Serie A Footballers Caught up in Blackmail Scam

By: Bob | March 14th, 2007

Over the past few months I have learned a lot of things by writing this blog. I’ve learned that grammar counts for little in the blogosphere, criticizing Cristiano Ronaldo will lead to 10,000 nasty emails from high school girls around the world and that the blackmail asking price for sordid pictures in Italy is around twenty thousand euros. That is how much former Prime Minister and AC Milan boss Silvio Berlusconi reportedly paid to keep his daughter’s pictures out of the newspapers and it is reportedly how much David Trezegeut paid to avoid the embarrassment of being shown with a woman who is not his wife.

More details from the Italy footballers’ blackmail scandal have emerged today and unfortunately these details are in Italian. So that means the non Italian speakers of the world must do what we have done for generations, try to use Google translate. Among the details one learns doing this is that Trezerguet was not alone in being blackmailed by a paparazzi photographer. Alberto Gilardino, Francesco Totti, Adriano and Francesco Coco are all somehow loosely involved.

It is Coco’s case that caught my attention. The renowned ladies man and clown apparently had to pony up blackmail money twice because, according to the best I can tell from Google translate, some of the photos were doctored to make it look like he was enjoying the company of a transsexual.

To the soccer player it was shown the publication of the images “compromising” on newspapers of gossip and, quite, their “possible manipulation”, so as to to make to seem the woman a transessuale. The Coco paid seimila euro for having the photos and not running risks.

I recently was given a book about organized crime in football in England called Football and Gangsters: How Organised Crime Controls the Beautiful Game. I thought the book was largely shite. It is poorly written. Its author is an egotistical tabloid journalist. It features stories of extortion attempts against football players that I found hard to believe. Hard to believe until I read the Italian papers today.