Ex-wife who ordered Gucci heir’s killing can keep money
The flamboyant ex-wife of Maurizio Gucci – late heir to the Gucci fashion millions – has been told by a Milan court that she can keep her nearly £900,000 (NZ$1.56 million) a-year divorce settlement despite paying a hitman to murder him.
Patrizia Reggiani, 68, is now out on parole after being jailed in 1998 for ordering the hit on Gucci, who was shot dead outside his Milan office in 1995, aged 46.
Dubbed ‘‘the Black Widow’’ during her trial, Reggiani enjoyed a jetset marriage to the fashion heir before signing a lucrative divorce deal with him in 1993.
Despite the payoff, she allegedly became jealous of Gucci’s affairs and sent him recordings of herself warning ‘‘for you, the inferno is yet to come’’.
Now judges have ruled that Reggiani, who once spent €10,000 a month on orchids, should continue to receive her annual support payments, which were cut off in 1995, as well as unreceived back payments worth millions.
‘‘The court decided the fact that she was jailed for murdering him is irrelevant – a deal is a deal, and the maintenance agreement still stands,’’ said Reggiani’s lawyer, Danilo Buon-giorno.
The ruling will allow Reggiani once again to live according to her tastes, after years in a prison cell with just pot plants and a pet ferret for company.
Before her incarceration she had been able to shuttle between properties in St Moritz and New York, where she and her late husband partied with Jackie Onassis. Reggiani once said: ‘‘I would rather weep in a Rolls-Royce than be happy on a bicycle.’’
To murder Gucci, she paid €300,000 to a debt-ridden pizzeria owner to pull the trigger. He was hired by her personal psychic.
In 2011, Reggiani was offered parole on the condition that she got a job, but she refused. ‘‘I’ve never worked in my life, and I don’t intend to start now,’’ she said.
After being granted parole in 2014, she went shopping along Milan’s Via Napoleone with a macaw perched on her shoulder.
Asked by a reporter why she hired a hitman, she replied: ‘‘My eyesight is not so good, I didn’t want to miss.’’
She has since denied ordering the murder.
In 2015 she took a job with Bozart, a Milan jewellery designer, but had trouble adjusting to using computers and accidentally wiped out the firm’s photographic archive, Maurizio Manca, the owner, said.