Mr. Gelli was convicted of bank fraud and obstruction of justice. He mysteriously escaped from prison or house arrest twice and served the remainder of his term in his villa, a 30-room redoubt near a 15th-century church in the Tuscan hills.

There he was found to have a gold thumb when nearly $2 million in bullion was discovered in 1998 in the terrace garden, hidden in terra cotta flower pots beneath begonias and geraniums.

In “God’s Banker,” his 1983 biography of Mr. Calvi, Rupert Cornwell wrote, “Italy, it must be recorded with honesty, albeit bemusement, has produced few more remarkable individuals this century than Licio Gelli.”

Mr. Gelli (pronounced jelly) was born on April 21, 1919, in Pistoia, north of Florence, in Tuscany. He married the former Wanda Vannaci. She died in 1993, and their three children, Raffaello, Maria Rosa and Maurizio, survive him, as does his second wife, the former Gabriella Vasile. (Another daughter died in an automobile accident.)

Mr. Gelli joined Benito Mussolini’s fascist Blackshirts in fighting for Generalissimo Francisco Franco in Spain’s Civil War in the 1930s. He served as an Italian liaison to Nazi Germany during World War II, then switched sides to support Communist partisans in his native Pistoia Province.

After the war, he fled to Argentina, where he became a confidant of the dictator Juan Perón. Returning to Italy, he became successful as a financier and self-made industrialist manufacturing mattresses.

Mr. Gelli emerged into the public eye in 1981 as Italian investigators were focusing on Mr. Calvi, who had presided over the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano, Italy’s largest private bank, and on Michele Sindona, another banker who had been accused in the failure of the Franklin National Bank in the United States. (Mr. Sindona was later convicted of murder and was himself murdered, by poisoning, in prison.)