Original subtitles

Roberto Calvi was one of the most powerful figures in Italy.

When his corpse was found, it was shocking.

The question of who killed Calvi is who didn't kill Calvi.

[music playing]

It was a huge story.

God's banker found hanging underneath Blackfriars Bridge.

It was just such an extraordinary case.

It touched the top of Italy.

It was well connected, a secret Masonic lodge.

The Vatican and the Mafia.

This man had so many enemies.

I don't think I've ever done a case quite like this one.

From the very beginning, there was some kind of conspiracy

to keep the truth under wraps.

They hadn't investigated the scene properly.

They simply made a mess of the investigation.

There were still questions to be answered.

This story had everything.

Chicanery, skullduggery, betrayals.

It is this mixture of people from high and low.

Criminals and murderers in contact

with Catholic Cardinals, the Italian ministers,

and ultimately the Pope.

There was all sorts of speculation.

He could have been killed by any one of these enemies.

Roberto Calvi built a house of cards,

but everything fell apart.

When the whole thing blew up and all these things came out,

not just in Italy, but in the international press,

it was a huge story.

[music playing]

Tito has been Calvi's driver for years.

Calvi arrives at the car like clockwork.

The rhythm of his Monday through Friday rarely changing,

except on this day.

The banker wasn't there, Tito reported him missing.

The head of Italy's biggest private bank

about to go bankrupt and he's disappeared.

Calvi has been missing them for exactly a week now.

People are looking for him internationally

and it's a very high profile case.

Early in the morning in London, a man

named Anthony Huntley, who worked at the Daily Express

newspaper was walking across Blackfriars Bridge on his way

to work.

He catches sight of what appears to be

a man dangling from a rope.

This death took place in the city of London,

which has its own separate police force called

the City of London Police.

What did you see?

I saw a complete body hanging by the neck

from a length of yellow-orange string tied

to the top horizontal scaffolding tube.

His feet were dangling in the water, which

was up to his ankle bones.

The City Police are accustomed to dealing

with financial crimes, and they very rarely deal with murders.

They're a relatively small force.

They just work in a fairly small geographical area.

The rest of London has the Metropolitan Police,

which is popularly known as Scotland Yard.

They have a great deal of experience

investigating murders.

The City of London Police does not.

Dead bodies are fished out from the Thames all the time.

Natural causes, drowning, suicides, not

major international mysteries.

There were mistakes in the handling of the crime scene.

He's not photographed in situ, another automatic precaution

in a mysterious death.

If you suspected any foul play of any kind,

you would want to have a full set of photographs.

And they certainly were photographing crime scenes

in the 1980s, absolutely.

And then of course, they untied the knot.

You wouldn't do that.

You normally cut the rope, so you had the knot intact.

The body has taken to the boat to a nearby pier, laid out.

The British police are handling this

as though it's the death of a tramp.

It was not the shining hour of the City of London Police.

There were the five stones or part bricks

that had been recovered from his pockets and his trousers.

One of the bricks has been placed

in the crotch of his trousers on top of his genitals.

They found $15,000 worth of various currencies.

Calvi was wearing a watch.

The City Police had not bothered to note

what time was on the watch when they found it.

The police identified him from his passport

as Gian Roberto Calvini.

They had an autopsy done by the top forensic pathologist

in the UK.

He concluded that there were no signs of struggle.

The suggestion is that he might have loaded himself

up with bricks intending to drown himself in the river.

Soon after this examination, the accurate identification

of Calvi actually happens very rapidly.

It's the head of Rome special branch.

I believe you have our banker.

Calvini?

Roberto Calvi.

Calvi has been missing from Rome since the 11th.

Well, the Italian authorities had reported

that Calvi was missing.

He was head of one of the largest banks in Italy

and was an advisor to the Vatican bank.

He's also someone who is involved

in all this shadowy political intrigue

and a member of the P2 Masonic Lodge.

The alternative interpretation of the bricks

is a symbol of Freemasonry.

And he's been executed in a way that

could happen to you if you breach your oath of silence,

loyalty to Freemasonry.

And then he's found under Blackfriars Bridge,

seen by many as another reference to Freemasonry.

He's a member of this secret underground Freemason

organization that counts some of the most powerful people

in the country.

The City Police weren't aware of this.

The Italian police were in the Italian general public.

The British claim to be indignant

that the Italians are not sharing information

with them about the background to his demise.

The British tabloids were all over it.

It was a huge story.

Gods banker found hanging underneath the bridge.

And for the British, question now

that is to be heard, murder or suicide?

People in Italy assumed immediately

that he had been murdered just because of who

he was and the circumstances of his death.

City Police didn't really know that he

had many, many enemies, any one of whom

could have potentially murdered him

or ordered him to be murdered.

[music playing]

Others who believe that Calvi was definitely

murdered, his own family.

His son Carlo who had been living and working

in the United States, his ambition

was to follow in his father's footsteps

in banking or financial career.

With him or his mother, Clara, and his sister,

Anna, who has left Italy at her father's

desperate urging only days before.

The family boards a flight to London.

Five weeks after Calvi's death, City of London Coroner Dr.

David Paul presides over the inquest.

The inquest is handled in extraordinary haste.

It's completed within one day, not giving people

time to consider evidence in any detail.

In less than an hour, the jury comes to a conclusion.

The jury has decided that the deceased killed himself.

Ooh.

I therefore record that the jury found

that Roberto Calvi, a male, 62 years,

was certified dead at Waterloo pier 18th of June, 1982.

Cause of death, asphyxia due to hanging.

Momentous words--

And that he killed himself.

--that will go a long way to postponing the solution

to the Calvi riddle.

There was outrage but there was also ridicule.

The idea of rushing to judgment on this

supports the theory of official desire for a cover up

to limit the damage from what the full truth might

have revealed.

The Calvi family were very upset at the result

of the first inquest.

They were pushing for a different verdict.

They employed a very high profile lawyer

to look into the case for them.

And eventually, they got a second inquest a year later.

Signor Calvi's widow and son maintained

that he was murdered.

There would never have been a second inquest

if it hadn't been for his family.

On the first day of the new inquest,

the jury of six men and three women

were brought to Blackfriars Bridge

where Signor Calvi's body was found

hanging almost a year ago.

It goes on for 11 days.

The family comes in and testifies at one point

about his state of mind.

For the Calvi family, that was a great victory

because it had gone from the point of being suicide to open

verdict and they took that finding of open verdict and use

that as the basis then to try to show it was murder.

I believe the killers were sending a message

by killing him in public in the heart of the city.

There was definitely something theatrical about it all.

And the message was clearly worth the risk.

The circles that he moved in invites

that kind of speculation.

I lean toward murder.

There were a hell of a lot of people who wanted him dead.

The intrigue dragged in so many different types

and levels of people.

It gives conspiracy theories a bad name.

When he got involved with these people,

that was the beginning of his downfall.

To understand how Roberto Calvi's death came to pass,

we must know his story.

[music playing]

Roberto Calvi came from a middle class family.

They were not rich.

He knew in school children of wealthy families

and he had a more of a simple middle class lifestyle.

So he was envious of many of his peers.

He was just so socially awkward and insecure

and just had problems dealing with people.

Calvi's middle class is very hard to break out of.

His father's a banker at a regional bank,

never gets past the position of manager.

Calvi did probably have a chip on his shoulder

with his father in terms of social snobbery.

Calvi was more ambitious and he attended Bocconi University

in Milan, specializing in business and economics

but he did not graduate.

If you're a university graduate in Italy,

you get to call yourself dottore.

But if you haven't graduated, you're

ragioniere, which is not an accountant, but a step below

that.

After serving honorably in World War II,

Calvi meets and falls in love with the beautiful Clara

Canetti.

He takes a job at his father's bank for a short time.

There, he realizes his facility for numbers.

Young Calvi can literally see power in numbers.

It is a universe of vast secrets hidden

inside endless combinations.

Everything is math.

Business, capitalism, power.

You need only to grasp the combinations

and then perhaps most importantly,

keep them to yourself.

Secrets are power.

He sees this more clearly than anything.

He finds the elite banks of Milan intimidating.

Then comes an opening at the small but respected

Banco Ambrosiano, the chief Catholic bank

of Milan known as the Bank of Priests.

Most of the coworkers really disliked him.

Around the same time, Roberto Rosone starts working there.

He later becomes a key figure with Calvi.

Rosone, he found Calvi infuriating

to speak to because he wouldn't look you the eye very socially

inept.

Diplomacy is part of the business

and that didn't come to him.

So naturally, it could be that it influenced

him to operate in the shadows and also of his rather

conspiratorial bent of mind.

He had a secretary, Graziella Corrocher.

With Graziella by his side, Calvi

begins his rise through the ranks of Banco Ambrosiano.

They're the number one Catholic bank in Italy

except, they have one rival.

[music playing]

A bank in the Venice area.

It's not arrival in terms of size,

but Banca Cattolica has something Ambrosiano doesn't.

It has a status and at least status even inside Catholicism.

So it has a snobbery value that Ambrosiano doesn't have.

That's something that Calvi always remembers.

He likes where he's at, at Ambrosiano,

but one day, far on the horizon, he looks at Banca Cattolica

and thinks, huh, maybe one day I can do something with that bank

too.

[music playing]

Though Rosone saw in Calvi, a lust for power.

He said at one point that he has no mistress other than power.

[music playing]

A year after they marry, Roberto and Clara

welcomed their first born, Carlo.

His sister Anna arrives soon after.

The family was doing well.

They had a vacation home in the country.

Calvi is having the kind of success

his father could only envy as he rides

on the wings of Italy's economic miracle.

[music playing]

In the 1950s, there's a beginning of this boom period.

It was a turning point in Italian history.

Before World War II, Italy was a rural agrarian country.

Italy goes from being a relatively poor country

into being a quite prosperous one.

And now, it's an industrial power.

[music playing]

Factories were grinding out cars and home appliances.

Hundreds of thousands of people are going to university.

The economy took off.

Italy has regained its place in the New World Order.

Lifestyle, culture changed dramatically.

It was the time of the vespa, the time of the Cinquecento.

It became a rich country.

It helped propel him further on his rise.

But for a large institution like Banco Ambrosiano,

you needed something more to get to the highest level.

You needed outside support for political support

or economic support.

Calvi didn't have political protectors so he felt isolated.

He had to make the contacts to be able to do business

on a much grander scale.

The real game is going on behind the scenes.

In the years that follow, Calvi's ambition

would lead him to some of Italy's most nefarious

characters.

Calvi's most crucial connections to the Vatican, the Mafia,

and the secret Masonic lodge P2, came through one man.

Calvi went over to the dark side influenced

by Michele Sindona, the great expert of how

to work your way around the rules

and maximize your profits.

Sindona was a much more dangerous and insidious

character than Calvi.

[music playing]

Sindona was a very wealthy and powerful banker.

He was this charismatic guy, financial genius,

he was well connected.

[music playing]

Born in 1920, Calvi and Sindona a month apart,

very different backgrounds.

Sindona was born into a dirt poor family.

It's the type of family you never

become a major banker in Milan.

[music playing]

The South is looked down on, Sicily is looked down on,

and it stigmatizes you.

And put you into a corner.

And in Northern Italy, they look down on Southern Italians,

they are the richer, better, more elitist, better educated

part of Italy.

But Sindona clearly had a view of himself.

Bigger than what it was.

He went to work for the Sicilian Tax Department.

It taught Sindona what the official tax law is,

so he would know how to evade it himself.

He should have been a lifelong state worker,

but he could think big enough and dream big enough

to go up North and think that he was going

to be a kingpin in financing.

[music playing]

He arrived in Milan having practiced elocution

for nearly a year beforehand to lose his Sicilian accent.

He was very different than Calvi.

He was animated, persuasive.

People liked him, he had a magnetic personality.

Montini is a rising star in the Italian church.

There was a natural synergy between people

running businesses and people running the church.

They had one enemy in mind.

And it was the Soviet Union.

Nations of the West trying to maintain their freedom

are menaced by conditions like these.

The threat of wild turmoil and chaos.

After the Second World War, you have two main power blocs

in Italy, you have the Catholic Christian Democrats

and you have the Communists.

And communism is the deadly enemy for the church.

Along with the US government, they

had one vision in mind, one focus in mind,

to stop the Communist Party.

Freedom everywhere.

Our freedom is in jeopardy.

So if you had communists in it, you're

the enemy the United States.

It could be communist ice cream and they'd be against it.

The problem was, Italy had the biggest Communist Party West

of the Balkans.

Italy stands at the crossroads of history.

They were very worried about the prospect

of communists coming to power.

In the 1948 parliamentary elections of post-war Italy,

the fear was that they could win.

[music playing]

It is the culmination of a bitter battle

in which both Western powers and Russia exerts strong pressure.

The US Department of State launched an all-out campaign

which included propaganda, psychological warfare,

and covert operations.

Catholic Church, the strategy was

if you vote for the communists, you will go to hell.

The pronouncements of the Pope draw the battle lines

between the communists and the church.

A lot of people will hear that message

and it will influence the way they vote.

In the Red Scare, Sindona sees opportunity.

He's called to a meeting with Montini,

the powerful Archbishop of Milan.

It is a relationship that will change Sindona's life.

Montini understands that the reason that the Communist

Party has been so successful in Milan

is because it's reaching the ears of the working

class in the factories and in the unions of Milan.

[music playing]

This is where Sindona comes up and becomes

a real friend of Montini.

He represents some of the unions themselves.

He has people own the mills as his clients as a lawyer.

[music playing]

He gets Montini inside those factories.

Montini is able to make the pitch that he wants to.

[applause]

The Christian Democrats hold on to power

while this gets Sindona in the door with Montini.

It is another act that solidifies their relationship.

He goes to Sindona and he says, you know what?

We're thinking of building this retirement home.

We need a couple of million for it.

Sindona says, let me see what I can do.

Comes back the next day, I've got your $2 million,

you don't have to go anywhere else.

Clearly that would consolidate a friendship

and create the idea that Sindona was a man to be trusted.

The source of Sindona's financing is not known.

Was it the Mafia?

The CIA?

It could have been either of them or both of them.

[music playing]

The CIA seeks out people in important positions

that can benefit them.

They see a prominent banker who's flexible.

Montini has heard rumors that Sindona

has ties to the Sicilian Mafia.

But are they only rumors?

The Catholic Church was notorious

for saying that the mafia didn't exist.

[music playing]

1960, Sindona buys his first of two Italian banks.

He is living Roberto Calvi's dream.

[music playing]

And then, a twist of fate propels Sindona even higher.

Montini selected Pope as Pope Paul VI.

Which for Sindona, is like hitting the lottery.

[music playing]

Sindona managed to become a sort of financial advisor

to the Vatican.

[music playing]

Cardinals in the church, they're incredibly poorly equipped

in terms of managing the church's money.

They have to rely on people outside of the church

to help them do that.

[music playing]

And of course, who is going to be drawn to helping

you manage this kind of money.

Some pretty shady characters.

And so you've got just like a recipe for disaster.

Sindona made money from his Vatican relationship.

Bending the rules is what the bank is all about.

[music playing]

The Vatican Bank, it was founded in the middle of World War II

so that it could get the Vatican off of the British and American

watch list and place the Vatican,

which was a neutral country, on the blacklist.

So they ended up forming a bank that operated

inside a sovereign country.

[music playing]

I.O.R. stands for, in Italian, the Institute

of Religious Works.

It's nicknamed the Vatican Bank.

All its transactions were off the radar

for British and American banking officials.

It allowed the Vatican to invest in German and Italian insurance

companies who were cheating the life insurance policies of Jews

sent to the death camps and the bank made outsized profits.

And when the war ended, the Vatican

said oh, we're a neutral.

We didn't invest anything in the Germans and Italians.

And nobody could tell that they were lying because it was

hidden inside the Vatican Bank.

So bending the rules is part of the DNA of the bank.

Sindona would be seen as the go-to man for Catholic finance.

The man with the Vatican contacts, the friendships,

and the financial know how.

Calvi sees this and admires Sindona.

He wants to be Sindona.

[music playing]

By 1965, Calvi has achieved the role of a manager.

He was now a little bit ahead of what his father had

achieved in his entire career.

But just then, Italy's high flying days hit turbulence.

The boom years don't lead to unending growth.

Young people after 1968, the student revolts

become increasingly violent.

3,000 left wing university students battle with police.

A left wing newspaper calls the Vatican, the biggest tax

evader in post-war Italy.

One source claims the Vatican owes as much as $720 million

in unpaid taxes.

A Communist government could come to power

and put all those holdings at risk.

[music playing]

Income Sindona, the financial magician with the solution.

[music playing]

He says to them, there's only one way.

You want to avoid, you want to get out of this debate,

you come into investments that I will put you in outside

of Italy in many cases.

We hide them under offshore corporations,

the government can't have any look at it,

you'll make just as much money or more.

The Pope likes that idea.

As the world's largest charity, the Pope's organization

supports 250,000 priests, a million nuns,

5 million employees, 20 million children in parochial schools,

and 600 million followers.

It is always in need of income.

As a result, they were ripe for exploitation.

The Holy Father gives Sindona complete control

over the Vatican's billions.

Sindona becomes the leading banker of the Roman Curia,

a big day for a kid born dirt poor in Sicily.

[music playing]

It's hard to overestimate the importance of the Vatican

Bank being in a separate jurisdiction

in the middle of Rome.

Because as far as Sindona is concerned,

it's the equivalent of operating an offshore bank

in the heart of Rome.

The government can't have any look at it for Sindona,

that's indispensably helpful.

People from Italy and other countries

put their money into the Vatican Bank

so that they could hide it.

Now the Vatican bank was giving it to Sindona

so he could hide their money.

Calvi would see him as a model for his own career

that he could gain valuable tips on how

to be successful in that world of Catholic finance.

He met Sindona in the late 1960s at a time when he had almost

reached the top of the bank.

Sindona had the knowledge about the places

to set up offshore companies.

He knew that the real way to do what

they call back-to-back companies, in which you're

reporting results of different companies

to make them look more inflated, you're borrowing more money

against them.

It's almost a Ponzi scheme.

He wants to see everything bagel, which turns out

to be-- all of the offshore banks

in the Caribbean turns out to be Panama.

All the European offshore banks at his height.

Sindona is running about a billion dollars

through nearly 80 to 85 different banks all outside

of Italy in tax havens in which you can't

get any information about them.

They established banks in Peru, Panama, the Bahamas.

Of course, Calvi too has heard the rumors of Sindona's ties

to Cosa Nostra.

Everyone has.

There were certainly plenty of stories about Sindona

being part of the Mafia, having gotten his start there

after the war with Vito Genovese,

having opened up the produce market for him.

And then he owed them forever.

An ABC stringer said that in 1957, he'd

been in a summit meeting of Mafia captains

at the Hotel De Palmes in Palermo.

These stories were part of Sindona's legend

when he was alive.

Of course, these are just stories.

The Mafia is a force to be reckoned with in Sicily.

The Mafia in Southern Italy and Sicily

has exercised enormous influence over the entire society.

If you're a young ambitious man, then perhaps, you will say,

what do I need to get on in life?

And he would have said, well, what I

need is some powerful friends.

People who would give me support to help me on my way out.

Those people would have certainly included in Sicily.

People of the Mafia.

Quite simply that.

Sindona was surrounded by people of Cosa Nostra.

Part of Sindona's business model was laundering heroin money.

Heroin, it's been alleged that nearly 2/3

of the heroin consumed in the United States

has been processed by Mafia middlemen in Sicily.

These men were smuggling it on commercial jets to New York.

The recipients say Italian police

were American relatives controlling the Mafia's drug

trade in the US.

[music playing]

Money from extortion, to sex trafficking,

human trafficking, drugs.

That money was dirty, it was criminal.

For him, it was still the same right color, it was green,

he took it, and he would wash it through the system for them.

While Calvi knows that Sindona is investing money

from the Vatican, he has no idea how in deep

he actually is with the Mafia.

[music playing]

Or does he?

Together, they both invested Cosa Nostra's money

into the Sindona's banks, Calvi's banks, and the Vatican.

Their point of contact with Cosa Nostra

is Giuseppe "Pippo" Calo known as cassiere de Cosa

Nostra or the Mafia's cashier.

Five years spent in prison with two prominent mob bosses

lifts him to the top levels of the Mafia.

Two years after the second inquest into Calvi's death,

a breakthrough in the case comes when Mafia Informant Mutolo

drops an accusation in his testimony

to the Italian authorities.

Pippo Calo was a link between Mafia business and white collar

crime.

He is the first person charged in the murder of Roberto Calvi.

But is the tip they received true?

And if Calo did order the hit on Calvi, to what end?

And was the Mafia acting alone?

[music playing]

Six years later, Calvi's wife Clara

is frustrated that the case still awaits trial.

In Italy, it's this constant frustration that nobody ever

gets to the bottom of things, nobody ever

finds out what really happened, what the true causes.

[music playing]

Clara Calvi is looking for something

that will stick to move her husband's death forward and get

it closer to the conclusion that she believes is murder.

To be frank about it, it would have been done.

The suicide would have been recorded and gone away

if the family did not hire an investigative agency

Kroll run by former FBI agents to investigate.

In 1992, I was approached by Jeff Katz of Kroll Associates

to see if I could help.

Jeff wanted me to look at the forensic science aspect.

As I started to get into it, I thought, my goodness,

what have I bitten off here?

It's a bit more than--

maybe I can chew.

The question of who killed Calvi is who didn't kill Calvi.

It's a long list.

Sometimes I've called it a three-ring circus

but maybe it was a five-ring circus.

By the end of it, this man had so many enemies.

[music playing]