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One of the most interesting interviews Zach and I did for this podcast was with Gerald Posner, who wrote the New York Times bestselling book, God's Bankers. I found myself constantly referring to Gerald's book and telling this story. It helped us understand so much about the Catholic Church and how the Vatican Bank became entangled in one of history's largest bank scandals. It's a complicated story, but Gerald made it easy to understand.
It all started back in 1929, when dictator Benito Mussolini was trying to earn favor with the Catholic Church and gave Vatican City what it always wanted, full autonomy, basically creating another country in the middle of Rome. And this is the, not the farce would be too much, but this is the, almost the joke of Vatican sovereignty. The irony. Yeah, the irony is that
You're standing on one corner in Rome, and you're in Italian territory. You cross the street, and you're in Vatican territory. You do something, and the Italians have to ask you to be extradited, which is remarkable. Then, after World War II broke out, the Vatican Bank was established, presumably to manage the money of the Church and direct it toward administrative and charitable pursuits. But in effect, it was a way for the Vatican to do business in secret.
It didn't take long for certain people to realize that having a secretive offshore bank in the middle of Rome offered some distinct advantages. The great thing about the Vatican Bank, as long as you know a monsignor or somebody who would deposit the money for you, the Vatican accepted physical deposits. So you could come in with a suitcase of cash or a suitcase of gold. You can come in with an old modern painting and a monsignor who had an account would have it opened and deposited for you. And you
you would pay them a percentage each year, 2%, 3%, 4% they were collecting at the Vatican to be able to keep your money there because it was better than paying Italian taxes. And nobody knew that that was happening. So at every moment, the Vatican played the power and the money game.
And that game included mafia money laundering and secret financial transactions between governments, including the Nazis. The Vatican wasn't crazy about the Third Reich and Nazis, but they thought the Bolsheviks and communism in Russia were worse than the Germans. With Stalin in power, they were equal opportunity atheists. They closed down synagogues and churches. The Nazis did not eliminate the Catholic Church.
During the war, the Vatican watched as the Nazis murdered Jews and other minorities, including Catholics in Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, they also watched as the Soviets closed down churches and established communist parties who disavowed organized religion. It fell upon the shoulders of a young Monsignor to quietly gather intelligence from priests living in occupied countries. His name was Giovanni Montini.
Giovanni Battista Montini spends World War II inside the Secretary of State's office at a pretty low position, but it turns out to be that he's the guy who's receiving the reports from the priest out in
the eastern occupied areas that the Germans have taken over, and Poland and later in Romania and Croatia, sending him the reports about the barbarity and the human tragedies and this killing of civilians. And then he's the one who's tasked to brief Pius XII, who is the pope. So Montini is close to the papacy,
during the war. And after the war, the Vatican's involved in all types of chicanery, like providing passports to fugitives or hiding maybe gold that came in from some of the looted countries. And some of that chicanery also fell on the shoulders of Monsignor Montini. For example, he helped a Catholic priest from Croatia, suspected of being a war criminal, escape American scrutiny.
What does Montini do? He goes to the CIA and says, stop looking for this Monsignor who comes in from Croatia. And the CIA stops. I guess the papacy, the Vatican sided with the CIA, the U.S., because of what was going on with communist Russia and the Soviet Union. Can you explain that a little bit? When the war's over, there's this sweeping movement through the democratic countries like Italy that
that where communism is sort of at its height, labor unions are big, communist leaders are running in those countries, like the biggest labor union out of Milan. And the fear was, if the communists get in power, the church will be, if not extinguished, there are a few things just under extinguished that are almost as bad. Taxed.
Oh, that's bad. Maybe not considered a separate sovereign country, subject to Italian laws, which would be run by communists. So who does the church look for to be partners with? The Americans.
and the U.S. sends in millions of dollars that the church then helps to distribute in every priest from every pulpit in Italy leading into the 1948 election, which is the big first post-war election. That election is won by the Christian Democrats. It's a great victory, and the CIA partnership with the church is in full bloom.
Monsignor Montini's career in the Vatican was on the rise. And there's another ambitious young man who had recently moved to Milan whose career was also on the rise, a local tax attorney by the name of Michele Sindona.
I have a number of people who are my favorite characters in this time. Nicola Sindona is one of them. He comes from a dirt poor family in Sicily. Sicily already poorer than the rest of Italy and Sindona's family really near the bottom, but he's very smart and he applies himself and he gets a lawyer's degree
and then goes to work for the Sicilian tax division. Like, stunning is too strong a word, but having a tax collection agency in Sicily is almost an oxymoron because evading taxes is an Italian pastime. He learned the way that people did evade taxes. He knew the loopholes, and later he would apply those for the Vatican Bank and others. ♪
The big break for him came when he is in Milan and he meets this guy, Montini, who's later going to become Pope Paul VI. And they are both worried about Milan's communist tilt.
Melanzioni City in the 1948 elections had elected a communist city mayor. The head of the big unions was Unionized City, was an outright communist. And so Montini says, I'd like to go and say mass. I'd like to give sermons in all the factories. And Sindona says, hey, no problem. I can do that for you. And he goes out and he lobbies the owners of the factories to allow Montini to get in there. And that forms a bond between them that's indispensably important.
In 1954, Montini was appointed Archbishop of Milan, and Sedona had a new friend in a high position. Montini wants to build this charity home. He needs $2 million. Sedona meets him in a church, and he says, "No problem. I'll get you that money," and then supposedly delivers it the next day. And then he starts to get some business inside the Vatican Bank.
Then, in 1963, Sedona's friendship with Montini really paid off, after Montini was elected Pope, Pope Paul VI. So the Pope clearly trusted Sedona, in part because he knew him as this anti-communist fighter, knew him as the person who was able to raise money. He was absolutely loyal. And then the Pope essentially says, you're it, you are my banker. And that's the official word. He is the first, what I call,
God's banker, an outside commercial banker who's worked himself into the Church and the Vatican Bank and is thought of as the go-to man by the people running the Vatican Bank. They loved Sindona because he came to them and had ideas that they had never thought about. And one of those ideas was for the Vatican Bank to start hiding its money in investments. Because even with the help of the Americans, the Catholic Church hadn't stopped the rise of communism in Italy.
It was becoming a distinct possibility that one day, communists would be running the country. He told them, "You're going to get taxed by the Italians on dividends." He's the one who says, "You should be hiding more of your investments. You shouldn't be showing them all. You should give up all your shares in public companies, and I can tell you how to invest it all." Everything complicated, everything hidden under seven layers of different banks, from San Marino to Liechtenstein to Switzerland to Bermuda to the Bahamas.
Sindona partnered with the Vatican in establishing offshore banks to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to investments he deemed worthy.
Sindona was growing to become one of the most prominent and well-known bankers in all of Italy. Because if you can say the Vatican's a partner in this project, other people come in and open up their wallets because they think it must be vetted. Oh my God, the Vatican's not putting its money into anything that's not kosher. And so having God's banker, Sindona, bring the Vatican along as a partner, as an investment on property or whatever else, he wielded some real power. ♪
But there was a downside. The Vatican seemed to always need more money to support the Pope and the Catholic Curia, as well as its religious works around the world. Pressure fell on Sedona to create income. He is running a financial empire, but behind the scenes, he's a disaster. He is essentially running something that resembles almost like a Ponzi scheme. You have the equivalent of a Bernie Madoff situation. So Sedona knows he's on...
thin ice in terms of his real finances because he's far overextended. So that forces him to do business with all types of underworld figures. Because the problem with the mafia is they have so much money, they don't know what to do with it. So Sindon is the perfect conduit to take some of those profits and put them into legitimate businesses. And then he becomes one of the dirtiest guys all the way around that you could possibly imagine.
In 1972, Sindona leveraged his way into buying a controlling interest of a large American bank. When he came to New York, guess who thought of him as like a heroic figure? Mafia guys. Guys inside the five families in New York and Gambino and Genovese and Lucchese. They said, hey, Nicolas Sindona, you're a rock star. You're amazing. They all wanted to hang out with him. And he liked hanging out with them, which is never a good thing. My
My advice, when the five families want to take you to dinner repeatedly in New York, just say no the first time and you'll avoid a lot of headaches down the road. Meanwhile, the Vatican didn't seem eager to find out if their main advisor was hobnobbing with gangsters. So when Sindona starts working so closely with the Vatican, they had to have known that Sindona was close with the mafia, right? Was he taking mobster money?
and using it in some of his ventures? I have no doubt that was the case. And I don't think the Vatican asked questions. Sindona had already proved his bona fides. He's proven to be a good, loyal Catholic.
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According to Gerald, there is one other loyal Catholic who got himself caught up in Michele Sedona's financial intrigue, a guy you've heard a lot about in this series, the head of the Vatican Bank at the time, Paul Casimir Marcinkas. So Marcinkas comes from this working class neighborhood in Cicero, Illinois. He was smart at school and he was a good student.
And he was pretty good at sports, played football and all. And he surprised everybody, all his friends and his family. When at 18, instead of going on to college and maybe trying out for a football team, he went into the seminary. And he ends up getting transferred to Rome. And that's where his luck starts.
He's able to ingratiate himself with everybody, gets the loyalty of the Pope. Pope Paul VI makes the first ever visit to America. It's a big deal in the 60s, Pope visiting America. Marcinkus is there. All the American cardinals get to meet him. They like him. And he becomes the American guy in Vatican City for them. So if they have something they want to get before the Pope, they call him up. He was tapped to go and run the Vatican Bank because the Pope trusted him.
Somebody at the time, a contemporaneous friend, said Marcinkus couldn't read a balance sheet. He was completely ill-equipped to run the bank. But over time, Marcinkus, even though he may not have been much better with a balance sheet, understood power. He understood where the money was going. And he's the first member of the Vatican Bank, the first ranking cleric in Vatican City history.
history, it's a long history there, to be on the board of a offshore bank. This is pretty fabulous for him. He's a director. He goes to meetings of the Swiss banks. He sees the offshore corporations that are being done. And he was very much a part, a knowing part of the Vatican's extension into a whole series of things that if he didn't know they were wrong, then I'd be surprised.
There's been a lot of speculation about just how much Archbishop Marcinkas knew about Michele Sedona's complicated and unstable financial dirty dealings. What he did know was the extent to which the Vatican investments with Sedona were shaky. He was worried about the Vatican's investments because he knew that they were not making returns and it was hard to
if not impossible, to get out of Sendona answers as to what was happening to those investments. The thing that I believe is that even Paul Martinkas did not know
the extent to which Sindona's entire empire was at risk. I think if he had known the extent that the entire thing was a paper tiger, that would have put him in more of a panic. I don't think he ever gets involved as a guy who is looking to do evil things. He may not have been a bad guy in terms of being evil, but he certainly did things that were fast and loose with the Vatican Bank and trusted people and worked with people like Sindona who were far from angels.
One of those people Archbishop Marcinkus worked with was a guy named Roberto Calvi. He's a banker. He's ambitious. Roberto Calvi is Mikola Sindona version 2.0. He's the improved and better Sindona. He admires Sindona, but when Sindona's empire starts to crash,
Somebody has to take advantage of that opportunity. And that's exactly what it is. It's an opportunity now to become the banker for the Vatican. And that's what Calvi does. Calvi repeats all of the same things that Sindona does, but on steroids. He does the offshore accounts. He does the complex Byzantine arrangements on finances. He hides the money. He deals in...
all types of money laundering and mafia assets. He's got an organization and a bank and investments that are overextended and could start to collapse at the next moment. But Calvi doesn't think it's going to unravel, even though he's seen it unravel for Sedona. He thinks he's smarter. His stuff will be better. He'll be safer. And he just runs a repeat of the same disastrous play out. So you wonder how far the fall is from Grace? It's total and complete.
So what happened to these guys like Sedona and Calvi, who Gerald calls God's bankers? If you listen to the podcast, you know that Michele Sedona was eventually arrested after his American bank collapsed, and he got a long prison sentence. But then Sedona ordered the murder of one of the lawyers looking into his Italian banks, and he was extradited to Italy to stand trial.
So we have Sindona jailed in the most secure prison the Italians have ever had for someone by cyanide in the coffee and that's deemed a suicide. And now Calvi's found swinging in 1982 under the arches of Blackfriars Bridge in London. He had 10 or 15 pounds of rocks or bricks in his pocket. And then he was
He's able to jump off swinging there. He dies, and that's the end of it. Nobody saw him do this, and it's remarkable to think that the Brits who did the first investigation think that it is a suicide. But they did, and it took years of real dedicated work by private investigators in the family.
to reveal that in fact it was a murder. And that's the disgrace that they finally tried a whole group of them for being involved in the murder. Everybody walked out. No convictions. Nobody's ever paid a price for being involved in Calfee's murder.
Yeah. I mean, the body counts, kind of unbelievable. The Secretary de Calvi cursing him, you know, throws herself out the window. Yeah, that's pretty dramatic. There's a guy, Salvatore Florio, who's an investigator into the Vatican. He dies in a single car wreck that looks really suspicious. The Italians wrote that off as an accident. And then, of course, you have, you know, Giorgio Ambrosoli, who's the investigator into Sindona, who's killed. A couple of days later,
There's an investigator looking into the Vatican and to Calvi, a fellow called Antonio Verisco.
He's in rush hour, stuck in traffic when gunmen come up to his car and kill him right in broad daylight. And about two weeks after that, Boris Giuliani, who's also looking at Vatican Bank connections and money laundering, goes to pay for his coffee after breakfast. Somebody walks up behind him and shoots him twice in the head. And then they drive off. Never found the killer alive.
And the last one is this Luciano Rossi, who's a lieutenant colonel, special unit, who's looking into Calvi. Shot dead in 82. Nobody pays the price for it. So it's not just the high profile people. It's not just Sindona. It's not just Calvi. But it's investigators. And that serves as a message to the incoming person who takes over. Hey, look what happened to your predecessor. The message seemed to be clear. Don't mess with the mafia.
What has never been clear is what exactly the Mafia's relationship was with Michele Sedona, Roberto Calvi, and the Vatican Bank. You might also remember from our series that in the late 1980s, Archbishop Paul Marcinkis was indicted by Italian authorities. The socialists get elected in Italy to a new government, and they're doing an investigation into financial crimes, and they see the Vatican's involved, and they come to the conclusion that Marcinkis was a material part of it. The Pope...
Lucky for Marcinkis, believes that this is a political hatchet job on the Vatican. It's done by leftists who want to embarrass the church. And Marcinkis is a guy that he knows is loyal. And so he's not going to
extradite Marcinkis to the Italians. And Marcinkis couldn't go outside. He couldn't go to the golf course that he liked to go to to play golf. He converted a part of the Vatican gardens into a putting course, I kid you not, so he could put around during the day. Then finally, the highest court in Italy, the equivalent of the Supreme Court, ruled against the Italian prosecutors and said, no, you can't extradite him. And at that moment, everybody breathed a sigh of relief.
And eventually, Martincus is sent home, not right away, because the Pope still likes him, but he is sent home to America, which probably seems more foreign land to him than Italy at that point, because he's been in Italy for so long. And finally, what does Gerald have to say about Pope John Paul I, the Pope after Pope Paul VI, who mysteriously died just 33 days after being elected? Having looked into it as much as I can, so many years after the event, I'm convinced that
The Vatican made fundamental and grievous errors of judgment. It was not the cover-up of a murder, but it was the cover-up of a whole bunch of things that they were worried about. So it looks horrible. I get it. They've opened the door to conspiracy theorists on top of something else. He doesn't like Marcinkus. He's going to change everything. And then a lot of people say, and he wasn't even sick.
heart condition. I don't think he had a heart condition. He was the most robust person we knew. You're dealing with an institution, 2,000-year-old institution, in which in the past, popes have been killed. And given that history and given all the money at stake and everything else, I understand why people could be suspicious from the get-go. And then you compound it with the way they handled the death of this pope, and no wonder people think something's fell.
I'm sort of, you know, a skeptic. I always say, I'll believe it, but you've got to show me the evidence. I'm suspicious. All right. Thank you for doing this. Glad it was helpful. Oh, it's going to be a wild ride. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Talk soon. The Confessions of Anthony Raimondi is a USG Audio and Truth Media podcast in partnership with Clockwork Films.
I want to thank Gerald Posner for his generosity and the hard work he did to make sense of a very complicated crime story. Read his book, God's Bankers. The show is produced by Alexa Burke, Kenny Kusiak, and Kevin Shepard. Zach St. Louis is our senior producer. Mark Smerling, that's me, is your host and story editor.
Executive producers are Josh Block from USG Audio, Jamie Cohen, Naomi Harvey, and Rob Huxley from Clockwork Films, and me, Mark Smerling. Scott Curtis is our production manager. Production support from Josh Lalongi at USG Audio. Fact-checking by Dania Suleman.
Sound design by Alexa Burke. George Drabing-Hicks did the mix. Music by Universal Production Music, Marmoset, and Kenny Kusiak. Our title track is Big Fish by Kenny Kusiak. Legal review by Linda Steinman and Abigail Everdell at Davis Wright Tremaine. If you've enjoyed The Confessions of Anthony Raimondi, leave us a review on iTunes. It really helps other people find the show. And thanks for listening.
