A Gucci Murder Story – E03 “Culprit” The third and final episode of the True Crime series dedicated to the Gucci murder
Three episodes - each every Wednesday - to tell the story of Maurizio Gucci and all the events that preceded it. The first episode, which tells of Maurizio's rise to the top of the company, can be read by clicking on this link while the second, which reconstructs the murder is available at this link.
To do so, we divided the story into three episodes, focused 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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In the hours following the murder of Maurizio Gucci, Patrizia Reggiani began to be besieged by journalists. She receives them in the salon of her penthouse in San Babila, disheveld, and humbly dressed. She refuses to make statements, saying that everything she knows will be published in the memoir she is writing (and will never be published) although she then, on the phone, tells a member of the press who asked her how she felt: «From a human standpoint, I'm sorry. From a personal standpoint, I couldn't say the same». Three-quarters of an hour after Maurizio's death, Patrizia is in Corso Venezia 38 together with her daughters, the house in which Maurizio lived with his new partner, Paola Franchi. She arrives with the excuse that little Alessandra wants to take a sweater from her father as a last memory – all an excuse to check that furniture and valuables are still there.
Accusing Franchi of having stole silverware and some curtains she drove her out of the house and moved in, according to some accounts she used to sleep in the same bed where Maurizio slept, and began to give parties «wordly but cheap», as an anonymous friend of the victim remarked to Repubblica. On her Cartier notebook, on the page corresponding to the day of the murder, she wrote only one thing: the Greek word Paradeisos - Heaven. A few months after the crime, in July, Patrizia went on holiday: a long cruise on the Crèole, the cursed family yacht. During the holiday, stopped off Portugal, he even receives Maurizio's ex-lawyer, Giuseppe Parodi, to whom he asks to transfer the money deposited in his daughters' account - but she did not succeed.
Cold trails
Meanwhile, the police investigation was lost in several potential directions – all of which were already false. Yet his cousin Paolo Gucci, who also had problems with the law and was destined to die a few months after Maurizio, had said and repeated that that murder had not been dictated by financial motives. Yet the investigators told her all, especially after the opening of the documents of Maurizio's new company revealed almost billions in debts: it was hypothesized that he had been killed for debts, punished for investing in a casino and manipulated money, punished even by international Arab or Russian killers for who knows what I'm going to pay. At one point the name of Delfo Zorzi came up, a neo-fascist involved in the Piazza Fontana massacre, who had lent money to Maurizio – but that too is a false lead. For two years we tried and yet nothing emerged. In the summer of '96 the name of Maurizio Gucci disappeared from the newspapers. But he would soon be back. Towards the end of the year, however, a phone call arrives: on the phone there is such a Gabriele Carpanese, one of the residents of the hotel where Ivano Savioni worked, who tells a story halfway between the tragedy and the farce that will lead to the arrest of the perpetrators of the Gucci murder.
On the low floor
Patrizia and Pina Auriemma were separated by a few cells when the trial began on May 11, 1997. A process that will prove seemingly easy, given the enormity of overwhelming evidence that all the accomplices, Patrizia in the first place, have left behind – but that the widow Gucci will make it a kind of ordeal trying in every way to cloud the waters. First offering two billion to Pina Auriemma to take full responsibility, then trying to exonerate herself with the insanity defense because of the "psychic disorders" caused to her by the tumor operation of 1991, finally presenting her own version of the facts using a ruse that, in retrospect, suggests a fairly accurate plan: before the murder, at the time when she had paid the advance of 150 million by getting herself a kind of receipt, Patrizia had left a closed envelope in the hands of the notary with that document and a note written on it that, if anything ever happened to her, the investigators should investigate Pina Auriemma who was the real perpetrator of the murder. According to Reggiani's version, rejected by the judges, Auriemma had Maurizio killed independently and then blackmailed Patrizia by implicating her in the crime of things done.
Media around the world watched the trial, which quickly spiraled into a sad game of mutual accusations. The sentence was read on November 3, 1998: Benedetto Ceraulo, material executor of the murder, will end up in prison for life; Patrizia Reggiani will serve 29 years as will Orazio Cicala, the killer's driver. Ivano Savioni and Pina Auriemma receive 26 and 25 years. The best summary of the whole affair, however, had already given it the implacable prosecutor, Carlo Nocerino, who on October 21st had demonstrated with a meticulous, long and irrefutable ten-hour indictment the guilt of all, analyzing in every detail Patrizia's behaviors, and concluding with these words:
«I also thought a lot about that absurd and incredible death. The death of a man that no one here has ever described with full clarity. That man was killed because Orazio Cicala wanted money to play at the casino; Benedetto Cerauolo to take his daughter to a larger house; Ivano Savioni to make a few pennies and Pina Auriemma in order to continue to be the lady-in-waiting she was. Here, these are the reasons why Maurizio Gucci died».
In the following years, until his release from prison in 2013, Patrizia Reggiani became famous again for her bizarre behaviors in prison the first of which was to call the penitentiary of San Vittore, Victor's Residence, as if it were a hotel. Daniele Pizzi, his lawyer, said: «Jail didn't change her, it is her who changed the jail». Those who visited her often found her sunbathing in the courtyard, always accompanied by Bamby, a ferret that the director of the penitentiary had allowed her to keep and who died when another prisoner, by mistake, sat on it. Its successor was another ferret which, on his death, was replaced by a parrot. In interviews following her release Patrizia claimed to have introduced make-up and fashion to female prisoners - and perhaps it must be believed considering that she obtained custody for good conduct and walked out of prison after 17 years in prison. During those years, however, she had not missed anything: the hairdresser, the dentist and the plastic surgeon came to visit her from outside and on the door of her cell hung a black cloth, as a curtain, to make sure not to wake her up before ten in the morning.
