by the City Police.

The theory that Calvi was taken to his place of death by boat had emerged fairly early on, White acknowledged, but police were not able to find any proof that a boat had actually been to Blackfriars Bridge on the night. It is not clear that any serious effort was ever made to find it, given that suicide was still the primary assumption. ‘It would have been the easiest thing for the City Police to say: “It’s a murder.” We were investigators and we did our job to the best of our ability. We never uncovered any evidence that he was murdered,’ White told me. ‘He may well have been murdered and there may be some evidence, but I’m not aware of it. That’s why the open verdict [in 1983] is the right verdict.’
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An open verdict was indeed the result of the second coroner’s inquest in June 1983, a verdict reached after a much more thorough examination of the facts lasting 11 days. Even that was not exhaustive, however. The jury foreman later told
The Times
that he and his colleagues would probably have returned a verdict of murder by persons unknown if the information that had subsequently emerged in the press had been available to them at the time of their deliberations.

There are, however, a number of episodes that call into question the good faith of the City Police, as well as their competence. Robert Clarke recalled being told his business card had been found on Calvi’s body but that information was never made public. The business card of another leading City lawyer with strong business contacts in Italy was also found in Calvi’s jacket pocket – a potentially important lead, given that Calvi was trying to resolve the Ambrosiano’s financial problems and needed to be in contact with professionals of exactly this
type – and that information too was not at first made public. The story was broken by Paul Foot in the
Daily Mirror
on 22 September 1983, after both London inquests had already come and gone. The lawyer was Colin McFadyean, a senior partner at the top City law firm of Slaughter and May.

McFadyean was interviewed by John White on 21 June 1982, three days after Calvi’s death. In a handwritten note White recorded the scant result: ‘Calvi not known by McFadyean. Shown photograph, not known. No business done for Banco Ambrosiano.’ The lawyer repeated his denial when he was interviewed by Paul Foot more than a year later. McFadyean had many close friends among leading commercial lawyers in Rome and Milan, Foot wrote, but he had never acted for Calvi. Nor was he a Catholic or a freemason. ‘In fact, I find freemasonry rather creepy,’ McFadyean told Foot. ‘When the police told me the dead man was Calvi of the Ambrosiano, I suggested they talk to Mr Ellsworth Donnell.’ Donnell was a director of Peter De Savary’s Artoc bank, in which Calvi’s BAOL had taken a 20 per cent stake in 1981, and one of McFadyean’s clients. Though Donnell managed some of Calvi’s money for him and lived in Chester Square, less than a mile from Chelsea Cloisters, it does not appear that the Italian banker got in touch with him. ‘I can absolutely swear to that,’ Donnell told Foot. ‘He never came anywhere near us.’

One of McFadyean’s Italian clients was Vincenzo Cazzaniga, head of the large holding company Bastogi when it went bankrupt. He was arrested in 1977 on charges of fraud and bribing politicians. McFadyean had ceased acting for him by that point, but the connection was nevertheless an interesting one. Six years earlier Calvi had made a secret pact with Hambros Bank and Michele Sindona to take the company over. The bid had failed and Calvi was left with a large secret shareholding in Bastogi, which he had to conceal in the labyrinthine network of his offshore companies. A close friend and ally of the ultra-conservative Cardinal Giuseppe Siri, Cazzaniga had
been chief executive of Esso Italiana for many years, a position which gave him responsibility for channelling CIA and oil multinational payments to Italy’s anti-communist political parties. Part of the money was allegedly funnelled through the Socialist-controlled Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, headed at the time by alleged P2 member Alberto Ferrari.

White later told detectives from Kroll Associates, who had been hired by the Calvi family in 1991, that McFadyean’s business card and statements from McFadyean and Donnell had been presented to the coroners at both inquests. But the card, despite its potential importance, was not mentioned at either inquest and neither coroner called either man to give evidence. What’s more, it was not among the documents found on Calvi’s body that were reproduced in police photographs and the Calvi family was not told about it. Carlo Calvi was indignant that the presence on his father’s body of a business card belonging to the underworld-connected Alvaro Giardili was highly publicized, while that of a top City lawyer – potentially relevant to his father’s efforts to save his bank – was never made public.

In an original draft of his article, which Foot submitted to McFadyean for vetting, the
Mirror
journalist briefly mentioned Cazzaniga and quoted McFadyean’s denial that there had been any cover-up. Both items were omitted from the published version. ‘I don’t know why this never came out,’ Foot quoted the lawyer as saying in the unpublished draft, which was among prosecution papers presented to the murder trial in Rome. ‘I’ve always been quite open about it, and I’ve never asked anyone to keep my name out of it. It’s an extraordinary mystery, and I’d really like to know how that card got into Calvi’s pocket.’ To be fair to Foot, his covering letter to McFadyean explained that he wanted his interviewee’s approval because he hadn’t recorded the conversation and had only taken notes at its end. He had in any case only learned of McFadyean’s card through his friendship with the
lawyer’s daughter and was therefore treating the subject with particular delicacy.

There are other reasons to consider the McFadyean connection potentially significant. Slaughter and May had close ties to Britain’s intelligence establishment dating back to the Second World War, when many of the partners worked for the Special Operations Executive. One wag is reported to have commented on SOE’s early lack of success: ‘Seems to be all may and no slaughter.’
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John Drewe, the ‘MI6’ art forger, laughed out loud when I showed him a list of McFadyean’s directorships. He was particularly struck by his seat on the board of one particular art and antiquities company. Drewe claimed the company had been used to launder money and to reward people for special services during the Cold War. ‘You want to give your friend in the Cold War a little tip? You say: “Your aunt has died. She has left you this painting.” The company was used to reward people during the Cold War.’
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A confidential report on the company in question drawn up for Kroll seemed to point in a similar direction. ‘When the business first started it was . . . specializing in discovering unknown masterpieces, mostly Old Master paintings and drawings, sculpture and antiquities. These were transported out of Europe, mostly to America and Japan, and sold to certain museums . . . anxious to expand their collections and willing to collude in not revealing their places of origin, since this often contravened international agreements on illicit removals of national treasures,’ the anonymous author wrote. The company was formed as a consortium including a financial partner whose identity has never been revealed. The report continued: ‘Is it possible that Roberto Calvi was induced to contribute to the war chest, financing buys? . . . Is it possible Carlo’s father was coming to London to see him regarding payments from investments? The company dealt in huge amounts of money in its clandestine buying.’

The idea is not as far-fetched as it might at first seem. Roberto Calvi collected modern art, doing some clandestine buying himself in Russia, and had contributed financially to the creation of Pope Paul VI’s modern art collection for the Vatican. The pope’s secretary, Monsignor Pasquale Macchi, travelled extensively to build the collection and was accompanied, as English interpreter, on some of the trips by Monsignor Paul Marcinkus – the origin of their friendship, according to one source.

Other names on McFadyean’s list of company directorships brought a flicker of recognition to Gerald James, the former Astra arms manufacturer. ‘Texas Instruments was involved in electronic stuff for weapons’, he told me, while he thought a number of others had traded with Iraq and had been involved in its supergun project.

Zapata Off-Shore Services Ltd recalled the Bush family oil company, Zapata Offshore, that was allegedly used by the CIA as cover in the planning of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

‘A lot of illegal arms operations went though Italy,’ James recalled. BMARC, an Astra subsidiary, had exported a lot of large guns to Iraq, he said. ‘Rapid-firing cannon have to be niterided [a hardening process for the barrels]. Oerlikon Italia had a niteriding department and shipped a lot of weapons to the Middle East after processing them. I suspect Calvi played a big part in all of that,’ he said. ‘Of course it continued after his death. Other banks like BNL and BCCI were heavily involved. I would think Calvi came here [to London] because a lot of the operations he’d been running were probably centred here.’
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Calvi himself had a penchant for cloak and dagger activities, as well as an abiding fascination with secret power. Among the scraps of paper found on his body was a narrow strip about three inches long containing a simple alphanumerical code: ten one-digit numbers and their corresponding letters of the alphabet.

For all these reasons it seems extraordinary that the McFadyean connection was not more thoroughly investigated. The apparent lack of interest continues to this day. When City Police sent copies of police photographs reproducing the documents on Calvi’s body to the Rome prosecutor in 2006 the McFadyean business card was still not part of the official collection. Only after a specific request from the prosecutor, Luca Tescaroli, did a reproduction of the card and DI White’s handwritten note of his interview with McFadyean find its way to Rome. Kroll too seems to have been less than forthcoming on the subject. The detective agency reported the list of McFadyean’s directorships to the Calvi family but neglected to mention the potential connections to the arms industry and the world of intelligence.

The kid glove treatment reserved for McFadyean could possibly be explained by his own personal connections to the intelligence world. The Slaughter and May solicitor had seen war service in the Royal Navy, rather than SOE, and had subsequently been recruited to serve in naval intelligence by Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond novels. His transfer to intelligence duties had been the result of a domestic accident: his sight was damaged after a chip flew into his eye while he was chopping wood, making him unfit for service as an officer of the watch. He turned his attention instead to interrogating German prisoners of war, according to an article about his second world war experience by his daughter, Melanie, published in the
Guardian Weekend
magazine on 6 July 2002. ‘A fluent German-speaker, he was appointed to interrogate U-boat prisoners at a secret Buckinghamshire location,’ Melanie McFadyean wrote. Rather than resorting to violence, the future lawyer preferred to coax information from the prisoners with kindness, taking one out to dinner in Soho and another on a mushroom-picking expedition in the countryside. The results were evidently satisfactory, as at the end of the war he was asked to debrief Admiral Karl Dönitz,
the German naval commander, who had been chosen by Adolf Hitler as his successor.

McFadyean, who retired shortly after the Calvi affair, was distinctly unkeen to discuss the subject when I contacted him by letter via Slaughter and May. ‘Nothing has happened in the meanwhile to change what I told Paul Foot. I have no further information since then,’ he told me by telephone. ‘I had quite a lot of Italian clients and knew colleagues in Italy, but they wouldn’t have had my business card. I don’t know who could have given it to him [Calvi]. He never contacted me.’
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If there is no proof that freemasonry exerted an influence on the progress of the Calvi inquiry, there is certainly evidence that it was a problem in the City Police at the time. In 1978 a massive investigation into corruption in the City and Metropolitan Police forces had begun, making use of police officers drawn from outside the London forces. For all the effort expended, ‘Operation Countryman’ secured the conviction of only one police officer.