Authors: Philip Willan
Police photographs of the man’s trousers show a small tear at the level of the right hip and a dark stain on the seat. The dark substance is also present, though less clearly visible, at the level of the calves. The stains, which went through the man’s shirt tail and underpants, appear to have been picked up by sitting on a dirty bench and were later determined to be caused by an oily substance compatible with the varnish used on boats.
At 2 p.m. Professor Keith Simpson, an eminent pathologist from the University of London, conducted a brief post-mortem examination. His report gives ‘asphyxia due to hanging’ as the cause of death and suggests it was the result of ‘deliberate self-suspension’. He added: ‘There is NO suggestion from autopsy of drowning and no injury to suggest manhandling or any kind of foul play.’
The clean-shaven man suspended above the river by the length of orange rope had been identified by police as a 62-year-old Italian, Gian Roberto Calvini. That was the name on the false passport he was carrying and that was the name that appeared on his post-mortem report: when Professor Simpson examined the corpse he had no idea that he was dealing with one of Europe’s leading bankers, on the run from a major financial catastrophe in his homeland. Seeing the torn and dirty clothes he was wearing – another anomaly for a man
of fastidious cleanliness – some police officers had taken the view that they were dealing with the suicide of a vagrant, and their initial assumption may also have coloured the professor’s view.
Overweight, balding and dressed in a top-quality grey business suit, Mr Calvini’s presence was immediately puzzling. Had he chosen this temporary structure erected for the repair of the banks and storm drains of the river as the setting for a bizarre, acrobatic suicide? Or had unidentified enemies strung him up, staging an awkward and risky execution ritual to broadcast a menacing message to the denizens of his secretive world? The only thing certain was that his death could not have been an accident.
An insight into Simpson’s – and the police’s – initial reaction to the death is contained in a four-page handwritten note he made later, which describes the telephone call he received from the police while at breakfast. ‘ “Hullo, sir. I know you’re coming through the City this morning, sir. We’ve got a man found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge. Doesn’t look like crime, sir, but would you care to look at it on your way through?” Nothing very unusual. The City police had been to the scene, cut the man down, called the Police Surgeon to certify the fact of death and have the body removed . . . just routine, you would say.’ This note was to be presented two decades later in Rome as part of the prosecution evidence for the trial of Calvi’s alleged murderers.
Simpson conducted his post-mortem at 2 p.m. and the body he dealt with was still that of the obscure Mr Calvini. Roberto Calvi was not correctly identified by the London police until around 7 p.m. on that Friday, when, according to a City of London Police report, the head of Rome’s Special Branch telephoned to say ‘he believed the body to be that of Roberto Calvi, an important banker, who had been missing from Rome
since approximately 11th June 1982.’ At that point the City Police were also informed that Calvi ‘was involved in a large bank fraud concerning Banco Ambrosiano, a private bank of which he was president’. News of the identification appears to have leaked quickly in Italy. The Rome newspaper
Il Tempo
was tipped off by an anonymous phone call at around the same time that evening. A woman with a Milanese accent told the paper that the body of Roberto Calvi had been found in London, according to a report by the Carabinieri paramilitary police.
The City Police might have been quicker in establishing Calvi’s true identity: his real name was on a label sewn into the lining of his jacket near the breast pocket.
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In his handwritten account Simpson elaborated on the international shake-up and court cases that followed over the next few weeks, and acknowledged: ‘It was no ordinary hanging for sure. Yet I could find absolutely no trace of violence or manhandling – and analysis revealed no drugs that might have been slipped into a drink to make Calvi unconscious, easy to overcome, slip into a noose and hoist onto the scaffolding on which he was hanging.’ The only mark Simpson found on the body was that left by the noose around the neck. The sort of mark, he wrote, ‘I had seen on hundreds of self-hanging suicides over whose deaths no further argument had arisen’. Tiny blood spots had burst out on his scalp and the whites of the eyes owing to constriction of the neck veins – petechiae, or ‘Tardieu spots’ after the French police surgeon who first described them in deaths from asphyxiation. ‘No, there could be no doubt he had hanged alive and died quietly – if that is the word – in that noose.’
More details of the exact circumstances of Calvi’s death can be gleaned from the witness statements of other officers who attended the scene and from a City of London Police report drawn up by Detective Inspector John White, one of the officers who oversaw the original investigation, on 20 July
1982 – one month after the event. Whether the police and other authorities correctly gathered and interpreted that evidence remains controversial to this day.
Police Constable Donald Bartliff was patrolling with the Thames River Police when he was called to Blackfriars Bridge at 7.48 a.m. His testimony, delivered ten days after the event, provides one of the fullest accounts of the crime scene on the morning of Calvi’s death. ‘On arrival at the scene at 8 a.m. under the north arch of Blackfriars Bridge, I saw the lifeless body of a man who I now know to be Roberto Calvi hanging from the scaffolding by a rope which was tied round his neck. The rope which was orange in colour is of a type commonly used on the river. The scaffolding was built on the foreshore alongside the river wall and the body was hanging on the down-river end close to the wall facing upstream. The feet were just resting on the fifth horizontal scaffold pole from the top. The left arm was draped over the third horizontal scaffold pole close to the wall. The full weight of the body was taken by the rope, which had been tied about three feet above the head by two half hitches to a securing eyelet, level with the second horizontal scaffold pole from the top.’
Like PC Palmer, Bartliff noticed ‘a half brick in the front of the trousers under the flies which were buttoned up’. This piece of brick rammed in front of Calvi’s genitals is one of the most telling items of evidence to point away from suicide. However distressed he may have been, it is unlikely that Calvi would have shown such disrespect for his own body, and later reconstructions showed it would have been very difficult for him to walk, let alone clamber athletically over the scaffolding, without the brick dislodging and rolling down one of his trouser-legs. Experiments also showed that any such movement was likely to leave chafe marks on Calvi’s inside thigh. Such physical disrespect would be entirely consistent with murder, however; a mark of scorn in the mafia’s coded language of physical gestures.
PC Bartliff’s evidence is clearly geared towards suicide, though. ‘There is a metal ladder secured to the river wall immediately upstream of the scaffold which would have provided easy access to the structure,’ he said. Calvi’s delivery to the scaffolding by boat, an essential element of the most plausible murder theory, would not have been so easy. ‘I have served on Thames Division at Waterloo Pier since 1964 and in my opinion it would need a boat’s crew with considerable experience and knowledge of the river Thames to place a boat in position alongside this scaffolding so that the body could have been secured in this way,’ he said. Later experiments would show that the procedure could indeed be carried out, much depending on the strength and direction of the tide at the time.
PC Bartliff’s evidence reveals he participated in one of the first operational errors in the police’s handling of the case, for all his long professional experience: ‘A police salvage line was placed loosely around the chest and under the armpits so that PC Johnston could support the body while I untied the rope from the scaffold.’ The knot was not preserved, as it could have been if the body had been cut down, thus destroying a vital clue to the technical competence of the person who attached Calvi to his place of death. Calvi was not an expert sailor and would not have been capable of creating a complex knot. It would not be the last mistake.
Further details of the crime scene were provided in John White’s report of 20 July. ‘The rope which was of a nylon substance, orange in colour and commonly found on the Thames, was secured to the north east corner of the scaffold by two half hitches and round the neck of the body by a loop which had been formed by doubling the rope and making one half hitch.’ The five bricks and stones weighing down Calvi’s pockets amounted to a total of 11lb 15oz (5.4kg). They were compatible with builder’s rubble found on waste ground 300 yards east of the bridge and adjacent to the river, the report said.
Photographs of Calvi’s body were not taken until it had been removed to Waterloo Pier and searched for clues to identity. ‘Calvi’s jacket was unbuttoned to be searched and incorrectly buttoned again by police before the photographs were taken,’ White wrote. The wrongly buttoned jacket, fastened by police officers rather than by Calvi’s killers, would give a spurious boost to the murder theory when the photo of the corpse lying on Waterloo Pier was acquired by
L’Espresso
magazine in Italy and published on its front cover.
Police were responsible for a catalogue of further errors, according to James Cameron, a professor of forensic medicine at the University of London who was retained as an expert witness by the Calvi family, who were understandably keen to prove Roberto had not committed suicide, for insurance as well as moral purposes. Professor Cameron outlined his misgivings about the police investigation when interviewed in 1992 by representatives of Kroll Associates, an American firm of detectives also hired by the Calvi family. ‘We questioned Professor Cameron about the manner in which the autopsy was conducted and he is of the strong opinion the police presented to Professor Simpson only the facts which supported a case of suicide,’ the Kroll detective wrote in a report on the meeting. ‘Professor Cameron said that when he was retained by Kingsley Napley [the Calvi family’s solicitors] it was known by them the City of London Police officers and Thames Division officers of the Metropolitan Police had from the outset dealt with the matter as a suicide. The usual procedures at the scene of a suspicious death were not adhered to and certain irregularities had occurred.’
The Kroll report said that Dr Arthur Gordon Davies, the coroner at the second London inquest in June 1983, had told all the counsel involved that ‘he did not think his Court was the correct place to question or accuse Police of negligence in relation to the handling of the body.’ Reporting on a second meeting with Professor Cameron, the Kroll agent said:
‘Professor Cameron stated the case was “cocked up” from the start with Police Officers from Thames Division dealing with the body in a most unprofessional manner. Professor Cameron said the Thames Police Officers, from the outset, dealt with the hanging of the body as one of suicide. The scene of the crime, and indeed the body, was not preserved as it should have been.’
The Kroll report said its investigators understood that no police photographs were taken of the crime scene. This was most unusual, it observed, even in obvious suicide cases. ‘There appears little doubt in this case the investigation was badly handled in the first 12 hours which is the most crucial period in any murder or sudden death inquiry,’ the firm said. Modern viewers of the television series
Silent Witness
or
CSI
would undoubtedly be shocked at the clumsy way Calvi’s death was initially investigated. But it appears that the handling of the case may have fallen short even of the more primitive standards pertaining a quarter of a century ago. Lieutenant Colonel Francesco Delfino, an officer of the Italian military intelligence service (SISMI), who was sent to London from his base in Brussels to follow developments in the Calvi case, gained the impression that his British colleagues were treating it ‘like the suicide of a tramp’.
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Calvi’s real importance was underlined by the extremely swift reaction of Italian authorities to the news of his death. A Rome magistrate, Domenico Sica, flew immediately to London in the company of four senior police officers to assist in the identification of the body. The group arrived at Heathrow by private plane less than 24 hours after the body’s discovery, at 3.30 a.m. on Saturday 19 June, and went straight to Snow Hill Police Station in the City. They were provided with all documents and statements taken in the investigation up to that point and their questions were answered where possible. A month later, DI White was sceptical of Sica’s murder hypothesis. ‘Dr Sica is convinced Calvi has been murdered, but cannot give any
tangible reasons to support his belief,’ he wrote in his report of 20 July. ‘He just speculates over the many unanswered questions that arise out of this particular case, bearing in mind the position Calvi held in Italy and the political intrigue which is being disclosed in the Italian press.’
White, in contrast, opts unequivocally for suicide. His report lays out clearly the elements that lead him to this conclusion: the rope used was common on the river and could have been left on the scaffolding by the tide; the knots, in his view, were those of a layman. There were no signs of force, drugs or poison in the body; the neck was not broken. Access to the scaffold was by a fixed ladder and was not difficult.
‘When looking at suicide, matters fall more readily into place,’ he wrote. Calvi had attempted suicide a year earlier, was on the run from police, and in a fragile state of mind. White reiterated his view that the Italian authorities had failed to produce any credible evidence to support their murder theory, adding: ‘There is little doubt that much of the information they have relating to Calvi has not been disclosed to us.’ International judicial cooperation on the case had evidently got off to a bad start.