Allegra Gucci about her family's film: “It's a terrible cartoon”

Gonzalo Sanchez Rome, 15 Mar “I am the daughter of a murdered father, of an imprisoned mother and granddaughter of a bastard”. This is how Allegra Gucci is presented in the memoirs with which she breaks her silence today about the murder of her father, which shook this Italian fashion dynasty, and about the recent film: “It's a terrible cartoon”, she regrets. The book bears a revealing title, “Fine dei giochi” (“The games are over”, Ed. Piemme), as he aspires to settle the “games” and rumors that followed the murder of his father Maurizio Gucci, ordered by his ex-wife and mother of the author, Patrizia Reggiani. On the morning of March 27, 1995, the businessman was shot outside his office in Milan (north), leaving two daughters, Allegra and Alessandra, aged 14 and 19, with huge assets. After two years of investigation, on the night of January 31, 1997, the police arrested the mother, accused of committing the crime to a hit man. The dish was served: hate, money and numerous questions. Much has been written since then, but Allegra, in Switzerland, has not opened her mouth until now, with a book in the form of posthumous dialogue with her father whose proceeds will go to charity. “SHE WAS, YOU HAD DISAPPEARED” Allegra (Milan, 1982) not only lost her father but also witnessed the media outcry and the trial and condemnation of her mother, whose innocence she illusely defended for years. At that time I lived with her after a sound divorce: “Then you didn't live with us, we saw each other very occasionally, ours was 'a precarious bond' (...) You had left home ten years before, I was 4 years old,” he recalls. Therefore, the young woman took her mother's side: “She was there, you were gone. His boredom had infected me,” he says, acknowledging that his father was generous with the pension. “A WOLF IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING” Allegra dispatches with her father's partner, former model Paola Franchi, with whom she held eternal litigation and whom she paints as a miser “wolf in sheep's clothing”. He accuses her of posing at the scene of the crime, of not attending the funeral and of plundering the luxurious apartment they shared on the same day of the murder. They experienced, he argues, a “trickle of baseness” that would have in Franchi its most stubborn source: “Their hunger for money would generate uninterrupted judicial and media persecution,” he attacks. The book includes a copy of a “Coexistence Agreement” between Maurizio and his girlfriend, a separation of property that “would not give time to sign because the hit man arrived earlier”. DAUGHTER'S “FAITH” Allegra attended the arrest of her mother, who left home at night dressed in her luxuries: “My jewels and furs go wherever I go,” she snubbed whoever reminded her that she would go to the dungeon. On 19 February 2001, the Supreme Court upheld Reggiani's 26-year sentence as ordering the assassination. The hit man Benedetto Ceraulo, was also sentenced to 28 years, 11 months and 20 days; the man who drove the car, Orazio Cicala, to 26 years; the organizer, Ivano Savioni, to 20 and a half years old, and the tarotist Pina Auriemma to 19 and a half years old. Reggiani spent 17 years in San Vittore prison, which she, haughty, called “Victor's Residence”, and even refused provisional release to avoid community work: “I never worked, I'm better off in prison,” he replied to the judge. Meanwhile, her daughter remained stubborn in her innocence until her mother, released in 2018, confessed everything on television: “I will never forget that day. His words stopped time and plunged me into darkness,” he recalls. “After the confusion, anger came. She had been deceived, had taken a false story for good, embraced a cause like a fanatical warrior, with the faith of a daughter,” she admits, without sparing attacks on her maternal grandmother, Silvana. “HOUSE OF GUCCI”, A CARTOON Allegra, a law graduate with two daughters, was silent for a long time but “the last straw” was the premiere of “House of Gucci”, the film by Ridley Scott in which Lady Gaga plays her mother and Adam Driver as her father. The film, he says, “has failed at all expectations” by portraying his family “in the worst form, like a terrible caricature”, a testimony “full of errors and clichés”. “I survived their screening for two hours and 37 minutes, I left disappointed, bewildered and sad,” she says, although she already suspected the result when she knew that her mother would be played by the eclectic pop diva. CHIEF gsm/lml (Archive resources at www.lafototeca.com Code 483093 and others)