Calvi murder linked to missing $70m

[emad]

From The Independent (UK)
By Peter Popham in Rome
18 February 2004


A portion of the huge treasure which the man known as God's banker, Roberto Calvi, was desperately trying to trace when he was murdered has been found in banks in the Bahamas.Amounting to $70m (£37m), the money has been in limbo since June 1982 when Calvi was found hanged under Blackfriars Bridge in London. His Banco Ambrosiano had gone bust some months before owing hundreds of millions of dollars to the Vatican, Sicilian Mafia gangs and many others. Declared by the original coroner's inquest to be suicide, Calvi's death is now believed to have been murder and four suspects are expected to go on trial in Italy.The new development in the joint Anglo-Italian investigation into the Calvi affair was leaked to Rome's La Repubblica newspaper yesterday. According to Luca Tescaroli and Anna Maria Monteleone, the Roman prosecutors leading the Italian side of the investigation, a sum of about $70m has been unearthed in several bank accounts in the Bahamas, funds which it is believed that Calvi was trying desperately to recover at the time of his death.

When Calvi's corpse was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge, his coat pockets were packed with bricks but there were no traces of brick dust on his hands. His death came shortly after the bank, which had close ties with the Mafia, the Vatican and a powerful Italian Masonic lodge counting many top politicians among its members, collapsed with debts of £800m.City of London Police have said the murder was being "actively investigated" using forensic techniques not available at the time of his death.Calvi died after being implicated in Italy's biggest post-war banking scandal. His death was initially recorded by a British coroner as suicide. However, following protests from his family a second inquest took place recording an open verdict.

The breakthrough persuading police to reopen the Calvi case came last year, when a panel of forensic scientists commissioned by a Rome tribunal concluded that he was killed. It has since been claimed that he was murdered by the Mafia as punishment for failing to look after their money, as well as to shut his mouth permanently.The Italian investigators believe the funds located in the Bahamas are part of the money Calvi was desperately trying to recover in order to stave off disaster. They think it could be part of the proceeds of a huge laundering operation undertaken by Calvi on behalf of Colombia's Medellin drug lords.The investigators claim that tens of millions of dollars left Colombia and passed through various banks in the US before showing up in the branch of the Banco Ambrosiano in Nassau, capital of the Bahamas. This was where the investigators of Italy's Direzione Investigativa Antimafia and a cell of the Milan office of the Guardia di Finanza, the tax police, recently succeeded in identifying the funds.

The exact provenance and intended eventual destination of the $70m that has been located is not yet fully understood.The new development in the investigation was made possible by an investigation carried out some years ago by the FBI, the investigators say. By following a paper trail of drug money from the Medellin cartel, which led through banks in Italy and in other countries, investigators succeeded in finding $70m transferred to the Banco Ambrosiano branch in Florida.It is claimed that Calvi created a network of contactsin south America, with politicians, bankers, and traffickers who trusted his ability to launder money gained from the cocaine traffic of the Colombian mafia. Sources who were close to him maintain that he knew everything about the intricate financial manoeuvres in high places in Italy, including the Institute for Religious Works, the private bank of the Vatican.A witness who testified to the Italian investigators recently maintained that "during the time that Calvi was in detention - from May to July 1981 - and again immediately after his release, many were actively trying to remove him from Italy, because he was a danger to everybody." He was the man who knew too much.

From: http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=492409

Re: "The exact provenance and intended eventual destination of the $70m that has been located is not yet fully understood"

During the initial 1982 investigation into Calvi's death in London, it was alleged that this sum was connected to money laundering by a sex ring in London that Calvi belonged to. The P2 Lodge was known to be operating in childrens' care homes in London and a number of successful arrests were made during the late 1970s and 1980s. Subsequent attempts to bring care workers to trial in the London Boroughs of Camden and Islington on paedophile charges were quashed when both the Crown Prosecution Service and Social Services responsible both alleged that material documentary evidence had become 'lost'. This was during the time when Blair crony Margaret Hodge MP (now Minister for Children godsaveus) was leader of Islington Council and gagged all investigation into allegations of child sex slavery and abuse.

One man who successfully evaded prosection into the laundering of P2 Lodge sex ring funds is Didier Garnier, now a so-called respectable restaurateur, and part owner of Le Colombier, in Chelsea's Dovehouse Street. He was also investigated in the disappearance/murder investigation of estate agent Suzie Lamplugh who 'vanished into thin air' in July 1986 in the Fulham area of West London.

Didier Garnier is widely believed to be the IRA lynchpin between what is now FARC (the Colombian terrorist organisation) and the P2 Lodge.

It was alleged during the 1982 Calvi investigation that Didier Garnier was allied to London mafia chief turned 'respectable' restaurateur Claudio Pulze, now owner of the London chain A to Z Restaurants. They were both investigated for the IRA bomb that killed military bandsmen in London Regent's Park around the time of Calvi's death.

Garnier, and his half brother Eric - owner of the Racine restaurant in London's Knightsbridge - has so far successfully evaded being charged in connection with any of the above, and is widely believed to be a protegee of retired Met cop Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Grieve, QPM. Both have been investigated over a series of massive property swindles, money laundering and bigamy charges.

[Minstrel Boy]

1. Banco Ambrosiano and the P2 Lodge

are pieces of the criminal-fascist underground to which Nugan Hand and BCCI belong. And it doesn't take much digging before the name Bush crops up. George HW Bush is an old buddy of P2 Lodge founder, Mussolini henchman Licio Gelli. Gelli spent a week with Bush in 1980 after Reagan's election, and Bush is reputed to be an honorary member of the lodge, with the lodge name of "the White Rose." (From Honegger's book, October Surprise).

Allegations of organized and protected paedophilia rings should have a grotesque familiarity for anyone who's followed this story.

[emad]

3. There's more to come on the Calvi story in London:

It is alleged that retired Met Assistant Deputy Commissioner John Grieve, QPM, was responsible for gagging a vital piece of evidence that was found on Calvi when he was cut down from the rope under Blackfriars Bridge in London. Namely, a piece of paper was found in his clothing with the words 'acid tripe' written on it and several strands of public hair. From my recollection of that initial police investigation - well reported in the UK press at the time but apparently not archived when the media went online in the UK - this evidence was first dismissed. Subsequently, the public hairs were analysed and found to contain similarities of DNA structure, leading police to suggest that 'acid tripe' is a sick joke anagram of 'patricide'.

[SpiralHawk]

2. Pedophilia is a distinct theme

in this, and of course it comes on the heels of the report this week that thousands of children have been victimized by priests in recent decades.

Could it possibly be that the feminine-repressing, "celibacy insisting" church "morals" and "practices" cause all the basic erotic energy of life to back up, get constipated, and then eventually to find perverted expression? Sure seems that way.

That's for posting this emad. The Dark Threads are woven through nearly everything. Time for the walls to come crumbling down.

[CaptainClark23]

4. well well well...

Just when I thought the streams of conspiracy and synchronicity couldn't get any deeper broader than they were already...Calvi pops back into the news.

There comes a point at which to claim that there ISN'T a Grand Conspiracy afoot in the world becomes willful blindness. There's just too much inter-connectivity. At the very best, I can only infer that there are forces at play which want to create the impression of a Grand Conspiracy.

The problem with tin hats though is that you must always question the genesis of any new information. Why is this particular story being told now? Who paled and dropped their spoon into their corn flakes while reading the paper yesterday morning?

[emad]

5. The Calvi death was reopened last year by City of London cops

after new forensic evidence showed suicide was highly improbable. As far as conspiracies are concerned, those who have reported on the BFEE and its long, cruel reign are resigned to the fact that many actual criminal lawsuits for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, conspiracy to murder, committ acts of terrorism, launder money, supply illicit arms, fund drug running AND run sex rings for clients with a linking for children as young as 18 months old etc etc have been gaged from the public domain. In the UK a series of successful prosecutions was gagged under parliamentary privilege nonsense when Thatcher was PM by using 'D' Notices: Ministry of Defence gagging orders.

These now seem to be virtually unenforceable as it emerges that the London BCCI creditors' class action is to hear previously unaired evidence from the UN Head of Military Intelligence that alleges BCCI operations were monitored by UN Security Council black ops, trailing ring of specialist paedophiles in high public ofice.

The right to hear that evidence was only made availale after a successful appeal in the UK High Courts last year. Something that Shrub and his Poodle were unable to suborn any longer.

More will emerge in the coming weeks, I'm told.

[Minstrel Boy]

6. conspiracy and willful blindness

You're right about that. And the more blatant the conspirators, the more willful must be the blindness to refuse to bear witness to the ugly truth.

The P2 Lodge sounds almost too paranoiac to be true, and yet it is: a secret masonic order, led by a fascist, connected to powerful international figures on the "respectable" far right (Bush senior. Berlusconi's name was found on Gelli's secret members roll years before he entered politics), having a hand in money laundering, assassination, sex rings and false-flag terrorism.

It's all out there. If people can't connect these dots, there's no hope for them.

[CaptainClark23]

14. Speaking of Tin Hats

The 'forbidden centrifuges' used for enriching uranium being shopped around by Pakistan's Dr. Khan are known as....wait for it....

P-2


a tongue-in-cheek post...perhaps...

[emad]

15. Great tongue in cheek post!....here's a ref to BCCI:

From: Pakistan Facts


Pakistan investigates BCCI role in sale of nuclear knowhow
Wednesday, February 04 2004 @ 06:11 PM CST
Stephen Fidler and Farhan Bokhari


The Pakistani government is examining records of the failed Bank of Credit and Commerce International in its investigation into the role Pakistani scientists may have played in selling nuclear knowhow to Iran, North Korea and Libya. According to bankers, some of whom worked with BCCI before it collapsed in 1991, Pakistani investigators have sought the help of former BCCI employees to try to uncover payments made to scientists connected with Pakistan's nuclear programme. BCCI's role in financing Pakistan's own nuclear efforts has long been the subject of scrutiny. In 1992, a report into BCCI from a US Congressional sub-committee headed by Senator John Kerry, now a leading Democratic presidential contender, said "there is good reason to conclude that BCCI did finance Pakistan's nuclear programme". Though it said the issue deserved further investigation, there was little public follow-through.

This year, however, as evidence has mounted that Pakistani scientists helped the uranium enrichment programmes of Iran, North Korea and Libya, the Pakistani government has launched an investigation. A government spokesman in Islamabad said that anybody found to have passed on secrets would be punished, but denied that the government approved any transfers. At least 11 Pakistani scientists and officials - as well as the so-called father of the Pakistani nuclear bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan - have been questioned.

BCCI helped the Pakistani government under General Zia ul Haq, the military dictator killed in a 1988 plane crash, to channel payments from the US Central Intelligence Agency to fighters seeking to oust Soviet troops from Afghanistan. Soviet troops withdrew in 1989 but former BCCI officials said the relationship for organising undocumented payments for influential Pakistanis continued until the bank's collapse. One former BCCI banker who said he organised funds transfers on behalf of senior military officers in the Zia regime commented: "I'm not surprised that the Pakistanis are now looking to put together dossiers on some of their scientists receiving payments through BCCI." He said that over the past two months, Pakistani officials had travelled to the Middle East, looking for evidence of nuclear scientists receiving payments through BCCI.

Another former BCCI banker said that establishing payments to Pakistani nuclear scientists through the bank could provide evidence about the so far undocumented role of senior former Pakistani military officers in overseeing the transfer of nuclear knowhow to other countries. The investigation has prompted speculation among western intelligence officials and diplomats over the extent to which General Zia, leader of a frontline anti-communist state, in fact sanctioned the transfer of nuclear knowhow to Iran. In the past four to eight weeks, he said the Pakistani investigators have been seeking evidence of payments made to Mohammad Farooq, one of the nuclear scientists at the centre of the investigation. Pakistani officials are said to have focused on Mr Farooq as a possible contact between the Iranians and Mr Khan.

<snip>
http://www.pakistan-facts.com/article.php/20040204181106258

[Minstrel Boy]

7. The Calvi story is always worth a kick n/t

[Octafish]

8. Money laundering is just one tentacle of the Octopus.

THE MONEY FOUNTAIN

The Dark Face of International Finance

by David Guyatt

Ever since the Nugan Hand Bank affair of the late seventies, bank crashes have followed a slick and familiar template. Narcotics trafficking, gun running, CIA covert ops., money laundering and fraud on a massive scale are just some of the ingredients that have sent bank after bank crashing to its knees. Once the smoke clears bank depositors and shareholders are left picking up the tab.

With a spate of billion dollar financial scandals hitting the headlines, 1995 hasn't been such a good year for harassed bank regulators and shareholders. Calls for tougher regulation of the burgeoning financial markets in the wake of the Daiwa, Barings' and other debacles is little more than a PR palliative designed to calm the nerves of a cynical public who still form the hard backbone of bank depositors. With the best will in the world regulators can't keep pace with an evolving and sophisticated money-machine that daily shuffles upwards of twenty four billion E-bucks around the globe in the blink of an eye1.

Yet tough regulation even when emplaced are easily and regularly evaded. Banking and crime are Cimmerian hand-maidens for the simple reason that banks are where the money is. Having access to the money and being "connected" is the name of the game where the stakes are other people's money. This is the dark side of the financial community, a hidden face that largely goes unreported until, that is, a major banking scandal hits the front pages. Squirming under the glare of public attention successive bank disclosures have revealed the sinister connections that leading banks have with organised crime and the intelligence community. The money-shuffler's of spooksville need "black" funds to finance covert operations and appear happy to exchange guns and military hardware for dope that is, in turn, peddled for dollars used to finance other black operations. This happy-go-lucky "Ferris wheel" approach to money-raising on the part of the intelligence community reveals a long history of entanglements with the Mafia.

Organised crime syndicates are now the single largest business sector on the planet and set to grow. They just love banking. Having accumulated a staggering $820 billion from investment interest over the last decade, the Mafia is now estimated to earn $250 billion a year from their legitimate investments.2 Dozens of nations who maintain strict bank secrecy laws are de facto providing full banking services to these mandarins of dirty money. A large number of banks are actually owned by Mafia syndicates.3 Some of the largest and most respectable appear content to turn a blind-eye and earn massive commissions from laundering dirty money4. The prudent image of bankers is just that - an image. Banking survives purely on depositor confidence making it the biggest ongoing "confidence trick" 5 the world has ever witnessed. That confidence has been dented by one scandal following on the heels of another.

CONTINUED... (check out the stuff on CIA drug-money laundering):

http://www.deepblacklies.co.uk/the_money_fountain.htm

[Minstrel Boy]

9. "Holy Smoke and Mirrors"

Another important and pertinent piece by David Guyatt. A lot of dark, dark business with these people:

Meanwhile, both Calvi and Sindona were members of the secretive Propaganda Due (P2) Masonic lodge, that is said to have been a “parallel government” in waiting and which planned to effect a coup d’etat in Italy following a communist party victory at the polls.

P2 was run by former Italian fascist and member of the Nazi SS, Licio Gelli – dubbed the “Puppet Master” by the Italian press. Gelli’s connections to the ultra hard right and fascists in Europe and Latin America were extensive. In fact, he had been deeply involved in establishing the Vatican run Ratlines that aided the worst Nazi war criminals to escape Allied justice at the end of WW11. All told an estimated 50,000 Nazi’s were helped to freedom.

...

During her continuing investigation into the Octopus, Marshall found that the SS occultism outlined above was connected to Lt. Col. Michael A. Aquino, a former US “Green Beret,” who is a self professed Satanist – and who held a top secret security clearance for his work in military intelligence and on classified psychological warfare matters. Aquino officiated at SS black magic ceremonies held at Wewelsburg, the Castle once used by SS chief Heinrich Himmler to create an SS order of Teutonic Knights based on the Knights Templars.

The foregoing connections lend themselves to a larger picture of global interlocking right wing fascist groupings that operate in the shadow-land of deniable military and intelligence operations associated with profit during WW11 and, later, throughout the cold war. In this respect it is intriguing to note that the Priory of Sion, one of the foremost Catholic groups under discussion use as a symbol something that is variously described as an octopus or a spider (l’araignee) on their documents.

http://www.deepblacklies.co.uk/holy_smoke_mirrors.htm

[bobbieinok]

10. does the Priory of Sion actually exist or is it part of the Holy Blood,

Holy Grail mix of truth and myth?

[Minstrel Boy]

11. It entered popular consciousness via Holy Blood, Holy Grail, but

the Priory of Sion does exist. (Which isn't to say it actually has anything to do with the "bloodline of Christ.")

[emad]

12. It has existed for centuries under various guises. Most

criminologists agree that it is another name for the 'Merovignian line' ie the Jesus/Magdalene hybrid tribe.

Lost of French intellectuals like Jean Paul Satre have admitted membership of the Priory of Sion, as well as General de Gaul.

[emad]

13. Addendum, re 'Didier Garnier'

This was not archived from the UK press when it went online in the mid-1990s, allegedly for security reasons following paranoia in the UK Special Branch after Calvi's brief case was found in a taxi in 1991 with details of secret bank account numbers and sorting codes, now widely believed to be part of the trail that has led to the $70 million bust in the Bahamas on 17/18 February:

'Didier Garnier' is a pseunomym for a sex offender from the North London Abraham family which has been involved in vice/drugs/corruption since the mid-1930s. Garnier was one of several people arrested in mid-June 1982 in central London and charged with running a paedophile brothel. When the cops busted the club all the patrons and prostitutes were made to give a blood sample as well as 'other bodily liquids'. These were used in evidence against Garnier and his financial backers, whose bank accounts were frozen and whose assets were eventually confiscated. Some of the bank accounts were feeder accounts into a BCCI account which regularly transferred funds to the Dutch Antilles, Cayman Islands, Bahamas and Turks & Caicos Isles.

The client list of the brothel also contained personal phone numbers and credit cards of an international clientele who always paid by funds that were debited from Carribean accounts.

There were a number of attempts by corrupt officers (subsequently busted, charged and jailed) to destroy these accounts, including details of airline passenger lists for clients who had arrived in the UK in May and June that year.

There was also a personal attempt by Margaret Thatcher to order these airline lists destroyed, including payments stubs and hotel receipts showing which foreign visitors were staying in town and using the brothel. One Tory MP weho got busted in the raid was Jonathan Aitken. Fellow Tory MP Jeffrey Archer subsequently gave him a false alibi and was busted for this, eventually doing a deal to hush it all up.

There were reports that 'The US Vice President's elder son' was among those busted in the brothel, although he gave a different name.

The blood/Semen/saliva/other DNA evidence samples were held in secure locations throughout the 1980s and 90s. At once stage they were deemed to be so politically sensitive that they were moved to arguably the most secure military location in central London - The Tower of London (where Her Maj keeps the baubles).

The last time these samples were discussed in court was in late 1998 when Didier Garnier tried to get them released to his lawyers, claiming he was being unfairly smeared and that it was affecting his restaurant business in Chelsea's Dovehouse Street. Other notable backers of his include peripheral members of the gang which did the Brinks Mat gold heist in October 1983 at Heathrow Airport, stealing some £26 million worth of gold bullion from Johnson Matthey.

Didier Garnier was also questioned re the disappearance of property-ring call girl Suzie Lamplugh in July 1986. The man who bailed him out was a close relative/colleague of retired Met Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Grieve, QPM.

The Lamplugh case is re opened in London following corroborated witness testimony in a civil suit last year.