Calvi disappears as news of the missing funds breaks. He speeds through Austria under a false name, accompanied by Silvano Vittor, the last person to see him alive. Vittor agrees to an interview, revealing Calvi’s blackmail-filled briefcase. Nicolo wonders: was Vittor a protector or a hunter?

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TRANSCRIPT

Nicolo Majnoni: Friends of the Pod subscribers can listen to the full season of Shadow Kingdom right now. Join Friends of the Pod at crooked.com/friends or on Apple podcasts.

[voice over]: Campside Media.

Nicolo Majnoni: On June 11th, 1981, Roberto Calvi disappeared.

Jessica Savitch: Thursday, June the 10th last year, Roberto Calvi vanished from his apartment in Rome. He told no one where he was going.

[news clip]: The circumstances that led to Calvi’s flight from Italy were to say the least unusual.

[news clip]: Il presidente del Banco Ambrosiano non si sa dove sia. Forse è scappato. Forse è fuggito….

[news clip]: Yet another chapter in what is shaping up to be a major banking scandal involving the Vatican.

Nicolo Majnoni: News reports said that Calvi had vanished seemingly in the middle of the night. His disappearance came just a couple of weeks before huge debt payments at the Ambrosiano were coming due. Hundreds of millions of dollars. Calvi had been frantically trying to drum up cash or buy more time from its creditors. He’d scheduled meetings with bankers and lawyers for the following week. He even made plans with his driver to commute to work as usual the following day. But instead… The driver found a vague note from Calvi saying that he was tired, he wasn’t feeling well, and that he was going to go away. The driver found the note so suspicious, so unlike Calvi, that he almost immediately alerted the authorities. God’s banker was officially a missing person, but there was no announcement from kidnappers, no demand for a ransom and none of Calvi’s employees knew what to do. Up until this point, only Calvi knew the full extent of the Banco Ambrosiano’s debts. Only he knew the tangled web of shell companies and offshore accounts set up to move that borrowed money around the world.

[news clip]: The Bank of Italy was demanding explanations for more than a billion dollars worth of loans. Behind the facade of respectability, Calvi had become entangled in a web of evil and corruption.

Nicolo Majnoni: Now that Calvi was missing and his massive debts were coming due, his employees struggled to run the bank without him, to untangle the mess he’d left behind. And because of the size of the Ambrosiano, Italian regulators were watching as well. The Ambrosiano was Italy’s biggest private bank. It had money tied to businesses around Italy and the world. If Calvi’s bank failed, it could rock international stock markets.

[news clip]: That’s why when a bank like Banco Ambrosiano gets into trouble, the ripples can wash around the world, sometimes with devastating effect.

Nicolo Majnoni: But the headline that seemed to dominate, beyond the bigger financial questions about the bank, what everybody wanted to know was, what the hell happened to Roberto Calvi? Was he kidnapped? Was he on the run? Had he been killed? I was pretty sure Calvi decided to escape rather than being abducted. And I know he’d be dead a week later. What I didn’t know is what happened in between. In other words, God’s banker’s final days. The answer was like a black box, hiding footage that could explain how and why it all came crashing down. Up until writing this episode, I thought I’d have to piece together that black box from news articles and history books. But then, I heard back from the last known person to see Calvi alive. [music plays] From Crooked Media and Campside Media, this is Shadow Kingdom: God’s Banker. I’m Nicolo Majnoni. And this is Episode 6: On the Run.

Clara Calvi: Nobody should be using the words on the run, nobody ran away.

Silvano Vittor: You need to leave with Calvi, right now!

Nicolo Majnoni: Okay, in my hotel room, about to go see Vittor. Actually, Vittor’s lawyer. And we’re gonna sit on the side of the street because Vittor is not telling us where he lives, which is bad for the blood pressure of those who love you. Okay. Let’s see what happens. It’s fall 2023, and I’m waiting to meet Silvano Vittor, a former contrabandiere, or contraband smuggler, who is also the last man we know of to see Calvi alive, the man responsible for watching over Calvi in his final days. Vittor hasn’t sat down for a recorded interview in 40 years, and even then, the questions he answered were mostly bureaucratic. I was desperate to speak to him. To ask him why did Calvi flee? What or who was he running from? If there was anyone Calvi had confided in during his final days, I suspected it might be Vittor. And so I spent months and months trying to wrangle Vittor. First he was down to talk, then he wasn’t. Then he wanted his lawyer to join, but I’d have to pay the lawyer. Then I thought he’d ghosted me finally he was in. So now I’ve traveled all the way to Trieste, a town on the northernmost border of Italy, and almost on cue, Vittor’s lawyer showed up first, outside of my hotel. [clip of Italian speaking] Fun fact, lawyers in Italy are actually called avvocato, which sounds like what guacamole is made from. So when two Italian lawyers greet each other, it sounds like we’re saying, hello, avocado. And as us two Italian avocados were going back and forth, a fit 70-something with cool, slicked back hair walked out of my hotel. At that moment, I realized I’d actually seen him. He’d been sitting in the hotel lobby all along, surveying the scene. Just like I’d never met a mafioso or a spy until working on this story, I’d never met a smuggler either, and I wasn’t sure what to expect.

Silvano Vittor: Assistito già altre volte qua a Trieste tanti anni fa, quando eri giovane…

Nicolo Majnoni: What immediately struck me about Vittor was how normal, nondescript he was. He has a fairly pronounced northern Italian accent, sort of like a Midwestern accent in the United States. He’d easily blend into a crowd, which I imagine was helpful in his former line of work. So the smuggler, the lawyer and I settled into a room on the ground floor of the hotel. And Vittor began to tell me about his work before Calvi.  E`quindi il commercio con lo Yugoslava di vestiti, alimenti…

Silvano Vittor: Mangiare cose e la maggior parte anche alimenti, ma la maggior parte vestiario, vestiario…

Nicolo Majnoni: Vittor didn’t go too in-depth, but he did say he smuggled food and clothes across the Iron Curtain. It’s easy to forget, but Italy was on the very border of the Cold War. And Trieste, where Vittor lived, was very close to the border with Soviet bloc countries, like Yugoslavia, great for smuggling goods or people. See, when Calvi was convicted of illegal currency exportation, he’d had to surrender his passport. The Italian government wouldn’t allow him to leave the country. But that’s exactly what he wanted to do, because if he stayed, he could be sent back to jail. So he reached out to his new fixer, Flavio Carboni, to see if he could help. And Carboni reached out to Vittor.

Silvano Vittor: E mi ha detto praticamente se sarei disposto—He asked me if I could make my boat available and if I could travel. I said sure and we decided to make arrangement the next day.

Nicolo Majnoni: I interviewed Vittor in Italian, so I’ve enlisted an actor to read his responses in English. So, Carboni and Vittor were dating sisters. They’d been friends for years, and so Carboni knew all about Vittor’s work as a smuggler. It wasn’t a huge surprise then that Carboni called Vittor and said he needed help smuggling a person. The next day, Vittor pulled up to a fancy hotel and saw an old Alfa Romeo driven by Carboni’s assistant. As Vittor moved to open the passenger door and look down, eyes squinting, he saw the silhouette of Roberto Calvi. Bald head, dark suit, clutching a briefcase.

Silvano Vittor: I took Calvi’s bag out of respect. I saw this heavy bag and I said, wait, I can help. I was 40 or less than 40 years old. I thought I’d help him. I said poor guy, he was 60, 62. So I took this bag and brought it in.

Nicolo Majnoni: I thought that was strange. A 40 year old insisting he help a 60 year old with carrying a briefcase. Calvi wasn’t an athlete, but he wasn’t like 90 years old. Anyway, the directions that Vittor had from Carboni were to smuggle Calvi over the border.

Silvano Vittor: So I made some phone calls to some people I knew and they told me that after midnight or around midnight there’d be no controls and I could safely cross the border.

Nicolo Majnoni: So, Vittor took Calvi to his house that afternoon, and the two settled into Vittor’s living room, waiting for midnight.

Silvano Vittor: We were sitting at the table and he made me turn on the television. And when we turned it on, they were broadcasting the news of him missing.

[news clip]: Presidente del Banco Ambrosiano, non si sa dove sia. Forse è scappato. Forse è fuggito. Di lui non si hanno notizie da due giorni.

Nicolo Majnoni: Time must have stood still for Calvi, as he watched the biggest evening news in Italy, plastering his face on the screen, saying he was on the run. Vittor said he freaked out.

Silvano Vittor: At this point he started to panic so I told him look why don’t you wait an extra day at my house I’ll arrange for a safer trip tomorrow but he wanted to leave as soon as possible.

Nicolo Majnoni: So he’s watching the news and he’s, he’s getting upset.

Silvano Vittor: Oh yeah. He changed it. He turned pale.

Nicolo Majnoni: And did he take his suit or his jacket off at all?

Silvano Vittor: It was actually a really hard day, it was boiling. So I think at one point he was down to his underwear.

Nicolo Majnoni: Vittor painted this vivid image for me. A half-naked Roberto Calvi, drenched in sweat, a week from death, watching his own face plastered on TV. He was running from something, but I still didn’t quite understand what. And then, unexpectedly, Vittor said something that put me on alert. He told Calvi, okay, you wanna leave right away, fine, but don’t take your briefcase.

Silvano Vittor: I told him, look, if you get caught at the border, the first thing they’ll say is, show us your briefcase. And I don’t know what you have in there, but you are running and realize that they take it from you. And so I told him, leave it with me and I can drop you off and bring it with me the following day.

Nicolo Majnoni: Vittor thought it’d be less risky if he helped Calvi sneak across the border without the briefcase. Once over the border, Calvi would sit tight in Austria. Then Vittor would go back to Italy, get the briefcase and drive across the border legally to meet Calvi. Vittor said Calvi initially freaked out and said, no way. But eventually somehow a panicked Calvi agreed, Vittor explained

Silvano Vittor: I told him, don’t worry, I’ll make sure to bring you your bag. And he said, yes. He also say he’s spoken to Carboni and who told him I was a person he could trust. So he gave it to me. And actually he even gave me the combination to the lock. It’s a combination I remember to this day. I remember it my whole life.

Nicolo Majnoni: Why or how?

Silvano Vittor: Because it was an easy combination.

Nicolo Majnoni: Can you share it?

Silvano Vittor: I never have.

Nicolo Majnoni: This just sounds off to me. Calvi, the king of paranoia, not only willingly parted with this precious briefcase, but also offered up the combination. I found myself wondering, were Vittor and Carboni genuinely helping Calvi, or did they have an alternative motive in these final, crucial days? But I decided not to press Vittor just yet. He was starting to get comfortable with me and was finally getting to the part of the story I’d come for. So Vittor’s plan continued. After midnight, the smuggler and the banker, now a bizarre buddy duo, stepped into Vittor’s boat under cover of darkness and slipped over the border out of Italy.

Silvano Vittor: The sea was beautiful it was a flat and calm beautiful sea but Calvi would ask me hey what are those lights there who are those guys i tell him those are fishing boats or he want to know what about the light moving towards us? I say those are fishing boats making their way around the gulf because there were quite a few boats around. Pretty much for the entire journey he kept asking me information, it was like an interrogation. He was just really worried and concerned.

Nicolo Majnoni: So he was afraid?

Silvano Vittor: Yeah, he thought he saw patrol boats and was afraid.

Nicolo Majnoni: Vittor reassured Calvi all throughout their boat ride to Yugoslavia. And from Yugoslavia, Vittor put Calvi in a car to Austria and set him up to stay in a chateau owned by his girlfriend’s family. [music plays]

Silvano Vittor: Calvi was really agitated he was agitated because the arrival of his briefcase has been delayed I was getting phone calls constantly saying I can’t stand this anymore.

Nicolo Majnoni: Vittor was supposed to zip back to Italy and return promptly with the briefcase. But weirdly, he stopped for a family get-together on his way back. When Vittor finally arrived in Austria, he was immediately greeted by Calvi.

Silvano Vittor: When he heard me coming with the car he stormed out. I was just getting out of the car with the briefcase in my hand and he was right there anxious waiting for his damn briefcase.

Nicolo Majnoni: With his precious briefcase in hand, relief washed over Calvi. He finally relaxed on an easy chair, talking to Vittor’s girlfriend about his family, his adolescence, his war stories. So talking with Vittor at this point, my ears perked up. Once Calvi had his briefcase and was out of the country, he was more confident, more relaxed. It makes me think that Calvi had a plan. Right, and that plan was going somewhat well? And maybe there was something in that briefcase that gave him power. Calvi called his wife from the chateau and reassured her that everything was okay. She recalled this in an Italian interview.

Clara Calvi: Roberto si arrabbiò a sua volta, mi rispose. non si deve mai dire quella parola E non voleva nemmeno dirla. La parola scappare non la voleva—And throughout the night he kept calling me, saying, nobody should be using the words on the run, nobody ran away. I didn’t run away, I need to do a job. He was going to recover the debt. He was doing really important negotiations. He was negotiating to resolve the Vatican debt problem.

Nicolo Majnoni: He said that the Vatican was going to give him protection, which is going to solve all his problems. He just needed time to negotiate outside of Italy. He wouldn’t say why exactly those negotiations needed to be outside of the country or what exactly he was afraid of. But right here in the Chateau, Calvi seemed confident that he could solve his looming debt crisis. After some time relaxing, Vittor watched Roberto Calvi get up and prepare some kindling.

Silvano Vittor: I remember the fireplace and how it was glowing. He was burning some of the paper that he had picked out from the briefcase.

Nicolo Majnoni: I asked Vittor what was Calvi burning, but he couldn’t see. He just said that Calvi burned a lot of papers. It seems odd to me that Calvi would bring documents with him from Italy, carefully guard them, obsess about them when they weren’t with him, and then burn some of these documents once he had them back in his possession. Maybe he decided it was too risky to carry them around or maybe he’d planned to use them and then changed his mind. I’ve often thought that if I could just see inside Calvi’s briefcase, I could finally find Calvi’s killer. But it’s like all these years have rusted the lock, and it won’t budge. There’s one person I know who held Calvi’s briefcase, and who knew his final itinerary, Silvano Vittor. And Vittor was getting closer and closer to London. to Calvi’s final day. Calvi and Vittor had been on the run for three days. They were just starting to get comfortable in their borrowed Austrian villa when late one night, Carboni the Fixer came to Vittor.

Silvano Vittor: He tells me, you need to leave with Calvi, right now. And it’s 11 o ‘clock at night or midnight. I don’t remember exactly, but it was late. He says, yeah, it’s all organized. It’s all set. And I say, where are we going? And he says, toward Switzerland. And so, we take off.

Nicolo Majnoni: Why Switzerland? I don’t know. There wasn’t any time for Vittor to ask questions. He just threw a change of clothes in the back of the car, got Calvi’s bags, put the banker in the passenger seat, and they headed to Switzerland. Sleep deprived and, I imagine, a bit confused.

Silvano Vittor: And the whole time, I was the one at the wheel. He never drove. So, we took.

Nicolo Majnoni: So, what would he tell you or what would you chat about?

Silvano Vittor: He would tell me about his family, about his daughter, most of all. He’d tell me about his time in the military, that he’d frozen his hand. He’d show me three of his fingers that were frozen. He’d also tell me, hey, Silvano, let’s chat. I don’t want you to fall asleep at the wheel.

Nicolo Majnoni: And so at this point, does it almost feel like there’s sort of a friendship growing here?

Silvano Vittor: Yes. I think so. The more time went on, the more you became attached because it was just the two of us. We were together all the time and he opened up a little bit. But he was also worried, I could feel it. There was nobody else around me. He needed someone because, you know, he was fugitive.

Nicolo Majnoni: Again, I was torn here between taking Vittor at his word that he and Calvi really were forming some kind of bond, and this other, alternate narrative, where Calvi was forcefully separated from his briefcase and sent to Switzerland without much of an explanation. He was, in this narrative, out of control, dependent, and at the whims of his handlers, It felt like a Hitchcock movie, where nothing overtly scary is happening. but somehow you’re on edge. Then, right as the duo started to approach the border with Switzerland—

Silvano Vittor: Carboni advised against going to Switzerland.

Nicolo Majnoni: Why is that?

Silvano Vittor: No one ever knew why.

Nicolo Majnoni: Carboni sent word to Calvi and Vittor that the border crossing was now too dangerous and that a plane was waiting for Calvi just a few miles down the road, headed to London. Now, I didn’t know about this last minute switch until speaking with Vittor, and I was feeling spooked here. Like something was off, and then Vittor said something that stayed with me.

Silvano Vittor: Calvi had to accept this. He was on the run. He was nervous and panicking and he had no other solution. So he had to accept going to London.

Nicolo Majnoni: So you’re saying at this point Calvi is almost resigned?

Silvano Vittor: Resigned, yes. Because they basically imposed this departure and arrival and the accommodation.

Nicolo Majnoni: Vittor made a hopeless face. I can still see it. Up to this point, Vittor described a somewhat resilient Calvi, fighting to get his briefcase back, chatty with Vittor as they drove into Austria, the Calvi I’d known for these two years of research, the uber planner, control freak, master of his destiny. But hearing the word resigned, I saw that Calvi disappear, turning into something different. I could see Calvi surrendering, being ushered off to the place where he’d die within days. Did he suspect that maybe Vittor and or Carboni weren’t his saviors? That maybe they were the wolves guiding him to a more sinister place? I mean, to recap, in less than a week, Roberto Calvi had secretly flown to Trieste in the far northeast of Italy. From there… he took a speedboat across the Adriatic to sneak into Yugoslavia. From Yugoslavia, he drove to southeast Austria, taking a rest at a beautiful chateau. Then, he took a road trip across Austria with his new best bud, Silvano Vittor, right up to the border with Switzerland, where at the last moment he was told by men whose motives I’m still not sure of, to charter a private jet to London.

Silvano Vittor: So we arrive at London Gatwick and we land off to the side where the private jets land. No commercial flight, no passport through a back door.

Nicolo Majnoni: Vittor kept taking me through the details of their trip, and he explained that Carboni had booked a suite at a cheap hotel in a bad part of Chelsea. Vittor called it a zero-star hotel.

Silvano Vittor: Calvi went totally mad here. As soon as we got in, he ran to the phone and started complaining. I can’t stay here. He was saying he had to meet real important people and the president of the bank couldn’t host people in such an environment.

Nicolo Majnoni: So, that’s interesting. Roberto Calvi resigned to his handlers, but still seriously trying to make a deal in London. He called his family and told them not to worry anymore. Calvi’s son, Carlo, said in testimony after his dad’s death that he’d claimed to be working on something big that would have taken care of all of his problems. Calvi told his wife Clara something similar.

Clara Calvi: The last call we had together, he said, this job is going with some troubles, but it’s gonna blow up as a crazy, crazy thing.

Nicolo Majnoni: A big deal that would blow up into a wonderful thing that could change their lives. But what were the details of that deal? He didn’t tell Clara, Carlo, or anyone else. Even though Calvi was in deal-making mode, he barely left the hotel. He was haunted by this fear of being recognized by someone on the streets in London. And so, Vittor was the one that brought back most of their meals. Vittor was the one that checked airline schedules in case they needed to move again. Vittor was Calvi’s main human contact. And in the midst of that strange arrangement, I just kept waiting for something awful to happen, like a big plot twist. But Calvi’s last days, even with him acting like there was one more deal out there, one key phone call to make, they seemed kind of procedural. At night, Vittor says, he and Calvi would sit together in their PJs and just chat, bonding like a long-term, bizarro sleepover, acting almost like the entire world wasn’t looking for them. And then, on June 17th, a day before Calvi died, Vittor says they receive news that Calvi’s secretary had jumped out of a window at the Banco Ambrosiano to her death.

Silvano Vittor: It was unbelievable, unbelievable. This was a blow to him. He basically dropped to the floor.

Nicolo Majnoni: That’s next time on the Shadow Kingdom.

[news clip]: He’d learned on the telephone that his powers with the Banco Ambrosiano had been removed.

Silvano Vittor: He opened the door, we got in, and there was no Calvi, just a suitcase.

[news clip]: Perhaps the key to Calvi’s death is to be found here on the River Thames.

Nicolo Majnoni: Shadow Kingdom is a production of Crooked Media and Campside Media. It’s hosted and reported by me, Nicolo Majnoni, with additional reporting by Simona Zecchi and Joe Hawthorne. The show is written by  Joe Hawthorne, Ashleyanne Krigbaum and me. Joe Hawthorne is our lead producer, and Ashleyanne Krigbaum is our managing producer. Tracey Samuelson is our story editor. Sound design, mix, and mastering by Mark McAdam. Our theme song and original score are composed by me and Mark McAdam. Our studio engineer is Yi-Wen Lai-Tremewan. Voice acting by Boni Biagini, Andrea Bianchi, Ferrante Cosma, Luca DeGennaro, Michele Teodori, and Mustafa Ziyalan. Field recording by Justin Trieger, Jonathan Zenti, Pete Shev, Jonathan Groubert and Joanna Broder. Fact checking by Zoe Sullivan. Our executive producers are me, Nicolo Majnoni. Along with Sarah Geismer, Katie Long and Alison Falzetta from Crooked Media. Dean, Adam Hoff, Matt Shaer and Vanessa Grigoriadis are the executive producers at Campside Media. [music plays] One last thing before we go. You can also listen to Shadow Kingdom in Italian. Look up Il Banchiere di Dio. The show is the same in one way, but it’s full of original reporting in Italian with unabridged versions of interviews with Italian guests. We’re really excited to tell the story in its native tongue. So please go check out Il Banchiere di Dio wherever you get your podcasts.