God’s Banker I 5. The Fixers
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Friends of the Pod subscribers can listen to the full season of Shadow Kingdom right now. Join Friends of the Pod at crooked.com slash friends or on Apple Podcasts. In the middle of a hot summer night in 1981, Roberto Calvi sat in a prison cell and began to cry. He'd been arrested just a week after the assassination attempt on John Paul II, and had spent two months wasting away in his cell. Calvi's stubble was beginning to show. His eyes were red from lack of sleep. His beige prison jumpsuit stunk of BO. Calvi had been stripped of his designer clothes right down to his shoelaces, and he hadn't had a good night's sleep in months. His cellmates would play cards, and they'd listen to music all night, keeping him from sleeping. Calvi was charged with breaking currency export laws.
Basically, Italy wanted to protect its economy by forcing people to keep their money in the country. Yeah, it's illegal to export a certain amount of capital abroad in Italy. Everybody was doing that. I asked Francisco Pacienza, the former spy who worked for Calvi, about Calvi's arrest. And he said what I heard from lots of people, which is, everybody ignored this law. To be clear, Calvi was up to a bunch of financial shenanigans. But it's also pretty normal for bankers to work internationally, sending cash outside of their country. So arresting Calvi for this kind of felt like arresting a pedestrian for jaywalking. It seemed like prosecutors were going after Calvi to send a political message. Some reporters claimed this was a left-wing vendetta against Calvi.
Others suggested that prosecutors wanted to send a message to tax cheats, to other rich Italians who were shadily trying to conceal money abroad. Either way, Patienza said this was a shock to Calvi's world.
Well, when Calvi was arrested, I was just in my office in Rome, and my secretary said, listen, listen, listen, listen. I heard the television. I saw that he was arrested. Roberto Calvi cannot leave Italy legally because his passport was withdrawn a few months ago.
You're the Calvi family creative fixer at this point. Are you helping him now that he's in jail? Are you giving him strategies?
I organized a contact with the chaplain of the jail. I told the chaplain to say that we are very close to him, don't worry, and so on.
Why did you want Calvi to know that you're with him and everything's okay?
Because just to keep him calm, quiet.
While Calvi was in prison, Patienza was still in contact with the Vatican and politicians around Italy. He sent word to Calvi through the prison chaplain, keep calm, keep quiet, we're with you. Don't talk to prosecutors about the Vatican, the Masons, any of it. This could be a reassuring message, sure, we've got your back, but I can also see how this could be threatening, like don't talk or else. I don't know which way Calvi read Patienza's message, but I do know he didn't do as he was told. Investigative journalist Gerald Posner said that jail just sort of broke Calvi.
This was a man obsessed with his own personal security, and now suddenly he's in an Italian prison, not very clean, not very sparkling, not washed down once a day, with a lot of prisoners in a shared space. Calvi hates that experience. The idea that he could be sentenced one day and sent there to him is as bad an example of the future as he could possibly imagine.
He'd been denied bail multiple times. He'd stopped leaving his cell during the day and stopped going outside to exercise. At one point, he got pneumonia. I mean, he was literally withering away. So according to Posner, on a July night in 1981, Calvi called three prosecutors to the prison and told them, you must get me out of here. I can't take it anymore.
So then he figures, okay, so what can I do?
He did what he knew he shouldn't do. He started offering up information in exchange for a deal.
Okay, that's it. I'll tell you what. P2, they're behind it all. They've got every conspiracy. They're the masterminds. They're pulling the strings. They're the puppet masters.
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