WHEN Anne Hathaway emerged from the limousine for the June premiere of her new movie, Get Smart, she looked the picture of Hollywood perfection.As she stood on the red carpet posing for pictures, a wall of flashbulbs made her translucently pale skin gleam and photographers aggressively vied for the best shot of her.
And yet, while the Bill Blass dress that sheathed her perfect figure got a resounding thumbs up from America's fashion press, the wider media noted that Hathaway was missing the one accessory that everyone was watching for: her long-time boyfriend, the controversial Italian businessman, Raffaello Follieri.
After years of rumour and counter-rumour, a prosecution case was now being made against Follieri, and Hathaway was said to have split from him. This was seemingly her first public confirmation, not that you would have known it from the impish little smile she gave as her co-stars Steve Carell and Dwayne Johnson, moved to her side, temporarily filling the void. She seemed at ease, even if she was churning inside. Everyone agreed that this, more than anything she had done onscreen so far, was the performance of her career.
To those who have followed Hathaway's career, Follieri has long been the distraction from an otherwise perfectly smooth rise to the summit of tinseltown.
The chairman of a large New York-based property development company, he has been accused of dodging millions in unpaid bills, misappropriating $1.3m (€834,000) and committing serious wire fraud. Even aside from Hathaway, Follieri was spectacularly well connected, and the names of his business contacts mentioned in court papers included Bill Clinton, supermarket magnate Ron Burkle and senior clergy.
Several shadier figures connected with the mafia were also alleged to have had business dealings with him. It was enough to make Hathaway, and the studio behind her new movie, highly nervous, especially when it was alleged that much of the misappropriated cash had been lavished on an "unnamed actress," widely understood to be The Devil Wears Prada star.
And yet, however strong the whiff of sulphur around Follieri became, on the surface where it mattered, he never seemed less than the perfect red-carpet chaperone for Hathaway. Impeccably dapper and good-looking, he was often described as a suaver, stockier version of the actor Zach Braff.
Follieri lived in an exclusive $40,000 a month duplex on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue. He seemed to combine the grace of a member of European royalty with a certain Gatsby-esque style. He has expensive tastes -- favouring bespoke Milanese suits and the same brand of tie -- Marinella -- used by JFK. In every way he appeared to be Hathaway's Mr Big.
It was his Italianness -- his ostentatious charm, swagger and gentle good manners -- that endeared people to Follieri. Born in 1978 in a small town in the spur of the heel of the country, he had a comfortable middle-class upbringing in a deeply Catholic family. The only child of Pasquale, a mechanic, and Anna, a journalist, he grew up with ambitions of leaving Italy and making his fortune in America. He studied "manufacture of cosmetics" at Rome's University of La Sapienza but dropped out before graduating.
Around the same time his father lost his car repair shop and, according to reports in the Italian press, began practising law without a qualification. Together they founded a company called Beauty Planet, which, according to the company's website, produced "mass market hair and beauty care products".
Records show, however, that the company almost always operated at a loss -- it bounced around $50,000 in bad cheques -- and in 2002 it went bankrupt. Undeterred by this failure, Follieri moved to New York in 2003, where he set up a property company called the Follieri Group, appointing himself as CEO and his father as president.
Follieri didn't have good English then, but he was an expert at wheeling and dealing. He stayed for the first few months with an Italian-American friend, Vincent Ponte, a man described on the Follieri Group website as a property developer. Ponte had also managed one of New York's largest waste disposal firms and, in a twist that could have been scripted by Scorsese, had ties to the Mob. A few years previously, Ponte and his father had been convicted of being involved in a waste-disposal cartel, organised by the notorious Genovese and Gambino families. Were his own past not so shady, you might have said that Follieri had fallen in with the wrong crowd.
This seemed like an inconvenient detail though as Follieri began to recast himself as a man two steps removed from God. In an audacious move, he claimed to have close ties to the Vatican, a claim that seemed designed to bring his property firm a much-needed sheen of respectability. It didn't seem to work, as the first year of business was extremely quiet for the Follieri business empire.
But then fate intervened. By the end of 2004 the full extent of the sexual abuse rot that had laid waste to Catholic parishes across America was laid bare. Faced with massive legal bills, the church had to sell some of its property holdings. And this was where Follieri stepped in. While the other real estate jackals baying for a slice of the church's wealth had experience and business acumen, the Follieri Group had connections to the Holy See (or so it was claimed -- his spokeswoman told one New York paper that he was a "representative of the Vatican") and an unmatched marketing campaign.
Apparently nothing as grubby as profit even crossed Follieri's mind. Any church property which passed through his hands would be sold only to bodies which would put it to good use -- nurseries, orphanages, that kind of thing. Any profits which were somehow made would be put to very good causes -- some would go to the Vatican, some would go to Follieri's own non-profit charity, which allegedly provided vaccinations for vulnerable children in Latin America.
Follieri's claims to be a church insider were boosted by the appointment to his property company of Andrea Sodano, whose uncle had been a cardinal under John Paul II.
It seemed little wonder that Follieri, this strange mix of Padre Pio and the Milk Tray Man, would be able to sweep Anne Hathaway off her feet. They met in 2004, when she was in the process of moving from being the star of teen movies such as The Princess Diaries to the acting heavyweight and A-lister that she is today.
According to Hathaway, she met Follieri while he was having dinner with a friend of hers. "I walked in, he looked up and we fell in love." Hathaway, who had reportedly aspired to be a nun when she was a child, was said to be enamoured with Follieri's faith. He used his connections to get her a tour of private gardens in the Vatican. She in turn introduced him to her A-list Hollywood friends. They were the glamour couple of the moment.
If meeting the likes of Eva Mendes was a thrill for Follieri, it couldn't compare to the excitement he must have felt as he leveraged his name as Hollywood boyfriend and supposed Vatican emissary into even bigger business ventures. In 2005, as Hathaway won universal praise for her stunning turn in Brokeback Mountain, Follieri was making friends with Doug Band, a businessman and former aide of Bill Clinton. Band would prove to be key in introducing Follieri to a host of well-connected property developers and close personal friends, including Clinton and the supermarket billionaire Ron Burkle. All were charmed by the dapper Italian, and Burkle even offered to go into business with him, to develop some of the unused Church properties. Burkle invested $105m in a joint venture.
By now, Follieri had been around billionaires enough to understand the benefits that philanthropic largesse could bring to a burgeoning business empire and he donated $1m to Bill Clinton's charitable foundation. He also pledged a further $50m to the foundation, eliciting an onstage thank you from Clinton at the 2006 meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative (it was never paid). This brought him into much closer contact with the former president, and they holidayed together in the Dominican Republic. The Italian looked like the man who had it all.
And then the first card in Follieri's elaborate house of cards began to flutter. In April of last year, Burkle filed a lawsuit alleging that rather than ploughing his (Burkle's) millions into their business plan, Follieri had instead been frittering them away on the high life with Hathaway. The Fifth Avenue apartment, his private jet, the hundreds of thousands in credit card bills, the personal chef -- all unwittingly bankrolled by Burkle, according to the suit.
Another lawsuit filed by a Washington DC-based PR company alleged it was owed $250,000. In the same month, news emerged that Follieri had paid Doug Band over $400,000 to get him an introduction with an influential property developer. Follieri would later be cited as exhibit A in Clinton's litany of not-quite-presidential business contacts and a spokeswoman for Slick Willy would subsequently deny that he and the Italian were in any way close.
It slowly emerged that most of the Church properties that Follieri had acquired were slow to sell or had been resold for almost the same price that they had been bought from the Church. In addition, the vaccination projects, planned for Latin America, had been pushed down the agenda. Of the hoped for 190,000 vaccinations, only 1,000 had taken place.
Meanwhile, the legal troubles kept on piling up. Follieri was sued by the company that ran his private jet for hundreds of thousands in unpaid bills. He was also arrested by New York City police for writing out a cheque for nearly $250,000 when he knew he only had $40 in the bank. And to top it all, Vatican officials denied that he had anything whatsoever to do with the Holy See.
Two separate yet equally significant events may have spelled the death knell for the relationship between Hathaway and Follieri. First, the New York state Attorney General announced that his department would be formally investigating Follieri's charitable foundation, of which Hathaway had been a board member. Up to now the legal quagmire that her boyfriend found himself in had been mostly civil but, with a criminal investigation imminent, she faced being cast as a gangster's moll, a role she was definitely not ready to play.
Second, there were numerous reports that through the difficulties Follieri had still found time to canoodle with other women. According to some reports (Hathaway's publicist has steadfastly refused to comment on any aspect of the affair) it was this as much as anything that made up Hathaway's mind.
Since then, more disturbing details have emerged about Follieri, such as the fact that he asked a monsignor to dress up in the robes of a more senior clergyman to give the impression of closer ties to the Pope. The story of modern celebrity is that a compelling narrative, however painful for the protagonists, can only help the careers of all involved.
Although it has to be said The Devil Wears Handmade Italian Suits doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
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