The Last Supper (43 page)

‘Were you responsible for killing Roberto Calvi?’ Tescaroli asked him. ‘Absolutely not.’ ‘Do you know who did?’ ‘Absolutely not.’ Calò said he had only ever seen Calvi on television and the banker had never been involved in laundering money for Cosa Nostra. The mafia boss dismissed suggestions that he had attempted to enlist Francesco Di Carlo’s assistance for the murder before falling back on the services of the Camorra’s Vincenzo Casillo. But with his denial came a fleeting moment of gritty frankness: ‘If I had wanted to, I could have had him killed in Rome. Why would I have turned to a Neapolitan drug addict who was in contact with the secret services, who was supposed to be my enemy, and who confided in his lover?’ Casillo’s lover had, after all, been murdered precisely because of her companion’s indiscreet pillow-talk.

The trial reached its climax in the autumn of 2006 with the cross-examination of Calò and two of the other defendants:
Flavio Carboni and Silvano Vittor. Perhaps the most eagerly awaited testimony was that of Carboni, the man who had known Calvi best and organized his journey to London. Carboni readily admitted that he had lied in the past about the circumstances surrounding Calvi’s death. He had done so to shield himself and others from the possible legal consequences of their actions – minor offences such as aiding Calvi in his illegal expatriation or violating Italy’s currency laws – or to save friends from embarrassment. Now, of course, he was telling the truth.

During several days of testimony, between 3 and 25 October, he offered explanations for many of the more troubling anomalies in his behaviour. The decision to go to London was Calvi’s and not his own and was prompted by the media furore over the banker’s disappearance, he told the court, contradicting the more recent testimony of Vittor to investigators. Calvi feared he might be recognized and arrested if he pursued his original plan of travelling to Zurich. In London he might pass unnoticed, but it was a city that Calvi knew and Carboni did not. The fact that he had noted the name and telephone number of his London contact William Morris in his diary on 11 June did not mean he had been in touch with him in advance of Calvi’s visit. He used the diary as a notepad and jotted things down irrespective of the dates, he said. And his failure to go up to his flat and reassure Calvi that he was making progress in the search for new accommodation on the evening of the banker’s death was perfectly understandable. He had run into Vittor in the Chelsea Cloisters lobby and had been led away to a neighbouring pub where the Kleinszig sisters were waiting impatiently, having kicked their heels around central London for the entire day. The pub was about to close, so it was necessary to go and collect the girls before they were turned out into the street. ‘They had been abandoned all day. It was logical that we should give priority to the girls.’ An angry Calvi had already packed his bags in eager anticipation of a move and was paying Carboni $19 million
for his services, but the Kleinszig girls – on a pleasure trip to London – came first.

Carboni was perhaps more convincing when he came to explain why he had asked Odette Morris to search for Calvi at Chelsea Cloisters on Friday 18 June, while he himself studiously avoided the building. ‘I was afraid that the police might be there,’ he told the court. But he was less so when dealing with the subject of his failed meeting with his friend Ugo Flavoni at Gatwick airport on that same Friday evening. It was not wildly extravagant to fly Flavoni to London by private jet in order to enable him to collect a modest debt, he said. The plane was intended to collect him as well, enabling Carboni to return to Italy having sorted out Calvi’s logistical problems, had things gone to plan. He had completely forgotten about the appointment in his agitation over Calvi’s unexplained disappearance, arriving, as a result, at the airport after Flavoni had departed. And he had attached so little significance to the episode that he had forgotten to mention it in his earliest accounts of his movements in London.

Carboni said he learned of Calvi’s death when he telephoned his Sardinian mistress, Maria Laura Scanu Concas, on the evening of 18 June. The television news was just then announcing that the body of a Gianroberto Calvini had been pulled from the river Thames, and he knew immediately it was the missing Calvi. ‘I fell into a state of total prostration,’ he recalled. ‘I remember the Morrises gave me a glass of whisky to pick me up.’ ‘Were you responsible for the murder of Roberto Calvi?’ Tescaroli asked him. ‘Not only was I not responsible but I have been a victim of Roberto Calvi’s death,’ Carboni replied. ‘Today I am profoundly convinced that Calvi committed suicide.’

Carboni was not entirely successful in persuading the court that that conviction was well founded. Having offered explanations for his behaviour that he had had almost a quarter of a century to ponder and having acquitted himself fairly well,
his credibility crumbled at the end when he was subjected to the probing and methodical questioning of Judge D’Andria. If Calvi was not afraid for his personal safety, as Carboni insisted, why did he avoid sleeping in his own apartment on his last night in Rome and why did he take Silvano Vittor with him on his travels as an unofficial bodyguard? Given the dramatic nature of the problems he was helping Calvi to resolve, and pressing problems of his own at home, why did Carboni not accompany him to London but travel instead to Amsterdam on 15 June for a recreational jaunt with the Kleinszig girls? And if Calvi’s briefcase had remained from the start in Klagenfurt under the control of the Kleinszig family, why did Carboni wait until 1986 before making it available to Italian investigators? The Sardinian businessman’s responses could not hide the fact that, at the very least, he had played an odd role in a rum affair.

The deposition of Silvano Vittor followed a similar course to that of Carboni, casting little fresh light on the mystery of Calvi’s last days. In his testimony, delivered on 6 and 11 November 2006, the former contraband smuggler contradicted himself, contradicted his earlier statements and contradicted Carboni. If he had lied in the early stages of the investigation, he explained, it was because he was confused, felt under pressure, or was advised to do so by his lawyers. Vittor broke down and wept when he finally confessed to prosecutors that the decision to go to London rather than Zurich had been Carboni’s, and not Calvi’s. In court, though, he was vague when he addressed the issue again. Carboni, Kunz and Calvi had discussed it over dinner in Bregenz. Carboni had told him of the decision in the evening and Calvi had confirmed it the next morning. He had never heard Calvi say he did not want to go to London, he told Carboni’s lawyer.

On key aspects of the story his evidence was either vague or aligned with Carboni’s and tended to corroborate the theory that Calvi had taken his own life. Carboni had told the court
that Calvi had reduced his moustache by the time he met him for their walk in Hyde Park on the afternoon of Wednesday 16 June. Vittor confirmed that the moustache had by then been trimmed to a thin strip, before being totally removed the next morning. But while Carboni claimed he had left the meeting with Calvi on several occasions to make phone calls, Vittor said he had been in visual contact with the two men throughout and Carboni had never absented himself. Was Calvi worried about his personal safety? Vittor was asked. No, he replied, he was just frightened of being recognized. In previous testimony he had acknowledged that the banker was indeed afraid, refused to leave his apartment after dark, insisted Vittor telephone him every quarter of an hour if he went out without him, and had told him the only people he trusted were Vittor and Carboni.

Vittor’s explanations for why he left Calvi alone for hours on the last evening of his life, why he pretended to have lost his identity card so that a Chelsea Cloisters employee would accompany him to the flat later that night, and why he fled precipitately the following morning without even leaving a message for his companions were all far from convincing. He told the court that Calvi was highly agitated that evening after learning he had been sacked as Banco Ambrosiano chairman and that his secretary had committed suicide. He had specifically ruled out that Calvi knew of Graziella Corrocher’s suicide at the London inquest and had neglected to mention the ‘fact’ in his first 16 interrogations, Prosecutor Tescaroli pointed out to him. ‘I don’t know why. I must have forgotten it, even though it was the most important thing,’ he conceded.

Judge D’Andria was unimpressed. ‘You say one thing and a few seconds later you say another, which is different or contradictory. First you say white, then black. You have the right to lie, but there is a limit, if you want to be believed.’ The man who had spent more time than anyone with Calvi during
the last five days of the banker’s life was still spreading confusion with a pitchfork some 24 years after the event.

Among the many court testimonies that left a strong sense of perplexity was that of Roberto Calvi’s brother Leone. Aged 80, with a bald head and tufts of white hair around his ears, he was the very image of what his brother might have looked like had he lived – minus the moustache. Asked to account for the presence of a half-brick wrapped in a newspaper that was found by police in a safety deposit box that had belonged to his mother in October 2002, his explanation was weak and convoluted. The newspaper was a copy of the
Corriere della Sera
from 29 May 1981 and it carried the news of the start of his brother’s currency trial on the front page, as well as a report on the death of the Polish Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, described in a long profile on an inside page as ‘The great defender of the Church in the East’. A symbolic reference to freemasonry wrapped in a newspaper that talked of some of his brother’s most delicate activities? Not a bit of it. He had put the half-brick into the safety deposit at the Milan branch of the Banco Ambrosiano himself, he admitted, but it was to prevent people from noticing the change in weight when he removed the valuables that had been contained in it before. And he had wrapped the brick in a newspaper to avoid getting his hands dirty. The explanation seemed so unlikely that some observers wondered that it might not be true.

Leone Calvi was also asked to explain a handwritten note that had been confiscated from his home and that appeared to refer to the need to make a 150 million lire payment to obtain the transfer of his brother’s currency trial from Milan to Rome. The note was on headed paper of the airline KLM and opened with a shopping list: ‘Fruit, Vegetables, Bread . . .’ before moving on to what appeared to be a bribe to magistrates, possibly something he had discussed with Roberto when his brother was in prison. Leone denied writing it; he didn’t write the number ‘5’ in that way, he said.
³
The unresolved episode
somehow seemed to encapsulate the spirit of the Calvi affair: a bribe of 150 million lire could be jotted down at the bottom of a shopping list, after ‘Cheese, Ham, Roast meat’, becoming equally commonplace and banal.

After months of evidence taken at the unusually intense pace of two hearings per week, the court had good reason to be suspicious of the defendants but it also had plenty of scope for a reasonable doubt. It had heard much about the mafia, the power of the P2 lodge and the financial problems of the Banco Ambrosiano, but much less about who had really killed Roberto Calvi and how. The evidence on that was hearsay – which is acceptable in the Italian justice system – and vague. Flavio Carboni’s disreputable actions and connections had been discussed in detail, as well as his friendships with members of Italy’s political and social elite. In response to the prosecutor’s suspicions, Carboni had outlined his defence from the witness stand: Calvi had almost certainly committed suicide, psychologically crushed by the news of his secretary’s suicide and by the certainty of impending financial disaster and professional disgrace. And in the unlikely event that he had been killed, Carboni had nothing to do with it. Calvi was his friend and he had been battling to the last to help him resolve his financial problems and reap the rich rewards that the Ambrosiano chairman had promised him. His sudden death was contrary to Carboni’s own material interests, depriving him of a valuable source of income and professional influence. Delivered with breathless speed and multiple digressions, his interventions often left the jurors with their heads in a whirl.

Vittor’s position was more succinct: he had been caught up in the whole ghastly imbroglio by accident. A simple man, he knew nothing of the complex background to Calvi’s financial and political affairs. He had merely helped the banker to escape to Austria as a favour to his friend Carboni. His role should have finished there, in Klagenfurt, but he had been persuaded at the last minute and against his will to continue
the journey with Calvi to London, departing unexpectedly and without even a change of clothes – no carefully planned murder plot here. It was only natural that he should flee to safety on the discovery of Calvi’s mysterious disappearance from Chelsea Cloisters on the night of 17 June.

Little had been heard in court on the role of Ernesto Diotallevi, as his lawyer tirelessly pointed out, and of Manuela Kleinszig, who appeared to have fallen into the story by mistake. According to the prosecution, she had received large sums of money from her Sardinian lover and helped him to conceal Calvi’s crucial blackmail documents after his death, but it was hard to imagine the then 21-year-old Austrian girl had actually conspired to murder him. If the court had a somewhat unclear idea on the individual responsibilities of the defendants, the political background to the case also remained confused. Some of the most sensitive secrets of the cold war era had been aired in the Rebibbia courtroom, but the overall story remained vague and incoherent. The Calvi case – described to me by one experienced justice official as the very emblem of Italy’s corrupt First Republic – had not, it seemed, completely lost its mystery.

When I ran into an Italian colleague in the street and mentioned I was working on a book on the Calvi case, his immediate comment was: ‘It stinks to heaven.’ The comment was peculiarly apt: the ungodly story of ‘God’s banker’ does give off a disagreeable odour. Jeff Katz, the Kroll Associates investigator who revived the investigation into Calvi’s fate in the early 1990s, got the same impression. A contact with ties to US intelligence warned him to tread carefully. Investigating Calvi’s death would be like ‘dancing in the mouth of the wolf’, he said. And the Calvi family lawyer, Bruno Rossini, confirmed the same idea. The Calvi murder was a ‘crime of power’.