When Patrizia
Reggiani married Maurizio Gucci, they became one of Italy’s first
celebrity power couples. But then he left her – and she had him
murdered. Abigail Haworth unpicks an incredible tale of glamour, sex,
betrayal, death and prison in the dizzying world of high fashion
Abigail Haworth
Sunday 24 July 2016
08.00 BST
Two years ago, not
long after Patrizia Reggiani was released from prison, a camera crew
from a trashy Italian TV show turned up unannounced at her Milan
workplace. Reggiani had just spent 16 years inside after being
convicted of arranging the murder, in March 1995, of her ex-husband
Maurizio Gucci, the last of the Gucci family dynasty to run the
luxury brand. The former socialite had always maintained her
innocence – her best friend had set her up, she said – but the TV
crew caught her in a reckless mood.
“Patrizia, why did
you hire a hitman to kill Maurizio Gucci? Why didn’t you shoot him
yourself?” badgered the reporter.
“My eyesight is
not so good,” she lobbed back. “I didn’t want to miss.”
Understandably then,
when I try to find her, Reggiani’s inner circle doesn’t seem keen
to let her near another journalist. “She’s not here. She’s off
work with a bad back,” says Alessandra Brunero, co-owner of Bozart,
a Milanese costume jewellery firm that has employed Reggiani as a
“design consultant” since April 2014.
Sentenced to 26
years on appeal, Reggiani was required to find a job as a condition
of her parole. She turned down her first offer of release in 2011,
according to the Italian press, because the very idea of working
horrified her. “I’ve never worked in my life and I don’t intend
to start now,” she told her lawyer.
Bozart, with its
Renaissance-style premises full of sparkling necklaces and
chandeliers, was obviously an acceptable compromise. Brunero and her
business-partner husband have now become Reggiani’s de facto
minders, tasked with ensuring the 67-year-old sticks to her parole
and quietly rebuilds her life as a regular citizen.
“Oh, mamma mia,
it’s not easy,” says Brunero, a stylish 40-something. She invites
me inside, and I get the impression she really needs to talk. “I
cried after that TV interview. It was terrible,” she says, putting
her head in her hands. “Naturally, Patrizia was only joking…”
Even before the
impromptu “confession”, persuading Reggiani to remain low-key was
a lost cause. One of her first acts of freedom was to go shopping on
Via Monte Napoleone – Milan’s Bond Street – decked out in gaudy
jewels and movie-star sunglasses, with a large pet macaw perched on
her shoulder. The paparazzi couldn’t believe their luck. Lady
Gucci, as she used to be known, was back.
The gunning down of
46-year-old Maurizio Gucci one morning in the red-carpeted foyer of
his office, and the subsequent murder trial, captivated Italy in the
late 1990s. It was sensational fin de siècle stuff. This was elegant
Milan, not mob-riddled Naples, and execution-style killings of the
city’s glamorous elite were unknown. Reggiani, dubbed the “Liz
Taylor of luxury labels” in the 1970s and 80s, was an immediate
suspect. She had openly threatened to kill Gucci after their split.
But, without evidence, the crime went unsolved for nearly two years.
A tip-off led to her arrest in 1997, along with four others,
including the hitman.
I met Maurizio at a
party and he fell madly in love with me. I was exciting and different
While the public
loved it, the Gucci company was less enthralled. After decades of
infighting among the heirs of the founder Guccio Gucci, the brand was
no longer under family control. Maurizio, a grandson of Guccio who’d
ousted his relatives from the business to become CEO in 1992, had
been forced to sell his stake 18 months before he died. Ownership was
taken over by Bahrain- based investment bank Investcorp. The murder
coincided with a thrilling revival of the brand’s image in the
mid-1990s under new boss Domenico De Sole and edgy young designer Tom
Ford.
“The last thing
Gucci wanted was a sordid scandal,” says Giusi Ferrè, a veteran
Milan-based fashion writer and cultural critic with trademark spiky
orange hair. “The company tried to ignore the whole drama and they
wanted everyone else to ignore it, too.” The label’s continued
rise over the past two decades has eclipsed memories of the murder
even more. Gucci is currently on yet another high. Revenue is
soaring, and androgynous new creative director Alessandro Michele
recently turned Westminster Abbey into the most hallowed venue ever
for his latest collection. Yet the amnesia is odd, because the saga
has everything: glamour, greed, sex, death, betrayal, raging status
anxiety. It probably says more about the primal allure of a name like
Gucci than all the sales figures in the world.
After Reggiani was
arrested, the media dubbed her Vedova Nera – the Black Widow –
and touted all the stereotypical theories about her likely motives.
She was jealous of Maurizio’s girlfriend, she wanted his money, she
was bitter about his neglect, she was plain mad. If there is a grain
of truth in any of these, there was also something deeper, too.
“Everything Reggiani was stemmed from being a Gucci,” says Ferrè.
“It was her whole identity, even as an ex-wife. She was furious
with Maurizio for selling out.” Even after her release from prison,
Reggiani couldn’t let go. She told La Repubblica newspaper in 2014
that, now she was available again, she hoped to return to the company
fold. “They need me,” she said. “I still feel like a Gucci –
in fact, the most Gucci of them all.”
Bozart’s owners
relent a week later and agree to introduce me to Reggiani at their
offices. She appears in their grand sitting room wearing a short
floral dress. She is tiny, barely 5ft tall, although her enormous
hair, now reddish brown, and nude high heels give her extra height.
“That’s a lovely dress,” I say to break the ice. “It’s
Zara. I don’t earn enough at this place to buy proper clothes,”
she replies, throwing a disgruntled look at her hovering employers.
We sit down on
matching white sofas to espressos and iced water, and I ask her about
life in Milan’s San Vittore prison. “I think I am a very strong
person because I survived all these years in captivity,” she says
in the heavily accented English she picked up during her jet-setting
days. “I slept a lot. I took care of my plants. I looked after
Bambi, my pet ferret.” Bambi, she adds, was a special privilege
negotiated by her lawyer, but the creature met a sticky end when a
fellow inmate accidentally sat on him. “I don’t like to talk
about this time at all,” she says, already keen to change the
subject. “It is all a bad dream to me.” Reggiani won’t admit
out loud that she was in prison, referring to her incarceration as
“my stay at Vittore Residence.”
She relaxes more
when we start to talk about the past. She was born in a small town
outside Milan to a waitress and a much older man who made his fortune
in trucking.
They were very rich,
but not part of Milan’s high society. As a young woman she liked
fine things – her father spoiled her with mink coats and fast cars
– and she found her way on to the elite social circuit. “I met
Maurizio at a party and he fell madly in love with me. I was exciting
and different,” says Reggiani. The Guccis came from Florence so
Maurizio also felt something of an outsider. “I didn’t think much
of him at first. He was just the quiet boy whose teeth crossed over
at the front.” Reggiani had other suitors, but the young Gucci
chased her hard with all the riches at his disposal.
They married in 1972
when they were both around 24. The union caused a rift with Gucci’s
father Rodolfo, one of Guccio Gucci’s sons, who disapproved of
Reggiani’s background and, no doubt, her strong personality.
Maurizio was an only child whose mother had died when he was five,
and his father had always been overprotective.
“Maurizio felt
free with me. We had fun, we were a team,” says Reggiani. Rodolfo
softened after she gave birth to a daughter, Alessandra, and he could
see that she “really loved Maurizio”. The elder Gucci bought the
couple numerous properties, including a luxury penthouse in New
York’s Olympic Tower. Early adopters of celebrity coupledom, the
pair rode around Manhattan in a chauffeur-driven car with the
personalised plate “Mauizia”. They hung out with Jackie Onassis
and the Kennedy brood whenever they were all in town.
I was angry with
Maurizio about many things. But losing the family business was stupid
“We were a
beautiful couple and we had a beautiful life, of course,” says
Reggiani, throwing her hands in the air and briefly leaving them
there. “It still hurts to think about this.” She perks up when
she remembers the lavish colour-themed parties she threw in the early
1980s – “one was all orange and yellow, including the food” –
and the trips to private islands on their 64m wooden yacht, the
Creole, which Maurizio bought to mark the birth of their second
daughter, Allegra. (Worth millions, it is still owned and sailed by
the couple’s two daughters). Their charmed world also included a
ski chalet in Saint Moritz, a holiday home in Acapulco and a farm in
Connecticut.
It all started to
unravel after the death of Rodolfo in 1983, Reggiani says, when
Maurizio inherited his father’s 50% stake in Gucci. “Maurizio got
crazy. Until then I was his chief adviser about all Gucci matters.
But he wanted to be the best, and he stopped listening to me.” The
Gucci brand had been losing prestige from over-licensing its famed
double-G logo and from mass production of canvas bags. Maurizio had a
plan to restore it to high-end glory by reverting to the exquisite
craftsmanship the company was built upon.
He fought for years
with his uncle and cousins, who jointly owned the other half of the
firm, until he pulled off a plot to buy them out with the help of
Investcorp. The couple’s marriage imploded along the way.
Apparently weary of Reggiani’s constant “meddling”, one evening
Maurizio packed an overnight bag and left. Meanwhile, the company
lost millions under his control. Reggiani had been right, at least,
that Maurizio was mismanaging business and not creating enough
revenue to execute his grand ideas. His personal fortune was
dwindling and he was forced to sell Gucci wholly to Investcorp for
$120m in 1993.
“I was angry with
Maurizio about many, many things at that time,” says Reggiani. “But
above all, this. Losing the family business. It was stupid. It was a
failure. I was filled with rage, but there was nothing I could do.”
She turns her head and drops her voice so low I can hardly hear her.
“He shouldn’t have done that to me.”
Giuseppe Onorato was
sweeping away leaves inside the arched doorway of Via Palestro 20,
the graceful building where Maurizio Gucci had his private office, at
8:30am on 27 March 1995. “It was a lovely spring morning, very
quiet,” says Onorato, now 71, the former building doorman and the
only person who witnessed what occurred next. “Mr Gucci arrived
carrying some magazines and said good morning. Then I saw a hand. It
was a beautiful, clean hand, and it was pointing a gun.”
The gun fired three
shots at Gucci’s back as he went up the steps, and a fourth into
his head as he collapsed. “I thought it was a joke. Then the
shooter saw me. He lifted the gun again and fired two more times.
‘What a shame,’ I thought. ‘This is how I die.’”
Reggiani couldn’t
bear the thought of another woman taking the power, status and money
she ‘had earned’
Onorato can’t
remember how he made it to the foyer’s steps after he’d been shot
twice in the arm, but he was sitting there in a pool of blood when
the carabinieri arrived. “I was cradling Mr Gucci’s head. He died
in my arms,” says the ex-doorman.
Speaking on the
phone from Sardinia, where he has a small holiday house, Onorato
still sounds incredulous that he survived. “I still have stabbing
pains in my left arm, but every day for the past 21 years I’ve
woken up thankful I’m alive.” The gunman vanished into Milan’s
Monday morning rush hour. The aftermath wasn’t easy for the
doorman.
As the only direct
witness, Onorato was terrified that the killer would return. “I was
a poor man, so I had to go back to work at Via Palestro 20 when I
recovered. I had a panic attack every time an unfriendly looking
stranger approached.”
After Reggiani’s
conviction, the courts ordered her to pay Onorato compensation of the
equivalent of roughly £142,000. He has yet to receive any of it, he
says. Reggiani’s daughters, who are now in their late 30s and have
always stuck by their mother (at least publicly), directly inherited
Maurizio Gucci’s millions, as well as the yacht and properties in
New York, Saint Moritz and Milan. Reggiani declared herself
nullatenente – the Italian word for bankrupt, meaning “a person
who has nothing”.
“I’m not
bitter,” says Onorato, “but I do wonder, if a rich person had
been wounded in that doorway instead of me, whether they’d have
been treated with more respect.” He has a point. When, for
instance, Gucci’s lawyers proposed a divorce settlement to Reggiani
of £2.5m plus £650,000 per year, she rejected it as “a mere bowl
of lentils” and landed a better deal.
Onorato isn’t the
only person whose life was turned upside down by the murder. Paola
Franchi, now 61, had been Gucci’s live-in partner for five years
before his death. The couple shared a palatial apartment on the city
centre boulevard, Corso Venezia, along with Franchi’s 11-year-old
son Charly, and had planned to marry. Tall and blonde, Franchi didn’t
fare much better than Reggiani in the trial’s media coverage, which
often portrayed her as a glamorous gold digger.
“Oh, they always
resort to these stupid types,” Franchi says. “Actually my
previous husband, whom I left for Maurizio, was even richer, so it
was all nonsense.” An interior designer turned artist, Franchi
lives in a converted porcelain factory in Milan and spends half the
year in Kenya. Her home is stuffed with books, paintings and exotic
souvenirs. She’s chatty and quick to laugh, with a lightness of
spirit that I wasn’t expecting.
During the trial it
emerged that Reggiani had put pressure on her hired accomplices to
carry out the murder quickly, before Franchi and Gucci’s wedding.
Reggiani’s one-time best friend Pina Auriemma, who confessed to
arranging the hitman, testified that Reggiani couldn’t bear the
thought of another woman taking her place as Mrs Maurizio Gucci –
and with it, the power, status and money that she “had earned”.
She also feared that
her daughters could lose some or all of their inheritance if the
couple had children. “Patrizia was stalking us,” says Franchi.
“She still had spies in Maurizio’s circle and she knew all about
our plans, his business dealings, everything. She called many times
abusing him and threatening to kill him.”
If Gucci didn’t
take Reggiani’s calls, she sent him diatribes on cassette tape,
later played in court, saying he was “a monster” for neglecting
her and their daughters, and warning that “the inferno for you is
yet to come”.
“I begged him to
hire a bodyguard,” says Franchi, “but he refused. He didn’t
believe Patrizia would go through with her threat because of their
girls.”
My family has cut
off my financial support. I have nothing, I haven’t even met my two
grandsons
Gucci and Franchi
had crossed paths briefly in their youth on the Euro-rich-kid party
circuit. They reconnected by chance when they were both reeling from
unhappy marriages. “We fell in love immediately. Maurizio used to
tell me” – Franchi starts to cry – “that we were two halves
of the same apple.”
The day after the
murder she received an eviction order from Reggiani to move out of
the grand apartment she’d shared with Gucci. The notarised
timestamp, Franchi noticed, showed the papers had been drawn up at
11am the previous day – less than three hours after Maurizio died.
“In those days co-habiting couples had no legal protection. Charly
and I were out, just like that.”
Franchi slowly
began, as she puts it, “to build a different future”. But five
years later she suffered another tragedy. While visiting his father
over Christmas, her son Charly killed himself at the age of 16. “It
was completely unexpected,” she says. “He was a happy, shining
boy, greatly loved. We think it was a flash of teen madness.”
Franchi has photos of Maurizio and Charly all over her house, but
says they’re not there so she can dwell on her pain. “I like to
have their faces around, to say hello. For a year after Charly died I
felt a rage in my soul, but then I got on with life. I’m the kind
of person who has to keep moving forward.” She poured her emotions
into painting and writing, she says, and is also active in a charity
for troubled or suicidal teens, L’Amico Charly, that her ex-
husband set up in memory of their son.
When Franchi moved
out of the Corso Venezia apartment, Reggiani moved in with her
daughters. She lived there in luxury for the next two years, until
one of her accomplices boasted about the murder to the wrong person.
The man informed the police, who launched a sting operation to trick
Reggiani and her four paid accomplices – her friend Pina Auriemma,
a friend of Auriemma’s who set up the hitman, the hitman himself
and the getaway driver – into discussing the crime on wiretapped
phones. It succeeded. Among other evidence they found at Reggiani’s
home was her Cartier diary, which had a one-word entry for the day of
Gucci’s death: “Paradeisos” – the Greek word for paradise.
In court, Reggiani
admitted she’d paid Auriemma around £200,000, but denied it was
for the murder, claiming Auriemma had arranged the hit herself and
was threatening to frame her if she didn’t pay. “But it was worth
every lira,” Reggiani then added, confusingly, unable to help
herself even then. All five involved in the murder plot were found
guilty. Despite the Gucci company’s supposed indifference to the
scandal, on the day of the verdict the Italian media reported that
Gucci shops around the country hung silver handcuffs in their
windows. (Gucci declined to make any comment at all for this
article.)
At Bozart, Brunero’s
husband and co-owner Maurizio Manca gives me a tour of Reggiani’s
new workplace. It seems almost too perfect for her. The jewellery the
upmarket firm creates is designed to be big, ornate and dazzling.
Manca, who is dressed all in black and has a mop of floppy grey hair,
freely admits the 60-year-old company had its heyday in the 1980s
when “there was corruption everywhere and the money was flowing”.
Stars, including Madonna and Pamela Anderson, have worn Bozart’s
designs which, best of all, supplied all the glitz worn by Linda
Evans’s character Krystle Carrington on the set of Dynasty.
When she’s at
work, Reggiani spends much of her day advising Bozart’s design team
and reading fashion magazines. “She’s like our Michael Schumacher
– she keeps on top of trends and test-drives our creations,” says
Manca.
“I prefer Senna.
He has much more class,” Reggiani says, emerging from her portrait
shoot with the Observer photographer. There’s a pause while
everyone remembers the unfortunate fates of both drivers, and the
analogy is quickly dropped. Reggiani says she enjoys the job, but
admits that she hasn’t found it easy to adjust to the modern
workplace. “I don’t like computers. They are quite evil.” Manca
points out, in her defence, that the fax machine was still
cutting-edge technology when she went to prison. Still, he adds that
they had to remove her computer from their internal network after she
permanently deleted Bozart’s entire photo archive.
Nobody says it
directly, but it seems clear a big reason for taking on Reggiani was
to generate publicity and try to rekindle the firm’s edge of flashy
danger. If so, it hasn’t been straightforward so far. When Reggiani
first arrived she helped to design a collection of rainbow coloured
jewellery and evening bags inspired by her pet macaw, Bo. Bozart held
a launch in Milan in September 2014 and invited the fashion press.
“Everybody came and it was a big success,” says Manca. “But it
happened to be on the same day that Gucci was having a runway show up
the street. The next day there was nothing at all in the newspapers
about Patrizia’s collection.” Manca says the journalists later
told him they’d been leaned on by “someone at Gucci” not to
publish. While Gucci wouldn’t confirm or deny, an Italian fashion
editor friend later doubts his claim. “The fashion corps probably
just didn’t like the parrot designs,” he says.
All the same, Manca
and Brunero appear to be genuinely fond of their employee. As the
afternoon goes by, Reggiani gets tired and cracks in her bravado
appear. She talks about how, by court order, she lives in a Milan
townhouse with her 89-year-old mother, who is still in good health.
“Sometimes I wish I was back inside Vittore Residence because my
mother is very difficult. She berates me every day for no reason.”
Reggiani’s daughters Alessandra and Allegra, who were 18 and 14
when she was arrested, are both married and now live in Switzerland.
Unimaginably rich thanks to their father’s estate, they haven’t
visited Reggiani much since her release.
It’s almost the
stuff of Greek tragedy. “We are going through a bad time now,”
says Reggiani. “They don’t understand me and have cut off my
financial support. I have nothing, and I haven’t even met my two
grandsons.” She says she has “no idea” what the future holds
when her parole ends, possibly in a few months. She may continue to
work at Bozart and says she’d like to travel when she’s allowed
to leave the country again. She seems to have given up the idea of
trying to find a job at Gucci, even if she hasn’t quite let go of
the past. “If I could see Maurizio again I would tell him that I
love him, because he is the person who has mattered most to me in my
life.” I ask her what she thinks he’d say to her in reply, and
she sounds a note of realism at last. “I think he’d say the
feeling wasn’t mutual.
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