Calvi is found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London. The British police call it suicide, but Nicolo finds Antonio Cornacchia, an Italian officer who insists it’s murder. Years later, new forensic evidence reopens the case, leading to a trial with Silvano Vittor among the accused. Friends of the Pod get early access to the entire first season of Shadow Kingdom: God's Banker before it drops for everyone else—ads included. Get early access to the full season now by joining Crooked’s Friends of the Pod at crooked.com/friends. Hear this episode in Italian by subscribing to Il Banchiere di Dio wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What happened on the last day of Roberto Calvi's life?
The last day of Roberto Calvi's life started with a shave. For the majority of his 63 years, he'd sported an ever-present dark mustache. Pretty much every picture you'll ever find of Calvi, there's a mustache. But on the morning of June 17th, 1982, Silvano Vitor found Calvi in their shared hotel bathroom with the door open.
He says, I'm shaving my mustache. This way, I'm less recognizable.
Chapter 2: Who was Silvano Vitor and what was his role in Calvi's final days?
Vitor is the former smuggler we heard from in the last episode, who told me about helping Calvi flee Italy and watching over him in his final days.
And I remember him saying, in my entire life, this is the first time I ever shaved my mustache.
And so what do you think? What do you feel in that moment?
That he just was so scared of being seen, and he would do anything to hide his appearance.
Calvi spent the rest of his morning in the cramped Chelsea Hotel, which was more like a hostel. His room was just 10 feet by 16 feet with one small window. Early in the day, Calvi handed Vitor cash to run some errands. And when Vitor returned, he used a special knock he had to identify himself. And Calvi let him in for lunch.
At the very same time, back in Milan, the Ambrosianos board members gathered at the bank. With Calvi on the run, they voted him out. He was no longer in control of the bank he'd led for seven years. And that soon became global news.
He'd learned on the telephone that his powers with the Banco Ambrosiano had been removed.
Any hope that Calvi may have had to go back to the Banco Ambrosiano was now extinguished. And then more bad news. Calvi received word that his secretary had died by suicide.
There, he lost it completely with the news about his secretary. He said, something happened to me that I never thought my secretary, he was just 100% depressed.
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Chapter 3: How did Roberto Calvi's disappearance unfold?
So I go down to the lobby and I speak to some guy and he comes with me upstairs all the way up into the room with a spare set of keys. He opened the door, we got in, and there was no Calvi. Just a suitcase. At the moment, I think he's probably coming to look for me, so I immediately also go down and go looking for Calvi in the vicinity. I went back down to the lobby where there was a restaurant.
I looked everywhere. He wasn't there. I went back into the room. And so what are you thinking at this point? As the hours went on, one became two, three. I was thinking about everything. It was maybe he left to speak with someone, or maybe he's coming back in 30 minutes, or maybe in an hour. Basically, I don't know. Maybe he went with somebody, but he'd be back later.
But I set apart that I didn't know anymore, and I had no answer until the morning.
Calvi was gone, and I know that this time he was gone for good. But what I don't know is what happened to him in those last few hours. The last time Silvano Vitor remembered seeing Calvi was around 8 p.m. on June 17th. Eventually, Vitor told me that he went to bed in the hotel suite alone, waiting, hoping that Roberto Calvi would magically reappear.
But when Calvi hadn't returned by the morning of June 18th, Vitor did something else that seemed strange to me. Vitor told me he had no idea what was going on. All he knew was that Calvi's disappearance was incredibly suspicious, and he didn't want to just be sitting around when shit hit the fan.
I mean, at the moment, I just didn't know anything. So at 11, I just decided, look, I'm not hearing anything. There is no Calvi, there is no Carboni. So anyway, I decided, I don't know, maybe I did a bad thing, but I decided to go back to Austria.
And while Vitor was boarding a plane, Calvi was eventually found. From Crooked Media and Campside Media, this is Shadow Kingdom, God's Banker. I'm Niccolo Mainoni, and this is Episode 7, Discovery.
That would have been a really frightening place. Dark, wet, dangerous.
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Chapter 4: Where and how was Roberto Calvi found dead?
Whether it was murder or suicide, no one knows.
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on June 18th, 1982, a postal clerk was walking along Blackfriars Bridge in London. Something caught his eye. He saw a head and then a body dangling underneath the bridge. He rushed to his office to share what he found. The police arrived on the scene by car and by boat. There they found a middle-aged John Doe in a gray suit hanging from a rope around his neck.
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Chapter 5: What evidence suggested Calvi's death was suicide or murder?
he was dangling off of temporary construction scaffolding under one of the bridge's arches. His ankles were just covered by the river. The turbulent water made reaching the body by boat difficult, and it would take police 11 hours to figure out that their John Doe was the world's most famous fugitive banker.
62-year-old Senor Calvi was found dangling from an orange rope here. But perhaps the key to Calvi's death is to be found here on the River Thames.
Whether it was murder or suicide, no one knows.
His suit was packed with 12 pounds of bricks, four pairs of glasses, a fake passport, and two wallets filled with thousands in various currencies. But his briefcase? Nowhere to be found. Now, London police weren't sure there was much cause for concern. This was no robbery. He had all of his valuables. It seemed like a suicide. England's ITV newscaster recounted a pathologist's testimony.
In my opinion, 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 none.
This was a pretty reasonable analysis. Suicide attempts were very common on the Thames. Plus, Calvi had already attempted suicide just a year before. Add to that, he'd just been fired, and his beloved bank was on the brink of collapse. The Ambrosiano's stock price was plummeting, and with it, his fortune.
When my friend Mario, from episode one, sent me on a journey to find out what happened to Calvi, he thought the more likely explanation was murder. And that's the way I've come at this whole investigation. Calvi worked with so many powerful, so many shadowy figures. P2 and its grand master, Alessio Gelli, the mafia, even the Pope. And now he was worthless to all of them.
Worse than worthless, he was a liability. a man desperate to stay out of jail, a man seemingly willing to use the secrets he kept to save himself. But on the other hand, my conversation with Vitor, reading transcripts from Calvi's wife, his kids, his co-workers, and reporters from around the world, it all painted a clear picture of Calvi in this moment, depressed, afraid, and alone.
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Chapter 6: Why did Italian investigators suspect foul play in Calvi's death?
It's been my mission to figure out who killed Calvi. But was it really Roberto Calvi himself all along? This is a question that Calvi's family, law enforcement, and private investigators have debated for decades. The first people to investigate Calvi's death were police in the city of London right after he died in 1982.
From the beginning, it was clear that Roberto Calvi's cause of death was asphyxiation. There were no signs of physical struggle and no known poisons in Calvi's body. So London police were quick to suspect suicide. But once word got back to Italy that Calvi was dead, Italian law enforcement immediately suspected foul play.
They knew all about Calvi, his P2 involvement, and his suspected mafia ties. I flew to Rome to meet with Antonio Cornacchia, an Italian counterintelligence officer who investigated Calvi's death. He told me that Calvi had been on his radar even before his body was found. So, I was under espionage.
I was at counterespionage when the whole Calvi affair broke out. And a colleague of mine grabbed me and said, have you heard what's happening? Have you heard about Roberto Calvi? My boss then said, would you be willing to take a walk? Meaning, take a look at this.
I spoke to Cornacchia in Italian, so we asked an actor to record his responses in English. When Cornacchia's boss asked him to look into Calvi's death, he quickly booked a flight to London. The way he talked about the whole investigation was really vivid. I could viscerally see and feel the Italian legal system, which I know well, clashing with the British legal system.
Okay, so I go to London, and the first thing we have to deal with is the police. And this is the police that operates on the right side of the River Thames. This is not real police.
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Chapter 7: What challenges did Antonio Cornacchia face investigating Calvi's death in London?
Not the real police. Kornacki's voice was full of his casual disdain here. He said the police he had to work with were from the city of London. which is confusingly a distinct municipality within Greater London. It's like if Wall Street was a separate little city inside New York with its own tiny police force, a police force a lot less equipped than Scotland Yard.
Quick example of the rookiness of their investigation, the City of London police untied the knot on the rope Calvi had around his neck instead of cutting the rope and preserving how the knot was tied. Apparently that's like policing 101. You don't untie the knot because the kind of knot and how it was tied can tell you a lot about the person who tied it.
So when Kornackia got to London, it was immediately clear to him that this, this is not the A-Team, shall we say. But he held back his contempt, and he started filling the British cops in on everything he knew about Calvi, his associates, how Calvi was a member of the secret society P2, how he was a fugitive,
and how, actually, Italian intelligence officers had been trying to piece together the timeline of Calvi on the run.
We know that while on the move, he's in contact with this character, a fixer. His name is Carboni. This guy Carboni made him take a plane in Trieste or somewhere around there. Then we know that Calvi went to Vienna with two possible people. We know some of them to be women who may be friends of Carboni. So I just left them everything, names, last names. And then I said, look, the boss is Jelly.
Jelly is the boss. You want to know what happened to Roberto Calvi? Look at Jelly.
Kornakia said the local cops just stared at him, blankly.
So I told my colleague, hey, tell them I'm not crazy, okay? And I remember everybody started laughing. The British, they just, they didn't believe me.
The City of London police continue to investigate Calvi's death. A month later, they held a coroner's inquest, where a coroner presents the evidence to a jury, and they decide if a crime has been committed. In this case, did Calvi die by suicide or was it murder?
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Chapter 8: What was the outcome of the City of London police coroner's inquest?
So the English legal system had spoken. Case closed. It was a suicide. Calve was a desperate man, and he found some rope hanging along a dock in the Thames. Police sent Cornacchia and his colleagues back home. And that's where the case seemed to end, with Calvi's Ambrosiano taken over by the Bank of Italy and his family left to fend for themselves.
Until a few months later, when there was breaking news.
There was a surprise development today in the case of the death of fugitive Italian banker Roberto Calvi. Today, Britain's highest court rejected the earlier suicide verdict and ordered a new hearing into Calvi's death.
there was new evidence that would tell a very different story. That's after the break.
And here in London today, the High Court has reopened the case of a dead man known to some as God's banker. The court overturned a suicide verdict on last summer's death of the fugitive Italian banker Roberto Calvi.
After the initial suicide verdict, Calvi's family fought tooth and nail to appeal. They noted all the inconsistencies, the sloppy police work, the dirt on Calvi's clothes, the list of possible suspects. And around the first anniversary of Calvi's death, they got a redo.
On the first day of the new inquest, the jury of six men and three women were brought here to Blackfriars Bridge, where Senor Calvi's body was found hanging almost a year ago.
This time, the court returned what's called an open verdict, which meant that the jury wasn't sure if it was murder or suicide, so they were keeping the case open if more evidence came through. I am here at Blackfriars Bridge, looking over the side of the bridge. As I was starting to wrap up my reporting for the show, I went to London. I wanted to see the bridge for myself.
I think it's helpful to see this place. With all the uncertainty about Calvi's death, I thought visiting the bridge might help me understand the mechanics and forensics of how Calvi died. The current seems very fast. I'm looking at objects move in the Thames, which is dirty as hell.
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