Early on the morning of Friday, June 18, 1982, a body was found dangling from an orange rope underneath Blackfriars Bridge in London, England. Police recovered the corpse of a middle age man, about sixty, paunchy, in a gray suit. Pieces of rocks and brick had been stuffed into the pockets, along with $15,000 in various currencies. A passport identified the victim as Gian Roberto Calvini, but soon it was learned that the dead man was really Roberto Calvi, chairman and managing director of Banco Ambrosiano in Milan, Italy. Calvi had mysteriously vanished from Rome on June 11, and his misfortune in London re-ignited media curiosity over a story which had already made headlines, and reverberated through the world’s major financial and political institutions.
Calvi was only one of a cast of characters in that story that included organized crime interests, political groups, secret societies, drug dealers, major financial institutions, and perhaps most stunning of all, a little-known entity identified as the Institute for Religious Works, or IOR, the official bank for the Vatican. The collapse of Calvi’s Banco Ambrosiano revealed that high officials within the Vatican and its bank had collaborated in building a network of offshore dummy corporations propped up under the Ambosirano Group’s line of credit, into which hundreds of millions of dollars disappeared. Some figures indicate that the Vatican’s participation in this scandal exceeded $1.25 billion dollars (and remember, this is the early 1980s). (more...)
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