VATICAN: More than two decades after Roberto Calvi was found hanging under London's Blackfriars Bridge, five people went on trial in Italy yesterday accused of murdering the man known as "God's banker" for his close Vatican ties.
A Sicilian mobster, a Sardinian financier and three others are accused of killing Calvi, whose death in June 1982 was initially ruled a suicide.
Rome prosecutors say the Mafia murdered Calvi for stealing from them and from Italian financier Licio Gelli, who was the head of the shadowy P2 Masonic organisation.
The trial opened yesterday and was adjourned until November 23rd after brief initial proceedings held inside a maximum-security prison in Italy's capital.
Convicted Cosa Nostra treasurer Pippo Calo listened via teleconference from his prison elsewhere in Italy. Calo was shown on a monitor in the courtroom, looking calm and wearing a dark sports coat with his hands folded in his lap.
In a court document, prosecutors say Calo (74) ordered the murder.
Calvi was "asphyxiated by strangulation and hanged in London under Blackfriars Bridge, on the Thames, in such a way as to simulate suicide".
He had bricks stuffed in his pockets and $15,000 on his person when found dangling from scaffolding under the bridge.
His death came shortly after the bank he headed, Banco Ambrosiano, went bankrupt in a spectacular scandal involving loans to Latin American companies. Ambrosiano was then Italy's largest private banking group and worked with the Vatican. It was Italy's biggest post-war banking scandal, and one that implicated the Vatican, which had provided letters of credit for massive missing loans.
After the initial suicide ruling, prosecutors say a more recent medical review found evidence pointing to murder, including the type of damage to Calvi's neck bones.
His hands and fingernails were also clean. If he had stuffed bits of brick in his own pockets and climbed a rusting scaffolding to hang himself, prosecutors have argued, there would have been traces of dirt.
The other defendants are Sardinian financier Flavio Carboni, his Austrian former girlfriend Manuela Kleinszig, businessman and alleged Rome crime boss Ernesto Diotallevi and Calvi's former bodyguard, Silvano Vittor.
Prosecutors allege Mr Carboni and Mr Vittor went to London with Calvi to deliver him to the people who would murder him, according to court documents and Vittor's lawyer.
They allege that Calvi, president of the failing Banco Ambrosiano, was laundering money for the Mafia, and that Calo ordered his murder because Mafia bosses were angry at Calvi for appropriating Mafia money and were afraid the banker would talk.
"There is no, absolutely no proof of any kind," said Mr Carboni, the only defendant in the courtroom. His lawyer suggested the court should take a closer look at the Vatican.
"There are many expert testimonies and they are in contradiction with each other," said Ersilia Barracca, a lawyer representing Kleinszig. "Some of them stated that Calvi had committed suicide, this was the London experts' testimony ... So we are starting this trial on the basis of a very doubtful hypothesis of murder."
Mr Vittor is one of the last people known to have seen Calvi, who had been appealing a four-year sentence when he left Rome in June 1982 and secretly headed to London. Mr Diotallevi is accused of being a go-between for Calo and Mr Carboni, helping Calvi flee Italy and supplying the fake passport found on his body.