Authors: Philip Willan
On the Thursday evening Carboni came to Chelsea Cloisters to inform them that he had resolved the accommodation problem. Strangely though, he refused to come up and speak to the crotchety Calvi in person. ‘I told Flavio that Calvi was angry, very nervous, and that he should come up to help calm him down,’ Vittor told me. ‘Flavio said he would come the next day. “I’m tired as I have been walking around since this morning and the girls have been waiting for us all afternoon in a bar.” ’ Instead of Carboni coming up to reassure Calvi, Vittor went down and accompanied the Sardinian to the nearby Suchet pub, where the Kleinszig girls had been waiting and which was about to close. Calvi had packed his bags and was waiting anxiously for the word from Carboni that would enable him to move into more congenial surroundings. His last words to Vittor were: ‘Tell Carboni to come up.’ But by that stage he had lost control over his bank and even over his travelling companions. If Coomber’s account was accurate though, Calvi may not even have been in Chelsea Cloisters by the time this exchange is supposed to have taken place, around 11 p.m.
After leaving Carboni and the girls Vittor says he returned to Chelsea Cloisters and found flat 881 empty. At around 1 a.m. he persuaded a porter to accompany him to the flat and let him in, saying he could produce proof of his identity once inside. Having tried initially to open the luggage in the flat, without success, he suddenly appeared to remember that he had an identity card in his wallet all along and pulled it out for the porter. The object of the exercise appears to be to avoid going into the flat alone: evidently Calvi was not the only person in a state of high alarm by this stage.
Vittor later agreed to participate in the BBC’s
Panorama
documentary about Calvi’s disappearance, driving a youthful Jeremy Paxman over the remote mountain roads that had constituted Calvi’s escape route through Austria. Paxman pointed out to a nervous-looking Vittor that it had been
highly convenient that both he and Carboni were absent at the moment Calvi went missing. ‘I can’t answer that question, because any answer would be the wrong one,’ the smuggler replied with admirable candour.
Vittor spent a sleepless night in the Chelsea Cloisters apartment and left early the next morning, flying to Vienna under the assumed name ‘Vitula’. He didn’t speak to Carboni and didn’t use the telephone, he claims. This leaves an unexplained phone call from the flat that was recorded as taking place between 10.45 p.m. and midnight. The Chelsea Cloisters telephone system didn’t record the destination numbers, so no one knows who made the call or to whom. The Hilton Hotel’s system did record destination numbers and showed that a call was made from Michaela Kleinszig’s room to Chelsea Cloisters between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. on the morning of 18 June. Did Vittor’s girlfriend call him then and urge him to flee? Carboni at this stage had moved to the Sheraton Hotel at Heathrow airport. Hotel records there showed a call had been made to Chelsea Cloisters during the same time frame at a cost of three units, so Carboni may also have touched base with Vittor during the night.
Two things happened on 18 June, the day Calvi was found dead, that raise suspicion about the roles of people in his immediate entourage. The first was in the morning, when Hans Kunz’s wife called on Anna Calvi and her boyfriend in their Zurich hotel to deliver 50,000 Swiss francs advanced to her on behalf of her father. Kunz had called earlier to announce the visit, saying he was expecting to see Anna’s father later that day. Mrs Kunz spoke poor English, the group’s only common language, and was soon talking at cross-purposes with Anna and Vittorio. Anna mentioned the news of Graziella Corrocher’s suicide, which she had heard the day before, and was amazed by Mrs Kunz’s reaction. ‘It was an exaggerated reaction for someone she had never known. We had to reassure her that it wasn’t a member of our family,’ Anna told the Rome murder trial. ‘We thought that she had understood
that it was my father who was dead, because her reaction was completely abnormal . . . I had the impression that she already knew my father was dead and she was alarmed that we knew too.’ Mrs Kunz started to talk about the fact that Calvi was in London – something Anna didn’t know at that point – and that he was looking for new accommodation because the owners had shown an undue interest in his identity. ‘She didn’t realize that we didn’t know my father was in London. So she stopped then, but she was very confused and agitated.’
4
Anna left for Washington that afternoon without having received the phone call her father had promised for that morning.
That morning Flavio Carboni visited the Morrises at their home not far from Heathrow and immediately struck William Morris by his nervousness. ‘He seemed quite agitated and kept pacing up and down,’ Morris told police three weeks later. ‘He didn’t give any indication as to why he was restless. I assumed it was business.’ Morris’s daughter Odette took the day off work to act as guide and interpreter for their agitated visitor. The two took a taxi to the Chelsea Hotel in Sloane Street and booked into a room so Carboni could use the phone. After lunch he asked Odette to call a London telephone number and ask for room 881. Having failed to get a response four times, Carboni sent her round to Chelsea Cloisters on her own to knock on the door. Later the two tried again, once again Carboni sending Odette up alone to the flat to knock on the door. Finally Odette made two copies of a cryptic note for him, leaving one under the door of flat 881 and the other with reception. The note, written in rudimentary Italian, read: ‘Dear Silvano Vitor, I have telephoned many times but have not heard from you. Tell me how I can find you. Telephone Elde and Vito immediately. Odina.’ Elde was actually the Kleinszig girls’ mother, Hildegard. To keep things discreet Odette had modified her own name too. She was, after all, assisting someone who had helped Calvi to leave Italy illegally . . . if nothing more serious than that.
In January 2006 Odette Morris – now with the married name Jones – was arrested by City Police on charges of perjury and perverting the course of justice. The reason was that she had originally failed to mention an important event that allegedly took place on that Thursday evening: a visit by taxi to Gatwick airport with Carboni to meet an incoming private jet sent by Kunz. Both Odette and Carboni forgot to mention this trip in their early testimony, and Odette failed to mention it at the first inquest, only doing so after news of the flight was reported in a British newspaper. At that point Carboni said he had been to the airport to meet a friend to whom he owed money, and Odette confirmed his account. He had initially forgotten about the appointment and arrived late, after his friend’s plane had already returned to Geneva, Carboni claimed. The episode is unquestionably strange, and British police now believe that Odette, and possibly even Carboni, never did go to the airport on that Friday evening. The time-line based on the evidence of other witnesses made it impossible for Odette to reach Gatwick and arrive home at the time her father and other family members said she returned. In the end Odette was released without charge.
Italian investigators suspect Carboni summoned a friend, the Rome antiques dealer and interior decorator Ugo Flavoni, to take possession of some of the crucial items of Calvi’s blackmail exercise: sensitive documents and the keys to bank safety deposits. If Carboni and Odette didn’t go to the airport, it raises the question as to whether an unidentified accomplice did. Flavoni, who was tried and convicted for perjury over the episode, said he was called to Geneva to recover a 20 million lire debt for refurbishment work on Carboni’s Rome office. He set out by car on the evening of 17 June – before Calvi’s death – and drove overnight to Geneva in the company of his mistress, her brother and the latter’s wife. In Geneva he met Carboni’s brother, Andrea, and Hans Kunz, and Kunz kindly arranged for the group to fly by private plane to Gatwick on
the evening of 18 June. By this time Calvi was dead and those with access could help themselves to his property. Kunz paid 11,000 Swiss francs for the flight, well over half of Carboni’s presumed debt to Flavoni. The flight arrived at 8.05 p.m. and departed one hour and 41 minutes later. Flavoni has since died, but his female travelling companions told the Rome murder trial that they had looked for Carboni fruitlessly at Gatwick and returned to Geneva without meeting him. They acknowledged, however, that Flavoni could conceivably have met someone in the airport during the brief moments that he was out of their sight. The following morning the group met Andrea Carboni in Geneva, who apologized for the contretemps, and they returned to Rome, once again driving through the night.
The episode, which Rome prosecutors cite as evidence that Carboni knew, in advance of Calvi’s death, that the banker would soon no longer need the sensitive documents that amounted to his life insurance policy, illustrates one of the curious features of the Calvi story: the traipsing of extraneous characters through some of its most delicate moments. Flavoni’s friends said they viewed the exhausting and extravagant marathon to London as something of a pleasure jaunt. And the presence of the Kleinszig girls on Calvi’s last journey – though Manuela has been charged as an accomplice to murder – appears somewhat
de trop
in a well-ordered murder conspiracy. Perhaps, as investigators surmise, they were brought along to reassure Calvi and quieten his fears, as well as to create the impression afterwards that this had been another pleasure jaunt and
not
a murder conspiracy.
The 21-year-old Odette, who worked as a clerk in a department store, was similarly out of her depths in Carboni’s international intrigue. On Saturday 19 June she flew with him from Gatwick to Edinburgh, as Carboni was keen to get out of London as quickly as possible, having spent Friday night in the safety and seclusion of the Morris home. They took rooms
in the George Hotel, booked in Odette’s name, and the next day Carboni was collected from Edinburgh airport by Kunz himself, once again in a private jet provided by Aeroleasing. Before leaving the hotel Carboni made five calls costing £22.93. Two were to the Rome number of the lawyer Wilfredo Vitalone and one to the Zurich home of Hans Kunz, presumably calling him to the rescue. Odette was to have accompanied him, to look for work in Italy, but a sudden health crisis for her father led her to return home instead. The latest generation of City Police investigators viewed Odette’s sudden modification of her story as deeply suspicious. Detective Superintendent Trevor Smith told the Rome trial he was convinced Odette lied when she claimed she had been to Gatwick with Carboni and that the lie played an important role in frustrating the original police inquiry. The change in her story had less impact on the earlier generation of City Police investigators, who required much more than that to arouse their professional curiosity.
The entire London party – minus Calvi of course – then met up again in Zurich, where they stayed at the Holiday Inn, with plenty of time to agree on a coherent version of events before Vittor decided to give himself up to the Italian police a few days later. The fact that he had returned voluntarily, Vittor told me during the early phase of the trial, was proof of his good faith. ‘My conscience is clear,’ he said. ‘Those who do much pay little; those who do little pay much in Italy. Sometimes someone has to pay just to keep public opinion happy.’
5
The Calvi family in Washington received news of Roberto’s death on the night of 18 June, when Clara’s brother Luciano Canetti telephoned from Italy. The news wasn’t certain at that point, but they immediately knew it was true. They moved into a flat in the Watergate Building and hired half a dozen private security guards for their protection.
One of the most damaging testimonies for Carboni at the Rome murder trial came from the mafia boss Antonino Giuffrè, who claimed to have direct knowledge of the Calvi
affair from associates in his own mafia ‘family’ who had been personally involved. Carboni had played Judas in a classic mafia murder scenario, he alleged. ‘From the moment when Calvi’s death was decreed, as always happens, someone plays the role of
compare
[friend] to Calvi. That is the person who collects Calvi and delivers him into the hands of those who will kill him. One of these people was Carboni,’ he told the court. ‘These are old stories that I didn’t participate in myself. As in many murders, you have someone who establishes a relationship of trust and plays the role of
compare.
First he gains Calvi’s confidence and then he delivers him to those who will strangle him . . . Flavio Carboni is the person who guided Calvi on this last stretch of the road.’ The quiet authority of Giuffrè’s account and the parallel with traditional mafia murder strategies, of which Giuffrè was an acknowledged expert, had a powerful impact in court. Giuffrè said Carboni had been entrusted with this delicate role by the mafia boss Pippo Calò and that the businessman Ernesto Diotallevi, with links to the Rome underworld, had played ‘a manual role’ in the murder. He later backtracked on this second statement, which went beyond anything the prosecution had attempted to prove, to say that Diotallevi had simply helped to organize the murder.
His description of Carboni’s links to organized crime was devastating, however. ‘There were people who were particularly suited to questionable activities in connection with the worlds of politics and finance. One of these was Flavio Carboni,’ Giuffrè said. Asked whether the secret services were involved in the crime, his answer brought him back to Carboni. ‘One heard a lot of stories about Carboni, that he had links here, that he had links there. He was a very crafty person. One heard rumours that certain representatives of the deviant secret services had made a contribution in this context. I can’t give you the names.’ The murder had been staged to look like
suicide, Giuffrè said. ‘These things happen frequently in the world of Cosa Nostra.’
6
Calvi had seriously injured his right index finger at his country home, an injury that would have a double bearing on the investigation into his death. The banker normally wore a rubber sheath on the finger to prevent it from bleeding if he had to do any energetic activity with his hands. Prosecutors were therefore sceptical that he could have climbed along the Blackfriars scaffolding without his finger protector and without reopening the wound, no mention of which was made in Professor Simpson’s report of his autopsy in 1982. They were even more suspicious when a sheath similar to the one used by Calvi was found in Carboni’s luggage following his arrest in Switzerland. Carboni had had control of Calvi’s belongings and had helped himself to whatever he wanted, its presence seemed to imply. The exuberant Sardinian was questioned about this curious fact by Rome magistrates in 1990. Knowing that the sheath had been found, he was ready with his answer. Pulling another sheath and a red handkerchief from his pocket, Carboni told the magistrates that he often used the object as a prop for conjuring tricks and he proceeded to attempt a demonstration. The credibility of his explanation was somewhat undermined however, as he repeatedly tried, and failed, to make the item disappear. Finally his exasperated lawyer, with his head in his hands, pleaded with his client to put the conjuring tools away.