The Vatican's bank, the Institute for Works of Religion (the IOR), acquired a sulphurous reputation in the 1970s when its American head, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, went into business first with Michele Sindona, a Cosa Nostra-linked financier who would end up convicted of bankruptcy and murder, and then Roberto Calvi, who would be found hanged under Blackfriars Bridge in London following the fraudulent collapse of his Banco Ambrosiano.
But the bank's reputation for skulduggery goes back further, almost to its inception in 1942. According to American intelligence documents cited by the author Ferruccio Pinotti, a group of leading Italian industrialists met in Turin in 1945 to discuss how to conduct the forthcoming war against communism in Italy.
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