Was financier laundering money for Mafia, Vatican? After 25 years, trial of five seeks the answers.

Bill Taylor | TheStar.com
October 11, 2005

Even the Pope couldn’t help “God’s banker.”

Roberto Calvi, an Italian financier with ties both to the Vatican — hence his nickname — and the Mafia, in 1982 begged John Paul II to step in and save his bank from collapse, The Times of London reports. But money was the least of Calvi’s problems.

Two weeks later, on June 19, he was found hanging by an orange rope tied in a lover’s knot from scaffolding under one of the nine arches of Blackfriars Bridge in central London. The 300-metre, 18th century stone structure spans the River Thames.

It was one of the showier crimes of the 20th century, originally ruled a suicide but revealed two years ago to be homicide, with all the ingredients of a good whodunit — organized crime, financial scandal, money laundering for the Mafia and the Vatican, and chicanery in the most confidential corridors of religious power and the equally secret affairs of freemasonry. (more…)