Case #1 - Roberto Calvi

The case of the Italian banker, Roberto Calvi, is a very interesting topic, so I decided this to be my first article. It was forensic science that made it possible in this case to distinguish between murder and suicide. Roberto Calvi used to run an Italian bank called the “Banco Ambrosiano”, based in Milan, and he was nicknamed “God’s banker” because a lot of cash from the Vatican would flow through his bank. Now, there were some strange goings-on within the “Banco Ambrosiano” and it culminated with about $1.2 billion missing. These days we are kind of used to banks losing much bigger quantities of money than that, but back in the 1980s, $1.2 billion was a very serious amount of money indeed. So what is known is that Roberto Calvi disappeared from Milan on June 11, 1982, and he was found dead just over a week later in London. He was hanging by his neck from underneath Blackfriars Bridge. And what he had done is to get a false passport, shave off his moustache, adopt a false name and escape from his problems in Italy to London. Clearly, he had committed suicide to escape from his problems since the Italian police was after him and the mafia was involved too. Furthermore, his bank was about to collapse, with a debt of over $1.3 billion dollars – reason enough, according to the London City Police for a suicide inducing depression. However, not everyone was convinced, and Roberto Calvi’s son was sure that his father wouldn’t do something like that. An inquest had been held and a verdict of suicide had been returned, but Roberto Calvi’s son campaigned so vigorously that the very unusual step of a second inquest was taken. When the police investigated they found some weird evidence. Roberto had bricks in his suit pocket which doesn’t make any sense. If you’re going to hang yourself, you don’t need any bricks, the weight of your body is sufficient. Bricks could be used if he was going to drown himself in the river, which he didn’t do. In his wallet he had $14.000 in various currencies. If you are going to kill yourself, why do you need so much cash? Because after all you can’t take the stuff with you. Also he had a false passport which means that he could travel. And when they checked his hotel in London, they found that his bags had been packed just as if he was going to travel. Let’s now look at the pathology. Well, his neck was not broken, there were no drugs in his blood, and there were no signs of a struggle, the marks around his neck are consistent with hanging and there was no water in is his lungs, so he hadn’t been drowned. He was wet quite a way up his body, but that is because the River Thames at that point is tidal, and the river level goes up and down. His very expensive Philippe Patek watch had stopped at 1:52 as it was not waterproof. Roberto Calvi’s son hired an investigator, who went to the company that had supplied the scaffolding for the maintenance of Blackfriars Bridge. Calvi was hanging from the yellow painted scaffolding. The investigator got the same scaffolding, he reassembled it, and he got someone to climb up and down that scaffolding. And he found that whenever you climbed up and down, you would always get flakes of yellow paint and marks on your clothes or body. And what was extremely interesting was that there were no marks or flakes on Roberto Calvi. So possibly he had been raised up from a boat there. From all these evidence, we can ask all sorts of questions. Why a rope and bricks? One is for hanging and one is for drowning. Where did he get the rope? Police investigations were never able to determine where the rope came from. How did he climb down there without getting any marks on him? And then there is a very basic question- why commit suicide in a rather cold, dirty river when you could do it on a nice comfortable hotel room? It has been established that suicidal people tend to make themselves feel cozy and comfortable in their final moments. Moreover, how did Calvi get from the hotel to the bridge? His hotel was in Chelsea, in West London and the bridge is on the east side of the city. There are plenty of bridges in Chelsea, why did he choose Blackfriars Bridge? Inquiries amongst taxi drivers and bus drivers, nobody had seen him traveling across the city that night. All of these questions raised up convinced the second inquest that it was not a nice, simple suicide. It was a much more complex case, and the likelihood was that Roberto Calvi had been murdered, presumably to keep him quiet. Well, establishing that a case is a murder and proving who did the murder are different things. But, there was not sufficient evidence to convict anyone of the murder. And when the Italian authorities charged some of Calvi’s associates with the murder, those people were acquitted, found not guilty, at the subsequent trial. So the question of who killed Roberto Calvi is still open.