Blackfriars Bridge

On the morning of the eighteenth of June nineteen eighty-two, a postman walking along the Thames noticed something hanging from scaffolding under this bridge. It was the body of Roberto Calvi, an Italian banker, swinging from an orange nylon rope. His pockets were stuffed with bricks. His jacket contained roughly fifteen thousand dollars in cash, in multiple currencies. His feet dangled just above the water.

Calvi was the chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, Italy's largest private bank. The bank had just collapsed with debts of over a billion dollars, much of it funnelled through the Vatican Bank. Calvi was a member of Propaganda Due — known as P2 — an illegal Masonic lodge whose members included intelligence chiefs, military officers, politicians, and organised crime figures. The lodge's members called themselves frati neri — black friars.

Black friars. Blackfriars Bridge. The location was almost certainly a message.

The initial inquest ruled suicide. But the evidence never added up. Calvi's hands showed no traces of the rust, paint, or grit that covered the scaffolding — meaning he probably didn't climb down himself. The ligature marks on his neck were inconsistent with self-hanging. And the bricks in his pockets weighed about five kilograms — an unusual suicide method, to say the least.

The case was reopened. Two Mafia associates and a financier were charged with murder in two thousand and five but acquitted in two thousand and seven due to insufficient evidence. Calvi's family has always maintained he was murdered.

The scaffolding is long gone. The bridge looks perfectly ordinary. But every time you cross it, you're walking over one of the most baroque unsolved murders in European history — a story involving the Vatican, the Mafia, a secret Masonic lodge, and a body under a bridge named after the killers.