He will go down in history as the captain who refused to return aboard the sinking Costa Concordia, saying it was too dark to help save lives in a tragedy that killed 32 people.
Long before Italy’s top court sealed his fate on Friday by upholding on appeal a 16-year jail term, Ray-Ban-wearing Francesco Schettino, now 56, had been marked as the villain of the piece, dubbed “Captain Coward” by the media for abandoning ship.
As terrified passengers threw themselves off the tilting cruise liner into the freezing waters after it hit an outcrop off the Tuscan island of Giglio on Jan. 13, 2012, Schettino spent most of the nighttime evacuation on a rock.
Photo: AP
He would later claim he fell into a lifeboat when the ship rolled and was carried ashore against his will.
“He looked like a beaten dog, cold and scared,” a taxi driver who saw him said.
Livorno port official Gregorio de Falco was hailed as a hero after a transcript emerged of him demanding that the captain return to the ship.
Photo: EPA
“Get on the ship and tell me how many people there are and what is happening onboard. Is that clear?” De Falco is heard saying.
When Schettino resists, he warns: “You may have managed to save yourself, but there, it will really go badly... I will create a lot of trouble for you. Get onboard!”
“I’m begging you,” Schettino says, to which De Falco replies: “Go... There are already bodies, Schettino.”
“How many are there?” he asks.
“You are the one who is supposed to tell me how many, damn it!” De Falco says.
“But do you realize that it is dark and we can’t see anything?” Schettino asks, leaving an incredulous De Falco to wonder: “What do you want to do, Schettino? Go home? It is dark so you want to go home?”
Schettino, who would later admit to recklessly ordering a sail-by “salute” near the island, did not return to the ship to run the rescue operations, which went on until 6am.
The conversation was seen in Italy as an allegory of the country’s “two souls”: On one side the “hair-creamed godfather used to breaking the rules,” on the other the military hero with rigorous ethics.
Despite discovering the crash had torn a huge hole in the liner, Schettino delayed sounding the alarm by more than an hour, by which point the lifeboats on one side of the liner were unusable.
As he sat on his rock, the ship’s purser and onboard doctor saved dozens of lives, with even the island’s deputy mayor climbing onboard the sinking giant to help rescue efforts.
Born into a seafaring family in Castellammare di Stabia near Naples, Schettino was hired by Costa Crociere in 2002 and enjoyed a reputation as a ladies’ man, hosting lavish dinners for glamorous guests at his table, according to crew members.
He was entertaining a blonde Moldovan woman — who was not on the official passenger list — in the moments before the crash.
During the trial he was ordered to stay within the boundaries of his hometown of Meta di Sorrento, but sparked the anger of victims’ relatives by being spotted sunning himself on a friend’s yacht.
He is separated from his wife and has reportedly been living alone with a dog given to him by his daughter.
In 2015 he published a 600-page book on the disaster, called The Truth Submerged, which he dedicated to those who died.
According to the journalist who helped him write the book, he said: “The only mistake I made was not dying too that night.”
However, after Friday’s verdict, the captain accepted his fate.
“He said: ‘I trust in the justice system, the verdict must be respected. I’m handing myself in right now,’” according to lawyer Saverio Senese, who spoke to Schettino by telephone.
Kouri Richins, a Utah mother who published a children’s book about grief after the death of her husband is to serve a life sentence for his murder without the possibility of parole, a judge ruled on Wednesday. Richins was convicted in March of aggravated murder for lacing a cocktail given to her husband, Eric Richins, with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl at their home near Park City in 2022. A jury also found her guilty of four other felonies, including insurance fraud, forgery and attempted murder for trying to poison her husband weeks earlier on Feb. 14, 2022, with a
‘PERSONAL MISTAKES’: Eileen Wang has agreed to plead guilty to the felony, which comes with a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison A southern California mayor has agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government and has resigned from her city position, officials said on Monday. Eileen Wang (王愛琳), mayor of Arcadia, was charged last month with one count of acting in the US as an illegal agent of a foreign government. She was accused of doing the bidding of Chinese officials, such as sharing articles favorable to Beijing, without prior notification to the US government as required by law. The 58-year-old was elected in November 2022 to a five-person city council, from which the mayor is selected
DELA ROSA CASE: The whereabouts of the senator, who is wanted by the ICC, was unclear, while President Marcos faces a political test over the senate situation Philippine authorities yesterday were seeking confirmation of reports that a top politician wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) had fled, a day after gunfire rang out at the Philippine Senate where he had taken refuge fearing his arrest. Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, the former national police chief and top enforcer of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs,” has been under Senate protection and is wanted for crimes against humanity, the same charges Duterte is accused of. “Several sources confirmed that the senator, Senator Bato, is no longer in the Senate premises, but we are still getting confirmation,” Presidential
HELP DENIED? The US Department of State said that the Cuban leadership refuses to allow the US to provide aid to Cubans, ‘who are in desperate need of assistance’ US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday said that Cuba’s leadership must change, as Washington renewed an offer of US$100 million in aid if the communist nation agrees to cooperate. Cuba has been suffering severe economic tumult led by an energy shortage that plunged 65 percent of the country into darkness on Tuesday. Cuba’s leaders have blamed US sanctions, but Rubio, a Cuban American and critic of the government established by Fidel Castro, said the system was to blame, including corruption by the military. “It’s a broken, nonfunctional economy, and it’s impossible to change it. I wish it were different,” he told
RSS