May 13, 1980: Sindona attempts suicide.

July 8, 1980: Roberto Calvi, also jailed for fraud, attempts suicide.

September 1, 1981: The Vatican Bank acknowledges its controlling interests in a number of banks fronted by Calvi-for more than one billion dollars of debt.

January 2, 1981: Shareholders in Banco Ambrosiano send a letter to John Paul II that expose the connections between the Vatican Bank and Roberto Calvi, P-2 and the Mafia. The letter is never acknowledged.

April 27, 1982: Attempted murder of Roberto Rosone, General Manager of Banco Ambrosiano. Rosone was reportedly trying to clean up the bank’s operations.

October 2, 1982: Giuseppe Dellacha, executive of Banco Ambrosiano, dies after a fall out of one of the bank’s windows.

March 23, 1986: Michele Sindona, in the Italian jail for which he was serving time for ordering the death of Giorgio Ambrosioli, is poisoned to death.

The most sensational of these events occurred on June 17, 1982. On that date, Roberto Calvi was found hanging by the neck from a bridge in London.

CHAPTER 6

The Mystery of the Pope’s Banker

On June 21, 1982, a postal clerk on his way to work in London glanced over “the parapet of the embankment of Blackfriars Bridge and noticed orange nylon rope lashed to a scaffolding pole under the bridge.” Hanging from it was the body of a man, “suavely dressed in his own topcoat and expensive Patek Philippe watch on his wrist, loafers by the same firm were on his feet… In his wallet were about 10,000 pounds sterling, Swiss francs and Italian lira. Stuffed into the pockets and down his flies were bricks and stones that the police believed came from a nearby building site.

“The presence of the money and the watch appeared to rule out a mercenary murder. At the same time, a coroner found no marks on Calvi’s body indicating he had [not] been the object of violence before his death, no syringe marks to suggest he had been drugged, and no drugs in his system besides the residue of the single sleeping pill he had taken the night before.” A coroner’s jury filed a verdict of suicide.

Because this ruling made no sense to Calvi’s widow, son and daughter, “they challenged the original inquest. A second one, held in London in 1983,…[ruled] it was impossible to say whether Calvi had killed himself or been killed by others. Yet Carlo Calvi, the banker’s only son, who was studying for a doctorate at Washington ’s Georgetown University when his father died, refused to give in…So in 1989 he hired a firm of private detectives to take the forensic investigation further than had the London Police.

“Kroll Associates located the scaffolding poles from which Calvi had been suspended, reassembled them exactly as they had been under Blackfriars Bridge, and then had a stand-in for Calvi, of the same height and weight, take the route that Calvi would have to have taken if he really had ended his own life at the end of the orange rope.

“The detectives were not interested in the factors that had already convinced Carlo Calvi that his father could not possibly have killed himself this way. Roberto Calvi was 62 when he died, overweight, and a chronic sufferer from vertigo. In the pitch darkness he would have had to spot the scaffolding under the bridge, practically submerged in the high tide, stuff his pockets and trouser flies with bricks, clamber over a stone parapet and down a 12 ft-long vertical ladder, then edge his way eight feet along the scaffolding. He would then have had to gingerly lower himself to another scaffolding pole before putting his neck in the noose and throwing himself off, because both inquests noted that there was minimal damage to the neck, indicating he had not dropped a long way.”

Kroll Associates was “not interested in what was probable,” noted an account of the case by London ’s The Independent, “only in what was unavoidable.” “They had their Calvi stand-in wear the same kind of loafers the banker was wearing when he died, then maneuver his way onto the scaffolding by the various possible routes: after which the shoes were soaked in water for the same length of time as Calvi’s.

“Each time the test was tried, microscopic examination of the shoes by a forensic chemist picked up traces of the yellow paint with which the scaffolding poles were stained. Because the shoes Calvi was wearing when he died betrayed no such traces, Kroll concluded, ‘Someone else had to have tied him to the scaffolding and killed him.’

“As a result of Carlo Calvi’s long campaign to clear his father from the dishonor of suicide, in September 2003 City of London Police reopened the case as a murder inquiry. Detective Superintendent Trevor Smith asserted, ‘We have been applying 21st century forensics and investigative techniques to a twenty-one-year-old crime.’”

The murder investigation would lead police, the general public, and Catholics into the modern manifestation of the two-thousand-year-old religion symbolized by the Vatican and, at the same time, unravel the mysterious life of the victim.

A cold, shy, stubborn man from the mountains north of Milan, Roberto Calvi in his prime was one of the most brilliant bankers in Italy. He had risen rapidly in the ranks of the private Banco Ambrosiano, which had been founded by a priest and had long had close relations with the Vatican’s bank, Istituto per le Opere di Religione.

“For all his brilliance,” wrote journalists Peter Popham and Philip Willan in Rome and Robert Verkaik for the Annotico Report in June 2007, “Calvi landed in desperate trouble. As well as co-operating closely with the Vatican ’s bankers, he also got into bed with the Sicilian Mafia, setting up a network of offshore shell companies which enabled them to launder the proceeds of the heroin trade.”

Calvi was a “member of P2, the secret Masonic lodge to which hundreds of Italian politicians, businessmen, secret service agents, policemen, civil servants” and high officials of the Vatican belonged, that Pope John Paul I had been determined to drive from the Holy See.

The Roman Catholic Church and Freemasonry had long been at loggerheads. The first public written attack on Masons was made on April 28, 1738, by Pope Clement XII in his decree In eminenti. “The principal objections to Freemasonry were: that it was open to men of all religions; that oaths were taken; that Masons denied clerical authority, and that Masons met in secret. Clement banned Masonic membership by Catholics and directed ‘Inquisitors of Heretical Depravity’ to take action against Catholics who became Masons or assisted Freemasonry in any way. He ordered excommunication as punishment for those who defied his ban.”

In an address by Pope Pius IX, Multiplices inter, on September 25, 1865, the pontiff renewed condemnation of Freemasonry and other secret societies. In it, he accused Masonic associations of conspiracy against the Church, God, and society. He attributed revolutions and uprisings to Masonic activities, and denounced Masonry’s secret oaths and clandestine meetings.

On February 15, 1882, Leo XIII’s encyclical Etsi nos referred to a “pernicious sect” at war with Jesus Christ. Two years later in Humanum genus (April 20, 1884), the most vicious attack on Freemasonry of any papal pronouncements stated, “The Masonic sect produces fruits that are pernicious and of the bitterest savor.” It went on to say that “Freemasonry’s goal was the destruction of the Roman Catholic Church, and that Freemasonry and the Roman Catholic Church were adversaries.” It further stated that “many Freemasons were unaware of the ultimate goals of Freemasonry and should not be considered partners in the criminal acts perpetrated by Freemasonry. He also condemned the naturalism of Freemasonry, by which is meant the belief that ‘human nature and human reason ought in all things to be mistress and guide.’ American Masonic leader Albert Pike stated that this encyclical was a “declaration of war, and the signal for a crusade, against the rights of man.”