He was also charged with ordering the murder of Roberto Calvi – nicknamed il banchiere di Dio ("the banker of God") – of the Banco Ambrosiano in 1982, but was acquitted in 2007 due to "insufficient evidence" in a surprise verdict.

Born and raised in Palermo, the capital of Sicily, he was inducted into the Porta Nuova Mafia family at the age of 23 after carrying out a murder to avenge his father.

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.

During the war, Giuseppe Calò personally took part in the murder of his former best friend Tommaso Buscetta's sons in September 1982,[3] as well as the killings of Palermo bosses Rosario Riccobono and Salvatore Scaglione on November 30, 1982.

After several years as a fugitive, Calò was arrested on 30 March 1985, in a villa at Poggio San Lorenzo, in the province of Rieti, together with Antonio Rotolo, one of the Mafia's heroin movers.

[8] 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.

[9] 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.

In July 2003, the prosecution concluded that the Mafia acted not only in its own interests, but also to ensure that Calvi could not blackmail "politico-institutional figures and [representatives] of freemasonry, the P2 lodge, and the Institute for the Works of Religion with whom he had invested substantial sums of money, some of it from Cosa Nostra and Italian public corporations".

[11][12] In March 2007, prosecutor Luca Tescaroli requested life sentences for the already convicted Pippo Calò, Flavio Carboni, Ernesto Diotallevi and Calvi's bodyguard Silvano Vittor.

[21] In 1997, in the trial for the Capaci massacre in which the judge Giovanni Falcone, his wife Francesca Morvillo and their escort of Antonio Montinaro, Vito Schifani and Rocco Di Cillo, lost their lives, Calò was sentenced to life imprisonment together with the bosses Bernardo Provenzano, Salvatore Riina, Pietro Aglieri, Bernardo Brusca, Raffaele Ganci, Nenè Geraci, Benedetto Spera, Nitto Santapaola, Salvatore Montalto, Giuseppe Graviano and Matteo Motisi.

[31] In September 2001, in the course of the trial of the Via D'Amelio bombing that killed judge Paolo Borsellino and his escort, Pippo Calò declared he dissociated from Cosa Nostra.