Black widow is awarded Gucci fortune by court
By in Rome AN ITALIAN socialite nicknamed “the black widow” for ordering the murder of her ex-husband, an heir to the Gucci fashion empire, is entitled to receive £900,000 a year from his estate, a court has ruled.
Patrizia Reggiani, known in Italy as “Lady Gucci”, was jailed in 1998 after being found guilty of paying a hit man the lire equivalent of €300,000 to murder her 46-year-old ex-husband Maurizio Gucci, the multi-millionaire heir to the fashion business.
He had been gunned down three years earlier in the foyer of his office in Milan as he arrived for work.
She was said to be jealous of a younger woman whom he intended to marry and angry about his management of the $170million he had accrued after selling the family business in 1993 to a Bahrain-based investment group, Investcorp.
After a trial that captivated Italy, she was found guilty of commissioning the hit and sentenced to 29 years in jail, which was reduced on appeal to 26 years.
For the previous two years, she had been allowed out on day release to work at a costume jewellery business in Milan, and was photographed wandering around some of the city’s smartest boutiques with a blue and yellow macaw on her shoulder.
She was finally released from custody in October last year, having served 18 years of the sentence, with time taken off for good behaviour.
An appeals court in Milan has ruled that despite ordering her husband’s killing, the 67-year-old is entitled to a huge annual stipend because of an agreement that Mr Gucci signed in 1993, two years before he was murdered.
She is also entitled to back payments from her time behind bars, which would amount to more than £16 million.
The money is to come from her exhusband’s estate, now managed by their daughters, Allegra and Alessandra Gucci, the court ruled.
Under the accord, signed in St Moritz in Switzerland, Mr Gucci, who was the grandson of Guccio Gucci, the founder of the brand, agreed to pay his ex-wife an allowance of 1.1 million Swiss francs a year for the rest of her life. The couple had divorced in 1985. The money will allow the socialite to resume her big-spending ways. Her extravagant tastes included spending €10,000 a month on orchids, and she once famously said: “I would rather weep in a Rolls-Royce than be happy on a bicycle.”
In its judgment, the court of appeal wrote: “The criminal act carried out by Patrizia Reggiani has nothing to do with the accord with Maurizio Gucci. It is irrelevant. Any other opinion belongs to the moral, rather than the strictly judicial, sphere.”
Ms Reggiani’s daughters, who live in Switzerland, are expected to contest the decision in Italy’s Supreme Court.