Licio Gelli obituary

Licio Gelli, who has died aged 96, was among those rare individuals of whom it could be said that what was not known about them was more interesting than what was. Did he work for the CIA after the second world war? Did he have a hand in the death of Roberto Calvi, the man known as “God’s banker”, whose corpse was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in 1982? And how did he come into possession of 179 gold ingots found at his house, hidden in flowerpots? There was no murky or mysterious affair in cold war Italy – not even the 1978 assassination of the prime minister Aldo Moro – over which Gelli’s shadow did not fall.

Born in Pistoia, Tuscany, Licio was the son of Ettore Gelli, a well-to-do landowner, and his wife, Maria (nee Gori). Licio’s earliest political involvement was with the far right. He volunteered to fight in the Spanish civil war on the side of Franco, and even enrolled in the Falange, the Spanish fascist party. In 1940 he studied briefly at an accountancy school.

Towards the end of the second world war, after Italy renounced its alliance with Germany, Gelli joined other fascists in the so-called republic of Salò (1943-45), the Nazi puppet state in the north of the country headed by its ousted dictator, Benito Mussolini. Much later in life, Gelli would declare: “I am a fascist and will die a fascist.” Yet he was not above switching sides as it became increasingly obvious that the allies would win. He joined the partisans and even helped in an important jailbreak.

What role he played after the war is unclear. It has been claimed that he worked for the CIA or British intelligence, or both. In common with many other former Mussolini supporters, Gelli reinvented himself as a Christian Democrat. But it was not until the 1960s that he found a spiritual home in freemasonry. Charming, witty, and an eager and effective networker, Gelli rose swiftly to become head, or venerable master, of the once prestigious Propaganda Due (P2) lodge in the centre of Rome. With a mandate from his superiors to revive the fortunes of the moribund P2, Gelli set about turning it into something a lot more than just a meeting place for the Italian elite.

The majority report of a parliamentary committee of inquiry later concluded that its true aim was to “intervene secretly in the political life of the country”. The official masonic leadership distanced itself from Gelli and the P2 in the mid-1970s. But by then its potential for influence was immense. Its members included the heads of the secret services, the son of the last king of Italy (who, from exile, made Gelli a count); several of the most senior figures in the civil service, the armed forces and the police; top businessmen, Silvio Berlusconi among them; politicians, and the editor of Italy’s foremost daily, Corriere della Sera.

The left has always suspected the P2 would have been the platform from which to launch a coup had the Italian communist party ever won power at a general election. That has never been proved. But Gelli certainly had warm relations with the officers who carried out the 1976 coup in Argentina and was later shown to have played a role in the aborted “Borghese” coup of 1970 in Italy: before closing his inquiry because of a statute of limitations, the investigating magistrate ruled Gelli’s involvement had been “objectively established”.

The venerable master had a part in trying to save the financial empire of the rogue banker Michele “the Shark” Sindona, who died after drinking a poisoned cup of coffee in jail. And Gelli was long suspected of involvement in the murder of Calvi, the head of Banco Ambrosiano. A mafia supergrass said that the banker, who worked closely with the Vatican, lost large sums of money entrusted to him by Gelli. Another theory was that Gelli had Calvi killed to avoid being blackmailed by him.

In 1981, police investigating the Sindona affair stumbled across a list of almost 1,000 P2 members. Keen to avoid the resulting scandal, Gelli fled to Switzerland, was arrested, escaped from prison, and fled again to South America, but gave himself up to the Swiss authorities in 1987. Eight years later, he was found guilty of obstructing the investigation into the 1980 bombing of Bologna railway station in which 85 people died (one of many deadly attacks in postwar Italy that remain a mystery to this day). But he did not go to prison.

In 1998, however, the supreme court dismissed his last appeal against another conviction, for fraud in connection with the failure of Banco Ambrosiano and, faced with the prospect of jail, Gelli once again fled the country. He was arrested in France later that year. It was during his absence that police discovered the ingots. During the war, Gelli, who was a senior fascist party official, had been in charge of transporting 60 tonnes of gold belonging to King Peter II of Yugoslavia. When it was handed back, 20 tonnes were missing. Gelli always denied a link between the two.

Villa Wanda in Arezzo, where he spent most of the rest of his life under house arrest, was named after Gelli’s wartime bride, Wanda Vannacci, who died in 1993. At the age of 85, in 2006, he married for a second time, to his Romanian carer, Gabriela Vasile, 38 years his junior. She survives him, as do three of the four children of his first marriage.

When he died, Gelli was still under investigation for having ordered the murder of Calvi. The prosecutor, however, had asked for the case to be shelved because, while it was “very plausible” that Gelli was involved, the evidence was less than conclusive. Ten years ago, when asked who was really behind the death of Calvi, Gelli told the Guardian: “It is not up to us to deliver judgments. Only God will be able to tell the truth.”