ROME (Reuters) - A convicted Mafioso and four other people went on trial on Thursday accused of the 1982 killing in London of Roberto Calvi, known as "God's Banker" because of his ties to the Vatican.
Calvi's body was found dangling from a noose under London's Blackfriars Bridge in 1982, bricks and $15,000 in cash stuffed in his pockets.
Calvi's death sent shockwaves across Italy and cast a shadow over the Vatican. The case remains shrouded in mystery almost a quarter of a century on.
Calvi's Banco Ambrosiano had collapsed shortly before his death in what was at the time Italy's largest private banking failure. His death was at first ruled a suicide.
Rome prosecutors now say that the Mafia killed Calvi for stealing money from them as well as from Licio Gelli, former head of a secret masonic lodge tied to the Italian business and political elite.
They say tests on Calvi's body show he never touched the bricks in his pockets and was hanged after being killed.
Convicted mobster Pippo Calo, once known as the Mafia's "treasurer" because he looked after much of its accounts, listened to the proceedings via teleconference from a prison.
He was shown on a monitor in the courtroom, looking calm and wearing a dark jacket, his hands folded in his lap.
In a court document seen by Reuters, prosecutors say Calo, 74, ordered the murder. Calvi was "asphyxiated by strangulation and hanged in London under Blackfriars Bridge, on the Thames, in such a way as to simulate suicide."
The other defendants are Sardinian financier Flavio Carboni, his Austrian former girlfriend Manuela Kleinszig, businessman and alleged Rome crime boss Ernesto Diotallevi and Calvi's former bodyguard, Silvano Vittor.
"There is no, absolutely no proof of any kind," said Carboni, the only defendant in the courtroom.
NECK BONES, FINGERNAILS
Italian magistrates at the time said the Vatican Bank, which owned a small part of Calvi's Banco Ambrosiano, bore some responsibility for the 1.3 billion dollars in bad debts it left when it collapsed.
The Vatican denied wrongdoing and said its bank, known as the IOR, had been hoodwinked by Calvi. It paid a $250 million settlement to Ambrosiano creditors in 1984 in what it called a goodwill gesture.
After the initial suicide ruling, prosecutors say a more recent medical review found evidence pointing to murder, including the type of injuries to bones in Calvi's neck.
His hands and fingernails were also clean. If he had stuffed bits of brick in his own pockets and climbed a rusting scaffolding to hang himself, prosecutors have argued there would have been traces of dirt.
"There are many expert witnesses and they contradict each other," said Ersilia Barracca, a lawyer representing Kleinszig.
"Some of them stated that Calvi had committed suicide, this was the London experts' testimony ... So we are starting this trial on the basis of a very doubtful hypothesis of murder."
Vittor is one of the last people known to have seen Calvi, who had been appealing a four-year sentence when he left Rome in June 1982 and secretly headed to London.
Vittor's lawyer said he had been paid by Carboni to accompany Calvi, but had left London before Calvi's death.
Prosecutors accuse Diotallevi of being a go-between for Calo and Carboni, helping Calvi flee Italy and supplying the fake passport found on his body.
After brief initial proceedings, the trial was adjourned until November 23.
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