Shock Claim : Did the Vatican Order the Killing of a Banker in Central London?

By Jeremy Culley
Daily Star
October 16, 2015

http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/470514/Vatican-Roberto-Calvi-Mafia-London-1982-Blackfriars-Bridge-Channel-5-murder-death

CLAIM: Roberto Calvi was initially thought to have committed suicide

Roberto Calvi was initially thought to have committed suicide after he was found hanged under Blackfriars Bridge On June 18, 1982.

Private investigators and journalists have claimed there was more to Calvi's death than meets the eye.

It is alleged that he was profiting from vast sums of money being laundered by the Mafia and the Vatican.

The Vatican ran the only unregulated bank in the world. It is claimed this meant money in it could be invested, and the profits would not be subject to tax laws because Italian regulators could not see it.

The theory being put forward by Channel 5 show Murder at the Vatican - Conspiracy, which airs on Friday at 8pm, is that the Vatican needed Calvi to siphon Mafia money from its bank to a network of global companies so it would be free of Mafia association.

CLOSE: A reconstructed scene involving Calvi in the Channel 5 documentary

Italian journalist Andrea Purgatori said: “When Calvi died, and the money disappeared it was wonderful for the Vatican bank. It was a very good business, his death.”

For years, the official line remained, that Calvi committed suicide, but in 2003 the City of London Police reopened the case as a murder enquiry. No one has been convicted.

Calvi was nicknamed 'God's banker' because his bank was backed by the Vatican. But could they be behind his murder in one of the biggest banking frauds of the twentieth century?

Days before Calvi's death, Italy’s biggest private bank, the Banco Ambrosiano, declared a ?1.5 billion gap in its funds. Calvi was facing a jail sentence for illegally funnelling ?30 million out of Italy.

Chief among the doubters was Roberto Calvi’s son, who hired a private investigator, Geoff Katz, to look into his father’s death.

Mr Katz said: “I was quite sceptical about the idea of suicide form the beginning for a variety of reasons.

BOSS: Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, in 1982

"He was a 62-year-old man, he was not used to walking around odd bits of London, and to then, in the middle of the night, climb over a parapet down ladder across to some scaffolding, and then, hang himself with some rope that was conveniently found on the scaffolding seemed improbable to me.”

Investigative author Gerald Posner believes Calvi’s death was no accident, but the result of his close involvement with archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the head of the Vatican’s bank.

Mr Posner claims: “It takes money in and then it invests that money, makes money on it and keeps it all secret, it really operates almost like an off-shore bank in the heart of Rome.

"It’s a bank like no other in the world. So all you need to do if you’re the Mafia or you’re an Italian looking to avoid taxes is get your money physically into the Vatican.

"You can drive a truck with ten million pounds in it, it’ll go straight into the Vatican and once it does, it disappears.

"No Italian tax investigator, no drug investigator, nobody from the DEA or the FBI can ever see it.”