The Death of "God's Banker", the Vatican, a Pope's Murder, Mafia Plots and a Secret Masonic Coup
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Roberto Calvi is on the run. It's June 10th, 1982, a year after Calvi's bombshell trial for banking fraud. One that exposed not only his dirty dealings, but that of a secretive Masonic sect named Propaganda Due, or P2. Then, Calvi had tried to kill himself, but he failed.

A year later, all kinds of revelations are tumbling out about P2. About its leader, a notorious fascist once pals with Hermann Göring, its involvement with violent mobsters, links to Italy's military, its politicians, and the Vatican City.

to whom Calvi has formed such a close bond, and with whose finances that of his own banker Ambrosiano is so intertwined, that people simply refer to him as the Bantieri de Dio, God's banker. Calvi's conviction added him a $20 million fine and a four-year suspended prison term. An appeal looms, but God's banker is convinced he's being chased by a bevy of devils.

He bumps up security, hiring goons and kicking his car out with bulletproof windows. He ships his family out of the country. And on that June 10, 1982, which is a Thursday, he disappears from his Rome apartment, telling nobody his destination, save for a shady clique of businessmen and a feared human trafficker who will act as his bodyguard. First, Calvi drives to Austria, then Switzerland.

Then, using a fake passport, the banker flies to London, where his associates put him up in a crummy apartment block in the city's fashionable Chelsea district. There, in a drab, colourless room, Calvi spends almost a week, with little but his bodyguard's phone number and a taché case he never lets out of his sight.

Rumour has it that the case is crammed full of documents and names of P2 members and the Vatican prelates who helped Calvi rip off his bank to the tune of over a billion dollars. It's his insurance. But the policy's about to be torn up. On June 17, around 11.30pm, Calvi shaves off his iconic bushy moustache and heads out into London night.

A few hours later, his lifeless body is discovered swinging from a scaffold beneath the city's Blackfriars Beach, four miles east. Calvi's pockets are filled with chunks of bricks, and he's carrying over 10,000 bucks in foreign change. Around the same time, Calvi's newfound clique flee the UK. That evening, a private plane takes off from London to Geneva, carrying an attaché case.

At first, London cops ruled Calvi's death a suicide. But that won't last long.

Killing of God's banker will send shockwaves through the worlds of high finance, organised crime and religion, taking in not only the demise of the banker Ambrosiano and the unmasking of P2, but also the deaths of a Prime Minister and a Pope, the rise of Italy's mafia, terror strikes, right-wing despots and a Vatican Archbishop they call the Gorilla.

Welcome to the Underworld Podcast. Hello everyone and welcome to the show where we tread the fine tightrope line between respected journalism and wackadoo subreddits. I'm your host Sean Williams. I'm in Berlin. I'm joined by fellow investigative reporter Danny Gold in New York City. We write about crime all over the world and that's why you're listening to this. We've got bonus shows coming up on porn, biker gangs, the Zetas and fake sports league. We've got a lot of

And hopefully a bit of a facelift pretty soon. So tons going on as usual. Yeah, as always, patreon.com slash the underworld podcast to support us and bonus stuff and all that. And you can always email us at the underworld podcast at gmail.com. You know, with a nice constructive criticism or just suggestions for episodes and everything like that.

Yeah, and speaking of which, I want to do a quick correction. In my last episode about Putin and his neo-Nazi spy, Rona Zontag, I think I mentioned that Putin wound up mayor of St. Petersburg, not the saint of Mayor Petersburg, which is not true. He worked in a bunch of positions in the city office as part of his rise to power, but he was never actually mayor. So I think a couple of people spotted that. So cheers to you guys. I love...

Love, love, love being corrected. I could actually enjoy our last show without me in it. It was really great. Yeah. Jake Hanrahan from Popular Front filled in. You were definitely missed, but you know how it is. Also, please subscribe, like, right? Five-star review, all that sort of stuff to help us out. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, let's get it going. Yeah. I mean, so this episode is about Roberto Calvi, who's God's Banker.

and crime and the vatican and if you watch the godfather part three which i'm guessing just about everyone listening to this show has uh you're going to recognize a lot of this as the plot of that movie yeah i think at least the first and the second one multiple times i don't think everyone's really dived into the third one right wait what was the one that got i think it was the one that got terrible reviews third is one and out right it's not it's not like the third was the one that got really bad reviews the set the third right yeah

Yeah, it kind of sucked. Except for the ending. I went back for it and, I don't know, Al Pacino is just a god. But yeah, this whole thing actually starts way back before that show, that movie, or any of this. So it's back in 1929, and that's when the Vatican City itself, it's actually turned into an independent state by...

Yeah, you guessed it. Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini. So in turn for the Pope's fealty and his land, Mussolini throws a bunch of money at the Catholic Church and he gives it this tiny, itty-bitty little city-state to call its own right in the middle of Rome on something called the Vatican Hill. So before we kick off some Vatican facts, of course...

This place is the smallest country on earth. It's 0.2 square miles total or about the same size as Manhattan's battery park. That means that running it is record time. I'm sorry for butchering these kind of like journalistic metaphors, but I love them. Usain Bolt could run the entire length of it in around a minute and a half. It also has the most crimes per capita thanks to its tourism and an ATM that works in Latin. I mean, all right, fine.

It's only officially home to 825 people, all of them male, surprisingly. And because there's no hospital and more importantly, no place to deliver a baby, you cannot be born a citizen of the Vatican City. You've got to work for something called the Holy See, which is what it goes by at the UN. The Holy See is the name for the diocese of the big man, the Pope. But it's also kind of a company that owns the Vatican, of which the Pope is CEO.

Oh, and he's the king too, which makes the Vatican one of only six remaining absolute monarchies remaining on Earth. Well, actually, he's the elected pope, the king, and the CEO rolled into one, all of which means that technically the Vatican City is the world's only elected non-hereditary absolute monarchy left.

All and none of which make sense all at the same time. Thank you very much. Wikipedia Williams over here.

Thank you. Yeah, I really enjoyed that part. I mean, you should be confused. I am too. And yes, before we dive into this whole story about crime and murder and all that kind of crazy stuff, yes, there are tunnels under the Vatican leading out to the Castel San Angelo in Rome, where at least a couple of popes have fled since the 1200s. It's a tough gig going around in that hat. And then...

You have the Swiss guard, highly trained marksmen dressed like jesters. I mean, you really got to wonder how Europeans allow themselves to laugh at stuff going on in America. Like you really don't need tinfoil hat conspiracies when all this stuff is 100% kosher. Anyway, in 1942, a few years after it's christened, I guess, or baptized, the Vatican starts something called the Institute of Religious Works or IOR in Italian and

This financial organisation squirrelled away at the top of one of the state's ancient towers.

But by around 1970, despite literally dripping in gold and getting donations for over a billion people, yeah, it's the Catholic Church, guys, the Vatican is turning over a loss of up to 30 mil a year. And it's looking to turn some of its assets, that cash Daddy Mussolini gave it, for example, into liquid assets that it can trade and make cash on. What? Like, how were they losing money? This is before the lawsuits or is that part of it? Which? Which ones?

You know, the not-so-pleasant ones. Yeah, the ones that we all associate. This is before that, and I don't even understand how the Catholic Church can be losing money. I really don't get it. I don't know. They're just not very good at financial stuff. And post-war, right? So at this point, no country is better at trading than the U.S. And just as luck may have it, on Saturday, November the 28th in Manila...

A 35-year-old Bolivian artist named Benjamin Mendoza, he lunges at 73-year-old Pope Paul VI with a knife.

Now, I say luck because, one, the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos is able to get between the assailant and the Pope and, according to a New York Times report, quote, struck Mendoza with a karate chop. That is, is there video of this? Like, I did not know. There is not. And you better fucking know that I look for it. Yeah. Yeah. I want to see that more than anything in the entire world. I know. I know. Marcos. Chop.

chopping a guy on the shot. It's so cool. Did he yell out karate chop before he did it? Was he like, karate chop! I really hope. Yeah, me too. And that's not actually the only incredible thing about this. Well...

Maybe it is. Anyway, among the entourage who saved the Pope's life is this hulking, golf-loving American archbishop named Paul Marcinkus. And Marcinkus is this towering guy from Cicero, Illinois. That's a place just outside Chicago. He's a straight talker, the son of Lithuanian immigrants, and he's imbued with that enthusiastic post-war American capitalist zeal. I think Cicero is also like a big mafia town and labor union town and all that. Like it's

I believe the reputation is like a tough place. Yeah, it's like an old factory place, right? So I've heard a couple of bits and pieces. And as we're going to learn, he's a boy of his town. I mean, fellow bishops call him the gorilla. One of his favorite phrases is, and this is great, quote, you can't run the church on Hail Marys. Which, I mean, I guess God's got something to say about all this, but yeah, I don't know.

Marcinkus quickly wins the Pope's trust and he becomes one of his closest confidants. By 1971, that's just a year after he's saved his life, Paul VI appoints Marcinkus as head of the IOR, which, by the way, most people just call the Vatican Bank. And he tells him to go out and invest the church's money on the international markets.

So Marcinkus installs IBM machines and modern bookkeeping, introduces this kind of whole modern world to the Vatican Bank. But despite his go-getting, do-it-yourself attitude, Marcinkus turns for help actually to an Italian banker called Michele Sintona, who's nicknamed the Shark, who, to be honest, could be a whole episode just by himself. It's pretty crazy actually.

Writes journalist David Yallop in his book, In God's Name, quote, Sindona, who had maneuvered his way to becoming owner of one of the biggest Italian merchant banks, apparently convinced the financially untutored Marcinkas it was high time the Vatican began to enjoy the fruits of its huge assets. You know, no shock there. But that turns out not to be such a great idea. Sindona is a crook and a pretty big one at that.

He's connected to mafia bosses and he's a member of this secret Masonic society called Propaganda Due or P2, which is an anti-communist far right, quote, state within a state with tentacles in the highest rooms of Italian power. Is that propaganda? P2 is propaganda duo. Yeah. Is that how you say it?

Do, do, do a, my Italian's a bit out. Yeah. I remember wanting to do an episode on that when I first learned about it a while back. But, uh, do you get it? Like, is this a big part of it right here? It is. Yeah. And they're, they're, they're linked to everything. I mean, it's pretty insane. I've never really heard of another organization like this. And, uh,

No wonder people are always full of conspiracies about Italian stuff, because, I mean, P2's chief is this guy called Lizio Gelli. Gelli, I think it's Gelli. I'm really sorry if your name's not Gelli. He's a fascist and he's once pen pals with Nazi leader Hermann Goering. And he allegedly has ties to right wing dictators all over Latin America, including Argentina's Juan Perón.

which is, you know, not ideal either then or in hindsight. In 1972, Sindona buys Long Island's Franklin National Bank, but a series of frauds brings it down. And in 1974, Sindona's financial empire collapses and it costs Marcinkas and the Vatican Bank millions. It's a huge scandal. It's a massive scandal and it's hugely embarrassing for the Catholic Church.

But, you know, Marcinkus is in with the big boys, so he stays on. Now, bear in mind that this entire era is absolutely insane for Italy. It's the so-called years of lead filled with hard left and hard right terror campaigns, targeted killing, political turmoil, high unemployment and, of course, crime.

And amid all this chaos, organised criminal outfits, they reign supreme. They traffic huge quantities of drugs. They take over ports and construction projects. I think we got into this with our episode on the Maxi trial in Sicily, but the island itself is probably the worst hit of anywhere in the country. And in these entire bland concrete blocks shooting up on the edge of its biggest city, Palermo, which locals call it the city's, quote, sack.

And I quote again, the word sack was not randomly chosen to describe that period, says Maurizio Carter, professor of urban planning at Palermo University. Like plundering barbarians, Mafiosi devastated the city with cement, disfiguring its parks, landscape and natural beauty. It's a good quote, especially from an architect. Not many of them get in the show. So this is all insane, right? Italy is in the thrall of mobsters, robbers,

Secret fascist societies, banking fraudsters and people being killed left, right and center. And even the Vatican's getting ripped off. The 70s in Europe were just completely insane, huh? Yeah, I don't know why we seem to think that the world's somehow normal now. I mean, it's only a few years ago.

And Paul Marcinkas, right? The gorilla, the guy from Cicero. He just gets right back on the horse after all this thing to mix metaphors or I don't know, perhaps gorillas can ride horses. I don't know. And so to do so, he reaches out to a guy called Roberto Calvi. Now, born to a wealthy Milan family in 1920, Calvi joins the Banco Ambrosiana, which is a small homespun outfit just after the Second World War.

By the 1970s, when Calvi has risen to become its chief, the bank has followed a similar path to the Vatican Bank. So it's a modern firm, it's got branches all over the world, and it's grown at an alarming rate that few outside the bank can really fathom, or inside. Calvi himself is described as incredibly cold with, quote, eyes of ice.

He's also a member of P2, because of course he is, and he's a close associate of some of Italy's biggest gangsters at the time. Obviously, therefore, Marcinkus loves him. And he designates Calvi and the Banco Ambrosiano to kind of internationalise the Vatican's assets. And this is how he does it.

Calvi sets up a firm called Banco Ambrosiano Holdings in Luxembourg. Standard, shifty operation, 5 out of 10 on the fraud scale. This allows him to move money from the Vatican outside Italy without actually touching Italian financial law. Then Calvi establishes something called the Banco Ortano in Switzerland. Secrecy secured, again, nothing spectacular. Another 5 out of 10 on the banking, shithousery scale.

And then he found Bank of Ambrosiano Overseas Limited in the Bahamas. All right, cool. Seven out of 10 move. Great beaches, holiday potential for work trips. I mean, it's not the Cayman Islands slightly off the beaten track, but all the corrupt officials and tax loopholes that anyone could ever want. I'm always curious how these people figure all this out. Like, it seems incredibly complex, but is it just moving money around, you know, back and forth until people lose sight of it?

Yeah, you just describing why we're not rich? Or is this... I think... Yeah, I mean, these guys are just... I don't know. They're shits. But it's pretty intelligent stuff. So...

At this point, Calvi throws a curveball and he sets up something called the Banco Comercial in Nicaragua. It itself is under the violent yoke of a CIA back right wing contra rebel group. Eight out of ten, shielding yourself under fascists in the Civil War.

Yeah, that's a different move. And then Calvi goes to Peru and he found something called the Banco Andino. A out of 10 move again. Good. Throwing law enforcement off the scent. More corrupt South American officials. More insurgencies.

And then he opens like a dozen shell corporations in politically tumultuous Panama. That's about to be taken over and run by drug kingpin Manuel Noriega. It's popped up in a ton of our shows. We should probably just do a whole episode about him.

These function pretty much just as mailboxes, so they keep paper trails away from the actual cash. Marcinkas, by the way, is a director at the bank's Nassau branch. Very rare for an archbishop, plus quote-unquote working in the Bahamas. Very nice. Nine out of ten.

Calvi, as a final little sort of cherry on top, is working on a multi-million dollar building project in Buenos Aires. Invest in real estate. Like that is, I mean, whatever the Instagram thing is, that is the ultimate, like that's the ultimate lesson. So,

To put all this stuff simply, Calvi is lending Ambrosiano cash to its own Central and South American subsidiaries. And Marcinkus is giving Calvi these funny things called letters of comfort from the Vatican Bank. And that's a letter basically saying that, in vague wording, the Vatican has interest in these companies and it's aware what Ambrosiano is doing with the funds.

If this sounds a bit like the tail wagging a dog, it totally is. And Ambrosiano under Calvi, with the consent of Marcinkas to use Vatican Bank funds, is creating a black hole right now around $1.4 billion deep. That is a lot of money. Calvi, by moving all this money around and buying shares in various subsidiaries, is putting himself in control of the entire thing.

Now, on March 16, 1978, the years of lead take another sharp turn for the batshit when far-left terrorists kill five policemen in Rome, kidnap Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, and 55 days later, murder him, leaving him in the trunk of a Renault in the city centre.

Despite it being the work of a group called the Red Brigades, obviously left, many believe P2 is also behind it. So yeah, I think our friend of the show, Alexander Reid-Ross, is doing a big podcast on the years of lead. He actually had me guess on one of them about the mafia involvement in it. But was P2 a known thing at this time? Like you're saying they believe they were behind it or is that, you know, 10 years down the road, people believe that P2 was behind it?

So this is interesting. I couldn't quite figure it out. So it seems that people started figuring out that P2 existed shortly after this. As we're going to find out, Calvi plays a key role in the whole unearthing of the whole thing. But people are definitely talking about it as something in the shadows at this point. But whether they know that it's involved in some of these high-profile attacks or...

kidnappings or things at the time. I'm not entirely sure. I'd welcome anyone to email us actually and tell us a little more about this stuff. Maybe people who can actually read Italian and can read the local stuff, but also it's, it's super crazy. Did you come up with the nickname P2 or do people actually call it that? People called it that. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe they didn't, but P2 works, right? That'll do for now. Um, so, um,

On August 6th, 1978, Pope Paul VI, he dies of a heart attack and he's replaced by Pope John Paul I, born Albino Luciani. So just to get that straight, that's the guy who Marcinko's saved from a stabbing in Manila. He's dead. There's a new guy in office, the white smoke coming out of the chimney in the Vatican or whatever they do when they do that stuff.

Now, John Paul I is a pretty cheerful guy, and folks nickname him El Papa del Sorriso, or the Smiling Pope, which is pretty nice. But underneath the grin, John Paul is a committed reformer.

He wants to lead a charge against opulence, which is like the biggest flex ever for the actual fucking Pope. And he's begun digging into the Vatican Bank's financial affairs. Michele Sindona, who by this point is on trial for ordering a hit and is faking his own suicide. Paul Marcinkas and of course, Roberto Calvi and his own growing empire with the Banco Ambrosiano, all of which is about as cloudy as a week old bottle of communion wine.

Um, that's a lot of people. Is this, is this making sense? I mean, sort of, you know, I think we're all along for the ride though. You know, I'm sure, I'm sure it'll make sense. I hope so. Yeah, it does. Yeah. Yeah. Professional storytelling and all that. Um, here, so John Paul, the first rain lasts all of 33 days. Here is a guardian article from September 30, 1978 quote,

When he did not appear yesterday morning in his private chapel for Mass, one of his secretaries, Father McGee, he's an Irishman, if you could ever figure that out, went to the Pope's bedroom door and knocked. There was no answer.

Upon entering, he found the Pope lying in his bed with a book open beside him and the reading light on. Yeah, I mean, that's not very clear. He's dead. So we've got a dead Italian prime minister, a dead Pope, and a corrupt Vatican at this point. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that there are going to be some conspiracy theories about this situation.

Ah, that limb. It's a good limb. It's a fat limb. You should cling on to it because we're going to come back to it in a bit. Yeah. So the mafia. Right. So the mafia, guys, that's why you're here. The mafia running right, left, right and centre. And left and right terrorists are popping off all over the place, right? Italy is going crazy. And Italians themselves, they even coined a word around this time, which is dietrologia. Dietrologia.

I tried to say that in like some really hackneyed Italian accent. And that is a belief that hidden realities lie below the surface of the accepted version of events. Kind of national conspiratorialism, Glenwaldianism, if you want. And when you can consider that P2 is yet to be kind of publicly unearthed,

It kind of checks out, right? It makes sense that people would think this. Now, Gelli, the leader of P2, Propaganda Due, this secret society, he even gets Roberto Calvi to buy 40% of Italy's biggest newspaper, Corriere della Sera, and he shifts its editorial to the right. So he's this kind of like Murdoch guy.

figure in Italy at the time and British intelligence officials start monitoring Roberto Calvi and Ambrosiano believing that they're funneling money and arms to the Argentine fascists in the war over the Falkland Islands which is you know fascists and Falklands pot kettle anyway

There is tons of stuff about the Catholic Church and its silence on the mafia and fascism in the fight against so-called godless communists during the Cold War. And I'm not going to get into all that too much in this episode because, yeah, I mean, it's dense, obviously, and it steps pretty firmly into wackadoo territory. But it's fair to say that the church keeps them on a lot of crime and right-wing corruption in these times.

And by this point, 1978, P2 has an entire blueprint for the overthrow and rule of Italy. God, this sounds so conspiracy theory podcast shit. This totally checks out, including routing its Communist Party and trade unions and installing fascists in office using the mafia as muscle and financial might to do so.

And incidentally, one of P2's members is a youngish, I mean, I don't know, he's like 150 now, Silvio Berlusconi.

In 1980, the years of lead reach their lowest point when a bomb goes off at Bologna's railway station and kills 85 people. The whole world reels. This is a huge terror attack. A year later, P2 is exposed just as Calvi's empire implodes. So this is how it goes down. First, the Vatican finds out about Calvi's shady dealings on the Milan Stock Exchange.

Part of these deals is that Calvi has been moving cash out of Italy illegally by buying shares in companies and foreign banks. So Calvi is arrested and thrown in jail. And there he attempts to take his own life by slashing his wrists and taking an OD of barbiturates. But he fails.

A court sentenced him to a large fine, that $20 million, and four years in prison, but it releases him pending an appeal. Then, cops find a document listing business deals between Jelly and Calvi. And this is dangerous information. And Jelly tries to call Calvi's home on several occasions. Wait, who is Jelly again?

That's Licio Jelly. He's like the P2 leader, this kind of crypto-fascist, crazy backroom puppet master guy.

So Calvi gets really suspicious. I mean, he would do. He installs alarms. He gets barriers. He hires bodyguards. He fits out a bulletproof car and he books bogus plane journeys wherever he travels to throw would-be P2 killers off his trail. And this, by the way, cost him a million bucks a year in like 1981. That's a lot of money.

But it's not enough. By the spring of 1982, as Calvi's appeal looms, he sends his family out of the country, admitting that he was making his illegal stock deals for the benefit of the Vatican itself. Remember, that's with our American friend Marcinkus. At the same time, the hole in the Banco Ambrosiano's accounts is just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. All of

And Calvi's kind of South American shithousery is kind of coming back to eat the bank. There's no money in the coffers and it's just like turning into a black hole of finance.

But then there's suddenly a chance for Roberto Calvi to escape all of this. A New York-based banker named Francisco Pazienza offers to buy 1.2 billion shares, 1.2 billion of shares, sorry, dollars in Banco Ambrosiano, plugging the hole in its finances. Why is he just really bad at his job? Like, why would you do that? Okay, so...

This is where it gets weird. I am... I mean, the whole fucking thing is weird. Like, Pacienza, he, like, speaks to this PBS documentary team, which is... There's this, like, old, grainy footage of him doing an interview in this sort of, like, overly ornate English. He's, like, supposedly got ties to the mafia and people who...

do not want this whole thing to fall on its ass because they have various interests, either in P2 or in dictatorships in South America or in the financial security of the Vatican City. I mean, seriously, why do people make up conspiracy theories about the Vatican? This stuff is more than enough. But I don't think I can stand it up.

Which is why I just told you in the podcast, as I would have done in the podcast in the first place. But either way, this guy has put up a ton of money and he says he's going to plug this hole in the Ambrosiano's finances. He introduced Calvi to a Sardinian real estate developer called Flavio Carboni, who Calvi meets on holiday in Sardinia itself.

Then, while they're there, Carboni introduces Calvi to a Swiss businessman named Hans Kunst and a suspected human trafficker named Silvano Vittor, who is going to become Calvi's bodyguard. Remember him from the start of the show.

So now we're back to the introduction, right? On Thursday, June 10th, Calvi disappears from his Rome apartment and he doesn't tell anyone where he's going. He drives first to Trieste, which is a city on the northeastern Adriatic coast, and then he drives to Austria and then he goes to Switzerland. And it's all with a fake passport and it's all with Sylvani Vittor.

That's the suspected human trafficker who's kind of acting as his bodyguard on the say-so of these shady real estate developers and Swiss businessmen.

i hope you're following this guys on the friday he calls the bank that's calvi and tells them that despite he's not being able to tell them where he is they should not worry and he will be back soon that's totally reassuring when they stop on the friday night in a place called brigance in austria calvi heads for a midnight meeting with carbony and hans kunz

Whatever they tell him, he ditches his plans to travel to Zurich, which he originally has, and he gets Vitor instead to drive into the nearest airport, which is Innsbruck, lovely place, really recommend it, where a private jet takes him to London. Calvi is reportedly cheerful at this point.

but less so when Hans Kunz, that's a Swiss businessman, books him a week-long stay, not at Claridge's, that's the five-star Mayfair hotel he's used to, but in room 881 of something called the Chelsea Cloisters, which is a tumble-down block partly used as a student hostel, which I looked up and they actually still use it and it looks like a shithole still. Anyway, on June 15th,

That's just a couple of days before Calvi's death. Flavio Carboni arrives in London. This guy is a multimillionaire, right? But he chooses to stay in a rundown apartment block outside Heathrow Airport as the guest of a British man named William Morris, who is alleged is a Freemason. It's not alleged. He is a Freemason.

That night, Calvi calls his daughter. She's staying at the time in a Zurich hotel. She was supposed to wait for him. The rest of the family is already in Washington, D.C., by the way. Calvi tells her to get a flight to the States the following day and says he'll call her again. He never does.

Later on, Calvi's daughter is approached by a woman calling herself Mrs. Kunst, who hands her 50,000 Swiss francs with no explanation, adding that her husband Hans will be meeting Calvi in London the next day. Now, if this is all confusing, I guess it's supposed to be, because it's pretty weird. On the morning of June 16th, Calvi and Carboni, the real estate guy, they meet in Hyde Park in central London.

Calvi complains about the standard of his hotel, of course, and Carboni asks him to come to the Hilton across town in London. Instead, he stays at the Chelsea Cloisters. He doesn't want to go to the Hilton. Then the Bancombrosiano board meets for an emergency meeting in Milan where they're told about Calvi's disappearance and the missing billion and a half dollars. They decide, shock horror, to fire Calvi, who is alleged is acting erratically in London. Yeah.

Later that day, Calvi's personal secretary, Graziella Carrocer, jumps to her death, having written a letter attacking him. By the way, that has now all but been proven not to have been a suicide. I mean, none of this is a shock. Then, late on June 17, Calvi shaves off his iconic tash. He heads out into London night.

and just hours later, he's found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge. And that location, by the way, is not insignificant. P2 members reportedly call themselves the Blackfriars, the Fratineri, and they wear black robes to their secret meetings.

Here's a PBS documentary host speaking, quote, I mean, we've all done that.

We have to believe that somehow, past midnight, he found some convenient rope. And all this time, back in his room, he had enough sleeping pills to kill himself easy and painlessly. But perhaps that wouldn't have been so dramatic. As one journalist quote, when Calvi died, I think several bottles of champagne were drunk all over Italy.

Now, before Calvi's body in London has even been identified, Vitor, his people smuggler-cum-bodyguard, he flees London. And that evening, a private plane leaves London for Geneva. Calvi carries a Taché case with him everywhere. It's found neither at the cloisters nor on his body. It's believed to contain documents showing his connections with P2, bankers and politicians, and of course, prelates of the Vatican.

Journalists learn that the private plane is carrying that case. Carboni, the real estate guy who's brokered this entire mad trip across Europe, he leaves William Morris' apartment near Heathrow. But instead of going to Heathrow Airport, he drives across the city to Gatwick, where he boards a flight to Edinburgh. Then he gets a connecting plane to Austria, where he rejoins Vitor, the bodyguard. I mean, I don't even know...

Like, this is all insane, dude. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, nothing, it's kind of like hard to put into a story because nothing makes sense, but I think that's the whole point, that everything is so muddled up that it throws everyone off the scent to such an extent that, like, the cops just basically give up on the spot. Anyway, Calvi's death causes pandemonium at the Banco Ambrosiano. Branches are shut, officials fired, writes the New York Times quote, the

The financial panic caused by news of Mr. Calvi's death and the Bank of Italy's investigation provoked the collapse of his financial empire. Shares of companies his group had interest in fell 30% and 40% on the Milan Stock Exchange.

After depositors rushed to withdraw their funds, Banco Ambrosiano itself had to be bailed out by a consortium of six major Italian banks hurriedly put together by the Bank of Italy. And it continues, in light of the rumours, officials at the normally staid Bank of Italy and Finance Ministry expressed amazement at last week's finding by a London coroner that Mr Calvi did indeed commit suicide by hanging himself under the bridge.

The common reaction was, quote, why bother to go to London to do that? I mean, like the great London vibes, you know, it kind of feels like the most dramatic and theatrical way to off yourself. Yeah, I think so. And I mean, I've been to a land a couple of times and I don't want to piss too many people off, but my land kind of sucks. Anyway, why? I mean, why indeed did he go to London? So.

London police first, of course, deemed Calvi's death a suicide. But years later, the case is blown wide open once more. Francesco...

quote, Frankie the Strangler DiCarlo, I mean, that's a hell of a nickname, who's a mafia godfather, had been living in London since the 1970s, having been linked to the deaths of two Sicilian cops before he fled. In 1991, a supergrass, which is a high-level informant, is that an American phrase that people call people supergrasses? No, not at all. Okay, yeah. That's like a really British phrase. Anyway,

This high-level informant fingers Frankie the Strangler as Calvi's killer. In 2012, he speaks out about the murder from the small Sicilian town in which he lives in later life. Quote,

I was in university. That's what I called the prisons in England. We were all in the association room watching television when the news came on that the killer of Calvi was Francesco Di Carlo. All the prisoners and guards looked over and stared. I just shrugged my shoulders and said that they must be talking about someone else with the same name as me. I mean...

No one said that, Frankie the Strangler, and no one looked over at you. But anyway, DiCarlo is a longtime target of law enforcement in the UK and Italy, and authorities actually link him to at least a dozen multi-million dollar drug hauls.

In 1985, Palermo police try expelling him. Within weeks, two of the investigators in that case are shot dead. Here's a Guardian story, quote, And then DiCarlo adds a little, quote,

I was in Rome and received a phone call from a friend in Sicily telling me that a certain high-ranking mafia member had just been killed. I will never forget the date because of this. It was 16th June 1982, two days before Calvi was murdered. The friend told me that Pippo Carlo, which is a very, very high-ranking mafia member known as the Mafia's cashier, was trying to get hold of me because he needed me to do something for him.

In the hierarchy of Cosa Nostra, he was a general, I was a colonel, so he was a little higher up, my superior. He continues, when I finally spoke to Pipo, he told me not to worry, but the problem had been taken care of. That's a code we use in the Cosa Nostra. We never talk about killing someone. We say they've been taken care of.

Very clever. And he goes on. Calvi was naming names. No one had any trust in him anymore. He owed a lot of money. We know this, mate. His friends had all distanced themselves. We know this too. Everyone wanted to get rid of him. Yep. He had been arrested and he had started to talk. We know this. Then he had tried to kill himself by cutting his wrist. We know this too. Mike DiCarlo. He was released but knew he could be rearrested at any time. He was weak. He was a broken man. I mean...

Yeah, all right.

They are made up of a mixture of politicians, bank presidents, the military, top security, and so on. This is a case that they continue to open and close again and again, but it will never be resolved. The higher you go, the less evidence you will find. So, you know, this guy, he's a bit of a fantasist, it sounds, but he was in the same place. He's got some pretty authentic knowledge at the time.

What actually happened to Roberto Calvi? Was he murdered by a London mafiosi, members of P2, somebody else? Or did he actually take his own life?

In 2005, UK cops officially reopened Calvi's case under the leadership of a Bronx-born journalist and investigator named Jeff Katz. Wait, who is this guy? This is a Netflix-ass plotline if I've ever heard one. Just like some dude from the Bronx, they were like, okay, you're in charge now?

Yeah, pretty much. There's really little more to it than that. He likes investigating the Catholic Church and he kind of got involved. And he's got a good turn of quotes. So he says to the BBC, when I started making inquiries through contacts in Italy, the answer came back that if we were to take this particular case on, it would be like dancing in the mouth of the wolf. I mean...

Yeah, I mean, five out of ten. In another article, Kat says that, quote, Roberto Calvi may have been God's banker, but he'd sup with the devil. And I mean, come on, mate. Like, even I've done that in the intro to this podcast. Investigators reassemble the scaffolding from which Calvi was found hanging, and they clamber all over it in pairs of Calvi's actual own shoes shipped in from Italy. And they find that such movement would have left rust on his soles, but there wasn't any at the scene.

They also find that if the River Thames is at high tide, it would be really easy for somebody on a boat to place the body where it was discovered. Quote, for the 62-year-old Calvi to get to the scaffolding fire himself, writes the fourth feature, he would have had to climb down the bridge from a ladder, jump a distance between the ladder and the scaffolding, all while weighted down by 12 pounds of bricks.

So the London cops get so far that in 2005, they actually put five people on trial for Calvi's murder. That's that Sicilian monster people, Carlo, that Di Carlo just fingered in the quotes that I mentioned before. Two businessmen, Ernesto Diotovelli, don't know who he is, Flavio Carboni, that's the real estate guy who helped him get out of the country.

carbone's ex-girlfriend manuela kleinzig you might recognize that name from the godfather part three and of course vittor the bodyguard human trafficker we're not really sure but in 2007 all five of them are acquitted although in the same breath the court decides that calvi was in fact murdered so well done for the uk authorities they've really pulled it out of the bag

Licio Gelli, the leader of P2, he lives a prosperous life and he dies at his luxurious Arezzo Villa in 2015. He actually carries on his fascist campaign long into the 1990s, saying of former protégé Silvio Berlusconi's then Italian premiership that, quote, he's implementing my plan for democratic rebirth to perfection. He should at least give me copyright. Yikes.

In 1989, after a long period of near silence, the Vatican itself reaches a financial settlement with the Bank of Italy to recognise its, quote, moral responsibility in the Banco Ambrosiano crash. Paul Marcinkus, the guerrilla, he denies any wrongdoing, despite being indicted as a, quote, accessory to fraudulent bankruptcy by Italian authorities in 1987.

The Vatican shields him from prosecution. Literally, he literally just sits inside the wall of the Vatican and they quietly shift him away from Rome in 1990. He lives out the rest of his life in a vow of silence on the affair. He continues playing golf and he dies in 2006, age 84, in Sun City, Arizona, with tons and tons of questions hanging over his involvement in Calvi's death and the

the Vatican's probable connections to the mafia and P2. Writes the New York Times in Marcinkas' obituary, quote, Archbishop Marcinkas was indicted but never trialed in the banking scandal, which peaked in 1982. The stuff of international thrillers, the scandal would ultimately involve Machiavellian intrigue, mysterious death, and a loss of more than $1 billion.

And I've actually researched tons of additional scandals in the Vatican for this show, which I'm going to turn into a bonus episode for our Patreon members this week. But that's not quite the end of this story. So you guys remember Pope John Paul I. He's the smiling pope, the guy whose 33-day rule ended when he died of a heart attack in his Vatican bed.

Well, he was succeeded by Pope John Paul II, one of the most popular popes in modern history. There's far too many Ps in this. He didn't exactly pursue the Vatican Bank's financial issues with the same gusto. And in October 2019, a guy called Anthony Raimondi, a Colombo crime family gangster and nephew of Lucky Luciano, claims that he, as part of a hit team, poisoned the pope with cyanide.

I love how the assassination of the Pope or one of the Popes is just like, you know, someone we throw in at the end of this episode. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, you, you,

You play with the big boys, you get spiked by a guy with a crappy beard that looks like Steven Seagal, who brings out a book in his late age. And, you know, we're not entirely sure whether this is legit. But he says that Marcinkus hired him, aged 28, to carry out the deed. Marcinkus, as Raymondi, spiked the Pope's tea with Valium before the hit team administered the deadly poison. I mean, that is a huge...

huge revelation. And he goes, he says in his book, which I'm not even going to say the title of because I bet it's shit. Quote, I stood in the hallway outside the Pope's quarters when the tea was served. I'd done a lot of things in my time, but I didn't want to be there in the room when they killed the Pope. I knew that would buy me a one-way ticket to hell. I mean, is this guy, I don't know, like what the fuck?

God can't see past the door. I don't know. I don't even get it. Jesus Christ. Raimondi claims that the Pope was killed for threatening to expose the Vatican Bank's shady financial investments, at the top of which, of course, sits Marcinkus. Now, soon after, Raimondi says Cardinals invited him back to the Vatican to whack John Paul II, who's also considering outing the financial conspirators, but he refuses.

I love this quote. No way, I said, he writes in his book. What are you going to do? Just keep killing popes? Raymondi says that Pope John Paul II ended up keeping quiet. And instead, Raymondi goes on a bender with the bishops. So he hasn't killed him. He goes on a party instead. And he says, quote, we stayed and partied for a week with cardinals wearing civilian clothes and lots of girls.

If I had to live the rest of my life in Vatican City, it would have been okay with me. It was some setup. My cousins all drove Cadillacs. I'm in the wrong business, I thought. I should have become a cardinal. Yeah. That's, uh, I mean, thanks for writing this up, dude. It's a tornado for sure. If you're still with us, like, thank you guys for supporting us as always.

Patreon.com slash New World Podcast. Sean will explain everything that happened here again in like a two hour episode.