Larry Gerwin

And I tried to explain to him, this is a commercial venture. I'm a professional writer. But it was beyond him. There had to be a hidden motive. There had to be like some enemy of Calvi who was secretly paying me to write this book.

Jelly was like a spider with a web and he got Calvi into his web.

And the importance of P2, purely from the Calvi point of view, was that they claimed that they could help him.

Telling him, I can help you because I know these politicians or I can... I have influence with the magistrates or whatever.

If you told him some conspiracy theory that there's a group of people sitting in a room who decide the fate of the world, he would be very inclined to believe this. This is one of the things that made him vulnerable to being manipulated.

Somebody like a Jelly could say to Calvi, I heard that there's going to be a surprise inspection of your bank on Monday, and I think I can get it called off. And then he comes back and says, I got them to call it off.

This raid on the bank, it never happened. Jelly's worth his weight in gold. That's the kind of naivete that he had. And then he sticks his hand out and Calvi gives him some money.

There's something called the strategy of tension. Are you familiar with that term?

The right-wingers would do a false flag terrorist attack, something that they would design in such a way that the left-wingers would be blamed for it, and that this could justify a lurch to the right, an authoritarian lurch by the government. because people would be fed up. Look at those horrible lefties who did this terrorist attack. We need tougher police. We need to crack down on people.

We need to go and lock up all these left-wing people, when in fact it was the right-wingers who planted the bomb.

They viewed, oh, this system is completely rotten, completely corrupt, completely illegitimate. Therefore, it's okay to blow up this entire building or to kill these thousands of people. You know, that's the mentality you get. It's really crazy.

He manipulated Calvi to just an incredible degree. He got Calvi to buy a media company, Rizzoli Corriere della Sera, which is one of the most important print media businesses in Italy. And they own Corriere della Sera, which is the most respected newspaper.

They took money from him. They manipulated him into doing things that were bad for the bank.

And so Calvi had to reassure creditors that Ambrosiano was okay, everything was cool, don't worry.

So the bank in Milan owned the Luxembourg Holding Company. The Luxembourg Holding Company, in turn, owned a bank in the Bahamas, one in Nicaragua, one in Panama, one in Peru, etc. And the bank regulators in Italy had no insight into what they were doing.

Collectively, his dummy companies owned almost 20% of Banco Ambrosiano, which was enough for him to control the bank.

There had to be a hidden motive.

I was a financial journalist. I was interested in the Calvi story. They said his body was found in the city of London. And so I grabbed a cab and went to the city of London. It was just an impulse.

I'll give you a concrete example from the Calvi case. During my research, I wanted to interview Roberto Calvi's brother, Leone, and I couldn't get an appointment with him. I eventually tracked him down, and when I said I was working on a book, He says, in Italian, he says, per conto di chi? You know, on whose behalf are you writing this book?