Nicolo reviews trial transcripts in Rome and listens to Calvi’s son, Carlo, finally making sense of a long-ignored interview. The investigation leads to the Bologna train station bombing, where the Mafia, the Vatican, and a fascist secret society intersect. The chilling truth behind Calvi’s murder emerges.

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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: Over two decades after Calvi’s death, the Italian state was finally ready to prove who killed Roberto Calvi. Forensic expert, Angela Gallop, had put together a stunning report. Calvi hadn’t killed himself, he was murdered. Gallop’s report made its way very slowly into the Italian halls of justice, where eventually, five years later, a young prosecutor grabbed it. Gallop’s report showed how Calvi had died. And the prosecutor was now ready to ask who had killed him. And so once again, the world turned its attention to one of the most confounding cold cases on the planet as the Italian state charged five people with the murder of Roberto Calvi.

[news clip]: —family the questions remain. What exactly did happen here at Blackfriars Bridge on that June night in 1982?

[news clip]: Almost exactly 25 years on from Roberto Calvi’s body being found hanging from this bridge—

[news clip]: The examination of his body only confirmed what his family had suspected all along, that the original verdict of suicide returned by a London inquest was probably wrong.

Nicolo Majnoni: When I first heard the prosecutor’s theory of the case, I thought it sounded ridiculous, like a 70s pulp novel. But I have to say now, two years into the story, it actually sounds far less ludicrous. Prosecutors alleged that the Mafia and the P2 masons teamed up to organize Calvi’s killing because the banker had lost money that he was supposed to launder. Among the five defendants were Silvano Vittor, the smuggler, and Flavio Carboni, the fixer. Prosecutors said they were hired by the Mafia to gain Calvi’s trust and divert him to London. There, a hitman drugged God’s banker and hang them to make it look like a suicide. The other defendants were Carboni’s girlfriend, who was with the men in London, and finally a mafioso and a gangster who were alleged to be involved with the planning. Early in my reporting, I used the trial mainly as a map, a way to suss out what names and events to research. But this past year, I became obsessed with the idea that this trial, which spanned almost two years, could tell me something I’d been missing, something hidden in plain sight on Italy’s version of Court TV. So. I just started listening. [Italian speaking] And at this point, I’ve listened to hundreds and hundreds of hours of that trial. [Italian speaking] It was sort of like watching an old family reunion. I recognized most of the crew, though they were 20 years younger here at the trial. [Italian speaking] I mean, I listened to the trial while exercising, while doing the dishes, when I went on long trips, as I made lunch and dinner, I watched bankers and mobsters and members of Calvi’s family testify. [Italian speaking] The prosecution called 600 witnesses, including Calvi’s relatives, co-workers, bank liquidators, priests, and actually anyone with an Ambrosiano connection in the 1980s who still had a pulse in 2005. There were experts from around the world, English scientists, Swiss-French accountants. It was a bit of a circus. [Italian speaking] But as I watched hour after hour of testimony, I noticed that the news cameras started to disappear. The crowds started to peter out. Even the defendants played hooky from the trial, which is legal in Italy. The case became unwieldy. Part of the trial just devolved into screaming matches. [Italian speaking] The prosecution tried to tie the mafia, and the masons, and the church, and even the Italian CIA, into this vast web of murder. [Italian speaking] But a lot of the evidence was hearsay. A former mafioso heard a story from another mafioso, or financial liquidators found payments that they suspected may have been used for criminal activity, but there was no smoking gun, no rock-solid piece of evidence implicating any of the living defendants. [Italian speaking] And the verdict?

[news clip]: Absolve Calò Giuseppe Vittor Silvano e Carboni Flavio, dal reato loro ascritto per non aver commesso il fatto, ordina la restituzione agli eredi di Roberto Calvi…

Nicolo Majnoni: All five defendants were found not guilty.

[news clip]: Despite 25 years of waiting for the truth for Roberto…

[news clip]: We’re really no closer to knowing how Roberto Calvi came to be found hanging here.

[news clip]: —people with method and motive so long, it appears that his murderers may never be brought to book.

Nicolo Majnoni: There was one important conclusion here. In his ruling, the judge wrote this definitely was murder, not a desperate suicide. And he believed the mafia, the masons, the Vatican, the spies were all still suspects. But he wrote too much of the evidence was speculative or tangential to convict any of the defendants. Listening back, it felt like a horrible game of clue. where you have the suspects, the murder weapon, the means, and the motive, yet no one goes to jail. After all these years of reporting, I wasn’t sure whether to dive back into the evidence one more time or just give up. And then I realized I’d missed a key clue from the very beginning of my reporting, Something that just might tie all these loose threads together. [music plays] From Crooked Media and Campside Media, this is Shadow Kingdom: God’s Banker. I’m your host, Nicolo Majnoni and this is our final episode: The Train Station.

[news clip]: The violent explosion ripped apart Bologna’s main train station, leaving tons of rubble and an unknown number of bodies trapped beneath.

Carlo Calvi: Lei si chiama Carlo Calvi.

Nicolo Majnoni: Carlo Calvi is Roberto Calvi’s son. He worked brief stints for his dad and was just 29 when his father died. This is Carlo testifying at that 2005 murder trial.

Carlo Calvi:  A Montreal, in Canada. Consapevole della responsabilità morale e giuridica che assumo con—

Nicolo Majnoni: I was especially interested in what Carlo had to say because I desperately wanted to interview him for the podcast. And the truth is that I already interviewed Carlo. Kind of. After talking with my friend Mario, who first suggested I look into this story, Carlo was actually the first person I reached out to. He was easy enough to track down. [Italian speaking] Neither of us were ready to do a formal interview. But we talked for hours, and I recorded my side of the conversation, and Carlo agreed to lay out his father’s story so that I could investigate it in more depth. He liked that I was a lawyer, and kept saying things like, and of course, as a lawyer, you know this. We were speaking in Italian, and he was going a thousand miles an hour. I kept trying to get him to tell me about what his dad was like. I was looking for personal vignettes, some way to understand Calvi on a deeper emotional level. But instead, most of what Carlo wanted to talk about were these really, really down the rabbit hole theories of the case. I’d ask him a question and he’d go, oh, that’s simple. And then he’d launch into esoteric connections between far right antiques dealers and wire transfers and terrorist bombings. None of it seemed to be an answer to the question I just posed to him. I could see as I spoke to him that his whole life had been in some sense about unlocking the mysterious death of his father. So my simplistic questions about how painful it must have been or what his dad was like, he almost didn’t even hear them. [Italian speaking] At the end of the conversation, I asked to speak to him again, and he smiled and nodded. I knew I’d need many, many more chats, because this one had made no sense to me. [Italian speaking] But that was okay. He agreed. I went off to do my research, to learn the ABCs of the story. But when I came back to Carlo, no response. Emails, calls, LinkedIn, you name it. He wouldn’t answer. Like so much of this story, he disappeared. And all he left me with were notes from a frantic three-hour conversation that made no sense to me. That is, until I revisited the 2005 trial. Many hours into Carlo’s testimony, I stumbled on something. To set the scene, Carlo’s on the witness stand, and one of the defense lawyers was firing questions at him pretty intensely. [Italian speaking] Gelli, Gelli. You hear that name mentioned a few times between the lawyer and Carlo That’s Licio Gelli the grand master of the far-right P2 masons [Italian speaking] Carlo testified that his dad’s plan was to come back from London and reveal the names of the people he’d been working with, presumably on various illegal schemes. Which is why this lawyer was pressing Carlo, tell us who these shadowy associates are, he thundered. So Carlo said, Gelli, of course, of course, Gelli. But the attorney wanted more. Give us more names. And then… It’s right here, at this moment, that Carlo adds another name, almost under his breath. [Italian speaking] Marco Ceruti. I was so surprised I had to rewind and listen again. Ceruti was a big threat, Carlo alleged. He said, Marco Ceruti received money, but that was it. Blink and you’d miss it. The trial barreled on, never to return to Ceruti. But not me. I was fixated on that money and why Calvi’s son would offer this name with a metaphorical gun to his head I racked my brain trying to remember if I’d ever heard that name before, I dug up my notes for my conversation with Carlo and sure enough there it was. Marco Ceruti.  About how he got money from the Calvi’s Ambrosiano Bank how Ceruti was allegedly connected to organized crime in London, maybe terrorism. Carlo told me, look into Ceruti’s wire transfers. Ceruti was moving really big amounts of money, but Carlo told me so many things in that conversation, it was completely buried. Now, with two years of reporting behind me, I could sense the outline of something significant, where before I’d honestly just seen chaos. But since Carlo still wasn’t responding to my messages, I needed to find a guide to help me crack this code. So I turned to a man who had already rescued me once. The man who’d entrusted me with the Rosone tapes and the tapes of Calvi’s Inner Circle, the modern day expert on Calvi, Philip Willan. He’s interviewed Carlo multiple times, And he knew all about Marco Ceruti.

Philip Willan: Ceruti was a kind of fixer and assistant to Gelli over a number of years.

Nicolo Majnoni: Remember, Gelli wanted to bring fascism back to Italy. In the 70s and 80s, P2 was trying to launch a coup to take over the country.

[news clip]: One of italy’s most wanted fugitives has been arrested in Switzerland Licio Gelli was the head of a secret organization called P2 accused of creating a state within the italian state Gelli was arrested trying to pick up money in the Geneva bank he is wanted in italy for political espionage and possession of state secrets he’s also been implicated in the scandal involving the Vatican Bank.

Nicolo Majnoni: When Gelli was finally arrested in 1982, he was carrying a document. A document that was mysteriously buried in his case file for a long time. It was only officially unearthed by Italian courts as I started reporting on the Calvi affair. The document shows that in the weeks surrounding a horrific terrorist attack, a bombing at a train station in Bologna, Gelli sent over $11 million to Marco Ciruti. The title of the makeshift accounting document was Bologna.

Philip Willan: The suspicion is that Ceruti may have been the person who actually passed on the money directly to the bombers.

Nicolo Majnoni: Willan is pretty matter of fact here, so let me just tell you that this is a stunning allegation. Putting my lawyer hat on for a moment, this was never proven in court. And through his lawyer, Ceruti has admitted that he received millions from Gelli, but claims they were for antiques. But Carlo’s theory is that Gelli used Ceruti to pay terrorists to set off a bomb in Bologna that killed 87 people. it’s still considered one of the worst acts of terrorism in European history.

[news clip]: The violent explosion ripped apart Bologna’s main train station, leaving tons of rubble and an unknown number of bodies trapped beneath.

Nicolo Majnoni: It’s hard to grasp how truly awful this attack was. The bomb exploded in the station in the middle of summer with families preparing for vacation. Stonework crashed down like a disaster movie, crushing and injuring hundreds. Even decades removed, watching videos of the rescue effort is really hard.

[news clip]: Officials involved in the rescue effort claim they do not yet know the cause however a right-wing extremist group claimed—

Nicolo Majnoni: Carlo and Willan think that Calvi had a copy of the multi-million dollar wire transfer because Calvi was Licio Gelli’s banker.

Philip Willan: The sensitive documents that Calvi carried around with him in a briefcase could have related to the Bologna bombing. And it’s possible that he realized that some of that money that sort of flowed out from the coffers that he was in charge of had gone to financing the Bologna station bombing and possibly other terrorist activities. [music plays] My idea would be that he was possibly unwitting about all of that when he came to understand it and he was desperate to recover the money to prop up the bank and avoid bankruptcy.

Nicolo Majnoni: This was exactly the kind of information Calvi was hoping to leverage to save his bank and himself. If Grandmaster Gelli paid for the Bologna train bombing, then maybe Calvi found out about these payments because they passed through his own Banco Ambrosiano. And maybe with this incendiary piece of news, Calvi tried to blackmail P2. And that may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Philip Willan: Prosecutors in the murder trial, the Calvi murder trial, were very clear that they felt that the motive for his murder was the blackmail that he was conducting at the end of his career to try and save the bank.

Nicolo Majnoni: Even so, it still felt a bit speculative. But then, Willan told me one very important detail. Bologna bombing investigators filed paperwork looking for Calvi the day he fled Italy.

Philip Willan: The fact that that really alarmed him fits into the idea that he knew there was a dangerous connection there for him and therefore he panics and he knows he’s got to run.

Nicolo Majnoni: The Bologna investigation coincided perfectly with Calvi’s escape. I was shocked I hadn’t heard about this sooner, but it had been considered a fringe theory by prosecutors up until very recently when Gelli’s documents were rediscovered. Once I understood the Bologna theory, though, a lot of the stories started to fit into place.

Philip Willan: Gelli could well have organized an operation where people kind of cluster around Calvi and say look your life is in danger you’ve got to get out of the country we’ll help you let’s go to initially Switzerland and then they change their minds they go to London and you know we’ll take care of things for you.

Nicolo Majnoni: Plus, Carboni the Fixer, the man who planned Calvi’s final trip, was a known associate of the mafia. Carboni had also been outed by mafia operatives, of all people, as a close associate of Gelli and Gelli’s crooked financial deals. So if Calvi was threatening to blackmail P2 with documents about the Bologna bombing, It would then have made sense for Carboni to shuffle Calvi out of the country and take his briefcase. The theory about the Bologna bombing would tie all these disparate threads together. All these red strings on my conspiracy corkboard now converged around the P2 Masons over Grandmaster Gelli as the ultimate reason why Calvi was murdered. To top it all off, Willan confronted Gelli about Bologna on the record. Before he died, you showed him the piece of paper where all of that is laid bare.

Philip Willan: His reaction I think would tend to confirm suspicions that there was something nasty and dangerous underlying it for him.

Nicolo Majnoni: That’s after the break.

[AD BREAK]

Nicolo Majnoni: Philip Willan had actually interviewed P2 grandmaster Licio Gelli multiple times before Gelli’s death in 2015.

Philip Willan: It was quite a kind of nerve-racking experience to speak to this man who had a reputation of being the puppet master who’d pulled the strings behind many very terrible events in Italian history.

Nicolo Majnoni: At first, the Grandmaster was pretty cagey with Willan, but after years of speaking together, he opened up. [Italian speaking] Willan gave me recordings of interviews where he’d ask the Grand Master about the mafia, politics, dirty banking, whatever you could find evidence on. [Italian speaking] At one point, Gelli vaguely suggests that the U.S. government supported P2’s anti-communist efforts. And when Philip Willan found the bank transfer information, possibly, allegedly, showing Gelli’s involvement in funding the Bologna bombing, he took his chance to ask Gelli about it.

Philip Willan: I took the photocopy of the document to show him and he said his lawyers had told him not to talk about it and clearly he knew exactly what it was.

Nicolo Majnoni: Willan has video of this exchange. Gelli took the quickest glance at the document Willan showed him, seemed to recognize what it was, and quickly looked away, refusing to engage. [Italian speaking]This is the only time I could find that Gelli was ever asked about this document. In earlier interviews with Willan, Gelli had no qualms about lying about other documents and sketchy bank transfers. He was happy to throw other people under the bus, especially as he got older and bored. But this covert receipt, Gelli would barely look at it. He wouldn’t touch it. And he didn’t even try to provide an excuse for what it could be. According to Willan, Gelli said his lawyers told him not to talk about the document. Also, in the same interview, Will impressed Gelli about Marco Ceruti, who handled the money. And the Grandmaster became more suspicious. [Italian speaking]He said he not only knew Ceruti, he was a friend and a member of P2. And when Willan asked about Ceruti’s name being on the Bologna document…

Philip Willan: He said that Ciruti was not in Italy and he wouldn’t be coming back. Yes, I mean, it was an indication that, you know, Gelli knew immediately who we were talking about. He knew where he was, which not very many people did. And, you know, I thought given the suspicions around the document and around Gelli and around Ceruti, to say immediately he won’t be coming back to Italy is, you know… a very significant response.

Nicolo Majnoni: Licio Gelli died several years ago, as did Carboni. Same with Calvi’s underlings, his wife, and his Vatican counterparts. Ceruti was called to testify about P2, but he fled to Brazil. I’ve tried countless ways to get in touch with him. No response. As Nicolo, the lawyer, I will say, Ceruti has denied any wrongdoing, and there’s no outstanding charge or conviction of a crime in connection with that money. So this is where the trail ends for me, at the answering machine of Marco Ceruti, where years of interviews and collected evidence have led me, a point where the asphalt road dissolves into dirt. But deep in those conspiratorial backroads, I see the picture emerge, a picture sketched by Carlo and the Bologna theory, that Calvi’s murder was organized by P2, by Licio Gelli, and his men, because P2 was worried about how much Calvi knew about the bombing and their involvement. Quite literally, he may have had the receipts. And since Calvi was facing his own legal troubles, Gelli worried that he would tell police what he knew and that he’d give the Grandmaster up to save himself. Gelli may have gotten help from or worked in concert with the mafia to bring Calvi down, but regardless, the Bologna massacre was the tipping point, the reason Calvi was murdered. One more murder to cover up dozens of others. Check, check, check, levels, one, one, two, check, check, check. Mario, what are you looking for? [Italian speaking] As I finished this story, I still felt a lot of frustration, a lot of uncertainty. I left my job and I set out searching for something far more concrete than what I’d found. So I returned to where this all started, with my friend Mario. It’s funny, because we are right back in the apartment where you first told me about the story, I realize now two plus years ago, when you told me that story about Carlo in 1982. And I had come over with this new recorder. I didn’t know quite how to use it. And I said, oh, maybe I’ll record Mario telling the story.

Mario Platero: It’s good that it came to an end and it must have been quite an interesting and long journey in the end.

Nicolo Majnoni: It was, it was less predictable than I had thought. I told Mario about Vincenzo Calcara, the mafioso scaring the shit out of me. I described Frank Pazienza smoking a pipe as he told me about the Vatican espionage, meeting Vittor the smuggler on the coast of Trieste, trying to trace the billions of dollars Calvi had borrowed and never repaid. We talked about the fascist Freemasons and the Cold War and Carlo Calvi’s Bologna theory. I tried to process all these threads with Mario in real time. Because if you’d asked me two years ago, I would have said these were all just rumors and stories. They were all silly and absurd, that clearly there was some more straightforward, reasonable story behind Calvi’s death. Yet, here I was, telling him, Mario, the quote unquote “spy,” about this web of shady characters, the nexus of power and money that orbited Calvi. And what was astounding to me was how much of that was happening at the same time behind the scenes, the fervor and the violence and the organized crime on another side. You talk to me about the term Dietrologia. You introduced me to that.

Mario Platero: Yes. “Behindology”, which is the theory of what’s behind something and you don’t have proofs, you can only use your imagination and your imagination can carry you very far in thinking what’s behind that? Why did they do that? Was there a conspiracy of people that decided to kill Calvi? This was the perfect example. I mean, you know, nobody knew why he was killed, or why he was dead, but there were all these dealings with the Vatican and with the P2 and Calvi and the Pope and Solidarnosc. You know, there was a whole thing that, you know, so people had to be imaginative and, you know, they didn’t come to an answer.

Nicolo Majnoni: You said Dietrologia gives you an answer when you can’t have one. I like that.

Mario Platero: It tries to give you an answer, yes, tries to give you an answer and many people believe it.

Nicolo Majnoni: I doubt that the 2005 defendants were actually Calvi’s murderers. I do believe in the Bologna theory. I believe that there was some kind of neo-fascist plot to kill Calvi. But like Mario said, we don’t know for certain. There’s only enough evidence to get imaginative. What I realized as we talked was that this story, Calvi’s story, had filled me with a surprising amount of compassion. A little bit for Roberto Calvi, who was caught up by forces far greater than himself. But mostly, it gives me compassion for the average Italians that live through the heyday of Dietrologia. People like my parents, who came of age in the 60s and 70s. During that time, the mafia… the Vatican spies, Da Vinci code style masons, they all did exist in Italy. Sure, they may have sounded like conspiracies, but they were real. Italy was a surprisingly violent place where the mafia regularly kidnapped people for ransom, where the fight for and against communism wasn’t abstract, it was bloody and in the streets. Where maybe you knew secret societies existed? but not which of your friends or neighbors had signed up. And remember, the state controlled much of the Italian economy. That was true all the way into the 90s. So there often was some hidden backstory, some reason why that executive friendly with that politician got that job. Given that context, Mario told me, in a way, Dietrologgia made sense.

Mario Platero: So there were many things that happened in Italian history that created a situation that was a little bit opaque, if you see what I mean, and therefore people liked to, you know, to conject, you know, to make assumptions or hypotheses. And that is what is an actual science of Dietrologia. But then it sort of took a life of its own, so it was applied to everything and everywhere.

Nicolo Majnoni: Yeah, but it helps me understand Italians a little better today, I guess, is what I’m saying, if that makes sense. Not so much that I validate the process of Dietrologia now, but it helps me understand people of my, let’s say, my father’s generation, or because they grew up in a world where, you know, like 40% of Dietrologia was not Dietrologia, it was just Davantiologia. It was true. And that’s kind of interesting. I didn’t expect that to happen. And that’s been very helpful to me. When stories that seem fantastical turn out to be true, it has a deep psychic impact on people. You start looking at other wild stories and wondering, could they also be true? I have to say this story has helped. I always am afraid as an Italian abroad that Italians are too bombastic, not tied in fact. So I always try to over-correct, because Italians are seen as an unreliable kind of operatic. Learning about this story, it’s helped me see a lot of, you know, Italy in the time you’re describing was, not to be dramatic, it was a little bit of a war zone. I mean, there were bombs on trains, there were… They were called the years of lead.

Mario Platero: Yeah, it was a very, very particular situation. You know, and Italy was a democracy, was a fragile democracy. The fear that communists would come in was there, and there were things that were happening in secret. This is the atmosphere in which we lived. We just recently had a high school reunion, and it turned out that one of our schoolmates in the class was with us in the class for many years had been arrested for the Dozier kidnapping. General Dozier. It was an American general. General Dozier had been kidnapped by the Red Brigades. So it was pervasive it was everywhere

Nicolo Majnoni: This far-left Marxist terrorist group kidnapped an American general in Italy in 1981 and held him captive for over a month. It was a huge story. But Mario just found out he went to high school with one of the alleged kidnappers. The point is, given the amount of violence in Italy at the time, personal connections like these were pretty common.

Mario Platero: So it’s every it’s anywhere, it changes, but human nature is always such that we’ll try to find an answer to something that it’s inexplicable and that was the atmosphere in which we were living back then.

Mario Platero: Living in that world was exhausting. But I understand the dietrologia better now. It’s an attempt to make sense of the world. A world where we don’t always have all the information. A world where our search for answers can lead us to some very strange places. Sometimes the conspiracy theories stay theories, unproven or even disproved. But sometimes, when you peer behind the curtain, those stories, they end up being true. [music plays] A question from my producer, Joe. What story should I do next?

Mario Platero: That’s up to you. You know, there are other interesting stories. This one, for example, could be an interesting one, a union case of a union leader that had been murdered somewhere years before in America.

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.