Tony Thompson at the British newspaper the Guardian offers a piece on the former Sicilian Cosa Nostra
boss turned informant who is a suspect in the murder of Robert Calvi (seen in the above photo), known as “God’s
Banker.”
One month before the 30th
anniversary of one of London's most enduring murder mysteries, the mafia
godfather at the heart of the case has spoken for the first time about why he
believes the real killers of Italian financier Roberto Calvi will never be brought
to justice.
Calvi, dubbed "God's
banker" because of his work with the Vatican, was found hanging from
scaffolding beneath Blackfriars bridge in London on 18 June 1982. Bricks had
been stuffed in his pockets and he had more than £10,000 in cash on him. In the
months before his death he had been accused of stealing millions being
laundered on behalf of the mafia.
His death was originally
ruled a suicide but later judged to be murder. In July 1991, Francesco
"Frankie the Strangler" Di Carlo, a mafia godfather who had lived in
England since the late 1970s, was named as Calvi's killer by a supergrass. Di
Carlo has since become a supergrass himself.
Speaking from the small town
in central Italy where he now lives, Di Carlo related how he first came to hear
that he had been accused of Calvi's murder.
"I was in university –
that's what I called the prisons in England. We were all in the association
room watching television when the news came on that the killer of Calvi was
Francesco Di Carlo. All the prisoners and guards looked over and stared. I just
shrugged my shoulders and said that they must be talking about someone else
with the same name as me."
Di Carlo seemed a likely
suspect. He had arrived in the UK in the 1970s, relocating shortly after being
linked to the murders of two Sicilian police officers.
He bought businesses and a
palatial home but soon came under the watchful eye of British customs, who
believed he had moved in order to oversee the Cosa Nostra's operations in the
UK. Between 1980 and 1985 customs officers allegedly linked him to at least a
dozen multimillion pound drug hauls, only a handful of which were intercepted.
... Although Di Carlo denies
killing Calvi, he admits that he and his mafia colleagues wanted him dead and
that his boss had attempted to contact him to carry out the hit.
"I was in Rome and
received a phone call from a friend in Sicily telling me that a certain
high-ranking mafia member had just been killed. I will never forget the date
because of this: it was 16 June 1982 – two days before Calvi was murdered. The
friend told me that Pippo Calò [known as the "mafia's cashier"] was
trying to get hold of me because he needed me to do something for him. In the
hierarchy of Cosa Nostra, he was a general, I was a colonel, so he was a little
higher up, my superior.
"While I finally spoke
to Pippo, he told me not to worry, that the problem had been taken care of.
That's a code we use in the Cosa Nostra. We never talk about killing someone.
We say they have been taken care of.
"Calvi was naming names.
No one had any trust in him any more. He owed a lot of money. His friends had
all distanced themselves. Everyone wanted to get rid of him. He had been
arrested and he had started to talk. Then he had tried to kill himself by
cutting his wrists. He was released, but knew he could be rearrested at any
time. He was weak, he was a broken man.
You can read the rest of the
piece via the below link:
No comments:
Post a Comment