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they constituted a formidable instrument of blackmail. According to the prosecutors of those eventually charged with his murder, the potential victims of that blackmail were, first, his former accomplices in politics and government, second, the heads of the secret P2 masonic lodge of which he was a member, and, third, the Vatican bank, the Institute for the Works of Religion, usually known by its Italian acronym as the IOR.
    For the past year, Calvi had been on bail pending an appeal against his conviction for violations of Italy’s laws on exporting currency. The appeal hearing was due to begin at the end of June. His passport had been withdrawn by Milan prosecutors pending the appeal hearing, so a legitimate departure was impossible. The bare details of his itinerary are asfollows. Smuggled over the border into Yugoslavia on a speedboat from the north-eastern port of Trieste, he travelled on a false passport to Austria and from there flew to London. He left Italy on 11 June and arrived in England four days later, spending the last days of his life in the sporadic company of four people.
    The man who had helped him arrange his escape and who had been advising him in recent months was Flavio Carboni, a flamboyant Sardinian businessman, a man who liked to boast to associates that he worked for the secret services and who habitually carried a handgun. His other male companion was Silvano Vittor, a smuggler based in Trieste who had been hired by Carboni to spirit the banker out of the country on board his powerful speedboat
L’Uragano
(The Hurricane), and to act subsequently as Calvi’s companion and bodyguard. But as well as trafficking in jeans and contraband cigarettes between Italy and Yugoslavia, Vittor rounded out his income by acting as a police informant. He had been recruited by the finance police, a militarized police force with special responsibility for financial, tax and customs matters, in June 1980 and given the codename ‘Umago’, from the name of his birthplace. The choice of Trieste as Calvi’s point of exit was no coincidence; the cold war frontier city, disputed between Italy and Yugoslavia at the end of the Second World War, was Vittor’s base of operations but it had also been an important financial centre for Carboni, who registered numerous companies there to take advantage of its special tax status.
    Calvi’s other two travelling companions were women, and not Italian but Austrian. The blonde Kleinszig sisters, in their early twenties, could be relied upon to be loyal and discreet. Manuela was Carboni’s mistress and her sister Michaela was with Vittor, who was the father of her baby daughter. Both men enjoyed living the high life and both were married to somebody else.
    Carboni had arranged for Calvi and Vittor to stay in a two-room apartment at Chelsea Cloisters, a massive barrack-likeresidence of private flats near Sloane Square. They arrived in London on the evening of Tuesday, 15 June.
    An early opportunity to crack the Calvi case came in January 1983, just six months after the banker’s death, when another informant of the Trieste finance police provided potentially vital clues apparently drawn from the group of people who had accompanied him to London. Instead of following up the information and sharing it with the British authorities, Italian investigators appeared determined to discourage the source from cooperating with them. Later in 1983 the finance police revealed his true identity to a Trieste prosecutor and he was promptly arrested as an accessory to Calvi’s flight, a charge he was later able to disprove. The man’s name was Eligio Paoli. A friend of Vittor’s and an underworld informant of the Italian secret services, he was known as source ‘Podgora’ to the finance police. His information was at times contradictory and confusing and sometimes it was downright wrong. But there were good reasons for taking Paoli seriously. For one thing, he was in contact with several of