The Gucci name is synonymous with wealth, style, and power. But the upcoming blockbuster House of Gucci promises a tale of scandal, betrayal, ambition and murder.
The biographical crime drama by director Ridley Scott stars Lady Gaga, Adam Driver and Al Pacino, and showcases the obscene riches and family infighting at the centre of the luxury fashion house during the 70s, 80s and 90s.
Based on Sara Gay Forden's 2001 book The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour and Greed, this is an impossibly true story. (So yes, there are spoilers ahead.)
"This is a story where, if you made it up, it wouldn't really be believable, because there's so many twists and turns," Forden told the ABC.
Scott's adaptation looks set to focus on how one ambitious woman, Patrizia Reggiani Martinelli, managed to muscle her way into the tight-knit family and threaten its legacy, setting off a "reckless spiral of betrayal, decadence and revenge".
As Patrizia, played by Lady Gaga, puts it in the film's second tantalising trailer: "Gucci needs new blood … it's time to take out the trash."
From daughter of a laundress to star of the social scene
Born in the small northern town of Vignola in 1948, Patrizia grew up as the only child of Silvana Barbieri, a waitress and launderer.
Patrizia never knew her biological father, but by the time she was 12, her mother had left her first husband (a Martinelli) for a handsome trucking magnate, Fernando Reggiani.
They moved to up-and-coming Milan where Reggiani later adopted Patrizia, doting on her and granting her every whim.
"Patrizia became the living image of Silvana's ambition," Forden wrote in The House of Gucci.
After high school, Patrizia enrolled in a school for translators and became fluent in English and French. According to friends she had at the time, she was also busy making something of a reputation for herself in the social scene.
"Patrizia always talked about how she wanted to marry a rich person and have a wealthy life," a schoolfriend told The Sydney Morning Herald in 1998.
"It was her only goal in life and became her life achievement."
In November 1970, Reggiani slipped on a red dress and headed out to a debutante party in the elite suburbs of Milan, where she caught the eye of an eligible young bachelor: Maurizio Gucci.
Maurizio, the only son of Rodolfo Gucci, was shy, but quite the catch.
He was on the cusp of finding a place in the successful fashion house founded by his grandfather, Guccio Gucci, in 1920s Florence.
"I didn't think much of him at first. He was just the quiet boy whose teeth crossed over at the front," Patrizia told The Guardian in 2016.
For Maurizio, it was love at first sight. The pair began dating — Maurizio reportedly asked Patrizia to marry him on their second date.
But their courtship wasn't all smooth sailing. Having raised Maurizio alone from the age of five, when the boy's mother died, Rodolfo was extremely protective.
He warned his son that Patrizia was a social climber with nothing but money on her mind.
Despite Rodolfo's protestations, Maurizio and Patrizia married at the Church of Santa Sepolcro, Milan, in 1972. Not a single Gucci attended.
Patrizia was determined for her husband to heal the rift with his family, and lobbied his uncle, Aldo Gucci, to convince Rodolfo to reconnect. It worked.
As a sign of his remorse, Rodolfo gifted Maurizio and Patrizia a luxury New York penthouse. The young couple packed up their life in Milan and moved to the US, where Maurizio was installed as Aldo's trainee in the expanding stateside wing of the company.
While Maurizio learned the tricks of the trade, Patrizia got to work rubbing shoulders with socialites and actresses alike.
In New York, they welcomed two daughters — Allesandra and Allegra — who they took on regular holidays to their palatial Connecticut farmhouse, a family chalet in St Moritz and a villa in Acapulco, Mexico.
They hopped from private island to private island on their 64-metre wooden yacht, the Creole — an extravagant purchase that Maurizio shelled out millions to refurbish.
It had once belonged to billionaire Greek shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos, who remodelled and renamed the vessel but walked away from it after the suspicious deaths of two of his wives on board.
Any sailor knows it is bad luck to rename a boat. Patrizia was certain the Creole was cursed, and convinced Maurizio to bring in a psychic who claimed to be able to exorcise the evil spirits that lingered.
Superstition aside, Maurizio and Patrizia's life together in the 70s and early 80s seemed like paradise — but a storm was brewing.
Family feuds and financial fears spell divorce — and danger for Maurizio
Early in their marriage, as Maurizio was finding his feet in the family business, Patrizia offered her husband advice, and propelled him toward a role as heir apparent.
"Maurizio felt free with me. We had fun, we were a team," she told The Guardian.
But she said everything changed when they returned to Milan after the death of Rodolfo in 1983.
Maurizio inherited Rodolfo's 50 per cent stake in the Gucci empire and began feuding with his cousins and uncles about the direction of the family business.
He felt the brand was drifting from its prestige roots, and began seeking counsel from his lawyers and close advisors rather than Patrizia.
By 1985, their marriage had crumbled. One day in May, he packed a bag and left for Florence without a word. A family friend broke the news to Patrizia that Maurizio would not be coming back.
Patrizia was furious. She confided in her close friend and self-styled astrologer Giuseppina Auriemma, or Pina.
"They spent several summers together in Capri, where Pina had helped find Patrizia a house. Pina's sarcastic Neapolitan banter and skill with tarot cards entertained Patrizia for hours — helping to soothe the pain of Maurizio's departure," Forden wrote.
Meanwhile, Maurizio struck a crafty deal to buy out his family with the help of a firm called Investcorp. He had the power and freedom he'd always wanted, but struggled to execute his grand ideas for the company.
"[Rodolfo] held the purse strings so tightly he never gave Maurizio a chance to stand on his own two feet," a close advisor told Forden for her book.
He was also "spending money like water", Forden said, on lavish upgrades to the Creole and his Milan apartment.
Within a couple of years Maurizio had racked up mountains of debt, and was forced to sell the rest of his shares. The company was no longer owned by anyone inside the Gucci family.
Though Maurizio continued to fund Patrizia's champagne lifestyle and the children's expenses, she grew frustrated over losing her influence and status as Mrs Gucci.
Maurizio had begun to distance himself more and more from his wife, suspicious that she had been spying on his new life with Paola Franchi, a tall blonde with green eyes every bit Patrizia's opposite. He asked for a divorce.
Patrizia was indeed seething — and spying. A network of loyal former Gucci employees, household staff and mutual friends had been feeding her details about business decisions, financial troubles and renovations.
On more than one occasion, Patrizia made her bitterness towards her estranged husband clear.
Patrizia, Forden wrote, saw Maurizio as the source of all her pain and suffering and vowed to destroy him before he destroyed their daughters by starting a new family.
"If it's the last thing I do, I want to see him dead," Patrizia once remarked to a housekeeper.
In 1995, Patrizia got her wish.
Just after 8:30am on Monday, March 27, Maurizio strolled into the foyer of his Milan office, past the doorman and up the red-carpeted staircase, and was shot dead.
The tip-off that led to a team of hitmen, a psychic and 'la Signora'
On the day that Maurizio died, Patrizia wrote a single word into her Cartier diary: "PARADEISOS" — the Greek word for paradise.
Afterward she marched over to the apartment on Corso Venezia where her ex-husband had been living with Paola and her son, and demanded to speak with the lady of the house.
Paola was distraught. And according to Forden's book, she had only one suspect in mind.
"The only thing I can tell you is that in the fall of 1994, Maurizio was worried because he learned from his lawyer that Patrizia told her lawyer she wanted to have him killed," she told police.
Meanwhile, officers from the carabinieri and polizia de stato, two of Italy's overlapping police forces, were combing the crime scene for clues.
At first, the fatal shot through Maurizio's temple had looked like the work of a Mafia-style hitman. But two eyewitnesses, including the doorman who'd been standing just metres away from the killer, had been left alive.
While Maurizio's body was chilling in the morgue, Patrizia got to work. Within hours she had issued a sequester to remove Paola from the Corso Venezia home and make way for Maurizio's daughters, who had inherited his estate. They would of course be accompanied by their mother.
Paola scrambled to take her belongings with her, stripping the apartment of everything from light fixtures and drapery to the contents of the cutlery drawer.
"The next day, Patrizia's lawyers ordered Paola to return everything, although in the end she was permitted to keep pieces she said were hers, including a set of green silk living room draperies that Patrizia had hotly contested," Forden wrote.
Patrizia arranged the funeral, where she sat in the front row, dressed in traditional mourning black and flanked by her daughters.
She told reporters outside the church: "On a human level, I'm sorry. On a personal level, I can't say the same thing."
There were no fresh leads in Maurizio's murder investigation for almost two years. Police had been poring over Maurizio's financial investments and business records for any sign of a deal gone wrong.
But the real culprit, Forden said, was sitting right under their noses.
In 1997, police received a tip-off from a mysterious caller that led them to a rag-tag bunch of conspirators with one woman allegedly at the top.
A young man named Gabriele Carpanese had overheard the night porter at the hotel he lived in boasting about ordering the hit on Maurizio Gucci.
The story was that Patrizia Gucci had enlisted her long-time friend and psychic Pina Auriemma to finally destroy her ex-husband.
Pina had acted as the go-between, connecting Patrizia — referred to in most conversations as 'la Signora' — with the contract killers, and funnelling money between the parties.
Pina's old friend Ivano Savioni, the night porter, knew Orazio Cicala, a bankrupt restaurant manager looking for some quick cash.
He in turn found the killer, former mechanic Bennedetto Ceraulo, and drove the getaway car.
Ceraulo had sourced a revolver, built a silencer, bought some bullets and taken out the target.
The dots all seemed to line up, and investigators launched a sting.
With the help of their tipster, and some undercover police work, they tapped phones, bugged cars and managed to get almost every suspect on tape discussing the murder plot.
In the wee hours of January 31, Patrizia Reggiani received a knock on the door. She was placed under arrest and carted off to the station in her floor-length mink coat, gold jewellery, and Gucci handbag.
A court case fit for a soap opera
Throughout the 80s and 90s, countless Gucci family dramas played out in the courts.
Maurizio's cousin Paolo Gucci was sued by his father Aldo for secretly launching a business using the Gucci name. He then dobbed in his father to the IRS, and Aldo was jailed for tax evasion.
Maurizio himself landed in hot water over offshore funds used to buy the Creole and forged signatures that sealed his inheritance and saved him a tidy tax bill.
But none of these cases would capture as much attention as the Maurizio Gucci murder trial, a courtroom scene so dramatic it could have been lifted from a soap opera.
Forden described it as the Italian version of the OJ Simpson trial. The press dubbed Patrizia "Vedova Nera", the Black Widow, and Pina the "strega" or "witch" of the house of Gucci.
"Every time Patrizia came in or out of court, all the cameras and paparazzi were on her. It was really kind of a national obsession," Forden told the ABC.
The five suspects were all on trial together, Patrizia's extravagant former life on stark display next to her co-conspirators.
In the prosecutor's opening remarks he described Patrizia as "an obsessed, hate-filled divorcee who coldly and determinedly orchestrated the murder of her husband to gain control of his multi-million-dollar estate", Forden wrote.
Her defence team would concede that Patrizia had indeed grown to hate her husband and wish for his death.
But they argued her long-time friend and trusted advisor, Pina, had taken advantage of this obsession and used it to blackmail Patrizia out of her fortune.
The 150 million lire (about $US150,000 in today's money) Patrizia paid to Pina before the murder was "a generous loan", they argued, and the 450 million paid afterwards had been extorted.
The defence presented the court with a signed notary from Patrizia that read: "I have been forced to pay hundreds of millions of lire for the safety of myself and my family. If anything should happen to me, it will be because I know the name of the person who killed my husband: Pina Auriemma."
But the confessions of Pina and Cicala, the driver who had arranged the hitman, proved fatal for Patrizia's defence.
The prosecution had also produced hours of covertly recorded conversations between the accused, Patrizia's diary entries, and an eyewitness account placing Ceraulo at the scene on the day of the murder.
The court ordered a psychological profile on Patrizia, which found that although she was fit to stand trial, she had a narcissistic personality disorder.
"That created a dynamic where anything that went against her in her life, she experienced it as a personal blow, an act of aggression," Forden told the ABC.
"So when Maurizio lost the company, for example, obviously he didn't do that to spite her, but she experienced it as a kind of a fatal blow."
After five months of testimony, all defendants were found guilty. Patrizia was sentenced to 29 years in Milan's San Vittore prison.
The week Patrizia was convicted, the flagship Gucci store in Florence displayed a sparkling set of silver handcuffs in the front window. Officially, the timing was a "coincidence".
'The most Gucci of them all'
Patrizia's prison cell was a far cry from the opulence she had enjoyed as Mrs Gucci.
She regularly clashed with other inmates and lobbied the warden for a private cell and a refrigerator to keep the homemade delicacies her mother Silvana delivered every week — to no avail.
She was granted permission to keep plants and a pet ferret, Bambi, as a special privilege.
By 2011, she was eligible for parole through work release, but turned her nose up, telling a judge: "I've never worked a day in my life, why would I start now?"
After serving 16 years, Patrizia Reggiani, once a Martinelli and no longer a Gucci, left her "San Vittore residence" in 2014.
Upon her release, she told Italian newspaper La Repubblica she hoped to return to the company fold.
"They need me," she said.
"I still feel like a Gucci — in fact, the most Gucci of them all."
To this day, that hasn't happened. Patrizia now lives a quiet life in her mother's Milan apartment, next to the courthouse where she was sentenced.
In one of her most recent interviews, Patrizia told an Italian journalist she had begun to make amends for her crimes, offering compensation to witnesses and Maurizio's former partner, Paola.
She said she told her estranged daughters they could forget all about the millions they owed her in the lifetime financial support Maurizio had agreed to after their divorce in 1993.
All she asked for in exchange was a modest monthly stipend and time with her grandchildren — as well as the occasional outing on Maurizio's cursed luxury yacht.