Roberto Calvi & the Briefcase of Secrets: The Vatican Bank, the Mafia, the Italian Deep State, and the Mystery of the Dead Banker
A discussion with journalist Nicolo Majnoni about his thrilling new podcast, "Shadow Kingdom: God's Banker"
On the morning of June 18, 1982, a body was found hanging from the scaffolding beneath the Blackfriars Bridge that spans the Thames. A suicide, the police report said. But was it? The man was wearing two watches (strange), and (even stranger) two pairs of underwear. On his body, police found $15,000 in various currencies (strange) and twelve pounds of bricks (what the—?).
And there was no note. Or, perhaps, the note was stowed away in the briefcase he carried around with him everywhere he went. But the briefcase was nowhere to be found.
That was the most suspicious part.
The dead man was named Roberto Calvi. He was the head of a old and prestigious Milan bank that, earlier that month, had collapsed when it found itself (oops!) a billion dollars in debt. But that wasn’t all. Calvi was the ultimate Man in the Middle. He occupied a space on the Venn diagram where the Vatican Bank, the Sicilian mob, the CIA, and Propaganda Due—a rogue Masonic lodge that was basically a fascist Italian Deep State—overlapped. Any one of those organizations might be fatally compromised by information in Calvi’s briefcase.
Dead men tell no tales, the old adage says. But a dead man’s briefcase? That’s another story.
And Roberto Calvi’s briefcase was missing. . .
My guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast is Nicolo Majnoni, a writer, podcast producer, and composer based in New York. He is the creator and host of Shadow Kingdom, a series about the hidden side of pivotal moments in history. The current season, God’s Banker, unpacks the intrigue and power struggles of the Vatican Bank during the Cold War. Our discussion involves the Sicilian mob, the Vatican Bank, the Pope, conclaves, Opus Dei, the Cold War, and a briefcase that may well have inspired the one Vinny and Jules acquire for Marcellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction.
Here are three takeaways from the discussion:
1. During the Cold War, the Vatican Bank was a hotbed for shady activity because of its extraordinary secrecy.
When we say “the Vatican Bank,” we don’t mean the Vatican Central Bank, or the Ministry of Finance, but rather the Istituto per le Opere di Religione, or IOR.
The IOR, Majnoni explains, “had the checking accounts of the Pope, of the staff of the Vatican, the clergy, but it also functioned essentially as a commercial bank. It’s a commercial bank.” Functionally, that meant that, “at a time when the banking regulations all over the world were a little looser than they are now,” the IOR “provided essentially an offshore banking center in the heart of Italy.”
In 1982, the Vatican Bank was like the Caymans or Panama—except it 1) was much more conveniently located, and 2) enjoyed the imprimatur of the Vicar of Christ. That the IOR is headquartered in the Tower of Nicholas V—a creepy medieval stone spire dating to the 15th century that plays a key role in God knows how many movies and novels—made it that much more mysterious.
Majnoni continues:
[T]he Italian regulators had absolutely no control over what came into the Vatican bank, the IOR. So it was extraordinarily attractive for people with kind of nefarious ends in mind.
It wasn’t created with in any bad faith. This was a institution that held deposits of the Pope. The Pope is the the shareholder, the one and only shareholder of the IOR. The Vatican Bank is the Pope. It publishes no balance sheet, no accounts are public or used to be in the era. And so from a relatively sleepy institution, you know, people start to see its value in 1960s and 1970s Italy. . . .
[B]asically, you can walk a suitcase of cash into Rome—[through] Rome’s border adjacent with the Vatican—and up until that minute…let’s say one billion of old lira that you had—which is like, you know, a million dollars—was subject to the Italian regulators: the Italian IRS. They want to know where you got it—if any of that was income, if any of it was revenue. You cross into the Vatican, and you give it to somebody to deposit. No real questions asked, as long as they have an account with the Vatican bank.
So say you have a monsignor friend who’s doing a, you know, like a junior year abroad in the Vatican. You hand them this suitcase of cash with the million dollars. He puts it in the Vatican bank and the IORs coffers. It’s gone. It’s gone. Nobody can ask you about it.
And so, you can imagine how attractive this is if you were, for example, running a organized crime racket.
And what do you know? There are indeed organized crime rackets in Italy!
2. The Vatican’s vast wealth comes from an unlikely—and relatively more recent—source.
“The Vatican has enormous wealth in paintings, statues—a lot of stuff that’s not especially liquid,” Majnoni tells me. “But there is a wonderful story that not a lot of people know. And that is that the Vatican used to be the Papal States—an enormous, enormous amount of land in Italy….If Italy is a boot, and you take the middle part of the boot, that used to be, for centuries, the Papal States. Mussolini came along in the 1920s and had little patience for it. And he says, ‘You’re going to have a state that is [only] the Vatican.’ (I’m simplifying horrifically, but just for the sake of brevity.) And he gives them an enormous amount of money for them to keep quiet and shut up and be okay with this little bit of land. ‘It’s lucky you got that at all.’”
This was part of the Lateran Pacts of 1929, a series of agreements that Pope Pius XI—who would become an ardent anti-fascist—reluctantly agreed to with the Mussolini government.
Majnoni continues:
The Vatican, through an incredible, incredibly astute financial genius, takes that money and invests it. There’s this guy that’s like a Warren Buffett of the Vatican. And in the 1920s, he invests this money and it just explodes. That money keeps compounding and compounding and compounding, and it’s billions of dollars.
So the Vatican, at the point in my story, is sitting on enormous reservoirs of cash, apart from all the cash that comes in from donations and, you know, rich people dying and saying, “I leave this house to the Jesuits” or whatever. But they have this enormous amount of wealth. That’s where a lot of the wealth that we talk about in my show is coming from. That’s the capital, and it’s billions of dollars…this wonderful pool of cash that sits in the IOR.
He adds: “I think almost as a middle finger, they invested it with the shrewdness of the best bankers on planet earth, even though they were a bunch of celibate clerics, you know, with no training.”
As it turns out, God is good at picking stocks.
3. Roberto Calvi was the Man in the Middle—and the Man Who Knew Too Much.
In terms of the sheer extent of his global network, the only recent analogs for Roberto Calvi that come to mind are Robert Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein. So it’s probably not all that surprising that he turned up un-alive.
Calvi was created by Propaganda Due, or P2, a covert network of rich and powerful Italian neo-fascists under the leadership of rightwing multi-millionaire Licio Gelli—a sort of Tuscan Koch Brother. This was a de facto shadow government that included the heads of spy agencies, prominent journalists, high-ranking politicians, military leaders, and presumptive royals. (One member was the late media mogul, prime minister, and wannabe strongman Silvio Berlusconi.)
Once recruited by P2, Calvi became their glorified bagman, routing a quarter of a billion of U.S. dollars between various members, charitable organizations, offshores, and fascist chums overseas.
“The leaders of P2,” Majnoni explains, “were part of a shadowy network of rightwing organizations all over the world, like the Condor Network in Latin America…this rightwing dictatorship network in Latin America. And they were all linked. They were all friends, and they would send money to each other for each other’s causes. And Calvi was their cashier—I would argue, slightly unbeknownst to Calvi. Calvi, I don’t think, had any interest in being the cashier of rightwing dictatorships in the end of the Cold War. But he was.”
And that wasn’t all. As a banker, Calvi was mentored by Michele Sindona—who, Majnoni explains, was the nefarious figure “who bought the Watergate complex, who was good friends with Nixon, who was the guy who bought the Franklin National Bank in Long Island and ran it into the ground, creating, in the United States, the largest bankruptcy in its history up to that point.” Sindona “had been crowned by the Pope of the time ‘God’s Banker’, kind of jokingly.” On the Street, they called him “The Shark.”
Sindona was also a key player in moving money for the Sicilian mob, which, thanks to the global heroin trade, had suddenly found itself wealthy beyond all measure—as Majnoni puts it, “inordinately rich for the first time in their history.” When Sindona went down, Calvi, the next man up, suddenly found himself as the organized crime equivalent of “a relationship banker at Citibank.” Which is not a job that ones gets to quit. You can’t say “Take this job and shove it” to La Cosa Nostra.
That’s not quite true. You can say “Take this job and shove it” to La Cosa Nostra. But you might wind up hanging from a London bridge with fifteen grand in your pocket, two watches on your wrist—and your briefcase of secrets gone.
LISTEN TO THE PODCAST
Roberto Calvi & the Briefcase of Secrets: The Vatican, the Mafia, the Italian Deep State, and the Mystery of the Dead Banker (with Nicolo Majnoni)
Greg Olear talks to Nicolo Majnoni about his thrilling new podcast, “Shadow Kingdom, God’s Banker,” which delves into the mysterious death of banker Roberto Calvi and the intricate financial systems of the Vatican. Majnoni shares his personal connection to the Vatican, the complexities of its banking operations, the historical context of its wealth, and the shadowy organization P2, as well as the future challenges facing the papacy amidst financial chaos. They discuss the connections between organized crime and the Vatican, culminating in the mysterious disappearance of Calvi’s briefcase, which held secrets that could have changed the course of history.
ABOUT SHADOW KINGDOM
Roberto Calvi, a man guarding a dangerous secret about the Vatican Bank’s criminal activities, sends a threatening letter to the Pope. A week later on June 17th, 1982 he’s found dead hanging from a bridge in London. British police call it suicide, but questions and conspiracies swirl. Forty years on, lawyer Nicolo Majnoni gets a tip there might be more to the story and embarks on a quest to uncover the truth. Was Roberto Calvi, aka God’s Banker, killed? And if so, by whom?
Listen to the podcast:
https://www.campsidemedia.com/stories/godsbanker
Visit Nicolo’s website:
https://www.nicolomajnoni.com/about
Make America Great Gatsby Again!
Subscribe to the PREVAIL newsletter:
https://gregolear.substack.com/about
Photo credit: GMO. Papal coins.
No doubt he was murdered, no mystery. What is a mystery is that the briefcase was found however it's contents never fully disclosed. Perhaps Pope Trumptosky, fully resplendent in his papal gown, tiara atop has them in his Mar a Shithole bathroom?
It’s TUESDAY🎉