A Gucci Murder Story - The Rise E01 The first episode of the double G true crime story

Three weekly drops are going to be the stage of Maurizio Gucci's murder story and all the events that led it. To do so, we have divided the story into three episodes, which will focus respectively on the rise of Maurizio Gucci to the top of the company, his murder and the investigations that followed. For the convenience of the exhibition, we present below a synthetic family tree of the Gucci family in which we have highlighted the main protagonists of the facts.

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Gucci is a name that, nowadays, is exclusively associated with fashion. Yet there was a time when the name recurred more on the news pages than in the fashion magazines and the family that gave the brand its name had become more famous than the brand itself. Scrolling through the headlines of the 80s, the most used terms of the story are called a "soap opera" or a "Dinasty", in reference to the train of scandals, betrayals, double crossings, financial crimes and power struggles that swept the Gucci family over fifteen years, almost bankrupted the company founded by Patriarch Guccio and, finally, culminated in the murder of Maurizio Gucci in 1995. 

For over a decade, the bitter struggles within the complicated Gucci family took place before the astonished eyes of the whole world, across an ocean and two continents, in a story that, in hindsight, became an emblem of an era in which fashion brands went from being family-run companies to multinationals run by groups of foreign investors. At the center of this huge painting is a woman who, at the time, captured the imagination of half of Italy: Patrizia Reggiani, aka Lady Gucci, aka the Black Widow. She was the woman behind the murder of the former president of the brand and, although the events of the company touched her only marginally, the process that led to her arrest and imprisonment made her the face and heart of the chaotic Gucci saga. 

A Quarrelsome Family

Maurizio convinced Paolo to give him his vote to remove Aldo from the position of president, in return he promised him his long-awaited creative independence, putting him in charge of a new division of the brand – a promise that was never kept. Within days of the vote, Aldo Gucci's desk was emptied and even office locks were changed. Maurizio had become the new president: his first mission was to dismantle his uncle's legacy starting from the Gucci Gallery, a sort of museum-boutique inaugurated in 1977 and ancestor of the VIP rooms, in which paintings by Modigliani and De Chirico were displayed along with bags and jewels. For Aldo Gucci, it was a public humiliation. To throw more salt on his wounds, Paolo Gucci ratted out his own father (then 81 years old) denouncing him with a $7.4 million tax evasion, causing him to end up in prison for a year and a day.

An unreserved legal battle began. Meanwhile Maurizio did not keep the promises made to his cousin Paolo, who returned to side with his father: the two denounced Maurizio claiming that the entrepreneur had falsified the signature of his father Rodolfo to sell some of his shares in the company and escape a series of debts accumulated over years of crazy expenses. A 1987 article in La Repubblica reads:

«Maurizio is accused of falsifying his father's signature to avoid having to pay huge inheritance taxes. The charges [...] are those of fraud against the state and corporate crimes. [...] On 16 May 1983, two days after the death of the old Rodolfo, his son Maurice and his right-hand man Gianvittorio Pilone had asked her to falsify Rodolfo's signature on the company's titles. It was 50% of the company, and it would have ended up bequeathed to Maurizio, the only child. But the son, evidently, wanted to avoid paying several billion inheritance taxes by having shown that he had already received those securities from his father in 1982».

Maurizio Gucci's response was not long in coming: he fled to Switzerland, where there was no extradition for financial crimes. Meanwhile in Milan the social position of his ex-wife, Patrizia Reggiani, was weakening and the woman did not care to mask the hatred she had towards him. When news of Maurizio's fraud conviction spread, Reggiani was interviewed by the news and, without blinking, said publicly that she believed her ex-husband to be guilty and deserving of going to prison. Maurizio lost the presidency of Gucci in Italy, seeing his shares seized while remaining president of the company Gucci America (which was distinct and separate from the company originally in Italy), but the battle had not ended, on the contrary, the internal conflict within the family was about to reach the next level: removing the company from the hands of the family.