In 2022, Attorney Nicolo Majnoni reconnects with an old friend, former White House reporter Mario Platero, who has been fixated for decades on the murder of Vatican banker Roberto Calvi. Mario suspects the Vatican, the Mafia, and other shadowy groups. What starts as a conversation sparks Nicolo’s obsession, leading him to abandon his law firm and dive into one of history’s most notorious unsolved crimes. Hear this episode in Italian by subscribing to Il Banchiere di Dio wherever you get your podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Nicolo Majnoni: Friends of the Pod subscribers can listen to the full season of Shadow Kingdom right now. Join Friends of the Pod at Crooked.com/friends or on Apple podcasts. [music plays]

[voice over]: Campside Media.

Nicolo Majnoni: 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 a 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, igniting 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. [music plays] I’m Nicolo Majnoni and this is episode 1, Death of a Banker. [music plays]

[news clip]: 62-year-old Signor Calvi was found dangling here just a few days before he was due to appear in Italian court—

Mario Platero: And I said, oh my god, what’s going on? I mean, what’s the excitement?

Nicolo Majnoni: I stumbled on the story of Calvi’s death while working as a corporate lawyer a couple of 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, so hold on, so we have very little time.

Mario Platero: Yeah. Let’s go.

Nicolo Majnoni: 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?

Mario Platero: Well, I wish, thank you though, for the advertisement. It’s not that I know every—first of all, I don’t.

Nicolo Majnoni: 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.

Mario Platero: 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, tear down this wall—[news clip]

Nicolo Majnoni: 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 confess, 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.

Mario Platero: 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.

Nicolo Majnoni: 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.

Mario Platero: 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.

Nicolo Majnoni: 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 moon-lighting journalist side of him took over.

Mario Platero: The excitement of finding Calvi at that moment became passionate. So my attention was totally diverted to that. And I started to call around.

Nicolo Majnoni: 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.

Mario Platero: And she says, uh, Calvi residence. And I say, yes, I’m looking for Mr. Carlo Calvi. She says, he’s not here. So I said, well, let’s go for the full monty as they say, may I talk to Mr. Roberto Calvi? Oh, no, he’s not here either. I’m sorry, but, uh,

Nicolo Majnoni: But you’re in luck, the housekeeper told Mario, the whole family, Roberto Calvi included, will be at their Bahamas home tomorrow..

Mario Platero: 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.

Nicolo Majnoni: 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.

Mario Platero: And I went to sleep with this excitement of pursuing my scoop, my first big scoop, okay? And I wake up the following morning.

Nicolo Majnoni: 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.

Mario Platero: 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?

Nicolo Majnoni: 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.

Mario Platero: The wire said Calvi found dead in London under the Blackfriars Bridge. Suicide, question mark. My answer was immediate no.

Nicolo Majnoni: 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.

Mario Platero: Suicide, question mark, but the kind of evidence I had was not leaning in that direction.

Nicolo Majnoni: Mario stared at the wire printout, little details jumping out at him. Like, wait. He had 12 pounds of bricks in his pockets. Lots 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. And Calvi was rumored to have partnered with a lot of shady characters, characters who may well have wanted revenge.

Mario Platero: 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 US, and Pope Wojtyla. So you say, oh my God—[both speaking]

Nicolo Majnoni: 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.

[news clip]: 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.

Nicolo Majnoni: 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’ve done this! by hiring God’s banker, Roberto Calvi.

Mario Platero: There was also the mafia involved.

Nicolo Majnoni: Sure, of course.

Mario Platero: Of course the mafia, exactly.

Nicolo Majnoni: So, so the Vatican using a bank as a money laundering operation to fight the Cold War with the U.S.—[both speaking]

Mario Platero: For different reasons.

Nicolo Majnoni: Let’s add the Mafia. Let’s add the Mafia.

Mario Platero: Exactly.

Nicolo Majnoni: 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. Growing up in the U.S., 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.

Mario Platero: Let me point out that I’m on your side with this.

Nicolo Majnoni: 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.

Mario Platero: You’re implying you didn’t believe me, that that’s another reason—.

Nicolo Majnoni: Of course, yes. I didn’t believe you..

Mario Platero: 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.

Nicolo Majnoni: So the 25-year-old Mario who wanted to interview Calvi and never did, you pass that baton to me?

Mario Platero: 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.

Nicolo Majnoni: Yeah, well it all sounded very fake and I wanted to prove you wrong and that 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 gonna 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. [AD BREAK] 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 that 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.

[news clip]: 62-year-old Signor Calvi was found dangling here just a few days before he was due to appear in Italian court—

Nicolo Majnoni: 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.

[news clip]: The British coroner’s jury ruled that he had committed suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed.

Nicolo Majnoni: 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.

[news clip]: All the evidence pointed towards suicide. Professor Simpson, who carried out a post-mortem examination on Signor 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 not.

Nicolo Majnoni: 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 believed 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, is the swinging body of Roberto Calvi. If I truly entertain Mario’s challenge, I would have to admit that there’s something to Dietrolegia, that there’s something behind the curtain, something that those in power want to stay hidden. From the start, I didn’t wanna 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? [music plays] Coming up on this season of Shadow Kingdom.

[unidentified speaker]: 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. / [speaking Italian] / He tells me you need to leave 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. / [speaking Italian] / 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.

Nicolo Majnoni: Shadow Kingdom is a production of Crooked Media and Campside Media. It’s hosted and reported by me, Nicolo Majnoni, with additional reporting by Simona Zecchi and Joe Hawthorne. The show is written by  Joe Hawthorne, Ashleyanne Krigbaum and me. Joe Hawthorne is our lead producer, and Ashleyanne Krigbaum is our managing producer. Tracey 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 Yi-Wen Lai-Tremewan. Voice acting by Boni Biagini, Andrea Bianchi, Ferrante Cosma, Luca DeGennaro, Michele Teodori, and Mustafa Ziyalan. Field recording by Justin Trieger, Jonathan Zenti, Pete Shev, Jonathan Groubert and Joanna Broder. Fact checking by Zoe Sullivan. Our executive producers are me, Nicolo Majnoni. Along with Sarah Geismer, Katie Long and Alison Falzetta from Crooked Media. Dean, Adam Hoff, Matt Shaer and Vanessa Grigoriadis are the executive producers at Campside Media. [music plays] 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.