1 Roberto Calvi – JUNE, 1982 Calvi, the chairman of Italy’s second largest bank, Banco Ambrosiano, which went bankrupt in 1982, was closely tied to the Pope John Paul II and the Vatican banking scandals of the 1980s. Banco Ambrosiano collapsed in the summer of 1982 with losses approaching $1.5 US billion, much of which had been siphoned off via the Vatican Bank. Calvi found hanged from scaffolding beneath Blackfriars Bridge on the edge of London’s financial district, The City. Calvi’s clothing was stuffed with bricks and he was carrying over $15,000 of cash in three different currencies. Calvi was a member of illegal Italian Masonic lodge known as Propaganda Due (P2), known as a frati neri or black friars. This led to the suggestion that Calvi was murdered as a Masonic warning because of the symbolism associated with the words black friars. 2 Michele Sindona – March, 1986 Known as “The Shark,” Sindona is alleged to have had ties with the Gambino family and had been a top tax lawyer and accountant with the top Italian real estate investment firm, Societa Generale Immobillari. Through his holding company, Fasco, he acquired controlling interest in a number of prominent Italian banks, and by 1969, had developed strong connections with the Vatican Bank and prominent Swiss banks, with which he was involved in large scale major currency speculation. The Shark was finally convicted on sixty-five counts of fraud and perjury in US courts and twenty-five years in Italian prison for conspiracy to commit murder. On March 18, 1986, he was poisoned with cyanide in his coffee at his cell in the prison, Voghera, while serving a life sentence for murder. 3 Amschel Rothschild – July, 1996 Amschel Rothschild, a direct heir to the Rothschild banking dynasty, reputed to own or secretly control a multi-trillion dollar fortune, was found hanged in his room at the Bristol Hotel in Paris. Previously, Amschel had split with his half brother, Lord Rothschild, and his cousin, Sir Evelyn Rothschild. Amschel was athletic and in excellent health, married and with a happy family that included three children. The billionaire investment banker’s death, according to well placed European sources, was not suicide as the world press reported, but rather, murder. Rothschild had been strangled with the heavy cord of his own bath robe, one end of which was attached to a towel rack, as if to suggest that his violent death was self-inflicted. After photographing the body, one of the investigators gave the towel rack a slight tug and it fell easily out of the wall. The unpublished conclusion was that Rothschild was definitely murdered. 4 Edmond J. Safra – December, 1999 Multi-billionaire banker, Edmond J. Safra, died of asphyxiation in a locked, bunker like bathroom in a fire that engulfed his magnificent penthouse apartment in Monaco, atop a building housing the Republic National of New York. Safra, the prime stockholder of the bank, had just made final arrangements to sell his interests in the bank a few days previously. Safra, whose specialty was private banking for wealthy clients, was reputed to know “all the secrets of the financial planet.” He was accused of laundering money for Panamanian dictator, Manuel Noriega, and was rumored to have had connections with the Iran Contra scandal. But Safra’s death may have been directly associated with a secretive international financial empire, active in clandestine gold trading. Safra’s banking and precious metals empire was founded and built primarily after the creation of the State of Israel, by Safra acting as a savvy money laundering expert for wealthy Sephardic Jews. Safra was allegedly an expert in gold smuggling and the use of gold in secret financing of covert operations, including assassinations, by intelligence agencies such as the CIA. 5 J. Clifford Baxter – January, 2002 A former top executive of scandal plagued Enron, Baxter was reputed to have shot himself in his Mercedes Benz, parked in a cul-de-sac near his Houston home. Baxter had already cashed in $35 million of his soon to be worthless Enron shares before the company collapsed and had received a subpoena from the Senate Government Affairs Subcommittee on Permanent Oversight and Investigation. The highest levels of the Bush administration were said to be implicated in the financial and political corruption involving Enron. If he had lived, Baxter’s testimony could have shed major light on the very top of the Enron fraud. 6 Alex Widmer – December, 2008 Widmer, a prominent Swiss private banker, at Julius Baer Holding, was reportedly found dead in Zurich. Confusingly, his death was ascribed to both illness and suicide. Widmer’s death came at a volatile time in Swiss banking. Swiss bank, UBS, had been investigated in a US tax evasion scandal and had reported $46 billion in write down losses. Baer had been accused of poaching high ranking bank officers from larger Swiss rival, UBS. 7 James McDonald – September, 2009 McDonald, prominent adviser to wealthy families and chief executive of investment management group, Rockefeller and Company, was found dead with a single gunshot wound in his car in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. Preliminary investigation indicated that it was an “apparent” suicide. McDonald was credited with helping to grow Rockefeller and Company, the New York based family business established by John D. Rockefeller in 1882, to manage that dynasty’s assets, into a much broader investment management company, with nearly $30 billion in assets.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 06:38:05 +0000
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