Pod Save the World - A true story of money, Mafia & the Vatican (Shadow Kingdom Episode 1)

Episode Date: March 17, 2025

Today we're excited to bring you the first episode of Shadow Kingdom: God's Banker. In the summer of 1982, the Vatican’s top money man was found dead. Roberto Calvi was at the center of a prolific money laundering scheme that put him in the crosshairs of the Sicilian mafia, a secret far-right chapter of the Freemasons, and the Catholic Church. Forty years after his death was ruled a suicide, Shadow Kingdom host Nicolo Majnoni got a tip that there was more to the story. So who killed God’s banker?Shadow Kingdom is a new series from Crooked Media and Campside Media. Each season starts with a crime, and as the layers are peeled back to find out who or what is at the center of it, a larger system at play is revealed.Subscribe to Shadow Kingdom: God’s Banker wherever you get your podcasts or join Crooked's Friends Of The Pod subscription community to hear the full season right now. Join Friends Of The Pod at crooked.com/friends or subscribe through the Shadow Kingdom Apple feed.

Hey, guys, Tommy here. Well, John's here too. Hi. There it is. I'm excited. We're excited to share with you the newest limited series, made in partnership with Campside Media that we know you guys are going to love. It's called Shadow Kingdom, God's Banker.

I mean, first of all, beat that title. We could say nothing else. Beat that title, Speilber. You should want to listen. Shadow Kingdom is a story about one of the most shocking cases of corruption and greatest mysteries in European history. This is the story of how the Vatican Bank became a money laundering machine and how God's banker, the man.

who controlled it all and knew too much, ended up hanging under a bridge in London. Wow. I remember green-led- Your Heart are a conclave. I remember we greenlit this. This was like a, they read us a log line and we greenlit the show.

Yep. And it is delivered in every way since then. It's fascinating deep dive. It's these hidden networks of power that shaped the world then and shaped the world today. There's new investigative reporting. There's lots of corruption and shady people and religious organization.

It's an awesome show. It's like a thriller. You are going to love this show. Here is the first episode of the series. If you enjoy this episode, you can binge all episodes starting on March 17th by subscribing to Friends of the Pod at crooked.com slash friends. Friends of the pod subscribers can listen to the full season of Shadow Kingdom right now. Join Friends of the pod at crooked.com slash friends or on Apple Podcasts. There's a scene that I have been obsessed with for the past several years.

It took place on a cool summer night in Austria in 1982. Italian banker Roberto Calvi sat in front of a cold fireplace. For him, it was a rare moment of stillness in what had been a full week on the run. His designer's suit was disheveled. There were sweat stains on his once crisp button-up shirt and dirt on his pants and jacket. he left his home in Rome in such a rush there wasn't much time to pack a couple of suitcases a forged passport and the precious item that hadn't left his sight since his leather briefcase calvi picked up a book of matches and struck igniting the small cavern of the brick fireplace one by one he pulled the documents from the

briefcase, dropping them carefully into the fire, page after page. Were these paper trails of illegal wire transfers, maybe blackmail materials on his rich and powerful clients, I can't be sure. But Calvi didn't burn everything. Some papers he stowed back in the case. Maybe he could use them to cut a deal and save himself, or perhaps, One of those powerful clients might protect him in order to protect their secrets. Among the papers he decided to save was a copy of a letter he'd written just a few weeks earlier.

It was written to one of his most important, most secret of clients, Pope John Paul II. Calvi had done so much work for the Vatican. He'd earned the nickname God's Banker. but now the Italian financier was in trouble. Santita, Calvys letter started. I have concluded that you are my last hope. Calvi wrote that he'd secretly moved money for the Vatican around the world and that he'd willingly taken on its, quote, mistakes and faults.

But now, he told the Pope, I am betrayed and abandoned by the Vatican. I read this letter as both a cry for help and vaguely threatening. But why did Calvi carry it with him? And did the Pope ever respond? I don't know. But I know what happened next. Five days later, Roberto Calvi would be found dead,

hanging from a rope over the Thames River in London. Bricks in his pockets. and his briefcase nowhere to be found. From crooked media and campside media, this is Shadow Kingdom, God's banker. I'm Niccolo Mainoni, and this is episode one, death of a banker. 62-year-old, Signor Calvi, was found dangling here just a few days before he was due to appear in Italian court. And I said, oh my God, what's going on?

I mean, what's the excitement? I stumbled on the story of Calvi's death while working as a corporate lawyer a couple years ago. I was having coffee with my friend Mario Platero, a well-connected former journalist. And Mario, he told me about the story he'd always wish he could pursue. There was some longing in his voice

that just drew me in. And I started researching this mysterious banker, reading everything I could find about the case. First at night, then on weekends. and then I did something relatively misguided. I quit my job to work on it full-time. I also wrangled Mario into a recording studio to talk about why this story had captured us both.

So Mario, so if we have very little time, let's go. We only had about 20 minutes, and he was on his cell with the foreign minister of an undisclosed country. It's very funny. We're in a studio, because I usually just talk to you face-to-face. and you know every story, you know everything, you know everyone. And is that correct?

Well, I wish. Thank you, though, for the advertisement. It's not that I know, first of all, I don't. He does. It's how he earned our family nickname for him, Mario the Spy. Today, Mario sits on various boards and is more banker than anything else. But during the Cold War, he was a journalist. Yes, I interviewed Reagan in the White House, in fact.

And I was in Moscow when he addressed the people and he said, Mr. Gorbachev, I pled you, tear down this wall. I was looking for stories and you said, hey, you know about God's banker, right? You know this God's banker story. And I confess, I don't know that I knew almost anything about God's banker except for that the name sounded cool and strange. And you told me, you said it involves without batting a, You said, the mafia, of course, the Vatican Bank, a covert organization, the Russians, the Pope.

Yeah, because, you know, it might have sounded a lot like a conspiracy theory. But for some reasons, you know, I happened to be at a certain moment, at a certain time, very close to this man that dealt a lot with the Vatican, that all of a sudden was found dead somehow. In June of 1982, when Roberto Calvi was on the run, burning documents, Mario was working full-time for an Italian bank in New York and moonlighting as a reporter. Calvi's bank was crashing, and Calvi was a fugitive. Big newspapers were all scrambling to figure out where Calvi was hiding.

It's at this moment that Mario got a call from one of those papers. So the editor-in-chief calls me up and says, we heard rumors that Calvi may be in New York. Everybody is looking for him. We are looking for him. We would like to have an interview with him. If you can find him, this would be a major interview. Mario held a beige receiver in his hand,

taking in the information. Around him, 20 or so bankers, all in suits and ties, buzzed around. But his head wasn't in banking right now. The moonlighting journalist side of him look over. The excitement of finding Calvi at that moment became passionate. So my attention was totally diverted to that.

And I started to call around. Mario thought, okay, I have a secondhand connection to Calvi's son, Carlo. So why don't I get Carlo's phone number in Canada and just try him? So he did. The phone started ringing. The housekeeper picked up. And she says, Calvi residents. And I say, yes, I'm looking for Mr. Carlo Calvi.

He's not here. So I said, well, let's go for the full multi, as they say. May I talk to Mr. Roberto Calvi? Oh, no, he's not here either. I'm sorry. But you're in luck, the housekeeper told Mario. The whole family, Roberto Calvi included, will be at their Bahamas home tomorrow.

So my degree of excitement and nervousness and tension at that point was at its height. But I kept my cool and I said, oh, really, I think I have the number, but I'm not sure I have it. Would you be so kind to give it to me? Oh, yes, of course. No problem. Mario was doing his best to act natural, as if this was any other check-in call. But his eyes were going wide. had this housekeeper really just offered up an itinerary of one of the biggest fugitives in the world?

She'd given Mario Calvi's address in the Bahamas, his phone number, and an invitation to call. Probably no other reporter on the planet had that. And I went to sleep with this excitement of pursuing my scoop, my first big scoop, okay? and I wake up the following morning. The morning of June 18, 1982, Mario's big day. Plane ticket to the Bahamas, ready to go.

Bags are packed. He just needs to swing by the office first. And people were a little, you know, they were talking, they were chatting, and they had this piece of paper in their hands. And I said, oh my God, what's going on? I mean, what's the excitement? His colleagues were huddled around a telex machine, a 1980s version of Twitter that printed news on this never-ending sheet of paper.

Someone had just ripped the sheet of paper from the machine. The wire said Calvi found dead in London under the Blackfriars Bridge. Suicide? Question mark. My answer was immediate. No. As the morning turned into a hot New York afternoon, Mario's office swung into gear. Telex machines resumed their humming. Young analysts chomped nervously on pencils.

But not Mario. He was replaying that headline in his head over and over. Suicide, question mark. But the kind of evidence I had was not leaning in the direction. Mario stared at the wire printout, little details jumping out at him. Like, wait. he had 12 pounds of bricks in his pockets, wads of cash, a fake passport, and Calvi had two pairs of underwear on and two watches.

Why? Add to that, what Mario knew as a banker, Calvi had lost over a billion dollars for his bank. And Calvi was rumored to have partnered with a lot of shady characters, characters who may well have wanted revenge. I think that this was a murder that was the result of events that were incredibly complicated that involved the Vatican, the mafia, the Russian Secret Service, the U.S., and Pope Voitila. So you say, oh, my God. Yeah, sure.

The Pope's, why not? Why not? It all sounds absurd, right? The Vatican, the Pope, spies in Russia and the U.S., Mario's saying they're all involved in Calvys death. But it might not be so far-fetched, Mario tells me. Remember, this is peak Cold War. So the U.S. and the Soviet Union, they're all at war in the existential fight of their lives. And strangely enough, in the 1970s,

a major front of this war was Italy. Which was once ruled by a fascist dictator and now has the largest communist party in Western Europe. The loss in man hours in Italy, because of strikes and absenteeism, is astronomical, five times out of France, for example, 50 times that of West Germany. Major plants are operating at three-quarters capacity. Italy has the lowest growth rate in Western Europe.

At the time, the communist, party in Italy was very strong. It had nearly 35% of the national vote by 1976. This was a disaster for the U.S. If Italy, a massive Western democracy, fell to communism, what was to stop others from following? It was like Vietnam, but in the heart of Europe. So the U.S. had a rather unlikely partner in this fight against communism in Italy. The Vatican. The Vatican, the Vatican hated communism because communism hated God. Most communist regimes shut down all churches, and closed churches meant, among other things,

no weekly donations to the Vatican. And so, supposedly, somewhere in this battle, the Vatican and the CIA joined forces to send secret cash to anti-communist fighters in the Soviet Union. They'd done this by hiring God's banker, Roberto Calvi. There was also the mafia involved. Sure, of course. Of course the mafia, exactly.

So to the Vatican using a bank as a money laundering operation to fight the Cold War with the US help. For different reasons. Let's add the mafia. Let's add the mafia. Sure. Okay. If you can sense a dismissive tone in my voice there, you're not wrong. I almost got mad at Mario while we were in the studio.

studio because I am an Italian. I lived in Rome until I was 10 and then I moved to the U.S., which is why I now sound the way I do. But my body and soul are very much tied to my strange country shaped like a boot. I moved back to Italy in my 20s to get an Italian law degree because I dreamt of being a prosecutor that would fight the mafia. But that ended up being very scary. So I practiced corporate law in the U.S. and the U.K. instead. Anyway, growing up in the U.S., I was always hearing Italians telling these wild stories, always bombastic, always over the top, always taking some benign event and turning it into a big conspiracy. Mario actually told me there's a word in Italian for this, diatrologia. It basically means that Italians never accept the given explanation for something.

They always suspect there's some darker truth lurking behind diatriologia. Pietro, the curtain. As an Italian abroad, I've had to fight this stereotype of the passionate, irrational Italian. And so I was immediately skeptical of Mario's theories about Calvi, the Vatican, the mafia. Let me point out that I'm on your side with this. No, but what I'm saying is that you come to me and you tell me a man was killed because he was using the Vatican bank via mafia laundered money to fight the Cold War with the backing of the CIA. And I thought this is so silly and it's the typical. Italian story, that is fake.

You're implying you didn't believe me. That's another reason to beat you up. Of course. I didn't believe you. In fact, I wanted to do a story myself on this, but then I didn't have the time and I never pursued, so I'm very glad you're doing it. So the 25-year-old Mario, who wanted to interview Calvia never did, you pass that baton to me.

Exactly, I give you the baton so that you can do a nice story about it, that now it's much more complete in a way. Yeah, well, it all sounded very fake, and I wanted to prove you wrong. And this season is that effort. Mario had piqued my curiosity. I wanted to find out who had killed Roberto Calvi. But I wasn't buying his whole Vatican CIA mafia Da Vinci Code story.

That honestly sounded a bit unhinged. Surely there was a more rational, more logical explanation. Maybe even that Roberto Calvi had very simply killed himself, just as the no-nonsense British police believed at the time of death. So find out what happened to Roberto Calvi. That's what I set out to do more than two years ago. Since then, I've traveled to the scene of the crime in London and made multiple trips to Italy. I've sat in a mafioso's living room choking on cigar smoke

and tracked down a smuggler who was the last person to see Calvi alive. I've spoken to an Italian spy, forensics experts, and members of Calvys family. I've worried about my own personal safety more than once. And my theory of the crime, which I'm going to share with you at the end of this, is completely and wildly different than I could have ever imagined at the start of this investigation. That's after the break. I started my research with something obvious, the official records of Kavis. Calvi's death. In 1982, the British police said Calvi committed suicide. But Italian

investigators said, no, don't be fooled. This is a murder. As I've mentioned, I've lived both in Italy and in England. My instinct here is to trust the British side of my brain. The Brits had no real skin in the game and so much less bias. While the Marios of this world, the Italians, the people for whom Calvi is a celebrity, I feel like they're much more likely to see a conspiracy where there isn't one. So if I'm going with the British side of my brain, why would Calvi have killed himself? First of all, Calvi's body was found hanging over the River Thames in London's business district. Suicide attempts were common there. Overworked bankers that can't take it anymore. It's really sad, but it isn't shocking.

Also, Calvi was facing some grim prospects in the coming days, with the international media following his every move. 62-year-old, Signor, Celvey, was found dangling here just a few days before he was due to appear in Italian court. Calvi had recently been convicted of illegally sneaking millions of dollars outside Italy, and he was very afraid of going to jail. I also found out that Calvi had actually... attempted suicide when he was facing similar legal issues just a year before.

The British coroner's jury ruled that he had committed suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed. And probably most damning to Mario's murder thesis was that when British police examined Calvi's body, there were no signs of bruises, no signs of violence. All the evidence pointed towards suicide. Professor Simpson, who carried out a post-mortem examination on Signor Calvay said there was no suggestion. in a foul play, no fraccar, no struggle. Had there been, I would have expected to have found some marks of resistance. There were none.

In other words, no one hit Calvi over the head and then deceptively propped him under a bridge. He didn't fight anyone. There were also no signs of chemical injections or stuff that might have knocked him out more peacefully. So there you have it. Calvi wasn't drugged. He didn't fight anyone. He was simply desperate, as he'd been in the past when he tried to kill him. and he ended his life in a place where many other bankers do.

And so ends the tale of God's banker. A very British ending, simple, logical, a bit dark, but without any fuss. Except not so fast. Because although I would like the British part of my brain to completely take over, the Italian side poked me in the middle of the night. It poked me and invited me to listen to the Italians. Why didn't they like the British suicide theory? Well, Calvi was hanging in a place that was really hard to reach

that a team of young British cops could barely get to. And Calvi, he was a middle-aged banker with vertigo. How could he have filled his pockets with bricks and climbed up to hang himself? Italian investigators would also note that Calvi's body was both soaked and then dry in ways that couldn't really be explained. And the dirt all over his pants wasn't from the area around the bridge at all. It was from somewhere totally different. It was almost like Calbi had levitated to his final hanging place.

Italians would also point out that Calvi had a boatload of medications at his disposal, which leads me to think that he could have overdosed and died peacefully in his sleep. No slippery bridge necessary. Oh, and finally, Calvi was a bit of bed. these precious briefcase, the one with the secrets from half the world, it was gone. So there it is. A British voice assuring me it was suicide and then Mario's Italian accent urging me to see this as a gruesome murder. But it's kind of terrifying to entertain Mario's challenge. Because if I believe that it was murder, then I open Pandora's box. And out of that box would come conspiracy theories

that tied the mafia to the pope, to secret fascist societies bend on overthrowing the state and hovering over all of this, the swinging body of Roberto Calvi. If I truly entertain Mario's challenge, I would have to admit that there's something to the etrologia, that there's something behind the curtain,

something that those in power want to stay hidden. From the start, I didn't want to be the wild-eyed Italian conspiracist. I wanted to be the mild-mannered English lawyer. But the deeper I went, the less the suicide theory made sense. The facts didn't quite add up, and I needed to know what really happened. To follow the question from the Italian side of my brain, Who killed God's banker? Coming up on this season of Shadow Kingdom.

The system is completely rotten, completely corrupt, completely legitimate. but therefore it's okay to blow up this entire building. They've got every conspiracy. They're the masterminds. They're pulling the strings. Top Vatican sources have now begun cautiously to discuss the plot to kill the Pope. This person is a level of world.

He tells me, you need to live with Cali. Right now. He is wanted in Italy for political espionage and possession of state secrets. I say, look, we have this guy moving. We know that while on the move, he's in contact with this character, a fixer. banking experts began to unravel the story of a big Italian bank scandal that reads like good fiction.

All he would talk about was death. It was unbelievable. He basically dropped to the floor. He was screaming and crying, saying, Clara, we can't find him. And I was a bit shaken and said, who can't you find? And he said, Roberto, we don't know where he is. Shadow Kingdom is a production of crooked media and campside media.

It's hosted and reported by me, Nicola Minoni, with additional reporting by Simon Azeke and Joe Hawthorne. The show is written by Joe Hawthorne, Ashley Ann Crigbaum and me. Joe Hawthorne is our lead producer, and Ashley Ann Crigbaum is our managing producer. Tracy Samuelson is our story editor. Sound design, mix, and mastering by Mark McAdam. Our theme song and original score are composed by me and Mark McAdam. Our studio engineer is Iwan Lai Tremuwen. voice acting by Bonnie Biagini, Andrea Bianchi, Ferranti Cosma,

Luca de Genaro, Michael Eodori, and Mustafa Zialan. Field recording by Justin Treger, Jonathan Zenti, Pete Shev, Jonathan Gruber, and Joanna Broder. Fact-checking by Zoe Sullivan. Our executive producers are me, Nicola Meinoni, along with Sarah Geismer, Katie Long, and Alison Falsetta from Crooked Media. Josh Dean, Adam Hoff, Matt Scher, and Vanessa Gregoriadis

are the executive producers at Campside Media. One last thing before we go. You can also listen to Shadow Kingdom in Italian. Look up El Banquire di Dio. The show is the same in one way, but it's full of original reporting in Italian with unabridged versions of interviews with Italian guests.

We're really excited to tell the story in its native tongue. So please go check out El Banquere di Dio wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for checking out, Shadow Kingdom, God's banker. If you love the show as much as we do, you can listen to full episodes

on the Shadow Kingdom feed starting today, March 17th, or binge all episodes by subscribing to Friends of the Pod at cricket.com slash friends.