[music playing]
There is no doubt that there were
people who were petrified about what Calvi might say.
He was under incredible stress.
With Gelli and the Masonic Lodge P2 gone, Calvi feels naked.
He hasn't got the protection that he once had.
Calvi had tried to commit suicide in prison,
it was a scared cat nowhere to go.
It is an indication that Calvi is
prepared to resort to desperate measures.
Calvi was convicted, his passport was taken away,
and he was forbidden to leave the country.
And this was not known to very many people.
The bank itself was rotting from the inside,
it was technically insolvent.
Now unable to travel internationally,
how would Calvi raise the money he needs to save his bank?
It's a growing level of chaos and isolation around him
until in the end, he's found hanging
under a bridge in London.
[music playing]
Because more evidence had emerged as to the possibility
that he was killed, including a lot of the fruits of the Kroll
investigation.
There may be more witnesses offering
different scenarios under which he might have been killed.
I think the gathering pressure that the official explanation
for what had happened was inadequate.
And as a result, in 1998, Calvi's body
is exhumed from the family tomb in Drezzo to be re-examined,
maybe provided the evidence where Calvi had been murdered.
And that leads towards the murder trial
held in Rome in 2005.
It's time to open up a murder probe in Italy.
The trial was set in a court that's
attached to Rebibbia prison, a fortified high security
courtroom scene of the big criminal trials
in Rome even today.
The prosecutor, Luca Tescaroli, prepared the case.
It was a difficult uphill battle.
Decades had passed, so a lot of witnesses had died.
The murder trial itself made available
a huge quantity of documentary evidence by the prosecutors,
Back in 1981, Calvi was released from prison
temporarily on bail pending appeal of the conviction.
If you want evidence of the ironclad control
that Calvi had over Ambrosiano it
is that days after his conviction,
he chaired a meeting of the board,
and the first thing that they did
was not vote them out of office.
They have a conviction of the head of the bank creating
all types of liability issues for them, it's unbelievable.
They didn't even realize the extent to which he
had put the bank into a hole.
The investigators later found out
that Ambrosiano subsidiaries had borrowed and shuffled
around a billion dollars in loans,
and the Vatican bank owed about $120 million of that.
Calvi took the money for share buybacks for Ambrosiano
and inflated the price wildly.
Everything was a wall of mirrors, nothing was real.
That was a serious problem.
By the end of 1981, six months before his death,
Calvi is unable to raise the money
he needs to stop his convoluted ghost company
network from unraveling.
With no one else to turn to, Calvi
is at the mercy of Marcinkus with his insatiable appetite
for funds for the Vatican bank.
The suggestion is that one of the channels through which
the lifeblood of the bank Ambrosiano hemorrhaged
was this financial support for the solidarity trade Union.
And it's possible that Calvi provided this money
on the assumption that it was a loan and it would be repaid.
And particularly, that point would
be when he was desperately short of money and facing bankruptcy,
clutching at anything that can keep him afloat.
Calvi had sought the assistance of Marcinkus,
but he didn't have the money to pay back
and I think he didn't recognize the obligation to do it.
It came to the point that Marcinkus just faced him down.
It's clearly a risky gamble that they've been involved in.
Marcinkus had agreed to give Calvi these letters saying
that the Vatican bank assumed a direct responsibility for some
of these very heavily indebted offshore companies.
What Marcinkus also did, however,
was he issued counter letters nullifying the comfort letters.
In which he said basically, we don't have any responsibility
for these debts whatsoever.
It was a kind of very high stakes poker game
and he called his bluff.
Marcinkus will vouch for Ambrosiano debts
only if Calvi promises that the Vatican will never
have to pay them.
And Calvi was desperate enough to agree.
By doing this is out and out fraud.
There's a moment of absolute panic
that comes in to somebody who's created a complex network that
depends on servicing the loans which
are inflating the assets and values of all
of your companies.
The minute you stop servicing one loan,
it's like a domino effect, puts him into a frenzy in a panic.
If he can't raise the money, he's in trouble.
As Calvi goes on his search to bail out
the bank from its mounting debts,
his straight arrow deputy, Roberto Rosone
continues to block his creative attempts at financing.
Rosone started asking awkward questions.
It's also important to remember the close financial ties
between the Ambrosiano and the Sicilian Mafia.
To go against those common interests is to risk your life.
Rosone is shot and wounded in downtown Milan.
The hitman is killed by a security guard.
Soon after, he is identified as Danilo Abbruciati, the head
of the infamous Magliana gang.
Organized crime groups, such as the Banda della Magliana,
can act as the tool of others.
For example, providing hitman services.
The Banda della Magliana has close ties
to Pippo Calo and the Sicilian Mafia.
They, of course, are hoping to get their money back.
Calvi was trying to find some sort of a deal
to rescue Banco Ambrosiano.
There was talk of Arab oil money, Iranian money
from people who had become rich under the Shah of Iran,
a deal involving Opus Dei, a secretive right wing
organization that's part of the Catholic Church.
Opus Dei would fit the bill in terms
of being a rich organization and would
be inclined to help somebody if that
helped the church and the Pope.
Opus Dei has denied that they were in contact with him
and there was any idea of them stepping in to bail him out.
All of these deals were pie in the sky
because they would have required an investor
spending vastly more money than the bank was really worth.
He had burned a lot of institutions,
he had taken money, he had lost money for powerful people.
More has come out in the murder trial,
more came out about Mafia connections
that wasn't known at the time.
What led to the death was the fear he was talking.
The people that are worried about what Calvi says
are the La Cosa Nostra, the people
on the mob, the people he's paid money to and they're worried.
Some of the defendants who were the ones who accompanied Calvi
on his last visit to London and arranged his accommodation--
There was very damning evidence from a witness,
Antonino Giuffre, who's been a very high level
member of Cosa Nostra.
He gave a description of a classic Mafia murder
where somebody gains the confidence
of the potential victim and then he delivers the victim
to his executioners.
He said he knew that had been Carboni's role.
Carboni was acting as a lobbyist fixer for Calvi.
Flavio Carboni was a Sardinian property magnate
who had ties with the mob and was with Calvi in London
in the days leading up to his death.
Carboni's most important role was helping Calvi leave Italy.
Calvin was easily manipulated by people who were quote unquote,
"helping him" before he died.
Did Calvi fear what the arrest warrant was for?
Was it for a crime far greater than a financial scandal?
Perhaps Carboni was playing on that fear
as the arrest warrant has since proven to be false.
Court documents recently brought to light show
that Calvi may actually have been
close to coming under investigation on suspicion
of involvement in the gravest act of terrorism perpetrated
in Italy since the end of the Second World War.
In Bologna, Italy, a powerful explosion
ripped through that towns central railroad station,
reducing it to rubble.
What is already being called Western Europe's worst ever act
of political terrorism.
In order to explain the Bologna massacre,
I prepared some documents.
For the Bologna massacre, there were many, many trials
in Italy.
Now, there is a new trial.
The basis is the Bologna document.
Licio Gelli, the head of the lodge P2,
escaped from Italy in 1981.
On September 13, '82, he was in Geneva.
That day, he's arrested because he's a fugitive.
He carries a document with him which bears the heading Bologna
and bank account number.
But this document remained, for some years,
in the drawers of the Swiss authorities.
Much later on, the Bologna document resurfaced
and it began to reveal its secrets.
It comes out that this is bank account of Licio Gelli.
The document linked with other documents
revealed to streams of sums from Banco Ambrosiano.
The movements went through the accounts
of the close collaborators of Licio Gelli.
It becomes clear that a lot of money
was moved close to the date of the massacre.
The prosecution theory is that this bombing was carried out
because Licio Gelli was close to being ready to achieve
a change of government, a given control of the country to Licio
Gelli and his friends.
What were the secrets that Calvi had
and that he could reveal if push came to shove?
Calvi may have been carrying sensitive financial documents
relating to the Bologna bombing.
That could have constituted a really damaging revelation that
would be worth Calvi's life.
During the trial, the prosecution
puts into evidence a letter that Calvi wrote to Pope John Paul
II dated June 5th, 13 days before he is found dead.
He's even trying to hit up the Pope for some help.
He wrote, "I've been a loyal soldier in helping you
for all these years fight communism in the East,
but I know lots of things, meet with me.
I can tell you what's really going on behind the scenes."
Days before he disappeared, Calvin told his daughter
that she had to leave Italy and said
that he was going to leave.
And he added that if things started to get worse,
he was going to start to tell everything he knew.
So by the 10th of June, Roberto Calvi is a man in flight,
he's a wanted fugitive.
On the run, Calvi flies to Rome where
he meets with Carboni and Ernesto Diotallevi
a leader of the Magliana gang that attempted to kill Rosone.
There, he is briefed.
June 11, 1982, one week before Calvi is found dead.
He has a car that takes him to his little fishing
village of Muggia.
Where Sylvano Vittor has his base of operations
and he's an informant of the finance police,
he's got a powerful motorboat in Trieste.
And so he sends Calvi out to cross the Adriatic
to Yugoslavia.
Waiting on the road beyond the quay, two friends of Vittor
and a dark Fiat.
With guides provided by Vittor he
travels through Yugoslavia and into Austria
to Klagenfurt where the family of the Kleinszig sisters
have their home.
The sisters are romantically attached
to both Flavio Carboni and Vittor
and end up being taken along for the ride.
At 6:00 AM, they reached Klagenfurt.
It is now June 12, 1,400 kilometers
from where Calvi will be found dead in six days.
Casarolii, the Secretary of State,
asked the questions of what's going on.
A Marcinkus, he is a cool customer,
he doesn't get ruffled, he plays dumb.
Carseroni would have been ballistic
if he had known the biggest debtor to Ambrosiano
was the Vatican bank.
With Calvi missing, Roberto Rosone
becomes the Ambrosiano's acting chairman.
Determined to get the bank's money back,
he requests an urgent meeting with Marcinkus.
Marcinkus gives him the cold shoulder by saying,
sorry, he's not around, he's in Switzerland.
A bad sign for Rosone because if Marcinkus' in Switzerland,
he's probably emptying out some Swiss bank accounts.
From the 11th to the 15th, Calvi moves around five or six
different little towns.
He's on the move all the time, but along that border area.
On June 15, he and Vittor board a plane
to London's Gatwick airport.
We don't know for sure why Calvi went to London,
but there's a very strong reason to suspect
that he had been told that there were people who could help him,
could prop up the bank.
Vittor shows Calvi to his hotel.
You're thinking might be at the Ritz, that's
where a banker of his esteem would stay,
but now he's a fugitive, so it's not so easy.
So he has to go to this rundown guest house called the Chelsea
Cloisters.
It's a shared bathroom down the hallway for a number
of rooms, its tattered, bed linens,
and Calvi is not that happy about being there.
Five days after Calvi has gone missing,
Roberto Rosone flies to Rome to meet with officials
from the Vatican bank.
He emphasizes the patronage letters
that Calvi and Marcinkus had signed.
They produced a side letter that was
signed between Calvi and Marcinkus that says,
by the way, you know that patronage letter
you signed in which the Vatican bank backs us up,
don't worry about that, it's just for show.
We'll tell everyone that that's real.
You don't know a thing, you're not liable for anything.
And Rosone is absolutely stunned.
He says, this is outrageous, this is fraud.
They said, yeah, so?
Two are very cool, they don't seem very concerned about it.
And as a result, Rosone knows they've
got to meet with Marcinkus, which they do the next day.
Everything is playing out at rapid speed.
By June 16, Calvi's demeanor has changed.
His confidence is suddenly shaken.
They're waiting for him to deliver on some promise.
So whatever he was supposed to do in London,
whatever door he was supposed to open up,
he's unable to do that, no matter how he tries.
Did a meeting planned for the night before not
turn around his fortunes as he had hoped?
He's feeling very insecure.
Calvi called his wife Clara from the Chelsea Cloisters
and he told her, I no longer trust the people I'm with.
I don't think they went to London to kill him,
but I think that in London, Calvi failed to deliver.
That's when the people with him decided to kill him.
And not just kill him, they decided
to make an example of him.
Di Carlo tells the investigators that when he had finally
gotten in touch, he was told it had been taken care of.
But he wasn't told by whom.
In 1983, Charles Raw, a journalist
for the Times of London, writes an investigative article
on the Calvi murder.
As a result of this major story, a man
called Frank Jennings contacted Raw with a story about a man
that he knew.
Hello, Raw here.
There's a man who confided in me about Calvi's murder.
What's his name?
His name was Sergio Vaccari.
Was?
Sergio Vaccari was an Italian operating
in the world of antiquities and art in London
but also involved in the cocaine trade.
On top of that, a man with ties to the far right in Italy.
If you were looking for a mercenary
to organize an operation like the assassination of Roberto
Calvi, he would be someone probably on your list.
Frank Jennings claimed that Vaccari
had been involved in threatening Calvi with the videos showing
a young woman being tortured.
And the implication was that this
was what might happen to Calvi's daughter
if he didn't bow to whatever requests
were being made of him.
It was clear that in Roberto Calvi's mind
he had no doubt that if the Mafia had to,
they would move against his family.
He calls his daughter.
Again, half of his telephone calls of his six calls
go to his daughter.
This time he has a different tone in his voice.
And he says, you've got to leave Italy, you've got to leave now.
June 17, 1982, the day before Calvi's murder.
Ambrosiano Executive, Michel Lehmans,
finally gets a meeting directly with Marcinkus.
He says to Marcinkus, these letters, if I walk out of here,
the Bank of Italy is going to take over Ambrosiano,
this is going to be all over the news.
This will be the end of you, this is going to go public.
And Marcinkus says to him essentially,
I'll have to pay for what I've done.
Rosone knew that Ambrosiano was going to be taken over
by the Bank of Italy.
So he knew that the bank's time was over.
6:00 PM that night, Bank of Italy regulators
swarm into the bank's headquarters.
7:14 PM, Graziella Corrocher has served
Roberto Calvi as his loyal executive assistant
for over 30 years.
The journalists can hear a commotion and people shouting.
Graziella Corrocher has jumped from the fourth floor
of the Ambrosiano building.
But she left a note.
She wrote this note saying that he should be--
Not just damned, but extra damned.
Clearly, it was very dramatic for Calvi to receive this news.
Nobody remembers the last time Calvi had his mustache off.
FBI reports over the years have said
that people are fooled by somebody's appearance
with a simple change of hair color
or facial hair in case of a man.
An action to change his physical appearance
possibly an indication that he's perhaps going to leave London.
He's then seen coming down in the lift
with two Italian men on the very last evening of his life.
They leave the building out of a back entrance.
That's the last official sighting of Roberto Calvi.
Casillo was his right hand man of the top
of an organization called the Nuevo Camorra
Organizata: the NCO.
The Camorra is the Mafia of Naples and the Neapolitan
hinterland.
The standard practice of a mob execution
is someone kills the person, then all of a sudden,
the person who did the killing dies.
Because it cuts off the middle person that
can lead in even an indirect way to the people
that are causing the problem.
And they were very good at that.
On the evening of June 17, 1982, Calvi
is driven by Vaccari and Cassio to the outskirts of London,
not far from the Thames.
One night, same time, same tide conditions, I and my chemist
colleague and Jeff Katz of Kroll associates,
we were just seeing what it was like at night
in those conditions and whether it was
possible to bring a boat up.
All through the night, we came down the Thames and all
of these bridges, it took ages.
The traces of oil stains on his trousers
were compatible with a scenario where he might have been bought
on a not very clean boat.
Because of the silt staining on the trousers,
he looked as though he had been sitting upright
with his legs stretched out in front of him
in the bottom of a boat.
And they might have been surprised and overpowered
just before they attached him to the scaffolding.
It's possible that he was hanged somewhere else
and then his body brought by boat.
That night, when we finally got down to Blackfriars Bridge
and discovered that if you wanted to get access
to the scaffolding, the point at which Calvi was suspended
from the scaffolding, that side of the scaffolding
would be the nearest point to where
you would want to put the boat to keep control of the boat
to achieve getting him out of it and hanging him
on the scaffolding.
Wouldn't have been the other side,
it would be this side that an experienced boatman would
have used because this gives you better
control over the boat in those kind of tidal conditions.
The trial record states that all the Mafia witnesses
were sure and in agreement in their statements
that it was a murder and not a suicide.
Some also specified that the execution
was part of a Mise en Scene to make it seem
like Calvi had killed himself.
Sergio Vaccari, the other suspect,
was stabbed to death in his flat some time
after the Calvi murder.
It was a very gruesome murder.
He was stabbed repeatedly in the face and chest.
One of the police officers said that he
thought his murder would have required more than one person.
Vaccari it emerges, is a very interesting character
with very interesting contacts.
He had been involved in drug trafficking in Latin America
and also in California, and he had been let off
with a remarkably light sentence after being caught smuggling
in quite significant quantities of cocaine in California.
He might have done some sort of a deal
that he would cooperate in some kind of intelligence capacity
with authorities in return for this astonishingly
light sentence.
The Bologna magistrates who are looking again
at the whole Calvi business have asked the British authorities
for information on Vaccari They're
interested in the contents of security deposit boxes
that he had in London, the contents of which have never
been returned to his family.
The Bologna magistrates have now made a request
to see this material.
And the British authorities are not
responding to them, which raises the question
as to whether the information might
be very sensitive and possibly very revealing.
The British just, as I understand it,
have simply ignored the request so far.
I understand why the mob would want to kill Calvi,
I just don't understand the entire Warner Brothers
scene of the hanging.
It's extremely bizarre for a suicide,
but it's equally bizarre for a Mafia killing.
The thing with Calvi that always struck me is I
can't see the Mafia leaving $13,000 in the wallet.
The only people who would throw away money like that
would be a government agency.
There's an enormous array of things
that Calvi could have spoken about that might have
been embarrassing for the CIA.
The whole P2 operation was basically CIA.
All of that skullduggery ultimately, in my opinion,
comes back to Langley, Virginia.
The impression that people have of the British
being very cursory in their investigation
and not being keen to get to the bottom of this story,
there may have been a role played by British intelligence.
If they felt that he'd been eliminated
by their American cousins, and then
wouldn't want people to know too much.
As a key element in a Western security conspiracy that
had financed anti-communism around the globe, somebody who
was threatening to spill the beans on this operation,
they could well feel that it wasn't
in the interests of the public that anything more should
be known about that.
There are a lot of allegations that you don't
know if are true or not true.
The reason you don't is because the CIA
destroyed all the records.
And I worked for the guy at Justice who did that.
When the Freedom of Information Act was coming about,
their management IT guy, he had all the records.
He came to the CIA leadership and says,
you better get rid of all this stuff
because after this freedom of Information Act,
we're going to have to show some of it.
So they destroyed it all.
Probably, Marcinkus was one of a large group of bystanders
who were happy and personally favored by the fact
that somebody took action and removed Roberta
Calvi from the chess board,
It is the biggest banking collapse in Italian history
and has involved inner circles of the Vatican.
Authorities charged that Marcinkus, as Vatican bank
president, acted improperly and could be involved in fraud.
During the subsequent trial around the bankruptcy
of Banco Ambrosiano, the Vatican is forced to pay $230 million
to its creditors, only a fraction of what it owed.
The Vatican say they were never involved
in dealings with the Ambrosiano Bank,
that they are only paying out in good faith.
It called the payment a donation,
never admitting fault.
This surely must be the highest price ever paid
by the Roman Catholic Church for innocence and good faith.
Earlier in the week, the Vatican fired another American Bishop,
a friend of the Pope.
Italian investigators said Calvi implicated Archbishop Marcinkus
in the fraudulent loan scheme.
They issued warrants for the arrest of the Archbishop,
but Marcinkus stayed inside the Vatican, a sovereign country,
which never gave him up for trial in Italy.
They want him for criminal charges
in the fall of the bank, and the Vatican won't give him up
because they don't have to give him up,
they are a sovereign state.
They refused to turn him over.
Marcinkus could have been put in a Vatican prison for fraud
and he wasn't.
Pope John Paul II loyalty to them
was not to turn them over to the Italians
so that for Marcinkus, it was a bittersweet moment.
The Archbishop is free to leave now
because an Italian court ruled his risk of prosecution
is over.
They reach a deal where Marcinkus can leave the Vatican
and come back to America and spend the rest of his years
quietly in this little diocese in Arizona.
[music playing]
When I was writing my book about the Calvi case,
it was clear that Marcinkus was a key witness to speak to.
But he told me that there was no way he was willing to speak.
I tried incessantly to get him to talk,
he wouldn't give me the time of day.
Marcinkus was very well behaved, right until the end.
Personally, I think it's unlikely
that Marcinkus himself had anything
to do with Calvi's death.
I don't see the Vatican as an organization
that directly hires hitmen.
Other organizations have a more natural vocation
for that kind of thing.
The Vatican says, OK, we can never
put the Vatican bank under one person who doesn't
know anything about finances.
So in the future, we'll make sure it runs right.
Vatican bank in the 90s after Marcinkus theft
was as bad or worse than the Vatican bank under Marcinkus.
It's remarkable that the Leopard doesn't change its spots.
So the Vatican bank didn't change,
it just operated in a different manner.
Michele Sindona is extradited back to Italy
where he is charged with paying $50,000 for the shooting
of Giorgio Ambrosoli.
His prison is Voghera on the outskirts of Milan.
The second day he's in serving his prison sentence.
Breakfast is bottom and he has this espresso,
and he comes out for the bathroom.
He's grabbing his throat and he's eating Italian poison,
and he drops dead.
They investigated, cyanide, he killed himself.
The smell was very strong.
No way it could have been an accident.
But equally, he could have been privy to a lot of very
sensitive secrets and have been required
to take his life in order to preserve
the safety of the members of his family.
And then, of course, in Calvi's case, a suicide, a murder,
a mystery.
It's been 25 years since Roberto Calvi was
found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London,
and two years since his murder came to trial at the Court
overseas in Rome.
Finally, a verdict.
One of the things I remember about the acquittal
was seeing Ernesto Diotallevi, one of the defendants,
punching the air in delight and celebration.
The presiding judge dismisses the case
due to lack of evidence.
These judges in two or three months time
will issue a long statement.
And it may even be at that stage that they'd
say there's doubt over whether he was murdered or not,
in which case, we really are right back to square one.
I never thought this was going to end today.
But these are the individuals I consider
responsible for organizing his journey to London
and his murder on the behalf of others.
It's obvious that such a public murder
was meant to send a message.
And I think the message was that if you
share the secrets of the Italian institutions, which
are part of Italian society, including
the Vatican, including the Mafia,
and including P2, you don't threaten to reveal them.
The Calvi affair is a brilliant microcosm of the Cold War,
it's the crime of power.
There's this red thread that runs through this history
of skullduggery.
A lot of the mysterious criminal or terrorist events
that have influenced Italian history since the war
are in there.
The same individuals or the same organizations keep cropping up.
Calvi is doing financial operations
in which millions of dollars are passing
through the hands of these various people,
possibly even to the Bologna bombings.
And the very spectacular end that he meets
is extraordinary shocking and theatrical.
And the whole point of these crimes of power
is that they are conducted by people who enjoy impunity,
and the truth will never come out about it.
Licio Gelli didn't die until 2015
when he was well into his 90s.
And, of course, he took a lot of secrets to the grave.
By 2012, from prison, Frankie "The Strangler" DeCarlo
opens up to the press about Calvi's murder.
The parliamentary commission of inquiry
that's set up to look into the P2 case
never reaches a unified conclusion.
In the report of Tina Anselmi, a metaphor
was written saying that the system of the large P2
is double pyramid.
And suddenly comes up with one theory,
which is the idea of the two pyramids.
The P2 was this state within a state,
with Gelli at the peak of the pyramid
and all his followers members underneath him.
But then there was an inverted pyramid,
if you like, stretching up into the higher
echelons of the state where Gelli was the connection point.
But we don't know--
that other pyramid remains mysterious.
We still have fascist now, more than Germany had fascist then.
Italy elected its first far right government
since World War two yesterday with Giorgia Meloni
set to become prime minister.
Her party, Brothers of Italy, has its roots
in Mussolini's Fascist Party.
Everything is bigger than us.
[laughs]
[music playing]