TRUE CRIME:
the shocking murder of fashion royalty Maurizio Gucci
Maurizio Gucci’s bloody murder rocked the high-stakes world of Italian fashion and scandalised the nation. Twenty-five years later, with a Hollywood retelling of the whole sorry saga in the works, William Langley finds the convicted murderess, Gucci’s former wife, still maintaining her innocence.
On the morning of March 27, 1995, Maurizio Gucci, heir to the celebrated Italian fashion house, left his apartment on Milan’s elegant Corso Venezia and walked briskly, in a dark suit and tasselled loafers, to his nearby office. A doorman, Giuseppe Onorato, was sweeping leaves off the marble steps, and the two men exchanged familiar “buongiornos” as Maurizio, 46, arrived at the building. Earlier, Giuseppe, a 52-year-old ex-soldier, had noticed a green Renault car, parked directly across the street, and idly wondered who it might belong to.
As Maurizio entered the doorway, another figure emerged. Striding calmly in the fashion boss’s footsteps, the man, well-dressed in a wide-brimmed Borsalino-style hat and gabardine raincoat, pulled out a handgun. The first bullet hit Maurizio in the left shoulder, the second in the right buttock. Then, as the victim lay writhing on a stretch of freshly-vacuumed carpet, the coup de grâce – a point-blank shot to the head.
So began the most sensational murder case in modern Italian history – one still wreathed, 25 years later, in the stench of jealousy, betrayal and dynastic decay – and still far from resolved.
The black widow
At its centre is the vivacious, violet-eyed figure of Maurizio’s former wife, Patrizia Reggiano, a flamboyant socialite known to Italian headline writers as
“la Vedova Nera” (the Black Widow), who served 18 years in prison for organising the killing, but continues – up to a point – to deny any involvement.
Feted during her marriage to Maurizio as one half of the most glamorous couple in Italy, Patrizia, now 71, is also known for a combustible temperament, which has not been soothed by the news that her life story is being made into a Hollywood film starring Lady Gaga. The word in
Milan is that Patrizia is fuming over the project – and particularly the choice of actress to play her.
“She told me no one has asked her for permission, or even informed her it was happening,” says Eleonora
Daniele, a TV journalist, who knows Patrizia well. “She thinks it is an outrageous liberty, and may damage her legal appeals.”
The Italian magazine Chi, goes further, reporting that Patrizia has been loudly complaining to friends that 33-year-old Gaga “looks nothing like me, and has an enormous nose,” adding, “She’s a pop singer from New York. What does she know of my world?”
Not that Patrizia’s world was always a whirl of wealth and style. The daughter of a waitress from Modena, 180km south of Milan, she was adopted by her mother’s second husband, Fernando Reggiani, who ran a haulage business. The apple of her stepfather’s eye, she grew up spoilt, smart, ravishingly pretty and precociously aware of her attractiveness to men.
She was already an accomplished seductress, when, aged 21, she met Maurizio at a party.
Young Gucci came not only from a higher social level, but laden with a quite different personality. At 22 he was sexually inexperienced, clean-living and under the thumb of his domineering father, Rodolfo Gucci, one of three brothers who had turned their family’s small leather goods business into a global fashion powerhouse. By the time Maurizio met Patrizia in 1970, Gucci had a string of stores in the world’s capitals and its high-priced signature products – notably handbags and shoes – were prized by the rich and stylish.
Horrified by his son’s entanglement with Patrizia, Rodolfo first warned and then threatened Maurizio. “You are a Gucci,” he told the young man. “You are different. This girl wants nothing but your money.”
It is a measure of Maurizio’s infatuation that, for the first time in his life, he defied his father, and in October 1972 he and Patrizia were married in Milan’s 14th-century Basilica Santa Maria. Not a single member of the Gucci dynasty attended.
Still, the besotted young couple had their consolations – mostly afforded by Gucci’s growing business, in which Maurizio held a significant stake. Along with a magnificently appointed Milan palazzo, they owned a large apartment in Manhattan, a ski chalet in St Moritz and an oceanside hacienda in Acapulco. To celebrate the birth of their first daughter, Alessandra, Maurizio bought and lavishly restored “the most beautiful yacht in the world” – a 65m, three-masted schooner, once owned by the famed Greek shipping tycoon, Stavros Niarchos.
“To us they were beyond glamour, beyond fascination,” remembers Luca Giordano, a writer and historian in
Florence, where the Gucci clan originates and still has strong ties. “They were like our real-life Romeo and Juliet, refusing to do their families’ bidding and risking everything for love. And like in the play, it didn’t end well.”
Unforgivable betrayal
After 13 years, the marriage collapsed – a casualty of the very excess that had made it such compulsive viewing. Maurizio, now back in the Gucci fold and effectively running the business, was spending less and less time at home, and more and more with his young mistress, Paola Franchi, a blonde Milanese interior designer. The divorce was long, bitter and expensive. A recorded phone message, played in court, gave a sense of Patrizia’s hurt: “You’ve reached the limit of making yourself despised by your family,” she told Maurizio. “You are a deformed outgrowth, you are a painful appendix that all of us want to forget. For you,” concluded Patrizia, “hell is yet to come.”
There were further grievances. Maurizio, for all his raffish charm and extensive grooming for the job, was turning out to be a less-than-brilliant businessman. His plan was to spread the Gucci brand into perfumes, watches and an ever-widening range of accessories, which rapidly sapped the company’s resources and distracted its creative talent. His uncle, the redoubtable Aldo Gucci, head of the money-spinning US operations, was jailed for tax evasion, and other family members began asking awkward questions about the true state of the company’s finances.
In 1988, Maurizio was forced to sell a large chunk of the business to a Middle East consortium, and five years later disposed of his entire holding.
Patrizia, who, despite the divorce still considered herself a Gucci and saw the firm as a legacy for her daughters, was appalled. “This beautiful thing that was part of all of us is lost,” she wrote to her brother-in-law, Paolo. “The foolishness, the betrayal, must not be forgiven.”
Little of this inner-family turmoil seemed to register with the Milan police as they pursued the investigation into Maurizio’s death. The killing bore all the hallmarks of a Mafia hit, and a look into the victim’s finances revealed a number of shady business contacts. “This is clearly a professional murder,” the city’s prosecutor, Carlo Nocerino declared confidently. “Those of us who work in the field of organised crime are familiar with the signs.”
A mass shakedown of mob suspects produced nothing however, and as the months went by with no breakthroughs the case became a national obsession, with ever-wilder theories circulating and suspicion falling on everyone from anti-capitalist terror groups to the Vatican. Meanwhile, Patrizia moved back into the 26-room Corso Venezia apartment and lodged a legal claim for her ex-husband’s entire fortune.
Almost two years had passed when Commissioner Filippo Ninni, head of the Milan murder squad, working late in his office, received a call from a previously unknown informant, suggesting they meet at an ice-cream parlour on the rougher edges of the city’s Loreto district. Waiting for the detective was Gabriele Carpanese, an overweight, slick-haired former restaurant manager, who had fallen on hard times and was living in one of the area’s cheap hotels.
There, he said, he had befriended the owner’s nephew and assistant, Ivano Savioni, who, over the course of numerous nights drinking, told him an astounding story of his involvement in the Gucci murder. The hit, he said, had been ordered personally by Patrizia Reggiani, who had paid 600 million lira (the equivalent of NZ$500,000) for it. Two other men were involved, but much of the money had gone on buying silence. Seeing Patrizia back in Corso Venezia and poised to collect the entire Gucci fortune, they asked her for more and were turned down. Now, perhaps, it was time to put the word around.
The trial of the Black Widow was Italy’s most hotly awaited since Galileo was put in the dock for heresy 360 years earlier. Among the revelations were
that the killing had been primarily organised by Patrizia’s friend and advisor, Pina Auriemma, a woman described as a “professional sorceress”, and carried out, not by a hardened hitman, but by Benedetto Ceraulo, a debt-ridden Sicilian pizzeria owner. Patrizia had been motivated, argued the prosecution, by a lethal blend of jealousy and fear that Maurizio was squandering the family fortune.
The mystery lives on
Today, Patrizia’s life seems only slightly less confused. Or colourful. A condition of her early release from jail was that she must find a job – to which she retorted that she would rather remain inside. “I have never worked in my life,” she declared. “And I do not intend to start now!”
The lure of freedom prevailed, however, and she was engaged as a consultant at Bozart, a Milanese jewellery boutique. When I turn up at the place, there is no sign of her – or the magnificent blue and yellow macaw that usually sits on Patrizia’s shoulder.
“We only see her sometimes,” huffs the store’s owner, Alessandra Brunero. “I do not think she is very well. She probably has a doctor’s appointment.”
At the elegant villa where Patrizia now resides, a voice on the intercom says she is “possibly in Monte Carlo,” where her late mother, Silvana, kept a home and tax residency. The two women spent years fighting over the tangled Gucci inheritance, with a tearful Patrizia telling one court hearing: “My mother is moved by love, but not for me – only for the money. The truth is she would rather take it to the afterlife.”
Patrizia’s hard-working lawyer, Daniele Pizzi, says his client is currently under orders to say nothing. “Whenever she does it causes trouble,” he sighs. “Look, I understand the interest, but these are sensitive issues.”
It is hard not to sympathise. Last year Patrizia claimed to be broke and living off a €400-a-month (NZ$730), court-approved allowance, only to be photographed in the ritzy Tuscan coastal resort of Forte Dei Marmi, pulling out a wad of €500 notes to pay a drinks bill.
The bulk of Maurizio’s fortune, estimated at $250 million, is now in the hands of his two, Swiss-based daughters, Alessandra, 42, and Allegra, 38, both of whom are estranged from their mother. To add to Patrizia’s problems, Giuseppe, the old Gucci doorman who was hit in the arm during the shooting, is suing for compensation.
Somewhere in the midst of this made-for-Hollywood saga hovers the unhappy ghost of Guccio Gucci, a former bellboy at London’s Savoy Hotel, who founded his small company in the early 1920s after admiring the quality of the luggage he carried to the rooms of the Savoy’s rich clients. Shortly before his death in 1953, Guccio decreed that the business must remain forever in the family, and that his descendants should live up to the standards he had set.
Today Guccio’s little venture is the fashion industry’s golden child, a cultural and commercial phenomenon with a valuation of US$16 billion, ostentatiously shaped by its creative chief, Alessandro Michele, the world’s hottest designer. Yet the family now has no involvement in the business, and its ranks are scattered, riven and reportedly nervous about the forthcoming film.
Whatever Patrizia’s own misgivings, a bigger problem may be avoiding a sequel. The “Vedova Nera” insists she isn’t done yet, and intends to clear her name in a new appeal to Italy’s Supreme Court.
“Nobody knows the truth better than me,” she said, before the lawyers gagged her. “I am not guilty, but I am not innocent. The things that happened were a misunderstanding. If I met Maurizio now, I would ask him, ‘Darling, forgive me.’”