The House of Gucci

by Sara G Forden

  “If you have a good lead, often the best thing to do is just play it out,” Ninni said later. “I had everything set up: ‘Carlos,’ tapped telephones, bugs in the car—we knew who they all were and what they had done. All they had to do was talk.”

  Ninni didn’t get all the time he wanted. On January 30, one of the agents at the listening post called him in.

  “Capo! I think you should listen to this.” He played a conversation that morning between Patrizia and one of her lawyers.

  “There are dark clouds gathering over this family,” the lawyer said ominously, although the subject of the call was an apparently innocuous debt Patrizia had run up with a local jeweler. After an emergency summit with Nocerino and his superiors, they decided they had enough evidence to cut the investigation short. They planned the arrests for dawn the following morning.

  “We thought she was onto us,” said Ninni later. “We were afraid she could slip out of Italy and then we’d never get her,” said Ninni.

  When the agents brought Savioni into the Criminalpol headquarters at Piazza San Sepolcro the morning of January 31, 1997, Ninni asked them to bring him into his office. Savioni slumped into the chair in front of Ninni’s desk, his hands handcuffed in front of him. Ninni asked one of his officers to take off Savioni’s handcuffs. He offered him a cigarette, which Savioni took.

  “You lost this time,” Ninni drawled. “We are one step ahead of you—we know everything. Your only hope is to confess, and if you do, things will go easier.”

  “I really thought he was a friend,” said Savioni, shaking his head and puffing on the cigarette. He had figured out that Carpanese had gone to the police. “I’m sure it was him. He sold me out. He betrayed me.”

  At that moment, a knock sounded on the door. Ninni looked up and saw the blond, blue-eyed Inspector Collenghi.

  “Ahhh, look who’s here! Savioni, a friend of yours,” said Ninni, smiling mischievously.

  Savioni turned around and recognized “Carlos,” the Colombian with the eyes of ice.

  “No, Carlos, they got you too?” he blurted.

  “Ciao, Savioni,” said “Carlos,” in perfect Italian. “I am Ispettore Collenghi.”

  Savioni brought his fist up to his forehead. “What an idiot I am,” he murmured.

  “As you can see, we played our hand well this time!” said Ninni. “Would you like to hear your own words? I can play them for you. Your only hope is to confess,” repeated Ninni. “The court will be more lenient with you if you do.”

  18

  TRIAL

  Just before 9:30 A.M. the morning of June 2, 1998, the door to the right of the judge’s bench opened suddenly and five female prison guards wearing jaunty blue berets escorted Patrizia into a packed courtroom in the Milan courthouse. A murmur rippled through the crowd. Photographers and television camera operators surged forward as she walked in, wearing the startled look of a deer frozen in car head lights. Her lawyers, in sweeping, tassel-trimmed black robes and ruffled white bibs, rose from their seats in the front row to greet her.

  The trial for the murder of Maurizio Gucci had already been in session for several days, but that gray Tuesday morning marked Patrizia’s first appearance in court. She had preferred to sit out the preliminaries in her San Vittore jail cell, as was her right. Patrizia consulted briefly with her lawyers, two high-profile criminal defense attorneys. The distinguished, white-haired Gaetano Pecorella would be elected a deputato to the Italian parliament before the trial was over, while the perpetually suntanned Gianni Dedola defended leading industrialists, including television magnate and former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Both attorneys had urged her to come to court well before she would take the stand in her own defense in order to become comfortable with the courtroom atmosphere.

  Patrizia walked straight past prosecutor Carlo Nocerino and the rows of lawyers and journalists behind him to take a seat on the last bench. Behind her, curious onlookers strained to get a good view, pressing against the waist-high wooden barrier that separated the trial’s participants from the general public. To her left and peering in at her between the blue-capped guards surrounding her, journalists scribbled every detail of her appearance in their notepads. Gone were all traces of the society queen dripping in jewels and self-confidence. At nearly fifty years old, pale and unkempt, the Patrizia who entered the courtroom that day had lost her bearings. Never had she been so on display, yet nothing had prepared her for what she must face. Her short, dark hair lay uncombed around her face, which was puffy from medications. She looked down at her hands, avoiding the staring eyes, twirling around her right wrist a string of pale green rosary beads given to her by the popular healing priest Monsignor Miligno. On her left, she wore a blue plastic Swatch watch. Though her closets back in Corso Venezia overflowed with designer suits, with shelves full of matching handbags and pumps, that morning Patrizia wore simple blue cotton slacks, a polo shirt, and a blue-and-white striped cotton sweater wrapped around her shoulders. Ever conscious of her diminutive height, on her tiny feet she wore pointy white leather mules, size four, with four-inch heels.

  Outside, television trucks, motors humming, parked in front of the courthouse, ready to broadcast live. Faced in white marble with the inscription IVSTITIA marching across its facade, the hulking building had been designed by Marcello Piacentini, a leading architect during the Mussolini regime. Churches, gardens, and two convents had been razed to build the courthouse, which occupied an entire city block on the east side of Milan. Each day, a teeming rush of people swarmed to the courthouse, parking fleets of bicycles, scooters, and cars outside and flooding up the concrete steps to deal with the more unpleasant aspects of life. Inside, kilometers of corridors wound around a main foyer whose high columns reached up several stories. From there, winding halls linked some sixty-five courtrooms and twelve hundred offices in a kafkaesque maze. Directly behind the courthouse stood Santa Maria della Pace, the basilica where Maurizio had married Patrizia twenty-six years before.

  For weeks before the trial, the Italian papers and television stations had produced scintillating accounts of the pending face-off between the “Black Widow,” as they called Patrizia, and the “Black Witch,” as they dubbed Pina, despite Auriemma’s protests that she had no real occult powers. In March, two months before the trial started, Pina broke her stony, fifteen-month silence and confessed. She said Patrizia had delivered a secret message to her cell via another inmate, offering to “shower her cell with gold” if she took all the blame for Maurizio’s murder. Pina, offended and angry, said she told Patrizia to go to hell—and told her lawyer to call Nocerino.

  “I’m an old woman and I’m going to be here a long time! What good is two billion lire [or about $1.5 million] to me in jail?” fumed Pina, who had turned fifty-two in March.

  Both Pina and Patrizia were held in the women’s section of the San Vittore prison, located on the western edge of central Milan. Savioni, the hotel doorman, and Ceraulo, the alleged triggerman, were also detained there, while Cicala, the former pizzeria owner, was locked up in Monza, just outside Milan. San Vittore held nearly two thousand people within its gray walls; it had been built in 1879 to house just eight hundred inmates. Copied from the Philadelphia model, long famous among penal experts, the facility consisted of a central tower from which four stone wings emanated in a star shape. Only about a hundred of all the inmates were women. They were housed separately in a low, concrete building that faced the main entrance, running between the two front wings. Armed guards paced the tops of the high external walls that enclosed the prison and others manned control towers at each corner. The guards watched as the inmates streamed into the courtyards for exercise every morning and afternoon while just a few yards away, on the other side of the walls, Milan’s residents motored back and forth on the city’s busy streets. The entrance to San Vittore looked like the gateway to a medieval fortress. Rose-colored stones bordered the high arched door and upstairs windows, while forked battlements flourishe
d along the top of the main building.

  San Vittore had become the symbol of Tangentopoli, the Clean Hands corruption cleanup scandal. Crusading magistrates had had leading politicians and captains of industry arrested and jailed to pressure them to confess to having paid and received kickbacks worth millions of dollars. However, their pretrial detention in this forbidding place alongside convicted drug dealers and mafiosi stirred up a heated civil rights controversy. And protesters charged that pretrial detention had caused two suicides among the incarcerated politicians and industrialists.

  As Patrizia’s lawyers battled in vain to have her released to house arrest for medical and psychological reasons, citing periodic epileptic attacks following the brain tumor operation, each day at San Vittore took Patrizia further away from the gilded world she had conquered and lost.

  In the beginning, Patrizia had clashed with the other inmates. “They think I am privileged, spoiled, and have had everything in life, so it is right that I must pay,” she said. She asked for permission to stay alone during recess in a separate garden after the other women had jeered and spit at her and tossed a volleyball onto her head during the group exercise breaks in the main courtyard. San Vittore’s director, an understanding man who tried to keep morale high despite the crowded conditions, agreed. But when Patrizia asked permission to install a refrigerator in her cell to store the homemade meatloaf and other delicacies her mother, Silvana, brought her on Fridays, he refused. When she offered to donate a refrigerator for every cell, he refused again. Patrizia sighed, resigned herself to the bland prison fare, and watched television late into the night inside the gray walls of cell number 12, a non-smoking cell.

  Her third-floor cell measured no more than six square meters, hardly seventy square feet. Two bunk beds, two single beds, a table, two chairs, and two closets lined the walls, leaving a skinny passageway in the middle. A small doorway at the far end opened into a tiny room with a sink and toilet in the far corner. In the other corner stood a table and chairs for meals delivered on trays by prison personnel three times a day through an opening in the iron cell door. Patrizia curled up in her bottom bunk where she had taped up a photograph of Padre Pio, a celebrated priest destined for beatification whose image had become highly commercialized.

  In the beginning, she refused to socialize with her cellmates—Daniela, another Italian woman who had been jailed on charges of fraudulent bankruptcy, and Maria, a Romanian girl accused of prostitution. She isolated herself in the lower bunk on the right, flipping through magazines and tearing out pictures of outfits she liked. Silvana did all she could to pamper her, bringing her nightgowns and lingerie in chiffon and silk that became the envy of her cellmates. Silvana also brought lipsticks, face creams, and Patrizia’s favorite perfume, Paloma Picasso. Patrizia wrote loving letters to her daughters, sealing the envelopes with stickers bearing hearts and flowers and the name Patrizia Reggiani Gucci—which she refused to drop. She prohibited Alessandra and Allegra from visiting her except at Christmas and Easter, saying jail wasn’t the right place for two young girls to visit their mother.

  Twice a week, prison guards walked her down the long hallway so she could call home from the orange pay phones at one end. In addition to a library, sewing workshop, and chapel, San Vittore boasted a hair salon, where Patrizia went once a month. There, with authorization from the prison director, famed Italian hair guru Cesare Ragazzi tended to the hair implant that covered Patrizia’s scar from her brain surgery. At night, suffering from insomnia, she read comic books to help herself fall asleep. The entire time she thought about her upcoming trial.

  Pina, afraid that Patrizia had decided to blame her, broke their pact of silence and told the entire sordid story to Nocerino, pointing her finger at Patrizia as the instigator of the murder plan. Pina’s confession confirmed what Savioni had said in police inspector Ninni’s office the day of his arrest. Nocerino was delighted. Despite his futile two-year foray into Maurizio’s business affairs, by the time the trial opened in May 1998, he had accumulated a staggering amount of evidence against Patrizia in forty-three bulging cardboard filing boxes. The defense attorneys had had to pay a small fortune to photocopy the contents and the court clerks repeatedly had to wheel the boxes in and out of the courtroom on metal carts. In addition to the confessions of Pina and Savioni, Nocerino had thousands of pages of transcripts from telephone conversations, including Patrizia’s and those of her codefendants, as well as depositions from friends, servants, psychics, and professionals who had known the Gucci couple. In the fall of 1997, investigators had even raided Patrizia’s jail cell, finding a statement from her Monte Carlo bank account, code-named “Lotus B,” that showed withdrawals corresponding to the sums Pina and Savioni said they received. In the margin next to the figures, Patrizia had written “P” for Pina. Nocerino even had Patrizia’s leather-bound diaries, which police had confiscated when they arrested her. But he had no direct admission of involvement from Patrizia, and this troubled him.

  From her seat at the back of the courtroom, Patrizia blankly scanned the brown steel cage—a standard feature in Italian courtrooms—that ran along the right side of the high-ceilinged room. Even though in Italy, as in the United States, defendants are considered innocent until proven guilty, people charged with violent crimes must sit out their trials in the cage. Inside, Benedetto Ceraulo, the accused triggerman, and Orazio Cicala, the alleged driver of the getaway car, hung their arms on the bars and scanned the sea of journalists, attorneys, and curious onlookers. Ceraulo, forty-six, dressed neatly in button-down shirt and jacket, his dark hair recently clipped and combed, scowled proudly out at the crowd with an unsettling stare. He had declared himself innocent—and there was no direct proof of his role in the murder, though Nocerino was confident he had enough circumstantial evidence for a conviction, including Savioni’s confession naming Benedetto as the killer. The balding, fifty-nine-year-old Cicala stooped next to him, his oversize jacket hanging from his shoulders as though on a hanger; after two years in jail, the bankrupt pizza man had lost more than thirty pounds and most of his hair. A series of frosted, louvered windows above the cage provided the only ventilation in the room. Black marble tile reached up the walls about eight feet, giving way to dingy white stucco covering the rest of the walls and ceiling.

  Patrizia refused to look at Pina, who sat on a bench a few rows in front of her sporting a new red hairstyle and a cotton sweater with a tiger motif. From time to time, Pina leaned over to whisper with her lawyer, Paolo Traini, a portly, smiling man who punctuated his speech by waving his bright blue reading glasses, which started a fashion trend among other lawyers in the Milan courthouse. Ivano Savioni, the doorman of the Hotel Adry, his face sullen and his hair gleaming with gel, slumped silently on the back bench to Patrizia’s right, wearing a black suit and pink shirt and surrounded by male guards.

  A buzzer sounded and the murmur hushed as Judge Renato Ludovici Samek swept into the courtroom followed by his assistant magistrate, both wearing the customary black robes and white bibs of the judiciary. After the two magistrates came six civilian jurors and two alternates, dressed in business clothes and each wearing a ceremonial sash draped from one shoulder across the chest, striped in the white, red, and green of the Italian flag. They all filed in behind the wooden podium that curved around the raised platform in the front of the courtroom. Samek sat down and the jurors took their seats on either side of him and his assistant. Samek looked out sternly over the reading glasses perched on the tip of his nose, as courtroom guards ushered out television camera operators and photographers who had been banned from the actual proceedings.

  “If I hear another telefonino ringing, the owner will be asked to leave,” Samek said, glaring out at the assembly after unsuccessfully trying to open the hearing over the rings of a cellular telephone. A trim man with a slightly receding hairline and unflappable, thin-lipped expression, Samek had become famous in Milan’s judicial community for the day when gunshots broke out in the high-se
curity bunker courtroom under San Vittore as he presided over the 1988 trial of mafia boss Angelo Epaminonda—a dangerous man with a long string of homicides on his record. As terrified attorneys and legal assistants dove for cover under tables and chairs, Samek jumped to his feet, shouting for order—the only person left standing in the entire room. The shooting, a settling of accounts among clansmen, left two carabinieri seriously wounded. To show that the state would not be shaken by such violence, Samek suspended the trial only momentarily and resumed the hearing that same afternoon.

  During the Gucci murder trial, Samek proved a demanding taskmaster, holding the court to an intensive three-day-a-week hearing schedule and meeting with the jury during off days to review the evidence. Samek, who would decide the case along with the jurors, as is the practice in the Italian court system, pushed for clarity throughout the trial. Intolerant of lazy questions or evasive answers, he often took over the interrogation of witnesses himself—something unheard of in a U.S. courtroom. The defense attorneys compared Samek under their breath with the unyielding, larger-than-life marble bas-relief of Sant’ Ambrogio, Milan’s patron saint, that looms high on the wall behind the podium. In his right hand, Sant’ Ambrogio raises a leather whip with seven knotted strands, sending two oafish figures tumbling with his blows.

  In the following weeks and months, Italians did not miss a detail of the Gucci trial in newspapers and on television as reports of the testimony unfolded into an epic story of love, disillusionment, power, wealth, luxury, jealousy, and greed.

  The Gucci murder trial became the Italian equivalent of the O. J. Simpson case in the United States. “This is not a murder case,” muttered Patrizia’s attorney, Dedola, “this story makes a Greek tragedy look like a children’s story.”