As Pope John Paul II visits communist Poland, his defiance stuns the KGB. Behind the scenes, Calvi is financing the Pope’s covert war on communism. Nicolo tracks down Francesco Pazienza, a spy who collaborated with Calvi. But then, a shocking call: “They’ve just shot the Pope!” Calvi senses danger closing in—who’s next?

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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.

[voice over]: Campside Media.

[news clip]: Good evening. The Pope is in Poland. The leader of the Roman Catholic Church has returned home. Home to a nation that is both communist and devoutly Catholic.

Nicolo Majnoni: It was a hot day in 1979 when Pope John Paul II’s plane touched down on the Polish runway. Half the world was monitoring the plane’s itinerary on television.

[news clip]: No pope has ever visited a communist country before it is a profound religious and political event.

Nicolo Majnoni: He’d been pope only eight months, the first non-Italian pope in over 400 years. And as a proud Polish citizen, he was returning to his homeland for the first time since taking on the papacy. But it wasn’t just a homecoming. It was an incredibly dangerous political act.

[news clip]: Most members of the Polish Communist Party Presidium had strong objections to the Pope’s visit, but realized there was little they could do to prevent it.

Nicolo Majnoni: Because Poland at that time was 90% Catholic, and Poles were desperate to see their beloved son come home. But Poland was also communist, part of the Soviet Bloc. And communist leaders saw religion, and the Catholic Church in particular, as a threat, a rival. They’d been trying to banish Christianity in Poland for decades. In the 70s, protests and strikes were breaking out in multiple cities across the country. And now here were over a million pro-Christian and likely anti-communist citizens altogether lining the streets of Warsaw, amped up for their Pope.

[news clip]: A crackdown seemed inevitable, if not by Polish authorities, then by the Soviet army.

Nicolo Majnoni: Though Polish officials didn’t want to allow the Pope’s visit, denying his entry meant that they’d face a possible riot. No other Pope had managed to slip behind the Iron Curtain before. But this Pope, the Polish Pope, he made his way in, which was unbelievable. Christ had breached the Iron Curtain. The West had breached the curtain. Every Catholic who grew up during the Cold War probably knows about this trip. It was like a grudge match. The Pope facing off against the communists. At stake was the fate of Poland.

[news clip]: Shaping up as the greatest demonstration of church loyalty ever seen in a Soviet bloc country.

Nicolo Majnoni: I’ve heard this story from my grandmother, who watched the scene from her television in Rome, but I never actually saw the images until now. In front of millions, and I mean millions, of Poles, Pope John Paul II strode confidently on a platform that was half altar, half Monsters of Rock stage. He was calm, like he knew exactly what he was doing. He knew that his next move could change the course of Polish history, and really world history. Would he encourage Poles to rise up against communism and risk their lives, or would he play it safe? With police and spies for the KGB watching in the wings, John Paul didn’t explicitly tell his country folk to fight, but he did tell them to keep living the life that God wanted for them. To keep going to church, keep supporting trade unions, in defiance of Soviet policies.

[news clip]: John Paul’s call is clear. Embrace God, choose him, not a communist doctrine. Have faith—

Nicolo Majnoni: Then the Pope looked out into the crowd and paused. I assumed that there’d be mass arrests erupting at this point, but no. At the end of the homily, the Polish crowds began to sing. [singing]

[news clip]: Frequent long applause interrupted him and once led spontaneously to an old Polish song they sang with their Pope’s amplified voice in unison changing the soviet approved words God bless our independent Poland to the words God bring an independent Poland.

Nicolo Majnoni: Then the crowds chanted, We want God. Some say the cheers went on for 14 minutes as Soviet police looked on helplessly.

[news clip]: His speech had finished an hour before in this town square, but they wouldn’t let him go, nor did he want to.

Nicolo Majnoni: It’s clear from the videos that emotions were running high throughout this demonstration of Catholic faith in the heart of Soviet Poland. But even with over a million devotees of Pope John Paul standing in the heart of Warsaw and thousands of cops at the ready, the day didn’t end in violence. But a revolution had begun. The Pope spent nine days in his mother country, nine triumphant days. according to a New York Times headline. And when he went back to Rome, the Pope was determined to keep the momentum up. He wanted to throw fuel on the anti-communist fire. He wanted to keep the resistance alive. And what the resistance needed now was money, lots of it. But the Pope couldn’t just deliver hundreds of thousands of dollars to them. This was the Cold War. And if the money was traced back to the Vatican, Hell, if it was detected by the Soviets at all, it could incite a violent backlash against his beloved Polish Catholics. Or worse, it could begin a full-on war. The Pope needed someone who could come up with the money and smuggle it across the world without being traced. Someone who was in a desperate enough position to do whatever the church asked him to do. And in the early 80s, there was one banker who fit the bill perfectly. [music plays] From Crooked Media and Campside Media, this is Shadow Kingdom, God’s Banker. I’m Nicolo Majnoni, and this is episode four, The Priest and the Spy.

[news clip]: Suddenly, a hand, a gun and a volley of fire.

Gerald Posner: The people who pulled the strings, the puppet masters, had been from Moscow.

Nicolo Majnoni: So the Pope needed a banker to make his money disappear, and Calvi, whose name had been outed in a secret Masonic conspiracy, needed a high-powered patron to bounce back. And they, the Pope and Calvi, would come together via a 6 ‘2″, rugby-playing bishop.

[news clip]: He is a man of great power, the governor of Vatican City and the head of the Vatican Bank. / Marcinkus is roughly the Vatican’s number three. He is also a kind of chief bodyguard for the pope, the burly figure you see next to John Paul on foreign trips.

Nicolo Majnoni: Archbishop Paul Marcinkus was an American from the outskirts of Chicago. Author Gerald Posner shared more.

Gerald Posner: He was larger than life, he smoked his cigars, he played golf, and he was garrulous, he was outgoing.

Nicolo Majnoni: And in 1971, shortly before meeting Calvi, Marcinkus added a new title to his Vatican resume, President of the Vatican Bank. Did he have the financial experience to lead a bank? No. But did that stop him? Not a chance.

Gerald Posner: He knew his own limitations. He might not express them to anyone. He would never say to the Pope, by the way, I don’t think I’m cut out for this job. What he viewed himself as was the quintessential judge of good character. And so therefore he could find the right outside bankers to do the work for him. He could find the investment people who would help him make the Vatican Bank big.

Nicolo Majnoni: investment people like Roberto Calvi. [music plays] After his 1979 trip to Poland, Pope John Paul II started to privately invite officials from the CIA to give him regular briefings and also invited Polish protest leaders to talk strategy. He told Archbishop Marcinkus that he wanted to support the Polish resistance financially. According to multiple reporters and the bishop himself, it was now Marcinkus’ duty to get money to the Polish anti-communist groups without being caught. So, of course, Marcinkus turned to Calvi, who’d already perfected the art of making Vatican cash disappear. Gerald Posner again.

Gerald Posner: Marcinkus suddenly moves from just being the head of the Vatican Bank to having this position where he’s now involved in this covert, surreptitious financing of money, CIA money and church money and others, back to Poland to destabilize communism.

Nicolo Majnoni: As God’s banker, Calvi would also become an anti-communist cash smuggler. You’re probably thinking, why does the Vatican Bank, the one that can make money disappear, need Calvi to help them move funds anonymously? Well, t he Vatican bank is like a black box. Cash that went in could disappear. And then it was a simple transfer to Switzerland or the Bahamas. But as Posner told me, this holy war was more complicated. You weren’t just transferring money to some Western hub, you were sending money behind enemy lines, which required a higher level of skill and anonymity, often physically smuggling money and material. Plus, the Polish economy was on the verge of collapse, and the Vatican bank had liquidity issues. The pope needed someone who could deploy millions ASAP. So, according to Calvi’s written account, the Vatican asked for his help to find sources of cash and also ensure that cash was received behind the Iron Curtain. And to Calvi, this seemed like the best way to gain some salvation from his own critical debt situation. Gerald Posner told me that after the P2 membership list was outed, many of Calvi’s investors wanted to distance themselves from him.

Gerald Posner: So it’s bad for him because they’re suddenly trying to show less of those connections and that means he can’t pick up the phone just call them and ask them to write a check for him for another one of his ventures in the Caribbean.

Nicolo Majnoni: Which meant less cash cash in Calvi’s bank. This created a problem for Calvi. The money that he would normally use to keep his operation going was drying up. If he was in the Pope’s good graces, perhaps he could leverage that trust to gain more support for his bank. He needed to make sure that the church kept the investments they already had in his bank, Banco Ambrosiano, as other investors were jumping ship. And so, Calvi got to work. But soon after, Calvi received word from a spy who said he knew all about his plans with the Vatican. And he wanted to meet with Calvi, or else. [AD BREAK] Espresso, pre-interview espresso is being made. It’s the summer of 2023, another sweltering day in Italy, and I’m in what looks like a pool house at a villa, waiting for an espresso to be made before my source is willing to talk to me. He didn’t give me his address until a few minutes before the interview, which I’m getting used to at this point. Do you have a favorite place to sit?

Francesco Pazienza: I put my ass wherever I want.

Nicolo Majnoni: You put your ass wherever you want? Okay. He lights up his pipe and will continue to do so, refilling and lighting throughout our five hour interview.

Francesco Pazienza: My name is Francesco, but everybody call me Frank. [music plays]

Nicolo Majnoni: Francesco Frank Pazienza is a jack of all trades. He was a medical doctor, a hard-nosed businessman, and most importantly, Pazienza used to be a spy working for the Italian version of the CIA. Posner told me that if I wanted to understand how Calvi and the pope were working together to send money behind the Iron Curtain, I had to talk to Pazienza. Because, at the time… he was spying on the Vatican. You see, one of the dirty secrets I’ve learned about the Vatican was that cardinals and bishops were all spying on each other. One rival cardinal apparently hired Pazienza to dig up dirt on Archbishop Marcinkus. And so what do you, he tells you this, he implies, fuck Marcinkus. What are you thinking? What’s going on in your head?

Francesco Pazienza: I was thinking, I was thinking, I said, something funny is going on over there. But I had the idea that I was living in probably one of the most important situations of the world. So I said, I have to find the documents.

Nicolo Majnoni: Frank Pazienza had to find a document so scandalous that it could take down Marcinkus. So Pazienza worked his connections and said he found damning financial statements between Marcinkus, Sindona, and Calvi. He wouldn’t go into more detail except to say this would have undermined the Calvi-Marcinkus covert operation. The two men would be exposed before they’d barely begun. But being a very Italian spy, Pazienza didn’t bring this information to the cardinal who hired him. He had his own agenda. He made contact with Calvi. And then the banker invited him to meet. The rendezvous was set for an office on Via della Concilazione in Rome, the massive boulevard that goes from the Tiber River to the doors of St. Peter’s Basilica. On the day of, Pazienza made his way to the address and went up a few flights of stairs to the room. And there he saw God’s banker. Suit. Tie. Mustache. Calvi was seated. So he gets up and he shakes your hand. Do you remember the handshake? You just shook my hand and it was kind of limp.

Francesco Pazienza: That’s right, that’s a Calvi.

Nicolo Majnoni: Oh, you think it’s emblematic of him?

Francesco Pazienza: Emblematic, very emblematic.

Nicolo Majnoni: So you shake his hand, it’s limp, then what happens?

Francesco Pazienza: He say, “I think, uh, present, we have a problem.” I say, “What’s the problem?”

Nicolo Majnoni: You’re making a gesture that you’re taking out documents from a briefcase. Pazienza said he laid out the documents showing Calvi’s secret transfers between the Vatican, the Ambrosiano, and its offshore companies.

Francesco Pazienza: He told me, what do you want to do now? I say, listen, I’m very frank, I don’t give a shit about you.

Nicolo Majnoni: You said this to the most important private banker in Italy in 1980.

Francesco Pazienza: Non me ne frega un cazzo di lei. Forse non ha capito dico.

Nicolo Majnoni: He told Calvi, I don’t give a shit about you. Maybe you don’t understand, I only care about the Pope. Pazienza thought this was a true conspiracy against the Pope inside the Vatican. And he said he didn’t want to be a part of it. Pazienza was on their side.

Francesco Pazienza: I was considering myself a fighter, a soldier.

Nicolo Majnoni: A soldier for what army?

Francesco Pazienza: A soldier against the international communists.

Nicolo Majnoni: Why? Why fight international communities?

Francesco Pazienza: Because I was hating the Communism. I was hating the extremism.

Nicolo Majnoni: Pazienza hated Communism, he hated the extremism of it. And so—[overlapping voices]

Nicolo Majnoni: Pazienza is saying here that he ripped up the document in front of Calvi, handed it to him, and told him he didn’t have any other copies. I had to ask this a few ways to confirm with Pazienza, but basically, he waltzed into Calvi’s office and showed the banker blackmail material on the Vatican bank, then tore it up. From there, Pazienza told Calvi he was ready to quit the Italian CIA, that he didn’t have a special allegiance to the left leaning cardinals. And Pazienza, anti-communist soldier, thought he’d be better off working privately for the banker.

Francesco Pazienza: And I explained everything. He didn’t have any reaction.

Nicolo Majnoni: He doesn’t freak out and cry, he says. Come work for me.

Francesco Pazienza: Yes.

Nicolo Majnoni: And what do you, and you tell him, yeah, but only if I do exactly what I want.

Francesco Pazienza: No, no.

Nicolo Majnoni: I don’t report, I only report to you.

Francesco Pazienza: Only report to you, and we agree on my steps.

Nicolo Majnoni: This sounded unbelievable, except that it was confirmed in every book, every article I’ve read about Pazienza’s hiring. In early 1981, he became Calvi’s fixer for about a half a million dollars a year. Instead of fucking over Marcinkus, Pazienza quit being a spy and went to work for the covert Marcinkus-Calvi Cold War Slush Fund Syndicate. What did that actually involve? Well. Calvi normally moved through loans and wire transfers. But to ensure that the money was untraceable, the best way here was to go with literal cash, gold, preferably, moved across borders. One story that Pazienza told me was about a call he got from Archbishop Marcinkus. He said that the Pope wanted to transport $3 million in gold across the Iron Curtain to a Polish anti-communist group.

Francesco Pazienza: He send me, “I would send you three million”, okay? A gram, two gram, et cetera, etc.

Nicolo Majnoni: Pazienza flew the money to Calvi’s Associates in Switzerland, where the currency could be converted to small ingots of 99.99 % pure gold. Pazienza then brought the gold back into Italy, and then to the border of Italy and Yugoslavia. There, he met a priest who would drive the gold to Poland in a small car.

Francesco Pazienza: This is the car, the most expensive car in the world, I say, because it’s $3 million car. So I check everything, the brake, everything. [music plays]

Nicolo Majnoni: Pazienza said he checked every inch of this beat-up Soviet car, then he put a false bottom for the gold.

Francesco Pazienza: And when the car was ready, I said, Monsignor, how long will you take? He said, listen, I drive day and night, a couple of days. Okay. I said, this is the number you have to call from Gdańsk. When you arrive in Gdańsk, you call me and say, Happy birthday! I understand that you arrive. Okay.

Nicolo Majnoni: Pazienza told the priest, when you arrive at your destination in Gdańsk, Poland, give me a call. The code is Tanti Auguri, which is Italian for happy birthday. So Pazienza said day one passed and he stayed near his phone. Day two passed and still he waited. On day three, Pazienza began to get nervous.

Francesco Pazienza: Finally, the phone rang.  “Doctorre, buongiorno! Tanti Aguiri cumpleano! Grazie, grazie, grazie, grazie!”

Nicolo Majnoni: Happy birthday, yeah, so the signal.

Francesco Pazienza: “Tutto posto. Okay. Arrivederci.” That was it.

Nicolo Majnoni: That’s enormous, that’s huge. That’s an incredible moment.

Francesco Pazienza: Oh, it was, this was the historical moment.

Nicolo Majnoni: And it wasn’t just in Poland. Pazienza told me he helped Calvi and Marcinkus send money to anti-communist groups in Latin American countries, like Costa Rica and Panama. And Calvi, in return, got to keep using the Vatican’s money and reputation to keep his bank afloat, just as he had hoped. I have to admit, though these stories are great, it’s hard to totally corroborate everything Pazienza has told me. But when it comes to the basic question of did the Vatican task Calvi with moving funds to anti-communist groups, there’s a document I mentioned earlier that confirms it all for me. [music plays] Remember back in episode one, when I talked about the letter Calvi had written to the Pope just days before he died, the one where he proclaims the Pope to be his last hope, a copy of which was also discovered tucked away in Calvi’s briefcase? In Italian, Calvi wrote, quote, “It was I who willingly took on the mistakes and faults of the Vatican bank. It was I who, on precise orders from your representatives, arranged for money to get to entities throughout the East.” In his final weeks, fearing for his safety, Calvi leveraged what he knew to try and get the Pope’s protection. He’s begging and threatening all at the same time. But why was Calvi so scared in those final days? I know generally about the mafia and the fascist Freemasons, and I’d learned more about the specifics of Calvi’s death. But. In the spring of 1981, something happened that would really set Calvi on edge. Pazienza told me everything was going smoothly in their new money movement operation for the first few months. But then he got a call from the Pope’s right-hand man.

Francesco Pazienza: So the telephone rings, it was Marcinkus. I said, you didn’t see what’s happened? I said, no, I’m not seeing what’s happened. You don’t know? They shot the Pope. Call me immediately.

[news clip]: Suddenly, a hand, a gun, and a volley of fire, the Pope slumped, hit by two bullets. / There was just an instance of silence, and then the screams, at which point the crowds just swarmed over the vehicle, and almost immediately armed guards, there hadn’t been any scene previous to that, came out, and a lot of screaming and yelling.

Nicolo Majnoni: Pazienza rushed to St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City, where Pope John Paul II was shot, but was caught in a sea of worshipers, of priests and journalists. Pazienza regrouped with Calvi and Marcinkus to judge the fallout. And very quickly, suspicion drifted toward the Soviet Union.

[news clip]: NBC News has accumulated a great deal of evidence linking the attempted murder here in St. Peter’s Square to the political and diplomatic needs of Red Square.

Gerald Posner: They were all types of rumors, and so the question was whether the communists had decided to kill the pope.

Nicolo Majnoni: Gerald Posner again.

Gerald Posner: There’s no question that Marcinkus and others inside the Vatican thought it was a very real possibility that the people who pulled the strings, the puppet masters, had been from Moscow.

Nicolo Majnoni: And in the year to come, Calvi would become increasingly afraid for his own personal safety and increasingly desperate. If the Pope’s anti-communist activities made him a target, if the Pope with his own security force could be shot in broad daylight, what might happen to Roberto Calvi? Calvi had poked the biggest bears in Italian society at this point, from the Soviets to the Freemasons to the mafia. There were a ton of powerful people with motives to punish Roberto Calvi. In just a few days after the Pope was shot, someone finally did come for God’s banker. But it wasn’t P2 or the Russians. It was the police. That’s next time on Shadow Kingdom.

Roberto Rosone: You see what’s happening, but you don’t fully understand.

Clara Calvi: Pazienza called me. He was screaming and crying, saying, Clara, we can’t find him.

Francesco Pazienza: Carboni was a very intelligent man, but he was a son of a bitch.

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.