Rafaello Follieri: Con Man or Delusional?
Rafaello Follieri, the 30-year-old Italian who's currently languishing in an eight-foot cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan, made the biggest mistake of his life not when he lied, cheated, and spent millions of dollars of other people's money on private jets and suites at the Ritz, but when he hooked up with Anne Hathaway, according to Michael Shnayerson's in-depth article in Vanity Fair. While the doomed smooth-talker displayed an incredible knack for deception—the apotheosis of which came in September 2006 with his appearance onstage at the Global Initiative gathering with Bill Clinton, who congratulated Follieri on his "good works" and thanked him for a completely imaginary $50 million pledge—his business dealings may only have caught the attention of the feds because of Hathaway.
While it was speculated at the time of Follieri's arrest back in June that Hathaway may have co-operated with the FBI to lure him back to New York from Europe, Shnayerson wonders if someone in the actress's camp actually orchestrated his downfall. "The U.S. attorney doesn't get out of bed for this sort of stuff," a source "close to the situation" tells Shnayerson. Especially since the main charges against Follieri—fraud and money laundering—concern his misappropriation of $1.3 million belonging to his erstwhile partner, supermarket billionaire Ron Burkle, and the funds had been paid back to Burkle months earlier following a civil suit.
None of which is to say that the picture of Follieri that emerges is sympathetic: Even if his thwarted business deals—which seem to have been undertaken more out of sheer hubris and delusion than outright criminal intent—might not have put him in jail, he probably deserves to be there for his many other offenses, like being obnoxious to waiters, hiring pointless bodyguards who weren't allowed to sit down in restaurants, and constantly yelling at his poor little secretary. Just how long society will be protected from such behavior isn't clear. A grand jury indictment is still yet to come.
