The rope around his neck was the same kind of noose used in Masonic rituals, where any attempt to pull back would be just as deadly. The noose was part of the Masonic rites, along with brutal punishments like cutting the throat, tearing out the tongue, and burying beneath the sand at a shore where the tide came in and out. On June 18, 1982, Roberto Calvi, an Italian Freemason, was found hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London. His body was suspended from scaffolding at such a height that the tide roseand fell around him twice a day, matching Masonic ritual exactly.
With no injury to his neck, the only way to die that way was to hold onto a bar with your hands, which showed no signs of rust or dirt—impossible. He had no intention of killing himself, because he loved life. He loved us. He wanted to be with us.
Earlier this year, an Italian court ruled that Calvi was actually murdered. As one of Italy’s most successful bankers, he was in charge of the secret finances of a powerful Masonic lodge. So, was his death a ritual killing? Was he murdered because he threatened to expose what the Italian Masons had done with the missing 200 million dollars?
Or did he know too much about a Masonic plot to weaken Italian democracy? Calvi headed Italy’s largest private bank and was so close to the Vaticanand the Pope that in Rome he was calledGod’s Banker. How he ended up dead a thousand miles away in London was a strange mystery. Journalist Paul Foot investigated his death.
I never had any doubt about this. It was perfectly clear to me that this was a ritual killing carried out along Masonic traditions. Foot believed the name of the bridge where Calvi died might also be significant. An image of a Black Friar was a special inspiration for Italian Masons.
Their true patron saint, Giordano Bruno, was a seventeenth century friar whom the Pope’s Inquisition burned alive for his beliefs. The scaffolding from which Calvi was found dangling was placed next to a ladder, which symbolized death to Masons. Masonic rituals give a central role to stonemasonry. A rough stone symbolized the uncivilized man before joining Freemasonry, anda smooth stone representeda worthy member of civilized society, whicha Mason becomes after years of craft training.
The rough stone or brick found in Calvi’s pocket symbolized failed or traitorous Masons. To me, this seemed like a Masonic ritual killing. The most astonishing part of the whole affair was the half-hearted way the City of London Police conducted their investigation. The suicide verdict was accepted by influential circles, yet to this day nobody knows how Calvi was murdered in the heart of our city.
The event took place, but we have no idea how it happened. Calvi’s death investigation fell to the City of London Police, a force of only eighty detectives. At the London inquest, city officials presented evidence that Calvi had killed himself. His bank, Ambrosiano, was deeply in debt—1,000 million pounds—and Calvi faced four years in prison for illegally smuggling Italian currency.
During the inquest, the coroner warned the jury not to return an open verdict. So they decided Calvi had committed suicide. His wife considered that decision unacceptable. She applied to the High Court for a second inquest.
This time, the jury returned an open verdict, meaning Calvi may have killed himself or may have been murdered. This removed the stain from my father’s name. We believe the jury did the best they could based on the evidence, but presenting the whole matter in coroner’s court was very difficult. Revealing the whole issue would have brought up Calvi’s secret membership in an Italian Masonic lodge.
The jury members who visited Blackfriars Bridge during the investigation were never told about it. But six months later, the foreman said that if they had known about Calvi’s Masonic connections, they would have returned a murder verdict. Some Italian journalists believed the whole affair had been covered up. There wasa desire not to create a major scandal.
There wasan attempt to keep the matter hidden. You can think whatever you like. You might even think they wanted to hide something. Something.
In January, three Italian judges ruled that Calvi was murdered. Five years later, they were convinced after seeing a reconstruction of his death at Blackfriars Bridge on the same tide night. They believed that given Calvi’s age and physical condition, he could not have climbed the scaffolding himself, especially without leaving rust marks on his hands, whereas from a boat he could easily have been strung up. But why would the Masons want to kill Calvi?
Why was it relevant to look for Masonic symbols in his death? Because fifteen months earlier, police had raided the property of an obscure towel manufacturer in Arezzo, Tuscany. His name was Licio Gelli. Police seized thousands of documents from a Masonic lodge called P2, about which few people outside Freemasonry knew anything.
What astonished police was a list of nine hundred eighty members. It included many of Italy’s top businessmen, industrialists, and the police chiefs of Italy’s four largest cities, along with forty-three members of parliament, including ministers of justice and foreign trade. There were fifty-one generals, admirals, and heads of all Italy’s secret services. These men together operated like a private government, controlling one of Europe’s largest democracies.
Top bankers like Calvi were also on that list. When the Italian government released the P2 list, we were stunned. It was as if we discovered that Italian democracy was something completely different from what we thought. We realized something else was going on behind the scenes.
So we asked ourselves, why? The answer goes back to the bitter struggle between Freemasonry and the Catholic Church in Italy, which had been going on since the 1730s when English gentlemen and sea captains introduced the brotherhood. The Church quickly condemned Freemasonry as the work of Satan and excommunicated all Catholic Masons. Italian Freemasonry became anti-Catholic and revolutionary, working in secret.
Since then, its history has been secretive and persecuted. The Grand Orient is the body that governs Italian Freemasonry. Unlike in England and America, where the state not only tolerates Freemasonry but recognizes it, here the state and the Church do not recognize it, but condemn it without knowing it. In 1926, Italy’s dictator Mussolini banned Freemasonry.
After World War II, it was legalized again and reborn as an old secret elite lodge calledPropaganda Due, or P2. Until 1970, it had not attracted many members, when the then Grand Master asked Licio Gelli to take charge. Gelli immediately began transforming P2’s character. Tonight, he spoke up in support of his lodge.
Inside the P2 lodge, we had Italy’s top people from every field—politics, diplomacy, industry, media, law, and civil service. They were all the best. By joining P2, they sought peace and order within the lodge so they could all contribute to improving society in their own fields. The P2 elite met insuite at Rome’s Excelsior Hotel, not in any Masonic temple.
It never met like a traditional lodge. Instead, selected groups of members conspired to control the state, as revealed in agendas seized at Gelli’s lair. Italy’s political and economic situation, the threat of the Italian Communist Party, goals of taking power, moral and disciplinary decay, and relations with the Italian state—we were committed to contributing to improving society and protecting our country’s democratic institutions. That was P2.
But when Mussolini ruled Italy in the 1930s and 1940s, Gelli was a dedicated fascist and was never a friend of democracy. After the war, he fled to South America. He returned in the 1960s, when he had become rich, respectable, and an ideal candidate to join the Masonic ranks. I used to think Masonry was a university where people went to learn the difference between right and wrong, graduating with degrees in morality, sound principles, and ideals.
Those were my only reasons for joining Masonry, and I became affiliated with them again. I wasa Mason. I was a Mason and I will behave like a Mason all my life. He isa man who loves darkness.
He is a man who loves conspiracy. He is a man who says he loves democracy, but his idea of democracy is very strange. He comes from far-right ideology. I don’t think he has ever moved from that position.
His friends are still the same fascists he met during the war. After the raid on Gelli’s villa and the unmasking of P2, it became clear that the lodge’s main aim was to destroy democracy. A detailed parliamentary inquiry found that P2 was a state within a state, a cabal of far-right figures determined to hold onto power by ruthless means. For example, in 1978, Italy’s Christian Democrat prime minister Aldo Moro was in favor of bringing Communists into government, known as the Historic Compromise.
But then Moro’s car was attacked and he was kidnapped by left-wing terrorists. Evidence that emerged later suggested that the longer Moro remained captive, the more convenient it was for the P2 Masons, who controlled the intelligence services. A committee of Interior Ministry officials was tasked with finding Moro. Almost all of them were P2 members.
I later served on the Moro inquiry commission. I read all the committee’s documents, which were few, and I can say impartially that they had no intention of finding Moro. Leaving Moro in the hands of terrorists and letting the situation become more complicated was a sure way to ensure the Historic Compromise did not succeed. Three months after Moro’s kidnapping, his body was found in the trunk of a car.
His body showed signs of repeated torture. But Italy’s political framework was also damaged, and since then Communists have been kept out of government. According to a report by the Italian parliament, P2 members planned or supported one of Europe’s most horrendous terrorist attacks as part of a smear campaign. In 1980, a bombat Bologna station killed eighty-five people.
It was blamed on left-wing terrorism to discredit Communists, but it was actually the work of fascists. According to the high court in Bologna, this massacre was carried out by certain extremist neo-fascists. But it is also true that there were deep connections between far-right elements, the P2 lodge, and P2 members. Today, heavily guarded by armed police, Gelli lives freely in his luxurious home in Tuscany.
Although not directly involved in the Bologna bombing, this year he was sentenced to ten years for concealing evidence about the bombers. But under the terms of his extradition from Switzerland, he will never have to serve time in prison for that crime. But the P2 lodge, over which he was Venerable Master, has also been linked to the murder of Roberto Calvi in London in a ritual Masonic manner. Roberto told me many times that those who betray Freemasonry face death—and he was genuinely terrified.
As head of Italy’s largest private bank, Roberto Calvi was a perfect target for recruitment into P2, which he joined in 1977. His Masonic sponsor was none other than Licio Gelli himself. Gelli and his P2 associates allegedly quickly began looting Calvi’s bank, Banco Ambrosiano. In one of the world’s largest financial scandals, the bank’s debts quickly exceeded its assets by more than 1,000 million.
Calvi was under enormous financial pressure. By 1982, the Vatican Bank was demanding repayment of 200 million pounds that Calvi had diverted for the benefit of Licio Gelli and the P2 group. Much of it was meant to buy Italy’s largest newspaper empire, Rizzoli, as part of P2’s plan to control Italian politics, but the money had vanished abroad. Calvi was also under legal pressure.
His appeal against his conviction for currency offenses was about to be heard. If he lost, he would go to prison, and Italy’s central bank was pursuing him over the dozen offshore shadow banking operations he had set up outside Italy. In June 1982, Calvi fled to London on a false passport, but why he went there remains a mystery. He may have wanted to pressure his debtors, but those who smuggled him out of Italy and provided the false passport had their own reasons for bringing him to London.
It was a place where they had powerful criminal connections. We know that the men with my father in London had connections in both London’s underworld and Italian Masonry. We know they were in contact with a group skilled in laundering money from organized crime and right-wing terrorism. So if Calvi threatened to expose those who looted his bank, London was possibly the most dangerous place for him.
Significantly, most of the documents he brought with him in his briefcase to London disappeared. Francesco Siniscalchi is the Italian Mason who first exposed Gelli and P2. He believes Calvi died because of what he threatened to reveal. In my opinion, the suitcase he had contained documents that were never fully disclosed, with which he could blackmail people.
And when someone resorts to such methods, their life is certainly at risk. If you have confidential information, you should reveal it today. If you say you will talk tomorrow, you are finished. They will kill you.
You must say it in advance—you cannot say, “I have your secret and I will disclose it tomorrow. ” Whatever secrets Roberto was threatening to expose in London, two days before his death he called his wife and told her he was on the verge of solving all his problems. He told me something extraordinary was about to happen. It would change our entire lives, because he was close to making a deal.
And he thought he could make that deal. Oh, yes. He was very happy. He said it was something that would change our whole lives.
So I was thrilled, you know. That happiness was short-lived. Two days later, Roberto was found dead. Calvi’s suspected associates in London’s underworld could easily have killed him at the request of their Italian counterparts.
But now, among a crowd of suspects—criminals, terrorists, bankers, politicians, even priests—where does the accusation that the Masons killed him fit? My father’s death is surrounded by many theories, and the theory of a Masonic conspiracy or Masonic murder does not necessarily contradict the others. They can very well coexist. Some of these people may have been criminals, politicians, businessmen, or even priests, and at the same time Masons, and in fact in some cases we know they were.
Licio Gelli, master of P2, would soon face trial in Italy for fraud at Calvi’s bank. The fact that Calvi is no longer alive to testify may suit Gelli, but he has denied any involvement in Calvi’s death. To be honest, Gelli was on the run in South America at the time, and he claims deep affection for the banker. Look, I would also like to know how Roberto Calvi died, especially because he was a dear friend of mine, a true friend, besides being brilliant in business.
But I don’t have a crystal ball, and if I did, I wouldn’t know how to use it or read it. It is a question to which I have no answer. By the time Calvi died, the Grand Orient of Italy had expelled Gelli and disbanded his P2 lodge because it was a distortion of Freemasonry. But in reality, Gelli and his lodge had taken to its extreme the centuries-old tradition of Italian Freemasonry secretly interfering in the fate of the state.
This enormous need for secrecy and concealment remains in Italian Masonic tradition. In this century, we were persecuted by fascism and Nazism. So in our country, Masons have always had to conspire a little against the state. English Freemasonry has a strict policy of non-interference in politics.
That is why it has always refused to recognize the high political tradition of Italian Freemasonry. But in 1972, England’s Masonic leaders changed their minds and recognized their Italian brethren. Ironically, the man who helped negotiate Italian Masons’ recognition by England was Licio Gelli, a close confidant of a former Italian Grand Master. Grand Master Salvini and I finally obtained recognition from England’s Mother Lodge.
I think this was one of the greatest moments of satisfaction for the P2 lodge and its members. Shortly after Gelli helped bring the two countries’ Masons together, England’s Masonic leaders went to Italy and, unknowingly, mixed with the underworld figures of Florence. In 1973, England’s then Grand Secretary, James Stubbs, visited Florence to establish an English-speaking lodge. P2’s top members, including Gelli’s close friend Alessandro Del Ben, welcomed him.
They hosted a banquet in Del Ben’s palace in honor of Stubbs. Stubbs did not know his host was an illegal arms dealer known as the Godfather of Florence in the Italian underworld. But Gelli claims he met an even more important English Freemason in the 1970s. In Freemasonry, we have a rule not to reveal the names of other Freemasons, but I will make an exception.
I know someone, and I will tell you about him. The Duke of Kent. I don’t know if you know him. I met him when he came to Florence.
At that great moment, the Grand Master and I exchanged formal embraces with the Duke, celebrating the recognition of Italian Masonry by England’s Mother Lodge. I met him in Florence and we had lunch together. I. The Duke of Kent is the Grand Master of English Freemasonry.
He has said that to his knowledge, he never met any member of an Italian brotherhood at any Masonic event in Florence. And although he has met many Italians over the years, to his recollection, none of them identified themselves as Masons. One person who definitely did meet Licio Gelli was Roberto Calvi. Even today, Calvi’s family continues to search for his killers in Canada.
At first, Clara supported her husband’s being a Mason. She never imagined it might be the cause of his death. When he joined Freemasonry, I didn’t think it was wrong because I remember my mother always spoke very respectfully and well of Freemasonry. So, I thought it was a good idea.
It was a protection. But one day I came to learn all these things that Freemasonry might symbolize. They killed Roberto, but they left the signature of the killing behind. No.
I want you.
