God’s Banker I 8. The Train Station

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Speaker 3 Campsite Media.

Speaker 3 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 together a stunning report.

Speaker 3 Calvi hadn't killed himself. He was murdered.

Speaker 3 Gallup's report made its way very slowly into the Italian halls of justice, where eventually, five years later, a young prosecutor grabbed it.

Speaker 3 Gallup's report showed how Calvey had died, and the prosecutor was now ready to ask who had killed him. And so, once again,

Speaker 3 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 Calvey.

Speaker 5 The questions remain: what exactly did happen here at Black Friars Bridge on that June night in 1981?

Speaker 6 Exactly 25 years on from Roberto Calvey's body being found hanging from this bridge.

Speaker 7 The The examination of his body only confirmed what his family had suspected all along, that the original verdict of suicide returned by a London inquest was probably wrong.

Speaker 3 When I first heard the prosecutor's theory of the case, I thought it sounded ridiculous, like a 70s pulp novel.

Speaker 3 But I have to say, now, two years into the story,

Speaker 3 it actually sounds far less ludicrous.

Speaker 3 Prosecutors alleged that the mafia and the P2 Masons teamed up to organize Calvey's killing because the banker had lost money that he was supposed to launder.

Speaker 3 Among the five defendants were Silvano Vitor, the smuggler, and Flavio Carboni, the fixer. Prosecutors said they were hired by the mafia to gain Calvey's trust and divert him to London.

Speaker 3 There, a hitman drugged God's banker and hanged him to make it look like a suicide.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Early in my reporting, I used the trial mainly as a map, a way to suss out what names and events to research.

Speaker 3 But this past year, I became obsessed with the idea that this trial, which spanned almost two years,

Speaker 3 could tell me something I'd been missing. Something hidden in plain sight on Italy's version of court TV.

Speaker 3 So I just started listening.

Speaker 3 At this point, I've listened to hundreds and hundreds of hours of that trial.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 6 Francesco Pazini.

Speaker 3 I mean, I listened to the trial while exercising, while doing the dishes,

Speaker 3 when I went on long trips.

Speaker 3 as I made lunch and dinner, I watched bankers and mobsters and members of Calvey's family testify.

Speaker 3 The prosecution called 600 witnesses, including Calvey's relatives, co-workers, bank liquidators, priests, and actually anyone with an Ambrosiano connection in the 1980s who still had a pulse in 2005.

Speaker 3 There were experts from around the world,

Speaker 3 English scientists,

Speaker 3 Swiss-French accountants.

Speaker 3 It was a bit of a circus.

Speaker 3 But as I watched hour after hour of testimony, I noticed that the news cameras started to disappear. The crowds started to peter out.

Speaker 3 Even the defendants played hookie from the trial, which is legal in Italy. The case became unwieldy.
Part of the trial just devolved into screaming matches.

Speaker 3 The prosecution tried to tie the mafia and the Masons and the church and even the Italian CIA into this vast web of murder.

Speaker 3 But a lot of the evidence was hearsay.

Speaker 3 A former mafioso heard a story from another mafioso, or financial liquidators found payments that they suspected may have been used for criminal activity.

Speaker 3 There was no smoking gun, no rock-solid piece of evidence implicating any of the living defendants.

Speaker 3 And the verdict?

Speaker 3 All five defendants were found

Speaker 3 not guilty.

Speaker 7 Despite 25 years of waiting for the truth, for Roberto Calvy, we're really no closer to knowing how Roberto Calvey came to be found hanging here.

Speaker 6 The lists of people with method and motive so long, it appears that his murderers may never be brought to book.

Speaker 3 There was one important conclusion here. In his ruling, the judge wrote this definitely was murder, not a desperate suicide.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 After all these years of reporting, I wasn't sure whether to dive back into the evidence one more time

Speaker 3 or just give up.

Speaker 3 And then I realized I'd missed a key clue from the very beginning of my reporting.

Speaker 3 Something that just might tie all these loose threads together.

Speaker 3 From Crooked Media and Campside Media, this is Shadow Kingdom, God's Banker. Banker.
I'm your host, Niccolo Mainoni, and this is our final episode, the train station.

Speaker 15 The viral explosion ripped apart Bologna's main train station, leaving tons of rubble and an unknown number of bodies trapped beneath.

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Speaker 8 Carlo Calvey.

Speaker 3 Carlo Calvey is Roberto Calvey'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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 After talking with my friend Mario, who first suggested I look into this story, Carlo was actually the first person I reached out to.

Speaker 3 He was easy enough to track down.

Speaker 3 Neither of us were ready to do a formal interview,

Speaker 3 but we talked for hours

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 He liked that I was a lawyer and kept saying things like, and of course, as a lawyer, you know this.

Speaker 3 We were speaking in Italian and he was going a thousand miles an hour.

Speaker 3 I kept trying to get him to tell me about what his dad was like.

Speaker 3 I was looking for personal vignettes, some way to understand Calvin on a deeper emotional level.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And then he'd launch into esoteric connections between far-right antique stealers and wire transfers and terrorist bombings. None of it seemed to be an answer to the question I just posed to him.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So, my simplistic questions about how painful it must have been or what his dad was like, he almost didn't even hear them.

Speaker 3 At the end of the conversation, I asked to speak to him again, and he smiled, nodded.

Speaker 3 I knew I'd need many, many more chats because this one

Speaker 3 had made no sense to me.

Speaker 3 But that was okay. He agreed.
I went off to do my research, to learn the ABCs of the story.

Speaker 3 But when I came back to Carlo,

Speaker 3 no response.

Speaker 3 Emails, calls, LinkedIn, you name it, he wouldn't answer.

Speaker 3 Like so much of this story, he disappeared.

Speaker 3 And all he left me with were notes from a frantic, three-hour conversation that made no sense to me.

Speaker 3 That is,

Speaker 3 until I revisited the 2005 trial.

Speaker 3 Many hours into Carlos' testimony, I stumbled on something.

Speaker 3 To set the scene, Carlos on the witness stand, and one of the defense lawyers was firing questions at him pretty intensely.

Speaker 3 That's Licho Jelly, the grandmaster of the far-right P2 Masons.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Give us more names.

Speaker 3 And then it's right here at this moment that Carlo adds another name. Almost under his breath,

Speaker 3 Marco Chiruti.

Speaker 3 I was so surprised, I had to rewind and listen again.

Speaker 3 Chiruti was a big threat, Carlo alleged. He said, Marco Cherruti received money, but that was it.
Blink and you'd miss it. The trial barreled on, never to return to Chirudi.

Speaker 4 But not me.

Speaker 3 I was fixated on that

Speaker 3 and why Calvey's son would offer this name with a metaphorical gun to his head.

Speaker 3 I racked my brain trying to remember if I'd ever heard that name before.

Speaker 3 I dug up my notes from my conversation with Carlo, and sure enough,

Speaker 3 there it was.

Speaker 16 Marco Chiruti.

Speaker 3 About how he got money from the Calvey's Ambrosiano bank, how Cheruti was allegedly connected to organized crime in London, maybe terrorism. Carlo told me, look into Chiruti's wire transfers.

Speaker 3 Chiruti was moving really big amounts of money. But Carlo told me so many things in that conversation, it was completely buried.

Speaker 3 Now, with two years of reporting behind me, I could sense the outline of something significant, where before I'd honestly just seen chaos.

Speaker 3 But since Carlo still wasn't responding to my messages, I needed to find a guide to help me crack this code.

Speaker 3 So I turned to a man who'd already rescued me once,

Speaker 3 the man who'd entrusted me with the Rossone tapes and the tapes of Calvey's inner circle, the modern-day expert on Calvey, Philip Willen.

Speaker 3 He's interviewed Carlo multiple times, and he knew all about Marco Cirrutti.

Speaker 4 Cirrutti was a kind of

Speaker 4 fixer and assistant to Jelly over a number of years.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 9 One of Italy's most wanted fugitives has been arrested in Switzerland. Liccio Gelli was the head of a secret organization called P2,

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 He's also been implicated in the scandal involving the Vatican Bank.

Speaker 3 When Jelly was finally arrested in 1982, he was carrying a document, a document that was mysteriously buried in his case file for a long time.

Speaker 3 It was only officially unearthed by Italian courts as I started reporting on the Calvi affair.

Speaker 3 The document shows that in the weeks surrounding a horrific terrorist attack, a bombing at a train station in Bologna, Jelly sent over $11 million

Speaker 3 to Marco Cherutti. The title of the makeshift accounting document was Bologna.

Speaker 4 The suspicion is that Cherutti may have been the person who actually

Speaker 4 passed on the money directly to the bombers.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And through his lawyer, Chiruti has admitted that he received millions from Jelly, but claims they were for antiques.

Speaker 3 But Carlos' theory is that Jelly used Chiruti to pay terrorists to set off a bomb in Bologna that killed 87 people.

Speaker 3 It's still considered one of the worst acts of terrorism in European history.

Speaker 15 The violent explosion ripped apart Bologna's main train station, leaving tons of rubble and an unknown number of bodies trapped beneath.

Speaker 10 More than one thousand.

Speaker 3 It's hard to grasp how truly awful this attack was.

Speaker 3 The bomb exploded in the station in the middle of summer, with families preparing for vacation.

Speaker 3 Stonework crashed down like a disaster movie, crushing and injuring hundreds, even decades removed. Watching videos of the rescue effort is really hard.

Speaker 15 Officials involved in the rescue effort claim they do not yet know the cause. However, a right-wing extremist group claimed responsibility.

Speaker 3 Carlo and Willen think that Calvey had a copy of the multi-million dollar wire transfer because Calvey was Licho Gelli's banker.

Speaker 4 The sensitive documents that Calvey 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

Speaker 4 sort of flowed out from the coffers that he was in charge of

Speaker 4 had gone to financing the Bologna station bombing and possibly other terrorist activities.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 3 This was exactly the kind of information Calvey was hoping to leverage to save his bank and himself.

Speaker 3 If Grand Master Jelly paid for the Bologna train bombing, then maybe Calvey found out about these payments because they passed through his own Banco Ambrosiano.

Speaker 3 And maybe with this incendiary piece of news, Calvey tried to blackmail P2.

Speaker 3 And that may have been the straw that broke the camel's back.

Speaker 4 The prosecutors in the murder trial, the Calvey 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.

Speaker 3 Even so, it still felt a bit speculative. But then Willen told me one very important detail.
Bologna bombing investigators filed paperwork looking for Calvey the day he fled Italy.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 3 The Bologna investigation coincided perfectly with Calvey's escape.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Once I understood the Bologna theory, though, a lot of the story started to fit into place.

Speaker 4 Jelly could well have organized an operation where people kind of cluster around Calvy and say, look, your life is in danger. You've got to get out of the country.
We'll help you.

Speaker 4 Let's go to initially Switzerland and then change their minds and go to London and, you know, we'll take care of things for you.

Speaker 3 Plus, Carboni the Fixer, the man who planned Calvy's final trip, was a known associate of the Mafia.

Speaker 3 Carboni had also been outed by mafia operatives, of all people, as a close associate of Jelly and Jelly's crooked financial deals.

Speaker 3 So, if Calvey was threatening to blackmail P2 with documents about the Bologna bombing, It would then have made sense for Carboni to shuffle Calvey out of the country and take his briefcase.

Speaker 3 The theory about the Bologna bombing would tie all these disparate threads together.

Speaker 3 All these red strings on my conspiracy corkboard now converged around the P2 Masons, over Grand Master Jelly as the ultimate reason why Calvey was murdered.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 4 His reaction, I think, would tend to confirm suspicions that there was something

Speaker 4 nasty and dangerous underlying it for him.

Speaker 3 That's after the break.

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Speaker 3 Philip Willen had actually interviewed P2 Grandmaster Licho Jelly multiple times before Jelly's death in 2015.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 3 At first, the Grand Master was pretty cagey with Willen, but after years of speaking together, he opened up.

Speaker 3 Willen gave me recordings of interviews where he'd asked the Grand Master about the mafia, politics, dirty banking, whatever he could find evidence on.

Speaker 3 At one point, Jelly vaguely suggests that the U.S. government supported P2's anti-communist efforts.

Speaker 3 And when Philip Lewin found the bank transfer information, possibly, allegedly showing Jelly's involvement in funding the Bologna bombing,

Speaker 3 he took his chance to ask Jelly about it.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 3 Willen has video of this exchange.

Speaker 3 Jelly took the quickest glance at the document Willen showed him, seemed to recognize what it was, and quickly looked away, refusing to engage.

Speaker 3 This is the only time I could find that Jelly was ever asked about this document. In earlier interviews with Willen, Jelly had no qualms about lying about other documents and sketchy bank transfers.

Speaker 3 He was happy to throw other people under the bus, especially as he got older and bored.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 According to Willen, Jelly said his lawyers told him not to talk about the document. Also, in the same interview, Willen pressed Jelly about Marco Ciruti, who handled the money.

Speaker 3 And the grandmaster became more suspicious.

Speaker 3 He said he not only knew Cirruti, he was a friend and a member of P2.

Speaker 4 And when Willen asked about Trudy's name being on the Bologna document, he said that Cirutti was not in Italy and he wouldn't be coming back.

Speaker 3 What did you make of that?

Speaker 4 Yes, I mean it was an indication that

Speaker 4 Celli knew immediately who we were talking about. He knew where he was, which

Speaker 4 not very many people did.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 I thought given the suspicions around the document and around Celli and around Cirutti, to say immediately he won't be coming back to Italy is

Speaker 4 a very significant response.

Speaker 3 Lito Gelli died several years ago, as did Carboni. Same with Calvey's underlings, his wife, and his Vatican counterparts.
Ciruti was called to testify about P2,

Speaker 3 but he fled to Brazil.

Speaker 3 I've tried countless ways to get in touch with him. No response.

Speaker 3 As Niccolo, the lawyer, I will say, Gerudi has denied any wrongdoing, and there's no outstanding charge or conviction of a crime in connection with that money.

Speaker 3 So this is where the trail ends for me, at the answering machine of Marco Gerudi, where years of interviews and collected evidence have led me. A point where the asphalt road dissolves into dirt.

Speaker 3 But deep in those conspiratorial backroads, I see the picture emerge. A picture sketched by Carlo and the Bologna theory.

Speaker 3 That Calvey's murder was organized by Pichu, by Lisho Jelly, and his men because Pichu was worried about how much Calvey knew about the bombing and their involvement.

Speaker 3 Quite literally, he may have had the receipts. And since Calvey was facing his own legal troubles, Jelly worried that he would tell police what he knew.

Speaker 3 and that he'd give the Grand Master up to save himself.

Speaker 3 Jelly may have gotten help from or worked in concert with the mafia to bring Calvey down. But regardless, the Bologna massacre was the tipping point.
The reason Calvy was murdered.

Speaker 3 One more murder to cover up dozens of others.

Speaker 4 Check, check, check. Levels.
One, one, two, check, check, check.

Speaker 3 My daughter, what are you looking for?

Speaker 3 As I finished this story, I still felt a lot 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.

Speaker 3 So I returned to where this all started with my friend Mario.

Speaker 3 It's funny because we are right back in the apartment where you first told me about this story, I realize now, two plus years ago, when you told me that story about Carlo in 1982, and I had come over with this new recorder, I didn't know quite how to use it.

Speaker 3 and I said, oh, maybe I'll record Mario telling the story.

Speaker 16 Well,

Speaker 16 it's good that it came to an end. And it must have been quite an interesting and long journey in the end.

Speaker 3 It was. It was.

Speaker 3 Less predictable than I had thought. It took me an hour.
I told Mario about Vincenzo Calcara, the mafioso scaring the shit out of me.

Speaker 3 I described Frank Pazienza smoking a pipe as he told me about the Vatican espionage.

Speaker 3 Meeting Vitor the smuggler on the coast of Trieste, trying to trace the billions of dollars Calvey had borrowed and never repaid.

Speaker 3 We talked about the fascist Freemasons and the Cold War and Carlo Calvey's Bologna theory. I tried to process all these threads with Mario in real time.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 that clearly there was some more straightforward, reasonable story behind Calvey's death.

Speaker 3 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 Calvey.

Speaker 3 And what was astounding to me was

Speaker 3 how much of that was happening at the same time behind the scenes. The fervor and the violence and the

Speaker 3 the organized crime on another side. You talked to me about the term dietrologia.
You introduced me to to that.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 16 Behindology, which is the theory of what's behind something.

Speaker 16 And you don't have proofs, you can only use your imagination. And your imagination can carry you very far in thinking what's behind that?

Speaker 16 Why did they do that? Was there a conspiracy of people?

Speaker 16 that decided to kill Calvi. This was the perfect example.

Speaker 16 I mean, you know, nobody knew why he was killed or why why he was dead, but there were all these dealings with the Vatican and with the Pitu and Calvi and the Pope and Solidar Nosh.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 3 You said Gietabilja gives you an answer when you can't have one. I like that.

Speaker 16 It tries to give you an answer, yes. Tries to give you an answer, and many people believe it.

Speaker 3 I doubt that the 2005 defendants were actually Calvey's murderers. I do believe in the Bologna theory.
I believe that there was some kind of neo-fascist plot to kill Calvey.

Speaker 3 But like Mario said, we don't know for certain. There's only enough evidence to get imaginative.

Speaker 3 What I realized as we talked was that this story, Calvey's story, had filled me with a surprising amount of compassion.

Speaker 3 A little bit for Roberto Calvey, who was caught up by forces far greater than himself. But mostly, it gives me compassion for the average Italians that lived through the heyday of Deaterlogia.

Speaker 3 People like my parents who came of age in the 60s and 70s. During that time, the mafia, the Vatican spies, da Vinci codes style masons, they all did exist in Italy.

Speaker 3 Sure, they may have sounded like conspiracies, but they were real.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Given that context, Mario told me, in a way, Teatrologia made sense.

Speaker 16 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

Speaker 16 conject,

Speaker 16 to make assumptions or hypotheses.

Speaker 16 And that is what is an actual science of deatrologia. But then it sort of took a life of its own, so it was applied to everything and everywhere.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but it helps me understand Italians a little better today, I guess, is what I'm saying, if that makes sense.

Speaker 3 Not so much that I validate the process of deathrologia now, but it helps me understand people of my, let's say, my father's generation.

Speaker 3 Because they grew up in a world where, you know, like 40% of Deatrologia was not theater logia. It was just the vanteologia.
It was true.

Speaker 3 And that's kind of interesting. I didn't expect that to happen.
And that's been very helpful to me.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 I have to say, this story has

Speaker 4 helped.

Speaker 3 I always am afraid as an Italian abroad that Italians are too

Speaker 3 bombastic, not tied in fact. So I always try to over-correct because Italians are seen as unreliable,

Speaker 3 kind of operatic. Learning about this story,

Speaker 3 it's helped me see

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 they were called the years of lead.

Speaker 16 Yeah, it was a very, a very particular situation.

Speaker 16 And Italy was a democracy, it was a fragile democracy.

Speaker 16 The fear that communists would come in

Speaker 16 was there.

Speaker 16 And there were things that were happening in secret. This is the atmosphere in which we lived.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 General Dozier was an American general. General Dozier had been kidnapped by the Red Brigades.
So it was pervasive. It was everywhere.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 16 So it's everywhere, it's anywhere, it changes, but human nature is always

Speaker 16 such that we'll try to find an answer to something that it's unexplicable. And that was the atmosphere in which we were living back then.

Speaker 3 Living in that world was exhausting, but I understand dietrologia better now.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Sometimes the conspiracy theories stay theories, unproven or even disproved.

Speaker 3 But sometimes, when you peer behind the curtain, those stories

Speaker 3 end up being true.

Speaker 3 A question from my producer, Joe. What story should I do next?

Speaker 16 That's up to you.

Speaker 16 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

Speaker 16 years before in America.

Speaker 3 Shadow Kingdom is a production of crooked media and campsite media. It's hosted and reported by me, Nicola Mainoni, with additional reporting by Simon Atzeki and Joe Hawthorne.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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 Ewen Lai Tremuyan.

Speaker 3 Voice acting by Bonnie Biagini, Andea Bianchi, Ferrante Cosma, Luca DeGennado, Michele Teodori, and Mustafa Zialin.

Speaker 3 Field recording by Justin Trieger, Jonathan Senti, Pete Chev, Jonathan Grubert, and Joanna Broder. Fact-checking by Zoe Sullivan.

Speaker 3 Our executive producers are me, Nicola Mainoni, along with Sarah Geismer, Katie Long, and Allison Falsetta from Crooked Media.

Speaker 3 Josh Dean, Adam Hoff, Matt Scher, and Vanessa Gregoriadis are the executive producers at Campside Media. We had additional help from Doug Slaiwin, Ashley Warren, Johnny Kaufman, and Anthony Puccillo.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Thank you to all the people that spoke with me for this story, especially Mario Platero, Grazia Mario.

Speaker 3 And finally, a special personal thanks for me to Jon Favreau, Strauss Zelnick, Matt Lieber, Alex Bloomberg, Avery Truffelman, and always and forever to George Wahlbeck.

Speaker 3 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.