The House of Gucci

by Sara G Forden

  On September 24, 1997, De Sole, alarmed, predicted slower than expected growth in the second half of the year. He was the first luxury goods executive to warn of the Asian crisis that would roil international markets over the upcoming months. In response, Gucci’s share price, which had soared to a high of $80.00 in November 1996, plunged some 60 percent over the following weeks to a low of $31.66.

  Tom Ford—who by then had stock options worth millions of dollars—cringed as Gucci’s stock plummeted, and berated De Sole behind closed doors for having been so explicit about the negative outlook, which had overpowered the good news about the Severin Montres acquisition. But De Sole’s warning proved a bellwether for the entire industry—soon Prada, LVMH, and DFS, to name a few, were all struggling to contain their losses in Asia.

  Gucci’s low and trembling stock price meant that for the first time since its flotation Gucci could be snapped up for some $2 billion, sparking rumors that the other captains of the luxury goods industry such as LVMH’s Bernard Arnault, already well known as a takeover baron, were considering a Gucci buyout. In November, despite intensive lobbying by De Sole, Gucci shareholders defeated an anti–hostile takeover measure that would have limited the voting power of a single shareholder to 20 percent, despite the size of the stake. This action left Gucci even more vulnerable—although for the moment all of the potential takeover kings in the business were busy shoring up their own empires in Asia.

  “It’s the shareholders’ privilege to decide,” said De Sole, trying to hide his disappointment at the defeat. “I’ve done my duty.”

  De Sole had survived the Gucci family wars as a champion leading Gucci into new territory. But like all conquerors, he would have to gird himself for new wars.

  17

  ARRESTS

  Her dark, unbrushed hair wild around her head, Alessandra Gucci pushed her mother into the spacious master bathroom of the apartment on Corso Venezia without any of the police officers seeing her. Patrizia and her two daughters had moved into the magnificent apartment a few months after Maurizio’s death, trading her penthouse in Galleria Passarella for Maurizio’s extravagant rented apartment. Alessandra locked the door quickly behind them and pushed her mother into the far corner against the marble tile wall, where she thought no one could hear them.

  “Mamma!” hissed Alessandra, holding her petite mother by the shoulders and staring into Patrizia’s unblinking eyes. “I swear to you that whatever you tell me now will stay a secret between you and me.

  “Tell me!” she said, her fingers digging into Patrizia’s shoulders. “Tell me if you did it! If you tell me, I promise you with all my heart, I won’t tell Nonna Silvana or Allegra.”

  Patrizia looked back into the white face of her oldest daughter. For an instant she studied the troubled blue eyes, eyes that just minutes earlier had been peacefully closed in sleep.

  At 4:30 A.M. on Friday, January 31, 1997, two police cars pulled up in front of the shuttered palazzo at Corso Venezia 38. Filippo Ninni, the dark-haired chief of Milan’s Criminalpol police force, got out and rang the bell of the Gucci apartment, where Patrizia now lived with Alessandra, Allegra, and two servants, as well as Roana, a cocker spaniel, a chirpy, talkative mynah bird, two ducks, two turtles, and a cat.

  “Polizia! Aprite!” he called into the intercom, to no response. The imposing arched wooden door remained shut. After buzzing several times with no results, Ninni, exasperated, dialed the Reggiani telephone number on his cellular phone. He knew Patrizia was home because his men had followed her back to the house after dinner. He also suspected she was awake because he knew from their wiretaps that she had been on the phone with her boyfriend, a local businessman named Renato Venona—Patrizia called him her teddy bear. They had talked until 3:30 A.M. Patrizia, who suffered from chronic insomnia, often spoke to friends on the telephone until dawn—and then slept until noon the next day. A groggy, foreign voice finally answered the buzzing doorbell and Ninni heard the bird squawking excitedly in the background.

  “Listen, this is the police, you must open the door,” Ninni said tersely. A few minutes later a sleepy Filipino maid swung open the heavy door and Ninni and his entourage of officers followed her through the stone courtyard and up the grand marble steps to the Gucci apartment, their footsteps ringing out in the early morning silence. As the officers ogled the plush furnishings, the maid ushered them down the hall into the living room and went to call Patrizia.

  Calm and cool despite the dawn incursion, Patrizia entered the room a few minutes later, wearing a pale blue dressing gown. Of the officers gathered in her living room, she recognized only a tall blond carabiniere, Giancarlo Togliatti, from the interrogations after Maurizio was murdered. Two years had gone by since Maurizio’s death and no suspects had been announced. Patrizia had a contact in the police department whom she called from time to time for updates on the investigation, but lately he had had nothing to report. She nodded to Togliatti and fixed her gaze blankly on Ninni, who was clearly in charge. He introduced himself and showed her the arrest warrant in his hands.

  “Signora Reggiani, I must place you under arrest for murder,” said Ninni, his voice like a deep rumble of thunder. Ninni, a seasoned investigator who had dedicated his career to fighting the ballooning drug trade in Milan, felt more at ease tracking mafia bosses and raiding abandoned warehouses than standing in Patrizia Reggiani’s sumptuous living room. He looked into her clear, expressionless eyes.

  “Yes, I see,” she said vaguely, glancing disinterestedly at the document in Ninni’s hands.

  “Do you know why we are here?” Ninni asked, taken aback by her nonchalance.

  “Yes,” she said impassively, “it is about the death of my husband, isn’t it?”

  “I am sorry, signora,” Ninni said. “You are under arrest. You must come with us.”

  Minutes later, upstairs in her bedroom, Alessandra woke in terror to find two policemen in her room. They explained that her mother had been placed under arrest and would be taken away with them.

  “They went through everything in my room, my stuffed animals, my computer. Then we went downstairs.” A startled and distraught Allegra joined them shortly with another investigator. As Allegra sobbed softly in the living room, Ninni ordered Patrizia to get dressed and come with him. That’s when Alessandra followed her and pulled her mother into the bathroom. The mother and the daughter—the one a younger reflection of the other—stared at each other for an instant.

  “I swear to you, Alessandra, I swear, I didn’t do it,” Patrizia said as one of the officers knocked on the door. While Patrizia dressed, supervised by a female officer, the other agents searched the apartment, sequestering papers and a stack of Patrizia’s leather-bound diaries. When she emerged, they all stared at her in disbelief. Patrizia had donned gleaming gold and diamond jewelry and a floor-length mink coat. In her manicured hands she grasped a leather Gucci handbag.

  “Well?” she said, surveying her astounded audience. “I’m ready!”

  “I’ll be back tonight,” she said crisply, turning to kiss her daughters. As she walked out, she slipped a pair of black sunglasses over her eyes, which were unusually pale and vulnerable looking without their customary shield of heavy black liner and mascara.

  Any compassion Ninni might have felt for Patrizia evaporated in that moment. “Where does she think we are going, to a masked ball?” he asked himself as he led the way down the marble steps and back out through the courtyard.

  Thin and wiry, with piercing dark eyes and a severe mustache, Ninni had a reputation for being a determined, no-nonsense investigator, passionate about police work. His main adversaries were the southern Italian families that had migrated to Milan and taken advantage of the growing drug trade flowing out of the Balkans. Many of these families had lost out in clan wars back home or had simply come north in search of work and found quick, easy money in drugs.

  As Ninni advanced through the ranks of the Milan police corps, he often thought of Modesto,
a Sicilian who had come to Milan with a large family to maintain. In the early days, Modesto circled the city streets as an organ-grinder, sending his seven or eight children to beg for tips from passers-by. Soon Modesto traded in his barrel organ for more lucrative pursuits, becoming one of the most important drug lords in the Lombardy region surrounding Milan.

  Ninni also came from southern Italy, from a small town outside Taranto in the Puglia region located on the heel of the boot of the Italian peninsula. As a boy, he devoured crime novels and police films, attentively studying all the techniques the investigators used. At family reunions, he peppered two of his relatives who worked for the police with questions about their work. Ninni even dropped out of a Rome university to enroll at the police academy, infuriating his father, a laborer at the naval shipyard.

  “Are you crazy?” Ninni’s father thundered at him. “Do you want to get yourself killed? Police work is dangerous,” he fumed. But Ninni insisted—passionate about becoming a policeman, he also wanted financial independence. His father still supported his two teenage brothers at home and he hated asking for money for schoolbooks. His father finally agreed, accompanying him to Rome the day he entered the academy. At the end of the first week, Ninni’s father went back to see how his son was faring. The minute he saw Ninni’s drawn face he told him to pack his bags and come home. Ninni didn’t hesitate.

  “No,” he said to his father, shaking his head. “I managed to get in here, I knew it was going to be rough and I’m going to leave when I graduate, unless they kick me out first.”

  Not only did Ninni survive the academy, he made his first arrest even before starting his first job—on the train north to Milan from Rome. A young Gypsy had just pickpocketed a carabiniere and kicked and screamed and carried on as the young officer tried in vain to arrest her and get his wallet back.

  “I’ll show you what to do,” said Ninni curtly to the carabiniere as he yanked the Gypsy’s bag out of her hand and tossed it onto the platform below. As the startled woman scrambled after her bag, Ninni arrested her and retrieved the wallet.

  Not all of Ninni’s arrests were so easy. In Milan he fought the warring factions of the calabrese mob—the clans of Salvatore Batti and Giuseppe Falchi—whose warfare had escalated into daily shootouts. But Ninni’s hands-on approach, nerves of steel, and sense of ethics won him respect from colleagues and clan members alike. In 1991 alone, working with just four men, he made more than five hundred arrests. Ninni treated the people he arrested with dignity, believing that even criminals should be given respect. His humanity not only won him a compliment from one of Milan’s most dangerous drug lords, it saved his life. During one trial, the Calabrian boss Salvatore Batti looked at him across the courtroom and said: “Dotto’ Ninni, se voi non fuste una persona onesta, avesse la morte,” or “If you weren’t an honest man, you’d have been killed already.”

  With Patrizia in the back seat, the police car sped through Milan’s empty streets to the Criminalpol headquarters in Piazza San Sepolcro, a historic square behind the stock market that dates back to the Roman era. A police station was the last thing one might expect to be housed in the three-story Palazzo Castani, which rose around a central courtyard graced with a vaulted portico around three sides and dated in part back to the Renaissance.

  Ninni and his squad ushered Patrizia in through the curving stone entryway between the sculpted profiles of Roman emperors Adriano and Nerva. High on the beam overhead a chiseled Latin inscription read “Elegantiae publicae, commoditati privatae,” or “For public elegance and private comfort,” while another inscription in ancient Greek wished good luck to those who entered.

  Ninni turned Patrizia over to his right-hand man, Inspector Carmine Gallo, a short, stocky man with dark, tender eyes. Gallo led Patrizia down a winding dark hallway and into an office furnished austerely with metal desks and file cabinets. She glanced at the heavily barred windows set high up in the wall as Gallo booked her. A photograph of murdered mafia-fighting judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino looked down on them. Shortly, Patrizia’s mother, Silvana, arrived with Alessandra and Allegra, faces drawn. They too were ushered into Gallo’s office as Ninni appeared in the doorway, staring at Patrizia, resplendent in gold and fur, sitting near Gallo’s desk. He felt a wave of disgust.

  “I have always tried to help the people I have arrested,” said Ninni later, “but I looked at her and felt something that I had never felt before. I saw her as a woman with nothing inside, a woman who defined herself by the things around her, a woman who thought money could buy her everything. I’m not proud of this, but I couldn’t bring myself to talk to her—something that has never happened to me in my career.”

  Ninni turned to Silvana, his dark mustache bristling with irritation.

  “Signora, it’s not a good idea to send your daughter to jail dressed like that, with all those valuables,” Ninni said.

  “They’re hers; if she wants to take them it’s up to her, nobody can stop her,” retorted Silvana, frowning.

  “Do as you like, but the prison authorities will confiscate them the minute she arrives. She won’t be allowed to keep them with her,” said Ninni as he turned heel and walked out the door.

  “You’d better let me take these,” clucked Silvana as she removed Patrizia’s heavy gold earrings and chunky gold and diamond bracelets and slipped the mink coat off her daughter’s shoulders and onto her own. Then she poked through the Gucci handbag.

  “What in the world do you have in here?” she asked her daughter crossly, pulling out lip pencils, containers of makeup, and face cream.

  “You won’t be needing these,” Silvana said as Patrizia started to shiver. Inspector Gallo looked up from his paperwork and offered her his jacket, a sporty green windbreaker, which she accepted willingly.

  “I felt sorry for her,” Gallo admitted later. Patrizia returned the coat after being admitted to jail. “She had come to the end of her road. She had done all that she could, she was at the end.”

  That same morning, four other people were arrested around Italy and charged with the Gucci murder. Patrizia’s longtime friend Pina Auriemma was arrested in Somma Vesuviana near Naples by a squad of plainclothes policemen and later that day was transported to Milan. Ivano Savioni, a Milan hotel porter, and Benedetto Ceraulo, a mechanic, were also brought to the Criminalpol building in Piazza San Sepolcro. Orazio Cicala, a bankrupt restaurant manager who was already in jail in the Milan suburb of Monza on unrelated drug charges, was served his papers the next day. The startling news was splashed all over the press: after two years, Maurizio Gucci’s ex-wife and four unlikely accomplices had been arrested for his murder.

  Just two months earlier, the investigation into Maurizio’s death had been going nowhere. Milan prosecutor Carlo Nocerino had asked for more time, but he grew despondent as the weeks went by and no serious leads emerged—until the evening of Wednesday, January 8, 1997. Filippo Ninni was working late, as he often did, when the night watchman rang saying there was a call for him.

  “Capo, Boss, there’s a guy on the line. He won’t give his name, but he says it’s urgent and he won’t talk to anybody but you.”

  At that hour, all the other offices at the Criminalpol headquarters were dark. Ninni had turned on his desk lamp, which he preferred to the fluorescent lights overhead, and was poring through the stacks of files laid out on his large, glass-topped desk, amid computers he had fought to obtain from the police department in order to quickly execute cross-checks and otherwise speed up his work. Over the faded blue wallpaper, Ninni had carefully hung the more than twenty diplomas, certificates, and merit plaques he had earned throughout his career. In the center of the room stood a worn leather couch flanked by two armchairs arranged around a low coffee table where he had placed his prize possession: a hand-carved chess set made of soapstone. Ninni liked the way the smooth cream-and beige-colored chess pieces felt in his hands. He challenged his officers to a game from time to time, believing it kept his mind sharp.


  That evening Ninni was reviewing the files of a drug case he had almost finished. Dubbed Operation Europe, the investigation had begun with a single Italian drug dealer who was at large. Instead of arresting him immediately, Ninni and his team tracked him. So far, their work had led to the arrests of more than twenty people across Europe and the confiscation of more than 360 kilos (792 pounds) of cocaine, 10 kilos (22 pounds) of heroin, and an arsenal of firearms. When they dug up the stash of drugs, which had been buried on the grounds of a small northern Italian business that operated earthmoving machinery, Ninni was stunned. A seemingly endless parade of tin containers filled with plastic bags of cocaine just kept on coming out of the ground.

  He closed the Operation Europe file, curious to know who could be calling him so late. He told the night watchman to put the call through.

  “Is this Ninni?” a low voice rasped, like the sound of a heavy metal gate being dragged over concrete.

  “Yes, who is this?”

  “I must speak with you face-to-face,” said the scraping voice. Ninni sensed urgency, fear, and desperation. “I have important information I must give you. I will tell you everything I know,” the voice insisted.

  Ninni, at once intrigued and perplexed, asked, “Who are you? How do I know I can trust you? I have enemies out there—at least tell me what it is about!”

  “Is it enough if I say it’s about the Gucci murder?” The scraping voice had turned into a wheeze.

  Ninni snapped to attention. His colleagues over at the carabinieri had been investigating the mysterious murder of the former businessman for almost two years with no breakthroughs. The magistrate, Carlo Nocerino, had returned the year before from Switzerland, where he had gone to investigate Gucci’s business affairs, with no leads. Checking rumors that Gucci had invested in a string of gambling casinos, Nocerino discovered that the “casinos” were really a luxury hotel with a small game hall in the Swiss resort of Crans-Montana. Everything was aboveboard—no trace of sinister business dealings. All of Gucci’s other business initiatives since he had sold his family company were only in the initial stages. Nocerino had also flown to Paris to interview Delfo Zorzi, who had agreed under strict conditions to answer prosecutors’ questions about the Piazza Fontana bombing—and also agreed to speak with Nocerino about the Gucci loan. Zorzi confirmed that Gucci had paid back in full the famous $40 million he found “under the floorboards.” Nocerino closed the “business” file on Gucci in May, but he had no other serious leads. That very morning, Ninni had read in the papers that Nocerino had gotten an extension to continue the investigation.