God’s Banker I 3. The Grandmaster

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Speaker 2 As the sun rose on a spring day in 1981,

Speaker 2 police officers in unmarked cars drove south from Milan, past fields, farms, and small towns, until they arrived at a mattress factory and knocked on the door.

Speaker 2 These men were working with Judge Giuliano Torone. Torone was famous for investigating the mafia in Milan, Calvey's hometown.
He was convinced Calvey was involved with the mob.

Speaker 2 Torone retold the story to me.

Speaker 5 Roberto Calvey was the money laundering man of the Corleonesi, Luciano Liggio, Salvatore Rina, etc.

Speaker 2 But on this day, Torone wasn't actually investigating Calvi. No, instead, he'd received a tip that bordered on conspiracy theory.

Speaker 2 That in this factory town, there could be evidence linking the mafia with an illegal underground branch of the Freemasons.

Speaker 2 He took the tip seriously, hand-picking officers for his team and keeping the raid confidential, even from other cops. Torone was worried that local police would tip off the Masonic group.

Speaker 11 I

Speaker 7 wrote down an order.

Speaker 5 You have to go

Speaker 5 in complete secret.

Speaker 2 The police pushed open the factory doors and were greeted by a secretary. who led them to the second floor.
As the officers climbed upstairs, they weren't quite sure what to expect.

Speaker 2 They were hoping to find a paper trail of where the mafia was moving its money, so they scoured desk drawers and bookshelves for documents, all while a secretary kept a close and silent watch on them.

Speaker 2 It didn't take long until they found a briefcase belonging to the factory's owner, Licho Jelli.

Speaker 5 We knew that Licho Jelli was a powerful person.

Speaker 5 We knew that he was protected and we did not know the names, but we knew that he had faithful persons among the Carabinieri, even the finance police.

Speaker 2 When police opened Gelli's briefcase, they were in for a shock.

Speaker 10 Inside were documents that looked like a sprawling blueprint for a new world order.

Speaker 2 They were all about bringing Italy back to its glory days under fascism.

Speaker 2 Jelly had written a manifesto wherein Freemasons would carefully infiltrate the government, buy up all the major media outlets, destroy unions, silence journalists, take over the military, and eliminate communism.

Speaker 2 Turone's men looked back and forth at each other and then at the papers.

Speaker 5 What the hell had they just stumbled upon?

Speaker 2 At best, they thought they'd find a mafia-linked safe house or where dirty money was stashed, but cryptic documents about a shadowy government takeover, they definitely didn't see that coming.

Speaker 2 And they still had more of the factory to search.

Speaker 2 Meanwhile, the secretary just kept watching and waiting.

Speaker 5 They had asked the lady whether there was a safe, and the lady said, yes, that is the safe, but I have not the keys.

Speaker 2 Jelly had a safe there. Great.

Speaker 2 But Jelly's secretary didn't have the keys. Not so great.

Speaker 2 It didn't take long, though, before Turone's men noticed the secretary fiddling with her purse.

Speaker 6 And the lady said, I have to go for a phone call.

Speaker 2 As the secretary made her way down the stairs, she pulled something shiny from her bag. It looked like she was going to pass a set of keys to someone who had just arrived.

Speaker 2 One of the cops, though, snuck down the steps, rushed behind the secretary, and actually grabbed the keys out of her hand. She was stunned for a moment, then recovered and said,

Speaker 2 be careful about what you're doing. My commander is a very powerful person.

Speaker 2 Tuidone's men ran back back up the stairs, found the safe, jammed the key in the lock.

Speaker 2 Inside

Speaker 2 were what looked like loyalty oaths to a branch of Freemasons called Propaganda Due.

Speaker 2 Signed documents that declared each member would obey the Masonic Lodge and the Grand Master.

Speaker 2 The safe held oaths from the country's most powerful military officers. From journalists, diplomats, professors, judges.

Speaker 2 There were at least 30 members of Italian parliament, two undersecretaries, government ministers, even future Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Speaker 2 According to these oaths, they had all joined Propaganda Due.

Speaker 2 Turone's men seem to have stumbled upon a master list of Propaganda Due members in Italy and beyond.

Speaker 2 And right in the middle was Roberto Calvi's name.

Speaker 2 From crooked media and campsite media, this is Shadow Kingdom,

Speaker 2 God's Banker.

Speaker 2 I'm Niccolo Maignoni, and this is episode three,

Speaker 2 The Grand Master.

Speaker 11 Government number 40 collapsed yesterday under the weight of a most unusual scandal.

Speaker 6 There had to be a hidden motive.

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Speaker 2 After I spoke with Tirone, I was kind of dumbfounded. Now I talked to both a a mafia insider and a mafia prosecutor, both of whom believed that Calvi was working with the mafia.

Speaker 2 But Turone was adding another super-secretive group into Calvey's world.

Speaker 2 What the heck was Propaganda Due? Even the group's name was mysterious. Propaganda 2.

Speaker 10 Was there Propaganda 1?

Speaker 2 What was this shadowy group, and why would Calvey, a fairly public banker, get involved with them? Well, I learned that propaganda due or P2,

Speaker 2 they're not your average Freemasons. Freemasonry's origins are murky, but it likely started 500 years ago as a trade group for actual masons in Scotland, as in stone and brick masons.

Speaker 2 From there, it spread to other professions and countries, eventually reaching the Americas.

Speaker 14 56 men gathered together on July 4th, 1776, to institute a new kind of government among men. 31 of them were members of Masonic lodges.
Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, John Hancock.

Speaker 2 The list goes on.

Speaker 2 George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Paul Revere, all Masons. There's still Masonic lodges and halls peppered around the U.S.

Speaker 2 Generally, it's more of a brotherhood type of community organization. But P2 in Italy was a very different, elite kind of Masonic Brotherhood.

Speaker 2 A bastion of uber-wealthy, occasionally hooded men plotting world domination. So, obviously, I started digging deeper into what P2 was.

Speaker 2 It turns out, though, that this is hard.

Speaker 2 If you're ever looking for an easy way to challenge yourself, you might try reporting on a secret Italian society from the Cold War.

Speaker 2 I tried calling former members, friends of members, investigators, and sometimes I'd get through.

Speaker 9 Just following up and saying we would still really, really love to chat

Speaker 2 your thoughts. But when I told them I was interested in P2,

Speaker 2 they'd go off the record or just ghost.

Speaker 2 The world of P2 Freemasons, I learned, was a world of smoke and mirrors, of double entendres and Cold War intrigue.

Speaker 2 But I was able to piece together eyewitness accounts from P2's early days.

Speaker 10 Picture a mansion hidden on a remote hill in Tuscany.

Speaker 2 Menacing-looking sculptures in the courtyard, including stone serpents with security cameras hidden in their eyes.

Speaker 2 Inside, exquisite marble halls lined with hanging portraits of 20th-century dictators: Perrone, Mussolini, Hitler.

Speaker 2 Around a marble table, you might find a handful of new P2 initiates, dressed in satin robes, faces obscured by black hoods, sitting next to their grand master, Licho Jelli, the only one who shows his face.

Speaker 2 He boasted about this ceremony years later on TV.

Speaker 2 Jelly described the dark uniforms, masks, and symbols of a flaming sword. He was the only one who knew all the recruits' identities.

Speaker 2 According to one account, Jelly would lift a small axe above a table and slam it down, asking for new members to enter.

Speaker 2 The initiates were blindfolded, sweat maybe dripping from their forehead, as the Grand Master began to question them.

Speaker 2 Are you prepared to die in order to preserve the secrets of propaganda due?

Speaker 2 Do you proclaim yourself an anti-communist?

Speaker 2 Are you prepared to fight and face death so that we may destroy this government?

Speaker 2 The initiate would say, I do.

Speaker 2 And then the blindfold would be removed.

Speaker 2 So, these colorful details of the the ceremony come from the first-hand account of a P2 member. It's a theatrical induction that Jelly likely reserved for his fanciest recruits.

Speaker 2 And I want to zoom in on Jelly for a moment, the man who recruited Calvey and made P2 what it was.

Speaker 2 I learned that in the 60s, when Jelly joined the Italian Freemasons, these guys were largely democratic and apolitical. But as Jelly rose to power, he remade his local group, P2, in his image.

Speaker 2 Anti-communist and pro-fascist.

Speaker 2 Very pro-fascist.

Speaker 2 Jelly said, quote, I studied with fascism. I fought for fascism.
I am a fascist, and I will die a fascist.

Speaker 2 I realized, after listening to hours of tapes of this guy, that for Jelly, World War II had never really ended.

Speaker 2 He came of age under Mussolini, when Italy was unified by a strong right identity and a single leader.

Speaker 2 To him, the Italy of the 1970s, around the time that Calvey was ascending, wasn't social freefall. Divorce and abortion were legal.
The streets were filled with hippies, liberals, and communists.

Speaker 11 The battle lines have been bombing rightly from my extreme right-wing Liberal Party to the Communist Party, have had a tenacious fight with the Vatican.

Speaker 18 Italy, one of the most Roman Catholic countries in the world and home of the Vatican, legalized abortion today.

Speaker 21 Italy has inflation, unemployment, and an impotent government, political terrorism, and street violence. But the savior, it may turn to history.

Speaker 2 The P2 leader was obsessed with restoring order to Italy. He wanted to demolish democracy and bring back a dictatorship.

Speaker 2 On a certain level, Calvey's connection to Jelly and P2 made sense. Calvey did volunteer to fight for the Axis powers.

Speaker 2 He was a rich banker, certainly anti-communist, but this was much more radical than anything I'd previously heard about Calvey.

Speaker 2 I knew Calvey wanted to be rich and powerful, sure, but I didn't get the impression that he wanted a far-right takeover of the state.

Speaker 2 And at this point in my research, in my quest to figure out who killed Calvy, I felt like I was, yet again, tripping face first into a wall of absurd conspiracies.

Speaker 2 I mean, a secret society plotting a national coup?

Speaker 10 Come on.

Speaker 2 I needed to find an anchor, someone to comfort the English side of my brain, someone that could say, there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this.

Speaker 2 That's when I found an American in Europe who who could relate to exactly what I was going through. I called him up when I was in Italy.

Speaker 6 I was a financial journalist. I was interested in the Calvey story.
They said his body was found in the city of London, and so I grabbed a cab and went to the city of London.

Speaker 6 It was just on an impulse.

Speaker 2 Larry Gerwin wrote one of the first books on Calvey after he died, and he interviewed scores of Calvey's friends and family. He also felt this overwhelming sense of paranoia from Italians.

Speaker 6 I'll give you a concrete example from the Calvey case. During my research, I wanted to interview Roberto Calvey's brother, Leone,

Speaker 8 and I couldn't get an appointment with him.

Speaker 6 I eventually tracked him down. And when I said I was working on a book, he says in Italian, he says, perconto di Chi.
You know, on whose behalf are you writing this book?

Speaker 6 And I tried to explain to him, this is a commercial venture. I'm a professional writer, but it was beyond him.
There had to be a hidden motive.

Speaker 6 There had to be like some enemy of Calvey who was secretly paying me to write this book.

Speaker 2 Through his research, Gruen was able to sketch the details of an early meeting between Calvey and Jelly.

Speaker 2 It was around 1970, a decade before the raid on P2, and Calvey was still a mid-level executive looking for a leg up.

Speaker 2 His then mentor, Michael Esindona, recommended Calvey to Jelly.

Speaker 2 When Calvey entered Jelly's office, he saw a wide desk with letters from senators, CEOs, celebrities, exactly the type of people Calvey had always wanted to hang out with, always wanted to be.

Speaker 2 So I can imagine how flattered and how charmed Calvey must have been when Jelly told him, we want you, Calvey. I want you.

Speaker 6 Jelly was like a spider with a web and he got Calvey into his web.

Speaker 2 Talking to Gerwin, there's no doubt that when Jelly looked at Calvey, he saw dollar signs, or Lira signs, I should say.

Speaker 2 Calvey was an up-and-coming executive in one of Italy's biggest banks, a bank that was increasingly international in its business.

Speaker 2 And that was handy because Jelly's pro-fascist, anti-communist ambitions weren't limited to Italy.

Speaker 2 At one point, Jelly was planning weapons sales to Argentina. Another time, he wanted to orchestrate oil transfers in Libya.

Speaker 2 Calvi could move money quickly and secretly to make those deals happen.

Speaker 6 And the importance of P2, purely from the Calvey point of view, was that they claimed that they could help him.

Speaker 2 In return, Jelly offered Calvey connections and protection. If Calvey joined P2, Jelly said he could start doing favors for him and help him get promoted.

Speaker 6 Telling him, I can help you because I know these politicians or I can I have influence with the magistrates or whatever.

Speaker 2 Jelly cultivated an aura that only he had these connections. Only Jelly could connect Calvey with important politicians and executives.

Speaker 2 He could get the nobility to respect Calvey in a way the banker had never been able to do on his own.

Speaker 2 Calvey loved the idea of this. He was new to being rich and very preoccupied, borderline paranoid with the idea of an elite cabal running Italy.

Speaker 6 If you told him some conspiracy theory that there's a group of people sitting in a room who decide the fate of the world, he would be very inclined to believe this.

Speaker 6 This is one of the things that made him vulnerable to being manipulated.

Speaker 2 Being part of P2 meant that no one would mess with you.

Speaker 2 And if they did, you'd have very powerful friends on your side. And this was also really appealing to Calvi, because Italy wasn't the safest place at the time.

Speaker 7 Rome.

Speaker 3 The evening police patrol leaves headquarters. It's a routine exercise, but it's taking place during the tensest moment in Italian post-war history.

Speaker 3 Since March the 16th, Italy, which has known continuous economic and political uncertainty for a decade, has been without its central political figure.

Speaker 18 A former mayor of Turin, Italy, was shot and wounded today outside his home. An anonymous

Speaker 21 political terrorism and street violence.

Speaker 20 Two sons of a neo-fascist official died after someone poured gasoline under the door of their apartment and set it on fire.

Speaker 10 The neo-fascists and the communists, but the murderers are not.

Speaker 2 Italy was going through an economic boom, but it was also extremely dangerous. My parents remember this time well.

Speaker 2 I grew up hearing stories about how their city was bombed, how you'd hear gunshots in the night.

Speaker 2 These were called Yannidi Pyumbo, the years of lead, because there were thousands of shootings and terrorist attacks from the mafia, the communists, and the neo-fascists.

Speaker 2 Society was extremely unstable. Every bank executive could be kidnapped for ransom by domestic terrorists, or they might have their bank raided by left-wing regulators.

Speaker 2 Jelly could sense that Calvey was afraid of the world around him, a fear that bordered on paranoia. And the Grand Master fed it by inventing threats to Calvey that P2 could magically take care of.

Speaker 6 Somebody like a Jelly could say to Calvey, I heard that there's going to be a surprise inspection of your bank on Monday, and I think I can get it called off.

Speaker 6 And then he comes back and says, I got them to call it off.

Speaker 2 Jelly would call Calvey multiple times after their first meeting. He'd say, there was an attempt to arrest you.
Or there was an attempt on your life, but I foiled it. And somehow, Calvey felt safer.

Speaker 6 This raid on the bank, it never happened. Jelly's worth his weight in gold.
That's the kind of naivete that he had. And then he sticks his hand out and Calvey gives him some money.

Speaker 2 P2 had connections to media, business leaders, judges, police, spies, even the mafia.

Speaker 2 And Calvey wrote in later letters that Jelly, quote, had me convinced that all political and financial power really depended on him.

Speaker 2 And so, according to Gerwin, by the summer of 1975, Roberto Calvey was sold.

Speaker 2 He pledged himself to the Freemasons and pledged himself to Licho Jelli.

Speaker 2 His signed sealed oath went into Jelly safe.

Speaker 2 From there, it only took Calvey a few months to reach the pinnacle. Promotion to chairman of the Banco Ambrosiano.
Roberto Calvey's ultimate goal.

Speaker 2 The thing was,

Speaker 2 he had tied himself to Licho Jelli and the P2 Masons. He owed them.
They expected his loyalty. And there's a reason nobody wanted to talk with me about propaganda due.

Speaker 2 People who defied or even slighted P2

Speaker 2 met with violent ends.

Speaker 2 Very violent.

Speaker 2 That's after the break.

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Speaker 2 As my conversation with Gerwin went on, I became increasingly disturbed.

Speaker 2 Here was yet another well-respected journalist who covered Calvi at the time, and here he was confirming the more conspiratorial parts of the story.

Speaker 2 I asked Irwin about the documents Turona's men found in Jelly's office, the ones that included plans for a takeover of the Italian state.

Speaker 6 There's something called the strategy of tension. Are you familiar with that term?

Speaker 2 Strategia della tensione.

Speaker 2 It meant that violence. was at the heart of Jelly's plan.
He wanted to destabilize the country through kidnappings, shootings, and mass arrests.

Speaker 2 Then, when people were looking for answers, P2-controlled media outlets would pump out propaganda about how nice it'd be to have a strong man fix everything.

Speaker 6 The right-wingers would do a false flag terrorist attack. something that they would design in such a way that the left-wingers would be blamed for it.

Speaker 6 And that this could justify a lurch to the right, an authoritarian lurch by the government, because people would be fed up. Look at those horrible lefties who did this terrorist attack.

Speaker 6 We need tougher police.

Speaker 9 We need to crack down on people.

Speaker 6 We need to go and lock up all these left-wing people. When in fact, it was the right-wingers who planted the bomb.

Speaker 2 Communist groups were staging student revolts and worker strikes. some of which turned violent.

Speaker 2 But what Irwin is saying here is that some fascist fascist groups, including possibly P2, planted terrorist attacks that they'd then blame on the communists.

Speaker 13 A massive explosion today in a train station in Bologna, Italy killed at least 76 people and injured almost 200 more.

Speaker 2 It may turn out to be the most serious terrorist incident to have occurred in Western Europe.

Speaker 6 They view it, oh, this system is completely rotten, completely corrupt, completely illegitimate. Therefore, it's okay to blow up this entire building or to kill these thousands of people.

Speaker 6 You know, that's the mentality you get. It's really crazy.

Speaker 2 And after Calvey became bank chairman, Jelly started regularly pressuring Calvey to fund some of his other P2 projects, propaganda projects to build on the P2 playbook.

Speaker 6 He manipulated Calvey to just an incredible degree. He got Calvey to buy a media company, Rizzoli Cordiere della Sera, which is one of the most important print media businesses in Italy.

Speaker 6 and they own Cordieria de La Sera, which is the most respected newspaper.

Speaker 2 With Calvey's help, Jelly filled the ownership board, the editorial board, and the writer's room with P2 members.

Speaker 2 From there, Jelly got Calvey to invest in foreign mining, construction, real estate, banking, even arms deals.

Speaker 6 They took money from him. They manipulated him into doing things that were bad for the bank.

Speaker 2 One day, the grand master would ask for help with Saudi construction projects. Another day, he'd get Calvey to open a friendly Argentine bank.

Speaker 2 Each deal got Jelly closer to powerful leaders who shared his politics, at least his hatred of communism. Perrone, Noriega, even Ronald Reagan.

Speaker 2 And it didn't seem to matter how many times Calvey helped Jelly. There was always another request, always another quote-unquote business opportunity.

Speaker 2 So not that long after Calvey's promotion, Gerwin said he was losing millions, hundreds of millions of dollars. But rather than risk his precious job, Calvey covered up the losses.

Speaker 6 And so Calvey had to reassure creditors that Ambrosiano was okay, everything was cool, don't worry. So what does he do?

Speaker 2 Calvey built a financial network so big and so complex that no one even inside his bank could follow his moves and losses.

Speaker 2 A labyrinth of foreign banks and shell companies all owned by the Ambrosiano in Milan.

Speaker 6 So the bank in Milan owned the Luxembourg Holding Company. The Luxembourg Holding Company in turn owned a bank in the Bahamas, one in Nicaragua, one in Panama, one in Peru, etc.

Speaker 6 And the bank regulators in Italy had no insight into what they were doing.

Speaker 2 German helped me understand this was Calvey's greatest skill and also his downfall.

Speaker 2 He could take big debts and bad loans and as if by magic, put them in his briefcase and make them disappear.

Speaker 2 But of course, debts don't disappear. Eventually, they have to be paid back.

Speaker 2 Throughout the 70s, Calvey would have the Ambrosiano borrow money from big banks around the world. These are big institutions from America, England, Japan, you name it.

Speaker 2 He'd then take that money and loan it to companies in Europe and the Americas. So on paper, the Ambrosiano's balance sheet looked good.

Speaker 2 Calvey's bank borrowed money, it loaned money, and it collected interests and then repaid those original debts.

Speaker 2 What no one knew was that Calvey was loaning that original money to shell companies he secretly controlled. Ghost companies that didn't really do anything other than collect Calvey money.

Speaker 2 But because they were offshore, no one regulator could see what he was doing. And here's the kicker.

Speaker 2 Some of his shell companies were actually using their loans from the Ambrosiano to buy stock in the Ambrosiano.

Speaker 10 Sneaky.

Speaker 2 This was Calvey's way of driving up the bank's share price and cementing his power.

Speaker 6 Collectively, his jummy companies owned almost 20% of Banco Boziano, which was enough for him to control the bank.

Speaker 2 Paradoxically, this made it easier for Calvey to hide what he was doing because he filled the bank's board with yes men.

Speaker 2 So each time Jelly called Calvey on his private line with a new request, the banker would squirm and then find a way to oblige the grandmaster.

Speaker 2 Calvey racked up debt for Jelly in 1976, 77, 78, 79, 80, until 1981, when news of Tirone's raid and the list of P2 members hit the media.

Speaker 11 Government number 40 collapsed yesterday under the weight of a most unusual scandal.

Speaker 11 The revelation that nearly 1,000 of Italy's elite, including three cabinet members, were allegedly members of an outlawed, super-secret, super-evil Masonic lodge called P2.

Speaker 2 Authorities started to ask questions about Calvey. Why was he on this shadowy list? Who was Calvey loaning money to?

Speaker 2 How safe were deposits at his bank?

Speaker 2 In public, Calvey presented a cool, calm demeanor, even denying he was a member of P2.

Speaker 2 But with all the bad press, Calvey had problems bringing in new investors and depositors. And as his debt mounted, Calvey tried avoiding Jelly.

Speaker 2 When the Mason would call, Gerwin says Calvey's family would cover for him. They'd say, he's in bed, he's sick, he's out.

Speaker 2 When they did talk, Calvey was a mess. The banker would plead poverty.
He didn't have any more money for oil transfers, arms deals, or right-wing dictators, let alone newspaper ventures.

Speaker 2 But Jelly threatened Calvey. If you can't pay me, I have no use for you.

Speaker 2 Calvey was at a loose end.

Speaker 2 His wife recalled those moments in a grainy PBS interview.

Speaker 23 He told me that and was frightened, so frightened.

Speaker 23 And he cried and he said,

Speaker 23 If they kill me, maybe I will not see you anymore.

Speaker 2 If they kill me, maybe I will not see you anymore, Calvey told his wife.

Speaker 2 When things would get tough and it felt like the world was closing in, Roberto Calvey would often retreat to his papers, his physical papers. Remember, this is the late 70s, early 80s.

Speaker 2 Calvey was old school.

Speaker 2 This is a rare recording of Calvey's son describing his father's habit.

Speaker 2 Calvi's son, Carlo, said that when his father needed to focus, he'd take documents out of his leather briefcase, one by one.

Speaker 2 He'd lay chart after chart out on the desk. Then, when the desk was full of papers, he'd move to the floor, laying each sheet down on the ground of his palatial office, piece by piece.

Speaker 2 Then, his eyes would dart from one piece of paper to the next, each eye movement representing a movement of cash. It was like a financial opera that only maestro Calvey could hear.

Speaker 2 And by 1981, the opera was tragic.

Speaker 2 No matter how Calvey shuffled the papers on the floor, no matter how many times he recalculated his accounts and his debts, there was no way to make the numbers work.

Speaker 2 I can see it now, looking over Calvey's shoulder. the way he kept getting himself in deeper and deeper.

Speaker 2 How every time he obliged some new funding request request from Jelly, it created a bigger problem for him down the road.

Speaker 2 Was Calvy naive enough to think Jelly and his friends would pay the Ambrosiano back? That he could keep adding new debt while juggling mafia payments?

Speaker 2 I picture Calvy sinking into his chair, surrendering, doing what human beings do when everything falls apart. When the darkness overpowers the light, when everything seems lost.

Speaker 2 I imagine Calvy closing his eyes and praying for help.

Speaker 2 But while you and I might close our eyes and look up to an abstract God,

Speaker 2 Roberto Calvy called upon the literal representative of God on earth.

Speaker 6 Good evening.

Speaker 15 The Pope is in Poland. The leader of the Roman Catholic Church has returned home.

Speaker 2 That's next time on Shadow Kingdom.

Speaker 2 Covert, surreptitious financing back to Poland to destabilize communism.

Speaker 9 Crackdown seemed inevitable. If not by Polish authorities, then by the Soviet Army.

Speaker 24 I say, listen, I'm very frank. I don't give a shit about you.

Speaker 2 Shadow Kingdom is a production of crooked media and campside media. It's hosted and reported by me, Nicola Majnoni, with additional reporting by Simon Adzeki and Joe Hawthorne.

Speaker 2 The show is written by Joe Hawthorne, Ashley Ann Kriegbaum, and me. Joe Hawthorne is our lead producer, and Ashley Ann Krigbaum is our managing producer.
Tracy Samuelson is our story editor.

Speaker 2 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 Iwen Lai Tremuen.

Speaker 2 Voice acting by Bonnie Biagini, Andrea Bianchi, Ferrante Cosma, Luca DeGennado, Michele Teodori, and Mustafa Zialin.

Speaker 2 Field recording by Justin Trieger, Jonathan Zenti, Pete Chev, Jonathan Grubert, and Joanna Broder. Fact-checking by Zoe Sullivan.

Speaker 2 Our executive producers are me, Niccolo Mainoni, along with Sarah Geismer, Katie Long, and Alison Falsetta from Crooked Media.

Speaker 2 Josh Dean, Adam Hoff, Mash Hare, and Vanessa Gregoriadis are the executive producers at Campsite Media.

Speaker 2 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.