Original subtitles

[music playing]

Sindona and Calvi's legal troubles increase.

They begin a string of events that will bring Calvi

ever closer to his doom.

Sindona crashed.

The largest bankruptcy in American history.

Sindona's wanted on both sides of the Atlantic.

The mafiosi want their money back.

Calvi turned to the P2 Lodge for protection.

They extracted a very high price.

Gelli used his position to get money out of Calvi.

It was clear that Calvi was in serious trouble.

It's not every day in London that you

find a body swinging under one of the great old story bridges.

It's a dramatic death.

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

to see if I could help.

He had been charged with reinvestigating the case

on behalf of the family.

Jeff wanted me to look at the forensic science.

I didn't make any assumptions about whether it was

likely to be murder or suicide.

I was just very interested in the circumstances

by which this high profile Italian banker had

come to be in this position-- hanging from a rope

under one of the big London bridges.

How on earth did that happen?

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

[music playing]

This model is something that we created

to explain the results of all our experiments

and observations and findings in relation to the conclusions

that we finally came to.

The framework I constructed consisted

of thinking about the routes by which Calvi could

have got onto the position on the scaffolding in which he

was found.

I decided in the end that there were probably

four main routes, two suicide routes and two murder routes.

There was a fixed iron ladder on the river wall

from which the people who wanted to get access

to the scaffolding and repair the gate from the river fleet

used to get down onto it.

Calvi would have climbed down this near-vertical ladder.

There was a 2 foot 8 inch gap that he

would have to have negotiated across

to the back of the scaffolding up against the river wall.

He would have stepped across onto the two scaffolding

planks, which were always apparently very slippery.

And then he would have had to have climbed up one pole's

distance, traversed to the other end of the scaffolding,

and then tied the rope to the scaffolding through an eyelet,

not onto the pole.

We worked out that it was between 1:50 and 2:45

that night.

The lights along the embankment there are set to light the path

and not set to light the river.

So he would have to have done that in darkness.

You have to bear in mind his age and his physical condition.

Roberto Calvi had vertigo, and he

had a weakness in one of his little fingers

that tended to get disturbed if he used his hand too roughly.

The other thing is that he was weighted down with these stones

and half bricks.

So that was one of the suicide routes.

Any tribunal could make up its own mind

as to whether that was likely or not.

[music playing]

At 6:18 on this warm Rome evening, just a few

pops of smoke, but unmistakably white.

On October 16, 1978, the arrival of a new Pope

will have unseen and deadly consequences for Roberto Calvi.

Karol Wojtyla of Poland, the first non-Italian Pope

in more than 4 and 1/2 centuries.

The papal name he has chosen, John Paul II.

John Paul II is very keen on the battle against communism,

and absolutely, the front line is

in his own homeland in Poland.

After World War II, the Soviet Union

institutes a new Communist government

in an unwilling Poland.

Karol Wojtyla, who will become Pope John Paul II

begins a 20 year rise through the church,

working tirelessly to undermine Soviet control.

He was very successful in defending

the Catholic Church in Poland.

His ascension as Pope alarms the Soviets.

Poland, at this time, has a communist government,

but also has a thriving Catholic community underneath.

[church bell]

John Paul II, I think, was the fiercest anti-communist

in the last part of the 20th century

and had his own agenda, which was to bring religion back

to Eastern Europe.

Bishop Marcinkus sees this as a good way

to ingratiate himself with his new boss.

John Paul II is inclined to turn a blind eye

to financial malpractices.

It was more important to cover up the dirty details in order

to preserve the reputation of the church.

And that's exactly the spirit that my Marcinkus

lived and espoused.

They were kindred spirits, let's say.

Bishop Marcinkus-- his willingness

to do things that the Pope finds useful

creates a relationship of trust that

allows Marcinkus not only to hold his position,

but to reinforce it.

Roberto Calvi also understands how the new Pope can

be useful for Banco Ambrosiano.

Calvi was shrewd enough to do things for the church,

to donate money to causes.

Those things would soon include the Pope's homeland.

Pope John Paul II became the first Pope to venture

behind the Iron Curtain, kissing the tarmac on his arrival

at Warsaw airport.

He was at the start of an historic nine day visit.

This was extremely significant for Polish Catholics.

It was confirmation that they had

the support of an influential, crucial world

institution in their battle against the Soviet domination.

There has been mixed in all these events

fierce Polish nationalism.

After he leaves, that may prove much harder to dampen down.

Shortly after that, in Poland, a small union forms.

The Solidarity Trade Union were fighting the Communist regime.

Union members locked themselves into shipyards

and stage a strike.

The Pope, the CIA and others starts

to see solidarity as a potential partner

for destabilizing the Communist government.

And Marcinkus is then keen to have banking experts who

can help him do that.

Buongiorno, Your Eminence.

Do you know what's happening in Poland?

Yes.

Come see us at the Vatican, Roberto.

There are few things better than being quote unquote,

"God's banker" and being summoned

to the seat of the Catholic Church Vatican City.

This drags Calvi ever deeper into the vortex

of the Pope's obsessive battle against communism.

The whole of my report was based on this framework

of what seemed to me to be the most likely routes that Calvi

could have taken.

The other suicide routes that we consider

was he had climbed down onto the foreshore some distance away.

Further downstream not that far away, there

was another ladder that led directly onto the foreshore.

So at low tide, you could climb down that.

Calvi could have walked along the foreshore

but he still would have had to walk through water

to get to the scaffolding.

The water would have been several feet deep.

He would've had to swum to it, really.

Then he would have had to have climbed onto scaffolding

and then climbed all the way up to where

he was found, which was reasonably near the top,

and then tied the rope.

Then of course, still, this is weighted down

with bricks and everything on his body.

We did a range of experiments.

We actually re-enacted climbing down the ladders

at the scene and particularly the one that led down

onto the foreshore and having a look at the damage you

get in the shoes from that.

Secondly, the poles were very rusty as well, and also

the yellow and green paint.

Then inspect the shoes afterwards,

compared them with what was found on the original shoes.

We then put the shoes in a bucket of swirling water

for a certain period of time.

And then looked at them to see how much

of the paint and the rust that had been transferred and then

been removed.

We had enough physical evidence here,

along with all of these other suppositions,

to leave one really convinced that neither of the suicide

routes were really possible.

That left the very strong conclusion

that he must have been murdered.

And I think the circles that he moved in invites

that kind of speculation.

Just five weeks after the Pope's visit to Poland,

prosecutor Giorgio Ambrosoli, who

had been delving into banker Michele Sindona's

fraudulent dealings is assassinated.

[gunshot sounds]

Who wanted Abrosoli dead?

It's a long list.

He was shot and killed in Milan by three men

in what Italian sources called a typical mafia execution.

But who wanted him dead that also had connections that might

relate to Italian-Americans?

Michele Sindona.

So it turned some of the attention toward him.

Sindona was furious.

Sindona, who's out on bail pending this trial,

is suddenly missing.

59-year-old Michele Sindona is under indictment

in the failure of the Franklin National Bank,

the largest bank collapse in US history.

He disappeared in New York City last week.

Hello, we now have Michele Sindona on as our prisoner.

You will be hearing from us.

So here you have a person charged

in a criminal trial about to take place in New York,

and he's been kidnapped.

The FBI is brought in.

One of their specialties is kidnapping.

They are worried enough to put Sindona's assistant at Franklin

National and who knows a lot of the secrets

in protective custody.

But the FBI refuses to classify it

as a kidnapping because from the get

go they are suspicious about it, and they think it's a setup.

[music playing]

So guess what?

The FBI was correct.

Sindona had put on a disguise, and he

had staged a fake kidnapping.

He didn't do it in a chintzy way.

He decided to do it in a big way.

So he disappears, and he travels to Sicily.

Sindona had business to do that he had to do in Italy.

He had to make commitments to mob bosses

that he would repay them millions and millions

of dollars.

These were people who wouldn't take kindly

to being bilked by their bankers.

During this stay in Palermo, Sindona

wrote many, many letters, pretending

that the letters were dictated to him by the people who

kidnapped him.

As Sindona becomes increasingly desperate,

I think there's possibly an element of madness.

He's losing contact with reality at that point.

The members of the Secret Masonic Lodge,

P2, were arriving to the conclusion

that there was not a possibility to trust Sindona

any longer because his discipline was so bad.

At that time, they decided that their financial man

was only Calvi.

Michele Sindona turned up in New York

today just as mysteriously as he disappeared last August 2.

He was taken to a Manhattan hospital with what was thought

was a bullet wound in the leg.

Unbelievably to many, Archbishop Marcinkus

agrees to act as a character witness.

People have asked, you think Sindona

had something on Marcinkus?

Some blackmail to force him to do it?

Absolutely not.

That was Marcinkus.

Loyalty was his DNA.

Marcinkus says, you know what, I'll go over and be a character

witness.

Wait, it gets worse than that.

So will a couple of people who work with me in the Vatican

Bank as senior lay officials who have been here forever.

The Vatican Secretary of State, Casaroli

is absolutely shocked at this.

Enough of this.

This Is just ridiculous.

I'm putting a stop to this.

It's vetoed.

You're not going.

Marcinkus was too much in bed with Sindona.

So when Sindona fell apart, they said, all right,

time to get rid of Marcinkus.

The Secretary of State, Casaroli,

goes to a friend of his who's running Italian intelligence

and says, will you get me some dirt on Marcinkus

so I can force him out.

They put this fellow, Francesco Pazienza on the case.

[music playing]

Money from the Vatican Bank that's taken out that's

illegal.

Now, he doesn't know what it's being used for.

It's not ending up in Marcinkus' pocket.

But what does he do with it?

Does he go back to the Italian intelligence and tell them?

This is so Italian.

Pazienza says, I've got information on Marcinkus.

Great, I'll meet with him.

And at that moment, he knew Marcinkus owed him a favor,

and that was worth it.

Meanwhile, investigators close in on the truth about Sindona's

disappearing act.

The Italians pick up a fellow coming into the country.

He is a senior member of the Gambino crime family,

and they give him a full frisking.

They find out that he has a piece of paper on him.

It's actually in his shoes.

It means something.

So they took all the names of the people on that flight--

over 180 of them.

The FBI went through one by one and they found one of them

was a person who didn't exist.

It was a false identification.

They then pulled out of the files

from immigration the actual declaration card,

and on that they find Sindona's fingerprint.

He's coming in back from Italy at a time when

he's supposed to be kidnapped.

He's traveling back and forth in the company of mobsters.

It's the end, as far as the FBI is concerned,

of sandona having been the innocent victim.

A judge in New York, today, sentenced Italian financier

Michele Sindona to 25 years in prison and fined him $207,000.

And that was the end of the scenery

because he was arrested and never was released anymore.

After I was able to eliminate the two suicide routes,

which left the very strong conclusion

that he must have been murdered.

That left the two murder routes, really.

The two murder routes we considered

was first of all, that one of his murderers

had lowered him, perhaps on a rope, over the parapet

and down the front of the river wall

to be caught by someone else who was on the scaffolding,

and then pulled the body towards him.

And he then attached the rope, and then Calvi was suspended.

You have to think, somebody's going to night work.

Somebody's pedaling by.

Somebody is going to see a group of people

and later just tell the police.

The whole thing is over.

You've got a murder from the get go.

There's a risk to doing it in public.

The other route was simply by being brought by boat.

The boat theory might be the more likely.

That was where we ended up.

[boat sounds]

At the beginning of 1981, we were investigating

the fake kidnapping.

It came out that Mr Joseph Miceli Crimi was also

in Palermo with Sindona.

Miceli Crimi, the doctor, kept traveling

between Palermo and Arezzo.

Arezzo is where Licio Gelli had his main headquarters

and office.

Licio Gelli, head of the Secret Lodge Propaganda Due or P2.

We already knew that this strange Secret Masonic

Lodge existed, and we knew that Licio Gelli was

the head of this Masonic Lodge.

Licio Gelli seemed to be a very powerful person protected

by several circles.

So now that there was this connection between Sindona

and Licio Gelli, we decided to search all the known

addresses of Licio Gelli.

We found out that jelly had a secret office

inside a textile company in the province of Arezzo.

Castiglion Fibocchi, that's the name of the small town.

The search was managed by the Guardia di

Finanza, the financial police.

That's a military organization that belongs to the Treasury

Department.

And they were created to fight corruption and money

laundering.

We sent Francesco Carluccio.

He was a very, very brave and clever investigator.

The lady's bag was on a chair in the office.

Then the officer went there and took that object.

It was the keys of the safe.

[key turning]

It's the Holy Grail of secret relationships.

This is the who's who of Italy.

Leaders of Italian intelligence agencies--

--prominent business people, bankers, media figures.

He was a young guy who was on the way up in the media

business.

He ends up being the Prime Minister of Italy afterwards--

one of the richest men in the country.

And of course, Sindona was a member of P2.

Calvi also was a member of P2.

Italy was shocked completely.

It was a shock.

Having the P2 two lists made public

was a political earthquake.

It seemed to be the incarnation of the kind

of masonic conspiracy that everybody had always suspected

the Freemasons would be.

The Forlani government resigned after allegations

that nearly 1,000 prominent Italians in all walks of life

belonged to a secret Freemasons lodge.

Government ministers quit.

The parliament outlawed P2, but even now, still debates

how enduring the influence of the lodge has been.

[music playing]

Not long after the discovery of the membership lists of P2,

Gelli's daughter arrives from South America at Rome airport.

And in the crudely created false bottom of her suitcase,

she has, among other things, blackmail materials.

A document was found, the name of which

is Piano di Rinascita Democratica,

Plan of Democratic Rebirth.

Which is a political manifesto, put simply.

This was a plan for a sort of authoritarian, conservative

turn in Italian politics.

Shutting up criminals and left wing troublemakers,

more intervention in the press, tighter

control over trade unions.

The document also had a kind of Masonic flavor to it

because he talked about a secret group

within P2, which would be kind of a rigorous moral elite

to lead society--

reform society from within, take over the Christian Democrat

party, which was to corrupt to be of use

in the anti-communist struggle.

That is what Gelli is really interested in.

And the whole plan for Democratic rebirth--

indeed the whole sort of Cold War climate

of fear of communism amplified when necessary,

allows a lot of rot under the surface.

And Gelli wants to operate in that rot.

That is his natural environment.

This is part of a creeping coup d'etat, which

went on in this country during a good part of the second part

of the last century.

We went through this coup d'etat more or less

between the 60s and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The main points of this creeping coup d'etat

are the massacre of Piazza Fontana in Milan 1969,

Brescia in 1974, all through the massacre of Bologna.

Bologna station bombing was the worst terrorist atrocity

that has been seen in Italy since the war.

At the time, it wasn't at all clear

what really was behind it.

The number of claims the responsibility for the bombing

from several groups, the most likely being the extreme right

wing, the neofascist.

There was this sense that this might

have been the last gasp of the fascists paving

the way for a military coup.

The only thing was that by 1980, that

didn't seem to be a very plausible scenario.

So it was rather mysterious.

Also, it came out that the Vatican Bank

was related with the finance affairs

of Michele Sindona, Banco Ambrosiano and Roberto Calvi.

How they were hiding money abroad,

and there was a whole file folder on Calvi.

And Calvi didn't disclose illegal behavior.

It was a story of Gelli's intercessions for him

over the years to help him, to try to stop investigations,

to get them thwarted, to get them pushed off to the side.

How he had helped Calvi and Ambrosiano to a point

where eventually, he couldn't do it any longer.

And Gelli fled down to Argentina, where he has a home.

When Gelli disappeared, Calvi was completely out

of any political connection.

Suddenly, he doesn't have the coverage and he feels naked.

And then it gets even worse for Calvi.

Milan's tough chief investigating magistrate,

armed with the new information, takes

charge of the ongoing probe into Calvi.

He was in desperate straits.

For the first time, God's banker has nowhere to turn.

The armed forces now rule in Poland with martial law

and the thread of execution for those who break it.

Crackdown was aimed at the independent Trade Union

solidarity.

By the end of '81, General Jaruszelski of Poland

did crackdown.

In Gdansk, they arrested nearly all the unions

leaders gathered there for a conference.

They cut the telephone line communications between Poland

and Vatican City.

They knew that they had to cut off that Vatican support.

The President of the United States.

The pontiff finds an enthusiastic ally

in the newly inaugurated Reagan administration.

Under Ronald Reagan--

Thank you.

--CIA was reinvigorated.

William Casey, the head of the CIA,

wants the Pope as a partner for destabilizing the communist

Government

If the CIA is involved in the plot to silence Calvi,

there's an enormous array of things

that Calvi could have spoken about that might have

been embarrassing for the CIA.

The Pope was getting American Intelligence briefings

inside the Vatican.

The CIA, sending an emissary over,

would show him photographs from satellites of what

was happening inside Poland.

John Paul II loved those.

He took real interest in it.

Any message for America?

Well, God bless America.

The head of the CIA wants to funnel money

through a willing partner, the Pope and Vatican.

And guess what.

There's only one American over there.

Casey sort of likes the idea that he's

talking to an American, somebody who

has this outgoing direct nature he

feels comfortable with Marcinkus himself.

And as a result, it gives Casey an extra level of confidence

that everything's going to go smoothly through the Vatican.

Getting money there was always risky.

Somebody like Calvi to do money laundering was always needed.

But after General Jaruzelski had cracked down, getting money

there was even riskier.

And Marcenkus got Francesco Pazienza

to go ahead and put together a shipment of gold to Poland.

According to Pazienza, a priest then

drove the vehicle loaded with millions in gold ingots

from Switzerland to solidarity representatives in Gdansk,

Poland.

[telephone ringing]

And then Calvi's worst fear comes true.

Calvi was at home with his family,

and there's a knock on the door.

And it's the police, and they arrest him

for illegal capital exports, for moving money abroad.

It was humiliating and shocking.

He was taken to prison.

Two days after Calvi's arrest, magistrates

began interrogating him.

They confronted him with a series of questions about Gelli

and his relationship with Gelli and business deals

he had been involved in.

Calvi was evasive, lying, not knowing

that his interrogators had documents to back up what

they were asking him about.

And so with each answer, they would confront him

with the document that showed that he

was lying or being evasive.

This happened again and again, and it was wearing him down.

It was clear that he was in serious trouble.

Calvi felt he was being treated like a common criminal.

It was very demoralizing to him.

That was sort of the beginning of the nosedive

because it sort of shattered his confidence.

One year before his death, Calvi's trial begins.

To Calvi, time feels merciless.

Over seven weeks, his blood pressure, anxiety

and depression increase.

The experience of prison makes him incredibly

nervous and fearful because it made

him feel extremely vulnerable.

His vertigo escalates.

So he agrees to talk to the magistrates.

He's a bit of a drama queen at this point.

He's going to paint himself as a victim, much as Sindona did.

So he goes from being one of the most important financial men

in all of Italy to now, it's all out of my control.

I'm just being used as a pawn.

And I'm not sure how much of that was real.

With the P2 out of commission, the Vatican is his last chance.

His wife, Clara and his daughter,

Anna visited Calvi in prison.

He confided in them that the share transactions that

were the basis for the criminal case against him

were actually done to benefit the Vatican Bank.

So Calvi says, really the Vatican Bank

is the one asking me to do all these things.

There's no doubt that there were people

who were petrified about what Calvi might say.

When you talk, you die.

It's one of the rules.

It's a very basic rule.

You don't talk.

It's been six long years since careful forensic re-analysis

ruled out suicide.

But in that time, Calvi's family hasn't

been able to convince a judge to reopen the case.

Until now.

An investigating judge in Rome orders Calvi's remains exhumed.

He wants to start from scratch in analyzing the death of Banco

Ambrosiano's chairman.

They brought the remains to the forensics Institute

of pathology in Milan, one of the most prestigious

medical examining institutes in all of Italy.

They come to these conclusions, but it's not

persuasive for a prosecutor to go ahead and start a case

and get anybody indicted.

It's been 20 years since Roberto Calvi's lifeless body was

found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge.

The pathology lab that tested Calvi's exhumed remains

two years earlier is relocating to a new office across town.

The movers are packing up and they find

what looks like body parts.

It turns out to be Calvi's tongue, part of his neck, part

of a shirt that had been left in as well,

and part of his intestines.

Even though it's a gruesome moment,

it gives them a chance to do another test.

They're able to determine with what's left of the neck

that the vertebrae snapped before he was

hanged from Blackfriars Bridge.

That's the moment at which you have the absolute conclusion

from science.

It's time to open up a murder probe in Italy.

[credits music]