Banco Ambrosiano collapse and the death of Roberto Calvi

On the morning of June 18, 1982, Roberto Calvi, chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, Italy's largest private bank, was found hanging from scaffolding under Blackfriars Bridge in London. His pockets held bricks and about 15,000 dollars in several currencies. He had fled Italy days earlier on a false passport as his bank collapsed under debts estimated at between 700 million and 1.5 billion dollars, much of it lent to shell companies in Panama and elsewhere that were linked to the Istituto per le Opere di Religione, the Vatican Bank, run by the American archbishop Paul Marcinkus. Calvi was also a member of P2, a secret Masonic lodge whose membership list, uncovered in 1981, included politicians, generals and intelligence chiefs.²³⁵

A first London inquest ruled suicide; a second in 1983 returned an open verdict. Calvi's family never accepted suicide, and a 2002 forensic study in Italy concluded he had been killed. In 2007 a Rome court tried five people, including a Mafia figure, and acquitted them all for lack of evidence, with the verdict leaving open that Calvi was murdered. The Vatican Bank denied legal liability but paid 224 million dollars to creditors in 1984 in recognition of its moral involvement.¹³⁴