God’s Banker I 1. Death of a Banker

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Campsite Media. campsite media there's a scene that i have been obsessed with for the past several years it took place on a cool summer night in austria in 1982 italian banker roberto calvi sat in front of cold fireplace.
For him, it was a rare moment of stillness in what had been a full week on the run. His designer suit was disheveled.
There were sweat stains on his once crisp button-up shirt and dirt on his pants and jacket. He left his home in Rome in such a rush,

there wasn't much time to pack. A couple of suitcases, a forged passport, and the precious item that hadn't left his sight since, his leather briefcase.
Calvi picked up a book of matches and struck ignitingiting the small cavern of the brick fireplace. One by one, he pulled the documents from the briefcase, dropping them carefully into the fire, page after page.
Were these paper trails of illegal wire transfers maybe blackmail materials on his rich and powerful clients. I can't be sure.
But Calvi didn't burn everything. Some papers he stowed back in the case.
Maybe he could use them to cut a deal and save himself. Or perhaps one of those powerful clients might protect him in order to protect their secrets.

Among the papers he decided to save was a copy of a letter he'd written just a few weeks earlier.

It was written to one of his most important, most secretive clients, Pope John Paul II.

Calvi had done so much work for the Vatican, he'd earned the nickname God's Banker. But now the Italian financier was in trouble.
Santita, Calvi's letter started. I have concluded that you are my last hope.
Calvi wrote that he'd secretly moved money for the Vatican around the world

and that he'd willingly taken on its, quote,

mistakes and faults.

But now, he told the Pope,

I am betrayed and abandoned by the Vatican.

I read this letter as both a cry for help

and vaguely threatening.

But why did Calvi carry it with him?

And did the Pope ever respond?

I don't know.

But I know what happened next.

Five days later, Roberto Calvi would be found dead.

Hanging from a rope over the Thames River in London. Bricks in his pockets.
And his briefcase? Nowhere to be found. From Crooked Media and Campside Media, this is Shadow Kingdom, God's Banker.
I'm Niccolo Mainoni, and this is episode one,

Death of a Banker. 62-year-old Signor Kelvey was found dangling here just a few days before

he was due to appear in Italian court. And I said, oh my God, what's going on? I mean, what's the excitement? This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.
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That person was a therapist, and I'd never been to therapy. I grew up in post-Calvi era Italy, and it really wasn't all that available, at least publicly.
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That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P.com slash kingdom. Reese's peanut butter cups are the greatest, but let me play devil's advocate here.
Let's see. So, no, that's a good thing.
That's definitely not a problem.

Races, you did it. You stumped this charming devil.

I stumbled on the story of Calvi's death while working as a corporate lawyer a couple years ago.

I was having coffee with my friend Mario Platero, a well-connected former journalist.

And Mario, he told me about the story he'd always wish he could pursue.

There was some longing in his voice that just drew me in.

And I started researching this mysterious banker, reading everything I could find about the case.

First at night, then on weekends, and then I did something relatively misguided. I quit my job to work on it full-time.
I also wrangled Mario into a recording studio to talk about why this story had captured us both. So Mario, hold on.
So we have very little time. Yeah, let's go.
We only had about 20 minutes, and he was on his cell with the foreign minister of an undisclosed country. It's very funny.
We're in a studio because I usually just talk to you face to face, and you know every story, you know everything, you know everyone. And is that correct? Well, I wish.
Thank you, though, for the advertisement. It's not that I know.
First of all, I don't. He does.
It's how he earned our family nickname for him, Mario the Spy. Today, Mario sits on various boards and is more banker than anything else.
But during the Cold War, he was a journalist. Yes, I interviewed Reagan in the White House, in fact.
And I was in Moscow when he addressed the people and he said, Mr. Gorbachev, I pledge you, tear down this wall.
I was looking for stories and you said, hey, you know about God's Banker, right? You know this God's Banker story? And I confessed, I don't know that I knew almost anything about God's Banker, except for that the name sounded cool and strange. And you told me, you said, it involves, without batting an eye, you said, the mafia, of course, the Vatican Bank, a covert organization, the Russians, the Pope.
Yeah, because, you know, it might have sounded a lot like a conspiracy theory. But for some reasons, you know, I happened to be at a certain moment, at a certain time, very close to this man that dealt a lot with the Vatican, that all of a sudden was found dead somehow.
In June of 1982, when Roberto Calvi was on the run burning documents, Mario was working full-time for an Italian bank in New York and moonlighting as a reporter. Calvi's bank was crashing and Calvi was a fugitive.
Big newspapers were all scrambling to figure out where Calvi was hiding. It's at this moment that Mario got a call from one of those papers.
So the editor-in-chief calls me up and says, we heard rumors that Calvi may be in New York. Everybody's looking for him.
We're looking for him. We would like to have an interview with him if you can find him this would be a major interview Mario held a beige receiver in his hand taking in the information around him 20 or so bankers all in suits and ties buzzed around but his head wasn't in banking right now the moonlightinging journalist side of him took over.
The excitement of finding Calvi at that moment became passionate. So my attention was totally diverted to that.
And I started to call around. Mario thought, okay, I have a secondhand connection to Calvi's son, Carlo.
So why don't I get Carlo's phone number in Canada and just try him? So he did. The phone started ringing.
The housekeeper picked up. And she says, Calvi residence.
And I say, yes, I'm looking for Mr. Carlo Calvi.
He's not here.

So I said, well, let's go for the full multi, as they say. May I talk to Mr.
Roberto Calvi? Oh, no, he's not here either. I'm sorry.
But you're in luck, the housekeeper told Mario. The whole family, Roberto Calvi included, will be at their Bahamas home tomorrow.
So my degree of excitement and nervousness and tension at that point was at its height.

But I kept my cool and I said, oh, really?

I think I have the number, but I'm not sure I have it.

Would you be so kind to give it to me?

Oh, yes, of course.

No problem.

Mario was doing his best to act natural, as if this was any other check-in call.

Presented by the it to me. Oh, yes, of course.
No problem. Mario was doing his best to act natural as if this was any other check-in call.
But his eyes were going wide. Had this housekeeper really just offered up an itinerary of one of the biggest fugitives in the world? She'd given Mario Calvi's address in the Bahamas, his phone number, and an invitation to call.
Probably no other reporter on the planet had that. And I went to sleep with his excitement of pursuing my scoop, my first big scoop, okay? And I wake up the following morning.
The morning of June 18th, 1982. Mario's big day.
Plane ticket to the Bahamas, ready to go. Bags are packed.
He just needs to swing by the office first. And people were a little, you know, they were talking, they were chatting, and they had this piece of paper in their hands.
And I said, oh my God, what's going on? I mean, what's the excitement?

His colleagues were huddled around a telex machine,

a 1980s version of Twitter that printed news

on this never-ending sheet of paper.

Someone had just ripped the sheet of paper from the machine.

The Wire said Calvi found Ted in London

under the Blackfriars Bridge. Suicide? Question mark.
My answer was immediate. No.
As the morning turned into a hot New York afternoon, Mario's office swung into gear. Telex machines resumed their humming.
Young analysts chomped nervously on pencils. But not Mario.
He was replaying that headline in his head over and over. Suicide? Question mark.
But the kind of evidence I had was not leaning in the direction. Mario stared at the wire printout,

little details jumping out at him.

Like, wait, he had 12 pounds of bricks in his pockets,

wads of cash, a fake passport,

and Calvi had two pairs of underwear on and two watches?

Why?

Add to that what Mario knew as a banker,

Calvi had lost over a billion dollars for his bank.

It's a great day. two watches? Why? Add to that what Mario knew as a banker, Calvi had lost over a billion dollars for his bank.
And Calvi was rumored to have partnered with a lot of shady characters. Characters who may well have wanted revenge.
I think that this was a murder that was the result of events that were incredibly complicated that involved the Vatican, the mafia, the Russian Secret Service, the U.S., and Pope Wojtyla. So you say, oh my God.
Yeah, sure. The Pope did.
Why not? It all sounds absurd, right? The Vatican, the Pope, spies in Russia and the U.S. Mario's saying they're all involved in Calvi's death.
But it might not be so far-fetched, Mario tells me. Remember, this is peak Cold War.
So the U.S. and the Soviet Union, they're all at war in the existential fight of their lives.
And strangely enough, in the 1970s, a major front of this war was Italy. Which was once ruled by a fascist dictator and now has the largest communist party in Western Europe.
The loss in man hours in Italy because of strikes and absenteeism is astronomical. Five times that of France, for example.
Fifty times that of West Germany. Major plants are operating at three-quarters capacity.
Italy has the lowest growth rate in Western Europe. At the time, the Communist Party in Italy was very strong.
It had nearly 35% of the national vote by 1976. This was a disaster for the U.S.
If Italy, a massive Western democracy, fell to communism, what was to stop others from following? It was like Vietnam, but in the heart of Europe.

So the U.S. had a rather unlikely partner

in this fight against communism in Italy,

the Vatican.

The Vatican hated communism

because communism hated God.

Most communist regimes shut down all churches,

and closed churches meant, among other things, no weekly donations to the Vatican. And so, supposedly, somewhere in this battle, the Vatican and the CIA joined forces to send secret cash to anti-communist fighters in the Soviet Union.
They'd done this by hiring God's banker, Roberto Calvi.

There was also the mafia involved.

Sure, of course.

Of course, the mafia, exactly.

So to the Vatican using a bank as a money laundering operation

to fight the Cold War with the US help.

For different reasons.

Let's add the mafia.

Let's add the mafia.

Let's add the mafia.

Sure.

Okay.

Sure. If you can sense a dismissive tone in my voice there, you're not wrong.
I almost got mad at Mario while we were in the studio because I am an Italian. I lived in Rome until I was 10 and then I moved to the US, which is why I now sound the way I do.
But my body and soul are very much tied to my strange country shaped like a boot.

I moved back to Italy in my 20s to get an Italian law degree because I dreamt of being a prosecutor that would fight the mafia.

But that ended up being very scary.

So I practiced corporate law in the US and the UK instead.

Anyway, growing up in the US, I was always hearing Italians telling these wild stories, always bombastic, always over the top, always taking some benign event and turning it into a big conspiracy. Mario actually told me there's a word in Italian for this, dietrologia.
It basically means that Italians never accept the given explanation for something. They always suspect there's some darker truth lurking behind dietro, the curtain.
As an Italian abroad, I've had to fight this stereotype of the passionate, irrational Italian. And so I was immediately skeptical of Mario's theories about Calvi, the Vatican, the mafia.
Let me point out that I'm on your side with this. No, but what I'm saying is that you come to me and you tell me a man was killed because he was using the Vatican bank via mafia laundered money to fight the Cold War with the backing of the CIA.
And I thought this is so silly and it's the typical Italian story that is fake. You're implying you didn't believe me.

That's another reason to beat you up again.

Of course, yes.

I didn't believe you.

In fact, I wanted to do a story myself on this, but then I didn't have the time, and I never pursued it, so I'm very glad you're doing it.

So the 25-year-old Mario who wanted to interview Calvia never did.

You passed that baton to me.

Exactly.

I give you the baton so that you can do a nice story about it that now it's much more complete in a way. Yeah, well, it all sounded very fake and I wanted to prove you wrong.
And this season is that effort. Mario had piqued my curiosity.
I wanted to find out who had killed Roberto Calvi. But I wasn't buying his whole Vatican, CIA, Mafia, Da Vinci Code story.
That honestly sounded a bit unhinged. Surely there was a more rational, more logical explanation.
Maybe even that Roberto Calvi had very simply killed himself, just as the no-nonsense

British police believed at the time of death. So find out what happened to Roberto Calvi.

That's what I set out to do more than two years ago. Since then, I've traveled to the scene of

the crime in London and made multiple trips to Italy. I've sat in a mafioso's living room, choking on cigar smoke, and tracked down a smuggler who was the last person to see Calvi alive.
I've spoken to an Italian spy, forensics experts, and members of Calvi's family. I've worried about my own personal safety more than once.

And my theory of the crime,

which I'm going to share with you at the end of this,

is completely and wildly different

than I could have ever imagined at the start of this investigation.

That's after the break.

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I started my research with something obvious, the official records of Calvi's death. In 1982, the British police said Calvi committed suicide.
But Italian investigators said, no, don't be fooled. This is a murder.
As I've mentioned, I've lived both in Italy and in England. My instinct here is to trust the British side of my brain.
The Brits had no real skin in the game and so much less bias. While the Marios of this world, the Italians,

the people for whom Calvi is a celebrity,

I feel like they're much more likely to see a conspiracy

where there isn't one.

So if I'm going with the British side of my brain,

why would Calvi have killed himself?

First of all, Calvi's body was found hanging over the River Thames in London's business district. Suicide attempts were common there.
Overworked bankers, they can't take it anymore. It's really sad, but it isn't shocking.
Also, Calvi was facing some grim prospects in the coming days, with the international media following his every move. 62-year-old Signor Calvi was found dangling here just a few days before he was due to appear in Italian court.
Calvi had recently been convicted of illegally sneaking millions of dollars outside Italy, and he was very afraid of going to jail. I also found out that Calvi had actually attempted suicide when he was facing similar legal issues just a year before.
The British coroner's jury ruled that he had committed suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed. And probably most damning to Mario's murder thesis was that when British police examined Calvi's body, there were no signs of bruises, no signs of violence.
All the evidence pointed towards suicide. Professor Simpson, who carried out a post-mortem examination on Senor Calvi, said there was no suggestion of foul play, no fracas, no struggle.
Had there been, I would have expected to have found some marks of resistance. There were none.
In other words, no one hit Calvi over the head and then deceptively propped him under a bridge. He didn't fight anyone.
There were also no signs of chemical injections or stuff that might have knocked him out more peacefully. So there you have it.
Calvi wasn't drugged. He didn't fight anyone.
He was simply desperate, as he'd been in the past when he tried to kill himself. And he ended his life in a place where many other bankers do.
And so ends the tale of God's Banker. A very British ending, simple, logical, a bit dark, but without any fuss.
Except, not so fast. Because although I would like the British part of my brain to completely take over, the Italian side poked me in the middle of the night.
It poked me and invited me to listen to the Italians. Why didn't they like the British suicide theory? Well, Calvi was hanging in a place that was really hard to reach, that a team of young British cops could barely get to.
And Calvi, he was a middle-aged banker with vertigo. How could he have filled his pockets with bricks and climbed up to hang himself? Italian investigators would also note that Calvi's body was both soaked and then dry in ways that couldn't really be explained.
And the dirt all over his pants wasn't from the area around the bridge at all. It was from somewhere totally different.
It was almost like Calvi had levitated to his final hanging place. Italians would also point out that Calvi had a boatload of medications at his disposal,

which leads me to think that he could have overdosed and died peacefully in his sleep.

No slippery bridge necessary.

Oh, and finally, Calvi's precious briefcase, the one with the secrets from half the world.

It was gone.

So there it is.

A British voice assuring me it was suicide,

and then Mario's Italian accent urging me to see this as a gruesome murder.

But it's kind of terrifying to entertain Mario's challenge.

Because if I believe that it was murder, then I opened Pandora's box. And out of that box would come conspiracy theories that tied the mafia to the Pope to secret fascist societies bent on overthrowing the state and hovering over all of this, the swinging body of Roberto Calvi.
If I truly entertain Mario's challenge, I would have to admit that there's something to diatrologia, that there's something behind the curtain, something that those in power want to stay hidden. From the start, I didn't want to be the wild-eyed Italian conspiracist.
I wanted to be the mild-mannered English lawyer.

But the deeper I went, the less the suicide theory made sense. The facts didn't quite add up, and I needed to know what really happened.
To follow the question from the Italian side of my brain. Who killed God's banker? Coming up on this season of Shadow Kingdom.
The system is completely rotten, completely corrupt, completely illegitimate. Therefore, it's okay to blow up this entire building.
They've got every conspiracy. They're the masterminds.
They're pulling the strings. Top Vatican sources have now begun cautiously to discuss the plot to kill the Pope.
He tells me, you need to live with Calvi right now. He is wanted in Italy for political espionage and possession of state secrets.
I say, look, we have this guy moving. We know that while on the move, he's in contact with this character, a fixer.
Banking experts began to unravel the story of a big Italian bank scandal that reads like good fiction.

All he would talk about was death.

It was unbelievable. He basically dropped to the floor.

He was screaming and crying, saying, Clara, we can't find him.

And I was a bit shaken and said, who? Who can't you find? And he said, Roberto, we don't know where he is. Shadow Kingdom is a production of Crooked Media and Campside Media.
It's hosted and reported by me, Nicola Mainoni, with additional reporting by Simona Zecchi and Joe Hawthorne. The show is written by Joe Hawthorne, Ashley Ann Krigbaum, and me.
Joe Hawthorne is our lead producer, and Ashley Ann Krigbaum is our managing producer. Tracy Samuelson is our story editor.
Sound design, mix, and mastering by Mark McAdam. Our theme song and original score are composed by me and Mark McAdam.
Our studio engineer is Iwan 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,

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. Look up Il Banchiere di Dio.
The show is the same in one way, but it's full of original reporting in Italian with unabridged versions of interviews with Italian guests. We're really excited to tell the story in its native tongue.
So please go check out Il Banchiere di Dio wherever you get your podcasts.