zecchinetta

OOOOOOOHHHHEEEEEE! This is just that shiz that gets me all inspired to ask questions and dig around where I shouldn’t. And it reminds me that I haven’t referenced Zio Silvio in the last few posts. WTF is wrong with me?!? Well, I can’t really tie him in here, but I do find it intriguing that all this has come to light at the end of his patronage role and with his private militia in the south being challenged for the top spot in the socio-political hierarchy of Sicily… The dealie behind this story began twenty-five years ago with the sinister discovery of a man hanging underneath a bridge in London. The ensuing scandal engulfed the Catholic Church, linking its financiers to a secret Masonic lodge, the Falklands conflict, and the Mafia.

As City of London police investigators were helping Italian investigators assemble evidence to convict those associated with Calvi's murder, they were also following leads to trace where any money linked to the bank might have ended up. It emerged that about £45 million associated with Banco Ambrosiano was found in the Bahamas three years ago. It was recently established, however, that the amount located in the Bahamas is significantly higher than that.

In fact, hundreds of millions of pounds linked to the collapse of the Italian bank at the centre of the murder of Roberto Calvi have been found in the Bahamas. Calvi, known as "God's Banker" because of his links to the Vatican, was found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London twenty-five years ago. It initially appeared to be a suicide. Forensics, however, showed that Calvi had been suicided, so to speak – murder that was made to appear as if it were suicide.

To date, there has been no conclusive evidence to convict anyone of the crime. Investigators say that the money involved has been traced to offshore Bahamian accounts…and finding that dough is a significant breakthrough in one of the most mysterious murders and financial crimes of modern history. Police sources in London indicate that the authorities in the Bahamas have been slow in supplying them with details associated with the accounts. Well, that’s hardly a surprise. It’s understood that the situation has prompted the intervention of the UK's Foreign Office.

When Banco Ambrosiano collapsed in 1982, £800m went missing. The Milanese bank had close ties with the Catholic Church, the secret Masonic sect known as Propaganda Due (P2), and the Sicilian Mafia. Calvi, the Chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, created a web of offshore accounts that were employed to hide the bank's activities, and its losses.

Calvi was found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge, in central London, with a length of orange rope woven into a lover's knot around his neck. His body was weighed down with bricks, and his pockets were stuffed with £15,000 in cash. In a decision that was ridiculed at the time, the Metropolitan Police in London concluded that Calvi's cause of death was suicide.

An inquest in London initially ruled his death was suicide, but, after a High Court challenge by his family, a second inquest was held and an open verdict was recorded. In 2003, Italian prosecutors concluded Calvi had been killed, and in October 2005 four men and a woman went on trial for murder. Prosecutors claimed one of the five, Giuseppe "Pippo" Calo, had ordered the killing. Calo, dubbed "Cosa Nostra's cashier" by the Italian media for his alleged laundering of mob money, has been in jail since the 1980s on Mafia charges unconnected to the Calvi claims.

The other defendants were Silvano Vittor, Calvi's driver and bodyguard; Ernesto Diotallevi and Flavio Carboni, both businessmen; and Manuela Kleinszig, Carboni's Austrian ex-girlfriend. Prosecutors had asked for Kleinszig to be acquitted because of insufficient evidence, and for life sentences for the other four defendants. The defense cited the initial assessment by British forensic experts that Calvi had killed himself to argue that the five had nothing to do with his death.

On June 6th 2007, after a 20-month trial in Rome, the five were cleared of murdering Calvi. Trial prosecutor Luca Tescaroli has received death threats. None of the defendants was in the high-security courtroom on the outskirts of the Italian capital when the judge read the verdicts, reached after a day and a half of deliberation.

New York-born investigator Jeff Katz, who was hired by the banker's family in 1991 to look into his death, said: "I don't think that this verdict changes the fact that he was murdered; it's just saying that these were not the people responsible." Katz spent three years on the case, reconstructing the circumstances of Calvi's death and uncovering evidence he could not have committed suicide. He showed that Calvi's shoes would have had flecks of rust and paint from the scaffolding below Blackfriars Bridge if he had shimmied there by himself, but police analysis found they did not.

It was alleged Calvi had been laundering money for the Mafia, and that mob bosses feared he would betray them after his Banco Ambrosiano collapsed in one of Italy's biggest fraud scandals. It went bust at the time of Calvi's death, following the disappearance of £670 million in loans the bank had provided to dummy companies in Latin America. The Mafia has long-claimed that Calvi’s murder was actually linked to his involvement in the provision of Exocet missiles to Argentina – missiles that were fired at British Royal Navy ships the day of his murder in London.

Untold damage was done to the prestige of the Catholic Church by the spectacular collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano in 1982. Vatican Bank was the Milan-based Ambrosiano's main shareholder. On 5 June 1982, two weeks before he died, Calvi wrote to Pope John Paul II, giving warning that the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano would 'provoke a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions in which the Church will suffer the gravest damage'.

As well as losing the Church £400 million, the failure caused a number of senior Vatican figures to spend the rest of their careers under a shadow. Among them was Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, who was in charge of the Vatican Bank at the time. Marcinkus implicated the Church in issuing "letters of patronage" vouching for companies used by Calvi to siphon off money from Banco Ambrosiano. In 1984, the Vatican agreed to make a £120 million goodwill payment to creditors of Banco Ambrosiano, whilst still denying any responsibility for its fraudulent collapse. Marcinkus was the subject of an arrest warrant by Italian magistrates in 1987, but spent the rest of his career as an assistant parish priest in Sun City, Arizona, until his death last year.

Many of those in positions to have had pertinent information about Banco Ambrosiano are now dead – Calvi. Soisson, and Albino Luciani (Pope John Paul I) all met with untimely deaths. So, finding the Calvi millions might just lead to solving a whole lot more than a bit of basic skimming and money laundering.