The Gigolo, The Heiress And The Blackmail Plot
Richard Shears

The line between true crime and crime fiction is becoming increasingly blurred when viewed against shocking real-life events that have made headlines in recent years. The challenge for novelists is to create a plot that keeps the reader, so accustomed to hideous daily evils, enthralled - while true crime authors need to take their work far beyond what has been published in newspapers, magazines and on the internet.

When I was asked to write a book about a Swiss gigolo who plotted to seduce the richest woman in Germany - and the 26th wealthiest in the world - before attempting to blackmail her with sex videos of them together, I eagerly took up the challenge. I live in Australia but believed I would be able to piece together a great story by travelling to the lothario's haunts in Europe and speaking to those who knew him and his hapless victim.

There were many stories about the gigolo, Helg Sgarbi, and his alleged accomplice, Italian Ernani Barretta, in European publications and what they were said to have got up to. But the more I researched the story I wondered whether pulling a book together would be such an easy task after all - much of what was written in one publication was more or less repeated in another. And there was very little in the way of official documentation.

The background material, then, my starting point, was extremely limited. As for Sgarbi's victim, BMW heiress Susanne Klatten, who is worth billions of Euros, she is one of the world's most private women, the need for secrecy about her personal life impressed upon her from an early age following a plot to kidnap her when she was a teenager.

However, with a lot of driving and a great deal of good fortune, I found enough people in my travels to piece together a story that allowed me to reconstruct scenes and conversations and write in a style that I enjoy - as the non-fiction novel.

I drove to every town that Sgarbi operated in, spoke to people who knew him and visited the hotels where he seduced his victims before he made his move on Mrs Klatten. Several people refused to talk to me. Some I met by chance, such as the woman who I just happened to get talking to in a small Swiss cafe during a day of little progress - and who revealed she knew Sgarbi as the 'quiet man who lived in a one-room flat just up the road'.

Ernani Barretta, who continues to protest his innocence, had not spoken to any writers as police investigated his alleged involvement in the dastardly plot to seduce and blackmail Mrs Klatten, but he invited me into his grand country home in the hills of central Italy.

I had not expected him to discuss Sgarbi at all, but he volunteered the information that they had been friends for years. But what Sgarbi had got up to had nothing to do with him, he insisted and he would tell that to a court later.

I left Europe with my notebook full. It was a fantastic story. But where to begin? Well, how would a novelist start.? Something like this perhaps - although this was true.....

'The woman would pay up. ...there was no way she would allow any scandal to touch her or her family. Nor would she want the whole Nazi thing brought up again...'

The Gigolo, the Heiress and the Blackmail Plot is published by New Holland

Posted at 11:30AM Friday 02 Oct 2009