by Gordon Kerr
It seems the truth of what happened to Jimmy Hoffa may actually lie in a series of confessions made by a man by the name of Frank Sheeran. Before he died in 2003, Sheeran claimed that he used his friendship with Hoffa to lure him to a house in north-western Detroit where Teamster business agent Thomas Andretta, Salvatore Briguglio and his brother Gabriel were waiting. Sheeran claimed he fired two shots into the back of Hoffa’s head before fleeing. He said that Hoffa’s body was then driven the short distance to Grand Lawn Cemetery where it was cremated within an hour of the murder. The hit had been ordered by Pennsylvania Mob boss Russell Bufalino and handed to Provenzano. Bufalino’s cousin, William, had had a serious disagreement with Hoffa some years previously, which, added to the fact that the Mafia did not want him to become Teamster president again, led to his murder.
Speculation continued, however, and in May 2006 land at the Hidden Dreams Farm in Michigan was dug up by the FBI following information received from a marijuana smuggler called Donovan Wells, incarcerated in Lexington, about a group of men who had met there 30 years previously. Nothing was found.
Jimmy Hoffa was declared legally dead in 1982. His case is still open, however, with an agent working on it full time at Detroit’s FBI field office. The investigation has generated more than 16,000 pages of documents gathered from interviews, wiretaps, and surveillance, but a question mark remains as to what the Mob did with his remains.
The authorities may not have been able to charge anyone with the disappearance and murder of Jimmy Hoffa, but the principals all got their come-uppance in one way or another over the following years.
Tony Pro’s Local 560 branch of the Teamsters came under investigation and his activities were seriously curtailed. In 1978, he was found guilty of the murder of Anthony Castellito some 17 years after Castellito’s body was put through a tree shredder. He died in prison in 1988, aged 81.
Tony Jack Giacalone was arrested for tax evasion and went to jail for ten years. In 1996 he was charged with racketeering but died before the case reached the courts.
Chuckie O’Brien who, in all likelihood, drove Hoffa from the restaurant to his death, worked in Florida for the Teamsters, but was kicked out of the union in 1990 because of his Mafia links. He has survived cancer and four heart bypass operations and now lives in Boca Raton. He resolutely sticks to his story that the government, not the Mob, killed Jimmy Hoffa.
Salvatore Briguglio, who was waiting in the house for Hoffa with the others, was murdered in Little Italy in New York when two gunmen fired a number of bullets into his chest and head. He had been talking to prosecutors about testifying against Provenzano in the Castellito case.
Only Frank Sheeran got to die peacefully, in a Philadelphia nursing home in 2003, aged 83.
Roberto Calvi
It was a postman passing at 7.30 in the morning who spotted it – a body dangling on the end of an orange rope tied to some scaffolding under Blackfriars Bridge in London. The body’s feet were submerged in the murky waters of the Thames and in his pockets and the flies of his trousers were stuffed a number of building bricks to weigh the body down. His expensive Patek Philippe watch was still on his wrist and his wallet still contained around 8,000 or so pounds in three different currencies – Swiss francs, Italian lire and sterling. So it seemed that he had not been the victim of a robbery or mugging. In his pockets police also found four pairs of spectacles and a passport in the name of Gian Roberto Calvini.
It was 18 June 1982, and the dead man, as the police quickly ascertained when they cut him down early next morning, was Roberto Calvi, chairman of the Italian Banco Ambrosiano. He had disappeared with a bag of documents from his Rome apartment ten days previously, had shaved off his distinctive moustache and travelled to Venice. There, he had hired a private plane that took him to London, using his false passport. Now the bag of papers had vanished, as well as £1.2 million from the Banco Ambrosiano’s subsidiaries in the Bahamas, Peru, Luxemburg and the Vatican.
An inquest held in London shortly after the body was discovered found that Calvi had committed suicide, raising eyebrows around the world. A second inquest, one year later, delivered an open verdict.
Nonetheless, it was a mystery and, to some extent, remains a mystery some 25 years later, in spite of countless books, films and theories about what actually happened to the man who, due to Banco Ambrosiano’s links with the Vatican, came to be known as God’s Banker.
A post-mortem examination was carried out by one of England’s most experienced pathologists, Professor Frederick Keith Simpson. He reported that there was no river water in Calvi’s lungs and that death had resulted from asphyxia by hanging. However, he deduced that the banker had dropped on the end of the noose only about two feet. Apart from the fact that the dead man had a noose around his neck, there was no evidence of foul play, nothing to indicate he had been restrained or involved in a struggle, no puncture marks to indicate that he might have been sedated by drugs and no chemicals in his stomach, other than some sleeping pills which Calvi was known to take.
Professor Simpson established the time of death to have been between one and two-thirty in the morning and further surmised that the time made suicide all the more unlikely. Calvi was 62 years old when he died. He was overweight and he suffered from vertigo. However, if he had in fact killed himself, he would have had to find the scaffolding, which was difficult to see from the walkway by the Thames, load up with bricks and clamber over the parapet onto the bridge. There was then a 12-foot-long vertical ladder and a 30-inch gap to negotiate to get onto the scaffolding. Once there, he would have had to edge his way along the rusty scaffolding poles, about eight feet, and tie the rope onto them. As there was no neck damage, however, he could not have leapt from there. He would have climbed down to the next row of scaffolding. All of this achieved while carrying the bricks and the rope.
It could be done, of course, but making it more unlikely was the lack of rust from the poles on his fingers, or under his fingernails, no scrapes or marks on his hands and the pristine state of his suit. When the bricks were examined, it also transpired that there was no evidence that Calvi had ever touched them.
The police could find no one who had seen Calvi that night. In fact, they could not even find out what he had been doing during the previous three days that he had spent in London. His personal effects were found in his suite at the Chelsea Cloisters Hotel, but he had been invisible during his time in London and no one at the hotel could even recall him leaving that night.
His journey to London had been extraordinarily complex, involving three false identities, eight separate private plane journeys in Europe, a speed boat, four cars and 14 different temporary residences in Zurich, Amsterdam, Edinburgh and London. This amazing escape was planned by, amongst others, Flavio Carboni, a contractor from Sardinia, Silvano Vittor, a cigarette smuggler and two Austrian sisters, Manuela and Michaela Klienzig.
After his flight to Venice, via Rome, he had been taken by road to Trieste and thence by speedboat to an abandoned pier in Yugoslavia. He was then driven to a chalet in Austria, followed by a car journey to Innsbruck Airport from where, disguised as a Fiat executive, he flew in a private jet to Britain.
When Calvi was settled in London the conspirators all left for various European destinations, Carboni to Switzerland to count the $11 million he had been paid for his trouble. However, by the night of 17 June they had all left England and they all denied having seen him that fatal night or knowing what might have happened to him.
Founded in 1896, and named after Saint Ambrose, the fourth-century archbishop of the city, the Catholic Banco Ambrosiano had originally been created as an alternative to Italy’s ‘lay’ banks and was supposed to have moral goals, to help pious works and religious bodies. In the 1960s it had begun to expand into business and consequently had become Italy’s second-biggest bank. Its collapse in 1982 sent shock-waves around Italy and the banking world.
Four years previously, the Bank of Italy had claimed in a r
eport on Banco Ambrosiano that several billion lire had been exported, contravening financial regulations. This resulted in the bank’s chairman, Roberto Calvi, being tried in 1981. Found guilty, he was given a four-year suspended sentence and fined almost £10 million for taking £13 million out of the country. Calvi was under a great deal of stress and while imprisoned for a short while awaiting trial, he attempted to kill himself. However, released on bail pending his appeal hearing, he was allowed to retain his position at the bank.
This was not the first time the Roman Catholic Church had been embroiled in a financial scandal. When bad loans and foreign currency transactions had brought about the collapse of the Franklin National Bank in 1974, the Vatican had taken a bath to the tune of around £15 million. That bank had been owned by Michele Sindonna, a Sicilian-born financier. Sindonna later died in prison after drinking a cup of coffee containing cyanide.
Just a few weeks before the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano, Calvi had written to the Pope, John Paul II, warning of the danger to the Church the bank’s collapse would pose. And, sure enough, when it all came tumbling down in June 1982, debts emerged of somewhere between £350 million and £1.5 billion. Much of this money had been syphoned off via the Istituto per le Opere Religiose, the Vatican Bank, Banco Ambrosiano’s principal shareholder.
Two years later, the Vatican Bank acknowledged its ‘moral involvement’ in the bank’s collapse by making a payment to creditors of around £120 million.
The mostly likely cause of Calvi’s death was that he just knew too much about too many things.
For instance, he knew a lot about the vexed question of Italian political funding. While being held in the prison at Lodi, he had provided magistrates with information about a loan of around £10 million to the Italian Socialist Party, hinting that he knew a great deal more. Indeed, he did. He knew the details of how major state-owned companies channelled funds in to the bank accounts of Italian politicians and political parties.
Or it could have been something to do with the mysterious Propogande Due – more commonly known as P2 – Masonic lodge in Rome. This lodge, run by Italian financier Licio Gelli, listed amongst its 900 members, 43 members of parliament, 48 generals, the heads of the Italian secret service, the top magistrates in the judiciary system, civil servants in charge of various state-owned enterprises, key bank regulators and leading businessmen. It was later described by a Parliamentary Commission as a ‘state within a state’. Unlike other lodges, P2 never held meetings or conducted the normal business of a Masonic lodge. In reality, by 1980, the year that Calvi joined, it had become a means by which businessmen could buy political favours from government officials. Licio Gelli was the go-between for many of these arrangements.
One of these was a move to take control of Rizzoli, the Italian publishing house. Gelli and other P2 members fashioned a deal involving the Rothschild Bank and Calvi’s bank which meant that Calvi lent £70 million to a Panamanian company called Bellatrix which deposited that money at the Rothschild Bank to buy the shares in Rizzoli. What made it worthwhile for all involved was that Bellatrix paid an artificially high price for Rizzoli’s shares – a staggering ten times what they were worth – and the P2 members involved made a small fortune. However, the Rothschild principals became frightened of the deal and decided to try to hide the money coming in from Bellatrix by putting it into two different accounts at the bank – Zirka and Reciota. Before too long, the money was flooding into accounts held by Gelli and other P2 members. Calvi’s £70 million had disappeared.
Unfortunately, though, Calvi had never received permission from the Italian financial authorities for Banco Ambrosiano to take control of the publishing house. This meant that the money that was now in P2 bank accounts was still technically cash that belonged to Banco Ambrosiano. This money was what brought the bank to its knees in June 1982.
Not long after Calvi’s body had been found Juerg Heer, executive director of the credit section of Zurich’s Rothschild Bank was given some secret instructions. Around £2.5 million, drawn from Licio Gelli’s account in Geneva – part of the Bellatrix money – was delivered to him in a suitcase. He also received half of a $100 bill. His instructions told him that two men would arrive with the other half of the $100 bill. He was to give them the suitcase and later discovered that the money was payment for the murder of Roberto Calvi.
Gelli was later arrested while making a withdrawal of £25 million from his account in Geneva. He was sentenced to 18 years and six months for fraudulently contributing to the bankruptcy of the Banco Ambrosiano. This was reduced on appeal to 12 years, but on the eve of his imprisonment, he escaped and was recaptured on the French Riviera.
Or perhaps it was the Mafia who killed God’s Banker. Rumours suggest that Calvi was laundering money for the Mafia and was about to spill the beans. Then again, the Mafia lost a great deal of money when the bank collapsed and somebody had to pay. Mafia pentito, Francesco Mannoia suggested that Calvi had been killed by Mafioso Franco di Carlo, who had been living in London at the time of the murder. Di Carlo, eventually given a 25-year sentence in Britain for narcotics smuggling, denied it, but it emerged that £50,000 had gone into his bank account the day before Calvi disappeared.
The Vatican is also in the frame. During a police raid against a gang of hashish and heroin importers in 1988, police discovered correspondence addressed to a high-ranking Vatican official, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli. The letters asked for around half a million pounds which the drug smuggler had given to Flavio Carboni to obtain documents written by Roberto Calvi. These were the documents that Calvi had taken on his tortuous journey to London. The documents had been delivered to a Vatican bishop who had paid him with cheques drawn from his personal account at the Vatican Bank. Carboni had received almost a million pounds for them.
In April 1986 the bag surfaced when Carboni and Silvano Vittor, Calvi’s bodyguard, showed it off on Italian television. The documents were filled with opportunities to blackmail. One letter from Calvi to Pope John Paul II said: ‘It was I who took on the heavy burden of remedying the errors and mistakes made by the present and former representatives of the IOR . . . providing financial aid to many countries and politico-religious associations on the instructions of authoritative representatives of the Vatican.’
Given the fact that more than half a billion pounds had gone missing from the Banco Ambrosiano, this was bad news for Archbishop Paul Marcinkus who had been a director of the bank’s overseas business and had forged greater links between the Vatican Bank and Banco Ambrosiano. The Vatican’s status as a sovereign state allowed Calvi to transfer money abroad.
Eventually, it was concluded that a number of people were guilty, but the judge presiding over the inquiry recommended that Franco di Carlo and Pippo Calò, the two Mafiosi allegedly contracted for the murder, be prosecuted alongside Flavio Carboni who got Calvi to London, and Licio Gelli who provided payment for the hit.
In 1998 Calvi’s body was exhumed and in 2002 it was confirmed that he had been murdered.
In June 2007, in a specially fortified courtroom in Rome, Giuseppe Calò, alleged to be cashier for the Sicilian Mafia, Flavio Carboni, businessman Ernesto Diotavelli, Silvano Vittor, Calvi’s former bodyguard, and Manuela Kleinszig were cleared of the murder of Roberto Calvi. The charges had claimed that they had arranged his death to prevent him blackmailing ‘his political and institutional sponsors from the world of Masonry, belonging to the P2 lodge, or to the Institute for Religious Works (the Vatican Bank) with whom he had managed investments and financing with conspicuous sums of money, some of it coming from Cosa Nostra and public agencies’.
As for Licio Gelli, he was not indicted for the murder. He has denied involvement, but has acknowledged that Calvi was murdered. In a statement before the court, he claimed the killing was commissioned in Poland, a reference to Calvi's alleged involvement in financing the Solidarity trade union movement at the request of the late Pope John Paul II, allegedly on behalf of the Vatican.
A private investigator, hired by Calvi’s family in 1991, claimed it was likely that senior figures in the Italian establishment had been involved in his murder. ‘The problem is that the people who probably actually ordered the death of Calvi are not in the dock,’ he said. ‘But to get to those people might be very difficult indeed.’ He said it was ‘probably true’ that the Mafia had carried out the killing but that the gangsters suspected of the crime were either dead or missing.
The prosecutor’s office in Rome had opened a second investigation implicating, among others, Licio Gelli. Meanwhile, Giuseppe Calò is serving a life sentence on unrelated Mafia charges.
Part Six: Killing All Over The World
Christopher Dale Flannery
Australia
Melbourne, Australia, could never have been said to be crime-central. It purports to be the country’s arts and culture capital and lacks the healthy anti-authority attitude of Sydney with its history of transported criminals and centuries of political and police corruption.
All the stranger, then, that Australia’s first contract killer, the hitman known as ‘Rentakill’, should have been born there, in Brunswick, an inner suburb of the city and home, since the war, to thousands of émigrés from southern Europe, Greece, Italy and Turkey.
It was against such a background that Christopher Dale Flannery was born, in 1949. He was always trouble, getting into scrapes from an early age and leaving school at 14. It was in that same year that he first came to the attention of the authorities with his first conviction and, by the age of 17, he was a fully fledged criminal; there was really only one direction his life was going to take. He was arrested and convicted of a whole litany of crimes – housebreaking, car theft, police assault, carrying firearms and rape. As a criminal, he was becoming something of a jack-of-all-trades. No one thanked him for it, however, and he was sentenced to seven years in prison.