Up next in 10
On 18 June 1982, a postman crossing Blackfriars Bridge looked down at the Thames and stopped. Hanging from the scaffolding below was a man in a handmade suit — the pockets stuffed with bricks, the suit carrying cash in three currencies, and a false passport in the name of Gian Roberto Calvini with a one-way ticket to Rio de Janeiro.
His name was Roberto Calvi. He was sixty-two years old, and he ran the largest private bank in Italy. The Italian press called him God's Banker, because his closest business partner was the bank of the Vatican.
A suicide verdict. Then an open verdict. Then a court ruling that he was murdered — by no one. Forty years of investigation produced a murder with a verdict and no face. This is the story of the money, the silence, and the only man who ever paid the full price.
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 The body under the bridge
02:18 The pockets: bricks, cash…
04:17 The inquest says suicide
06:28 The family forces open verdict
07:15 God's Banker — Vatican bank
09:29 The P2 lodge and the list
10:35 Collapse & letter to the Pope
12:42 The escape route (BBC, 1982)
15:07 The last night
17:10 The exhumation: forensics
19:41 The trial in Rome
21:45 A murder without a murderer
22:38 The Vatican settlement
26:56 The leftover
SOURCES
Drawn from BBC reporting (including Hugh Scully's June 1982 broadcast), The Guardian, The Independent, TIME, the Italian prosecutors' 2003 findings, the 2005–2011 Rome trial records, and the 2002 court-appointed forensic report. Where sources conflict, the film keeps both versions and says so.
DISCLAIMER
Documentary reconstruction for educational purposes. Archival photographs are used where available; all other visuals are AI-assisted recreations of documented events. No living person's voice is imitated, and every quote comes from published court, broadcast, or press records.
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0:01
7:30 a.m. June 1982,
0:04
a secret worth billions
0:07
buried in the Thames mud.
0:10
>> 7:30 on the morning of Friday, the 18th
0:13
of June, 1982,
0:15
and a postman [music] crossing
0:16
Blackfriars Bridge on his way to work
0:19
looks down at the river and stops.
0:22
There is a man hanging from the
0:23
scaffolding [music]
0:24
under the bridge, a man in a business
0:26
suit, his face turned to the stone. The
0:29
Thames is low that morning, mud showing,
0:32
and the body hangs almost gently in the
0:35
gray light, the way things do when they
0:37
have been arranged. The suit is
0:39
handmade, the shoes are expensive, the
0:43
pockets are stuffed with bricks, and the
0:45
dead man is carrying cash. He has been
0:48
missing for more than a week. His name
0:51
is Roberto Calvi. He is 62 years old,
0:54
and until days ago, he ran the largest
0:57
private bank in Italy. The question that
0:59
[music] morning was a simple one. Nobody
1:02
has answered it since. Was this a
1:04
suicide or a body put on display?
1:08
>> [music]
1:10
>> The police empty the pockets carefully,
1:13
and the contents do not fit a suicide.
1:15
Five bricks stuffed into the suit and
1:18
down the trouser legs, as if someone
1:21
wanted the body to sink.
1:23
Then the cash, the equivalent of about
1:25
$14,000
1:27
in three currencies, and a passport
1:30
folded in the jacket. It is false, in
1:33
the name of Gian Roberto Calvini, with a
1:35
current visa for Brazil inside, and a
1:38
one-way ticket to Rio de Janeiro. The
1:41
photograph shows Roberto Calvi with his
1:44
mustache shaved off. He built a second
1:47
identity to disappear into. He left it
1:50
in his pocket. [music] The name on the
1:52
real documents is Roberto Calvi,
1:54
chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, Italy's
1:57
largest private bank.
1:59
The Italian press called him God's
2:01
banker because his closest business
2:04
partner was the bank of the Vatican.
2:07
He was also [music] a convicted criminal
2:09
out on bail and on the run. He spent his
2:12
last days in London in a service flat at
2:15
Chelsea Cloisters, about 40 pounds a
2:17
night with a 1-month lease. He had
2:20
shaved off his mustache and paid in
2:23
cash. He told no one where he was. His
2:26
driver and bodyguard, Silvano Vita, had
2:29
traveled with him from Italy. Here is
2:31
the strange part. Nobody in that week
2:34
remembers seeing him. Not the staff, not
2:37
the neighbors, not anyone. There is no
2:39
record of a phone call, no record of a
2:42
meeting, no record of him leaving the
2:44
building.
2:46
A senior police officer put it plainly,
2:48
"The long and short of it is we do not
2:51
know how Calvi's body got onto the end
2:53
of that rope." What the record actually
2:55
shows is simpler. He stayed in that
2:58
room.
2:59
On the night of the 17th of June at
3:02
about 11:00, he walked out of the lobby
3:04
of Chelsea Cloisters and the record of
3:07
Roberto Calvi ends there. The inquest
3:10
opens in London in July 1982
3:13
and it takes a single day. The coroner,
3:16
Dr. David Paul, puts one question to the
3:19
jury, "Suicide or unlawful killing?" The
3:22
pathologist, Professor Keith Simpson,
3:25
tells the court the neck injuries do not
3:27
support strangulation.
3:29
The jury agrees. Verdict, suicide. They
3:33
heard that Calvi was a ruined man and
3:35
that much is true. His bank was
3:38
collapsing. He had been convicted and
3:40
faced a prison sentence.
3:42
The court heard about the sleeping pill
3:44
found in his system and nothing else. No
3:48
marks of violence, no syringe marks,
3:51
nothing. The picture they painted was a
3:53
man who walked to the river and ended
3:56
it.
3:56
>> [music]
3:56
>> The bricks were the detail nobody could
3:58
explain. The passport was another.
4:02
The one-way ticket to Rio was a third.
4:05
And the jury heard that the day before
4:07
he died, the Bank of Italy had removed
4:10
him from his post. In Milan the same
4:12
week, the bank was in the hands of the
4:14
Bank of Italy's commissioners [music]
4:17
and Calvi was out. The record shows his
4:20
private secretary, Graziella Corrocher,
4:23
fell from a window of the bank's
4:24
headquarters that same day. She left a
4:27
note behind. And the note [music] cursed
4:29
him for the harm he had done. The note
4:31
said Calvi was twice cursed for the
4:34
damage he caused to the bank and all its
4:36
employees. Her death was ruled a
4:38
suicide. Two deaths then inside two days
4:42
at the same [music] institution, both
4:44
explained the same way. The Milan
4:47
magistrates closed her file. The London
4:49
coroner closed his. The only difference
4:52
was the distance between the two
4:54
windows. The family did not accept the
4:56
verdict. [music] Calvi's wife Clara, his
4:59
son Carlo, and his daughter Anna hired
5:01
George Carman, one of the most famous
5:04
barristers in England, and they forced a
5:06
second inquest. It was held in July
5:10
1983.
5:11
And this time the jury could not agree
5:14
on a verdict. Open verdict.
5:18
>> [music]
5:20
>> An open verdict means the court cannot
5:22
say how the man died. Not suicide, not
5:26
murder, a blank page. The family had won
5:29
the right to be heard and lost [music]
5:30
the right to an answer.
5:32
Two inquests, two years, two different
5:35
verdicts, and the body had not changed.
5:38
The record of 1983 [music] is where this
5:40
story refuses to move. For the family it
5:43
was a beginning. They They paying for
5:45
their own investigation.
5:47
>> [music]
5:48
>> and they kept paying for it for decades.
5:50
Everything that follows in this story
5:53
>> [music]
5:53
>> comes from the same place. People who
5:55
were not in the room where it happened
5:57
trying to reconstruct a room that no one
6:00
will admit existed.
6:02
>> [music]
6:08
>> Banco Ambrosiano was founded in 1896,
6:12
one of the oldest banks in Italy and the
6:14
largest private bank in the country. And
6:17
from 1975,
6:19
its chairman was Roberto Calvi.
6:22
It was a Catholic bank close to the
6:24
church and the church was also its
6:26
customer, its shareholder and its
6:29
shield. The Italian press had a nickname
6:32
for the man at the center, God's banker.
6:35
The Vatican's own bank, the Institute
6:37
for the Works of Religion, had become
6:39
Ambrosiano's main shareholder and its
6:42
[music] president, Archbishop Paul
6:44
Marcinkus, was Calvi's business partner
6:47
through the whole of his chairmanship.
6:49
The church's name was the bank's real
6:52
collateral. The Vatican is its own
6:54
country,
6:55
>> [music]
6:55
>> so Italian regulators had no control
6:57
over its bank and secrecy was
7:00
everything. [music]
7:01
Letters of comfort from the Vatican
7:03
reassured the bank's creditors that the
7:05
church stood behind it. Money went out
7:08
to companies that existed [music]
7:10
on paper and paper came back as profit.
7:13
The circle worked until it stopped. The
7:16
circle had a geography. The bank's money
7:19
moved through companies that existed on
7:21
paper in Nicaragua, in Panama, in Peru,
7:25
owned in the end by the Vatican's own
7:27
institution.
7:28
>> [music]
7:28
>> Ambrosiano lent to the shells. The
7:31
shells bought Ambrosiano shares. The
7:34
loans were made in dollars and the
7:36
purchases in lire. It worked until the
7:39
currency turned. The lira fell, the
7:42
dollar loans grew heavier, and the
7:44
companies that owed the money did not
7:46
have it.
7:47
By the spring of 1982,
7:49
the hole in the books was more than a
7:51
billion dollars, and the Bank of Italy
7:54
moved in, taking over the bank's [music]
7:56
administration. Calvi's name appeared on
7:59
the membership list of Propaganda Due,
8:01
the outlawed Masonic Lodge, and the
8:04
lodge's grand master was a man named
8:06
Licio Gelli,
8:08
the banker who had opened [music] the
8:09
Vatican's door to Calvi, Michele
8:11
Sindona, died in an Italian prison in
8:15
1986, [music]
8:16
poisoned, convicted of ordering a
8:19
murder.
8:20
The pattern was already on the wall. In
8:22
March 1981, police raided Gelli's villa
8:26
in Tuscany [music] and found the lodge's
8:28
membership list. Hundreds of names,
8:31
generals, admirals, politicians,
8:34
bankers, policemen, judges. Roberto
8:37
Calvi was on it. So was a network that
8:40
reached into almost every institution of
8:42
the state. The list was published, and
8:44
the fallout buried the government. The
8:47
lodge had a name for itself, the Black
8:49
Friars, Frati Neri in Italian. Some
8:52
pointed out that Calvi was found under
8:55
Blackfriars [music] Bridge. Whether that
8:57
was a message or a coincidence was never
9:00
established. The record keeps [music]
9:02
both. In July 1981, a court in Milan
9:06
convicted Calvi of illegally exporting
9:08
currency and gave him a four-year
9:11
suspended sentence with a fine of nearly
9:14
20 million dollars. He spent a short
9:16
spell in jail, where he attempted
9:18
suicide before he was released on bail
9:22
pending appeal.
9:23
He walked [music] straight back into his
9:25
chairmanship as if the state had
9:27
blinked. The crash followed the
9:28
conviction like weather. The loans were
9:31
coming due in June in dollars, while the
9:33
lira sank. The hole in the books was
9:36
more than a billion dollars and the
9:38
state was counting it while the chairman
9:40
hid in Chelsea.
9:42
Five days before he vanished, Calvi
9:44
wrote to the Pope warning that the
9:46
collapse would provoke a catastrophe of
9:49
unimaginable [music]
9:50
proportions in which the church would
9:52
suffer the gravest damage. The violence
9:55
arrived in the same season. Calvi's
9:57
deputy, Carlo De Benedetti, resigned
10:00
after two months saying he had received
10:03
threats. His replacement, Roberto
10:05
Rosone, was shot in both legs near
10:08
Milan's Central Station in April 1982.
10:12
The city understood the message. The
10:14
bank kept trading. On the 10th of June,
10:17
Calvi vanished from his apartment in
10:19
Rome. Eight days later, his body was
10:22
found under a bridge in London. The week
10:25
in between is the part of this story
10:28
that has never closed [music]
10:29
and the fight over that week is the real
10:32
investigation.
10:33
It lasted 40 years. From London, Calvi
10:37
sent signals back to Rome. According to
10:40
investigators, he let it be known that
10:42
if he was sent to prison, he would tell
10:45
everything he knew. There were people in
10:47
Rome who could not afford that. The
10:50
timing of his death is the whole case.
10:52
He had also let it be known, according
10:55
to investigators, that he could name
10:57
names, politicians, lodge members,
11:00
Vatican officials whose money had passed
11:03
through his bank. A man who carries a
11:05
list like that, the prosecutors argued,
11:08
was not going to be allowed to talk. The
11:11
argument is the case. That is the motive
11:14
on the record, [music] in the
11:15
prosecutor's words, the money and the
11:18
silence. What is not on the record is
11:21
who gave the order, who held the rope,
11:23
and who paid for the flight. Those names
11:26
were never produced. The case has run on
11:29
that absence ever since.
11:34
>> [music]
11:35
>> The escape route survives in the record.
11:37
False passport in the name of Gian
11:40
Roberto Calvini, a shaved mustache, a
11:43
private plane [music] out of Venice
11:45
routed through Zurich landing at an
11:47
airfield outside London. He checked into
11:50
Chelsea Cloisters, a 1-month lease paid
11:54
in cash, and the record of the week goes
11:56
quiet. [music] The record does not say
11:58
what passed between London and Rome that
12:01
week. It does say that the passport he
12:03
carried held a current visa for Brazil,
12:06
and that the airline ticket in his
12:08
pocket was one way to Rio de Janeiro.
12:12
Everything in his last week points
12:14
south.
12:15
>> Inside the passport was a current visa
12:18
for Brazil, and the airline ticket was
12:20
for a one-way ticket to Rio de Janeiro.
12:24
Why, you might ask, go to all those
12:27
lengths simply to finish up on the end
12:29
of a rope on the Blackfriars Bridge?
12:31
>> The BBC's Hugh Scully put it this way.
12:34
Calvi's last journey was hardly that of
12:37
a man contemplating suicide. Indeed, he
12:41
had made the most elaborate plans to get
12:43
out [music] of Italy secretly. Now, here
12:46
is the shape of his final day. The 17th
12:49
of June, 1982, was a Thursday. That
12:53
morning, the newspapers in Milan
12:55
reported the disappearance of Roberto
12:57
Calvi. In the afternoon, the Bank of
13:00
Italy removed him from his post. At 7:00
13:04
in [music] the evening, his secretary,
13:06
Graziella Corrocher, fell from a window
13:09
of the bank's headquarters. [music]
13:10
She was 55 years old. Her note said
13:13
Calvi was twice cursed for the damage he
13:16
caused to the bank and all its
13:18
employees. The coroner in Milan ruled
13:21
her death a suicide. At about 11:00 that
13:24
night, Calvi walked out of the lobby of
13:26
Chelsea Cloisters.
13:28
>> [music]
13:28
>> Nobody has ever established where he was
13:31
going. Every plan he made pointed away
13:33
from London. The ticket was to Rio. The
13:37
lease was for a month. And yet, sometime
13:40
in the hours after 11:00, Roberto Calvi
13:43
ended up on the scaffolding under
13:44
Blackfriars Bridge with the tide out and
13:48
the bricks in his pockets. Nothing about
13:50
that journey has ever been explained.
13:53
>> [music]
13:55
>> The last people known to have seen him
13:57
were in the flat where he was staying.
13:59
Flavio Carboni, a Sardinian businessman,
14:03
and Carboni's companion, Manuela
14:05
Kleinzig, had dinner with him that week.
14:08
His driver, Silvano Vitta, later told
14:11
prosecutors that on the final evening,
14:14
Calvi left the flat with Carboni.
14:16
Carboni denied it. No transcript
14:19
survives of that night, and no third
14:21
witness ever appeared. Vitta said Calvi
14:24
left the flat with Carboni. Carboni said
14:27
he never saw Calvi that night at all.
14:30
Their accounts never touched, and the
14:32
police never found a doorman or a
14:34
neighbor to settle it. The City of
14:36
London police investigated that flat for
14:39
years and built nothing [music] they
14:40
could take to a jury. The last verified
14:43
fact is the time, about 11:00.
14:47
After 11:00, the record [music] goes
14:49
dark. The next fact is the bridge at
14:52
7:30 the next morning with the tide out.
14:56
The suicide case rests on one image, a
14:58
ruined man walking to the river. The
15:01
case against it is all detail. The tide,
15:04
for one, at the hour he died, the water
15:07
was high enough that a boat could sit
15:09
under the bridge. The scaffolding was
15:11
reachable from a boat. From the shore,
15:14
in the dark, alone, it was not. The body
15:17
was found at low tide, hanging from a
15:20
platform a man could not easily reach on
15:22
his own. Later forensic examinations
15:26
would confirm what the first coroner
15:28
would not hear. The injuries on the neck
15:30
were not the injuries of hanging. The
15:33
hands had never touched the bricks. The
15:35
shoes had never [music] touched the
15:37
scaffolding. Against that, the coroner's
15:39
court in 1982 had heard a different
15:42
version.
15:43
The pathologist told the jury there were
15:45
no signs of strangulation, no defensive
15:48
wounds, nothing but a sleeping pill in
15:51
his system.
15:52
>> [music]
15:52
>> Two sets of experts, 20 years apart,
15:56
reading the same body, and neither could
15:58
make the other one wrong.
16:02
>> [music]
16:04
>> In 1991, 9 years after the funeral, the
16:07
family hired Kroll Associates, an
16:10
international investigation firm, and
16:12
the case went to a man named Jeff Cats.
16:15
Cats hired a former Home Office forensic
16:18
scientist, Angela Gallop. She examined
16:21
Calvi's shoes. They carried no rust and
16:24
no paint. He had never walked on that
16:26
scaffolding. The report went to the Home
16:29
Secretary in October 1992,
16:32
and the police dismissed it at the time.
16:35
In December 1998, Italian magistrates
16:38
had the body exhumed. In October 2002,
16:43
a German forensic scientist appointed by
16:45
the court confirmed the family's
16:47
findings. The neck injuries were
16:49
inconsistent with hanging. He had never
16:52
touched the bricks. His life insurance
16:54
was paid out at last, 10 million
16:57
dollars, with half of it claimed by the
16:59
bank's [music] creditors, who had been
17:00
waiting since the collapse.
17:03
In 2003,
17:05
Italian prosecutors concluded [music]
17:07
that Calvi had been murdered, killed by
17:09
the Mafia over money he had been
17:11
laundering for them.
17:13
City of London police reopened the death
17:16
as a murder inquiry the same year. The
17:19
investigators' version of the night
17:21
reads like this. Calvi was lured onto a
17:23
boat on the Thames, taken from a point
17:26
of access in West London, according to
17:28
the reconstruction. He was killed on the
17:31
boat, the money recovered, the scene
17:33
staged. The body was hung from the
17:35
scaffolding at high tide to make a
17:38
suicide, and the tide went out before
17:41
morning.
17:41
>> [music]
17:42
>> The bricks were the stage directions.
17:44
The motive, according to the
17:46
prosecutors, was the money itself. Calvi
17:49
had been laundering funds for Cosa
17:51
Nostra,
17:52
>> [music]
17:52
>> and when the bank collapsed, the funds
17:54
collapsed with it. The Mafia wanted the
17:57
money back, and the Mafia wanted the
17:59
banker silent. That is the case the
18:02
prosecution brought to [music] Rome. A
18:04
Mafia man turned state's witness,
18:06
Francesco Di Carlo, told the court the
18:09
killers were two men from the Naples
18:10
underworld, Sergio Vaccari and Vincenzo
18:13
Casillo, both of whom were later
18:15
murdered themselves. Another informer
18:18
had already named the man who ordered
18:20
it, the Mafia treasurer, Giuseppe Carlo.
18:23
The prosecutors built their case on men
18:25
like him. The defense [music] called
18:27
them liars.
18:35
On the 5th of October, 2005,
18:38
the trial opened in Rome in a fortified
18:40
[music] courtroom inside Rebibbia
18:42
prison.
18:43
In the dock, the Mafia treasurer,
18:45
Giuseppe [music] Carlo, serving life for
18:47
other crimes, the businessman Flavio
18:50
Carboni, his former companion Manuela
18:53
Kleinzig, the Roman businessman Ernesto
18:56
Diotallevi, and Calvi's driver, Silvano
18:59
Vittor.
19:00
>> After 23 years, it is a great success
19:02
[music] that this trial is taking place.
19:05
We will keep on with our investigations.
19:07
This is just the starting point. There
19:09
will will further developments. Other
19:11
names will be added [music] to the list
19:13
of the accused. The indictment accused
19:16
the five of conspiracy to murder, and it
19:18
read like a map of the whole affair.
19:21
The killing, it said, was ordered to
19:23
stop Calvi using blackmail against his
19:26
sponsors in masonry, in the P2 Lodge,
19:29
and in the Vatican Bank, the
19:31
institutions that had invested with him,
19:34
some of it Cosa [music] Nostra's money.
19:36
The verdict came on the 6th of June,
19:38
2007,
19:40
after 20 months of hearings. All five
19:43
defendants [music] were acquitted. The
19:45
judge, Mario Lucio D'Andria, said the
19:47
evidence was insufficient. And then the
19:50
court said something stranger. It ruled,
19:53
on the same day, that Roberto Calvi had
19:56
been murdered, murdered by no one. The
19:59
prosecutor, Luca Tescaroli, had asked
20:02
for life sentences for four of the five.
20:05
After the verdict, he said that for the
20:06
family, Calvi had been murdered a second
20:09
time. The family's investigators agreed
20:12
with him. The people who ordered the
20:14
killing, they said, were not in the
20:16
dock, and getting to them would be very
20:19
difficult indeed. The appeals upheld the
20:22
acquittals, and in 2011,
20:25
the Court of Cassation closed the file
20:27
for good.
20:28
The charge against Licio Gelli had
20:31
already been dropped in 2009.
20:35
The law had reached the end of the road,
20:37
and the road had led nowhere. The
20:39
Italian state had concluded in writing
20:42
that the banker was murdered. The
20:44
Italian courts had concluded that nobody
20:47
could be convicted of it. Both things
20:49
are true, and they are the whole story
20:51
of the case, a murder without a
20:54
murderer,
20:54
>> [music]
20:55
>> filed in a system that cannot hold a
20:57
file like that.
20:59
>> The problem [music] is that the people
21:00
who probably actually ordered the death
21:03
of Calvi are not in the dock.
21:06
But to get to those people might be very
21:08
difficult indeed. That was Jeff Katz,
21:11
the investigator hired by the family,
21:14
speaking in 2007.
21:16
He said it was probably true that the
21:19
Mafia carried out the killing, and that
21:21
the gangsters suspected of the crime
21:23
were dead or missing.
21:26
The investigation has never found a way
21:28
past that sentence.
21:32
There is one institution in this story
21:34
that settled, and it was not the Mafia,
21:37
and it was not the lodge.
21:39
In 1984,
21:41
the Vatican's bank agreed [music] to pay
21:43
the creditors of Banco Ambrosiano about
21:46
$240 million
21:49
in recognition of its moral involvement
21:52
in the collapse. The phrase was chosen
21:55
with care. Moral involvement, the
21:57
Vatican said, was not legal
21:59
responsibility.
22:01
The settlement went to 120 [music]
22:03
creditor banks, and the money bought
22:05
silence, or at least it bought a line
22:08
under the story. The church admitted
22:10
nothing,
22:11
>> [music]
22:11
>> and it was never required to. Archbishop
22:14
Marcinkus, the president of the Vatican
22:16
bank, was the man who had signed the
22:18
letters of comfort that kept Ambrosiano
22:21
afloat. Italian magistrates [music]
22:24
wanted to question him. He stayed inside
22:26
the Vatican, beyond their reach. He
22:29
retired to Arizona, and he died in 2006
22:33
without ever answering a question under
22:36
oath. So, put the ledger next to the
22:38
body. More than a billion dollars left
22:40
the books of Banco Ambrosiano, routed
22:43
through shell companies in Latin
22:45
America, guaranteed by letters from the
22:47
Vatican. The bank collapsed. The
22:50
depositors lost their money. The
22:53
employees lost their jobs. The
22:55
shareholders lost everything, down to
22:57
the name on the door. The collapse did
23:00
produce convictions. Gelli himself was
23:03
convicted over the bank's failure, and
23:06
the sentence was confirmed only after
23:08
years of escapes and appeals. Even the
23:11
fraud verdict had to chase its man
23:14
halfway around the world. The murder
23:16
verdict never got that far, and still
23:19
the institution at the center of it all
23:21
answered [music] with money, not
23:23
testimony. Its president never faced a
23:25
courtroom, and its letters were never
23:27
tested under oath. The courts [music]
23:30
convicted men of the fraud. The courts
23:33
acquitted men of the murder. No
23:35
institution ever answered for the whole.
23:40
>> [music]
23:42
>> The people at the edges of the case kept
23:44
dying in ways the case could not solve.
23:47
Sergio Vaccari, the small-time [music]
23:50
dealer who had stayed in the same
23:51
Chelsea building as Calvi, was found
23:54
dead in his London flat months later
23:57
with Masonic papers among his
23:59
belongings. His murder was never solved.
24:02
The informers said Vaccari had been one
24:05
of the killers. Vaccari was murdered.
24:07
The other man named as a killer, the
24:09
Naples underworld figure Vincenzo
24:11
Casillo, was murdered, too. Calvi's
24:15
murder and Vaccari's murder both
24:17
involved bricks stuffed into clothing,
24:19
and the informers said that was how the
24:21
organization kept its accounts. The
24:24
court noted that the key witnesses in
24:26
the case were unwilling, untraceable, or
24:29
dead. And the family carried the file.
24:32
Clara Calvi, the widow, fought for
24:35
decades. Her son Carlo kept boxes of
24:38
documents in his basement and spent
24:40
millions on investigators, lawyers, and
24:43
exhumations.
24:45
His father's body was dug up and
24:47
examined, and the examination said
24:49
murder, and the murderer stayed a blank.
24:52
Let the record say what it actually
24:54
says. Confirmed, he did not touch the
24:57
bricks in his own pockets. Confirmed, he
25:00
did not climb the scaffolding.
25:02
Confirmed, the injuries to his neck were
25:05
not the injuries of a hanging man.
25:07
Confirmed by a court in writing, [music]
25:10
Roberto Calvi was murdered. Not
25:12
confirmed who gave the order. Not
25:14
confirmed who held the rope. Not
25:17
confirmed the boat, the bridge, the
25:20
Masonic signal, the Vatican's letter,
25:22
the Mafia's ledger. The case is a murder
25:25
with a verdict and no face, and after 40
25:28
years it still is. Gelli acknowledged
25:30
before the court that Calvi had been
25:32
murdered, and claimed the killing had
25:34
been commissioned abroad. The murder
25:37
case against him was dropped in 2009
25:41
for insufficient evidence. He was
25:43
convicted in the fraud and acquitted of
25:45
the killing, and that double entry is
25:48
the whole affair in one line. The
25:50
morning of the 18th of June, 1982,
25:54
a banker under a London Bridge,
25:56
>> [music]
25:56
>> bricks in his pockets, cash in his suit,
25:59
a one-way ticket to Rio in his jacket.
26:02
Every plan he had pointed south, away
26:04
from that bridge. The bridge is where he
26:07
ended. [music]
26:08
40 years of investigation have never
26:10
closed the distance between those
26:12
[music] two facts. Banco Ambrosiano is
26:15
the leftover. The puzzle everyone tried
26:17
[music] to solve was the rope. The
26:20
institution that lost the money and the
26:22
institutions that signed for it answered
26:25
with settlements and statements and
26:27
silence, and the courts accepted all
26:30
three. The only person in this story who
26:33
paid the full price is the one who could
26:35
not defend himself. The tide was out
26:38
when they found him, and the mud shone
26:40
under the bridge. Whoever put him there
26:42
counted on the river keeping a secret.
26:45
The river turned, the tide went out, and
26:48
the body was given back, arranged in a
26:50
suit with bricks. The bricks say the
26:53
scene was made. The record says the
26:56
maker was never found.
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