“I live off money that women give me,” so-called “Swiss gigolo” Helg Sgarbi told Swiss police in 2001.
But when he allegedly tried to hoodwink BMW heiress Susanne Klatten, it looks like Sgarbi got too greedy.
Sgarbi goes on trial in Munich on Monday, charged with blackmailing a string of super-rich women out of millions of euros. If convicted, the smooth-talking Sgarbi, who told his wealthy conquests he was a “special Swiss representative in crisis zones,” the charge sheet says, faces up to 10 years in prison.
Prosecutors say he first met Klatten, who the Forbes Rich List says has a personal fortune of more than US$13 billion, at the exclusive Austrian Lanserhof health resort in July 2007. At first the married mother-of-three spurned his advances but when Sgarbi turned up unexpectedly in the south of France where she was on holiday the following month, they began an affair.
They met again in August in a Holiday Inn hotel in Munich for an “intimate” encounter that Sgarbi secretly filmed, the charge sheet says.
In September they met at the same hotel and this time Sgarbi allegedly said he needed 10 million euros (US$12.7 million) because he had injured a little girl in a car crash in Florida, asking Klatten to lend him 7 million euros.
Klatten believed him, and in the hotel’s underground garage, handed over a cardboard box containing seven plastic folders each containing a thousand 500-euro banknotes.
But then Sgarbi told the 46-year-old to leave her husband and put into a trust fund 290 million euros to fund their new life together. Klatten balked and ended the relationship. But Sgarbi turned nasty, prosecutors say, threatening to send compromising video footage of the two together to the press, her husband and others.
This time he allegedly demanded 49 million euros, which he subsequently reduced to 14 million euros, and set a deadline of Jan. 15 last year. But Klatten had long since informed the police, and Sgarbi was arrested.
Klatten, however, was not Sgarbi’s only victim.
The German magazine Stern reported Sgarbi first came to the attention of Geneva police in 2001 because his “fiancee,” one Countess Verena du Pasquier-Geubels — 50 years his senior — had gone to the police.
The countess first met Sgarbi — then called Russak — in May 2001 when she was 83 after he sent had three red roses sent to her table in a luxury hotel in Monte Carlo.
Feeling sorry for Sgarbi, she dropped the charges after he returned 20 million Swiss francs (US$17.3 million) to her. She even paid the lawyers’ fees of SF750,000. She died in 2002, and Russak changed his name to Sgarbi.
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