'God's Banker' Roberto Calvi was murdered by the Mafia to punish him for mishandling their money and prevent him revealing the identities of powerful people who acted as go-betweens, a Rome court said Wednesday.
''It is more credible that Calvi was killed to punish him and stop him revealing relations with persons who acted as conduits with the criminal organisation,'' the court said, releasing a June 6 ruling that acquitted four people of Calvi's murder.
''Calvi failed to fulfill the commitments he had with those criminal groups,'' the ruling said.
The court said it was unlikely the mob murdered the banker to get its money back, since ''it's obvious they would only have been able to do that if they kept Calvi alive''.
It rejected as implausible a prosecutor's assertion that the Mafia feared embarrassment from the possible revelation that its money had been rerouted to Latina American dictators and the Solidarity anti-government trade union movement in Poland.
''It's more logical to think that the disclosure of that funding would have damaged the Vatican more than the Mafia''.
Calvi, who earned the nickname 'God's Banker' by working closely with the Vatican bank, was found hanging under London's Blackfrair's Bridge in 1982, his pockets bulging with banknotes and bricks.
The court said the ''symbolic'' location and the staging of the murder to make it look like a suicide ''were all hallmarks of Cosa Nostra''.
Calvi's death was originally ruled a suicide but Italian prosecutors later accused the four defendants acquitted in June of killing him on a contract from the Mafia.
Prosecutors claimed Calvi was forced into a corner by his exposure to the Vatican bank led by the since-dismissed American cardinal, Paul Marcinkus.
The four charged with premeditated murder - jailed Mafia boss Pippo Calo', Sardinian wheeler-dealer Flavio Carboni, Rome crime boss Ernesto Diotallevi and smuggler Silvano Victor - were acquitted for insufficient evidence.
But the prosecution said the wording of the verdict ''proves that this was murder and we will go forward in our search for the truth''.
The prosecution is appealing the verdict, which was the first in Italy's three-tiered justice system.
In a separate probe, about a dozen people are under investigation for the murder, including the former head of rightist Propaganda Due (P2) Masonic lodge, Licio Gelli.
