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Listening on Audible helps your imagination soar. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, any genre you love, you can be inspired to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, new ways of thinking. Maybe you'll find inspiration in the incredible true story of black female mathematicians at NASA in Hidden Figures, or the fantasy world of Throne of Glass. There's more to imagine when you listen. As an Audible member, you get to choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog,
New members can try Audible free for 30 days. Visit audible.com slash imagine or text imagine to 500-500. That's audible.com slash imagine or text imagine to 500-500. Anticipating the announcement of the new leader of the Catholic Church, thousands of the faithful gather in St. Peter's Square.
It's August 1978 in Vatican City, and Paul Marcinkus, the head of the Vatican Bank, waits to find out who will be elected the next pope. The traditional white smoke issuing from the building announces that a pope has been elected. Marcinkus has attracted a lot of attention lately. The Italian press has been writing articles about a vast financial scandal involving his bank.
There are rumors that he will lose his job, but that decision will be made by this guy. Cardinal Albino Luciani, Patriarch of Venice, a man of humble origins. He has chosen the papal name of John Paul I. Albino Luciani was the former bishop from the mountains of northern Italy, who preached charity to the poor, and Marcinkus had dealt with Luciani. You might remember from episode 3, Luciani fought with Marcinkus over the sale of the venerable Banca Cattolica.
The spiritual and material world awaits with hope the reign of Pope John Paul I. Thirty-three days later, 65-year-old Pope John Paul I woke at 4.30 a.m. He opened the door of his chambers to find a cup of coffee left there by his longtime aide, Sister Vincenza. He attended morning mass in his private chapel at 5.30 a.m. with his secretary, Monsignor John McGee. After a light breakfast, he worked until 10 a.m.
Then it's time to take an elevator one floor below for the start of his official duties. Pope John Paul I speaks with Filipino bishops. He has a meeting with the Cardinal of Milan. The day ends back in his private chapel for evening mass. And at 9.30 p.m., the new pope goes to bed. The following is a BBC News broadcast of the Vatican's official account of what happened next.
It's just after half past seven, and here's Laurie McMillan with a summary of the news. Pope John Paul I is dead. The news was issued by the Vatican just an hour ago. At about 5.30 this morning, the Pope's private secretary, Father McGee, found the pontiff dead in bed with the light still on, as though he had been reading. The Pope's doctor, who arrived quickly, established that death had occurred presumably before midnight of a heart attack.
Within hours, John Paul's body would be embalmed. His funeral would come soon after that. And over the next few years, important details in the Vatican's account of this day would prove to be lies. And we met one man who spent a lifetime thinking about those details.
To my mind, if there is a plausible motive for his assassination, the most likely one is an intention to clean up the Vatican's embarrassing financial connections, which could have upset a lot of powerful people. I'm Mark Smerling, and these are the confessions of Anthony Raimondi. First time I saw him, Lucien, he was in his 50s, early 50s, and he was a mountain climber. So he was a fit guy. Right.
He hears that the Vatican Bank wants to sell Banco Catalica. He's absolutely opposed to it. And he goes down to the Vatican and eventually meets with Marcinkus. Marcinkus, Paul Jacob Marcinkus, he goes, show us how to take him out in a nice way. Marcinkus earned a new enemy. Little did he know that that new enemy would eventually become a pope.
Luciani was contemplating cleaning up the Vatican Bank. Well, obviously, he passed away before he was able to do it. He only lasted 33 days. Did John Paul struggle for the poor cost of his life? Chapter 5, Wisdom. There are a lot of theories surrounding the death of Pope John Paul I. We've already heard one of them from our Brooklyn gangster, Anthony Raimondi. But now we're going to put Anthony's story aside and let someone else talk.
Someone who was there back then and who actually investigated the Pope's murder. A journalist and expert on the Vatican by the name of Philip Willen. My introduction to this subject matter came when I was starting out as a freelance journalist in Rome. In the early 1980s, Philip was just starting his career and he was looking for a story to tell.
I must have been in my early 20s, I guess. One day, he found himself looking for a job on the bulletin board in the foreign press club in Rome, when something caught his eye. David Yallop put an announcement saying that he was looking for somebody who spoke Italian and English who could assist him with his research for the book that he was setting out on.
David Yallop was a British journalist who wrote popular books about true crime and conspiracies. Philip applied for the job, and a few days later, Yallop reached out to schedule a meeting. We met at a bar on the Piazza Barberini and chatted for a long time over cups of coffee.
He would order double espressos. And because we kept talking for a long time, I had numerous single espressos. So I suffered from severe insomnia the night after that.
Something else that might have contributed to Philip's insomnia was learning about the subject of Yallop's book. Investigating the hypothesis that the Pope had been murdered, obviously I had to agree that I was prepared to investigate in that direction. But when I started the research for Yallop, I was very skeptical. ♪
Yalop started off by explaining to Philip his theory for why the Pope might have been murdered. And it had to do with a Sicilian banker named Michele Sindona. Michele Sindona, an influential, powerful financier, was once one of the richest men in Europe. You had the emergence of Michele Sindona with mafia ties and an eager supporter of the anti-communist cause in Italy.
He owned holding companies in Liechtenstein and Luxembourg, and banks in Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and New York. At one point, Sindona was thought to be worth $500 million. He seems to have increasingly developed his contacts with people responsible for Vatican finances, becoming close to Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the American Archbishop who becomes the head of the Vatican Bank.
In fact, Michele Sindona and Paul Marcinkis shared a common goal, to keep communism at bay. The Italian Communist Party emerged as a very powerful political force, threatening to come to power through the ballot box and becoming the biggest communist party in the Western world.
But there were powerful people in Italy determined not to let that happen. Italians called this era the Years of Lead. The violence and the killing is the work of extremist political groups, mostly of the left but also of the right, and splinter groups from all directions. The trail of violence began with the firebombing of industrial executives' cars, escalated to kneecapping of politicians and journalists, then kidnapping and murder.
Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, he's a natural recruit for the anti-communist crusade because his family are from Lithuania, a country under Soviet rule and where obviously Catholics would be subject to oppression. By the mid-70s, cracks began forming in Michele Sedona's secretive empire of banks and offshore holding companies. And his troubles began when news broke in New York City that one of his U.S. banks was bankrupt. ♪
Franklin National, the 20th largest bank in the country, went bankrupt today. The largest bank failure in the nation's history. Sindona kept an apartment in the Luxuries Pier Hotel in Manhattan, and he was arrested nearby. Sindona is charged with embezzling a total of $45 million from Franklin National stockholders. And then he was put on trial. Do you have a comment on the trial, Mr. Sindona? No comment at the time.
Today, a United States District Judge in New York sentenced Zindone to 25 years in prison fined him $207,000. That was one of the stiffest sentences ever handed out for a white collar crime. Much of the missing money was followed to right wing political leaders to stop the rise of communism in Latin America. The scandal has caused instability in the international banking system and embarrassment for the Vatican.
In the midst of all this, Paul Marcinkis watched as Albino Luciani was elected Pope John Paul I. And according to author David Yallop, Luciani was not the kind of pope guys like Marcinkis, Michele Sindona, and the mafia would have wanted. That was the hypothesis that he'd sold to his publisher, that Pope John Paul I was murdered because he was intending to crack down on the
shenanigans that were going on in the Vatican and particularly the financial shenanigans that Marcinkus was involved in.
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A few years after the Vatican announced the death of Pope John Paul I, a young Philip Willen joined author David Yallop in his investigation. And right away, Willen started running into problems with the Vatican's account of how the Pope's body was found. At about 5.30 this morning, the Pope's private secretary, Father McGee, found the pontiff dead in bed with the light still on, as though he had been reading.
The official version was that the Pope had been found dead by his male secretary, Monsignor McGee, when the truth is that he was found by Sister Vincenza, one of the nuns who regularly brought him coffee in the mornings.
The Vatican later admitted that they lied, but they said they had a reason for lying. In order to allay the suspicion that a nun might have entered the Pope's bedroom, but that contradiction between the facts of Sistema Incensa helped to create suspicion surrounding the death, suspicions that they were trying to cover up something major and untoward.
To find out if the Vatican was trying to cover up something major and untoward, Philip requested an interview with Sister Vincenza to see what she remembered about the morning she found the Pope's body. She obviously was a key figure in the reconstruction of what had happened. And I called the convent that she was living in at that time, which was somewhere in the mountains in the north of Italy. And I was told that she'd
wouldn't speak to the press, so there's no point in my coming to try and interview her. After hitting that dead end, Philip went to see the man the Vatican had originally said found the Pope's body, his secretary, Monsignor John McGee. I made contact with McGee, and then he agreed with some reluctance to speak to me, and I went and interviewed him in an office in the Vatican.
He seemed very tormented in talking about the circumstances of the Pope's death, very sort of conflicted about what had happened and not very forthcoming. And my impression after the conversation with him was that he was holding back some terrible secret, such as that the Pope had been murdered.
The Vatican had said that Pope John Paul died of a heart attack, so Philip went to talk to the Pope's doctor. He had visited John Paul I in the Vatican to check up on his health situation, and his way of expressing his view of the Pope's health at that point was "non stabene, stabenone."
He's not well. He's very well. Finally, Philip started reading news reports from around the time of the Pope's death. That's when he stumbled across an interview with the Vatican embalmers. September 29th, 1978, the Italian National Associated Press Agency. The two Signeracci brothers, Ernesto and Arnaldo, were awoken this morning at dawn, and the five were collected from their homes by a Vatican car, which took them to the mortuary, where they began the operation.
A 5 a.m. pickup by a Vatican car means that whoever made the call to the Signoracci brothers did so very close to the time the Pope's body was found. David Yallop suspected that the person who made that call may have wanted the embalmers to help cover up the real cause of death, namely that the Pope was poisoned. So Philip went to speak with the Signoracci brothers.
I think they were aware that it wasn't wise on their part to give too much information away. And clearly they wouldn't want to be on the record as openly contradicting the Vatican. Their position subsequently was that they were called much later in a time frame that fit in how events unfolded.
At the stage when we were completing the research, I thought that possibly something really, really grave, possibly even that the Pope had been murdered, that seemed to me to be surprisingly believable at the time. But proving it in a book would be a whole different story. It was interesting that in conversations with Yalop shortly before he left Italy to go back to London to write the book,
He admitted that he was concerned that he might not be able to stand up his thesis in a way that was convincing and satisfied his publisher. But there were so many things that happened in Italy around this time that the murder of a pope didn't seem so far-fetched. This summer, a well-known Milan lawyer was murdered while investigating the bankruptcy of one of Sindona's banks.
On July 12, 1979, a man auditing Michele Sindona's Milan banks was shot and killed by a New York associate of the Gambino crime family. The hitman was arrested, but he didn't last long in jail. Accused hitman William Marrico was killed in a fall when he and another prisoner tried to escape from the ninth floor of a Manhattan jail last night.
There was also a Sicilian police chief who was shot and killed. He had discovered large checks in a dead mafioso's pocket that suggested Michele Sedona had been laundering international heroin profits through the Vatican Bank. Sedona's name was linked to several murders believed committed by organized crime. Then, in 1982, Italians awoke to discover that their entire banking system was on the brink of collapse.
It is the biggest banking collapse in Italian history and has involved inner circles of the Vatican. Italian investigators were searching for $1,400,000,000 in vanished loans. The guy who ran that bank also did business with Paul Marcinkus and the Vatican Bank. His name was Roberto Calvi. Calvi obtained from Marcinkus letters of patronage, which in effect vouched for the solvency of the Panamanian companies, without at the same time indicating any Vatican participation in the companies.
And of course, Calvi had been a partner of Michele Sindona's. Roberto Calvi's body was found hanging from the Blackfriars Bridge over the Thames River. In his suit pocket, police found a fraudulent passport and 12 pounds of bricks and stones. In 1984, Michele Sindona was extradited to Italy to stand trial for ordering the hit on The Auditor in Milan. He was found guilty and given a life sentence.
a sentence for life that lasted less than one year. International banker and convicted murderer Michele Sedona died today, three days after swallowing cyanide in his prison cell. The source of his poisoning remains a mystery, since Sedona was under 24-hour guard and his meals were prepared under police supervision and served in sealed containers. Since the scandal erupted, Archbishop Marchinkas has moved into the Vatican to avoid questioning by Italian authorities.
Not just in America, but in a dozen other countries this summer, publishers are anxiously hoping this is what you'll buy to read on the beach. David Yallop called his book In God's Name. In it, he claimed that the Pope could have been murdered by poison. And he named Michele Sindona and Paul Marcinkus as suspects. Because they've printed half a million copies of the book, which makes the sensational claim that Pope John Paul I was murdered.
At the Vatican, official spokesmen called the suggestion that John Paul I was murdered imaginary and absurd. In God's Name spent 15 weeks on the bestseller list and was translated into more than 30 languages. More than 6 million copies were sold. And the story told in Yallop's book eventually found its way to Hollywood. Don Corleone, my gift was to be able to persuade people to give to the Holy Church.
Six years after Yallop's book came out, a highly anticipated movie hit the theaters, The Godfather III, the long-awaited final chapter to the story of the Corleone family. Then Rome decides to put me in charge of the Vatican Bank. Oh, Constantine. The plot had a familiar ring. The head of the Vatican Bank, in league with a mafia-connected private banker, poisons a pope.
The impact of the book was very significant at the time. I mean, it was a worldwide bestseller, and obviously being absorbed into The Godfather III, it reaches an even wider audience. I guess it's kind of molded the popular view of the Vatican in countries around the world. For Philip, working on In God's Name marked the beginning of a successful career reporting on the Vatican.
And as he learned more about the church's inner workings, he came to question the book's conclusion. After the book came out, I was hired to work as a researcher for a television program that was based on the book. One of the other people involved in the television program was David Yallop, the book's author and Willen's old boss.
We went to speak to a Vatican journalist called Benny Lai, who was an Italian, and he was a great expert on Vatican finances. And we explained to him that one reason to believe that the Pope might have been murdered was the fact that people were not telling the truth, and that if senior members of the Church are lying about something as important as
as this, they would only be doing it if there was a need to cover up something really monumentally important. And Benny Lai, he said, they lie every day as a matter of routine. I thought that was a very shocking observation and it was almost a toss-up as to what was worse for the Catholic Church, that a lot of people had lied to cover up the fact that the Pope had been murdered.
or that these people lied every day as a matter of routine, given that the Catholic Church as an organization exists to disseminate the truth about God and the truth about human life on earth.
While in God's name enjoyed huge success, Paul Marcinkus was still hiding from Italian authorities inside Vatican City. An Italian arrest warrant was issued for an American archbishop, Paul Marcinkus, who heads the Vatican Bank. He is accused of participating in the 1982 collapse of an Italian bank triggered by $1.3 billion in loans to dummy corporations. Marcinkus has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in the case.
Italian police staked out the Vatican gates. They even kept an eye on Marcinkus' favorite golf course in Rome, trying to arrest him and finally get answers to their many questions. But that didn't happen. Eventually, the charges against Marcinkus were dropped, and he was removed as head of the Vatican Bank. After a number of years...
He then retired and moved back to the United States and settled in Sun City in Arizona, living in a small bungalow on the edge of a golf club where he could continue to play golf, which was a sport that he'd always been very keen on.
And there are these contrasting pictures of him as the golf-playing, whiskey-drinking, cigar-chomping possible murderer of John Paul I. Doesn't square with the accounts that I've read of him as a really devoted, faithful Catholic priest. So as far as I'm concerned, he remains an enigma,
After talking for hours, I had one final question for Philip. Where does he stand on the murder of Pope John Paul I today? My current position now, after all these years, is really that having gone from being skeptical to being convinced that something serious could well have happened, I've kind of slipped back into agnosticism and I couldn't really tell you whether he was murdered or not.
I mean, the one thing that I would be keen to avoid is giving the idea that I endorse the conspiracy theory myself today, and particularly that I endorse in any way this crazy man who claims to have participated in the conspiracy himself. This crazy man Philip is referring to is, of course, our Brooklyn gangster, Anthony Raimondi.
I was contacted, I think, quite a long time ago by somebody else who'd interviewed him and they sent me a recording of what he was saying. You know, if you want to carry out disinformation, you need to blend some true elements and some false elements and create a situation of complete confusion.
You can keep the truth at bay by putting out these concoctions of blended truth and fabrication, and that will help to bury the truth even more deeply for the rest of time. And it seems to me that maybe that is the intention. So that would be important for me, that that should be clear from...
from your podcast. Philip sums up Anthony's story about the murder of Pope John Paul I quite succinctly. Yes, it's a subject for the psychiatrists. Next time on The Confessions of Anthony Raimondi. You know, a lot of the mob stuff, it rings true. And your details, your names, your dates and everything ring true.
We can't find anything about the Kadabra Club shooting. Do you recognize this guy? I can't see the picture good. Not really. Not really. That's Hans. The Confessions of Anthony Raimondi is a USG Audio and Truth Media podcast in partnership with Clockwork Films.
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 Lalonghi at USG Audio. Fact-checking by Dania Sulemin.
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.