Free Dark Mysteries of the Vatican by H. Paul Jeffers Page B

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