The Underworld Podcast - The Death of "God's Banker", the Vatican, a Pope's Murder, Mafia Plots and a Secret Masonic Coup

Episode Date: July 28, 2022

When Roberto Calvi's body was found swinging from a London bridge in 1982 it sent shockwaves through the religious, financial and criminal worlds. But who killed him? And how are the Vatican, Italy's powerful Mafia, a secret society called P2 and a Pope's death all linked in this wild, barely believable web of deceit and dollars? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Roberto Calvi is on the run. It's June 10, 1982, a year after Calvys' bombshell trial for banking fraud. One of exposed not only his dirty dealings but that of a secretive Masonic sect named Propaganda Duay or P2. then Calvia tried to kill himself, but he failed. A year later, all kinds of revelations are tumbling out about P2, about its leader, a notorious fascist once powers with Herman Guring,

its involvement with violent mobsters, links to Italy's military, its politicians, and the Vatican City, to whom Calvia has formed such a close bond, and with whose finances that of his own banker Ambrosiano is so into 12, that people simply referred to him as the Bantieri de Die, God's banker. Calvys' conviction added him a $20 million fine and a four-year suspended prison term. An appeal looms. But God's banker is convinced he's being chased by a bevy of devils.

He bumps up security, hiring goons and kicking his car out with bulletproof windows. He ships his family out of the country. And on that June 10, in 1982, which is a Thursday, he disappears from his Rome apartment, telling nobody's destination, save for a shady clique of businessman and a feared human trafficker who will act as his bodyguard. First, Calvi drives to Austria, then Switzerland. Then, using a fake passport, the banker flies to London, where his associates put him up in the crummy apartment block in the city's fashionable Chelsea district.

There, in a drab, colourless room, Calvi spends almost a week, with Little Bit his bodyguard's phone number and a taché case he never lets out of his sight. Rumour has it, that the case is crammed full of documents and names of P2 members, and the Vatican prelates who helped Calvi rip off his bank to the tune of over a billion dollars. It's his insurance. But the policy's about to be torn up. On June 17, around 11.30pm, Calvys shaves off his iconic bushy moustache and heads out into London night. A few hours later, his lifeless body is discovered swinging from a scaffold beneath the city's Blackfriars' bidge, four miles east.

Calvie's pockets are filled with chunks of bricks and he's carrying over 10,000 bucks in foreign change. Around the same time, Calvys' newfound clique flee the UK. That evening, a private plane takes off from London to Geneva, carrying an attach-aid case. At first, London cops rule Calvies' death as suicide. But that won't last long. The killing of God's banker will send shockwaves through the worlds of high finance, organised crime and religion, taking in not only the demise of the banker and brinkering, Rosiano and the unmasking of P2, but also the deaths of a prime minister and a pope, the rise of

Italy's mafia, terror strikes, right-wing despots, and a Vatican archbishop, they call the guerrilla. Welcome to the underworld podcast. Hello everyone and welcome to the show where we tread the fine, tightrope line between respected journalism and Wackadoo subredits. I'm your host Sean Williams. I'm in Berlin. I'm joined by fellow investigative reporter Danny Gold in New York City. We write about crime all over the world and that's why you're listening to this.

We've got bonus shows coming up on porn, biker gangs, the Zetas and Fake Sports League. And hopefully a bit of a facelift pretty soon, so tons going on as usual. Yeah, as always, patreon.com slash the Underworld Podcast to support us and bonus stuff and all that. And you can always email us at the Underworld Podcast at gmail.com. you know, with nice constructive criticism or just suggestions for episodes and everything like that. Yeah, and speaking of which, I want to do a quick correction. In my last episode about Putin, his neo-Nazi spy, Rona Zontag, I think I mentioned that Putin wound up mayor of St. Petersburg, not the saint of Mayor Petersburg, which is not true. He worked in a bunch of positions in the city office as part of his rise to power, but he was never actually mayor.

so I think a couple of people spotted that. So, cheers to you guys. I love, love, love, love being corrected. I could actually enjoy our last show without me in it. It was really great. Yeah, Jake Hanrahan from Popular Front filled in. You were definitely missed, but, you know, you know how it is. Also, please subscribe, like, right?

Five-star review, all that sort of stuff to help us out. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, let's get it going. Yeah, I mean, so. This episode is about Roberto Calvi, who's God's Banker and Crime and the Vatican. And if you watch The Godfather Part 3, which I'm guessing just about everyone listening to this show has, you're going to recognize a lot of this as the plot of that movie. Yeah, I think at least the first and the second one multiple times.

I don't think everyone's really dived into the third one, right? Wait, what was the one that got? Yeah, what was the one that got terrible reviews? I think the third is one and out, right? It's not, it's not that. The third was the one that got really bad reviews, the third, right? Yeah. Yeah, it kind of sucked.

Except for the ending, I went back through it and I don't know, Al Pacino is just a god. But yeah, this whole thing actually starts way back before that show, that movie or any of this. So it's back in 1929. And that's when the Vatican City itself, it's actually turned into an independent state by, yeah, you guessed it. Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini. So in turn for the Pope's faulty and his land, Mussolini, Mussolini throws a bunch of money at the Catholic Church and he gives it this tiny,

itty-bitty little city stay to call its own right in the middle of Rome on something called the Vatican Hill. So before we kick off some Vatican facts, of course, this place is the smallest country on earth. It's 0.2 square miles total or about the same size as Manhattan's Battery Park. That means that running at his record time,

I'm sorry for butchering these kind of like journalistic metaphors, but I love them. Usain Bolt could run the entire length of it in around a minute and a half. It also has the most crimes per capita thanks to its tourism and an ATM that works in Latin. I mean, all right, fine. It's only officially home to 825 people, all of them male, surprisingly. And because there's no hospital and more importantly no place to deliver a baby,

you cannot be born a citizen of the Vatican City. You've got to work for something called the Holy See, which is what it goes by at the UN. The Holy See is the name for the diocese of the big man, the Pope. But it's also kind of a company that owns the Vatican, of which the Pope is CEO. Oh, and he's the King too, which makes the Vatican one of only six remaining absolute monarchy's remaining on earth. Well, actually, he's the elected Pope, the king and the CEO rolled into one, all of which means that technically the Vatican City is the world's only elected non-hereditary absolute monarchy,

all and none of which makes sense all at the same time. Thank you very much, Wikipedia Williams over here. Thank you. Yeah, I really enjoyed that part. I mean, you should be confused. I am too. And yes, before we dive into this whole story about crime and murder and all that kind of crazy stuff, Yes, there are tunnels under the Vatican

leading that to the Castel, San Angelo in Rome, where at least a couple of popes have fled since the 1,200s. It's a tough gig going around in that hat. And then you have the Swiss Guard, highly trained marksmen, dressed like jesters. I mean, you really got to wonder how Europeans allow themselves to laugh at stuff going on in America.

Like, you really don't need Tim 4-Hack conspiracies when all this stuff is 100% kosher. Anyway, in 1942, a few years after it's christened, I guess, or baptized, the Vatican starts something called the Institute of Religious Works or IOR in Italian. This financial organization squirreled away at the top of one of the state's ancient towers. But by around 1970, despite literally dripping in gold and getting donations for over a billion people, yeah, it's the Catholic Church, guys. the Vatican is turning over a loss of up to 30 mil a year. And it's looking to turn some of its assets that cash Daddy Mussolini gave it, for example, into liquid assets that it can trade and make cash on. What?

Like, how were they losing money? This is before the lawsuits, or is that part of it? Which, which ones? You know, the not-so-pleasing ones. Yeah, the ones that we all associate. This is before that. understand how the Catholic Church can be losing money. I really don't get it. I don't know. They're just not very good at financial stuff. And post-war, right? So at this point, no country is

better at trading in the US. And just as luck may have it, on Saturday, November the 28th in Manila, a 35-year-old Bolivian artist named Benjamin Mendoza, he lunges at 73-year-old Pope Paul the 6th with a knife. Now, I say luck, because one, then Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos is able to get between the assailant and the Pope and, according to a New York Times report, quote, struck Mendoza with a karate chop. That is, is there video with this? Like, I did not know. It is not.

And you better fucking know that I look for it, yeah. Yeah, I want to see that more than anything in the entire world. I know, I know. Marcos chopping a guy on the shot. Just karate? It's so cool. Did he yell out karate chop before he did it? It was like, karate chop?

I really hope. Yeah, me too. And that's not actually the only incredible thing about this. Well, maybe it is. Anyway, among the entourage you saved the Pope's life is this hulking, golf-loving American archbishop named Paul Marcinkas. And Marsinkas is this tarring guy from Cicero, Illinois. That's a place just outside Chicago.

He's a straight talker, the son of Lithuania immigrants, and he's imbued with that enthusiastic post-war American capitalist zeal. I think Cicero is also like a big mafia town and labor union town and all that. Like it's, I believe the reputation is like a tough place. Yeah, it's like an old factory place, right? So I've heard a couple of bits and pieces. And as we're going to learn, he's a boy of his town. I mean, fellow bishops call him the gorilla.

One of his favorite phrases is, and this is great, quote, you can't run the church on Hail Mary's. Which, I mean, I guess God's got something that's about all this, but yeah, I don't know. Marsinkas quickly wins the Pope's trust, and he becomes one of his closest confidence. By 1971, that's just a year after he's saved his life, Paul the 6th appoints Marcyndas as head of the IOR, which, by the way, most people just called a Vatican bank, and he tells him to go out and invest the church's money on the international markets.

So, Marsinkas installs IBM machines and modern bookkeeping. He introduces this kind of whole modern world to the Vatican Bank. But despite his go-getting, do-it-your-your-self attitude, Marsinkas turns for help actually to an Italian banker called Miquely Sintona, who's nicknamed The Shark, who, to be honest, could be a whole episode just by himself. It's pretty crazy. He writes journalist David Yallop in his book, in God's name, quote, Sindona, who had manoeuvred his way to becoming an owner of one of the biggest Italian merchant

banks, apparently convinced the financially untutored Marcinkas. It was high time the Vatican began to enjoy the fruits of its huge assets. You know, no shock there. But that turns out not to be such a great idea. Sindona is a crook and a pretty big one at that. He's connected to mafia bosses and he's a member of this secret Masonic society called Propaganda Dewe or P2, which is an anti-communist far right quote, state within a state

with tentacles in the highest rooms of Italian power. Is that propaganda, P2 is propaganda duo, yeah? Is that how you say it? Dewe, my Italian's a bit out. Yeah. I remember wanting to do an episode on that when I first learned about it a while back. But do you get it, like, is this a big part of it right here?

It is, yeah. And they're linked to everything. I mean, it's pretty insane. I've never really heard of another organization like this. And I wonder, people are always full of conspiracies about Italian stuff because, I mean, P2's chief is this guy called Littio Jelly, or Geli, I think it's Jelly, I'm really sorry if your name's not Geli. He's a fascist, and he's once pen pals with Nazi leader Herman Gering, and he allegedly

has ties to right-wing dictators all over Latin America, including Argentina's Juan Perron, which is, you know, not ideal either then or in hindsight. In 1972, Sindona buys Long Island's Franklin National Bank, but a series of frauds brings it down, and in 1974, Sindona's financial empire collapses, and it costs Marcinkas and the Vatican Bank millions. It's a huge scandal, it's a massive scandal, and it's hugely embarrassing for the Catholic Church,

but, you know, Marsinkas is in with a big boy, so he stays on. Now, bear in mind that this entire era is absolutely insane for Italy. It's the so-called years of lead, filled with hard left and hard-right terror campaigns, targeted killing, political turmoil, high unemployment and, of course, crime. And amid all this chaos, organized criminal outfits, they reign supreme. They traffic huge quantities of drugs. They take over ports and construction projects.

I think we got into this with our episode on the Maxi trial in Sicily, but the island itself is probably the worst hit of anywhere in the country and in these entire bland concrete blocks shooting up on the edge of its biggest city, Palermo, which locals call it the city's quote sack. And I quote again, the word sack was not randomly chosen to describe that period, says Maurizio Carter, Professor of Urban Planning at Palermo University. Like plundering barbarians,

Mafiosi devastated the city with cement, disfiguring its parks, landscape, and natural beauty. It's a good quote, especially from an architect. Not many of them get in this show. So this is all insane, right? Italy is in the thrall of mobsters, secret fascist societies, banking fraudsters,

and people being killed, left, right and center, and even the Vatican's getting ripped off. The 70s in Europe were just, completely insane, huh? Yeah, I don't know why we seem to think that the world's somehow normal now. I mean, this is only a few years ago. And Paul Marsinkas, right, the gorilla, the guy from Cicero, he just gets right back on the horse after all this thing to mix metaphors,

or I don't know, perhaps gorillas can ride horses, I don't know. And so to do so, he reaches out to a guy called Roberto Calvi. Now, born to a wealthy Milan family in 1920, Calvi joins the Banco Ambrosiana, which is a small homespun outfit just after the Second World War. By the 1970s, when Calvi has risen to become its chief, the bank has followed a similar path to the Vatican Bank. So it's a modern firm, it's got branches all over the world, and it's grown at an alarming rate that few outside the bank can really fathom, or inside. Calvi himself is described as incredibly cold with quote Eyes of Ice. He's also a member of P2 because of course he is

and he's a close associate of some of Italy's biggest gangsters at the time. Obviously, therefore, Marcinkas loves him and he designates Calvi and the Banko Ambrosiano to kind of internationalize the Vatican's assets. And this is how he does it. Calvary sets up a firm called Banko Ambrosiano Holdings in Luxembourg standard shifty operation, five out of ten on the fraud scale.

This allows him to move money from the Vatican outside Italy without actually touching Italian financial law. Then Calvi established his saying called the Banco Ortono in Switzerland. Secrecy secured again, nothing spectacular, another five out of ten on the banking shithousery scale. And then he found Bankroeniano overseas limited in the Bahamas. All right, cool.

seven out of ten move, great beaches, holiday potential for work trips. I mean, it's not the Cayman Islands, slightly off the being track, but all the corrupt officials and tax loopholes that anyone could ever want. Most curious how these people figure all this out. Like, it seems incredibly complex, but is it just moving money around, you know, back and forth until people lose sight of it? Yeah, you just describing why we're not rich? Or is this?

I think, yeah, I mean, these guys are just, I, I, I don't. no, they're shit, but it's pretty intelligent stuff. So at this point, Calvi throws a curveball and he sets up something called the Banco Commercial in Nicaragua and itself is under the violent yoke of a CIA back right wing contra rebel group. A. out of 10, shielding yourself under fascists in the civil war. Yeah, that's a different move. And then Calvia goes to Peru, and he found something called the Banco Andino. A. A. out of 10 move again. Again, good throwing law enforcement off the scent, more corrupt South American officials, more cold warring, more insurgencies. And then he opens like a dozen shell corporations in politically tumultuous Panama.

That's about to be taken over and run by drug kingpin Manuel Noriega. It's popped up in a ton of our shows, which we should probably just do a whole episode about him. These function pretty much just as mailboxes. So they keep paper trails away from the actual cash. Marcinkas, by the way, is a director at the bank's Nassau branch. Very rare for an archbishop plus quote unquote working in the Bahamas. Very nice, nine out of ten. Calvi, as a final little sort of cherry on top, is working on a multi-million dollar building project in Buenos Aires.

Invest in real estate. Like, that is, I mean, whatever the Instagram thing is, that is the ultimate, like, that's the ultimate lesson. So to put all this stuff simply, Calvi is lending Ambrosiano cash to its own Central and South American subsidiaries. And Marcinkas is giving Calvi these funny things called Letters of Comfort from the Vatican Bank. And that's a letter basically saying that in vague wording, the Vatican has interested in these companies and it's aware what Ambrosiano is doing with the funds. If this sounds a bit like the tail wagging a dog, it totally is. and Ambrosiano under Calvi, with the consent of Marsinkas to use Vatican Bank funds, is creating a black hole right now around $1.4 billion deep.

That is a lot of money. Calvi, by moving all this money around and buying shares and various subsidiaries, is putting himself in control of the entire thing. Where is Territaph? A minor. Don't miss the return of Marvel television's daredevil born again. So what's next? I'll be liberated.

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Bloomberg follows the money. it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. On March 16, 1978, the years of lead take another sharp turn for the batshit, when far-left terrorists kill five policemen in Rome, kidnapped Italian Prime Minister Aldo Morrow, and 55 days later, murder him, leaving him in the trunk of a Reno in the city center. Despite it being the work of a group called the Red Brigades, obviously left, many believe P2 is also behind it.

So yeah, I think our friend of the show, Alexander Reed Ross, is doing a big podcast on the years of lead. He actually had me guessed on one of them about the mafia involvement in it. But was P2 a known thing at this time? Like you're saying, they believe they were behind it, or is that, you know, 10 years down the road, people believe that P2 was behind it? So this is interesting. I couldn't quite figure it out.

So like, it seems that people started figuring out that P2 existed shortly after this. As we're going to find out, Calvi plays a key role in the whole unearthing of the whole thing. But people are definitely talking about it as something in the shadows at this point. But whether they know that it's involved in some of these high-profile attacks or kidnappings or things at the time, I'm not entirely sure. I'd welcome anyone to email us, actually, and tell us a little more about this stuff. Maybe people who can actually read Italian

and can read the local stuff. But it's super crazy. Did you come up with the nickname P2, or did people actually call it that? People called it that. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know.

Maybe they didn't. But P2 works, right? That will do for now. So, on August 6, 1978, Pope Paul the 6th, he dies of a heart attack, and he's replaced by Pope John Paul I, born Albino Luciani. So just to get that straight, that's the guy who Mar Sincers saved from a stabbing in Manila. He's dead.

There's a new guy in office, the white smoke coming out of the chimney and the Vatican or whatever they do when they do that stuff. Now, John Paul I first is a pretty cheerful guy, and folks nicknamed him, El Papa del Soriso, or the Soros. smiling Pope, which is, no, it's pretty nice. But underneath the grin, John Paul is a committed reformer. He wants to lead a charge against opulence, which is like the biggest flex ever for the actual fucking Pope, and he's begun digging into the Vatican Bank's financial affairs,

McKellie Sindona, who by this point is on trial for ordering a hit and is faking his own suicide, Paul Marc Sinkas, and of course Roberto Calvi and his own growing empire, with the banker Ambrosiano, all of which is about as cloudy as a week old bottle of communion wine. That's a lot of people. Is this making sense? I mean, sort of. You know, I think we're all along for the ride, though, you know? I'm sure it'll make sense to the end.

I hope so. Yeah, it does. Yeah, professional storytelling and all that. Here, so John Paul I, last all of 33 days. Here is a Guardian article from September 30, 1978. Quote, When he did not appear yesterday morning in his private chapel for Mass, one of his secretaries, Father McGee, as an Irishman,

if you could ever figure that out, went to the Pope's bedroom door and knocked. There was no answer. Upon entering, he found the Pope lying in his bed with a book open beside him and the reading light on. Yeah, I mean, that's not very clear. He's dead. So we've got a dead Italian prime minister, a dead pope and a corrupt Vatican at this point.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that there are going to be some conspiracy theories about this situation. That limb, it's a good limb. It's a fat limb. You should cling on to it because we're going to come back to it in a bit. Yeah. So the mafia. Right. So the mafia guys, that's why you're here. The mafia running right, left. right and center. And left and right terrorists are popping off all over the place, right? Italy is going crazy. And Italians themselves, they even coin a word around this time, which is dietrologia. I tried to say that in like some really hackney, the Italian accent.

And that is a belief that hidden realities lie below the surface of the accepted version of events. Kind of national conspiratorialism, Glenn Maldianism, if you want. and when you can consider that P2 is yet to be kind of publicly unearthed, it kind of checks out, right? It makes sense that people would think this. Now, Jelly, the leader of P2, propaganda Dewey, the secret society, he even gets Roberto Calvi to buy 40% of Italy's biggest newspaper, Coriere de la Cera, and he shifts its editorial to the right.

So he's this kind of like Murdoch figure. in Italy at the time, and British intelligence officials start monitoring Roberto Calvi and Ambrosiano, believing that they're funneling money and arms to the Argentine fascists in the war over the Falkland Islands, which is, you know, fascists and Falklands pot, kettle. Anyway, there is tons of stuff about the Catholic Church and its silence on the mafia and fascism in the fight against so-called godless communist during the Cold War, And I'm not going to get into all that too much in this episode because, yeah, I mean, it's dense, obviously, and it steps pretty firmly into Wackadoo territory. But it's fair to say that the church keeps them on a lot of crime of right-wing corruption in these times.

And by this point, 1978, P2 has an entire blueprint for the overthrow and rule of Italy. God, this sounds so conspiracy theory podcast shit. This totally checks out. including routing its Communist Party and trade unions and installing fascists in office using the mafia as muscle and financial might to do so. And incidentally, one of P2's members is a youngish, I mean, I don't know, he's like 150 now, Sylvio Berlusconi.

In 1980, the years of lead reached their lowest point when a bomb goes off at Bologna's railway station and kills 85 people. the whole world rules. This is a huge terror attack. A year later, P2 is exposed just as Calvi's empire implodes. So this is how it goes down. First, the Vatican finds out about Calvi's shady dealings on the Milan Stock Exchange. Part of these deals is that Calvi has been moving cash out of Italy illegally by buying shares in companies and foreign banks. So Calvi is arrested and thrown in jail. and there he attempts to take his own life by slashing his wrists and taking an OD of barbiturates, but he fails. A court sentenced him to a large fine, that $20 million and four years in prison, but it releases him pending an appeal. Then, comps find a document listing business deals between Jelly and Calvi, and this is dangerous information, and Jelly tries to call Calvies home on several occasions.

who is jelly again? That's Lissio Jelly. He's like the P2 leader, this kind of crypto-fascist, crazy backroom puppet master guy. So Calvi gets really suspicious.

I mean, he would do. He installs alarms. He gets barriers. He hires bodyguards. He fits out a bulletproof car and he books bogus plane journeys wherever he travels

to throw would-be P-2 killers off his trail. And this, by the way, cost him a million bucks a year in like 1981. That's a lot of money. But it's not enough. By the spring of 1982, as Calvys' appeal looms, he sends his family out of the country, admitting that he was making his illegal stock deals for the benefit of the Vatican itself. Remember, that's with our American friend Marsinkas. At the same time, the whole in the Bank of Ambrosiano's accounts is just getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

All of Calvi's kind of South American shithousery is kind of coming back to eat the bank. There's no money in the coffers and it's just like turning into a black hole of finance. But then there's suddenly a chance for Roberto Calvi to escape all of this. A New York-based banker named Francisco Patsienza offered to buy 1.2 billion shares, $1.2 billion of shares, sorry, in Banko and Brosiano plugging the hole in its finances. Why is he just really bad at his job?

Like, why would you do that? Okay. So, this is where it is weird. I am, I mean, the whole fucking thing is weird. Like, Passienza, he like speaks to this PBS documentary team, which is, there's this, like, old, grainy footage. of him doing an interview in this sort of like overly ornate English.

He's like supposedly got ties to the mafia and people who do not want this whole thing to fall on its ass because they have various interests, either in P2 or in dictatorships in South America or in the financial security of the Vatican City. I mean, like, why, like, seriously, why do people make up conspiracy theories about the VAC? And this stuff is more than enough. But I don't think I can stand it up, which is why I just told you in the podcast, as I would have done in the podcast in the first place. But either way, this guy has put up a ton of money and he says he's going to plug this hole in the Ambrosiano's finances. He introduced Calvi to a Sardinian real estate developer called Flavio Carboni,

who Calvi meets on holiday in Sardinia itself. Then, while they're there, Carboni introduces Calvi to a Swiss businessman named Hans Kunst and a suspected human trafficker named Silvano Vitor, who is going to become Calvi's bodyguard, remember him from the start of the show. So now we're back to the introduction, right? on Thursday, June 10th, Calvi disappears from his Rome apartment,

and he doesn't tell anyone where he's going. He drives first to Trieste, which is the city on the northeastern Adriatic coast, and he drives to Austria, and then he goes to Switzerland. And it's all with a fake passport, and it's all with Silvani Vittor. That's the suspecting to human trafficker who's kind of acting as his bodyguard on the say-so of these shady real estate developers and Swiss businessmen. I hope you're following this, guys. On the Friday, he calls the bank, that's Calvi,

and tells them that despite he's not being able to tell them where he is, they should not worry and he will be back soon. That's totally reassuring. When they stop on the Friday night in a place called Brigentz in Austria, Calvi heads for a midnight meeting with Carboni and Hans Kuntz. Whatever they tell him, he ditches his plans to travel to Zurich, which he originally has, and he gets Vitor instead to drive into the nearest airport,

which is Innsbruck, lovely place, really recommend it, where a private jet takes him to London. Calvi is reportedly cheerful at this point, but less so when Hans Kuntz, that's a Swiss businessman, books him a week-long stay, not a claridges, and that's the five-star Mayfair Hotel is used to, but in room 881 of something called the Chelsea Cloisters, which is a tumble-down block,

partly used as a student hostel, which I looked up and I actually still use it, and it looks like a shithole still. Anyway, on June 15th, that's just a couple days before Calvi's death, Flavio Carboney arrives in London. This guy is a multi-millionaire, right? But he chooses to stay in a run-down apartment block outside Heathrow Airport as the guest of a British man named William Morris,

who, it's alleged, is a freemason. It's not alleged, he is a freemason. That night, Calvi calls his daughter, She's staying at the time in a Zurich hotel She was supposed to wait for him The rest of the family is already in Washington, D.C., by the way. Calvi tells her to get a flight to the States the following day and says he'll call her again.

He never does. Later on, Calvie's daughter is approached by a woman calling herself Mrs. Kunst, who hands her 50,000 Swiss francs with no explanation, adding that her husband, Hans, will be meeting Calvi in London the next day. Now, if this is all confusing, I guess it's supposed to be, because it's pretty weird. On the morning of June 16th, Calvi and Carboney, the real estate guy, they meet in Hyde Park in central London.

Calvi complains about the standard of his hotel, of course, and Carboney asks him to come to the Hilton across town in London. Instead, he stays at the Chelsea Closters. He doesn't want to go to the Hildon. Then the bank and Broseaano board meets for an emergency meeting. meeting in Milan, where they're told about Calvys disappearance and the missing billion and a half dollars. They decide, shock horror, to fire Calvi, who is alleged is acting erratically in London. Later that day, Calvi's personal secretary, Gratsella Carrocher, jumps to her death, having written a letter attacking him. By the way, that has now all but been proven not to

have been a suicide. I mean, none of this is a shock. Then, late on June 17, Calvi shaves off his iconic tash, he heads out into London night, and just hours later, he's found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge. And that location, by the way, is not insignificant. P2 members reportedly call themselves the Black Friars, the Fraternieri, and they wear black robes to their secret meetings. Here's a PBS documentary host speaking, quote, To believe that he committed suicide, we must accept that he travelled over four miles to Blackfriars Bridge,

and once there found some scaffolding, which he could not see from the road. We must accept, too, that he happened to find several stray bricks, which he then put into his pants and his pockets. I mean, we've all done that. We have to believe that somehow, past midnight, he found some convenient rope. And all this time, back in his room, he had enough sleeping pills to kill himself easily, and painlessly, but perhaps that wouldn't have been so dramatic. Adds one journalist, quote, when Calvi died, I think several bottles of champagne were drunk all over Italy.

Now, before Calvi's body in London has even been identified, Vitor, his people smuggler come bodyguard, he flees London. And that evening, a private plane leaves London for Geneva. Calvi carries a tachet case with him everywhere. It's found neither at the cloisters nor on his body. It's believed to contain documents showing his connections with P2, bankers and politicians, and of course, prelates of the Vatican. Journalists learn that the private plane is carrying that case.

Carboni, the real estate guy who's brokered this entire mad trip across Europe, he leaves William Morris's apartment near Heathrow, but instead of going to Heathrow Airport, he drives across the city to Gatwick where he boards a flight to Edinburgh, then he gets a connecting plane to Austria where he rejoins Vitor, the bodyguard. I mean, I don't even know... Like, this is all insane, dude.

Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, nothing... It's kind of like hard to put into a story because nothing makes sense, but I think that's the whole point that everything is so muddled up that it throws everyone off the scent. To such an extent that the cops

just basically give up on the spot. Anyway, Calvys' death causes pandemonium at the banker Ambrosiano. Branches are shut, officials fired, writes the New York Times, quote, The financial panic caused by news of Mr. Calvys' death and the Bank of Italy's investigation provoke the collapse of his financial empire. Shares of companies whose group had interest in fell 30 and 40% on the Milan Stock Exchange. After depositors rushed to withdraw their funds, banker Ambrosiano itself had to be bailed out by a

consortium of six major Italian banks hurriedly put together by the Bank of Italy. And it continues, in light of the rumours, officials at the normally stayed Bank of Italy and finance ministry expressed amazement at last week's finding by a London coroner that Mr. Calve did indeed commit suicide by hanging himself under the bridge. The common reaction was, quote, why bothered to go to London to do that? I mean, like the grey London vibes, you know, it kind of feels like... the most dramatic and theatrical way to off yourself. Yeah, I think so.

And, I mean, I've been to a land a couple of times, and I don't want to piss too many people off, but Milan kind of sucks. Anyway, why, I mean, why indeed did he go to London? So, London police first, of course, Dean Calvys death of suicide. But years later,

the case is blown wide open once more. Francesco, quote, Frankie the Strangler DiCarlo, I mean, that's a hell of a nickname, who's a mafia godfather, have been living in London since the 1970s, having been linked to the deaths of two Sicilian cops

before he fled. In 1991, a supergrass, which is a high-level informant. Is that an American phrase that people call people supergrasses? No, not at all. Okay, yeah, that's like a really British phrase. Anyway, this high-level informant

fingers Frankie the Strangler as Calvys killer. In 2012, he speaks out about the murder from the small Sicilian town in which he lives in later life. Quote, I was in university. That's what I called the prisons in England. We were all in the association room watching television when the news came on that the killer of Calvi was Francesco DiCarlo. All the prisoners of guards looked over and stared. I just shrugged my shoulders and said that they must be talking about someone else with the same name as me. I mean, No one said that, Frankie, the Strangler, and no one looked over at you. But anyway, DiCalo is a long-time target of law enforcement in the UK in Italy,

and authorities actually link him to at least a dozen multi-million dollar drug halls. In 1985, Paloma police tried ex-striating him. Within weeks, two of the investigators in that case are shot dead. Here's a Guardian story, quote, Although DiCarlo denies killing Calvi, he admits that he and his mafia colleagues wanted him dead and that his boss has attempted to contact him to carry out the hit. When you finally find your thing,

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They get their race day fit, and you get a payout for trying. someone on Deepop wants what you've got. Start selling now. Deepop, where taste recognizes taste. And then, DeCarlo adds a little, quote, I was in Rome and received a phone call from a friend in Sicily telling me that a certain high-ranking mafia member had just be killed. I will never forget the date because of this.

It was 16 June, 1982, two days before Calvi was murdered. The friend told me that Pippo Calo, which is a very, very high-ranking mafia member known as the mafia's cashier, was trying to get hold of me because he needed me to do something for him. In the hierarchy of Kosovo, he was a general, I was a colonel, so he was a little higher up, my superior. He continues, when I finally spoke to Pippo, he told me not to worry, but the problem had been taken care of. that's a code we use in the Kossin Nostela. We never talk about killing someone. We say they've been taken care of.

Very clever. And he goes on. Calvi was naming names. No one had any trusted him anymore. He owed a lot of money. We know this, mate. His friends had all distanced him to themselves. We know this too.

Everyone wanted to get rid of him. Yep. He had been arrested and he started to talk. We know this. Then he had tried to kill himself by cutting his wrist. We know this too, like DiCarlo. he was released but knew he could be re-arrested at any time

he was weak he was a broken man I mean yeah alright I was not the one who hanged Calvi says DiCarlo one day I may write the full story but the real killers will never be brought to justice because they are being protected by the Italian state by members of the P2 Masonic Lodge

they have massive power they are made up of a mixture of politicians bank presidents the military top security and so on. This is a case that they continue to open and close again and again, but it will never be resolved. The higher you go, the less evidence you will find. So, you know, this guy, he's a bit of a fantasist, it sounds,

but he was in the same place. He's got some pretty authentic knowledge at the time. But what actually happened to Roberto Calvi? Was he murdered by a London Mathiosi? members of P2, somebody else? Or did he actually take his own life? In 2005, UK cops officially reopened Calvys case under the leadership of a Bronx-born journalist and investigator named Jeff Katz.

Wait, who is this guy? This is a Netflix-ass plotline, if I've ever heard one. Just like some dude from the Bronx, they were like, okay, you're in charge now? Yeah, pretty much. There's like really little more to it than that. He likes to investigate in the Catholic Church and he kind of got involved. And he's got a good turn of quote. So he says to the BBC, when I started making inquiries through contacts in Italy,

the answer came back that if we were to take this particular case on, it would be like dancing in the mouth of the wolf. I mean, yeah, I mean, five out of ten. In another article, Katz says that, quote, Roberto Calvi may have been God's banker, but he'd suck with the devil. And I mean, come on, mate. Like, even I've done that in the intro to this podcast. Investigators reassemble the scaffolding from which Calvie was found hanging

and they clamber all over it in pairs of Calvys' actual own shoes shipped in from Italy and they find that such movement would have left rust on his souls but there wasn't any of the scene. They also find that if the River Thames is at high tide it would be really easy for somebody on a boat to place the body where it's discovered. quote, for the 62-year-old Calvi to get to the scaffolding fire himself, writes the fourth feature, he would have had to climb down the bridge from a ladder, jump a distance between the ladder and the scaffolding, all while weighted down by 12 pounds of bricks. So the London cops get so far that in 2005, they actually put five people on trial for Calvi's murder.

That's that Sicilian Most of the people, Carlo, that DiColo just fingered in the case. the quotes that I mentioned before. Two businessmen, Anesto Diatervelli, don't know who he is, Flavio Carboni, that's the real estate guy who helped him get out of the country.

Carboni's ex-girlfriend, Manuela Kleinsig, you might recognize that name from the Godfather Part 3. And of course, Vitor, the bodyguard, human trafficker, we're not really sure.

But in 2007, all five of them are acquitted. Although, in the same breath, the court decides that Calvi was in fact murdered. So, well done for the UK authorities. They've really pulled it out of the bag. Lichio Jelly, the leader of P2,

he lives a prosperous life, and he dies at his luxurious Arezzo Villa in 2015. He actually carries on his fascist campaign long into the 1990s, saying of former protégé, Silvio Berlusconi's then Italian premiership, that, quote, he's implementing my plan for democratic rebirth to perfection.

You should at least give me copyright. Yikes. In 1989, after a long period of near silence, the Vatican itself reaches a financial settlement with the Bank of Italy to recognise its, quote, moral responsibility in the Banco-embrosiano crash. Paul Marcinkas, the guerrilla, he denies any wrongdoing, despite being indicted as a, quote, accessory to fordulent bankruptcy by Italian authorities in 1987.

The Vatican shields him from prosecution. Literally, he literally just sits inside the wall of the Vatican, and they quietly shift him away from Rome in 1990. He lives out the rest of his life in a vow of silence on the affair. He continues playing golf and he dies in 2006, age 84, in Sun City, Arizona, with tons and tons of questions hanging over his involvement in Calvys' death and the Vatican's probable connection to the moment. mafia and P2.

Writes the New York Times in Marsinkas an obituary, quote, Archbishop Marsinkas was indicted but never trialed in the banking scandal, which peaked in 1982. The stuff of international thrillers, the scandal would ultimately involve Machiavelli and intrigue, mysterious death, and a loss of more than $1 billion. And I've actually researched tons of additional scandals in the Vatican for this show, which I'm going to turn into a bonus episode for our episode.

Patreon members this week. But that's not quite the end of this story. So you guys remember Pope John Paul I? He's the smiling Pope, the guy whose 33-day rule ended when he died of a heart attack in his Vatican bed. Well, he was succeeded by Pope John Paul the second, one of the most popular popes in modern history. There's far too many peas in this.

Who didn't exactly pursue the Vatican Bank's financial issues with the same gusto. And in October 2019, a guy called Anthony Raimondi, Colombo crime family gangster, a nephew of Lucky Luciano, claims that he, as part of a hit team, poisoned the Pope with cyanide. I love how the assassination of the Pope, or one of the popes,

is just like, you know, something we throw in at the end of this episode. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's, you know, you play with the big boys, you get spiked. by a guy with a crappy beard that looks like Stephen Seagull, who brings out a book in his late age, and we're not entirely sure whether this is legit. But he says that Marcinkas hired him, age 28,

to carry out the deed. Marcinkas, as Raymondi, spiked the Pope's tea with Valium before the hit team administered the deadly poison. I mean, that is a huge, huge revelation. And he goes, he says, in his book, which I'm not even going to say the tight love, because I bet it's shit. Quote, I stood in the hallway outside the Pope's quarters when the tea was served.

I'd done a lot of things in my time, but I didn't want to be there in the room when they killed the Pope. I knew that would buy me a one-way ticket to hell. I mean, is this guy, I don't know. Like, what the fuck? God can't see past the door. I don't know. Like, I don't even get it. Jesus Christ.

Raimondi claims that the Pope was killed for threatening to expose the Vatican Bank's shady financial investments at the top of which, of course, sits Marcinkas. Now, soon after, Raimondi says Cardinals invited him back to the Vatican to whack John Paul II, who's also considering outing the financial conspirators, but he refuses. I love this quote.

No way, I said, he writes in his book. What are you going to do? Just keep killing popes. Raymondi says that Pope John Paul II ended up keeping quiet and instead Raymondi goes on a bender with the bishops so he hasn't killed him, he goes on a party instead and he says quote,

we stayed and partied for a week with cardinals wearing civilian clothes and lots of girls. If I had to live the rest of my life in Vatican City it would have been okay with me. It was some set up. My cousins all drove Cadillacs I'm in the wrong business I thought I should have become a cardinal.

Yeah. That's a... I mean, thanks for writing this up, dude. It's a tornado for sure. If you're still with us, thank you guys for supporting us as always. Definitely, uh, Patreon.com such a normal podcast.

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