Calvi went missing from his
Rome apartment on 10 June 1982, having fled the country on a false passport under the name Gian Roberto Calvini, fleeing initially to
Venice. From there, he apparently hired a private plane to
London via
Zürich. A postal clerk was crossing London's
Blackfriars Bridge at 7:30 am on Friday, 18 June and noticed Calvi's body hanging from the scaffolding beneath. Calvi had five bricks in his pockets and had in his possession about US$14,000 in three different currencies. Calvi was a member of
Licio Gelli's illegal
masonic lodge Propaganda Due (P2), who referred to themselves as
frati neri or "black friars." This led to a suggestion in some quarters that Calvi was murdered as a masonic warning because of the symbolism associated with the word "Blackfriars". Calvi's death was the subject of two
coroners' inquests in London. The first recorded verdict of suicide was in July 1982. The Calvi family then secured the services of
George Carman,
QC. The second inquest was held in July 1983, and the jury recorded an
open verdict, indicating that the court had been unable to determine the exact cause of death. Calvi's family maintained that his death had been a murder. In 1991, the Calvi family commissioned the
New York-based investigation company
Kroll Associates to investigate the circumstances of Calvi's death. The case was assigned to Jeff Katz, who was a senior case manager for the company in London. As part of his two-year investigation, Katz hired a former
Home Office forensic scientist,
Angela Gallop, to undertake forensic tests. She found that Calvi could not have hanged himself from the scaffolding because the lack of paint and rust on his shoes proved that he had not walked on the scaffolding. In October 1992, the forensic report was submitted to the
home secretary and the
City of London Police, who dismissed it at the time. Calvi's body was exhumed in December 1998, and an Italian court commissioned a German forensic scientist to repeat the work produced by Katz and his forensic team. That report was published in October 2002, ten years after the original, and confirmed the first report. In addition, it said that the injuries to Calvi's neck were inconsistent with hanging and that he had not touched the bricks found in his pockets. When his body was found, the
River Thames had receded with the tide, but the scaffolding could have been reached by a person standing in a boat at the time of the hanging. That had also been the conclusion of a separate report by Katz in 1992, which also detailed a reconstruction based on Calvi's last known movements in London and theorized that he had been taken by boat from a point of access to the Thames in West London. This aspect of Calvi's death was the focus of the theory that he was murdered and is the version of events depicted in Giuseppe Ferrara's film reconstruction of the event. In September 2003, the City of London Police re-opened their investigation as a murder inquiry. More evidence arose, revealing that Calvi stayed in a flat in Chelsea Cloisters just prior to his death. Sergio Vaccari was a small-time drug dealer who had stayed in the same flat, and he was found dead in possession of masonic papers displaying member names of P2. The murders of both Calvi and Vaccari involved bricks stuffed in clothing, correlating the two deaths and confirming Calvi's ties to the lodge. Calvi's life was insured for US$10 million with Unione Italiana. His family's attempts to obtain a payout resulted in litigation (
Fisher v Unione Italiana [1998] CLC 682). The forensic report of 2002 established that Calvi had been murdered and the policy was finally settled, although around half of the sum was paid to creditors of the Calvi family who incurred considerable costs during their attempts to establish the cause of his death. ==Prosecution of Giuseppe Calò and Licio Gelli==