God’s Banker I 6. On the Run

Choosing a bottled Starbucks Frappuccino drink that's all flavor in just 100 calories? Easy.

Choosing between creamy vanilla, double chocolate, and sea salt caramel flavors? A little harder.

Try the delicious new Starbucks Frappuccino light drinks.

Look for them wherever you buy groceries. Start with Starbucks coffee.

Friends of the Pod subscribers can listen to the full season of Shadow Kingdom right now.

Join Friends of the Pod at crooked.com slash friends or on Apple Podcasts.

Campsite Media. On June 11th, 1981, Roberto Calvi disappeared.
Yet another chapter in what is shaping up to be a major banking scandal involving the Vatican.

News reports said that Calvi had vanished seemingly in the middle of the night.

His disappearance came just a couple of weeks before huge debt payments at the Ambrosiano were coming due.

Hundreds of millions of dollars.

Calvi had been frantically trying to drum up cash or buy more time from its creditors. He'd scheduled meetings with bankers and lawyers for the following week.
He even made plans with his driver to commute to work as usual the following day. But instead, the driver found a vague note from Calvi saying that he was tired, he wasn't feeling well, and that he was going to go away.
The driver found the note so suspicious, so unlike Calvi, that he almost immediately alerted the authorities. God's banker was officially a missing person.
But there was no announcement from kidnappers, no demand for a ransom, and none of Calvi's employees knew what to do. Up until this point, only Calvi knew the full extent of the Banco Ambrosiano's debts.
Only he knew the tangled web of shell companies and offshore accounts set up to move that borrowed money around the world. The Bank of Italy was demanding explanations for more than a billion dollars worth of loans.
Behind the facade of respectability, Calvi had become entangled in a web of evil and corruption. Now that Calvi was missing and his massive debts were coming due, his employees struggled to run the bank without him, to untangle the mess he'd left behind.
And because of the size of the Ambrosiano, Italian regulators were watching as well. The Ambrosiano was Italy's biggest private bank.
It had money tied to businesses around Italy and the world. If Calvi's bank failed, it could rock international stock markets.
That's why when a bank like Banco Ambrosiano gets into trouble, the ripples can wash around the world, sometimes with devastating effect. But the headline that seemed to dominate, beyond the bigger financial questions about the bank, what everybody wanted to know was, what the hell happened to Roberto Calvi? Was he kidnapped? Was he on the run? Had he been killed? I was pretty sure Calvi decided to escape rather than being abducted.
And I know he'd be dead a week later. What I didn't know is what happened in between.
In other words, God's Banker's final days. The answer was like a black box, hiding footage that could explain how

and why it all came crashing down.

Up until writing this episode,

I thought I'd have to piece together that black box

from news articles and history books.

But then I heard back from the last known person

to see Calvi alive. From Crooked Media and Campside Media, this is Shadow Kingdom.
God's banker. I'm Niccolo Mainoni, and this is episode six, On the Run.
Nobody should be using the words on the run. Nobody ran away.
You need to live with COVID right now. Shadow Kingdom is brought to you by Lumen.
Did you know that when your metabolism is working properly, you will feel the benefits in literally every

aspect of your life. I have found a valuable tool, one that was given to me, to be fair,

but it's valuable nonetheless. And it gives me insights into how to create a healthy metabolism

for my body. It's called Lumen.
Lumen is a handheld tracker that reads your metabolism

through your breath. And keep in mind, your metabolism is basically your body's engine.
It's how you turn food into fuel. All you have to do is blow into the device, check the app, and it tells you whether you're burning carbs or fat at that moment.
At first, candidly, I had no idea why that mattered. But then I understood and I saw the patterns.
The days I woke up burning fat, I had steady energy. I was more focused.
No mid-afternoon crashes. The days I woke up burning carbs, on the other hand, I was a little more foggy, a little more sluggish.
And here's the part that really matters. Lumen doesn't just tell you what's happening.
It helps you change it, essentially by giving you a personalized plan. What to eat, how to adjust workouts, even how sleep impacts your metabolism.
So you're not just guessing. Okay, the warmer months are coming.
Spring back into your health and fitness and go to lumen.me slash kingdom to get 15% off your lumen. That is l-u-m-e-n dot m-e slash kingdom for 15% off your purchase.
Thank you to our friends at Lumen for sponsoring this episode. What makes a great pair of glasses? At Warby Parker, it's all the invisible extras without the extra cost.
Their designer quality frames start at $95, including prescription lenses, plus scratch-resistant, smudge-resistant, and anti-reflective coatings, and UV protection, and free adjustments for life. To find your next pair of glasses, sunglasses, or contact lenses, or to find the Warby Parker store nearest you, head over to warbyparker.com.
That's warbyparker.com. Okay, in my hotel room, about to go see Vitor.
Actually, Vitor's lawyer. We're going to sit on the side of a street because Vitor is not telling us where he lives, which is bad for the blood pressure of those who love you.
Okay, let's see what happens. It's fall 2023.
And I'm waiting to meet Silvano Vitor, a former contrabandiere or contraband smuggler, who is also the last man we know of to see Calvi alive. The man responsible for watching over Calvi in his final days.
Vitor hasn't sat down for a recorded interview in 40 years. And even then, the questions he answered were mostly bureaucratic.
I was desperate to speak to him, to ask him why did Calvi flee? What or who was he running from? If there was anyone Calvi had confided in during his final days, I suspected it might be Vitor. And so I spent months and months trying to wrangle Vitor.
First, he was down to talk. Then he wasn't.

Then he wanted his lawyer to join,

but I'd have to pay the lawyer.

Then I thought he'd ghosted me.

Finally, he was in.

So now, I've traveled all the way to Trieste,

a town on the northernmost border of Italy.

And almost on cue,

Vitor's lawyer showed up first,

outside of my hotel. Fun fact, lawyers in Italy are actually called avvocato, which sounds like what guacamole is made from.
So when two Italian lawyers greet each other, it sounds like we're saying, hello, avocado. And as us two Italian avocados were going back and forth, a fit 70-something with cool slicked back hair walked out of my hotel.
At that moment, I realized I'd actually seen him. He'd been sitting in the hotel lobby all along, surveying the scene.
Just like I'd never met a mafioso or a spy until working on this story, I'd never met a smuggler either, and I wasn't sure what to expect. What immediately struck me about Vitor was how normal, nondescript he was.
He has a fairly pronounced northern Italian accent,

sort of like a Midwestern accent

in the United States.

He'd easily blend into a crowd,

which I imagine was helpful

in his former line of work.

So the smuggler, the lawyer, and I

settled into a room

on the ground floor of the hotel,

and Vitor began to tell me

about his work before Calvi. Vitor didn't go too in-depth, but he did say he smuggled food and clothes across the Iron Curtain.
It's easy to forget, but Italy was on the very border of the Cold War. and Trieste, where Vitor lived, was very close to the border with Soviet bloc countries like Yugoslavia.
Great for smuggling goods or people. See, when Calvi was convicted of illegal currency exportation, he'd had to surrender his passport.
The Italian

government wouldn't allow him to leave the country. But that's exactly what he wanted to do, because if he stayed, he could be sent back to jail.
So he reached out to his new fixer, Flavio Carboni, to see if he could help. And Carboni reached out to Vitor.
and interviewed Vitor in Italian, so I've enlisted an actor to read his responses in English. So Carboni and Vitor were dating sisters.
They'd been friends for years. And so Carboni knew all about Vitor's work as a smuggler.
It wasn't a huge surprise then that Carboni called Vitor and said he needed help smuggling a person. The next day, Vitor pulled up to a fancy hotel and saw an old Alfa Romeo driven by Carboni's assistant.
As Vitor moved to open the passenger door and look down, eyes squinting, he saw the silhouette of Roberto Calvi. Bald head, dark suit, clutching a briefcase.
I took Calvi's bag out of respect. I saw this heavy bag and I said, wait, I can help.
I was 40 or less than 40 years old. I thought I'd help him.
I said, poor guy, he was 60, 62. So I took this bag and brought it in.
I thought that was strange. A 40-year-old insisting he help a 60-year-old with carrying a briefcase? Calvi wasn't an athlete, but he wasn't like 90 years old.
Anyway, the directions that Vitor had from Carboni were to smuggle Calvi over the border. So I made some phone calls to some people I knew and and they told me that after midnight or around midnight,

there'd be no controls, and I could safely cross the border.

So Vitor took Calvi to his house that afternoon,

and the two settled into Vitor's living room, waiting for midnight.

We were sitting at the table, and he made me turn on the television.

And when we turned it on, they were broadcasting the news of him missing me. Time must have stood still for Calvi as he watched the biggest evening news in Italy, plastering his face on the screen, saying he was on the run.
Vitor said he freaked out. At this point, he started to panic.
So I told him, look, why don't you wait an extra day at my house? I'll arrange for a safer trip tomorrow. But he wanted to leave as soon as possible.
So he's watching the news and he's getting upset. Yeah, he changed it.
He turned pale. And did he take his suit or his jacket off at all? It was actually a really hot day.
It was boiling. So I think at one point he was down to his underwear.
Vitor painted this vivid image for me. A half-naked Roberto Calvi drenched in sweat a week from death, watching his own face plastered on TV.
He was running from something, but I still didn't quite understand what. And then, unexpectedly, Vitor said something that put me on alert.
He told Calvi, okay, you want to leave right away, fine, but don't take your briefcase. I told him, look, if we get coach at the border, the first thing they'll say is show us your briefcase.
And I don't know what you have in there, but you are running a real risk that they take it from you. And so I told him, leave it with me, and I can drop you off and bring it with me the following day.
Vitor thought it'd be less risky if he helped Calvi sneak across the border without the briefcase. Once over the border, Calvi would sit tight in Austria.

Then Vitor would go back to Italy, get the briefcase, and drive across the border legally

to meet Calvi.

Vitor said Calvi initially freaked out and said, no way.

But eventually, somehow, a panicked Calvi agreed. Vitor explained.
I told him, don't worry. I'll make sure to bring you your bag.
And he said, yes. He also said he spoke to Carboni, and who told him I was a person he could trust.
So he gave it to me. And actually, he even gave me the combination to the lock.
It's a combination I remember to this day. I remember it my whole life.
Why or how? Because it was an easy combination. Can you share it? I never have.
Again, this just sounds off to me. Calvi, the king of paranoia, not only willingly parted with his precious briefcase, but also offered up the combination.
I found myself wondering, were Vitor and Carboni genuinely helping Calvi, or did they have an alternative motive in these final, crucial days? But I decided not to press a Vitor just yet. He was starting to get comfortable with me and was finally getting to the part of the story I'd come for.
So Vitor's plan continued. After midnight, the smuggler and the banker, now a bizarre buddy duo, stepped into Vitor's boat under cover of darkness and slipped over the border out of Italy.
The sea was beautiful. It was a flat and calm, beautiful sea.
But Calvi would ask me, hey, what are those lights there? Who are those guys? I tell him, those are fishing boats.

Or he wants to know, what about the light moving toward us?

I say, those are fishing boats making their way around the Gulf.

Because there were quite a few boats around.

Pretty much for the entire journey, he kept asking me information.

It was like an interrogation. He was just really worried and concerned.
So he was afraid? Yeah. He thought he saw patrol boats and was afraid.
Vitor reassured Calvi all throughout their boat ride to Yugoslavia. And from Yugoslavia, Vitor put Calvi in a car to Austria and set him up to stay in a chateau owned by his girlfriend's family.
Calvi was really agitated. He was agitated because the arrival of his briefcase has been delayed.
I was getting phone calls constantly saying, I can't stand this anymore. Vitor was supposed to zip back to Italy and return promptly with the briefcase.
But weirdly, he stopped for a family get-together on his way back. When Vitor finally arrived in Austria, he was immediately greeted by Calvi.
When he heard me coming with the car, he stoned out. I was just getting out of the car with the briefcase in my hand, and he was right there anxious, waiting for his damn briefcase.
With his precious briefcase in hand, relief washed over Calvi. He finally relaxed on an easy chair,

talking to Vitor's girlfriend about his family,

his adolescence, his war stories.

So, talking with Vitor at this point,

my ears perked up.

Once Calvi had his briefcase and was out of the country,

he was more confident, more relaxed.

It makes me think that Calvi had a plan, right?

And that plan was going somewhat well. And maybe there was something in that briefcase

that gave him power. Calvi called his wife from the chateau and reassured her that everything

was okay. She recalled this in an Italian interview.
Roberto si arrabbiò a sua volta.

Mi rispose, non si deve mai dire quella parola.

E non voleva nemmeno dirla.

La parola scappare.

Non la voleva pronunciare.

And throughout the night, he kept calling me,

saying, nobody should be using the words on the run.

Nobody ran away.

I didn't run away.

I need to do a job.

He was going to recover the debt.

He was doing really important negotiations.

He was a member recover the debt. He was doing really important negotiations.
He was negotiating to resolve the Vatican debt problem. He said that the Vatican was going to give him protection, which is going to solve all his problems.
He just needed time to negotiate outside of Italy. He wouldn't say why exactly those negotiations needed to be outside of the country or what exactly he was afraid of.
But right here in the chateau, Calvi seemed confident that he could solve his looming debt crisis. After some time relaxing, Vitor watched Roberto Calvi get up and prepare some kindling.
I remember the fireplace and how it was glowing. He was burning some of the paper that he had picked out from the briefcase.
I asked Vitor what was Calvi burning, but he couldn't see.

He just said that Calvi burned a lot of papers.

It seems odd to me that Calvi would bring documents with him from Italy,

carefully guard them,

obsess about them when they weren't with him,

and then burn some of these documents

once he had them back in his possession.

Maybe he decided it was too risky to carry them around, or maybe he'd planned to use them and then changed his mind. I've often thought that if I could just see inside Calvi's briefcase, I could finally find Calvi's killer.
But it's like all these years have rusted the lock and it won't budge. There's one person I know

who held Calvi's briefcase and who knew his final itinerary. Silvano Vitor.
And Vitor was getting closer and closer to London. To Calvi's final day.
Hey guys, have you heard of Gold Belly?

It's this amazing site where they ship the most iconic, famous foods from restaurants across the country, anywhere nationwide.

I've never found a more perfect gift than food.

Gold Belly ships Chicago deep dish pizza, New York bagels, Maine lobster rolls, and even Ina Gardens famous cakes. So if you're looking for a gift for the food lover in your life, head to goldbelly.com and get 20% off your first order with promo code gift.
That's goldbelly.com promo code gift. The basketball playoffs are here on prize picks, the best place to cash in on the action.
The app is simple.

Pick more or less on at least two players for a shot to win up to 2,000 times your cash.

Download the PrizePix app today and use code FIELD, that's code FIELD,

and get $50 instantly when you play $5.

That's code FIELD on PrizePix to get $50 instantly when you play $5.

Win or lose, you'll get $50 for just playing, guaranteed.

PrizePix, Run your game.

Must be present in certain states. Visit PrizePix.com

for restrictions and details.

Calvi and Vitor

had been on the run for three

days. They were just

starting to get comfortable in their

borrowed Austrian villa

when, late one night,

Carboni the Fixer came to Vitor.

He tells me, you

need to live with Calvi right now.

And it's 11 o'clock

Thank you. when, late one night, Carboni the Fixer came to Vitor.
He tells me, you need to leave with Calvi right now.

And it's 11 o'clock at night or midnight.

I don't remember exactly, but it was late.

He says, yeah, it's all organized.

It's all set. And I say, where are we going?

And he says, toward Switzerland. And so we take off.

Why Switzerland? I don't know. There wasn't any time for Vitor to ask questions.

He just threw a change of clothes in the back of the car, got Calvi's bags, put the banker in the

passenger seat, and they headed to Switzerland.

Sleep-deprived and, I imagine, a bit confused.

And the whole time, I was the one at the wheel.

He never drove.

So, we took.

So, what would he tell you, or what would you chat about?

He would tell me about his family. About his daughter, most of all.
He'd tell me about his time in the military, that he'd frozen his hand. He showed me three of his fingers that were frozen.
He'd also tell me, Hey, Giovanni, let's chat. I don't want you to fall asleep at the wheel.
And so at this point, does it almost feel like there's sort of a friendship growing here? Yes, I think so. And the more time went on the more you become attached because it was just the two of us.
We were together all the time and he'd open up a little bit. But he was also worried.
I could feel it. There was nobody else around me.
He needed someone because, you know, he was fugitive. Again, I was torn here between taking Vitor at his word, that he and Calvi really were forming some kind of bond, and this other alternate narrative, where Calvi was forcefully separated from his briefcase and sent to Switzerland without much of an explanation.
He was, in this narrative, out of control, dependent, and at the whims of his handlers. It felt like a Hitchcock movie, where nothing overtly scary is happening, but somehow you're on edge?

Then, right as the duo started to approach the border with Switzerland... Carboni advised against going to Switzerland.

Why is that?

No one ever knew why.

Carboni sent word to Calvi and Vitor that the border crossing was now too dangerous,

and that a plane was waiting for Calvi just a few miles down the road, headed to London. Now, I didn't know about this last-minute switch until speaking with Vitor, and I was feeling spooked here, like something was off.
And then Vitor said something that stayed with me.

Calvi had to accept this.

He was on the run.

He was nervous and panicking.

And he had no other solution.

So he had to accept going to London.

So you're saying at this point Calvi is almost resigned?

Resigned, yes.

Because they basically imposed this departure and arrival and the accommodation. And he accepted.
Vitor made a hopeless face. I can still see it.
Up to this point, Vitor described a somewhat resilient Calvi, fighting to get his briefcase back, chatty with Vitor as they drove into Austria. The Calvi I'd known for these two years of research, the uber planner, control freak, master of his destiny.
But hearing the word resigned, I saw that Calvi disappear, turning into something different. I could see Calvi surrendering, being ushered off to the place where he'd die within days.
Did he suspect that maybe Vitor and or Carboni weren't his saviors? That maybe they were the wolves guiding him to a more sinister place? I mean, to recap, in less than a week, Roberto Calvi had secretly flown to Trieste, in the far northeast of Italy. From there, he took a speedboat across the Adriatic to sneak into Yugoslavia.
From Yugoslavia, he drove to southeast Austria, taking a rest at a beautiful chateau. Then, he took a road trip across Austria with his new best bud, Silvano Vitor, right up to the border with Switzerland, where, at the last moment, he was told by men whose motives I'm still not sure of, to charter a private jet to London.
So we arrived at London Gatwick, and we land off to the side where the private jets land. No commercial flight.
No passport through a back door. Vitor kept taking me through the details of their trip and he explained that Carboni had booked a suite at a cheap hotel in a bad part of Chelsea.
Vitor called it a zero-star hotel. Calvi went totally mad here.
As soon as we got in, he ran to the phone and started complaining. I can't stay here.
He was saying he had to meet real important people, and the president of the bank couldn't host people in such an environment. So that's interesting.
Roberto Calvi resigned to his handlers, but still seriously trying to make a deal in London. He called his family and told them not to worry anymore.
Calvi's son, Carlo, said in testimony after his dad's death that he'd claimed to be working on something big that would have taken care of all of his problems. Calvi told his wife Clara something similar.
The last call we had together, he said, this job is going with some troubles, but it's going to blow up as a crazy, crazy thing. A big deal that would blow up into a wonderful thing that could change their lives.
But what were the details of that deal? He didn't tell Clara, Carlo, or anyone else. Even though Calvi was in deal-making mode, he barely left the hotel.
He was haunted by this fear of being recognized by someone on the streets in London. And so Vitor was the one that brought back most of their meals.
Vitor was the one that checked airline schedules in case they needed to move again.

Vitor was Calvi's main human contact.

And in the midst of that strange arrangement,

I just kept waiting for something awful to happen,

like a big plot twist.

But Calvi's last days,

even with him acting like there was one more deal out there, one key phone call to make,

Thank you. plot twist.
But Calvi's last days, even with him acting like there was one more deal out there, one key phone call to make, they seemed kind of procedural. At night, Vitor says he and Calvi would sit together in their PJs and just chat, bonding like a long-term bizarro sleepover, acting almost like the entire world wasn't looking for them.

And then... long-term bizarro sleepover, acting almost like the entire world wasn't looking for them.

And then, on June 17th, a day before Calvi died,

Vitor says they received news that Calvi's secretary

had jumped out of a window at the Banco Ambrosiano to her death.

It was unbelievable.

Unbelievable.

This was a blow to him.

He basically dropped to the floor.

That's next time on Shadow Kingdom.

He learned on the telephone that his powers with the Banco Ambrosiano had been removed. He opened the door, he got in, and there was no Calvi, just a suitcase.
Perhaps the key to Calvi's death is to be found here on the River Thames. Shadow Kingdom is a production of Crooked Media and campsite me.
Thank you. and me.
Joe Hawthorne is our lead producer and Ashley Ann Krigwam 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 Laitremuwen. Voice acting by Bonnie Biagini, Andrea Bianchi, Ferrante Cosma, Luca De Gennaro, Michele Teodori, and Mustafa Zialan.
Field recording by Justin Trieger, Jonathan Zenti, Pete Shev, Jonathan Gruber, and Joanna Broder. Fact-checking by Zoe

Sullivan. Our executive producers are me, Niccolo Mainoni, along with Sarah Geismer, Katie Long,

and Alison Falsetta from Crooked Media. Josh Dean, Adam Hoff, Matt Scher, and Vanessa Gregoriadis

are the executive producers at Campside Media.

One last thing before we go.

You can also listen to Shadow Kingdom in Italian.

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