Original subtitles

[music playing]

What did you see?

I saw a complete body hanging by the neck from a length

of string, tied to the top horizontal scaffolding tube.

His feet were dangling in the water.

The hurried British investigation

was very badly handled.

They hadn't investigated the scene properly

because the police suspected it was suicide.

Roberto Calvi was certified dead at Waterloo Pier.

The cause of death?

Asphyxia due to hanging, and that he killed himself.

To be frank about it, it wouldn't have been done.

But then the family hired their own investigators.

Question isn't, who killed Calvi?

It's, who didn't kill Calvi?

It could have been the mob, P2, the Vatican, the CIA,

even the KGB.

This man had so many enemies.

If you wanted to come up with a suspect list, it's a long list.

Calvi was somebody whose time had come.

[music playing]

The family hired an investigative agency, Kroll,

which is run by former FBI agents at the time.

And there's a fellow that really came on the case

for two years, Jeff Katz.

He was somebody who was a superb investigator.

He didn't want to do it the wrong way.

He didn't like dumpster diving, illegal phone taps,

cutting the corners that many private investigators had

before Kroll came around.

He viewed investigations as intelligence gathering,

shoe leather work, meticulous details,

trying to piece things together that might

unearth the truth of Roberto Calvi's death.

Your assertion is that your husband

was murdered to keep him from naming people involved

in international fraud.

We want to prove, not only that he was murdered,

but that he was the victim of forces out of his control,

forces that ultimately controlled him.

We need to look again at the crime scene.

We need our own forensics expert.

10 years later, what can we expect to find?

We need to review what exists.

We need to understand all the possible ways

he could have ended up hanging from that bridge.

How did he get there?

I hear a lot of conjecture, but what's actually

scientifically plausible?

Anyone in mind?

Angela Gallop.

She's the best.

In 1992, Jeff Katz of Kroll Associates

got in touch with me.

Gallop is a forensics expert.

She resolved the question of whether Princess Di was

pregnant when she died by taking a part of her stomach lining

and being able to show that didn't have the right chemical.

Angela?

Jeff Katz from Kroll.

How can I help you, Jeff?

I'm asking you 10 years later than I should,

but I have a job for you.

The original crime scene was botched.

I need you to take a look at the evidence that still exists.

Jeff wanted me to look at the forensic science aspect.

I'm known for setting up and running

full-scale forensic laboratories and also

my particular interest, which is leading teams

for cold-case investigations.

I was very aware that this high-profile Italian banker

had been found hanging from scaffolding

underneath Blackfriars Bridge.

Everybody had assumed it was suicide,

and so they hadn't investigated the scene properly.

I remember saying, well, this is a very unusual case,

and I don't know at this stage whether I will be able to help.

I spent some time down at Blackfriars Bridge.

It was a little bit different.

There was no scaffolding there in 1992.

But I was very much looking at the foreshore there

and under low tide, when it got exposed.

I must admit, sometimes, 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.

You always have to understand the context of the case

that you're investigating.

It's within that context that you look

for certain types of evidence.

It's about the crime scene, but it's

about everything that went on around the crime scene as well.

Details like that can be really important.

The web of players is complex, each with a strong motive

to want Calvi disappeared.

Suspects span Italy's vast centers of power.

The Vatican, a secret Masonic lodge, the American CIA,

and Cosa Nostra.

One of the problems with the Calvi case

was the excessive number of suspects,

starting with the Vatican itself.

He was potentially a source of major embarrassment

and reputational harm to them.

The Vatican is an extraordinary power

behind the scenes which mustn't be ignored.

How does the Vatican get so caught up in something

like this?

You mean, out millions, marred by scandal,

and accused of murder?

I have books for you.

The reputation of the Vatican has really taken

a hit for decades, particularly when Archbishop Paul Marcinkus

dragged it into the whole problem of the Banco

Ambrosiano.

The chairman is found hanging under a bridge in London.

It was an extraordinary moment of crisis for the reputation

of the church.

Pope Paul VI named Marcinkus secretary of the IOR

in 1969, around the time he became an archbishop.

Why a priest from Chicago?

Didn't you want a banker?

He's not even Italian.

Paul VI wanted someone he knew he could trust, someone loyal.

And that was Marcinkus.

[music playing]

He is Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, who

climbed from the blue-collar churches of Cicero, Illinois

to this tower in the outer walls of Saint Peter's, where

he heads the Vatican Bank.

He was very unlike the typical priest,

who might be small and meek.

He was a big, macho man.

[music playing]

The nickname for Marcinkus inside the Vatican

was The Gorilla, and it was not said as a term of affection.

Because of his size--

6 feet 5 inches tall--

he became the unofficial bodyguard to the pope

as they went around on trips.

He didn't have any sort of financial training

or background at all.

Although I will look at that and say, boy,

did they pick the wrong guy to run the Vatican Bank,

from Sindona's perspective, the pope

picked exactly the right person.

Marcinkus was the perfect person for the other two

to use because they had, by him, the stamp

of approval of the Vatican Bank.

The Vatican Bank could handle money

and it could be distributed around the world

in a confidential manner.

The operation that brings these three key players

together is when they set up the Banco Ambrosiano Overseas

Limited.

In the Bahamas.

It was believed to be the only example

of a Catholic bishop in the world who was

serving on the board of a bank.

By having untraceable funds, they

could be used for any ideologically driven projects,

as well as moneymaking projects.

The Vatican Bank has no balance sheets.

There's no advisory board.

There's no independent board.

It has one shareholder, the pope.

So therefore, you don't have to worry

if you happen to take a few dollars

on the side for yourself.

But that wasn't Marcinkus.

He was interested, though, in power.

He did, at times, take off millions of dollars.

An example was when they did this backdoor deal

on this Catholic bank.

Calvi wanted to acquire a Catholic bank in Venice

called Banca Cattolica del Veneto.

With Banca Cattolica del Veneto, Banco Ambrosiano

would be the largest private sector bank

in the Italian banking system.

Marcinkus actually sold them 50%.

The deal was that Calvi would buy, through Ambrosiano, 37%.

And you know what happened on the side?

The extra 13%.

That money comes back into the Vatican Bank as cash

that Marcinkus uses for other things.

$6 and 1/2 million to buy himself a Cardinals position.

But the top Catholic official in Venice, Luciani,

who was opposed to the deal-- and he objected to Marcinkus.

This deal is against the church's long-term interest.

And excuse me, but I don't think Calvi has the best interests

of the parishioners in mind.

Eminence, no disrespect, but don't you

have anything better to do?

This is a conversation no number of Hail Marys

will fix for Marcinkus, a conversation he will live

to regret.

I have been an investigating judge in the '70s and '80s.

Through our investigations, relationships

came out that the Vatican Bank was related with the finance

affairs of Michele Sindona, Roberto Calvi, and the Mafia.

[gunshots]

The new Mafia-- ruthless and acting without compassion.

The gangs control the food markets and almost

every form of commerce, but they make their big money

in the drug racket.

From the port in Palermo, between two and four tons

of heroin are shipped to the US each year.

[phone ringing]

He specialized in money laundering.

Signor Calo!

From what we know from Mafia witnesses,

Sindona was the main banker for the older Palermo families,

who were the ones who were first involved in the heroin

trafficking.

People would say, don't cross Michele Sindona,

because he's connected.

You'll have nothing but problems.

[music playing]

Mafia operatives could have been just the kind of personnel

that you needed on the ground to park Mr. Calvi under the bridge

with a noose around his neck.

Looking back, we all know where the downturn starts.

[music playing]

When Sindona's at his height, he's now a storied success

because he's gone on to make it big in America.

Sindona acquired an American bank

which was one of the largest banks in the US.

He's buying a stake in Franklin National Bank

to use that bank to further his transfers

and his offshore accounts and to run it

through Franklin National.

This empire that he's built has hundreds

of millions of dollars in loans that

aren't going to be paid back.

It's not, will it fall apart?

What will fall apart first?

[music playing]

1973 dramatized dependence on foreign oil.

All countries that were heavily dependent on foreign oil

imports, such as Italy, their currency plummeted in value.

This caused havoc for Sindona.

At the same time, the currency traders

inside Franklin National made the wrong bet

on the lira and the dollar and got creamed by the market.

Franklin National becomes the largest bankruptcy

in American history at that point.

The man Fortune magazine pegged the previous year

with a $450 million net worth now holds huge paper losses

on foreign currency trades.

Plummeting stock prices mean he cannot raise enough money

to cover his bad bets.

He had lost money for powerful people.

He had lost money and put the Vatican

into a terrible position.

With a financial empire that is on the edge of collapse,

Sindona thinks, I will call in all the favors

that I gave in the past.

Calvi was very nervous.

He turned to the P2 lodge for protection.

They claimed to have political influence,

so he asked them to help him.

P2 was extremely powerful in Italian business.

It was an elite club to be part of to advance your career.

P2.

Propaganda Due.

That's right.

In the '70s, we knew this strange Masonic lodge existed,

but our knowledge was not complete.

P2 was really run by one man.

He was connected to everybody.

Licio Gelli, the head of the secret Masonic lodge,

is the other partner in their illicit laundering.

Was he, too, complicit in Calvi's murder?

Jeff Katz told me a lot about the background to the story.

And there were some connections, I understand,

with Blackfriars, and therefore Blackfriars Bridge.

It's certainly enough to wonder about.

In the late 1960s, to make Freemasonry important again,

the grand master decides to revive an old lodge called

Lodge Propaganda.

This lodge is now called Propaganda Due,

or P2 for short.

And at the same time, there happens

along a man called Licio Gelli.

And he's soon master of this P2 project.

Gelli is a convinced fascist.

He fights in the civil war in Spain,

and after fighting, got to meet Mussolini.

Gelli is very good at capitalizing

on his reputation as a fascist to build his power, to build

his connections.

How'd they all know each other?

Gelli and Sindona met in the mid '60s.

Their relationship was mutually beneficial.

Gelli had political connections, and Sindona had banks.

Money.

Sindona was financing extreme right-wing organizations

for Licio Gelli.

It also brings him into contact with the CIA.

Gelli was a recruit and ended up being a good recruit.

The key to P2's power was its usefulness for the Cold War

and for Italy's American masters.

The key cement justifying everything

was commitment to the anticommunist cause.

The idea was to prevent communists from taking power.

Anything was justified to win.

[rioting sounds]

[rioting sounds]

This attempt at spreading fear and terror across the country

by staging bomb attacks.

Now, behind this strategy, there were

rightist, neofascist paramilitary groups and also

state intelligence agencies.

NATO and CIA was involved.

Many of these right-wing bombings

were staged to look as though they

were the work of left-wing extremists

with the plan of scapegoating people.

These fascists wanted to be able to create enough instability

that the average Italian says, whoa,

we don't like any of this.

Let's get a strong leader like Mussolini again.

People like Licio Gelli believed that they can be that leader.

And so as more and more people are

nervous about the country moving toward revolution,

Gelli's power rises.

If you are engaging in dodgy financial practices,

it's a good thing to have political friends

in high places.

[choir chanting]

He was very gullible, very willing to accept claims

of other people who said that they could

help him and protect him and support him

in one way or another.

They extracted a very high price.

Gelli's power depended, to a large extent, on blackmail.

It was one of the key instruments of the P2 regime.

Even the membership forms said, do you

have any useful information on people that we can use?

Gelli wanted to tap that information

to make blackmail part of his toolkit.

Once you get into the system, you're bought.

You do one deal, you're stuck.

All they have to do is turn you in for that deal.

The P2 membership lists and a lot of important documents

are then spirited away and kept in the safe.

Gelli used his position in the P2 to get money out of Calvi.

He was certainly using this for self enrichment,

along with whatever political program he

may have had in mind.

Three months after his initiation into P2,

Calvi achieves his career ambition.

In 1975, Calvi becomes one of the most important

financial men in all of Italy.

Ambrosiano is no longer just a small regional bank.

It is one of a handful of the largest banks in Italy.

With regional banks across the country,

with relationships with corresponding banks

in nearly 20 different countries,

Ambrosiano is reporting big profits.

Calvi is living his dream, his rise now

complete as Sindona's fortunes continue their tumble.

Their career trajectories crossing at that time--

Calvi on his way up, Sindona on his way down.

After the collapse of Sindona, Calvi

stepped into Sindona's shoes as a financial advisor

to the Vatican, and he became increasingly close

to Archbishop Marcinkus.

By the mid '70s, the church has an active banking relationship

with almost a dozen Calvi-controlled shell

companies.

After his losses that he has with Sindona, Marcinkus

makes the amateur investor mistake of,

I lost that money on Amazon.

I'm going to make it up double here on Facebook.

Increase the risk to get back the money that had been lost.

And that's what Marcinkus does with Calvi.

Gives Calvi tremendous power, but for Marcinkus,

it's a dangerous move further down the rabbit hole.

[rioting sounds]

Italy is in real crisis.

The lira is now worth 40% less than three months ago.

The economy in Italy continues to sputter.

Safe financial havens abroad for the wealthy's money

become more attractive than ever.

Italy, in the 1970s, had incredibly strict laws

against currency exploitation.

For Calvi and his clients, the IOR

becomes instrumental in hiding their capital.

And where does the money go?

Ambrosiano's branch in Lugano, Switzerland.

It becomes the safe haven for the rich.

Hm.

But not legally.

No.

And now the penalty, if caught, is prison time.

So the stakes are rising for Calvi.

And Sindona.

Sindona is already screwed.

Sindona gets into deep trouble.

He's wanted on both sides of the Atlantic.

The mafiosi want their money back.

[phone ringing]

He's in a desperate situation.

At a certain point, the Italian state

puts an investigator on the trail

of what's happening to his Italian operation.

It's a guy called Giorgio Ambrosoli in Milan.

That means the beginning of the end for Sindona.

Giorgio Ambrosoli is not prepared to cut Sindona

any slack.

Of course, Sindona hated him.

As Sindona becomes increasingly desperate,

he decides to use blackmail to put pressure

on people who might be in a position to help him.

And Calvi is one of the first targets.

Sindona hires this blackmail artist.

[music playing]

[engine revving]

On a certain day of 1977, Luigi Cavallo

puts posters in the streets of Milan

bearing the words, "Roberto Calvi in jail,"

and accusing him of fraud, false accounting, embezzlement,

and other crimes.

Well, the giant posters really drew Banco Ambrosiano

to the attention of the Bank of Italy and to the magistrates

in Milan.

Giulio Padalino is an investigating magistrate

who decides that he's investigating Ambrosiano.

That's bad for Calvi.

Calvi doesn't know how bad it is until his offices are actually

raided.

A group of investigators pick up paperwork,

they pick up files and everything else.

So Calvi goes to Licio Gelli, and he asks for assistance

on doing something on this fellow called Padalino.

Calvi was already deep into a web

where he would take money from your bank account

and put it into a Calvi thing, so that when a bank audit was

taking place, his books would look

better than they really were.

Every time you're doing stuff like that,

there's a kind of tax to be paid.

You need to keep people happy and keep them quiet,

and so you're making worse and worse decisions as a banker.

Calvi's offshore dummy companies had borrowed dollars,

but the shares that they bought were lira.

The problem is that there was another currency

crisis in the '70s.

I want to have a frank talk with you tonight about inflation.

As a way of fighting inflation, the Federal Reserve

decided to sharply push up interest rates.

And this caused the value of the dollar to rise sharply.

So imagine you have a debt that you

have to pay that's in dollars, and you

have an asset which is in lira.

And suddenly, the burden of the debt is doubled.

That led to the collapse of Calvi's scheme.

If things continued this way, there was a real risk

that Calvi could lose control of the bank, the chairmanship

of Banco Ambrosiano.

He knows that if someone like Roberto Rosone, his deputy,

gains control, they will uncover all of his shell games,

and he'll be finished.

So that's when he starts buying up shares of Ambrosiano.

Oh, yes.

It was a bank that had a very diffuse shareholding structure,

so he didn't need to have anywhere near 50%

to control it.

And the offshore dumping companies

that he controlled collectively owned 20%.

And that was enough?

Yes, that was enough for him to have

voting control of the bank.

And when Bank of Italy supervisors

found that these obscure offshore companies collectively

owned 20% of the bank, that was a red flag.

Why?

Who are these companies?

[music playing]

In 1979, Sindona and Calvi's legal troubles increase.

They begin a string of events that will bring Calvi

ever closer to his doom.

In New York, Sindona is indicted in a 99-count indictment

from federal prosecutors that charge fraud, misappropriation,

conspiracy.

Two weeks after Sindona was indicted in New York,

Giorgio Ambrosoli came out with a 10-pound, 2000-page report

that was stunning.

The entire Ambrosoli report, it essentially

shows how Sindona has used Franklin National as a conduit

to pass through millions of dollars in his paper phantom

ghost bank empire and ran Franklin National down

to the bare bones, having really looted the company.

[music playing]

It is a devastating report and is

a major obstacle to getting Sindona out of the trouble

that he's in.

Ambrosoli knew exactly that he might have been killed.

But he did his duty nevertheless.

[music playing]

[striking match]

Sindona was kind of a loose cannon.

He begins first threatening Ambrosoli

and then, eventually, actually contracts to have him killed.

[gunshots]

Sindona is becoming a liability to his former friends.

If you are the Mafia, looking to recycle money,

Pippo Calo was a shrewd character

who sensed which way the wind was blowing.

And so because Sindona is beginning to fall apart,

the Corleonesi begin using Calvi's bank as their money

laundering vehicle.

He was being drained of huge amounts of money

by Licio Gelli and his lobbyists and fixers.

[music playing]

Angela?

Jeff Katz from Kroll.

I look forward to joining you at the crime scene

today and seeing you work some of your magic.

We were quite a good pair, really.

Jeff was absolutely amazing.

He had an encyclopedic knowledge of this case.

His passion for investigation matched mine

for forensic investigation.

When I first started to get into it,

I thought long and hard about what I could do,

how I could use the scientific knowledge I had to help.

Forensic science is all about physical evidence,

looking for tiny traces of material or marks.

I was very keen to look at the items that were available

and that the original scientists had examined.

And they had notes on them, and there were people

I could talk to about it.

They had compared the five stones or part bricks that

had been recovered from his pockets

with similar bricks and stones on a building site

fairly near to Blackfriars Bridge.

And they decided that these items had

come from that building site.

I also had a look at the items that

had been examined originally.

One of the watches was a wristwatch

that was very badly corroded.

The other one, a pocketwatch, wasn't so badly affected.

You couldn't see that water had flooded into it.

Under Blackfriars Bridge, the water

sort of rushed to either side of the supports

as the tides were coming in and out.

But you also had the wash created

by passing river traffic, which could raise

the level of the river locally by about two

or three feet a night.

So the less badly damaged watch was probably

in the upper pocket, and the wristwatch was probably

on his wrist, which would have been under water

at a certain period of time.

And it had stopped at 1:52, which

might have been important.

I was particularly interested in the shoes

because they could reflect some of the last things Calvi

had walked over, including, for example,

the stones on the foreshore.

The scaffolding-- he'd have to have walked

along or up the scaffolding.

And I needed some help from a forensic chemist, who's

a specialist in footwear and marks in footwear

and the marks footwear makes.

We were interested in paint because some

of the bars of the scaffolding had yellow and green paint

on it.

And so the soles and the lower parts of the uppers

would have been of great interest.

This was an incident about which there were still

questions to be answered.

The framework I constructed consisted

of thinking about the routes by which Calvi could

have got on the scaffolding.

And I decided there were probably four main routes--

two suicide routes and two murder routes.

And these were the ones that I was going to focus on.

Pope Paul VI is dead.

The great and the humble come to pay their respects

as Pope Paul lies in state.

August 1978, Marcinkus faces his greatest crisis to date

when he loses his ally at the Vatican.

Obviously, this is a cause for concern

for Marcinkus's consolidated position of power

within the Vatican.

Everything could change depending

on who the new man is.

The vast numbers waiting outside St. Peter's Basilica

confidently expected a conservative

to occupy the papal throne.

The choice of a new pope is bad news for Marcinkus.

Albino Luciani, patriarch of Venice, was a surprise.

[applause]

The person who's elected is Albino Luciani,

this man that he'd quarreled with over the Banca Cattolica

del Veneto.

He's known as The Smiling Pope.

He seems like a loose cannon in the Vatican

and a man who's known for his hard line on financial probity.

Things are not looking good for Marcinkus.

And then, after 33 days, there was a scandal

that broke the church.

A faithful nun would bring him a cup of coffee in the morning.

He failed to pick up the coffee from outside his door.

She knocked and entered and discovered the dead body

of the pope.

[glass shattering]

The almost incredible news is released to the world.

Pope John Paul I is dead.

In order not to admit the possibility

that a woman might have gone into the pope's bedroom,

the Vatican officially announced that the body had been found

by one of his male secretaries.

So from the very beginning, you had contradictions

in the official account.

It's not just a comedy of errors, it's a disaster.

The idea that has emerged is that, given

that it's a serious sin for Catholics to lie,

if the Vatican was lying officially

on so many of these details, they would only be doing it

for a very important reason--

to cover up something that was even worse

than a lie, such as murder.

If he was murdered, the financial motive

is the most plausible one.

If he was threatening to clean up,

people think Marcinkus could well have objected strongly.

Whatever caused Luciani's passing,

it is a fortunate turn of events for Marcinkus,

one that could not have happened at a better time.

A month later, Giulio Padalino, who

had been leading the investigation

into Roberto Calvi and the Banco Ambrosiano,

goes public with his report.

Marcinkus and the IOR find themselves implicated.

The extreme right-wing forces present in Latin America

and engaged in the struggle against communism

and in these dirty wars involving human rights

abuses and torture and murder.

[drill instruction]

P2 is part of that story.

It is a part of the global reach of the organization

and an indication of how important it was.

Gelli had drained millions of dollars out of the bank.

And there had also been some bad loans

that Calvi was forced to make by the P2 leaders.

They would basically extort him or pressure

him to lend to certain parties who should not have been

allowed to borrow that much.

[music playing]

Marcinkus is basically an officer of the Vatican state,

and therefore, Italy has no jurisdiction over him.

With Calvi, they certainly do.

This was the first serious major investigation that said,

something stinks in Ambrosiano.

[music playing]

With Sindona and Calvi both now compromised,

the stakes could not be higher.

Or could they?

[music playing]

Enter into this tinderbox John Paul

II, a cold warrior driven to defeat

the communists at all costs.

The arrival of a new pope will have unseen and deadly

consequences for Roberto Calvi.

[music playing]

[bell ringing]

[thunder rumbling]

[music playing]