Giuseppe Calò
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Giuseppe 'Pippo' Calò (born September 30, 1931 in Palermo) is a member of the Sicilian Mafia. He was referred to as the "Mafia's Cashier" because he was heavily involved in the financial side of organized crime, primarily money laundering.
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[edit] Boss of the Porta Nuova Mafia family
Born and raised in Palermo, the capital of Sicily, he was inducted into the Porta Nuova Mafia Family at the age of twenty-three after carrying out a murder to avenge his father. By 1969 he was the boss of Porta Nuova, and amongst his men was the informant Tommaso Buscetta. Calò was on the Sicilian Mafia Commission, a group of the most powerful Mafia bosses in Sicily who regularly met, supposedly to iron out differences and solve disputes.
In the beginning of the 1970s Calò moved to Rome. Under the guise of an antiques dealer and under the false identity of Mario Agliarolo he invested in real estate and laundered large proceeds of crime for many Mafia families. He was able to establish close links with common criminals of the Banda della Magliana, neo-fascist groups and members of the Italian intelligence agencies.
During the early 1980s he supported Salvatore Riina and the Corleone Family during the Mafia War that decimated most of the other Families.
Calò arranged the bombing of the 904 express train between Florence and Bologna on December 23, 1984 that killed 16 people and injured around 200 others [1]. It was meant to divert attention from the revelations given by various Mafia informants, including Buscetta. Calò and his men had joined up with neo-fascist terrorists to carry out the atrocity.
[edit] Giuseppe Calò's 1985 arrest
Calò was arrested on March 30, 1985, in a villa at Poggio San Lorenzo, in the province of Rieti, after several years as a fugitive. He was one of the hundreds of defendants at the Maxi Trial that started the following year, where he was charged with Mafia association, money laundering and the Naples train bombing. He cross-examined Tommaso Buscetta himself and the pair, who had previously been lifelong friends, engaged in a vicious round of mud-slinging and insults as they attempted to discredit each other.
At the end of the Maxi Trial in 1987 Calò was found guilty and given two life sentences. Anti-Mafia prosecutors and investigators were outraged when it was discovered in 1989 that Calò and a number of other convicted Mafia bosses were living a life of relative luxury in their own section of the prison hospital, being waited on by common criminals and having their food brought in from the outside. Calò was supposedly suffering from asthma but he showed no symptoms. The anti-Mafia judges forced Calò and his fellow Mafiosi back to their cells. He was substituted by Salvatore Cancemi as capo mandamento of the Puorta Nova family.
[edit] Roberto Calvi's 1982 murder
In July 1991 the Mafia pentito (a mafioso turned informer) Francesco Marino Mannoia claimed that Roberto Calvi – nicknamed "God's banker" because he was in charge of Banco Ambrosiano, in which the Vatican Bank was the main share-holder – had been killed in 1982 because he had lost Mafia funds when the Banco Ambrosiano collapsed. According to Mannoia the killer was Francesco Di Carlo, a mafioso living in London at the time, and the order to kill Calvi had come from Calò and Licio Gelli, the head of the secret Italian masonic lodge Propaganda Due (P2). When Di Carlo became an informer in June 1996, he denied that he was the killer, but admitted that he had been approached by Calò to do the job. However, Di Carlo could not be reached in time, and when he later called Calò, the latter said that everything had been taken care of already.
In 1997, Italian prosecutors in Rome implicated Calò in Calvi's murder, along with Flavio Carboni, a Sardinian businessman with wide ranging interests, as well as Ernesto Diotallevi (one of the leaders of the Banda della Magliana, a Roman Mafia-like organization) and Di Carlo. The trial finally began in October 2005. It is expected to last up to two years.
[edit] References
- ^ Italy Convicts 7 in Bombing Of Train Fatal to 16 in 1984, Associated Press, on The New York Times, February 26, 1989
[edit] Bibliography
- Excellent Cadavers. The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic (1995) Alexander Stille, Vintage ISBN 009 9594919
- Cosa Nostra. A history of the Sicilian Mafia (2004) John Dickie, Coronet, ISBN 0340824352
[edit] See also
- Mani pulite
- Banco Ambrosiano scandal, which led to Roberto Calvi's 1982 murder
- Licio Gelli, headmaster of Propaganda Due, the masonic lodge involved in Gladio's "strategy of tension" (Gladio was the Italian branch of the NATO "stay-behind" secret paramilitary organization, involved in various acts of domestic terror, starting with the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing)
