The House of Gucci

by Sara G Forden

  “I didn’t respect him anymore,” she said softly after a brief silence. “He wasn’t the man I had married, he didn’t have the same ideals anymore,” said Patrizia, describing how shocked she had been at Maurizio’s treatment of Aldo, his leaving home, his business failures.

  “Then why did you write down his every phone call, every meeting with your daughters in your diary?” asked Nocerino, reciting examples for the court. “July 18: Mau calls and then disappears; July 23: Mau calls; July 27: Mau calls; September 10: Mau shows up; September 11: Mau calls, he meets the girls, we talk; September 12: Mau goes to the movies; September 16: Mau calls; September 17: Mau meets the girls at school.”

  “Perhaps—perhaps I didn’t have anything better to do,” answered Patrizia limply.

  “It doesn’t seem, from these diary entries at least, that Maurizio had abandoned the family, the girls,” Nocerino said.

  “He would have moments of tremendous interest,” Patrizia explained, “and he would call the girls and say, ‘OK, I’m taking you to the movies this afternoon,’ and they would go there and wait for him and he wouldn’t show up and he would call at night and say, ‘Oh, amore, I’m so sorry, I forgot. How about tomorrow?’ And it would go on like that,” Patrizia said.

  “What about the phrases—‘PARADEISOS,’ on the day Maurizio died; ‘There is no crime which cannot be bought,’ ten days before the murder—how can you explain these?” Nocerino asked.

  “Ever since I started working on my manuscript,” Patrizia answered coolly, “I wrote down quotations and turns of phrase that attracted me or intrigued me, nothing more,” she answered.

  “And the threats written in your diaries, the cassette you sent him in which you say you won’t give him a minute of peace?” Nocerino asked.

  Patrizia’s dark eyes narrowed.

  “How would you feel if you were in a clinic and the doctors gave you only a few days to live and your mother took your children to your husband and said, ‘Your wife is dying,’ and he said, ‘I’m too busy, I don’t have time,’ and the girls had to watch you being wheeled away and they didn’t know if you were going to come out of that room alive? How would you feel?”

  “And the relationship with Paola Franchi?” Nocerino pressed on.

  “Every time we spoke, Maurizio would tell me, ‘Say, did you know that I’m seeing a woman who is the complete opposite of you? She’s tall, blond, green-eyed, and always walks three steps behind me!’” Patrizia said. “From what I could tell, he had had other blond women who walked three steps behind him. I was different.”

  “And were you worried that they might get married?”

  “No, because Maurizio told me, ‘The day we get divorced, I don’t want to have another woman at my side, not even by mistake!’”

  Patrizia said the first she knew about the plot to murder Maurizio was from Pina, a few days after he died. Out walking, the two women had stopped in front of the Invernizzi gardens, behind the Corso Venezia apartment, to watch the pink flamingos walking daintily across the manicured lawn. Patrizia described their conversation to the court.

  “So, are you happy about the nice present we gave you?” Pina said. “Maurizio is gone, you are free. Savioni and I don’t have a lira—you are the goose with the golden eggs.” Pina—her friend of more than twenty-five years, the woman who had been at her side at Allegra’s birth, who had helped her through Maurizio’s departure and her brain surgery—became “arrogant, rough, and vulgar,” threatening her and her daughters if she didn’t pay five hundred million lire for the death of Maurizio.

  “I felt sick, I asked her if she had gone crazy, I said I would go to the police. She said if I did, she would accuse me. ‘Everybody knows you went around talking about finding a killer for Maurizio Gucci.’ She told me, ‘Don’t forget—there has been one death, but there could easily be three [meaning Patrizia and the two girls].’ She said she wanted five hundred million lire,” Patrizia said as Pina, seated a few rows back, snorted and spread her arms wide, shaking her head in disgust at Patrizia’s words.

  “Why didn’t you rebel?” asked Nocerino. “Why didn’t you go to the police?”

  Patrizia looked at him as though the answer were obvious. “Because I was afraid of the scandal that would explode, just as it did,” she answered. “Besides,” she added nonchalantly, “Maurizio’s death was something I had wanted for so many years—it seemed to me a fair price to pay for his death.” (Italics added.)

  Nocerino reminded Patrizia that in the months after Maurizio’s death she and Pina had talked on the phone almost daily, taken a cruise together on the Creole, and gone to Marrakesh on vacation.

  “Your relationship was the picture of an intimate friendship between two women, rather than of a victim being blackmailed,” Nocerino pointed out.

  “Pina warned me that the phones were almost certainly tapped and told me that I should not betray any tension in my voice or words. She said our behavior had to seem as normal as it had always been,” Patrizia retorted without batting an eyelash.

  In September, Silvana took the stand to defend her daughter. Dressed simply in brown slacks and matching checked jacket, her red hair teased and smoothed back from her forehead, she described Patrizia as “putty in Pina’s hands—Pina decided everything, from what they would have for dinner to where they would go on vacation.” Her gnarled fingers resting on a silver-tipped cane and dark brown eyes dense and dull, she said, “Pina had drunk her brain.” Silvana also admitted that Patrizia talked openly about finding a killer for Maurizio—and that she, Silvana, had thought nothing of it.

  “She would say it the way she would have said, ‘Would you like to go have tea at Sant’ Ambroeus?’ I never gave much weight to her words, unfortunately….”

  Samek raised his eyes over his spectacles to peer down at Silvana.

  “‘Unfortunately,’ why?” he asked her.

  “Because I should have made her stop saying such stupid things,” Silvana replied.

  “Hmmmm,” mused Samek out loud. “That ‘unfortunately’ doesn’t convince me.”

  In late October, Nocerino launched into his closing arguments, which lasted two days and spared no detail of the complex trial. Samek took off his reading glasses and settled into his high-backed leather chair. The witness chair sat empty at the front of the courtroom, and the single television camera had returned, trained on Nocerino.

  “Patrizia Martinelli Reggiani has categorically rejected the accusation that she ordered the murder of Maurizio Gucci,” Nocerino said, his words ringing in the lofty courtroom. “She has offered us her version of the facts, saying that Pina Auriemma gave her a present and threatened her to make her pay for it. This is her defense.

  “But her defense is not credible,” Nocerino said softly, before raising his voice again.

  “Patrizia Martinelli Reggiani was a woman of high society whose pride had been deeply wounded at the hands of her husband. Only his death could cauterize those wounds!” he cried to the court. “And after his death she talks of the serenity she finally feels, she writes the word ‘PARADEISOS’ in her diary—this tells us about her spirit,” Nocerino said. In closing he asked the court for life sentences—the severest punishment under Italian law—for all five defendants. Patrizia promptly announced a hunger strike in protest.

  Patrizia’s daughters, Alessandra and Allegra, came to court for the first time the day her defenders stood up to deliver their closing arguments. The two girls huddled on the back bench with Silvana, while Patrizia remained up front in between her lawyers.

  When Patrizia’s lawyer, Dedola, began to speak, he filled the high room with his trembling baritone.

  “There was a thief who stole Patrizia’s desire to see her husband dead!” Dedola intoned. “A thief who took things into her own hands! That thief is in this courtroom. The thief is Pina Auriemma!”

  During breaks in Dedola’s closing oratory, Patrizia moved back to hug and kiss her daughters—whom she had seen only
a few times since her dawn arrest. As she embraced the girls, they were surrounded by the flashing strobe lights of the paparazzi who crowded into the courtroom. The girls stroked Patrizia’s cheeks and handed over a bag of carrots they had brought for her so she could eat something despite her hunger strike. They chatted awkwardly in undertones, pretending to ignore the crowd of onlookers who were robbing them of any privacy they might have hoped for.

  On November 3, the last day of the trial, the sky, the buildings, and the streets all seemed the same shade of dirty gray, a not-so-uncommon phenomenon of Milan winters. Samek opened proceedings promptly at 9:30 A.M. and announced that the verdict would be handed down that afternoon. Reporters rushed out of the courtroom to notify their head offices. Samek then allowed each of the defendants to make a statement.

  Patrizia, wearing a black pin-striped Yves Saint Laurent suit and black vinyl hooded jacket lined with silvery fabric, stood up first. She had discarded a statement prepared by her lawyers, preferring to use her own words.

  “I have been naive to the point of stupidity,” she said. “I found myself involved against my will and I deny categorically that I was an accomplice.” Then she repeated an old adage she attributed to Aldo Gucci: “Never let even a friendly wolf into your chicken coop; sooner or later it will get hungry.” Silvana clucked her tongue at her daughter’s willfulness and refusal to read the lawyer’s statement.

  Roberto and Giorgio Gucci, each watching her on the news separately that night—Roberto in Florence, Giorgio in Rome—exploded in fury that she had invoked their father’s name in the sordid story she had set into motion.

  By late afternoon, the sky had thickened with fog and a steady drizzle. A stream of journalists, cameramen, and television trucks made their way to the courthouse, where Sant’ Ambrogio’s marble eyes stared grimly down on the packed courtroom. The room filled with murmurs as the blue-bereted guards brought in Patrizia and her four codefendants. She settled into the bench between her lawyers, her eyes wide, her skin pale and waxy. As journalists and cameramen jostled for space, Nocerino put a hand on the arm of Togliatti, the young carabiniere who had worked by his side during the past three years. For an instant, the dark head moved close to the blond one as Nocerino whispered in Togliatti’s ear.

  “Mi raccomando, whatever happens, control yourself. Don’t let yourself go,” said Nocerino, knowing that Togliatti, who could be emotional, had invested the past three years of his life in searching for the solution to the Gucci murder—Nocerino didn’t want any unseemly reactions, either in joy or despair.

  All eyes followed Samek’s clerk as she moved back and forth between the packed courtroom and the judge’s chambers. Only Silvana, Alessandra, and Allegra were missing. That morning, after the defendants’ final statements, they had gone to Santa Maria delle Grazie, the church that draws hundreds of tourists each year to view the modern restoration of The Last Supper. They lit three candles: the first one for Sant’ Espedito—the saint of quick forgiveness—as Patrizia had begged them to do. Then they lighted two more—one for Patrizia and one for Maurizio. Alessandra left for Lugano, where she had her own apartment and studied business at a branch of Milan’s prestigious Bocconi University, preferring to be by herself. She slipped three sacred images into her sleeve—Sant’ Espedito, the Madonna of Lourdes, and Sant’ Antonio—and tried to attend class, but the courtroom images of her mother, the lawyers, the jury, and the judge flowed through her head and she couldn’t concentrate. She went back to her apartment, watched her favorite video-tape—Walt Disney’s Beauty and the Beast—and prayed.

  At 5:10 P.M., after nearly seven hours of deliberations, the buzzer sounded and Samek swept into the room, followed by the assistant magistrate and the six jurors. Photographers and television camera operators strained forward. For a few seconds, the shutters snapping furiously were the only sounds in the room.

  Samek looked up momentarily from the sheet of white paper in his hands to scan the crowd before he began to read.

  “In the name of the Italian people…”

  Patrizia Martinelli Reggiani and all four accomplices were found guilty of the murder of Maurizio Gucci. Samek read out the sentences, which in Italian courts are issued at the moment of the verdict: Patrizia Reggiani, twenty-nine years; Orazio Cicala, twenty-nine years; Ivano Savioni, twenty-six years; and Pina Auriemma, twenty-five years. Despite Nocerino’s request, only Benedetto Ceraulo, the killer, received a life sentence. The crowd murmured.

  As television cameras trained on Patrizia, she stood, immobile, her eyes glued to Samek’s face. As he read out her sentence, her eyes fluttered. She looked down for an instant, then up again, impassive as Samek finished reading. He looked out at the courtroom again, folded his sheet of paper, and swept out. It was 5:20 P.M.

  The crowd in the courtroom surged forward as the door closed behind Samek and the jurors. Journalists and cameras pressed around Patrizia, who huddled between the dark robes of her lawyers.

  “Truth is the daughter of time,” she said, and closed her mouth firmly, refusing to say more. Dedola raised a cellular phone to his ear and dialed the number of Corso Venezia 38, where Silvana and Allegra had gone to await the verdict.

  As Samek read the verdict, blood rushed to Togliatti’s head. He had never heard of a person who commissioned a murder receiving less than the killer. He looked at Nocerino, choked back his anger, and fled the courtroom, running a quick calculation in his head—twenty-nine years? That meant Patrizia Reggiani could be out in twelve to fifteen years’ time. She would be sixty-two to sixty-five years old. Togliatti, after all the murder cases he had handled, felt sick.

  In the cage, the surly Benedetto Ceraulo jumped up high on the bench, clinging to the bars, looking down on the crowd for his young wife in the crowd. She, the mother of their new baby, had collapsed in tears.

  “I knew it would end like this,” Ceraulo shouted out over the crowd. “They think they have discovered hot water! Other than cry out my innocence, there is nothing I can do. I am just a monkey in a cage!”

  Despite their stiff prison terms, Pina, Savioni, and Cicala sighed in relief. It was all over; they had avoided life imprisonment. They leaned toward their lawyers for whispered consultations. With time off for good behavior, they might be out in fifteen years or less.

  Samek would later issue his written opinion, in which he explained the reasoning behind each sentence. In Patrizia’s case, he reiterated the seriousness of her crime, though he acknowledged the impact of her “narcissistic” personality disorder as diagnosed by the panel of psychiatrists, thus justifying the twenty-nine-year jail penalty instead of a full life sentence.

  “Maurizio Gucci was sentenced to death by his ex-wife, who found the people who were willing to satisfy her hatred in exchange for money,” Samek wrote. “Her hatred had been cultivated, day after day, with no mercy for a man—the father of her daughters—who was young, healthy, finally serene and whom she had once loved. Maurizio Gucci certainly had his defects—perhaps he wasn’t the most present of fathers, nor the most attentive of ex-husbands, but in his wife’s eyes he had committed an unpardonable wrong: Maurizio Gucci had stripped her, through their divorce, of a formidable patrimony and an internationally recognized name—and the accompanying status, benefits, luxuries, and prerogatives. Patrizia Reggiani did not intend to give these up.”

  Samek said that Patrizia’s behavior was especially serious in view of the gravity of the crime, the lengthy planning, the economic motive, the disregard for the emotional ties that united Maurizio with her and still do via their daughters, and the sense of liberation and serenity she admitted feeling after his death.

  Patrizia’s personality disorder emerged when her life twisted away from her dreams and expectations, Samek pointed out. “During the long stretches in which life was generous with Reggiani, she didn’t manifest any signs of disturbance,” pointed out Samek. “But the instant this mechanism was broken, her feelings and her behavior went far beyond acceptable
standards, manifesting signs of disturbance,” Samek said. “Patrizia Reggiani cannot underestimate the seriousness of what she did: an act of extreme violence only because someone didn’t respect her wishes, deliver her ambitions, or fulfill her expectations.”

  Maurizio Gucci had died for what he had—his name and his fortune—and not for who he was.

  Back in the pink-walled living room of the apartment on Corso Venezia, Silvana rocked herself back and forth on the overstuffed couch in front of the wall-sized oil portrait of Patrizia, whose liquid brown eyes stared out over her mother’s head.

  “Twenty-nine years, twenty-nine years,” Silvana said over and over, as though repeating the words could somehow cancel their meaning. Allegra hugged her grandmother to console her and then called Alessandra in Lugano to give her the news. After she hung up, the telephone rang constantly as friends, relatives, and Patrizia’s social worker from San Vittore called to console them.

  “I don’t have twenty-nine years to wait,” Silvana said forcefully, hugging Allegra again. “It’s time to stop crying. Tomorrow morning at nine-thirty we have to go to Patrizia. We have to get her out.”

  The week Patrizia was convicted, Gucci stores around the world displayed a gleaming pair of sterling silver handcuffs in their windows—although a spokeswoman assured callers the timing of the display was a “coincidence.”

  19

  TAKEOVER

  Domenico De Sole had just settled into bed with his wife, Eleanore, in their Knightsbridge town house to steal a mid-morning nap after making the transatlantic flight back to London overnight from New York. It was Wednesday morning, January 6, 1999, and they had just returned from a skiing vacation in Colorado with their two daughters, who by this time were in their teens.

  The previous fall, De Sole and Ford had moved Gucci’s corporate offices to London, although the company’s production operations remained in Scandicci and the group’s legal headquarters in Amsterdam as before. The move came five years after Bill Flanz had closed San Fedele and moved Gucci’s headquarters back to Florence saying it was important to unite the company’s head with its heart. But a lot had happened in five years, and both De Sole and Ford felt the move would be positive for Gucci. Having a London corporate headquarters would help Gucci recruit top-level international managers; it was difficult to find qualified people willing to move to Florence. Furthermore, Ford had set his heart on moving to London—flourishing, fashionable, and a hotbed of new trends. Though Paris was ever-chic, he hadn’t found the city welcoming. “I was ready to live somewhere that I spoke the language!” he admitted. De Sole’s wife, Eleanore, was thrilled. She had been longing to move away from Florence. The London move had caused some concern and controversy within the firm at first, but that seemed to have dissipated. De Sole traveled frequently to Florence, where he kept an office. The move also enabled Ford to unite his creative staff in London. Previously he and his assistants had shuttled between Florence and Paris, an inconvenient and inefficient arrangement. Ford ordered video conferencing equipment installed at several of his homes and in Gucci’s main offices and around the world so he could conduct fittings and design meetings wherever he was. Though he acknowledged the equipment was expensive, he felt the savings in time, energy, and travel were well worth the investment.