Nicolo Majnoni
speaker
58 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Nicolo Majnoni’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Am Morgen des 18. Juni 1982. Marios großer Tag. Plane-Ticket in die Bahamas, bereit zu gehen. Die Taschen sind gepackt. Er muss nur zuerst durch das Büro fliegen.
Seine Kollegen wurden um eine Telex-Maschine gehuddelt. Eine 1980er-Jahre-Version von Twitter, die News auf dieser unendlichen Schicht Papier gedruckt hat. Someone had just ripped the sheet of paper from the machine.
As the morning turned into a hot New York afternoon, Mario's office swung into gear. Telex-Machines resumed their humming. Young analysts chomped nervously on pencils. But not Mario. He was replaying that headline in his head over and over.
Mario schaute auf das Gerät, kleine Details, die an ihm auskamen. Wie, warte, er hatte zwölf Pounder Bricks in seinen Knochen, Wads von Geld, einen falschen Passwort und Calvi hatte zwei Paare Unterhaut und zwei Schuhe an. Ich glaube, dass das ein Mord war. Das war das Ergebnis von Ereignissen, die unglaublich kompliziert waren.
Es klingt alles absurd, nicht wahr? Der Vatikan, der Popen, Spiele in Russland und den USA. Mario sagt, sie sind alle involviert in Kalvis Tod. Mario sagt mir aber, dass es nicht so weit weg sein könnte. Verstehe, das ist die peak Cold War. Also die USA und die Sowjetunion, sie sind alle im Krieg in der existenziellen Kämpfe ihrer Leben.
Und seltsam genug, in den 1970er Jahren war eine große Front dieser Kriege Italien. ... die früher von einem faschistischen Diktator regiert wurde und jetzt die größte kommunistische Partei in Westeuropa hat.
At the time, the Communist Party in Italy was very strong. It had nearly 35% of the national vote by 1976. This was a disaster for the US. If Italy, a massive western democracy, fell to communism, what was to stop others from following? It was like Vietnam, but in the heart of Europe. So the US had a rather unlikely partner in this fight against communism in Italy. The Vatican.
The Vatican hated communism because communism hated God. Most communist regimes shut down all churches. And closed churches meant, among other things, no weekly donations to the Vatican. And so, supposedly, somewhere in this battle, the Vatican and the CIA joined forces to send secret cash to anti-communist fighters in the Soviet Union. They'd done this by hiring God's banker, Roberto Calvi.
Of course the Mafia, exactly. So to the Vatican using a bank as a money laundering operation to fight the Cold War with US help.
If you can sense a dismissive tone in my voice there, you're not wrong. I almost got mad at Mario while we were in the studio. Because I am an Italian. I lived in Rome until I was 10 and then I moved to the US, which is why I now sound the way I do. But my body and soul are very much tied to my strange country, shaped like a boot.
I moved back to Italy in my 20s to get an Italian law degree, because I dreamt of being a prosecutor that would fight the mafia. But that ended up being very scary. So I practiced corporate law in the US and the UK instead. Anyway, growing up in the US, I was always hearing Italians telling these wild stories. Always bombastic, always over the top.
Always taking some benign event and turning it into a big conspiracy. Mario hat mir eigentlich gesagt, dass es ein Wort in Italien für das heißt. Dietrologia. Es bedeutet im Grunde, dass Italiener niemals die entsprechende Erklärung für etwas akzeptieren. Sie denken immer, dass es eine dunkle Wahrheit ist, die hinter Dietro, der Gürtel, fliegt.
As an Italian abroad, I've had to fight this stereotype of the passionate, irrational Italian. And so I was immediately skeptical of Mario's theories about Calvi, the Vatican, the Mafia. Let me point out that I'm on your side with this.
No, but what I'm saying is that you come to me and you tell me a man was killed because he was using the Vatican Bank via Mafia laundered money to fight the Cold War with the backing of the CIA. And I thought this is so silly and it's the typical Italian story that is fake.
You pass that baton to me.
Yeah, well, it all sounded very fake and I wanted to prove you wrong. And this season is that effort. Mario had piqued my curiosity. I wanted to find out who had killed Roberto Calvi. But I wasn't buying his whole Vatican, CIA, Mafia, Da Vinci Code story. That honestly sounded a bit unhinged. Surely there was a more rational, more logical explanation.
Maybe even that Roberto Calvi had very simply killed himself. Just as the no-nonsense British police believed at the time of death. So find out what happened to Roberto Calvi. That's what I set out to do more than two years ago. Since then, I've traveled to the scene of the crime in London and made multiple trips to Italy.
I've sat in a mafioso's living room choking on cigar smoke and tracked down a smuggler who was the last person to see Calvi alive. I've spoken to an Italian spy, forensics experts, and members of Calvi's family. I've worried about my own personal safety more than once.
And my theory of the crime, which I'm going to share with you at the end of this, is completely and wildly different than I could have ever imagined at the start of this investigation. That's after the break. Shadow Kingdom is brought to you by Lumen. Did you know that when your metabolism is working properly, you'll feel the benefits in literally every aspect of your life?
I found a valuable tool that gives me insights to create a healthy metabolism for my body. It's called Lumen. Lumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach, which just means it's a device that measures your metabolism through your breath.
Showing 21–40 of 58 · page 2 of 3
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