God’s Banker I 6. On the Run
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Who was Roberto Calvi and what led to his disappearance?
Campsite Media On June 11th, 1981, Roberto Calvi disappeared.
Thursday, June the 10th last year, Roberto Calvi vanished from his apartment in Rome. He told no one where he was going. The circumstances that led to Calvi's flight from Italy were, to say the least, unusual. Yet another chapter in what is shaping up to be a major banking scandal involving the Vatican.
What was the financial scandal surrounding Banco Ambrosiano?
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.
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.
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.
That's why when a bank like Banco Ambrosiano gets into trouble, the ripples can wash around the world, sometimes with devastating effect.
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.
From Crooked Media and Campside Media, this is Shadow Kingdom, God's Banker. I'm Niccolo Mainoni, and this is episode six, On the Run.
Nobody should be using the words on the run. Nobody ran away.
What were the circumstances and timeline of Calvi's disappearance?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who was Roberto Calvi and what led to his disappearance?
0:10–0:55
2
What was the financial scandal surrounding Banco Ambrosiano?
0:55–4:12
3
What were the circumstances and timeline of Calvi's disappearance?
4:12–10:53
4
Who is Silvano Vitor and what role did he play in Calvi's final days?
10:53–17:32
5
How did Silvano Vitor assist Calvi's escape from Italy?
17:32–25:19
6
What was inside Calvi's briefcase and why was it important?
25:19
7
What insights does Vitor provide about Calvi's state during the escape?
21:56
8
How did the media portray Calvi during his disappearance?
21:51–30:36