Calvi is found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London. The British police call it suicide, but Nicolo finds Antonio Cornacchia, an Italian officer who insists it’s murder. Years later, new forensic evidence reopens the case, leading to a trial with Silvano Vittor among the accused.

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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: The last day of Roberto Calvi’s life started with a shave. For the majority of his 63 years, he’d sported an ever-present dark mustache. Pretty much every picture you’ll ever find of Calvi, there’s a mustache. But on the morning of June 17th, 1982, Silvano Vittor found Calvi in their shared hotel bathroom with the door open.

Silvano Vittor: He says I’m shaving my mustache, this way I’m less recognizable.

Nicolo Majnoni: Vittor is the former smuggler we heard from in the last episode, who told me about helping Calvi flee Italy and watching over him in his final days.

Silvano Vittor: And I remember him saying, in my entire life, this is the first time I ever shaved my mustache.

Nicolo Majnoni: And so what do you think? What do you feel in that moment?

Silvano Vittor: That he just was so scared of being seen and he would do anything to hide his appearance.

Nicolo Majnoni: Calvi spent the rest of his morning in the cramped Chelsea hotel, which was more like a hostel. His room was just 10 feet by 16 feet with one small window. Early in the day, Calvi handed Vittor cash to run some errands. And when Vittor returned, he used a special knock he had to identify himself. And Calvi let him in for lunch. At the very same time, back in Milan, The Ambrosianos board members gathered at the bank. With Calvi on the run, they voted him out. He was no longer in control of the bank he’d led for seven years. And that soon became global news.

[news clip]: [In Italian] Rumors about the disappearance of Roberto Calvi, the president of the Ambrosiano Bank…

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

Nicolo Majnoni: Any hope that Calvi may have had to go back to the Banco Ambrosiano was now extinguished. In then more bad news, Calvi received word that his secretary had died by suicide.

Silvano Vittor: There he lost it completely with the news about his secretary. He said something happened to me that I never thought my secretary… He was just 100% depressed.

Nicolo Majnoni: The secretary had drafted a suicide note, saying, quote, “having been exhausted for a long time, I wholeheartedly apologize to everyone for the trauma I have caused, and ask for forgiveness from my superiors and all those who love me at Banco Ambrosiano.” But she also added a pointed message to Calvi. May you be twice damned for what you’ve done. Calvi was so down that when his fixer, Flavio Carboni, arrived at the hotel, he refused to go down to the lobby to meet him. Calvi simply couldn’t or wouldn’t budge. Carboni had arranged this whole trip, the whole escape from Italy, but then strangely, the fixer also refused to come up to see Calvi. So the two men were locked in this bizarre standoff that evening. With Vittor shuttling back and forth between them, it’d almost be funny if it didn’t feel so, I don’t know, sad? Maybe a little ominous? Calvi, a nervous wreck, and Carboni so close but refusing to go to him. Did Carboni not want to face Calvi for some reason?

Silvano Vittor: I told Flavio, Flavio, aren’t you coming? And he said, no, I’m not coming. I just don’t want to meet Calvi. It seems to me like he just really didn’t want to meet him.

Nicolo Majnoni: Instead, Carboni and Vittor went to a nearby pub to meet their girlfriends who traveled with them from Austria. They left Calvi in the hotel to fend for himself. The whole thing struck me as utterly bizarre that Carboni and Vittor would go and chivalrously tend to their girlfriends while their protectee, God’s banker, the most wanted man in Europe, freaked out in his hostel alone. Were they taking an innocent, if badly timed, break here, or was there a more sinister design at play? I’m not sure. In any event, the two men were gone a few hours. Vittor told me he went back to the Chelsea Hotel a bit after midnight.

Silvano Vittor: I take the elevator and I go up. I walk to the door and I got for a usual signal, two knocks, boom, boom, one knocks, boom. With the pause between and nothing, no answer. I try to do it again, so I knock, I knock again, nothing. And I don’t have the key because when I left, I left them inside because I knew he’d be there. Sure. I go down to the lobby and I speak to some guy and he comes with me upstairs, all the way up into the room with a spare set of keys. He opened the door, we got in and there was no Calvi, just a suitcase. At the moment I think he’s probably coming to look for me, so I immediately also go down and go looking for Calvi in the vicinity. I went back down to the lobby where there was a restaurant. I looked everywhere. He wasn’t there. I went back into the room.

Nicolo Majnoni: And so what are you thinking at this point?

Silvano Vittor: As the hours went on, one became two, three. I was thinking about everything. Maybe he left to speak with someone, or maybe he’s coming back in 30 minutes, or maybe in an hour. Basically, I don’t know. Maybe he went with somebody, but he’d be back later. But I said the part that I didn’t know anymore, and I had no answer until the morning.

Nicolo Majnoni: Calvi was gone. And I know that this time he was gone for good. But what I don’t know is what happened to him in those last few hours. The last time Silvano Vittor remembered seeing Calvi was around 8 p.m. on June 17th. Eventually, Vittor told me that he went to bed in the hotel suite alone, waiting, hoping that Roberto Calvi would magically reappear. But when Calvi hadn’t returned by the morning of June 18th, Vittor did something else that seemed strange to me. Vittor told me he had no idea what was going on. All he knew was that Calvi’s disappearance was incredibly suspicious, and he didn’t wanna just be sitting around when shit hit the fan.

Silvano Vittor: I mean at the moment I just didn’t know anything so at 11 I just decided look I’m not hearing anything there is no Calvi there is no Carboni so anyway I decided I don’t know maybe I did a bad thing but I decided to go back to Austria.

Nicolo Majnoni: And while Vittor was boarding a plane, Calvi was eventually found. [music plays] From Crooked Media and Campside Media, this is Shadow Kingdom, God’s Banker. I’m Nicolo Manjoni, and this is  Episode 7: Discovery.

Angela Gallop: That would have been a really frightening place. Dark, wet. Dangerous.

[news clip]: Whether it was murder or suicide. No one knows

Nicolo Majnoni: At 7:30 a .m. on June 18th, 1982, a postal clerk was walking along Blackfriar’s Bridge in London. Something caught his eye. He saw a head and then a body dangling underneath the bridge. He rushed to his office to share what he found. The police arrived on the scene by car and by boat. There they found a middle-aged John Doe in a gray suit hanging from a rope around his neck. He was dangling off of temporary construction scaffolding under one of the bridge’s arches. His ankles were just covered by the river. The turbulent water made reaching the body by boat difficult. And it would take police 11 hours to figure out that their John Doe was the world’s most famous fugitive banker.

[news clip]: 62-year-old senior Calvi was found dangling from an orange rope here, but perhaps the key to Calvi’s death is to be found here on the River Thames.

[news clip]: Siamo di fronte ad un giallo veramente degno di un film di—

[news clip]: Whether it was murder or suicide, no one knows.

Nicolo Majnoni: His suit was packed with 12 pounds of bricks, four pairs of glasses, a fake passport, and two wallets filled with thousands in various currencies. But his briefcase? Nowhere to be found. Now, London police weren’t sure there was much cause for concern. This was no robbery. He had all of his valuables. It seemed like a suicide. England’s ITV newscaster recounted a pathologist’s testimony.

[news clip]: In my opinion, there was no suggestion of foul play, no fracas, no struggle. Had there been, I would have expected to have found some marks of resistance. There were none.

Nicolo Majnoni: This was a pretty reasonable analysis. Suicide attempts were very common on the Thames. Plus, Calvi had already attempted suicide just a year before. Add to that, he’d just been fired and his beloved bank was on the brink of collapse. The Ambrosiano stock price was plummeting and with it, his fortune. When my friend Mario, from episode one, sent me on a journey to find out what happened to Calvi, he thought the more likely explanation was murder. And that’s the way I’ve come at this whole investigation. Calvi worked with so many powerful, so many shadowy figures, P2 and its grand master, Licio Gelli, the mafia, even the pope. And now he was worthless to all of them. Worse than worthless, he was a liability. A man desperate to stay out of jail, a man seemingly willing to use the secrets he kept to save himself. But on the other hand, my conversation with Vittor, reading transcripts from Calvi’s wife, his kids, his coworkers, and reporters from around the world, it all painted a clear picture of Calvi in this moment, depressed, afraid, and alone. It’s been my mission to figure out who killed Calvi. But was it really Roberto Calvi himself all along? This is a question that Calvi’s family, law enforcement, and private investigators have debated for decades. The first people to investigate Calvi’s death were police in the city of London right after he died in 1982. From the beginning, it was clear that Roberto Calvi’s cause of death was asphyxiation. There were no signs of physical struggle and no known poisons in Calvi’s body. So, London police were quick to suspect suicide. But. Once word got back to Italy that Calvi was dead, Italian law enforcement immediately suspected foul play. They knew all about Calvi, his P2 involvement, and his suspected mafia ties. I flew to Rome to meet with Antonio Cornacchia, an Italian counter-intelligence officer who investigated Calvi’s death. He told me that Calvi had been on his radar even before his body was found.

General Cornacchia: Allora io stavo al controspionaggio. I was at counter-espionage when the whole Calvi affair broke out. And a colleague of mine grabbed me and said, have you heard what’s happening? Have you heard about Roberto Calvi? My boss then said, would you be willing to take a walk? Meaning, take a look at this.

Nicolo Majnoni: I spoke to Cornacchia in Italian, so we asked an actor to record his responses in English. When Cornacchia’s boss asked him to look into Calvi’s death, he quickly booked a flight to London. The way he talked about the whole investigation was really vivid. I could viscerally see and feel the Italian legal system, which I know well, clashing with the British legal system.

General Cornacchia: Okay, so I go to London, and the first thing we have to deal with is the police. And this is the police that operates on the right side of the River Thames. This is not real police.

Nicolo Majnoni: Not the real police. Cornacchia’s voice was full of this casual disdain here. He said the police he had to work with were from the city of London, which is confusingly a distinct municipality within Greater London. It’s like if Wall Street was a separate little city inside New York with its own tiny police force, a police force a lot less equipped than Scotland Yard. Quick example of the rookiness of their investigation. The City of London police untied the knot on the rope Calvi had around his neck, instead of cutting the rope and preserving how the knot was tied. Apparently that’s like policing 101. You don’t untie the knot because the kind of knot and how it was tied can tell you a lot about the person who tied it. So when Cornacchia got to London, it was immediately clear to him that this, this is not the A-Team, shall we say. But he held back his contempt and he started filling the British cops in on everything he knew about Calvi, his associates, how Calvi was a member of the secret society P2, how he was a fugitive. Italian intelligence officers had been trying to piece together the timeline of Calvi on the run.

General Cornacchia: We know that while on the move, he’s in contact with this character, a fixer. His name is Carboni. This guy Carboni made him take a plane in Trieste or somewhere around there. Then we know that Calvi went to Vienna with two possible people. We know some of them to be women who may be friends of Carboni. So I just left them everything. Names, last names. And then I said, look, the boss is Gelli. Gelli is the boss. You want to know what happened to Roberto Calvi? Look at Gelli!

Nicolo Majnoni: Cornacchia said the local cops just stared at him. Blankly.

General Cornacchia: So I told my colleague, hey, tell them I’m not crazy, OK? And I remember everybody started laughing. The British, they just, they didn’t believe me.

Nicolo Majnoni: The City of London Police continued to investigate Calvi’s death. A month later, they held a coroner’s inquest, where a coroner presents the evidence to a jury and they decide if a crime has been committed. In this case, did Calvi die by suicide or was it murder? But before Cornacchia could do anything else…

[news clip]: The Calvary inquest ruled that Signor Calvary hanged himself beneath Blackfriars Bridge.

Nicolo Majnoni: The jury ruled that Calvi’s death was a suicide.

[news clip]: Professor Simpson, who carried out a post-mortem examination on Signor Calve, said he found no marks of violence on the body to suggest the Italian banker had been manhandled, lifted or held in any way.

Nicolo Majnoni: So the English legal system had spoken. Case closed. It was a suicide. Calvi was a desperate man and he found some rope hanging along a dock in the Thames. Police sent Cornacchia and his colleagues back home. And that’s where the case seemed to end. With Calvi’s Ambrosiano taken over by the Bank of Italy and his family left to fend for themselves. Until a few months later. when there was breaking news.

[news clip]: There was a surprise development today in the case of the death of fugitive Italian banker Roberto Calvi. Today, Britain’s highest court rejected the earlier suicide verdict and ordered a new hearing into Calvi’s death.

Nicolo Majnoni: There was new evidence that would tell a very different story. That’s after the break.

[news clip]: And here in London today the high court has reopened the case of a dead man known to some as God’s banker. The court overturned a suicide verdict on last summer’s death of the fugitive Italian banker Roberto Calvi—

Nicolo Majnoni: After the initial suicide verdict, Calvi’s family fought tooth and nail to appeal. They noted all the inconsistencies, the sloppy police work, the dirt on Calvi’s clothes, the list of possible suspects, and around the first anniversary of Calvi’s death, they got a redo.

[news clip]: On the first day of the new inquest, the jury of six men and three women were brought here to Blackfriars Bridge, where Signor Calvi’s body was found hanging almost a year ago.

Nicolo Majnoni: This time, the court returned what’s called an open verdict, which meant that the jury wasn’t sure if it was murder or suicide. So they were keeping the case open if more evidence came through. I am here at Blackfriars Bridge. Looking over the side of the bridge as I was starting to wrap up my reporting for the show. I went to London I wanted to see the bridge for myself I think it’s I think it’s helpful to see this place with all the uncertainty about Calvi’s death I thought visiting the bridge might help me understand the mechanics and forensics of how Calvi died. The current seems very fast. I’m looking at objects move in the Thames, which is dirty as hell just gloomy and spooky and it’s you know there’s basically essentially a highway that runs along the side of this. What a lonely place to for this guy’s demise. Standing alongside the bridge, I could see that it has five enormous arches that sit on top of these five massive granite piers. Calvi was found hanging from temporary scaffolding that rose up out of the water under one of the bridge’s arches. As I walked over the bridge, I tried to imagine how Calvi got to the place where he died. A lot of people have tried to figure this out. It wouldn’t have been easy to get to, whether he was murdered or died by suicide.

Angela Gallop: It was quite a tough environment, and when I was there at night, I thought it was a frightening place.

Nicolo Majnoni: This is Angela Gallop, a forensic scientist and a person who altered the course of the Calvi mystery. Over the course of a decade, the Calvi family tried everything they could to solve the banker’s death. They appealed to British authorities, Italian authorities, criminal court, civil court. And in the early 90s, the family decided to do their own investigation. The Calvis assembled a team of the best private investigators money could buy, including Gallop. Full disclosure, we compensated Gallop for her time preparing for this interview, because her research was so important to this case.

Angela Gallop: So, I remember saying, yes, absolutely, we’ll have a look at it, and then I remember very shortly afterwards, when I started to have a look through some of the papers, I thought, well, you know, there’s hardly anything to look at. All there is is the suit that Roberto Calvi was wearing, and there was his shoes, and there was the rope that was taken from around his neck, and that was pretty much it. And I thought, this is a huge question, was he… Was he murdered or did he commit suicide? And I only have this stuff. [music plays]

Nicolo Majnoni: Gallop had been working on cold cases for years. But she says this case was especially tricky because the initial investigators didn’t treat Calvi’s death like a crime. So they missed a lot of evidence.

Angela Gallop: And so, you know, there were so many disadvantages [laughs] to this case that I do remember wondering to myself what I’d taken on.

Nicolo Majnoni: Gallop, like me, knew that she needed to revisit the scene of Calvi’s death. So on a cool June night in the early 90s, she made her way onto a boat in the River Thames.

Angela Gallop: There’s quite a lot to manage in this atmosphere of water moving up and down, vast volumes of water, a strong current underneath you. It’s quite a lot to think about. That would have been a really frightening place. Dark, wet, noisy. Dangerous, obviously dangerous.

Nicolo Majnoni: Once she was at the bridge, Gallop figured that there were only four ways Calvi could have died.

Angela Gallop: Four main routes by which Calvi could have got to the scaffolding. Well, two suicide routes, two murder routes I should say.

Nicolo Majnoni: Calvi died hanging from temporary construction scaffolding that was set up directly under the bridge’s first arch, closest to the riverbank.

Angela Gallop: He walked along the embankment, walked under Blackfriars.

Nicolo Majnoni: Gallop gave me a very detailed walkthrough, but basically, if Calvi had died by suicide, he had two options. If he started on top of the bridge, he could have climbed over the edge, made his way down a rickety ladder, then jumped onto the scaffolding under the archway. Or he could have started under the bridge by swimming across the river and climbing up out of the water onto the scaffolding. Two options for suicide. Now, if Calvi had been murdered, the routes would actually be very similar.

Angela Gallop: One of the murder routes was someone else to help him, goodness knows.

Nicolo Majnoni: Someone would either have to carry Calvi down the same riggedy ladder and balance him on the temporary scaffolding, or the killers would have brought Calvi to the scaffolding via the water. This probably meant by boat. They would have lifted Calvi off the boat and hung him on the scaffolding. So, all in all, four ways Calvi could have died. Two ways from the top of the bridge, two ways from the water. Put that way, it almost seems simple.

Angela Gallop: We can say some things, some routes, are so deeply unlikely, and actually there’s absolutely no evidence of the type that you would expect that we can basically rule them out.

Nicolo Majnoni: It was quickly clear to Gallop that Calvi didn’t swim to the bridge himself because his suit didn’t have evidence of being soaked. So that’s one theory down, three to go. What about the idea that a distraught Calvi climbed down the ladder himself onto the scaffolding? For this, Gallop had a man about Calvi’s size retrace his steps.

Angela Gallop: This particular chap that I got to climb down the ladder did happen to be my husband. He was a forensic scientist too. I remember he complained bitterly and he claimed to have vertigo because I think it was quite tricky. You know, these very thin little metal bars on a very sort of tight frame. You know, it was near vertical and the rungs were very narrow and just tricky to climb down that, really tricky.

Nicolo Majnoni: Calvi had poor eyesight and vertigo. So as Gallop watched her husband struggle to climb down the bridge, she found it hard to imagine Calvi doing the same. To further test this route, Gallop actually built a replica scaffolding and had volunteers wear the same clothes, the same shoes, even put the same heavy bricks in their pockets. The results continued to get weirder. For example, Gallop’s actors got bruises and scratches, none of which seemed to match Calvi’s. But what really stood out to her was the footwear.

Angela Gallop: Looking at the shoes made us think, well, what would you expect if he had, for example, on the suicide routes, walked along the scaffolding poles? What could we expect to find?

Nicolo Majnoni: In the replica scaffolding she built, Gallop had been careful to match the exact type of metal and the same type of paint as the scaffolding where Calvi had been found. Now she had her volunteers walk up and down the scaffolding with the same shoe model that Calvi wore. And she noticed small flecks of paint lodged in the soles.

Angela Gallop: Even if you then subjected them to being submerged in swirling water, you still found this stuff. And even if you then scrub at the soles a bit, they were still there after all this treatment. And so you would have expected to have found something like that had he walked across these poles.

Nicolo Majnoni: In other words, if Calvi had actually walked on the scaffolding on his own, he should have had microscopic flecks of paint in his shoes. But, guess what? They weren’t there. There was nothing. Which meant, if Calvi had hanged himself below the bridge, he’d magically flown there.

Angela Gallop: So all of these experiments with spare shoes that Kelby had and his suits and things, all fed into this conclusion that we finally came to, which was that both the suicide routes were, you know, seemed to be really unlikely.

Nicolo Majnoni: If Calvi didn’t swim to the bridge and he didn’t climb down from the top, then Gallop felt very confident that he didn’t kill himself. But also her tests and reenactments convinced her that it would have been impossible for someone to carry Calvi over the side of the bridge onto the scaffolding. So that left one solitary route, one where Calvi was knocked out and led to his final resting place via boat. But there’s one big hurdle here. And that is that back in 1982, detectives couldn’t find any physical marks of violence or traces of poison or sedation on Calvi. So was even this route a no-go? Would Gallop eliminate all four options? Not so fast.

Angela Gallop: I began to see that because the police had almost immediately come to the conclusion that it was suicide, they didn’t bother to look at the scene in as much detail as you might like.

Nicolo Majnoni: It’s not that they didn’t find any sedation. It’s that they didn’t really look. There was no thorough sweep that might have caught traces of chloroform, for example. And as Gallop continued examining the clues, a final piece of evidence really caught her eye. Calvi’s underwear.

Angela Gallop: When I looked at the underpants, you could see the curve of the bottom of the shirt, and then you could see all the stripes in this silty kind of material on the underpants, and it made it look as if he’d been sitting down in something that was quite silty.

Nicolo Majnoni: Previously, the hasty coroner had basically concluded, his underwear’s dirty, that’s probably just from the river. But Gallop made her own way through the evidence. And yet again, something stuck out to her. The shape of the dirt stains on Calvi’s body. These were no simple water stains. The way the silt had settled convinced Gallop that Roberto Calvi, in the last moments of his life, had sat in something.

Angela Gallop: And if he’d had his legs stretched out in front of him, then that was maybe why the backs of the calves had the same sort of material on them. And so then that made me think about… It made me think about boats.

Nicolo Majnoni: And it made her think that Calvi had sat on the wet floor of a boat with his legs out straight in front of him. Whether Calvi had been sedated and rode to the scaffolding or if he’d been held at gunpoint or tricked into getting on a boat and then strangled and at the last moment hung, Gallop couldn’t say. But she could say this, God’s banker had almost certainly been murdered. She shared her evidence with Calvi’s son, and then waited, and waited. A year went by, then five, then 20 years passed. Calvi’s death, his story, and the mysteries around it, all faded. He became an unsolved puzzle and conspiracy fodder. My sources, my parents, even my friend Mario from episode one, thought this would never get solved. And then, one day, Gallop got a call. Because of her evidence, someone had finally been arrested for the murder of Roberto Calvi. That’s next time on Shadow Kingdom. [music plays]

[news clip]: One of Italy’s most wanted fugitives has been arrested in Switzerland.

[voice over]: He said that Cirruti was not in Italy and he wouldn’t be coming back.

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.