The House of Gucci Read online

  Dedication

  For Julia

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1: A Death

  2: The Gucci Dynasty

  3: Gucci Goes American

  4: Youthful Rebellion

  5: Family Rivalries

  6: Paolo Strikes Back

  7: Wins and Losses

  8: Maurizio Takes Charge

  9: Changing Partners

  10: Americans

  11: A Day in Court

  12: Divorce

  13: A Mountain of Debts

  14: Luxury Living

  15: Paradeisos

  16: Turnaround

  17: Arrests

  18: Trial

  19: Takeover

  Epilogue

  Bibliographical Notes

  Searchable Terms

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  A DEATH

  At 8:30 A.M. on Monday, March 27, 1995, Giuseppe Onorato was sweeping up the leaves that had blown into the entryway of the building where he worked. He had arrived at eight o’clock that morning, as he did every weekday, his first task being to swing open the two great wooden doors of the building at Via Palestro 20. The four-story Renaissance-style building housed apartments and offices and stood in one of the most elegant neighborhoods in Milan. Across the street, amid tall cedars and poplars, stretched the clipped lawns and winding paths of the Giardini Pubblici, an oasis of foliage and serenity in a smoggy, fast-paced city.

  Over the weekend, a warm wind had blown through the city, clearing the ever-present cap of smog and blowing the last dried leaves from the trees. Onorato had found his entryway littered with leaves that morning and hurried to sweep them up before people started coming in and out of the building. His military training had instilled in him a strong sense of order and duty, although it hadn’t broken his spirit. Fifty-one years old, he was always neatly dressed and impeccably groomed, his white mustache perfectly trimmed, his remaining hair clipped close. A Sicilian from the town of Casteldaccia, he had come north like so many others looking for work and a new life. Following his retirement from the army in 1980 after fourteen years as a noncommissioned officer, Onorato had decided to settle in Milan, where he worked for several years at various odd jobs. He took the doorman’s post on Via Palestro in 1989, traveling back and forth on a small motor scooter from the apartment where he lived with his wife in the northwest section of the city. A gentle man with clear blue eyes and a sweet, shy smile, Onorato kept the entryway immaculate. The six highly polished, red granite steps that rose immediately inside the massive front doorway, the sparkling glass doors at the top of the steps, and the shiny stone floors of the foyer reflected his efforts. At the back of the foyer, Onorato had a small glassed-in cubicle made of wood with a table and chair, but he rarely sat there, preferring to keep busy with his chores. Onorato had never quite felt at ease in Milan, which had offered him work but little else. He was sensitive to the bias many northern Italians have against meridionali, or people from the south, and it took little more than a glance to make him bristle. He never talked back and he obeyed his superiors as he had learned to do in the army, but he refused to bow his head.

  “I am just as worthy as the next man,” Onorato would think, “even if he is rich or from an important family.”

  Onorato glanced up as he swept and noticed a man across the street. Onorato had seen the man immediately that morning upon opening the two great doors. The man had been standing behind a small green car parked perpendicular to the street with its nose facing the Giardini Pubblici, away from Onorato’s building. Usually cars lined the curbs of Via Palestro, one of the few streets in downtown Milan that still had free parking. The cars parked at an angle, facing the curb. It was early, and the car was still alone. The license plate caught Onorato’s eye because it was hanging so low it almost touched the ground. Onorato wondered what business the man had at that hour. Clean shaven and well dressed, the man was wearing a light brown overcoat. He kept looking down the street toward Corso Venezia as though expecting someone. Absently stroking his own balding crown, Onorato noticed with some envy that the man had a full head of dark, wavy hair.

  Ever since a bomb had gone off up the street in July of 1993, he had kept his eyes open. With a blast that shook the city, a car packed with dynamite had exploded, killing five people and destroying the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, the modern art museum, which collapsed in a rubble of cement, steel girders, and dust. That same evening, another bomb had exploded in Rome, damaging San Giorgio Velabro, a church in the city’s historic center. The bombs were later linked to an earlier explosion in Florence on Via dei Georgofili that also killed five people, wounded thirty, and destroyed dozens of pieces of artwork that were stored in the building above the explosion. The bombings were later traced to a Sicilian mafia boss, Salvatore “Toto” Riina, who had been arrested earlier that year for the 1992 murder of Italy’s top mafia prosecutor, Giovanni Falcone. Riina had ordered the bombings of some of Italy’s most precious cultural monuments in retaliation for his arrest. He was later convicted for both the Falcone murder and the bombings and is currently serving two life sentences. The DIGOS, Italy’s political police, which has a specific mandate to move against acts of terrorism, had interviewed all the portinai, or doormen, in the Via Palestro neighborhood. Onorato had told them he’d seen a suspicious-looking camper parked near one of the gates to the park that day. From then on, he made little notes on a pad he kept in his cubicle to record anything he saw that seemed unusual.

  “We are the eyes and ears of this neighborhood,” Onorato explained to one of his army buddies who often stopped by for coffee. “We know who comes and goes and it’s part of our job to observe.”

  Onorato turned and pulled the right-hand door toward him in order to sweep the last few leaves out from behind it. Stepping behind the door, leaving it half-closed, he heard quick footsteps on the stairs and a familiar voice call out to him: “Buongiorno!”

  Onorato turned to see Maurizio Gucci, who had offices upstairs on the first floor, sprinting up the entry stairs with his usual energy, his camel coat swinging.

  “Buongiorno, Dottore,” Onorato replied with a smile, lifting a hand in greeting.

  Onorato knew Maurizio Gucci was a member of the famous Gucci family of Florence that had founded the luxury goods firm of the same name. In Italy, the Gucci name had always been associated with elegance and style. Italians were proud of their creativity and artisan traditions and Gucci was one of those names, along with Ferragamo and Bulgari, that symbolized quality and craftsmanship. Italy had also produced some of the world’s greatest designers, such as Giorgio Armani and Gianni Versace, but Gucci was a name that went back generations, before the designers had even been born. Maurizio Gucci had been the last of the Guccis to run the family firm before selling it two years earlier to his financial partners who that spring had begun to study a plan to take Gucci public. Maurizio, no longer involved in any aspect of his family business, had opened his own offices on Via Palestro in the spring of 1994.

  Gucci lived just around the corner in a stately palazzo on Corso Venezia, and walked to work every morning, usually arriving between 8:00 and 8:30. On some days, he let himself in with his own key and was already upstairs even before Onorato swung open the heavy wooden doors.

  Onorato often wondered wistfully what it would be like to be in Gucci’s shoes. He was a rich, attractive young man with a beautiful girlfriend who was tall, thin, and blond. She had helped Gucci furnish his offices upstairs on the first floor, as the second floor is cal
led in Europe, with exotic Chinese antiques, elegantly upholstered sofas and armchairs, richly colored draperies, and valuable paintings. She frequently came to meet Gucci for lunch, dressed in her Chanel suits, her mane of blond hair perfectly coifed. To Onorato, they seemed a perfect couple with a perfect life.

  As Maurizio Gucci reached the top step and started to walk into the foyer, Onorato saw the dark-haired man step into the doorway. In a flash he realized that the man had been waiting for Gucci. He wondered why the man had stopped at the foot of the stairs, where the wide, brown-bristled doormat ended and the gray cloth runner started, held in place at the base of each step with brass step rails. Gucci hadn’t noticed the man step in after him and the man did not call out his name.

  As Onorato watched, the man opened his coat with one hand, and with the other pulled out a gun. He straightened his arm, raised it toward Maurizio Gucci’s back, and started firing. Onorato, no more than a yard away, stood frozen, broom in hand. In shock, he felt powerless to stop the man.

  Onorato heard three quick, muffled shots in fast succession.

  Motionless, Onorato watched in horror. He saw the first bullet enter Gucci’s camel topcoat at the right hip. The second shot hit him just under the left shoulder. Onorato noticed how Gucci’s camel coat shivered as each bullet pierced the fabric. “It doesn’t look that way when someone gets shot in the movies,” he thought.

  Gucci, stunned, turned with a puzzled expression on his face. He looked at the gunman, showing no sign of recognition, then looked past him directly at Onorato as though to ask, “What is happening? Why? Why is this happening to me?”

  A third bullet grazed his right arm.

  As Gucci moaned and slumped to the floor, his attacker fired a final, fatal shot into his right temple. The gunman spun around to leave, only to stop short at the sight of Onorato staring at him in horror.

  Onorato saw the man’s dark eyebrows rise in surprise, as though he hadn’t taken Onorato’s presence into consideration.

  The gunman’s arm was still outstretched and now it pointed directly at him. Onorato looked at the gun, noticing it had a long silencer covering the barrel. He looked at the hand grasping the gun, at the long, well-groomed fingers, the fingernails that looked as though they had been freshly manicured.

  For an instant that seemed an eternity, Onorato looked into the gunman’s eyes. Then he heard his own voice.

  “Noooo,” he cried, shrinking back, raising his left hand as though to say, “I have nothing to do with this!”

  The gunman fired two more shots directly at Onorato, then turned and ran out the door. Onorato heard a tinkling sound and realized it came from the falling bullet casings dancing on the granite floor.

  “Incredible!” he found himself thinking, “I don’t feel any pain! I didn’t know that it doesn’t hurt when you get shot.” He wondered if Gucci had felt any pain.

  “So this is it,” he mused. “Now I am going to die. What a shame to die like this. This is not fair,” he thought.

  Then Onorato realized he was still standing up. He looked down at his left arm, which was hanging strangely. Blood dripped from his sleeve. Slowly, he lowered himself to sit on the first of the granite steps.

  “At least I didn’t fall,” he thought, preparing mentally to die. He thought of his wife, of his days in the army, of the view of the sea and the mountains from Casteldaccia. Then he realized he was only wounded; he had been shot twice in the arm, he was not going to die. A wave of happiness washed over him. He turned to see the lifeless body of Maurizio Gucci lying at the top of the stairs in a spreading pool of blood. Gucci was stretched out as he had fallen, lying on his right side, his head resting on his right arm. Onorato tried to scream for help, but when he opened his mouth, he couldn’t hear the sound of his own voice.

  A few minutes later, the wailing of an approaching siren grew louder and louder, then shut off abruptly as a police car braked to a screeching halt in front of Via Palestro 20. Four uniformed carabinieri jumped out, weapons drawn.

  “It was a man with a gun,” moaned Onorato weakly from his seat on the first step as the men rushed toward him.

  2

  THE GUCCI DYNASTY

  Bright red blood spatters formed Jackson Pollock–like patterns on the doors and the white walls on either side of the entryway where Maurizio lay. A scattering of shell casings had fallen on the floor. The proprietor of a kiosk across the street in the Giardini Publicci had heard Onorato cry out, and quickly called the carabinieri.

  “That is Dottor Gucci,” said Onorato to the officers, using his right arm to gesture up the steps to Maurizio’s motionless body while his left arm hung limply. “Is he dead?”

  One of the carabinieri knelt by Maurizio’s body and pressed his fingers to Maurizio’s neck, nodding when he found no pulse. Maurizio’s lawyer, Fabio Franchini, who had arrived a few minutes earlier for an appointment, huddled disconsolately on the cold floor next to Maurizio’s body—and stayed there for the next four hours while law enforcement officials and paramedics worked around him. As ambulances and more police cars arrived, a small crowd of curious onlookers formed in front of the building. The paramedics attended quickly to Onorato, whisking him away in one of the ambulances just before the homicide squad of the carabinieri arrived on the scene. Corporal Giancarlo Togliatti, a tall, lanky blond officer with twelve years experience in the homicide division, began to examine Maurizio’s body. In the past few years, Togliatti’s main job had been investigating murders among warring clans of Albanian immigrants who had moved into Milan. This was his first case among the city’s elite—it wasn’t every day that a leading businessman was gunned down in cold blood in the center of town.

  “Who is the victim?” asked Togliatti as he bent down.

  “That’s Maurizio Gucci,” one of his colleagues told him.

  Togliatti looked up, smiling quizzically. “Right, and I’m Valentino,” he said sardonically, naming the perpetually suntanned, dark-haired Rome fashion designer. He had always associated the Gucci name with the Florentine leather goods house—what was a Gucci doing with an office in Milan?

  “For me, he was a corpse, just like any other,” Togliatti later said.

  Togliatti gently pulled a cluster of blood-spattered newspaper clippings out of Maurizio’s limp hand and removed his watch, a Tiffany, still ticking. As he carefully went through Maurizio’s pockets, Milan prosecutor Carlo Nocerino arrived. The scene was near pandemonium; cameramen and journalists jostled paramedics and law enforcement officials from both the carabinieri and polizia. Italy has three law enforcement corps—the carabinieri, the polizia, and the guardia di finanzia, or fiscal police. Concerned that key evidence might be destroyed in the uproar, Nocerino asked which corps had gotten there first. One of the basic unwritten rules among Italy’s law enforcement agencies is that the first to arrive at the scene of the crime handles the case. Upon learning that the carabinieri had arrived first, Nocerino quickly dispatched the polizia, and ordered the great doors to the foyer closed and the sidewalk around the front doors cordoned off to keep the growing crowd at bay. Then Nocerino walked up the steps to where Togliatti was examining the body of Maurizio Gucci.

  Nocerino and the investigators thought the shot to Maurizio’s temple made the murder look like a mafia-style execution. The skin and hair around the wound had been burned, indicating close-range firing.

  “This is the work of a professional killer,” said Nocerino, studying the wound and then the floor where the investigating team had outlined six shell casings with chalk circles.

  “It is the classic colpo di grazia,” agreed Togliatti’s colleague, Captain Antonello Bucciol. Yet they were perplexed. Too many bullets had been fired and two eyewitnesses, Onorato and a young woman who had nearly collided with the killer as he ran out the door, had been left alive—hardly the work of a professional bent on administering a traditional coup de grâce.

  It took Togliatti the next hour and a half to examine Maurizio, but i
t would take him the next three years to learn every detail of Maurizio’s life.

  “Maurizio Gucci was essentially unknown to us,” Togliatti said later. “We were going to have to take his life in our hands and open it like a book.”

  TO UNDERSTAND MAURIZIO GUCCI and the family he came from, it’s necessary to understand the Tuscan character. Different from the affable Emilians, the austere Lombardians, and the chaotic Romans, Tuscans tend to be individualistic and haughty. They feel they represent the wellspring of culture and art in Italy, and they are especially proud of their role in originating the modern Italian language, thanks in large part to Dante Alighieri. Some call them the “French of Italy”—arrogant, self-sufficient, and closed to outsiders. Italian novelist Curzio Malaparte wrote about them in Maledetti Toscani, or Damned Tuscans.

  In the Inferno, Dante describes Filippo Argenti as “il fiorentino spirito bizzarro.” The bizarre Florentine or Tuscan spirit can also be cutting and sarcastic, ready with the quick comment or joke, as seen in Roberto Benigni, the Oscar-winning director and lead actor of Life Is Beautiful.

  When a writer from Town & Country asked Roberto Gucci, Maurizio’s cousin, in 1977 if Gucci could have come from another part of Italy, Roberto looked at him in amazement.

  “You might as well ask me if Chianti could come from Lombardy,” he roared. “It wouldn’t be Chianti any more than Gucci would be Gucci,” he bellowed, flinging his arms wide. “How could we not be Florentine if we are what we are?”