God’s Banker I 8. The Train Station

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Campsite Media. over two decades after calvey's death the italian state was finally ready to prove who killed roberto calvey forensic expert angela gallup had put a stunning report.
Calvi hadn't killed himself. He was murdered.
Gallup's report made its way very slowly into the Italian halls of justice, where eventually, five years later, a young prosecutor grabbed it. Gallup's report showed how Calvi had died.
And the prosecutor was now ready to ask who had killed him. And so, once again, the world turned its attention to one of the most confounding cold cases on the planet, as the Italian state charged five people with the murder of Roberto Calvi.
The questions remain. What exactly did happen here at Blackfriars Bridge on that June night

in 1982? Almost exactly 25 years on from Roberto Calvi's body being found hanging from this bridge.

The examination of his body only confirmed what his family had suspected all along,

that the original verdict the P2 man story, it actually sounds far less ludicrous.

Prosecutors alleged that the mafia and the P2 Masons teamed up to organize Calvi's killing because the banker had lost money that he was supposed to launder. Among the five defendants were Silvano Vitor, the smuggler, and Flavio Carboni, the fixer.
Prosecutors said they were hired by the mafia to gain Calvi's trust and divert him to London. There, a hitman drugged God's banker and hanged him to make it look like a suicide.
The other defendants were Carboni's girlfriend, who was with the men in London, and finally a mafioso and a gangster who were alleged to be involved with the planning. Early in my reporting, I used the trial mainly as a map, a way to suss out what names and events to research.
But this past year, I became obsessed with the idea that this trial, which spanned almost two years, could tell me something I'd been missing. Something hidden in plain sight on Italy's version of court TV.
So I just started listening. And at this point, I've listened to hundreds and hundreds of hours of that trial.
It was sort of like watching an old family reunion. I recognized most of the crew, though they were 20 years younger here at the trial.
I mean, I listened to the trial while exercising, while doing the dishes, when I went on long trips. As I made lunch and dinner, I watched bankers and mobsters and members of Calvi's family testify.
The prosecution called 600 witnesses, including Calvi's relatives, co-workers, bank liquidators, priests, and actually anyone with an Ambrosiano connection in the 1980s who still had a pulse in 2005. There were experts from around the world, English scientists, Swiss-French accountants.
It was a bit of a circus. But as I watched hour after hour of testimony, I noticed that the news cameras started to disappear.
The crowds started to peter out. Even the defendants played hooky from the trial, which is legal in Italy.
The case became unwieldy. Part of the trial just devolved into screaming matches.
The prosecution tried to tie the mafia and the masons and the church and even the Italian CIA into this vast web of murder. But a lot of the evidence was hearsay.
A former mafioso heard a story from another mafioso, or financial liquidators found payments that they suspected may have been used for criminal activity.

But there was no smoking gun, no rock-solid piece of evidence implicating any of the living to not have committed the act. Order of the restitution of the heredity of Roberto Calvi.

All five defendants were found not guilty.

Despite 25 years of waiting for the truth for Roberto Calvi's family...

We're really no closer to knowing

how Roberto Calvi came to be found hanging here.

With a list of people with method and motive so long,

it appears that his murderers may never be brought to book.

There was one important conclusion here.

In his ruling, the judge wrote this definitely was murder,

not a desperate suicide.

And he believed the mafia, the Masons, the Vatican,

the spies were all still suspects.

But he wrote too much of the evidence

was speculative or tangential

to convict any of the defendants.

Listening back, it felt like a horrible game of Clue

where you have the suspects, the murder weapon, the means, and the motive, yet no one goes to jail. After all these years of reporting, I wasn't sure whether to dive back into the evidence one more time or just give up.
And then I realized I'd missed a key clue from the very beginning of my reporting.

Something that just might tie all these loose threads together.

From Crooked Media and Campside Media, this is Shadow Kingdom, God's Banker. I'm your host, Niccolo Mainoni, and this is our final episode, The Train Station.
The violent explosion ripped apart Bologna's main train station, leaving tons of rubble and an unknown number of bodies trapped in me. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.
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He's called Carlo Calvi. Carlo Calvi is Roberto Calvi's son.
He worked brief stints for his dad and was just 29 when his father died. This is Carlo testifying at that 2005 murder trial.
I was especially interested in what Carlo had to say because I desperately wanted to interview him for the podcast. And the truth is that I already interviewed Carlo.
Kind of. After talking with my friend Mario, who first suggested I look into this story, Carlo was actually the first person I reached out to.
He was easy enough to track down.

Neither of us were ready to do a formal interview,

but we talked for hours,

and I recorded my side of the conversation.

And Carlo agreed to lay out his father's story so that I could investigate it in more depth.

He liked that I was a lawyer

and kept saying things like,

and of course, as a lawyer, you know this. We were speaking in Italian, and he was going a thousand miles an hour.
I kept trying to get him to tell me about what his dad was like. I was looking for personal vignettes, some way to understand Calvi on a deeper emotional level.
But instead, most of what Carlo wanted to talk about were these really, really down the rabbit hole theories of the case. I'd ask him a question and he'd go, oh, that's simple.
And then he'd launch into esoteric connections between far right antiques dealers and wire transfers and terrorist bombings, none of it seemed to be an answer

to the question I just posed to him. I could see as I spoke to him that his whole life had been,

in some sense, about unlocking the mysterious death of his father. So my simplistic questions

about how painful it must have been or what his dad was like. He almost didn't even hear them.
At the end of the conversation, I asked to speak to him again, and he smiled and nodded. I knew I'd need many, many more chats because this one had made no sense to me.
But that was okay. He agreed.
I went off to do my research, to learn the ABCs of the story. But when I came back to Carlo, no response.
Emails, calls, LinkedIn, you name it, he wouldn't answer. Like so much of this story, he disappeared.

And all he left me with were notes from a frantic three-hour conversation that made no sense to me. That is, until I revisited the 2005 trial.
Many hours into Carlo's testimony, I stumbled on something. To set the scene, Carlo's on the witness stand, and one of the defense lawyers was firing questions at him pretty intensely.
Jelly.. Gelli, you hear that name mentioned a few times between the lawyer and Carlo.
That's Licio Gelli, the grandmaster of the far-right P2 masons. Carlo testified that his dad's plan was to come back from London and reveal the names of the people he'd been working with, presumably on various illegal schemes.
Which is why this lawyer was pressing Carlo. Tell us who these shadowy associates are, he thundered.
So Carlo said, Jelly, of course,

of course, Jelly. But the attorney wanted more.
Give us more names. And then it's right here at this moment that Carlo adds another name, almost under his breath.

Marco Cerruti. I was so surprised I had to rewind and listen again.
Cerruti was a big threat, Carlo alleged. He said Marco Cerruti received money.
But that was it. Blink and you'd miss it.
The trial barreled on, never to return to Cerruty. But not me.
I was fixated on that money. And why Calvi's son would offer this name with a metaphorical gun to his head.
I racked my brain trying to remember if I'd ever heard that name before. I dug up my notes for my conversation with Carlo, and sure enough, there it was.

Marco Cerruti.

About how he got money from the Calvi's Ambrosiano Bank,

how Cerruti was allegedly connected to organized crime in London,

maybe terrorism.

Carlo told me, look into Cerruti's wire transfers transfers. Charuti was moving really big amounts of money.
But Carlo told me so many things in that conversation, it was completely buried. Now, with two years of reporting behind me, I could sense the outline of something significant, where before I'd honestly just seen chaos.
But since Carlo still wasn't responding to my messages, I needed to find a guide to help me crack this code. So I turned to a man who had already rescued me once.
The man who'd entrusted me with the Rossone tapes and the tapes of Calvi's inner circle, the modern-day expert on Calvi, Philip Willen. He's interviewed Carlo multiple times, and he knew all about Marco Cerruti.
Cerruti was a kind of fixer and assistant to Gelli over a number of years. Remember, Gelli wanted to bring fascism back to Italy.
In the 70s and 80s, P2 was trying to launch a coup to take over the country. One of Italy's most wanted fugitives has been arrested in Switzerland.
Licio Gelli was the head of a secret organization called P2, accused of creating a state within the Italian state. Gelli was arrested trying to pick up money in a Geneva bank.
He is wanted in Italy for political espionage and possession of state secrets. He's also been implicated in the scandal involving the Vatican Bank.
When Gelli was finally arrested in 1982, he was carrying a document. A document that was mysteriously buried in his case file for a long time.

It was only officially unearthed by Italian courts as I started reporting on the Calvi affair.

The document shows that in the weeks surrounding a horrific terrorist attack,

a bombing at a train station in Bologna,

Gelli sent over $11 million to Marco Cerruti. The title of the makeshift accounting document was Bologna.
The suspicion is that Cerruti may have been the person who actually passed on the money directly to the bombers. Willen is pretty matter-of-fact here, so let me just tell you that this is a stunning allegation.
Putting my lawyer hat on for a moment, this was never proven in court. And through his lawyer, Chirruti has admitted that he received millions from Jelly, but claims they were for antiques.
But Carlo's theory is that Jelly used Chirruti to pay terrorists to set off a bomb in Bologna that killed 87 people. It's still considered one of the worst acts of terrorism in European history.
The violent explosion ripped apart Bologna's main train station, leaving tons of rubble and an unknown number of bodies trapped beneath. It's hard to grasp how truly awful this attack was.
The bomb exploded in the station in the middle of summer, with families preparing for vacation. Stonework crashed down like a disaster movie, crushing and injuring hundreds, even decades removed.
Watching videos of the rescue effort is really hard. Officials involved in the rescue effort claim they do not yet know the cause.
However, a right-wing extremist group claimed... Carlo and Willen think that Calvi had a copy of the multi-million dollar wire transfer because Calvi was Leecho Gelli's banker.
The sensitive documents that Calvi carried around with him in a briefcase

could have related to the Bologna bombing.

And it's possible that he realized that some of that money

that sort of flowed out from the coffers that he was in charge of

had gone to financing the Bologna station bombing and possibly other terrorist activities. My idea would be that he was possibly unwitting about all of that when he came to understand it and he was desperate to recover the money to prop up the bank and avoid bankruptcy.

This was exactly the kind of information

Calvi was hoping to leverage to save his bank and himself.

If Grandmaster Jelly paid for the Bologna train bombing,

then maybe Calvi found out about these payments

because they passed through his own Banco Ambrosiano. And maybe, with this incendiary piece of news, Calvi tried to blackmail P2.
And that may have been the straw that broke the camel's back. The prosecutors in the murder trial, the Calvi murder trial, were very clear that they felt that the motive for his murder

was the blackmail that he was conducting at the end of his career

to try and save the bank.

Even so, it still felt a bit speculative.

But then Willen told me one very important detail.

Bologna bombing investigators filed paperwork looking for Calvi the day he fled Italy. The fact that that really alarmed him fits into the idea that he knew there was a dangerous connection there for him, and therefore he panics and he knows he's got to run.
The Bologna investigation coincided perfectly with Calvi's escape. I was shocked I hadn't heard about this sooner, but it had been considered a fringe theory by prosecutors up until very recently, when Jelly's documents were rediscovered.
Once I understood the Bologna theory, though, a lot of the story started to fit into place. Jellie could well have organized an operation where people kind of cluster around Calvi and say, look, your life is in danger.
You've got to get out of the country. We'll help you.
Let's go to initially Switzerland and then change their minds and then go to London and, you know, we'll take care of things for you. Plus, Carboni the Fixer, the man who planned Calvi's final trip, was a known associate of the mafia.
Carboni had also been outed by mafia operatives, of all people, as a close associate of Jelly and Jelly's crooked financial deals. So if Calvi was threatening to blackmail P2 with documents about the Bologna bombing, it would then have made sense for Carboni to shuffle Calvi out of the country and take his briefcase.
The theory about the Bologna bombing would tie all these disparate threads together.

All these red strings on my conspiracy corkboard now converged around the P-2 Masons

over Grandmaster Jelly as the ultimate reason why Calvi was murdered.

To top it all off, Willen confronted Jelly about Bologna on the record. Before he died, you showed him the piece of paper where all of that is laid bare.
Yes. His reaction, I think, would tend to confirm suspicions that there was something nasty and dangerous underlying it for him.
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Philip Willen had actually interviewed P2 Grandmaster Licho Jelly multiple times before Jelly's death in 2015. It was quite a kind of nerve-wracking experience to speak to this man who had a reputation of being the puppet master who'd pulled the strings behind many very terrible events in

Italian history.

At first, the Grand Master was pretty cagey with Willen.

But after years of speaking together, he opened up. Willen gave me recordings of interviews where he'd ask the Grand Master about the mafia, politics, dirty banking, whatever he could find evidence on.
How did the P2 were vaguely suggests that the U.S. government supported P2's anti-communist efforts.
And when Philip Willen found the bank transfer information, possibly, allegedly, showing Gelli's involvement in funding the Bologna bombing, he took his chance to ask Jelly about it. I took the photocopy of the document to show him, and he said his lawyers had told him not to talk about it, and clearly he knew exactly what it was.
Willen has video of this exchange. Jelly took the quickest glance at the document Willen showed him, seemed to recognize what it was, and quickly looked away, refusing to engage.
This is the only time I could find that Gelli was ever asked about this document. In earlier interviews with Willen, Gelli had no qualms about lying about other documents and sketchy bank transfers.
He was happy to throw other people under the bus, especially as he got older and bored. But this covert receipt, Jelly would barely look at it.
He wouldn't touch it. And he didn't even try to provide an

excuse for what it could be. According to Willen, Gelli said his lawyers told him not to talk about

the document. Also, in the same interview, Willen pressed Gelli about Marco Cerruti,

who handled the money. And the grandmaster became more suspicious.

He said he not only knew Cerruti, he was a friend and a member of P2. And when Willen asked about Cerruti's name being on the Bologna document...
He said that Cerruti was not in Italy and he wouldn't be coming back. What did you make of that? It was an ominous kind of...
I thought, given the suspicions around the document and around Gelli and around Cerruti, to say immediately he won't be coming back to Italy is a very significant response. Lito Gelli died several years ago, as did Carboni.
Same with Calvi's underlings, his wife, and his Vatican counterparts. Chirruti was called to testify about P2, but he fled to Brazil.
I've tried countless ways to get in touch with him. No response.
As Niccolo the lawyer, I will say, Chirruti has denied any wrongdoing, and there's no outstanding charge or conviction of a crime in connection with that money. So this is where the trail ends for me, at the answering machine of Marco Cerruti, where years of interviews and collected evidence have led me, a point where the asphalt road dissolves into dirt.
But deep in those conspiratorial backroads,

I see the picture emerge,

a picture sketched by Carlo and the Bologna theory,

that Calvi's murder was organized by Pichu,

by Lichogeli, and his men,

because Pichu was worried about how much Calvi knew

about the bombing and their involvement.

Quite literally, he may have had the receipts. And since Calvi was facing his own legal troubles, Jelly worried that he would tell police what he knew and that he'd give the Grandmaster up to save himself.
Jelly may have gotten help from or worked in concert with the mafia to bring Calvi down. But regardless, the Bologna massacre was the tipping point.
The reason Calvi was murdered. One more murder to cover up dozens of others.
Check, check, check. Levels.
One, one, two. Check, check, check.
Mario, what are you looking for?

As I finished this story, I still felt a lot of frustration, a lot of uncertainty.

I left my job, and I set out searching for something far more concrete than what I'd found.

So I returned to where this all started, with my friend Mario.

It's funny because we are right back in the apartment where you first told me about the story, I realize now, two plus years ago. When you told me that story about Carlo in 1982 and I'd come over with this new recorder, I didn't know quite how to use it.
And I said, maybe I'll record Mario telling the story. Well, it's good that it came to an end.
And it must have been quite an interesting and long journey in the end. It was.
It was. Less predictable than I had thought.
I told Mario about Vincenzo Calcara, the mafioso scaring the shit out of me. I described Frank Pazienza smoking a pipe as he told me about the Vatican espionage, meeting Vitor the smuggler on the coast of Trieste, trying to trace the billions of dollars Calvi had borrowed and never repaid.
We talked about the fascist Freemasons and the Cold War and Carlo Calvi's Bologna theory. I tried to process all these threads with Mario in real time.
Because if you'd asked me two years ago, I would have said these were all just rumors and stories. They were all silly and absurd.
But clearly there was some more straightforward, reasonable story behind Calvi's death. Yet, here I was, telling him, Mario, the quote-unquote spy, about this web of shady characters, the nexus of power and money that orbited Calvi.
And what was astounding to me was how much of that was happening at the same time behind the scenes. The fervor and the violence and the organized crime on another side.
You talked to me about the term dieterologia. You introduced me to that.
Yes. Behindology, which is the theory of what's behind something.
And you don't have proofs. You can only use your imagination.
And your imagination can carry you very far in thinking, what's that why did they do that was there a conspiracy of people that decided to kill calvi this was the perfect example i mean you know nobody knew why he was killed or why he was dead but there were all these dealings with Vatican and with the Pitu and Calvi and the Pope and Solidarnoche and, you know, there was a whole thing that, you know, so people had to be imaginative and, you know, they didn't come to an answer. You said Dieterologia gives you an answer when you can't have one.
I like that. It tries to give you an answer, yes.
Tries to give you an answer, and many people believe it. I doubt that the 2005 defendants were actually Calvi's murderers.
I do believe in the Bologna theory. I believe that there was some kind of neo-fascist plot to kill Calvi.
But like Mario said, we don't know for certain. There's only enough evidence to get imaginative.
What I realized as we talked was that this story, Calvi's story, had filled me with a surprising amount of compassion. A little bit for Roberto Calvi, who was caught up by forces far greater than himself.
But mostly, it gives me compassion for the average Italians

that live through the heyday of Dietrologia.

People like my parents, who came of age in the 60s and 70s.

During that time, the mafia, the Vatican spies,

Da Vinci Code-style masons, they all did exist in Italy.

Sure, they may have sounded like conspiracies, but they were real. Italy was a surprisingly violent place where the mafia regularly kidnapped people for ransom, where the fight for and against communism wasn't abstract.
It was bloody and in the streets, where maybe you knew secret societies existed, but not which of your friends or neighbors had signed up. And remember, the state controlled much of the Italian economy.
That was true all the way into the 90s. So there often was some hidden backstory, some reason why that executive friendly with that politician got that job.
Given that context, Mario told me, in a way, teatrologia made sense. So there were many things that happened in Italian history that created a situation that was a little bit opaque, if you see what I mean.
And therefore people like to, you know, to conject, you know, to make assumptions or hypotheses. And that is what is an actual science of dieterologia.
But then it sort of took a life of its own. So it was applied to everything and everywhere.
Yeah, but it helps me understand Italians a little better today, I guess is what I'm saying, if that makes sense.

Not so much that I validate the process of diatrologia now,

but it helps me understand people of my, let's say, my father's generation.

Because they grew up in a world where, you know,

like 40% of diatrologia was not diatrologia. It was just davantiologia.

It was true.

And that's kind of interesting. I didn't expect that to happen.
And that's been very helpful to me. When stories that seem fantastical turn out to be true, it has a deep psychic impact on people.
You start looking at other wild stories and wondering, could they also be true? I have to say this story has helped. I always am afraid as an Italian abroad that Italians are too bombastic, not tied in fact.
So I always try to overcorrect because Italians are seen as unreliable, kind of operatic. Learning about this story, it's helped me see a lot of, you know, Italy in the time you're describing was, not to be dramatic, it was a little bit of a war zone.
I mean, there were bombs on trains. There were, they were called the years of lead.
Yeah, it was a very, very particular situation. Yeah.
You know, and Italy was a democracy, it was a fragile democracy.

The fear that communists would come in was there. And there were things that were happening in secret.
This is the atmosphere in which we lived. We just recently had a high school reunion and it turned out that one of our schoolmates in the class, was with us in the class for many years, had been arrested for the Dozier kidnapping, General Dozier.
It was an American general. General Dozier had been kidnapped by the Red Brigades.
So it was pervasive. It was everywhere.
This far left Marxist terrorist group kidnapped an American general in Italy in 1981 and held him captive for over a month. It was a huge story.
But Mario just found out he went to high school with one of the alleged kidnappers. The point is, given the amount of violence in Italy at the time, personal connections like these were pretty common.
So, it's everywhere, it's anywhere, it changes, but human nature is always such that we'll try to find an answer to something that is unexplicable.

And that was the atmosphere in which we were living back then. Living in that world was exhausting.
But I understand dieterologia better now. It's an attempt to make sense of the world.
A world where we don't always have all the information. A world where our search for answers can lead us to some very strange places.
Sometimes the conspiracy theories stay theories. Unproven or even disproved.
But sometimes when you peer behind the curtain, those stories, they end up being true. A question from my producer, Joe.
What story should I do next? It's up to you. You know, there are other interesting stories.
This one, for example, could be an interesting one.

A union case of a union leader that had been murdered somewhere years before in America.

Shadow Kingdom is a production of Crooked Media and Campside Media.

It's hosted and reported by me, Nicola Mainoni,

with additional reporting by Simona Zeki and Joe Hawthorne.

The show is written by Joe Hawthorne,

Ashley Ann Krigbaum, and me.

Joe Hawthorne is our lead producer,

and Ashley Ann Krigbaum 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 Tremuen.
Voice acting by Bonnie Biagini, Andrea Bianchi, Ferrante Cosma, Luca De Gennaro, Michele Teodori, and Mustafa Zialan. Field recording by Justin Trieger, Jonathan Senti, Pete Shev, Jonathan Gruber, and Joanna Broder.
Fact-checking by Zoe Sullivan. Our executive producers are Warren, Johnny Kaufman, and Anthony Pucillo.

Thanks to Philip Willen for talking with me over these many years and answering my many questions. His book, Vatican at War, was especially helpful when researching this series.
Thank you to all the people that spoke with me for this story, especially Mario Platero. Grazie, Mario.
And finally, a special personal thanks from me to Jon Favreau, Strauss

Zelnick, Matt Lieber, Alex Bloomberg,

Avery Truffleman, and

always and forever

to George Wahlbeck.

One last thing

before we go. You can also listen

to Shadow Kingdom in Italian.

Look up Il Banchiere di Dio wherever you get your podcasts.