Calvi is arrested on a banking technicality, but after his release, he becomes paranoid. When his deputy is shot in the street, Nicolo uncovers secret tapes revealing Calvi’s mounting fear. The Bank of Italy finds a $1.2 billion hole in Calvi’s accounts—money meant for the Vatican, the Mafia, and P2. Now, it’s gone.

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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.

Nicolo Majnoni: In the middle of a hot summer night in 1981, Roberto Calvi sat in a prison cell and began to cry. He’d been arrested just a week after the assassination attempt on John Paul II, and had spent two months wasting away in his cell. Calvi’s stubble was beginning to show. His eyes were red from lack of sleep. His beige prison jumpsuit stunk of BO. Calvi had been stripped of his designer clothes right down to his shoelaces, and he hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in months. His cellmates would play cards and they’d listen to music all night, keeping him from sleeping. Calvi was charged with breaking currency export laws. Basically, Italy wanted to protect its economy by forcing people to keep their money in the country.

Francesco Pazienza: Importazione illegale di capitali. C’era la famosa Legge 159. Se la ricorda lei?

Nicolo Majnoni: Yeah, it’s illegal to export a certain amount of capital abroad in Italy.

Francesco Pazienza: Everybody was doing that.

Nicolo Majnoni: I asked Francesco Pazienza, the former spy who worked for Calvi, about Calvi’s arrest. And he said what I heard from lots of people, which is, everybody ignored this law. To be clear, Calvi was up to a bunch of financial shenanigans. But it’s also pretty normal for bankers to work internationally, sending cash outside of their country. Arresting Calvi for this kind of felt like arresting a pedestrian for jaywalking. It seemed like prosecutors were going after Calvi to send a political message. Some reporters claimed this was a left-wing vendetta against Calvi. Others suggested that prosecutors wanted to send a message to tax cheats, to other rich Italians who were shadily trying to conceal money abroad. Either way, Pazienza said this was a shock to Calvi’s world.

Francesco Pazienza: Well, when Calvi was arrested, I was just in my office in Rome and my secretary said, listen, listen, listen, listen, I heard the television, I saw that he was arrested.

[news clip]: Roberto Calvi non può comunque lasciare legalmente l’italia perché il passaporto gli è stato ritirato.

Nicolo Majnoni: You’re the Calvi family creative fixer at this point. Are you helping him now that he’s in jail? Are you giving him strategies?

Francesco Pazienza: I organized a contact with the chaplain of the jail. I told the chaplain to say that we are very close to him, don’t worry and so on.

Nicolo Majnoni: Why did you want Calvi to know that you’re with him and everything’s okay?

Francesco Pazienza: Because just to keep him calm, you know, calm, quiet.

Nicolo Majnoni: While Calvi was in prison, Pazienza was still in contact with the Vatican and politicians around Italy. He sent word to Calvi through the prison chaplain, keep calm, keep quiet, we’re with you. Don’t talk to prosecutors about the Vatican, the Masons, any of it. This could be a reassuring message, sure, we’ve got your back, but I can also see how this could be threatening, like don’t talk or else. I don’t know which way Calvi read Pazienza’s message, but I do know he didn’t do as he was told. Investigative journalist Gerald Posner said that jail just sort of broke Calvi.

Gerald Posner: This was a man obsessed with his own personal security. And now suddenly he’s in an Italian prison, not very clean, not very sparkling, not washed down once a day with a lot of prisoners in a shared space. Calvi hates that experience. The idea that he could be sentenced one day and sent there to him is as bad an example of the future as he could possibly imagine.

Nicolo Majnoni: He’d been denied bail multiple times. He’d stopped leaving his cell during the day and stopped going outside to exercise. At one point he got pneumonia. I mean, he was literally withering away. So according to Posner, on a July night in 1981, Calvi called three prosecutors to the prison and told them, you must get me out of here. I can’t take it anymore.

Gerald Posner: So then he figures, okay, so what can I do?

Nicolo Majnoni: He did what he knew he shouldn’t do. He started offering up information in exchange for a deal.

Gerald Posner: Okay. That’s it. I’ll tell you what. P2. They’re behind it all. They’ve got every conspiracy. They’re the masterminds. They’re pulling the strings. They’re the puppet masters.

Nicolo Majnoni: Pozner told me at that point, Calvi let it all out. He claimed he’d made payments to politicians on behalf of P2. The P2 masons were behind crooked oil deals and the big Italian newspaper he’d bought. He wept and wept, but the prosecutors demanded more. I read some Italian reporting of this exchange that quoted Calvi as telling the prosecutors, I’m the last wheel on the cart and I’m simply in the service of someone else. But who controls you, the prosecutors demanded. At this point, Calvi realized he’d gone too far. He shut down.

Gerald Posner: And then the prosecutors come in and say we need more you can’t just say that we need more and then he says, Oh, I was wrong about that. No, it’s not true. I take it all back

Nicolo Majnoni: The prosecutors grumbled and said they weren’t sure how much they could do for Calvi. Over the next few days, Calvi retracted much of what he said about P2. He also sent desperate messages to his lawyers while his body and his career continued to deteriorate. Meanwhile, a public trial was on the horizon and his chances of being found innocent were looking worse and worse. About a week after his meeting with prosecutors, guards discovered God’s banker collapsed and unconscious in his jail cell. [music plays] From Crooked Media and Campside Media, this is Shadow Kingdom: God’s Banker. I’m Nicolo Majnoni and this is Episode 5: The Fixers.

Clara Calvi: I’m afraid all he would talk about was death, always.

Gerald Posner: The moment it starts to unravel, it all starts to unravel.

Nicolo Majnoni: In court, on the morning of July 9th, one of Calvi’s defense lawyers made a surprising announcement. God’s banker had attempted suicide and had been rushed to the hospital. This is a really sensitive part of the Calvi story, so I want to tread carefully here. It’s tough to say for certain what Calvi was thinking at this moment and what his intentions were. His family said his life was never actually in danger. that this wasn’t a quote unquote “real attempt.” But it feels important to acknowledge that Calvi had a history of suicide attempts, especially given how he died. And picturing him there in that moment, I really do feel for him. I don’t think Calvi started out trying to make a billion dollar criminal empire, but I can see how Calvi’s first fraud led to a lie, then a bigger lie, and a bigger lie. And there’s something so tragic, so Shakespearean, about a man who’s gone too far, who’s been swallowed up by his own crimes. Calvi had always been able to stay one step ahead of trouble in the past, always found someone to save him, someone to protect him. But his arrest made it clear that any protection was now gone. Also, Calvi had talked to authorities in jail, despite Pazienza’s warning not to. He was now a potential liability for a dangerous list of associates who might prefer his mouth to be closed permanently. Soon after Calvi’s suicide attempt, he was officially convicted of those export violations and then was let out of prison pending appeal. But the violence Calvi had seemed to keep at bay was about to hit close to home. And I had just the person to ask about it. Hi, Philip.

Philip Willan: Hi.

Nicolo Majnoni: Good to see you. Benvenuti.

Philip Willan: Come in.

Nicolo Majnoni: This is Philip Willan, a British expat who lives in Rome and writes for The Times, the British newspaper. He’s written two books about Roberto Calvi and spent over 20 years trying to piece together the final weeks of the banker’s life. Over the course of my reporting, Willan and I have become friends. We’ve talked over a dozen times, but this visit was the first time we’d met in person. I traveled to Rome because he promised to open his personal archive for me. What’s it? Yeah, opening the seal.

Philip Willan: Yes.

Nicolo Majnoni: What do we have?

Philip Willan: These are tapes of some of the interviews that I did. We’ve got Roberto Rosone.

Nicolo Majnoni: That’s Calvi’s VP.

Philip Willan: Yes.

Nicolo Majnoni: Willan had recordings of interviews he’d done with Calvi’s family, with mafiosos, diplomats, and many other people who knew Calvi, including Roberto Rosone, Calvi’s deputy at the Banco Ambrosiano. These were people I would have loved to interview, but most of them are now dead. As soon as I left Willan, I rushed to have these tapes digitized. Handing them over, I felt this pang of anxiety. And then, a couple of days later, I got this tidy list of files back. I could just hit play from the convenience of my laptop. I started with the Rosone tapes. Hitting play, the first thing I heard Rosone say was.

Roberto Rosone:  Mi aspettava l’autista sul lago.  Vedo un bell’uomo

[voice over]: So I opened the door. My driver was waiting by the corner and I see a handsome guy.

Nicolo Majnoni: Rosone described an afternoon in the spring of 1982, after Calvi was out of prison. Rosone was leaving the Banco Ambrosiano when a young man approached him on the street and held up a gun. We’ve asked an actor to read Rosone’s transcript here.

[voice over]: And this was one of those moments in life where you see what’s happening, but you don’t fully understand.

Nicolo Majnoni: When Rosone was asked about the Calvi affair, this was the first thing he talked about, staring down the barrel of a gun.

[voice over]: The man points a gun at me, and shoots, but the shot didn’t end up firing, so he starts to reload the gun, and in the act of reloading, the gun somehow goes off, and the bullet went right by my testicles, and back then I was more attached to them than I am now.

Nicolo Majnoni: Rosone laughed about it after the fact, but in that moment, he watched as his bodyguard opened fire on the shooter. The hitman fell to the ground, dead, while Rosone fell, clutching his leg. This story was the exact kind of attack Calvi had been afraid of. It’s why he’d paid for armored cars, armed security, and had gotten involved with P2, which had promised him protection, all in the hopes of avoiding this kind of attack. It was shocking to hear Rosone describe his own shooting, but perhaps more surprising was that Rosone blamed Calvi’s inner circle for the shooting. Rosone said that things… had gotten increasingly disorganized at the Banco Ambrosiano after Calvi’s arrest. Suspicious loans, shady businessmen coming in and out. And Rosone blamed a new business associate of Calvi’s for the shooting. Someone Calvi had met and had started confiding in right after he was released from prison. A man named Flavio Carboni.

[voice over]: If you and I run a red light, we get caught, we get a ticket. But Carboni, a man so utterly under-qualified, he somehow kept everyone off his back.

Nicolo Majnoni: Carboni was a powerful construction magnate, a bit of a lobbyist with high-level government connections. He was someone you could pay to get you out of a jam, a fixer of sorts. He had a lot of experience getting out of trouble.

[voice over]: They tried Carboni in something like 10 trials. Have you ever heard of any of them? No, because to everyone’s surprise, he is always acquitted. Even in the face of incontrovertible evidence.

Nicolo Majnoni: Rosone thought Carboni had it out for him. That’s because Carboni had been asking the Banco Ambrosiano for all these shady loans, and Rosone had been denying them. I kept listening to the tape, captivated by Rosone, when suddenly he dropped this incredible piece of news.

[voice over]: The bank’s security guard shot the assailant as he was riding away in a motorbike. He got him right in the back of the head and then they would find that he had on him the phone number of Carboni.

Nicolo Majnoni: So this was nuts, like a huge red flag. If Carboni was trying to kill high-level Ambrosiano bankers, I needed to go much deeper on him. I asked Pazienza what he knew about him. Who was Carboni, first of all? How would you describe him?

Francesco Pazienza: Carboni was a very intelligent man, but was a son of a bitch. He got a lot of money from Calvi.

Nicolo Majnoni: Pazienza explained that in July of 1981, Calvi was recovering from his suicide attempt and was out of jail for now pending his appeal. So after Calvi got out of jail, Pazienza organized a vacation for him on the island of Sardinia, which happened to be Carboni’s hometown. It was a nice, thoughtful idea, a chance to recuperate, maybe do some business.

Francesco Pazienza: And one day I met Carboni with another boat close to a beach. So I said, hey, listen, Senor Presidente, uh, voila—

Nicolo Majnoni: Pazienza knew Carboni had connections in the justice system that he might be able to lean on to keep Calvi free. So Pazienza organized a quote-unquote “chance encounter” with Calvi and Carboni. Carboni started charming Calvi, joking with him, apparently even making the banker laugh. He invited Calvi onto his yacht and gave him a big wheel of Pecorino cheese, which to me sounds like someone doing an impression of an over-the-top Italian lobbyist. In fact, Pazienza has started feeling a little a little threatened, a little jealous maybe.

Francesco Pazienza: Carboni at that point, he was thinking to take Calvi from my hands and handle him directly. Calvi completely abandoned himself on the hands of that piece of shit of Carboni.

Nicolo Majnoni: Not that Pazienza  is still upset about it or anything. Coming back from vacation, Calvi was determined to prove he could still run the Banco Ambrosiano. He’d been temporarily replaced as chairman while he was in jail. But now that he was free, he made his way to the executive elevator and up to the Ambrosiano boardroom where he greeted employees as if everything was normal. He took back his chairmanship and told employees that he would steady the ship. Gerald Posner again.

Gerald Posner: That shows you the hold that Calvi had on the bank. The bank does not demand his resignation. They say, okay, that’s fine. You’re still running the bank, it’s okay. And he stays there with an iron hand and he doubles down on many of the things that later get him in trouble.

Nicolo Majnoni: All the while, he continued to see Carboni more and Pazienza less. After vacationing together, the two would often meet at Calvi’s home in Milan and his vacation home near the Swiss border. They would have long, intense, private conversations together. Carboni organized meetings with high-profile ministers for Calvi and gave him business advice because the world didn’t know it yet, but Calvi knew that all was not well at the Banco Ambrosiano. [music plays] The bank’s stock price had been artificially inflated as Calvi secretly bought more and more shares, but those shares began to lose value when Calvi was arrested. Also, the bank had way more debt than was publicly known. And so, yet again, Calvi searched for a way out, a bailout for his bank. Throughout the summer of 1981 and into the fall, he looked for new financial partners. He met with Libyan, Saudi, and Iranian investors. He talked about negotiating a deal with Opus Dei, a secretive organization within the Catholic Church, and ENI, Italy’s state-run oil conglomerate. In November, Calvi recruited one of the most respected businessmen in Italy to join the Ambrosiano board. But the new board member stepped down after serving only a few months and sold his stake in the bank. He said only that he was appalled by what he found. By January of 1982, Calvi was really beginning to lose it. He was still appealing his conviction for illegal export control. The Italian government had taken his passport away, which meant he couldn’t travel for business. Author Gerald Posner again.

Gerald Posner: You yank the passport and you suddenly essentially locked the person down to Italy and when that happened to Calvi, he was absolutely stunned by that.

Nicolo Majnoni: In February, Italian regulators followed up on Calvi’s mafia and Mason ties. They threatened to take over Calvi’s bank if he didn’t reveal more information about his shell companies. In March, Ambrosiana board members openly questioned Calvi during a meeting. They were no longer his yes men.

Gerald Posner: Calvi has lost all control by this point, and his desperation is showing in every possible way. He is a man whose desperation is controlling everything he does. And what Calvi probably could not see is the moment it starts to unravel, it all starts to unravel. It’s like putting your finger in the dike, hoping you stop the flood from coming, and then another leak stops and another leak starts, and you run out of fingers before the whole thing starts to leak.

Nicolo Majnoni: By the end of March, we know Calvi had just two and a half months left to live. And as the calendar flipped toward June, Calvi received threats that cut deeper than those at the Banco Ambrosiano. Threats that weren’t financial, but personal. Someone was following his family. A big chunk of the money Calvi had borrowed, 300 million, was due to be repaid at the end of June 1982. Part of that was due to big institutional banks, part of it was due to the Vatican, and part of it was reportedly due to the mafia. But that borrowed money, remember, Calvi had given a ton of it to the far-right masons who weren’t going to pay him back, and he’d used a lot of it to buy shares in his own bank. But since those shares had plummeted in value after his arrest, Calvi did not have the money to pay what was due. In the past, Calvi had always been able to find new investors or take out new loans to repay the old loans. But now that he’d been convicted of a crime, he was nervous his whole house of cards might topple and take him down with it.

Clara Calvi: Quattro o cinque volte dalla gioia. Eravamo folli, di gioia…

[voice over]: I remember once he came through the front door. He took me in his arms and he threw me up in the air four or five times. We were overjoyed.

Nicolo Majnoni: Clara Calvi, his wife, spoke to a journalist after his death, the translation read here by an actor. She said that Roberto Calvi’s mood would swing from mad joy to sobbing depression.

[voice over]: Another time, I was already in bed sleeping, and he was coming back from Rome. At that point, he was already going back and forth for these trips, and he could no longer control the bank. It’d been a while now that he couldn’t control the bank. Anyway, he came into bed and just burst into tears. I tried to comfort him best I could, and then he fell asleep. He was tired. He was so tired.

Nicolo Majnoni: Throughout 1982, Calvi told his wife he thought multiple people were after his family. They were so worried, they stopped letting the normal house cleaners in. The circle of trust tightened.

[voice over]: We couldn’t have housekeepers living with us anymore. He’d get up, he’d look at me, over and over, and I couldn’t bear his eyes.

Nicolo Majnoni: At one point, Calvi took out a gun and began to clean it in front of his family, mumbling that he needed it for protection. His new emotional state scared Clara.

[voice over]: I have so much remorse now, but at a certain point I just refused to go to him. And my daughter would say, Mom, why don’t you want to go and see Dad? And I told her, because I’m afraid. All he would talk about was death, always. [music plays]

Nicolo Majnoni: As May turned to June, Calvi didn’t seem to have a plan. He bounced between trying to figure out how to save his bank and sobbing at home with his family. In a fit of despair, Roberto packed his wife’s bags and practically forced her out of the country. Calvi’s son, Carlo, was already living in the U .S. at the time and picked his mom up at the airport in Washington, D .C.

[voice over]: When she arrived, I went to pick her up, and I remember this palpable tension.

Nicolo Majnoni: Carlo described his dad’s time on the run as part of his testimony in a 2005 court case. Again, this is an English translation.

[voice over]: As soon as she stepped off the plane, she told me about an episode. She said that my dad had found himself in a dark room with an official from the finance police, and he had been shown some documents that had truly scared him. It was a situation where you had a threat that was palpable, and it made her really, really scared. This is the first thing my mom told me right as she arrived at the airport. These were documents about a legal proceeding that you know, my mom says we’re a real, real threat for my dad.

Nicolo Majnoni: Soon after Clara landed in Washington, she and Carlos started to suspect they were being watched. Though by whom, they didn’t know.

[voice over]: There was no doubt in our minds that we were followed all the way home. There, a car stopped right in front of our house and stayed there for most of the night. Maybe the whole night.

Nicolo Majnoni: It spooked them enough to reach out to local law enforcement for protection. Then, on June 9th, just a week before his death, Roberto Calvi held a dinner at his office in the Banco Ambrosiano. Multiple witnesses recounted the scene to print reporters. Overlooking the lights of Milan, Calvi hosted French and Austrian bankers to talk about an acquisition of Ambrosiano subsidiaries. The bankers mulled a $200 million deal over fine wine and pristine silverware. Calvi was uncharacteristically social, making small talk about his life and debating the Falklands War that was raging off the coast of Argentina. He spoke in French, playing the part of the suave CEO, acting as if his board wasn’t actively rebelling against him, as if his empire wasn’t falling apart. The men sipped wine and chatted deep into the night. But as the clock approached midnight, Calvi seemed distracted. Dessert was barely finished when Roberto Calvi suddenly stood up and said he had to go. His fellow bankers caught off guard began to ask where their host was going, but Calvi waved them off. Let’s talk again soon, you can get in touch with my foreign department. Roberto Calvi rushed out the door, almost running for the elevator. One dinner guest recalled trying to follow him, but as the guest saw Calvi in the elevator and tried to waive him down, the doors closed. The remaining bankers turned toward one another. One raised his eyebrows, saying, quote, “like the devil, he’s disappeared toward hell.” A day later, Calvi’s wife got a call.

[voice over]: Pazienza called me, he was screaming and crying saying, Clara, we can’t find him. And I was a bit shaken and said, who can’t you find? And he said, Roberto, he’s been gone for 24 hours. We don’t know where he is. We don’t know where he’s hiding.

Nicolo Majnoni: Roberto Calvi was missing, and he only had a week to live. Next time, on Shadow Kingdom.

[news clip]: In other news overseas today, yet another chapter in what is shaping up to be a major banking scandal involving the Vatican.

Silvano Vittor: I remember the fireplace and he was burning some of the paper that he had picked out from the briefcase.

Clara Calvi: The last call we had together he said he’s gonna blow up that’s a crazy crazy thing/

[news clip]: Behind the facade of respectability, Calvi had become entangled in a web of evil and corruption.

Silvano Vittor: I can’t stand this anymore.

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.