for a job at the Banco Ambrosiano with the idea of getting his hands on documents ‘of great importance in a war of influence between rival power centres’. The documents could be enormously valuable if sold to interested parties, Paoli observed. They concerned ‘important international operations and, from what he understood, also regarded the Vatican’.
His reports also concern practical aspects of Calvi’s stay in London. Calvi had wanted to go to his customary London hotel, a move considered imprudent by Vittor and out of the question for Carboni. Calvi was extremely unhappy with the flat at Chelsea Cloisters, so Vittor was given the task of seeing that he didn’t go out ‘for his own good’ until such time as Carboni confirmed there was no further danger. Even Calvi’s telephone communications with the outside world were rationed, Paoli wrote. The flat allegedly had a problem with the phone line.
Paoli continued: ‘After a few days, Calvi, who until then had been fairly sure of himself and of the situation, began to be afraid of something. What’s more, the only thing he wanted to do was telephone, but that was exactly what had become impossible. And Vittor did not leave him on his ownfor a second.’ Calvi had appealed to Vittor to ignore Carboni’s instructions and offered him a lot of money in exchange for his help. Vittor refused: it was better to wait until Carboni had found safer accommodation. According to Paoli’s account: ‘On the last day a phone call arrives and then a vehicle: Calvi must go to dinner with friends.’ Paoli pithily summed up Vittor’s role in London in a deposition to Rome prosecutors in July 2003. His task, the Adriatic smuggler had told him, had been ‘to do little and understand little’.
The tenor of Paoli’s revelations about Calvi was no more welcome to the Italian authorities than his prediction of Gelli’s prison breakout. In another deposition later that month he explained: ‘At a certain point my friendship with Vittor came to an end without any specific reason and I realized that the finance police were no longer interested in acquiring further information about the Calvi affair. I gained that impression from speaking to [his controller, Captain] Rino Stanig, who gave me to understand that someone in Rome did not want him to cultivate this confidential relationship with me any longer.’
Paoli exuded a strange blend of shrewdness and paranoia when I caught up with him in Trieste in November 2005. He told me he was an inventor whose discoveries were worth millions of euros, and that he had been unjustly persecuted and defrauded by some of the biggest names in Italian business. ‘I have been more defamed and accused than Pol Pot,’ he said. He said that having studied industrial and naval design in Yugoslavia and done his military service in the Italian air force – in an office responsible for communications with NATO headquarters in Brussels – he had gone on to work for an import-export company that traded with countries in Eastern Europe from a base in the north-eastern Italian town of Udine. Without saying so explicitly, much of his tale seemed to lead back to the role of the secret services at the time of the Cold War. The decision to take Calvi out of Italy throughYugoslavia had been intended to ‘drag the secret services of the East’ into the affair, he said. And he repeated his account of a desperate and frightened Calvi who had realized, once he arrived in London, that he had fallen into a trap. A lengthy conversation over coffee in the elegant Caffè degli Specchi, which looks on to Trieste’s main sea-front square with its Habsburg-style palaces, hardly gave the impression that the chubby, white-haired inventor and police informant would make a convincing witness when called to the stand at the Calvi trial in Rome. The conspiracies to which he had been witness, or victim, were legion and ultimately did little to bolster his credibility,
His reports also concern practical aspects of Calvi’s stay in London. Calvi had wanted to go to his customary London hotel, a move considered imprudent by Vittor and out of the question for Carboni. Calvi was extremely unhappy with the flat at Chelsea Cloisters, so Vittor was given the task of seeing that he didn’t go out ‘for his own good’ until such time as Carboni confirmed there was no further danger. Even Calvi’s telephone communications with the outside world were rationed, Paoli wrote. The flat allegedly had a problem with the phone line.
Paoli continued: ‘After a few days, Calvi, who until then had been fairly sure of himself and of the situation, began to be afraid of something. What’s more, the only thing he wanted to do was telephone, but that was exactly what had become impossible. And Vittor did not leave him on his ownfor a second.’ Calvi had appealed to Vittor to ignore Carboni’s instructions and offered him a lot of money in exchange for his help. Vittor refused: it was better to wait until Carboni had found safer accommodation. According to Paoli’s account: ‘On the last day a phone call arrives and then a vehicle: Calvi must go to dinner with friends.’ Paoli pithily summed up Vittor’s role in London in a deposition to Rome prosecutors in July 2003. His task, the Adriatic smuggler had told him, had been ‘to do little and understand little’.
The tenor of Paoli’s revelations about Calvi was no more welcome to the Italian authorities than his prediction of Gelli’s prison breakout. In another deposition later that month he explained: ‘At a certain point my friendship with Vittor came to an end without any specific reason and I realized that the finance police were no longer interested in acquiring further information about the Calvi affair. I gained that impression from speaking to [his controller, Captain] Rino Stanig, who gave me to understand that someone in Rome did not want him to cultivate this confidential relationship with me any longer.’
Paoli exuded a strange blend of shrewdness and paranoia when I caught up with him in Trieste in November 2005. He told me he was an inventor whose discoveries were worth millions of euros, and that he had been unjustly persecuted and defrauded by some of the biggest names in Italian business. ‘I have been more defamed and accused than Pol Pot,’ he said. He said that having studied industrial and naval design in Yugoslavia and done his military service in the Italian air force – in an office responsible for communications with NATO headquarters in Brussels – he had gone on to work for an import-export company that traded with countries in Eastern Europe from a base in the north-eastern Italian town of Udine. Without saying so explicitly, much of his tale seemed to lead back to the role of the secret services at the time of the Cold War. The decision to take Calvi out of Italy throughYugoslavia had been intended to ‘drag the secret services of the East’ into the affair, he said. And he repeated his account of a desperate and frightened Calvi who had realized, once he arrived in London, that he had fallen into a trap. A lengthy conversation over coffee in the elegant Caffè degli Specchi, which looks on to Trieste’s main sea-front square with its Habsburg-style palaces, hardly gave the impression that the chubby, white-haired inventor and police informant would make a convincing witness when called to the stand at the Calvi trial in Rome. The conspiracies to which he had been witness, or victim, were legion and ultimately did little to bolster his credibility,
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