The House of Gucci

by Sara G Forden

  “I was the one who got handed the project,” recalled Alberta Ballerini ruefully. “And I had a small staff that had become passionate about this race. We designed and produced everything for the crew, from T-shirts to jackets, pants, and bags. They were the best-dressed sailors I had ever seen!”

  The tricolor look that Gucci created for Italia’s crew was so striking that Italia quickly became known as “the Gucci boat.” Prada’s competition in the America’s Cup 2000 in Auckland with Luna Rossa is not unlike what Maurizio had hoped to do with the Italia consortium.

  In October 1984, the competition to select the Italian boat that would compete in the America’s Cup was held in Sardinia, off the Emerald Coast. Gucci established a base at Porto Cervo, where a few months earlier Maurizio, De Sole, and Pilone had planned their coup.

  After several days of grueling competitions, Italia won the runoff, to everyone’s surprise, beating out the favored Azzurra.

  Unfortunately, not only did Italia not win the America’s Cup, it became most famous for the day one of its prototypes sank in port after being transferred to Perth, Australia, where the America’s Cup challenge was to be held. On launch day, the crane lifting the boat toppled over, sinking the boat under its weight. The boat was recovered damaged, and there wasn’t time to reconstruct it before the race.

  The Caffè Italia restaurant that Maurizio operated in Perth during the races was much more successful, quickly becoming the central meeting place and watering hole for all of the race participants. Table linens, silverware, crystal, and china were all imported from Italy for the occasion, as were the chefs, waiters, and all provisions, including mineral water, wine, and pasta.

  When Maurizio wasn’t off following the America’s Cup endeavor, he found his new responsibility for Gucci all-consuming. He worked twelve-and fifteen-hour days, traveling constantly, tireless in his quest to realize his dream for Gucci. Lunch and dinner became opportunities to organize business appointments. He even traveled on weekends to supervise store openings and renovations, sacrificing his personal life, the sports he loved, his family.

  As Rodolfo predicted, Maurizio changed. He relied on De Sole and Pilone for advice, becoming increasingly annoyed by Patrizia’s efforts to guide him. As a younger man, Maurizio had looked to Patrizia to support him, giving him the strength to stand up to his own father. As he gained power, she had somehow taken over his father’s role—telling him what to do, how and when to do it, and criticizing his decisions and advisors. Though he had finally won control of his family company, he felt oppressed.

  “Patrizia really beat him up,” recalled De Sole. “She set him up against his uncle, his cousins, or anybody else she didn’t feel was treating him properly. At Gucci events she would say things like, ‘I didn’t get offered champagne first, that means they don’t respect you!’”

  “She became a real nuisance,” agreed Pilone. “She was an ambitious woman and she wanted a role in the company. I told her to stay out, ‘no wives allowed,’ and she hated me for it.”

  Meanwhile, Rodolfo’s warning rang in Patrizia’s head. She finally admitted that her father-in-law had been right about Maurizio. Her husband, obsessed with his dream for Gucci, excluded all else—including his own family. He rejected her opinions and advice, and the distance between them started to grow.

  “He wanted Patrizia to tell him ‘bravo’ all the time; instead she reprimanded him constantly,” said Roberta Cassol. “She became unpleasant.”

  De Sole and Pilone replaced Patrizia as his trusted advisors and she deeply resented them. Driven by her own ambition, she envisioned herself as the strong woman behind the weak man—but then suddenly found herself on the sidelines.

  “Maurizio became unstable…arrogant and unpleasant,” Patrizia recalled. “He stopped coming home for lunch, weekends he went off with his ‘geniuses.’ He gained weight and dressed badly…he surrounded himself with unsubstantial people. Pilone was the first. Bit by bit he changed my Maurizio. I realized it when Maurizio stopped telling me things, his tone grew detached. We spoke less. We grew cold and impassive with each other,” she said.

  Maurizio began to call his folletto rosso the strega piri-piri after a witch in a popular children’s cartoon.

  On Wednesday, May 22, 1985, Maurizio opened the wardrobe in their Milan penthouse and packed a small suitcase. He told Patrizia he was going to Florence for a few days, said goodbye to her, and kissed the girls, Alessandra, nine, and little Allegra, four. They spoke the next day by phone; nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary.

  The next afternoon, a doctor who was a close friend and confidant of Maurizio stopped by to tell Patrizia that Maurizio wasn’t coming back for the weekend—if ever. Patrizia was stunned. The doctor offered some consoling words—and the bottle of Valium he had tucked in his little black bag. She promptly sent the doctor and his bag packing. Patrizia knew that she and Maurizio had grown apart, but she never imagined that he would leave her and his children. A few days later, Patrizia’s good friend Susy invited her over for lunch to deliver another message from Maurizio.

  “Patrizia, Maurizio isn’t coming back home,” Susy said. “He wants you to prepare a couple of bags with his clothing and he will send a driver to pick it up. His decision is final.”

  “Tell me where I can find him,” snapped Patrizia, “the least he can do is tell me to my face.”

  In July, Maurizio called and arranged to see the children on weekends. In September, he came home and asked Patrizia to accompany him to a polo match Gucci had sponsored and to present the winner’s cup. During the week he was home, they finally had a chance to talk about their relationship. He invited her for dinner at Santa Lucia, the cozy trattoria where he had courted her.

  “I need my freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” he explained. “Don’t you understand? First I had my father, who told me what to do, now I have you. I have never been free in all my life! I didn’t enjoy my youth and now I want to do what I want to do.”

  Patrizia sat speechless as her pizza grew cold. Maurizio explained that he wasn’t leaving her for another woman, but because he felt “castrated” by her relentless criticism and bossiness.

  “What is this freedom you want?” she finally replied. “To go rafting in the Grand Canyon, to buy a red Ferrari? You can do those things if you want to anyway! Your family is your freedom!”

  Patrizia couldn’t understand why Maurizio wanted freedom to come home at three o’clock in the morning when he was the kind of man who usually fell asleep at 11 P.M. in front of the television. She suspected he had been seduced by his own growing importance in the luxury goods business and by the respect given him by his new lieutenants in the office.

  “My intelligence disturbed him,” she said later, “he wanted to be number one and thought he had found the people who were going to make him number one!”

  “Do what you must do,” Patrizia finally told him coldly. “But don’t forget you have obligations to me and to the children.” Cold and impassive on the outside, inside, Patrizia felt her world falling apart.

  They agreed not to tell the children immediately and Maurizio left. Initially he rented a residence on Milan’s tree-lined Foro Bonaparte; later he took a small apartment in Piazza Belgoioso, although with all his travels, he rarely slept there. He never went back to Galleria Passarella to empty his wardrobe—he simply had new shirts and suits custom made, new shoes ordered.

  After Maurizio left home, Patrizia turned to an unlikely companion for solace—a Neapolitan woman named Pina Auriemma who had become her friend. She and Maurizio had met Pina many years before at a health spa in Ischia, an island off the coast of Naples known for its thermal springs and mud baths. In Pina, who came from an industrial family that operated in the food sector, Patrizia found a lively and entertaining companion. They spent several summers together in Capri, where Pina had helped find Patrizia a house. Pina’s sarcastic Neapolitan banter and skill with tarot cards entertained Patrizia for hours—helping to soothe
the pain of Maurizio’s departure.

  “When we were in Capri, she came to visit me every day,” Patrizia recalled. “We talked for hours and she was funny, she made me laugh.”

  The two women became fast friends and Pina often visited Patrizia in Milan or accompanied her on trips. Patrizia persuaded Maurizio to let Pina open a Gucci franchise in Naples that she operated for several years before turning it over to an associate. Pina was by Patrizia’s bedside when Allegra was born in 1981. After Maurizio left home, Patrizia turned to Pina for consolation. When Patrizia became distraught enough to contemplate suicide, Pina talked her out of it.

  “She stayed by me in the moment of my deepest depression,” said Patrizia later. “She saved my life.”

  Although Patrizia thrived on the competitive social milieu she had found in Milan, she rarely felt at ease in it and had made few friends in whom she felt she could truly confide. When she really wanted to talk, she turned to Pina. When they weren’t together, they talked for hours by telephone.

  “I trusted her, I didn’t have to watch my words with her, I told her everything,” Patrizia recalled. “I knew she wasn’t a gossip.”

  In the early years after Maurizio left home, Patrizia and Maurizio kept up the appearance of their marriage socially and sometimes went to public functions together. She dressed up to look her best whenever he came over to see the girls, but after he left she locked the door to her room, threw herself on the bed, and cried for hours. Even though every month Maurizio deposited some 60 million lire (about $35,000) in a Milan bank account for Patrizia—she began to feel that all she had achieved was slipping through her fingers. She turned to the Cartier diaries she bought each year that were bound in tan calfskin with a miniature photograph of herself set into the cover. She began to record every contact she had with her “Mau,” as she still referred to him, in what would become an obsession.

  The breakup of his marriage was only one of Maurizio’s problems. Aldo and his sons had not taken Maurizio’s coup lying down. They turned over a detailed dossier, complete with names of key witnesses, to the authorities in June 1985, indicating that Maurizio had forged his father’s signature on his share certificates in order to avoid paying inheritance taxes. Aldo’s strategy was to stop Maurizio’s advance on Gucci by showing that he hadn’t legitimately obtained his 50 percent stake in the company.

  The key name in the file was Roberta Cassol, the woman who had worked for Gucci for more than twenty years, starting as a salesgirl and working her way up to become Rodolfo’s assistant. Cassol handled all of Rodolfo’s business and personal affairs, and when she had finished her tasks in the office, she spent long evenings with Rodolfo in his basement film studio, typing and retyping the narration to his film. As his health deteriorated, Cassol also traveled frequently with him to Saint Moritz to help him handle correspondence and other arrangements even when he was out of the office.

  In the early months after Rodolfo’s death, Cassol worked side by side with Maurizio as she had with his father. As he laid out his plans for modernizing the business, Cassol asked Maurizio for a promotion to commercial director. However, their relationship soured. He associated Cassol with his father and the past; he wanted to bring new people with fresh ideas into the company and wanted young, motivated professionals to replace Gucci’s old guard and carry forward his dream. Maurizio turned down Cassol’s request.

  “We need fresh air,” he said to her, and asked her to leave. They argued and left each other on bad terms.

  “In life one must always learn to count to ten,” Cassol said years later, admitting that she hadn’t handled their breakup in the best way. At the time she felt angry that after years of devotion to his father, there was no room for her in Maurizio’s new vision.

  “He couldn’t stand to have anyone around him who reminded him of his past,” Cassol concluded.

  That August, the chief of the Florence police, Fernando Sergio, summoned Cassol to his office. She took the train down from Milan, a three-hour trip. When she arrived in his office, he had a forty-page dossier on his desk that had been carefully prepared by Aldo, Giorgio, and Roberto. They accused Maurizio of having falsified his father’s signature to avoid paying inheritance taxes of some 13 billion lire (or about $8.6 million).

  “Can you confirm what is written here?” he asked her.

  “I can confirm it,” she said nervously.

  “Tell me how things went.”

  Cassol took a deep breath.

  “On May 16, two days after Rodolfo Gucci died, his son, Dr. Maurizio Gucci, and his advisor, Dr. Gian Vittorio Pilone, asked me to imitate Rodolfo Gucci’s signature on five share certificates that had been put in his name. We were in the Gucci offices in Milan on Via Monte Napoleone. I didn’t think I was able to forge the signature, so I suggested that my assistant, Liliana Colombo, do it. Late morning, in Pilone’s house on Corso Matteotti, Colombo executed the signatures. But they didn’t come out well and so the certificates were destroyed and new ones were printed, and two days later, twenty-four hours after Rodolfo’s funeral, again in the home of Gian Vittorio Pilone, she forged the signatures again on share certificates of Guccio Gucci SpA, Gucci Parfums, and several green certificates she didn’t know the identity of.”

  The dossier identified another key witness who had also been summoned by Sergio that day. Giorgio Cantini, a member of Gucci’s administrative staff in Florence, held the keys to the company safe, which was located in Gucci’s Florence offices. An old black Wertheim made in Austria in 1911, the safe contained all of Gucci’s most important documents.

  Cantini told the police chief that the documents had been in the safe from March 14, 1982, until May 16, 1983, when he had delivered them to Maurizio after Rodolfo’s death. When Sergio informed him that the share certificates had been signed by Rodolfo on November 5, 1982, Cantini, incredulous, reacted immediately.

  “Impossibile, signore!” he said. He was the only person, besides Rodolfo himself, who possessed a key to the safe and he had not opened that black box for anyone. It seemed strange to think that the ailing Rodolfo could have traveled to Florence off-hours, opened the safe with his key, and taken and later replaced the share certificates, all without Cantini knowing about it.

  Sergio realized the case was too hot for his jurisdiction and turned it over to his colleagues in Milan, where the alleged forgery had taken place. On September 8, 1985, a Milan court sequestered Maurizio’s 50 percent stake in the company pending an investigation into the alleged forgery. Maurizio—who felt that Cassol had aligned with his relatives in a personal vendetta—issued an indignant statement on Guccio Gucci presidential stationery with the company seal at the top. In the meantime, Aldo, Roberto, and Giorgio—not content with the criminal action they had initiated—also filed civil suits against Maurizio. Working with his lawyers, Maurizio managed to have the sequester removed on September 24, but for him, the big fight had only just begun.

  The year before, after seizing control of the board of directors, Maurizio felt he had been magnanimous with Aldo, giving him the honorary title and letting him stay in his presidential twelfth-floor office in Gucci’s New York building. When Maurizio realized that Aldo had put the dossier on Sergio’s desk, he showed Aldo no mercy. He told De Sole what had happened. Overnight, Domenico De Sole called in workers who boxed up Aldo’s belongings and moved the Guru of Gucci out of his presidential office. When the New York staff reported for work the next morning, Domenico De Sole sat behind Aldo’s curved wooden desk.

  “They started the war again,” De Sole said. “I told Aldo that he had to be rational and make fair decisions—if he started litigation I would fight him back. He kept telling me that he liked what I was doing, he saw that I was putting things in order. But I think he was being set up by his children, even though he himself used to say all the time he thought they were stupid. He attacked us in court and so I threw him out,” De Sole said matter-of-factly. With Maurizio’s approval, he banned Aldo from ent
ering the building and issued a press release saying that Gucci management “has decided to terminate Aldo Gucci’s role in the company.” The statement added that Aldo Gucci had been directed “to take no further actions to represent the company” due to confusion over who represented the business. Then Gucci America filed suit against Aldo and Roberto for allegedly siphoning more than $1 million of company funds for their personal benefit.

  When Bruna Palumbo heard what had happened, she called Maria Manetti Farrow, the former GAC distributor, who had become a friend.

  “Something terrible has happened,” Bruna told Maria, asking her in a trembling voice to light a candle for the Madonna. After thirty-two years, Aldo had been kicked out the door of his own company by his nephew.

  During the 1980s, Gucci became better known for its family wars than for its trademark products. The twists and turns of the family fights filled pages of gossip columns as the press had a field day with the stories. The larger and more sensational the headlines, it seemed, the more customers filed into Gucci stores.

  “This is a new episode of a new, authentically Italian ‘Dynasty’ where the players are all real people, not actors,” wrote La Repubblica, referring to the American television series that had captured a vast audience in Europe. A few days later, La Repubblica wrote, “G isn’t for Gucci, but for guerra,” which means “war” in Italian. And according to London’s Daily Express, “Gucci is a multimillion-dollar company where more chaos reigns than in a Roman pizzeria.”

  “It is the kind of fighting where you go in as pigs and come out sausage,” another paper wrote, quoting an English comedian. Even the Florence-based La Nazione, Gucci’s hometown newspaper, cracked irreverently in a full-page spread on the Gucci dynasty: “Wealth can give you everything—except transfusions of blue blood.”

  By this time Aldo, finally facing up to the seriousness of his legal and fiscal problems in the United States, decided it was time to clean house. In December 1985, Aldo called Giorgio and Roberto to meet with him in Rome. He came straight to the point, telling them he had decided to cede his Gucci shares to them, for two reasons. First, he feared that the impending IRS investigation was going to result in heavy fines on his assets; he wanted to lighten his portfolio, but keep the assets in the family. Second, he was eighty years old and wanted to protect his boys from steep inheritance taxes—especially after what had happened with Maurizio. “Why give money away to the tax authorities?” he reasoned.