Calvi disappears as news of the missing funds breaks. He speeds through Austria under a false name, accompanied by Silvano Vittor, the last person to see him alive. Vittor agrees to an interview, revealing Calvi’s blackmail-filled briefcase. Nicolo wonders: was Vittor a protector or a hunter? Friends of the Pod get early access to the entire first season of Shadow Kingdom: God's Banker before it drops for everyone else—ads included. Get early access to the full season now by joining Crooked’s Friends of the Pod at crooked.com/friends. Hear this episode in Italian by subscribing to Il Banchiere di Dio wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: 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.
Chapter 2: 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.
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Chapter 3: What were the circumstances and timeline of Calvi's disappearance?
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Okay, in my hotel room, about to go see Vitor. Actually, Vitor's lawyer. And we're going to sit on the side of a street because Vitor is not telling us where he lives, which is bad for the blood pressure of those who love you. Okay, let's see what happens.
It's fall 2023, and I'm waiting to meet Silvano Vitor, a former contrabandiere, or contraband smuggler. who was also the last man we know of to see Calvi alive, the man responsible for watching over Calvi in his final days. Vitor hasn't sat down for a recorded interview in 40 years. And even then, the questions he answered were mostly bureaucratic.
I was desperate to speak to him, to ask him why did Calvi flee? What or who was he running from? If there was anyone Calvi had confided in during his final days, I suspected it might be Vitor. And so I spent months and months trying to wrangle Vitor. First, he was down to talk. Then he wasn't. Then he wanted his lawyer to join, but I'd have to pay the lawyer. Then I thought he'd ghosted me.
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Chapter 4: Who is Silvano Vitor and what role did he play in Calvi's final days?
I took Calvi's bag out of respect. I saw this heavy bag and I say, wait, I can help. I was 40 or less than 40 years old. I thought I'd help him. I said, poor guy, he was 60, 62. So I took this bag and brought it in.
I thought that was strange. A 40-year-old insisting he help a 60-year-old with carrying a briefcase. Calvi wasn't an athlete, but he wasn't like 90 years old. Anyway, the directions that Vitor had from Carboni were to smuggle Calvi over the border.
So I made some phone calls to some people I knew, and they told me that after midnight or around midnight, there'd be no controls, and I could safely cross the border.
So Vitor took Calvi to his house that afternoon, and the two settled into Vitor's living room, waiting for midnight.
We were sitting at the table, and he made me turn on the television. And when we turned it on, they were broadcasting the news of him missing.
Time must have stood still for Calvi as he watched the biggest evening news in Italy, plastering his face on the screen, saying he was on the run.
Vitor said he freaked out.
At this point, he started to panic. So I told him, look, why don't you wait an extra day at my house? I'll arrange for a safer trip tomorrow. But he wanted to leave as soon as possible. So he's watching the news and he's getting upset.
Yeah, he changed. He turned pale. And did he take his suit or his jacket off at all?
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Chapter 5: How did Silvano Vitor assist Calvi's escape from Italy?
With his precious briefcase in hand, relief washed over Calvi. He finally relaxed on an easy chair, talking to Vitor's girlfriend about his family, his adolescence, his war stories. So, talking with Vitor, at this point, my ears perked up. Once Calvi had his briefcase and was out of the country, he was more confident, more relaxed. It makes me think that Calvi had a plan, right?
And that plan was going somewhat well. And maybe there was something in that briefcase that gave him power. Calvi called his wife from the chateau and reassured her that everything was okay. She recalled this in an Italian interview.
Roberto got angry and said to me, you should never say that word. He didn't even want to say it. He didn't want to pronounce it.
And throughout the night, he kept calling me, saying, nobody should be using the words on the run. Nobody ran away. I didn't run away. I need to do a job. He was going to recover the debt. He was doing really important negotiations. He was negotiating to resolve the Vatican debt problem.
He said that the Vatican was going to give him protection, which is going to solve all his problems. He just needed time to negotiate outside of Italy. He wouldn't say why exactly those negotiations needed to be outside of the country or what exactly he was afraid of. But right here in the Chateau, Calvi seemed confident that he could solve his looming debt crisis.
After some time relaxing, Vitor watched Roberto Calvi get up and prepare some kindling.
I remember the fireplace and how it was glowing. He was burning some of the paper that he had picked out from the briefcase.
I asked Vitor what was Calvi burning, but he couldn't see. He just said that Calvi burned a lot of papers. It seems odd to me that Calvi would bring documents with him from Italy, carefully guard them, obsess about them when they weren't with him, and then burn some of these documents once he had them back in his possession.
Maybe he decided it was too risky to carry them around, or maybe he'd planned to use them and then changed his mind. I've often thought that if I could just see inside Calvi's briefcase, I could finally find Calvi's killer. But it's like all these years have rusted the lock and it won't budge. There's one person I know who held Calvi's briefcase and who knew his final itinerary, Silvano Vitor.
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Chapter 6: What was inside Calvi's briefcase and why was it important?
Chapter 7: What insights does Vitor provide about Calvi's state during the escape?
Chapter 8: How did the media portray Calvi during his disappearance?
So what would he tell you, or what would you chat about?
He would tell me about his family, about his daughter most of all. He'd tell me about his time in the military, that he'd frozen his hand. He showed me three of his fingers that were frozen. He'd also tell me, hey Silvano, let's chat. I don't want you to fall asleep at the wheel.
And so at this point, does it almost feel like there's sort of a friendship growing here?
Yes, I think so. And the more time went on, the more you become attached because it was just the two of us. We were together all the time and he opened up a little bit. But he was also worried. I could feel it. There was nobody else around me. He needed someone because, you know, he was fugitive.
Again, I was torn here between taking Vitor at his word, that he and Calvi really were forming some kind of bond, and this other alternate narrative. where Calvi was forcefully separated from his briefcase and sent to Switzerland without much of an explanation.
He was, in this narrative, out of control, dependent, and at the whims of his handlers, it felt like a Hitchcock movie, where nothing overtly scary is happening, but somehow you're on edge. Then, right as the duo started to approach the border with Switzerland... Carboni advised against going to Switzerland.
Why is that? No one ever knew why.
Carboni sent word to Calvi and Vitor that the border crossing was now too dangerous, and that a plane was waiting for Calvi just a few miles down the road, headed to London. Now, I didn't know about this last minute switch until speaking with Vitor. And I was feeling spooked here, like something was off. And then Vitor said something that stayed with me.
Calvi had to accept this. He was on the run. He was nervous and panicking. And he had no other solution. So he had to accept going to London. So you're saying at this point Calvi has almost resigned? Resigned, yes. Because they basically imposed this departure and arrival and the accommodation. And he accepted.
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