God’s Banker I 3. The Grandmaster

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These men were working with Judge Giuliano Turone. Turone was famous for investigating the mafia in Milan, Calvi's hometown.
He was convinced Calvi was involved with the mob. Turone retold the story to me.
Roberto Calvi was the money laundering man of the Corleonesi, Luciano Liggio, Salvatore Rina, etc. But on this day, Turone wasn't actually investigating Calvi.
No, instead, he'd received a tip that bordered on conspiracy theory. That in this factory town, there could be evidence linking the mafia with an illegal underground branch of the Freemasons.
He took the tip seriously, hand-picking officers for his team and keeping the raid confidential, even from other cops. Turone was worried that local police would tip off the Masonic group.
I wrote down an order. You have to go in complete secret.
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.
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. It didn't take long until they found a briefcase belonging to the factory's owner, Licio Gelli.
We knew that Licio Gelli was a powerful person. 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.
When police opened Gelli's briefcase, they were in for a shock. Inside were documents that looked like a sprawling blueprint for a new world order.
They were all about bringing Italy back to its glory days under fascism. Jalli 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 government, buy up all the major media outlets,

destroy unions, silence journalists,

take over the military,

and eliminate communism.

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

What the hell had they just stumbled upon?

At best, they thought they'd find a mafia-linked safehouse or where dirty money was stashed, but cryptic documents about a shadowy government takeover, they definitely didn't see that coming. And they still had more of the factory to search.
Meanwhile, the secretary just kept watching and waiting. 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. Jelly had a safe there.
Great. But Jelly's secretary didn't have the keys.
Not so great. It didn't take long, though, before Turone's men noticed the secretary fiddling with her purse.
And the lady said, I have to go for a phone call. 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. 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, be careful about what you're doing. My commander is a very powerful person.
Turone's men ran back up the stairs, found the safe, jammed the key in the lock. Inside were what looked like loyalty oaths to a branch of Freemasons called Propaganda Due.
Signed documents that declared each member would obey the Masonic Lodge and the Grand Master. You could find carabinieri, guardia di finanza, parlamentari...
The safe held oaths from the country's most powerful military officers, from journalists, diplomats, professors, judges, there were at least 30 members of Italian parliament, two undersecretaries, government ministers, even future Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. According to these oaths, they had all joined Propaganda Due.
Turone's men seem to have stumbled upon a master list of Propaganda Due members in Italy and beyond.

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

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Copyright 2025. After I spoke with Turone, I was kind of dumbfounded.

Now I talked to both a mafia insider and a mafia prosecutor, both of whom believed the Calvi was working with the mafia.

But Turone was adding another super secretive group in the Calvi's world.

What the heck was Propaganda 2? Even the group's name was mysterious. Propaganda Two.
Was there a Propaganda One? What was this shadowy group, and why would Calvi, a fairly public banker, get involved with them? Well, I learned that Propaganda Due or P2, 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.
From there, it spread to other professions and countries eventually reaching the Americas. Fifty-six men gathered together on July 4th, 1776 to institute a new kind of government among men.
Thirty-one of them were members of Masonic lodges. Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, John Hancock.
The list goes on. George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Paul Revere, all Masons.
There are still Masonic lodges and halls peppered around the US. Generally, it's more of a brotherhood type of community organization.
But P2 in Italy was a very different elite kind of Masonic brotherhood, a bastion of uber wealthy, occasionally hooded men plotting world domination.

So, obviously, I started digging deeper into what P2 was.

It turns out, though, that this is hard.

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.

I tried calling former members, friends of members P2, they'd go off the record. Or just ghost me.
The world of P2 Freemasons, I learned, was a world of smoke and mirrors, of double entendres

and Cold War intrigue.

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

Picture a mansion hidden on a remote hill in Tuscany.

Menacing looking sculptures in the courtyard, including stone serpents with security cameras

Thank you. on a remote hill in Tuscany.
Menacing-looking sculptures in the courtyard, including stone serpents with security cameras hidden in their eyes. Inside, exquisite marble halls lined with hanging portraits of 20th century dictators.
Peron, Mussolini, Hitler. 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 grandmaster, Licio Gelli, the only one who shows his face. He boasted about this ceremony years later on TV.
Jellie described the dark uniforms, masks, and symbols of a flaming sword. He was the only one who knew all the recruits' identities.
According to one account, Jelly would lift a small axe above a table and slam it down, asking for new members to enter. The initiates were blindfolded, sweat maybe dripping from their forehead, as the Grand Master began to question them.
Are you prepared to die in order to preserve the secrets of Propaganda Due? Do you proclaim yourself an anti-communist? Are you prepared to fight and face death so that we may destroy this government? The initiate would say, I do. And then the blindfold would be removed.
So these colorful details of the ceremony come from the firsthand account of a P2 member. It's a theatrical induction that Jelly likely reserved for his fanciest recruits.

And I want to zoom in on Jelly for a moment,

the man who recruited Calvi and made P2 what it was.

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. Anti-communist and pro-fascist.
Very pro-fascist. Gelli said, quote, I studied with fascism.
I fought for fascism. I am a fascist and I will die a fascist.
I realized after listening to hours of tapes of this guy that for Gelli, World War II had never really ended. He came of age under Mussolini when Italy was unified by a strong right identity and a single leader.
To him, the Italy of the 1970s, around the time that Calvi was ascending, wasn't social freefall. Divorce and abortion were legal.
The streets were filled with hippies, liberals, and communists. The battle lines have been forming in Italy for months.
The extreme right-wing liberal party to the communist party have had a tenacious fight with the Vatican. Italy, one of the most Roman Catholic countries in the world and home of the Vatican.
Legalized abortion today. Italy has inflation, unemployment, and an impotent government, political terrorism, and street violence.
But the savior they may turn to this time is the P2 leader. The P2 leader was obsessed with restoring order to Italy.
He wanted to demolish democracy and bring back a dictatorship. On a certain level, Calvi's connection to Jelly and P2 made sense.
Calvi did volunteer to fight for the Axis powers. He was a rich banker, certainly anti-communist.
But this was much more radical than anything I'd previously heard about Calvi. I knew Calvi wanted to be rich and powerful, sure.
But I didn't get the impression that he wanted a far-right takeover of the state. At this point in my research, in my quest to figure out who killed Calvi, I felt like I was, yet again, tripping face-first into a wall of absurd conspiracies.
I mean, a secret society plotting a national coup? Come on. 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.
That's when I found an American in Europe who could relate to exactly what I was going through. I called him up when I was in Italy.
I was a financial journalist. I was interested in the Calvi 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.
It was just on an impulse. Larry Gerwin wrote one of the first books on Calvi after he died.
And he interviewed scores of Calvi's friends and family. He also felt this overwhelming sense of paranoia from Italians.
I'll give you a concrete example from the Calvi case. During my research, I wanted to interview Roberto Calvi's brother, Leone, and I couldn't get an appointment with him.
I eventually tracked him down. And when I said I I was working on a book, he says in Italian, he says, per conto di chi? You know, on whose behalf are you writing this book? 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. There had to be like some enemy of Calvi who was secretly paying me to write this book.
Through his research, Gruen was able to sketch the details of an early meeting between Calvi and Jelly. It was around 1970, a decade before the raid on P2, and Calvi was still a mid-level executive looking for a leg up.
His then mentor, Michele Sindona, recommended Calvi to Jelly. When Calvi entered Jelly's office, he saw a wide desk with letters from senators, CEOs, celebrities, exactly the type of people Calvi had always wanted to hang out with, always wanted to be.
So I can imagine how flattered and how charmed Calvi must have been when Jelly told him, we want you, Calvi. I want you.
Jelly was like a spider with a web and he got Calvi into his web. Talking to Gerwin, there's no doubt that when Jelly looked at Calvi, he saw dollar signs, or lira signs, I should say.
Calvi was an up-and-coming executive in one of Italy's biggest banks, a bank that was increasingly international in its business. And that was handy because Jelly's pro-fascist, anti-communist ambitions weren't limited to Italy.
At one point, Jelly was planning weapons sales to Argentina. Another time, he wanted to orchestrate oil transfers in Libya.
Calvi could move money quickly and secretly to make those deals happen. And the importance of P2, purely from the Calvi point of view, was that they claimed that they could help him.
In return, Jelly offered Calvi connections and protection. If Calvi joined P2, Jelly said he could start doing favors for him and help him get promoted.
Telling him, I can help you because I know these politicians or I have influence with the magistrates or whatever. Jelly cultivated an aura that only he had these connections.
Only Jelly could connect Calvi with important politicians and executives. He could get the nobility to respect Calvi in a way the banker had never been able to do on his own.
Calvi 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.
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. This is one of the things that made him vulnerable to being manipulated.
Being part of P2 meant that no one would mess with you. 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. Rome.
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.
Since March the 16th, Italy, which has known continuous economic and political uncertainty for a decade, has been without its central political figure. A former mayor of Turin, Italy, was shot and wounded today outside his home.
Italy has inflation, unemployment, political terrorism, and street violence. Two sons of a neo-fascist official died after someone poured gasoline under the door of their apartment and set it on fire.

The neo-fascists and the communists...

Italy was going through an economic boom,

but it was also extremely dangerous.

My parents remember this time well.

I grew up hearing stories about how their city was bombed,

how you'd hear gunshots in the night. These were called Yanni di Pyombo, the years of lead, because there were thousands of shootings and terrorist attacks from the mafia, the communists, and the neo-fascists.
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. Jelly could sense that Calvi was afraid of the world around him.
A fear that bordered on paranoia. And the Grandmaster fed it by inventing threats to Calvi that Pitu could magically take care of.
Somebody like a Jelly could say to Calvi, 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. And he comes back and says, I got them to call it off.
Jelly would call Calvi multiple times after the 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, Calvi felt safer.

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 Calvi gives him some money. P2 had connections to media, business leaders, judges, police, spies, even the mafia.
And Calvi wrote in later letters that Jelly, quote, had me convinced that all political and financial power

really depended on him.

And so, according to Gerwin,

by the summer of 1975,

Roberto Calvi was sold.

He pledged himself to the Freemasons

and pledged himself to Licio Gelli.

His signed, sealed oath went into Gelli's safe. From there, it only took Calvi a few months to reach the pinnacle.
Promotion to chairman of the Banco Ambrosiano, Roberto Calvi's ultimate goal. The thing was, he had tied himself to Licio Gelli and the P2 Masons.

He owed them.

They expected his loyalty.

And there's a reason nobody wanted to talk with me about Propaganda 2.

People who defied or even slighted P2 met with violent ends.

Very violent.

That's after the break.

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As my conversation with Gerwin went on, I became increasingly disturbed. 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.
I asked Gerwin about the documents Turone's men found in Jelly's office, the ones that included plans for a takeover of the Italian state. There's something called the strategy of tension.
Are you familiar with that term? Strategia della tensione. It meant that violence was at the heart of Jelly's plan.
He wanted to destabilize the country through kidnappings, shootings, and mass arrests. 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.
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, 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.
We need tougher police, we need to crack down on people,

we need to go and lock up all these left-wing people,

when in fact it was the right-wingers who planted the bomb.

Communist groups were staging student revolts

and worker strikes,

some of which turned violent.

But what Gerwin is saying here

is that some fascist groups,

including possibly P2, planted terrorist attacks that they then blame on the communists. A massive explosion today in a train station in Bologna, Italy, killed at least 76 people and injured almost 200 more.
It may turn out to be the most serious terrorist incident to have occurred in Western Europe. They viewed, 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. You know, that's the mentality you get.
It's really crazy. And after Calvi became bank chairman, Jelly started regularly pressuring Calvi to fund some of his other P2 projects, propaganda projects to build on the P2 playbook.
He manipulated Calvi to just an incredible degree. He got Calvi to buy a media company, Rizzoli Corriere della Sera, which is one of the most important print media businesses in Italy.
And they own Corriere della Sera, which is the most respected newspaper. With Calvi's help, Jelly filled the ownership board, the editorial board, and the writer's room with P2 members.
From there, Jelly got Calvi to invest in foreign mining, construction, real estate, banking, even arms deals. They took money from him.
They manipulated him into doing things that were bad for the bank. One day, the Grand Master would ask for help with Saudi construction projects.
Another day, he'd get Calvi to open a friendly Argentine bank. Each deal got Jelly closer to powerful leaders who shared his politics.
At least his hatred of communism. Perón, Noriega, even Ronald Reagan.
And it didn't seem to matter how many times Calvi helped Jelly. There was always another request.
Always another, quote-unquote, business opportunity. So not that long after Calvi's promotion, Gerwin said he was losing

millions, hundreds of millions of dollars. But rather than risk his precious job, Calvi covered up the losses.
And so Calvi had to reassure creditors that Ambrosiano was okay, everything was cool. Don't worry.

So what does he do?

Calvi built a financial network so

big and so complex that no one, even inside his bank, could follow his moves and losses. A labyrinth of foreign banks and shell companies all owned by the Ambrosiano in Milan.
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.
And the bank regulators in Italy had no insight into what they were doing. Gurman helped me understand this was Calvi's greatest skill and also his downfall.
He could take big debts and bad loans and, as if by magic, put them in his briefcase and make them disappear. But of course, debts don't disappear.
Eventually, they have to be paid back. Throughout the 70s, Calvi would have the Ambrosiano borrow money from big banks around the world.
These are big institutions from America, England, Japan, you name it. 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.

Calvi's bank borrowed money, it loaned money,

and it collected interest and then repaid those original debts.

What no one knew was that Calvi was loaning that original money to shell companies he secretly controlled.

Ghost companies that didn't really do anything other than collect Calvi money. But because they were offshore, no one regulator could see what he was doing.
And here's the kicker. Some of his shell companies were actually using their loans from the Ambrosiano to buy stock in the Ambrosiano.
Sneaky. This was Calvi's way of driving up the bank's share price and cementing his power.
Collectively, his dummy companies owned almost 20% of Banco Ambrosiano, which was enough for him to control the bank. Paradoxically, this made it easier for Calvi to hide what he was doing because he filled the bank's board with yes men.
So each time Jelly called Calvi on his private line with a new request, the banker would squirm and then find a way to oblige the Grandmaster. Calvi racked up debt for Jelly in 1976, 77, 78, 79, 80, until 1981, when news of Turone's raid and the list of P2 members hit the media.
Government number 40 collapsed yesterday

under the weight of a most unusual scandal.

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.

Authorities started to ask questions about Calvi.

Why was he on this shadowy list?

Who was Calvi loaning money to?

How safe were deposits at his bank?

In public, Calvi presented a cool, calm demeanor,

even denying he was a member of P2.

But with all the bad press,

Calvi had problems bringing in new investors and depositors. And as his debt mounted, Calvi tried avoiding Jelly.
When the mason would call, Gerwin says Calvi's family would cover for him. They'd say, he's in bed.
He's sick. He's out.
When they did talk, Calvi was a mess. The banker would plead poverty.

He didn't have any more money for oil transfers,

arms deals, for right-wing dictators,

let alone newspaper ventures.

But Jelly threatened Calvi.

If you can't pay me, I have no use for you.

Calvi was at a loose end.

His wife recalled those moments in a grainy PBS interview. He told me that.
And was frightened, so frightened. And he cried and he said, if they kill me, maybe I will not see you anymore.
If they kill me, maybe I will not see you anymore, Calvi told his wife.

When things would get tough

and it felt like the world was closing in,

Roberto Calvi would often

retreat to his papers,

his physical papers. Remember,

this is the late 70s, early 80s.

Calvi was old school.

This is a rare recording of Calvi's son, describing his father's habit. Calvi's son, Carlo, said that when his father needed to focus, he'd take documents out of his leather briefcase, one by one.
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.

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 Calvi

could hear. And by 1981,

the opera

Thank you. representing a movement of cash.
It was like a financial opera that only maestro Calvi could hear. And by 1981, the opera was tragic.
No matter how Calvi 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. I can see it now, looking over Calvi's shoulder, the way he kept getting himself in deeper and deeper, how every time he obliged some new funding request from Jelly, it created a bigger problem for him down the road.
Was Calvi naive enough to think Jelly and his friends would pay the Ambrosiano back? That he could keep adding new debt while juggling mafia payments? I picture Calvi sinking into his chair, surrendering, doing what human beings do when everything falls apart, when the darkness overpowers the light, when everything seems lost. I imagine Calvi closing his eyes and praying for help.
But while you and I might close our eyes and look up to an abstract God,

Roberto Calvi called upon the literal representative of God on Earth.

Good evening. The Pope is in Poland.

The leader of the Roman Catholic Church has returned home.

That's next time on Shadow Kingdom. Covert, surreptitious financing back to Poland to destabilize communism.
A crackdown seemed inevitable. If not by Polish authorities, then by the Soviet army.
I say, listen, I'm very frank. I don't give a shit about you.
Shev, Jonathan Gruber, and Joanna Broder. Fact-checking by Zoe Sullivan.
Our executive producers are me, Nicola 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.