The Annals of Unsolved Crime

by Edward Jay Epstein

  Behind every great crime, to paraphrase Balzac, there is a multitude of theories in Italy. In the case of the hanging of God’s banker, almost all the theories proceed from a single motive: silencing Calvi. Various theories thus point to all the financial, political, and criminal interests for whom Calvi was laundering money, a list that includes offshore bankers, Gelli’s P-2 lodge, and the Vatican. In almost all of these theories, the Mafia, or some offshoot of it, organizes the actual murder. The umbrella theory, at least in the realm of fiction, can be found in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1990 movie The Godfather Part III. It depicts the hanging of a Calvi-like banker under Blackfriars Bridge in London as the work of Mafia killers who carried out this murder on the orders of the Godfather, who did so as a favor to corrupt figures in the Vatican. In the realm of reality, Italian magistrates advanced a similar theory in court based almost entirely the testimony of “pentiti,” or ex-Mafia turncoats who, despite their oath of silence, agreed to cooperate with government investigations. One such turncoat was Francesco Marino Mannoia, a former member of the Sicilian Mafia who had been involved in heroin trafficking and at least seventeen murders before his conversion to government witness. In July 1991, he claimed to have hearsay information about the Calvi case, saying that he had heard from others that Francesco DiCarlo, another imprisoned Mafia hitman, had killed Calvi on orders from a Mafia boss Giuseppe Calo. For his part, DiCarlo, who was imprisoned in Britain for drug trafficking, denied the allegation. Instead, he told the magistrates that although he had been asked to “punish” the banker for squandering Mafia assets, he had refused the order. Then he offered his own hearsay evidence, saying that he had heard that two mafiosi from Naples had killed Calvi, but both men he mentioned were themselves dead.

  The obvious problem with pentiti hearsay evidence is that it cannot be tested by confronting its source. Nor can the pentiti themselves be assumed to be telling the truth, since they have powerful incentives, including their freedom, money, and even vengeance, to invent unverifiable stories that assist high-profile prosecutions. On June 6, 2007, after 20 months of hearing such evidence in a prison in Rome, presiding judge Mario Lucio d’Andria dismissed the charges proceeding from this ex-Mafia testimony on the basis that there was “insufficient evidence” to continue.

  My assessment, based on my interviews with some of the principal figures involved in the scandal, is more modest. The most obvious suspects in my view are the people responsible for Calvi’s protection on the night he was killed, Flavio Carboni, and his associates in London. Carboni, it will be recalled, organized Calvi’s escape, his travel plans, his forged documents, his bodyguard, and his hotel room at the Chelsea Cloisters. He had also accompanied Calvi in the private plane to London and was in constant touch with him by phone. So he had opportunity.

  Carboni had also supplied Calvi’s lone bodyguard, Vittor, who left Calvi unprotected that night. At about 5:00 p.m. Carboni phoned Calvi from the London Hilton, where he was staying, and told him to pack his bags since he had arranged for him to move to a flat, which was untrue. According to Vittor, Carboni arrived at the Chelsea Cloisters in a taxi that evening, and met Vittor at the front desk, but didn’t go up to see Calvi, who was waiting for him to move him. Since Calvi was relying on Carboni to hide him, he presumably would have followed whatever instructions Carboni provided, such as getting into a car or even a onto bridge to await a boat. If so, whether or not he used them, Carboni had the means to get Calvi to Blackfriars Bridge without using force.

  Carboni also showed what might be construed as consciousness of guilt. Using a pseudonym, he left England by going to Scotland, where he had a chartered jet waiting to fly him to Switzerland. (Vittor, also using a pseudonym, took an early-morning commercial flight to Austria.)

  Carboni also had a motive: money. He had in his Swiss bank account in Zurich $11 million that he had gotten from Calvi and which Calvi, if he had lived, might have used for his own purposes. More important, Calvi’s death also provided Carboni with the contents of Calvi’s black attaché case. The last time Vittor saw Calvi, he had the bag, but, after his vanishing, the bag disappeared. The value of its contents became clear only six years later. An Italian police raid on a smuggling suspect turned up copies of two letters apparently sent by registered mail to Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, who then was a high-ranking Vatican official. The letters said that the smuggler had advanced to Carboni $1 million to get from him incriminating documents written by Calvi. I learned about this remarkable effort to extort money from the Vatican from Judge Almerighi, a self-styled Sherlock Holmes among investigating magistrates, who prided himself on his deductive logic. Since these documents had come from Calvi’s missing black bag, and he was investigating the Calvi affair, they were brought to his attention. When I interviewed Judge Almerighi in Rome, he told me that the Vatican acknowledged to him that a Vatican bishop had written checks for $2 million to Carboni on the Instituto per le Opere di Religione, the Vatican’s bank. The magistrate also uncovered a memo in which a Vatican official discussed paying $40 million to Carboni for other Calvi documents from the black bag. He concluded that these sensitive documents were being used, as he put it to me, “to blackmail the pope.” In tracing the scheme back to June 20, 1982, Almerighi also found a witness who claimed to have seen Carboni give an envelope to a Vatican official the day after Calvi died. If Carboni believed that the Vatican would pay to keep secret the documents Calvi had in his black bag, Calvi might have appeared to be worth a great deal more dead than alive.

  One clue that caught Almerighi’s attention was the fact that Calvi had shaved off the moustache that he had worn his entire adult life on the day he was last seen in London by Vittor. “We know he had packed his bags and was waiting for a car that evening: he had an escape plan,” Almerighi told me. “Shaving the moustache would be necessary if he was told he was getting a new identity.” His reasoning was that Calvi was carefully following Carboni’s instructions when he was delivered into the hands of a contract killer at the bridge. His view of the case, which was presented at trial, was that Carboni took Calvi’s black bag and then betrayed him. Carboni had been first arrested in 1982, then released. In 1997, he was brought to trial, along with others, for the murder of Calvi, but he was acquitted in 2005. As a result, three decades later, the hanging of Calvi remains an unsolved crime.

  But where murder intersects with high finance, follow the money. The obstacles to this approach in the case of God’s banker’s are not only that the money trail runs through an elaborate maze of offshore corporations but that the individuals who set up these accounts, including Calvi, Sindona, and Canesi, were dead, and that others who had knowledge of the pathways, such as Marcinkus, were protected by the sovereign secrecy of the Vatican. Even so, there was a thread that could be followed: the documents that Calvi had in his black bag when he fled Italy, and which vanished from his hotel room in London.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE DEATH OF DAG HAMMARSKJÖLD

  In 1961, in the heat of a bloody war of secession in the heart of Africa, UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld tried to mediate between the Republic of the Congo, which had just won its independence from Belgium, and Congo’s breakaway mineral-rich province of Katanga, whose self-proclaimed president, Moise Tshombe, and his mercenary forces were secretly financed by the giant mining corporation, Union Minerale. At stake were billions of dollars in annual mineral revenues. To end the conflict, Hammarskjöld arranged a secret meeting in Rhodesia. On September 17, 1961, he took off in a UN-chartered DC-6 airliner from Leopoldville, the capital of the Republic of the Congo, on a 1,000-mile flight to Ndola in Rhodesia. Because of the danger that Union Minerale mercenaries might try to interfere with the mission, a decoy plane was sent ahead and no flight plan was filed. On board, Hammarskjöld was accompanied by only a small staff to maintain secrecy. The captain also maintained radio silence until the plane reached the Rhodesian border at 11:35 p.m. Only then did he notify the control tower at the Ndola airpor
t that the UN plane would land there in less than thirty minutes. This was the last communication with the aircraft. Just after midnight, a large flash of light was seen in the sky near the airport. The next afternoon, the plane’s wreckage was found some nine miles from the airport. So were the fifteen badly burned bodies of the members of Hammarskjöld’s party and the crew. The only survivor was Hammarskjöld’s security chief, Harold Julien, who died five days later in a hospital.

  Even though the death of the UN Secretary General was no minor matter, investigators could not resolve whether he died by accident or design. The 180-man search party scoured a six-square-kilometer area but found few clues. The plane was not equipped with either a black box or a cockpit recorder. Swedish, British, and American experts were called in to examine the few pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that were recovered, and they found no signs of structural defects in the plane itself. The altimeters were determined by a U.S. lab to have been in working order at the time of the crash, so there was no technical reason for the pilots to have misjudged their altitude. Nor was there was evidence of fire aboard the plane before the crash. The Rhodesian Board of Investigation ruled the crash a probable accident but said it could not rule out the possibility of sabotage because major parts of the plane were not recovered and several witnesses testified that it had been left unguarded at the Leopoldville airport prior to the flight.

  The United Nations then appointed its own Commission of Investigation, but since it relied heavily on the Rhodesian inquiry, its results were also inconclusive. One problem for the UN investigators was that they found out that the corpses of two of Hammarskjöld’s Swedish bodyguards had multiple bullet wounds, and bodyguards do not ordinarily get shot in a plane crash. In this case, however, the Rhodesian medical examiners posited that the bullet wounds had been the result of exploding ammunition. The plane did carry ammunition that could have been ignited when the plane burned in the fire after the crash, but ballistics expert Major C. F. Westell found that exploding ammunition would not replicate their actual bullet wounds. He stated, “I can certainly describe as sheer nonsense the statement that cartridges of machine guns or pistols detonated in a fire can penetrate a human body.” Adding further to the mystery, General Bjorn Egge, who was the first UN official to see Hammarskjöld’s body, said in a newspaper interview in 2005 that he had seen a large hole in Hammarskjöld’s forehead (and that it had been airbrushed out of the photographs). Since Hammarskjöld was not seated near the ammunition in the rear of the plane, a bullet wound in him would suggest that he had been shot.

  POLITICAL PLANE CRASHES

  DATE CRASH SITE VICTIM

  SEPTEMBER 7, 1940 Paraguay Paraguayan dictator President José Félix Estigarribia

  JULY 4, 1943 Gibraltar Polish resistance leader Wladyslaw Sikorski

  MARCH 17, 1957 Cebu, Philippines Philippines President Ramon Magsaysay

  SEPTEMBER 18, 1957 Zambia UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld

  APRIL 13, 1966 Iraq Iraqi President Abdul Salam Arif

  APRIL 27, 1969 Mongolia Chinese Vice Premier Lin Biao

  DECEMBER 4, 1980 Portugal Portuguese Prime Minister Francisco de Sá Carne

  MAY 24, 1981 Ecuador Ecuadorian President Jaime Roldós Aguilera

  JULY 31, 1981 Panama Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos

  OCTOBER 19, 1986 Mozambique Mozambique President Samora Machel

  AUGUST 17, 1988 Pakistan Pakistani President Zia-ul-haq

  APRIL 6, 1994 Rwanda Rwanda President Juvénal Habyarimana and Burunda President Cyprien Ntaryamira

  FEBRUARY 26, 2004 Bosnia Macadonia President Boris Trajkovski

  OCTOBER 19, 2006 Nigeria Sultan of Sokoto, head of Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs

  APRIL 10, 2010 Russia Polish President Lech Kaczynski

  Then, in 1998, after the apartheid government fell in South Africa, new evidence emerged from the archives of South Africa’s intelligence archive. According to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel laureate who headed South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, documents in the files indicated that a bomb had been planted in the plane’s landing gear. One such report implicated both the CIA and Britain’s MI-5 in the sabotage, though this could not be verified. The British Foreign Office, in denying its validity, suggested that it may have been planted in the files as disinformation. In any case, without any forensic means of establishing the facts surrounding Hammarskjöld’s death, the case could not be settled by a questionable intelligence record. It thus remains an unresolved mystery.

  The most innocent theory is that the crash was caused by pilot error. According to it, the pilot, though experienced, was fatigued by the tense flight, and in his approach he misjudged the distance to the airport. A second theory is that the plane was sabotaged by those opposed to Hammarskjöld’s efforts to get Tshombe to end the secession of Katanga. There is also a theory that someone aboard the plane tried to hijack it, and a gunfight broke out. This scenario would account for the guards’ bullet wounds. Finally, there is the theory that a plane piloted by a mercenary tried to intercept the UN plane after it broke radio silence, and caused the crash. In 2011, A. Susan Williams, a research fellow at the University of London, argued in her book Who Killed Hammarskjöld? that there was an explosion before the plane fell from the sky, as the only survivor of the crash, Harold Julien, had testified, and that U.S. intelligence had intercepted a message from the cockpit in which the pilot says “I’ve hit it.”

  My assessment is that the crash involved more than pilot error. The problem with both the hijacker and interception theories is that the pilot was in radio contact with the control tower in the last half-hour and, if there had been a battle on the plane or an attack by another aircraft, he certainly would have reported it over the radio or sounded a mayday alert, as he did not suffer bullet wounds. Before the plane was reported missing, several witnesses reported to police a bright flash in the sky. Such an explosion high in the sky could scatter parts of the plane far from where the wreckage was found and account for why they were not found by the search party. Such an explosion would also discount the pilot error theory. So the most compelling explanation is sabotage, possibly an explosive device planted on the plane before it departed and triggered by the lowering of the landing gear. In this scenario, the bullet wounds remain a problem. They could have been the result of a gunman finding the wreckage before the search party and completing the job, or from a guard on the plane discharging his weapon in panic after the explosion. But unless some of the missing pieces of wreckage turn up after a half-century, we will never know the answer.

  The lesson here is that an assassination disguised as a plane crash, if not a perfect crime, makes it difficult to definitively identify the culprit by conventional forensic methods. The successful explosion of an aircraft leaves no crime scene and no witnesses.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE STRANGE DEATH OF

  MARILYN MONROE

  By 1962, Marilyn Monroe had become a living legend. Unlike the pageant of iconic blond bombshells that preceded her as sex symbols for movie audiences, her appeal went far beyond anything that Hollywood’s publicity machine could create. Born Norma Jeane Mortenson in 1926 and brought up in orphanages and foster homes, she transcended the boundaries of the entertainment universe, and through her intimate association with President John F. Kennedy, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and other members of the Kennedy clan, she gained entry to the corridors of power before her death.

  She died on August 4, 1962, in her home in Los Angeles after a day of frantic phone calls to members of the Kennedy family. The exact time is unknown. The Los Angeles police received an urgent phone call at 4:25 a.m. on Sunday, August 5, 1962, from her psychoanalyst, Ralph Greenson, informing them that Marilyn Monroe had committed suicide. When they arrived at her Brentwood home, they were met by Dr. Greenson, Dr. Hyman Engelberg, her physician, and her live-in house keeper, Eunice Murray. Murray said she had been concerned because the light was on in Mo
nroe’s bedroom at 3:00 a.m., and Monroe did not answer when called. Murray had called Dr. Engelberg, who, with her, had discovered her dead.

  In her bedroom, the police found Monroe’s nude body lying face down on her bed. Next to her body, they saw several nearly empty bottles of the barbiturate Nembutal. They did not see any glass in the room that she might have used to take the capsules (though one would turn up later), and there was no running water in the room that Monroe could have used to swallow the pills. Murray told the police that she had cleaned the room and done the laundry after finding the body, saying that she wanted to make sure everything was neat and tidy before the police arrived. Later, an empty glass turned up in the room, but the police insisted that it was not there when they initially searched the room.

  The police estimated from the advanced state of rigor mortis that Monroe had died between 9:30 and 11:30 p.m. on Saturday night. So there was a gap of near five to seven hours before the police were notified. After examining the body, the coroner determined that Monroe had died from a fatal mixture of at least thirty-eight capsules of Nembutal and chloral hydrate, a hypnotic sedative (also used illegally in bars as a “knockout drug”). One problem was that if she had swallowed thirty-eight yellow Nembutal capsules, they would have left crystals, yellow dye, and other residue in her digestive system, but the coroner could find no traces of them in her stomach or her intestines. Could she have been injected with the drug? That possibility was ruled out because the coroner could find no injection marks, bruises, or other signs that the drugs had been intravenously delivered. The final possibility he considered was that the drugs had been administered rectally. But there was no enema bag found in her home. The coroner, Dr. Thomas Noguchi, later attempted to obtain a further toxicological analysis of her liver, kidneys, and other organs, but he was told that they had been destroyed. Even though it was not clear how she took the lethal mixture, he concluded that her death was a “probable suicide.”