[Valhalla]

Great read about about an average beta looking man seducing married women from powerful European families and getting money from them. Eventually he attempts to blackmail the heiress of BMW. Game recognized. The story reads like a novel.

http://www.details.com/culture-trends/ne...rentPage=1

Quote:

Seducing, swindling, and blackmailing European matrons, Helg Sgarbi perfected a scam that made him a fortune. Then one day he met the billionaire BMW heiress

The gigolo is not an attractive man. Thin-lipped and angular, Helg Sgarbi appears more bookish than rakish, and his blue eyes seem to telegraph a constant message: vulnerability and need. When I enter the visiting room at Munich's Stadelheim prison, he is slouched behind a long wooden table, sandwiched between two other inmates. A little girl plays on the floor while two brothers argue in low tones. Dressed in blue prison jeans and a collared jersey, arms folded high, Sgarbi looks bored, accustomed as he is to the salons of Monte Carlo, the spa resorts of Austria, and the company of sad, doting rich women.

When he sees me approach, followed by a translator, he appears startled. Sgarbi is expecting his lawyer, not a complete stranger. Perhaps I am a hit man, sent by a cuckolded husband. A former Credit Suisse banker, the 44-year-old Sgarbi used to make his living preying on lonely women of means, seducing them, videotaping them having sex with him, and blackmailing them. That is, until the summer of 2007, when he took on three for-profit affairs simultaneously, including the one with his prize catch—Susanne Klatten, the married heiress to the BMW fortune and the richest woman in Germany, worth $12 billion—who became his downfall. Tabloids called him the "Swiss Gigolo," and he ranks as the most notorious con-man Lothario in the world today, a grifter accused of swindling a half-dozen women (though one eventually dropped the charges) out of more than $38 million in the course of his career.

I assure Sgarbi I am not here to hurt him, that I have met with his lawyer. He cuts me off: "You spoke to my lawyer about my case?" he says in English. "I did not give permission." In fact, Sgarbi's attorney offered to broker an interview—for a few hundred euros—and is looking to cut a deal for the film rights to Sgarbi's life story. You can see Sgarbi struggling to keep up with who is selling what to whom. "I am sorry you have come all this way," he says, sounding quite genteel, as he stands. "But there is nothing that I can tell you."

There is plenty Sgarbi could say but hasn't. In March, he averted what would surely have been a long and sensational trial by delivering a bombshell five-line confession on his first day in court. It conveniently saved him and the powerful Klatten, or "Lady BMW," as the press calls her, from having to air in public the lurid details of their affair—which included a videotaped sex romp at a Holiday Inn. Although prosecutors asked that Sgarbi serve nine years in prison for fraud and blackmail, the judges sentenced him to only six after he confessed. Sgarbi, who is fluent in six languages, got to keep his mouth shut—and his ill-gotten millions hidden.

But now comes a noisy sideshow that could threaten Sgarbi's fortune. This month, Italian prosecutors will put Sgarbi's alleged puppet-master, a 64-year-old former mechanic, on trial for "criminal association." Police say Ernano Barretta, an Italian religious-sect leader who claims to be a faith healer and allegedly has used female followers for sex, controlled Sgarbi, helping him target women, videotape them, and spend their money—conveniently enough, by buying resort properties in Egypt and splurging on Ferraris and Lamborghinis. What Barretta couldn't spend, Italian prosecutors say, he buried on his estate, near a 13th-century village close to the Adriatic coast.



When police raided the compound after Sgarbi's arrest in early 2008, they found €1.5 million in cash stuffed in vases, a suit of armor, and moldy tin cans buried in the yard. Among seven people arrested that day were Barretta's wife, his adult son and daughter, several waitresses from a wedding hall Barretta runs, and Sgarbi's wife, Franziska, who lives in the village with their 3-year-old daughter.

With his wife and friends charged as co-conspirators, Sgarbi receives no visitors. Out of loneliness or curiosity, or perhaps just to practice his gamesmanship, he finally invites me to sit, but he remains suspicious. "There are two stories," Sgarbi says, "the lies they tell about me and my family and the person who I am. I feel very sorry for me and my friends involved in this case." The legendary ladies' man, who bragged he could "read women like a map" and noted that in the female "everything is signposted," is absorbed in self-pity.

Soon, though, he is peppering me with personal queries (how long have I been a journalist? How was my flight? Do I read the Economist?). He shows interest in my responses, what appears to be genuine empathy—a trait that must have helped him gain victims' trust. "He seemed," one woman told investigators, "very unthreatening."

Helg Sgarbi was born Helg Russak in Zurich, the son of the deputy director of a machine and diesel-engine factory in the Swiss industrial center of Winterthur. He spent several years of his childhood in Brazil, after his father got work there as an engineer. At 22, he joined the Swiss Army. He later attended law school in Zurich, graduating in 1992 and going to work at Credit Suisse. These are facts Sgarbi is willing to discuss. Other details are murkier.

Sgarbi liked to gain sympathy from women by spinning his middle-class upbringing into a hard-luck story of lost wealth—he had a falling-out with his father over an inheritance, he would tell them, and had raised himself since he was a teen. He would also claim he had the ears of prominent businessmen like Josef Ackermann, the head of Deutsche Bank. There were elements of truth in his tales. Ackermann had served as president of Credit Suisse's executive board during the four years that Sgarbi worked at the bank, in mergers and acquisitions. "Afterwards," admits Sgarbi's lawyer, Egon Geis, "his life is not so well-known." Sgarbi tells me, with great enthusiasm, that after leaving Credit Suisse he became a corporate consultant, "taking tech companies public." But he refuses to name any of them. He also boasts of having opened a translation company with 300 employees worldwide, called Technology Business Development. "It no longer exists," he says.

We're now sitting across from each other. After 30 minutes, he is more relaxed—and voluble. "I always try to find a niche," he tells me, "some new element to exploit."