God's bankers A history of money and power at the Vatican

Review by Choice Review

An award-winning journalist and writer, Posner begins with the suspicious 1982 death of banker Roberto Calvi in London. He provides a sketchy history of papal finances behind the 1929 Lateran Pact between the Vatican and Italy, which brought the papacy money, and he describes how Bernardino Nogara (the Vatican's financial adviser) pursued profit in business arrangements with fascists and Nazis, including during the Holocaust. Just as Nogara was trusted by Pius XI and Pius XII, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus (at the Vatican Bank) was trusted by Paul VI and John Paul II. Marcinkus was tied to Roberto Calvi and Michele Sindona; both were involved in a dizzying network of shell companies, money laundering, and risky transactions. These speculations ruined Sindona and Calvi, who died under suspicious circumstances. Marcinkus eventually fell from favor. Posner details these transactions, starting with Nogara's involvements in the efforts of Pope Francis to reform the Vatican Bank. Most of this is documented, but there are occasional problems with unverified rumors and guesswork. The destruction of documents, stonewalling by prelates, and closed Vatican archives made Posner's work harder, necessitating conjectures. This sad tale is known in its outlines, but Posner provides much more detail. Summing Up: Recommended. Of use primarily to general readers. --Thomas M. Izbicki, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

---

Review by New York Times Review

ask a devout, theologically literate Roman Catholic to describe the institution of the church, and you're likely to be told that it was founded by Jesus Christ at the moment he gave his disciple Peter the "keys to the kingdom of heaven" and vowed that "whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven." This made Peter the head of the universal church, empowered to administer the sacraments, spread the Gospel, save souls and forgive sins until Christ's return, as well as to pronounce with infallible authority on matters of Christian faith and morals. Christ also promised Peter that "the gates of hell shall not prevail" against the church - meaning that no matter how corrupt the institution might appear at any given moment of history, it will never be so consumed by evil that it ceases to be capable of fulfilling its God-appointed tasks. Ask an informed historian or journalist about the history of the church - especially the Vatican and the papacy - and you are likely to hear a different story. On this telling, the church from the beginning has been an all-too-human institution that often follows a logic of self-interest, placing the good of its members ahead of those outside it, and the good of those in positions of ecclesiastical power ahead of the good of everyone else. To a greater or lesser extent, this has been true of most institutions throughout history, though it has been a particular problem in the 2,000-year history of the church, with its lack of democratic accountability and deep roots in the corruption-prone political culture of the Italian peninsula. The result has been a tension - and sometimes a blatant contradiction - between the church's exalted claims for itself and its behavior. Think of medieval popes waging the Crusades - raising armies, sacking cities and conquering territory - in the name of Jesus Christ. Or prelates torturing apostates and heretics during the Inquisition. Or Pope Pius V expelling Jews from the Papal States in 1569. Or Pope Pius XI signing the Reichskonkordat with Hitler, which, in return for winning a measure of freedom for German Catholics under the Nazis, assured silence from the Holy See over the forced sterilization of 400,000 people and then only the faintest of objections to the Holocaust. Or more recently, bishops and other church officials concealing widespread and repeated child sexual abuse by priests. All of these and many other well-known acts of complicity with the ways of the world are touched on in Gerald Posner's new book, but its main subject is a somewhat more arcane form of corruption. "God's Bankers" provides an exhaustive history of financial machinations at the center of the church in Rome, from the final decades of the 19 th century down to Pope Francis' sincere but as yet inconclusive efforts to reform the church's labyrinthine bureaucracy (the Curia) and the Vatican Bank (named Istituto per le Opere di Religione, or Institute for the Works of Religion, also known as the I.O.R.). That the Vatican has a bank at all is surprising when taking in the long view of church history. During the Middle Ages, the papacy developed into an aristocratic and feudal institution dependent for much of its income on rents and taxes collected in the Papal States of central Italy. This came to an abrupt end with the final unification of Italy in 1870, which deprived the church of its lands and feudal income, leading to several decades of acute financial insecurity. Popes of this period - Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius X, Benedict XV, Pius XI - publicly denounced lending money at interest (usury) while at the same time accepting massive loans from the Rothschilds and making their own interest-bearing loans to Italian Catholics. Beginning with Bernardino Nogara, appointed by Pius XI in 1929, the church also empowered a series of often shady financial advisers to engage in financial wheeling and dealing around the globe. "So long as the balance sheets showed surpluses," Posner writes, "Pius and his chief advisers were pleased." That pattern would continue through the rest of the 20th century. Posner does an impressive job of explaining how Nogara guided the church through the economic minefields of the Depression, World War II and the immediate postwar years using a combination of shrewdly diversified investments and morally suspect (and to this day still murky) financial deals. (Pope Pius XII founded the Vatican Bank in 1942 at Nogara's suggestion.) From there Posner weaves an extraordinarily intricate tale of intrigue, corruption and organized criminality - much of it familiar to journalists who cover the Vatican, though not widely known among more casual church watchers - from Pius XII down to Benedict XVI. These were years when the Vatican moved beyond the last vestiges of feudal restraint to become "a savvy international holding company with its own central bank" and a "maze of offshore holding companies" that were used as sprawling money-laundering operations for the Mafia and lucrative slush funds for Italian politicians. Posner's gifts as a reporter and storyteller are most vividly displayed in a series of lurid chapters on the American archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the arch-Machiavellian who ran the Vatican Bank from 1971 to 1989. Notorious for declaring that "you can't run the church on Hail Marys," Marcinkus ended up implicated in several sensational scandals. The biggest by far was the collapse of Italy's largest private bank, Banco Ambrosiano, in 1982 - an event preceded by mob hits on a string of investigators looking into corruption in the Italian banking industry and followed by the spectacular (and still unsolved) murder of Ambrosiano's chairman Roberto Calvi, who was found hanging from scaffolding beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London shortly after news of the bank's implosion began to break. (Although the Vatican Bank was eventually absolved of legal culpability in Ambrosiano's collapse, it did concede "moral involvement" and agreed to pay its creditors the enormous sum of $244 million.) In one of his biggest scoops, Posner reveals that while Marcinkus was running his shell game at the Vatican Bank, he also served as a spy for the State Department, providing the American government with "personal details" about John Paul II, and even encouraging the pope "at the behest of embassy officials ... to publicly endorse American positions on a broad range of political issues, including: the war on drugs; the guerrilla fighting in El Salvador; bigger defense budgets; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; and even Reagan's ambitious missile defense shield." THE CUMULATIVE EFFECT of Posner's detective work is an acute sensation of disgust - along with a mix of admiration for and skepticism about Pope Francis' efforts to reform the Vatican Bank and its curial enablers. Pope Benedict, too, attempted to bring the bank into conformity with the European Union's stringent money-laundering and transparency statutes. But the effort failed. With the Holy See engulfed in a maelstrom of scandals in early 2013 - the pope's personal butler leaked a huge cache of embarrassing documents to the Italian press, and a 300-page report exposed a "'gay network' of ranking clerics" that indulges in "regular sex parties" and exerts "'undue influence' in the Curia" - Benedict became the first pope in nearly 600 years to resign. So far, Francis is proving to be a far more effective institutional reformer, with an aggressive, hands-on approach that seems to be yielding positive results. The question is whether it will make a real, lasting difference. Posner, ending on a hopeful note, seems to think it might. One wonders whether he would have been wiser to conclude by recalling the cynical motto that's been heard to echo through the halls of the Vatican bureaucracy down through the centuries: Popes come and go, but the Curia goes on forever. DAMON LINKER, a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com, is the author of "The Theocons" and "The Religious Test."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 22, 2015]

---

Review by Booklist Review

A decade of exhaustive research into the deep and mysterious history of the Vatican's finances is a monumental task, but controversial author Posner proves more than up to this daunting challenge. The tireless and prolific historian and investigative journalist has also written weighty tomes on such conspiracy-laden topics as the assassination of John F. Kennedy (Case Closed, 1993) and the 9/11 attacks (Why America Slept, 2003). Unsurprisingly, the Catholic Church had no interest in welcoming him inside its secrecy-shrouded archives, so Posner had to sift through thousands of government papers, court records, and private-company documents scattered around the world, in multiple countries, just to piece his remarkably taut exposé together. He also interviewed a handful of clerics and officials in Rome who spoke only on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. At 700-plus pages, the book's sheer size might intimidate some readers, but it's a fast-paced read that brings history alive on every page. The book will captivate those who prefer their historical nonfiction spiked with real-life tales of murder, power, and intrigue.--Keech, Chris Copyright 2015 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

---

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Posner (Miami Babylon) uses his superlative investigative skills to craft a fascinating and comprehensive look at the dark side of the Catholic Church, documenting "how money, and accumulating and fighting over it, has been a dominant theme in the history of the Catholic Church and its divine mission." He opens with the various spiritually creative methods the Church has used to make ends meet, such as the sale of indulgences and Pope Urban II's offer of full absolution to those who volunteered to fight in the Crusades. The bulk of the book focuses on the mid-20th century and includes the Papacy's accommodations to the Nazis. While this is familiar terrain, Posner convincingly buttresses his unusual position that money swayed Pope Pius XII "to remain silent in the face of overwhelming evidence of mass murder." And the author's access to previously undisclosed documents enables him to flesh out the Vatican Bank scandal, which reached its nadir with the mysterious hanging-from London's Blackfriars Bridge-of Italian banker and convicted fraudster Roberto Calvi. Accessible and well written, Posner's is the definitive history of the topic to date. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---

Review by Library Journal Review

Stories of the inner workings of the Vatican Bank are popular among those fascinated by conspiracy theories. A mysterious organization managing billions of dollars in assets and controlled by the largest church in the world naturally invites intense interest and scrutiny. Posner (Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK) is no stranger to such stories, having written books about theories surrounding the deaths of both John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Here he expertly shows that theory and conjecture aren't necessary when the real-life narrative is compelling enough. Despite its extensive length, with nearly 200 of those pages as notes, Posner's history of the institution reads like a sprawling novel, full of complex characters and surprising twists. The book also serves as a modern history of the Catholic Church, showing how the institution's financial issues connect with its broader goal of maintaining and growing its influence over the faithful. VERDICT Readers interested in issues involving religion and international finance will find Posner's work a compelling read. [See Prepub Alert, 8/22/14.]-Brett Rohlwing, Milwaukee P.L. (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

---

Review by Kirkus Book Review

A dogged reporter exhaustively pursues the nefarious enrichment of the Vatican, from the Borgias to Pope Francis.In one of his previous works, Mengele (1986), former Wall Street lawyer-turned-accomplished historian and author Posner (Warlords of Crime; Hitler's Children, etc.) followed the money connection from the Nazi criminals fleeing the Third Reich to Argentinaand struck Vatican gold. Laundering Nazi booty extracted from the Jews, protecting Nazi criminals as they found refuge across the globe, providing hush money for egregious cases of pedophiliac prieststhese are just some of the tentacles of Vatican bankrolling since World War II. Having overcome its aversion to moneylending and capitalism as being practices of Protestants and Jews after Italian unification, the Vatican later established a stabilizing appeasement policy with secular leader Mussolini in the form of the Lateran Pacts. Pope Pius XI's financial adviser, Bernardino Nogara, diversified Vatican finances through the Depression era, entangling Vatican and Fascist ties. The Reichskonkordat, a series of pacts signed by Hitler, extracted taxes from Catholic churches and guaranteed the Vatican's silence regarding the Holocaust; it also funneled "blood money" from Nazi victims and supported the "ratline" for escaping Nazi criminals. Posner tracks the formation of the Institute per le Opere di Religione (the Vatican bank) in 1942 through its troubled survival into the present era, as it has battled accusations of mob ties, "gay lobby" scandals, WikiLeaks disclosures, lawsuits by victims of sex abuse and the insistence by the European Union on more transparency in the bank's dealings. Pope Francis' promises of reform are going to be closely watched. Posner bases his massive research on extensive interviews and documents found in the archives of governments and private companies across the world (the author was barred from the Vatican's own Secret Archives). A meticulous work that cracks wide open the Vatican's legendary, enabling secrecy. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

---

God's Bankers 1 Murder in London London, June 18, 1982, 7:30 a.m. Anthony Huntley, a young postal clerk at the Daily Express, was walking to work along the footpath under Blackfriars Bridge. His daily commute had become so routine that he paid little attention to the bridge's distinctive pale blue and white wrought iron arches. But a yellowish orange rope tied to a pipe at the far end of the north arch caught his attention. Curious, he leaned over the parapet and froze. A body hung from the rope, a thick knot tied around its neck. The dead man's eyes were partially open. The river lapped at his feet. Huntley rubbed his eyes in disbelief and then walked to a nearby terrace with an unobstructed view over the Thames: he wanted to confirm what he had seen. The shock of his grisly discovery sank in. 1 By the time Huntley made his way to his newspaper office, he was pale and felt ill. He was so distressed that a colleague had to make the emergency call to Scotland Yard. 2 In thirty minutes the Thames River Police anchored one of their boats beneath Blackfriars' Number One arch. There they got a close-up of the dead man. He appeared to be about sixty, average height, slightly overweight, and his receding hair was dyed jet black. His expensive gray suit was lumpy and distorted. After cutting him down, they laid the body on the boat deck. It was then they discovered the reason his suit was so misshapen. He had stones stuffed in his trouser pockets, and half a brick inside his jacket and another half crammed in his pants. 3 The River Police thought it a likely suicide. They took no crime scene photos before moving the body to nearby Waterloo Pier, where murder squad detectives were waiting. 4 There the first pictures were taken of the corpse and clothing. The stones and brick weighed nearly twelve pounds. The name in his Italian passport was Gian Roberto Calvini. 5 He had $13,700 in British, Swiss, and Italian currency. The $15,000 gold Patek Philippe on his wrist had stopped at 1:52 a.m. and a pocket watch was frozen at 5:49 a.m. Sandwiched between the rocks in his pockets were two wallets, a ring, cuff links, some papers, four eyeglasses, three eyeglass cases, a few photographs, and a pencil. 6 Among the papers was an address book page with the contact details for a former official at the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro; Italy's Socialist Finance Minister; a prominent London solicitor; and Monsignor Hilary Franco, who held the honorary title of Prelate of the Pope. 7 Police never found the rest of the book. A city coroner arrived at 9:30, two hours after the body's discovery, and took it to London's Milton Court morgue. 8 There they stripped the corpse, took his fingerprints, and prepared for an autopsy. Their notes reflect that the dead man oddly wore two pairs of underwear. 9 London police quickly learned from the Italian embassy that the passport was a fake. And it took only a day to discover the false name was simply a variation of the dead man's real one: he was sixty-two-year-old Italian banker Roberto Calvi, chairman and managing director of Milan's Banco Ambrosiano, one of Italy's largest private banks. He had been missing for a week. A judge there had issued a fugitive warrant because Calvi had jumped bail pending the appeal of a criminal fraud conviction the previous year. A Roman magistrate and four Italian detectives flew to London to help British police cobble together a personal dossier. 10 Calvi had risen from a middle-class family to become the chief of the Ambrosiano. He had turned a sleepy provincial bank into an aggressive international merchant bank. The magistrate informed his British counterpart that Calvi was no ordinary banker. He was involved with some of Italy's greatest power brokers in a secret Masonic lodge and he was a confidant of the Vatican's top moneymen. 11 Despite his criminal conviction, the Ambrosiano's board had allowed him to remain at the helm of the bank. Although Calvi publicly promised to rescue his financial empire and restore its reputation, he knew that the Ambrosiano was near collapse under the weight of enormous debts and bad investments. 12 The bank's board of directors had fired him only the day before his body swung from Blackfriars. 13 The police began patching together how Calvi ended up in London. His odyssey had begun a week earlier when he had flown from Rome to Venice. From there he went by car to Trieste, where a fishing trawler took him on the short journey across the Gulf of Trieste to the tiny Yugoslavian fishing village of Muggia. 14 The moment he left Italy's territorial waters he became a fugitive. From Muggia, an Italian smuggler arranged for him to be driven overnight to Austria, where he shuttled between several cities for a few days before boarding a private charter in Innsbruck for a flight to London. He spent the last three days of his life in flat 881, a tiny room at the Chelsea Cloisters, a dreary guesthouse in the capital's posh South Kensington district. 15 The number of unanswered questions grew as the investigation continued. They were not even certain how Calvi got to Blackfriars. It was four and a half miles from his guesthouse. On a walk he would have passed half a dozen other bridges, any of which would have been just as suitable for a flashy suicide. Calvi was well known for his entourage of bodyguards. But British investigators found none. Nor could they locate a black briefcase supposedly crammed with sensitive documents. 16 Calvi's waistcoat was buttoned incorrectly, which friends and family told the police was out of character for the compulsive banker. 17 He had shaved his trademark mustache the day before his death, but police interpreted that not as a sign of a suicidal man but evidence that he was altering his appearance to successfully stay on the run. 18 Two men had been with Calvi in London. Silvano Vittor, a small-time smuggler, had flown with him on the charter. The other, Flavio Carboni, was a flashy Sardinian with diverse business interests and much rumored mob connections. 19 They had fled London before detectives could interview them. The police had also to cope with a flood of false sightings. Many thought they had seen Calvi in his final days, everywhere from the Tower of London to a sex parlor to a nightclub in the company of a cocaine trafficker. 20 Police soon confirmed that Calvi had a $3 million life insurance policy that named his family as the only beneficiaries. 21 In his spartan hotel room investigators found a bottle of barbiturates, more than enough for a painless suicide. But toxicology reports revealed no trace of any drug. When police interviewed Calvi's wife, Clara, she said that in one recent telephone call he told her, "I don't trust the people I'm with anymore." 22 Anna, Calvi's daughter, told the inspectors that she had spoken to her father three times the day before he died. He seemed agitated and urged her to leave her Zurich home and join her mother in Washington, D.C. "Something really important is happening, and today and tomorrow all hell is going to break loose." 23 Another complication was that Calvi suffered from mild vertigo. The police calculated that he had to be acrobatic to reach his hanging spot. It required climbing over the parapet, descending a narrow twenty-five-foot ladder attached to the side of the bridge, rolling over a three-foot gap in construction scaffolding, and then tying one end of the rope around a pipe and the other around his throat, all the while balancing himself with twelve pounds of rocks and a brick crammed into his pockets, suit, and crotch. Not likely, thought the lead detective. 24 Moreover, the police matched the stones to a construction site some three hundred yards east of the Thames. Calvi would have had to pick up the rocks there and return to Blackfriars before putting them into his clothing. But lab tests found no residue on his hands. Also, since the ladder he would have descended was heavily rusted, police expected some trace on his hands, suit, or polished dress shoes. There was none. The London coroner, Dr. David Paul, expressed no doubts that the cause of death was suicide. He relied on the opinion of Professor Keith Simpson, the dean of British medical examiners, who had performed the autopsy. 25 A month after Calvi's body was found, an inquest was held in the Coroner's Court. Paul presented the details of the police investigation and autopsy to a nine-person jury. Simpson testified that in his postmortem exam he found no signs of foul play and "there was no evidence to suggest that the hanging was other than a self-suspension in the absence of marks of violence." 26 Thirty-seven others testified, mostly police officers. 27 Calvi's brother, Lorenzo, surprised the inquest with a written statement that revealed that Roberto had tried killing himself a year earlier. Carboni and Vittor, the duo with Calvi in London, refused to return to England but submitted affidavits. When they last saw Calvi late on the night he died, he was relaxed. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Police would not discover for another decade that Carboni had left London with Calvi's briefcase packed with important documents. 28 Paul admitted that it was difficult for Calvi to kill himself at Blackfriars. But it would have been just as tough for someone to murder him and leave no trace evidence or injuries on the body. 29 Paul took ten hours to set forth his case. He allowed only a twenty-minute lunch break. It was Friday evening and the jury seemed restless to go home. But the coroner insisted they start deliberations. The six men and three women reported back in under an hour. They were having trouble reaching a verdict. Dr. Paul instructed them that their decision did not have to be unanimous. Seven of nine jurors would suffice for a verdict. 30 After another hour, at 10 p.m., they returned with a majority finding that Calvi had killed himself. 31 The Calvi family instantly rejected the finding. 32 Clara told an Italian newspaper that her husband was murdered and his death was connected to "ferocious struggles for power in the Vatican." 33 Some questioned whether she was motivated by money in pushing a murder theory since Calvi's life insurance was voided if he killed himself. 34 But the Calvis were not the only ones skeptical about the suicide ruling. Italian investigators who had assisted the British police believed there was foul play. 35 And businessmen and government officials who knew Calvi were startled by the finding. "Why bother to go to London to do that," a senior bank director said. The British and Italian press were unanimous that the British inquest seemed a surprisingly incompetent rush to judgment. 36 That verdict would probably have been greeted with even greater derision had it then been public knowledge that only days before his death Calvi had written a personal letter--part confessional, part a plea for help--to Pope John Paul II. 37 In the letter, Calvi declared he had been a strategic front man for the Vatican in fighting Marxism from Eastern Europe to South America. 38 And he warned that upcoming events would "provoke a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions in which the Church will suffer the gravest damage." 39 He pleaded for an immediate meeting with the Pontiff so that he could explain everything. He also claimed to have "important documents" for the Pope. 40 The catastrophe Calvi wrote about might have been the Ambrosiano's collapse, which took place within weeks of his death. 41 Early news reports said the bank had a debt of $1.8 billion, much of it guaranteed by the Istituto per le Opere di Religione (the Institute for Works of Religion, or more simply, the Vatican Bank). 42 Investigators soon learned the Vatican Bank was the Ambrosiano's largest shareholder. Did the Vatican itself play a role in the Ambrosiano's failure? British tabloids quickly dubbed Calvi "God's Banker." 43 A veritable conspiracy industry in "Who killed Calvi?" sprang up, complete with TV documentaries, books, and even walking tours of Blackfriars Bridge. Nine months after the coroner's verdict, three Italian forensics experts conducted a second autopsy but could not resolve whether the death was suicide or murder. 44 The Calvis pushed for a new inquest. 45 A British appellate court ordered one almost a year to the date after the original hearing. 46 A different coroner, Dr. Arthur Gordon Davies, impaneled another jury of nine. This time there was no crammed single day of testimony and deliberations. Instead, the "what's-the-rush" pacing translated into a nearly two-week hearing. When the jurors got the case they deliberated for three hours before settling unanimously on an "open verdict," a British bureaucratic loophole that essentially means "we don't know." The original suicide finding was vacated. The case was reclassified unsolved and there was no official cause of death. 47 The Calvis then petitioned Italian prosecutors to get a new investigation of the death. 48 The family hired U.S.-based Kroll Security Group--a preeminent private investigative company--to conduct a fresh probe. 49 Kroll concluded that both British inquests were "incomplete at best and potentially flawed at worst," as they had glossed over evidence that indicated Calvi might have been drugged and murdered. 50 The following year, the Calvis retained two former Scotland Yard forensic scientists to utilize a laser test not available in 1982 to reexamine the clothing. They discovered water staining on Calvi's suit and unexplained marks on the back of his jacket. It was "almost inconceivable," they concluded, that Calvi alone had climbed to the spot on the bridge's scaffolding from which he was hanged. 51 In 1998, sixteen years after his death, the Calvi family convinced a Roman judge to order the body exhumed. Pathologists at Milan's respected Institute of Forensic Medicine conducted a thorough autopsy. 52 They cited suspicious circumstantial evidence, including possible bruises on the banker's wrist and foot. They also identified traces of another person's DNA on Calvi's underwear. 53 The team offered a complicated explanation of how water stains on the clothing--read against a table of the tides on the fateful night--suggested it was likely murder. But there still was not enough compelling evidence to move the case forward. Meanwhile, Italian prosecutors had a problem. Too many people were either confessing to killing Calvi or trying to cut deals on their own criminal cases by asserting they knew who had done it. So many claimed to have "the inside story" that after a while an offer to solve the Calvi case became the quickest way for a plea-bargaining defendant to lose credibility. In 2002, when movers were packing up the Institute of Forensic Medicine in preparation for a cross-town move, they stumbled across some mislaid evidence--Calvi's tongue, part of his intestines and neck, and some fabric from his suit and shirt--in the back of a cupboard. Three Roman investigating magistrates ordered the evidence be turned over for yet another examination. Scientists applied the latest forensic techniques, some of which had not existed just a couple of years earlier. If Calvi had climbed into place over the bridge's scaffolding, reenactments demonstrated that he would have had microscopic iron filings under his nails or on his shoes and socks. There were none. And markings on his upper vertebrae indicated two points of strangulation. Calvi was strangled before the cord was placed around his neck. 54 The Calvis cited those findings in demanding the criminal investigation move faster. But prosecutors were in no hurry, hoping to avoid any mistakes in a case already marked by many missteps. It took another three years before they had enough evidence to issue murder indictments against five people, including the former chief of the secret Masonic lodge of which Calvi was a member and also Flavio Carboni, who was with Calvi in London over the fateful days in 1982. 55 A high security courtroom in Rome's Rebibbia Prison was built for the sensational televised trial, which got under way on October 6, 2005. 56 The murder case was circumstantial. And the motive was a convoluted one involving embezzlement and blackmail. Still, many legal observers expected a guilty verdict. The jury got the trial after twenty months but deliberated only a day and a half. Almost two years to the date of their arrest, the defendants received the verdict: not guilty on all charges. 57 "It [the acquittal] has killed Calvi all over again," a stunned prosecutor told the press. 58 In 2010 and 2011 two Italian appellate courts upheld the acquittals. 59 •  •  • What did Calvi know that was so important that someone killed him and disguised it as an elaborate public suicide? That cannot be answered without pointing a spotlight on the corridors of power and money inside the Vatican. The underlying tale is how for centuries the clerics in Rome, trusted with guarding the spiritual heritage of the Catholic faithful, have fought an internecine war over who controls the enormous profits and far-flung businesses of the world's biggest religion. Only by examining the Catholic Church's often contentious and uneasy history with money is it possible to expose the forces behind Calvi's death. Ultimately, Calvi's murder is a prequel to understanding the modern-day scandals from St. Peter's and fully appreciating the challenges faced by Pope Francis in trying to reform an institution in which money has so often been at the center of its most notorious scandals. Excerpted from God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican by Gerald Posner All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

---