ABSTRACT: The Mafia had nothing to do with the death of Roberto Calvi. Starting out from this thesis, the author analyses the evidence that supports the hypothesis of suicide rather than murder.

(IL Globo, July 24, 1982)

One of the clearest and most sensible things that have been said these days regarding the Mafia and high finance is what Pino Arlachi (1) wrote in La Repubblica (2) on July 10 with exactly that title: "The New Mafia and High Finance". Taking this article as a point of departure, one can formulate the probable hypothesis that from '68 onwards (why not attribute this date to the "new Mafia" as well?) the Mafia found itself with more money than ideas on what to do with it. Arlacchi says: "The rapidity with which the Mafia accumulated capital has up to now blocked any massive transformation of it into investments. It still exists in good part as "liquid cash" and requires - to be satisfactorily managed - the mobilisation of the highest order of financial expertise." In short: the Mafia itself, internally, was not capable of managing it, and in the American system it was unable to get collaboration or complicity of a high order. Therefore it was obliged to turn to financing and banking systems more open and les

s controlled and that seemed for this very reason of uncontrolled mobility to be growing, to be on the rise. And here, it seems the case to say, is where everything went on the rocks. The illusory growth process of systems of this kind is like the story of the little peasant girl who was taking her ricotta to the market and on the way was fantasising about the profits she would make on the ricotta, and then the profits she would make on those profits; and she went on like this progressing from profits to profits until becoming rich and powerful. So she bowed down before this power as others would bow down before her and so the ricotta fell off her head where she had been balancing it. But the story has a sense if we say that,in the systems of which we are speaking, either the ricotta had fallen quite some time ago or else there had never been any ricotta there in the first place. And this without anyone having noticed or wanting to notice it.

I have no competence in the matter and only record impressions: but systems like this in a country like ours and also, one may be allowed to believe, in some South American countries, are excogitated by sadly mediocre people who, favoured by a first stroke of luck, succeed in believing and making others believe that they are possessed of genius and competence: whereas it is all a fantasy not unlike that of the peasant girl carrying the ricotta to market - except that they go dauntlessly on even when there is no more ricotta.

And I would say that the most indicative and worrisome aspect of Italian corruption lies not so much in the fact of thievery in the public and private domains, as in the fact that the thievery is not done intelligently and that absolutely mediocre people are in charge of public and private enterprises. In these people the mediocrity is accompanied by an element of mania, of insanity that, as long as luck is good, does not show up, except perhaps for some slight sign; but when the first difficulties appear, it begins to show and grows until it overwhelms them. One can say of them what D'Annunzio said of Marinetti (3): that they are cretins with an occasional flash of imbecility. Only that in the context in which they move, the imbecility appears to be - and in a certain sense and up to a certain point it is - fantasy. In a well-ordered society they would never have got much further than being subaltern employees; in a society in ferment and transformation they would have been pushed to the side lines at once

- not being able to stand up to the competition of the intelligent - like cheap swindlers; in a non-society they get to the top and stay there until the same context that produced them swallows them up again.

Incapable of inventing an investment system of its own, and with the impossibility of finding a more trustworthy, a safer one, the Mafia could do nothing but opt for the low-risk and high-profit kind that in any case was congenial to it and, one might also say, made in its image and likeness. And it goes without saying that I use the word "Mafia" in the sense of a confederation of criminal associations no longer identifiable - from without - as was the old Mafia by its interests, its targets, and the extraction of the people affiliated with it. Today all criminal associations, in every part of the world, have disparate interests, hidden and contradictory intrusions, appear amorphous and in the amorphous process of aggregation. It is an irreversible process of aggregation: that is, reversible only by world peace, in the industrious and vigilant collaboration of governments and peoples.

The model for it - and it remains unsurpassed - is the old Sicilian Mafia; but from the organisational standpoint, not from what it has become fashionable to call its "culture" and which one might agree to consider a view of life, a way of being. Those today who take top place in a criminal association will have very little similarity to Don Vito Cascio-Ferro and Don Calogero Vizzini (two presumed Mafia chiefs, ed.). And that does not mean to grant "nobility" to the old Mafia (fewer killings and a lesser degree of barbarism in committing them are certainly not patents of "nobility"), but is only to say that it was different. But it is not of the Mafia that I wish to speak now. Of Calvi, rather, and his death. And I do not exclude - on the contrary I can readily admit - that Mafia capital may have gotten into his hands and been risked and lost. But contrary to what Arlacchi says at the end of his article ("The broken promises of low risk and high profit and all other infractions of the rules of the game - in

these circles - are not resolved in court but under the arches of a London bridge"), I do not believe that the Mafia had anything to do with the death of Calvi. It is a case that appears to be very complicated, but from the beginning I have had the impression that it was complicated in the manner of Charles Bovary's beret. Flaubert spends half a page in describing it, but at a certain point, as if becoming aware of the object's "indescribability", he stops and compares it to the face of an imbecile. For the rest - and quite rightly - imbeciles and imbecility always seemed damned complicated to Gustave Flaubert.

Intelligence, which as Poe teaches us is less mathematical mind than poetic mind, is simple and works by simplifying - just as in the story of the purloined letter, in which the minister (who is a mathematician, but most of all a poet) thinks out the simple and great idea of invisibility for excess of visibility; and the detective (who, like E.A. Poe, is a poet with mathematical knowledge) easily discovers it by simple intuition. In short: the case of Calvi, rather than appearing to be the work of an omnipresent criminal association, immediately looked to me like the work of imbecility. As macabre as you like, but imbecility. And I can say more: as soon as the news of his disappearance became known, and before the discovery of his death was announced, in the Sunday, June 13 edition of XIX Secolo, I ended my short article with what may have then appeared to be the rash conclusion about how fragile was the personality of Calvi - which clashed with his being the head of a bank that performed such daring and ris

ky operations. It seemed immediately clear to me, then, that Calvi's mysterious disappearance was to be explained by his mental and psychic fragility. And in this Calvi could have appeared to be a not unique example: Virgillito, Giuffrè and Sindona were not less so. And of the same temper, I believe, will those turn out to be who, inspired by the same context of corruption, will be swallowed up by it tomorrow.

I spoke with Michele Tito, Alberto Moravia, Enzo Siciliano (all writers, ed.) and other friends of this conviction of mine - that it was Calvi and only Calvi who complicated the Calvi case, and that there was definitely no one else involved except presumably those who might have helped him to escape. And I must confess to feeling a certain remorse in writing about it. I am tired of being misunderstood, of being accused of having "objective alliances" with someone or another, whether or not those who have misunderstood and accused me be either imbeciles or malign. And it is not out of place to say here and now that this idea they have thought up of "objective alliances" as an accusation against those who defend certain civil rights that they would prefer to have forgotten, or those who disagree with certain opinions that they wish to impose on everyone - this is one of the heaviest forms of blackmail weighing on life in Italy where blackmail cannot be said to be a scarcity. And I must add that I have almost b

een alarmed by the discredit thrown on the English police by Italian news services - immediately, as soon as it was understood that in London this thesis (of suicide, ed.) was considered the most tenable. And the English police may not be Ed McBain's 80th District, but it seems to me to have enjoyed a degree of credit even in Italy until it showed that it thought

Calvi had killed himself.

From that moment it became one of the world's most inefficient and bungling police forces, not to speak of the accusations of corruption that began to be made against it. Calvi had been murdered and that was that... Anyone who dared to question such a certainty was an "objective ally" and perhaps even a "subjective" one of the Mafia's, of the Freemasons', of Mafia-Freemasonry... And here, I think, a doubt arose: of whom to proclaim the allies, those who thought Calvi had killed himself? In England, one knows, Freemasonry is rather strong, but it doesn't seem to have significant criminal precedents. However, to insinuate something of the sort, to allude to the symbolism of the bricks that were found in Calvi's pockets, in the end that might...

That a panel of experts found Calvi to be psychologically fragile

does not seem to me a good reason for believing the opposite. He was. And he was so even before last Summer when a warrant for his arrest unravelled his sense of security. He thought he was powerful, secure, untouchable; and this image of himself he managed to impose on others, adoring or fearful, who surrounded him. But an arrest warrant and a few days in jail were enough to plunge him into desperation. Which proves that inside himself he did not feel as secure as he appeared and was thought to be. There is a refusal to believe that in the Lodi prison he seriously wanted to commit suicide; but it is only based on the fact that he didn't succeed.

I don't want to write a book about Calvi, nor to suggest that others do it (although one might be needed): but it is enough to look at him in one's mind as a personage, with just that quantity of compassion that the operation requires, and the facts will reveal the nature of his disorder. As soon as one gave it attention, it would be mirrored in his mental turmoil and in the (indubitable) suicide of his secretary.

The very moment that Calvi discovers that in Italy there is - if not law in an absolute sense - magistrates who administer the law and who can administrate it against him, annihilating him, he falls into a real and true paranoid crisis: the man of icy cunning he thought he was (and was thought to be) who tries to save the weak and vacillating man he had become. Once he leaves the Lodi prison and returns to the presidency of his bank, he speaks with only one idea in mind which is to retract a statement he made in prison which - he says - was suggested to him and which in a moment of particular weakness he agreed to make in exchange for being freed: for the rest he keeps silent but nourishes in his schizophrenia the intention of paying back everyone, everyone, everyone; and perhaps the intention - giving credence to the attempt on Rosone's life and his declarations - to eliminate someone physically.

But its more than he can manage. On the contrary, at a certain point he sees that he is in a blind alley. That is to say that another warrant for arrest is hanging over him. And this time not for financial entanglements but for the attempted homicide of the bank's general director, that same Rosone who used to think he was a god and now sees him as a poor madman crazed by the lust for power, a liar, a swindled swindler, the ruin of a once solid and honest institution. But Calvi too, one is obliged to say, considered himself the head of a solid and honest institution.

One can understand nothing of his behaviour, of his turmoil, if one does not take into account precisely this image of solid honesty which that Calvi had of his bank and which he transmitted to his collaborators, Rosone included, and, at the highest level, his secretary. The Lombard accountant who was a self-made man (and all self-made men in Italy, it is evident, are rather badly made) lived in the fatherland of corruption as every living creature lives inside his own skin.

And here it is well to remember that essay on the Mafia by Henner Hess where that simple and essential discovery is made that the Mafia members do not know they are Mafia in the sense that people on the outside have of the Mafia. They are good citizens of a state that those on the outside call Mafia and consider to be outside the law. Thus Calvi considered himself a good citizen of that system of corruption that he knew, accepted and nourished. Which goes to say that there are responsibilities of a general order, not only his. Calvi was deathly afraid of prison. Many people are - to the point of delirium. Keeping track of the dates, one can see why at about the beginning of June that fear grew monstrously great and exploded into madness. On Friday, June 18, Rosone is called before the judge who is investigating the assassination attempt made on him in April. When questioned Rosone makes it very clear that it was Calvi who ordered Abbruciati to kill him or to wound him as a warning. Considering the way out ju

dicial offices work in regard to speed and secrecy, is it at all possible that Calvi wouldn't know - at the moment he decided to disappear - that it wouldn't be long before he was arrested for having ordered the attempt on Rosone? So he thinks up a suicide that not only looks like homicide, but that makes him appear to be the victim of an obscure and complex plot in which embezzlement and homicide attempts seem to come from powerful hidden forces. A very complicated form of suicide (the beret of Charles Bovary) and one whose intention may well have been vindictive as well. But let us for a moment accept the idea that Calvi was murdered and try to prove it to show its absurdity. And to facilitate the demonstration let us make do without a motive, which is always essential, but which we must believe to be undiscoverable in this case. (To say that Calvi had not kept certain promises and so was punished, is as vague and inconsistent a thesis as can be imagined.) So let us say that there is a criminal organisati

on that wants Calvi dead. But we find ourselves facing a dilemma: do they want him dead to serve as an example so that, if not everyone, at least their most vacillating associates will know and understand the why and by whom of the execution? Or do they want him to appear a suicide? An insoluble dilemma. And in order to continue to believe in the suicide we must set it aside unsolved. Let us set it aside. Now let us ask ourselves this: what are Calvi's relations with this association at the time of his disappearance? Does he trust them or is he afraid of them? If he is afraid, the elementary precaution would be to arrange not to be alone and undefended against them. If, on the other hand, he trusted them, his only worry would be to escape from Italian justice.

There is, of course, a third hypothesis: that he neither feared nor trusted them but was ignorant of their intentions and took no account of them in his escape plan. But is this possible? If he knew of the existence of such an organisation - and even more so if he was a part of it - and knew that he had wronged them or was in their debt, he could not avoid considering the possibility that they might create obstacles to his plan of flight.

Unless one wants to attribute to this association everything that happened to Calvi from the evening of June 10 until he was found hanging under the London bridge: and that would be to capture him in his Rome apartment, shave off his moustache, send him from Rome to Austria, from Austria to England. But it doesn't seem that one can: because everything leads us to believe that Calvi left Rome of his own accord; and because if one wanted to believe the contrary, one would have to admit that those who helped him escapee were voluntary accomplices or the more or less direct perpetrators of his execution. But this cannot even be suspected: those who helped him to escape from Italy and get to London evidently are acting in the conviction that they are not committing any crime before Italian law (since there was no arrest warrant out for Calvi) and that the flight is not going to end in his death, either by murder or suicide, under a London bridge. It is certainly true that they help him openly and in such a way t

hat the police do not need to expend any great efforts to discover his whereabouts. In this chain of hypotheses and queries, the strongest link (but without forgetting that the first link is the one that doesn't hold) could be this: Calvi had two distinct lines of safety - the first to help him leave Italy (we can call it clandestine), and the second to help him, once in London, arrange for a more certain and permanent disappearance. A disappearance in the Gelli (4) style, in short. Unless it was precisely some of these friends who arranged his death. And here another problem arises. On the assumption (entirely obvious to those who support the idea of his murder) that a Calvi murdered would be more in control of his faculties than a Calvi suicide, how could he have so blindly entrusted himself to people (or an organisation?) that had reasons for wanting him dead? He might, being ignorant of it, not be frightened; but to trust them with saving him is a bit too much. Ma aquì està el busillis(5): what were thes

e reasons? The most evident one to those who maintain Calvi was murdered seems to be this: that Calvi had squandered the capital they had entrusted to him. At this point the need to find a motive, which we had thrown out at the door, comes back in by the window. And it is not a convincing motive. Calvi was not yet bankrupt; and from a live Calvi there was hope of recuperating, even if only marginally, those funds which would certainly be lost forever with his death. And one can even cite a precedent.

No one has asked, as far as I know, why Sindona was made to disappear and taken on risky round-the-world trips for a certain time - almost as if it were a caprice or the itch to travel on his or his travel-companions' part. (The story of the preparation for a Sicilian separatist movement is a fantasy that some journalist or Parliamentary commission member might believe, but certainly not Sindona or his travel-companions.) There is only one possible and probable reason to explain those peregrinations: that they wanted to force Sindona to pull the money out of the hiding places in which they thought he had put it. If they did or did not achieve that much, we cannot say. The only certainty is that once the trip was over, Sindona was abandoned by his guardians to his destiny.

The only serious motive that can be imagined for the murder of Calvi by a Mafia-type criminal association, is the punishment for the betrayal of secrets that could compromise the security of such an organisation. But Calvi betrayed no secrets of that order. The only revelation he made - and later retracted - regarded the billions loaned to the Socialist Party. And one cannot see why that kind of revelation, even if true, should cause a scandal considering that there was none - certainly not as far as one knows - about other billions lent to the newspaper Paese Sera.

The most interesting thing that I have happened to read about the Calvi case was written by Lietta Tornabuoni (in La Stampa, June 24). With subtle intuition she realised that the Calvi death was to be put in the category of bad literature - and she began her London investigation by interviewing Penelope Wallace, the daughter of Edgar. Penelope says: "The one thing that makes a bad thriller out of this story is that it ends with a suicide: a mystery story that ends with a suicide is a bad mystery story, it swindles the reader. Now you tell me that in Italy many people are convinced it was a murder. Well then, yes, that turns it into a good mystery. a mystery that Edgar Wallace had already written." Wallace's mystery is entitled "The Sinister Man: The story of a banker who is found hanged and considered a suicide but who in reality was murdered." Perfect. Only that we, having no sentimental attachment to Edgar Wallace and only being distant readers, say that the suicide is a bad thriller, but the murder - in i

mitation of Wallace - would be a bad mystery. Wallace, who was considered phenomenal and almost a genius, was a bad mystery writer. Complicated, artificially involved - and boring. (Try reading him, or worse, re-reading him.)

Thus to call on his books as authorities in the Calvi case is perfectly appropriate. Whether suicide or murder, the case has the gratuitous complications and the not ingenious twists of a Wallace story. Thus there do not appear to be even aesthetic reasons, let us say, for preferring the homicide to the suicide thesis. There are, however, political ones, as can be deduced from certain declarations. But it would be shameless and dangerous to let them prevail over the truth. When Italian politicians, with a candour worthy of better causes and cases, say that they have to explained to English politicians that the Calvi case is a "political affair", we begin to feel very seriously worried.

For the English the case cannot and must not be "political", it must only be a police case. Whether they are aware of it or not, the Italian news media are effectively putting pressure on the English to make them choose the good murder mystery over the bad suicide thriller. But it would be unpardonable if the Italian politicians explaining to the English politicians that "the case

is political" were to try to do the same thing. Not unless, along with the explanation, they provided some hard evidence leading to the indubitable conclusion that Calvi has been murdered. But it doesn't seem that the English have had any such evidence as yet. This is what detective Tarbun said in an interview with an Italian correspondent: "There have been plenty of conflicting explanations written and spoken. But it has been the Italian press and television to accept mere rumours as if they were the gospel truth. We cannot allow ourselves such procedures. And from the beginning to the end we have repeated the same thing: up until now there has been no serious proof, no objective facts to suggest anything but that Calvi killed himself. If there exist in Italy any real facts that can induce me to investigate along other lines, I assure you I would do so even now. But no one has come from your country with concrete facts to tell us we know this and that and now investigate further..." This statement was made

on July 15. Yesterday the public hearing took place and the coroner's report was made. The investigators and the coroner have not in the meantime been convinced that Calvi was murdered. But perhaps they will continue to say stubbornly that Calvi committed suicide.

The evidence that is considered to favour the thesis of homicide amount, in effect, to this: that it would have been difficult for a man of Calvi's age to reach the spot in which he was found hanged; that the hour established by experts for his death was not a late one and thus someone would have seen him; that Calvi did not know how to tie a sailor's knot; that his jacket buttons were not fitted into their corresponding button holes, as Borgese said of D'Annunzio's verses.

With regard to the first point: difficulties are not impossibilities; and the nervous tension of a man who wants to kill himself makes it possible to overcome far greater difficulties. As for the second, the spot from what everyone says, is rather off the beaten track and it is very possible that no one passed there in those few minutes; or if anyone did they may have been busy or distracted. For the third point, none of our friends or relatives, however close, are able to swear, I think, that we do not know how to tie a sailor's knot. And as to

the fourth, a man who is about to kill himself is not in the mental state of one who is about to enter a salon and does not look to see if he is properly buttoned or not. On the contrary, this last point seems to prove the opposite. Without forgetting that the first point does too, inasmuch as killing Calvi in one place and then moving him to the bridge involves difficulties and risks of being seen that are much greater than those that Calvi alone would have faced.

One might do on and on. But the urgent question is this: why is there in Italy a preference for the good mystery rather than the bad thriller? A disturbing, a very disturbing question.

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1) Pino Arlacchi, a journalist

2) A Rome newspaper

3) Gabriele D'Annunzio, the prominent writer of the first half of this century; Marinetti, the Futurist writer,

4) Lucio Gelli, head of the P2 Masonic lodge