Serie A: Genoa President Ferrero is in jail – Sport

There are characters that only exist in Italy. Figures from the eternal Commedia dell’arte, dazzling tightrope walkers on the abyss. The leadership of Italian football in particular was always full of patrons, drunk by the applause of the fans, staggering between megalomania and real satire. Let us only remind you of Silvio Berlusconi. But now they are leaving, one after the other, often giving way to investors from abroad. Some walk quietly, others loud and inglorious.

The Roman film and cinema entrepreneur Massimo Ferrero, 70, until recently the owner and president of Sampdoria Genoa, was arrested a few days ago. Because of fraudulent bankruptcy, falsification of accounts in some of his companies, all bad on 38 counts. The investigating public prosecutors refused to allow him house arrest because, according to the court, the accused was far too “cunning and sly”. Ferrero is now in San Vittore, Milan’s prison. He has resigned from the presidency of the association, there was probably no other choice, although the allegations against him do not concern Sampdoria itself. So far, at least.

The not all that surprising fate of Ferrero, whom they also call “he viperetta”, Roman for “the little viper”, fills the newspapers. Preventive melancholy resonates in the reports. The whole Calcio circus lives from these characters, at least more than from American hedge funds and Chinese investors.

Gianluca Vialli, an old club hero, had other donors on hand

Ferrero has always made a sport of being better than its many parodies. More colorful, more grotesque, a caricature of himself, and that wasn’t easy. The best impersonator in Italy, Maurizio Crozza from the TV station Nove, a great master of pastiche and a fan of the “Samp”, had Ferrero included in his repertoire, but always remained a little pale in the role. Of all things. Because the original was just too good.

Every Sunday Ferrero added it himself, mostly in the Stadio Luigi Ferraris, the venue for both first division clubs from Genoa. He always showed himself in fancy clothes, in cashmere jackets, black and white shoes, silk scarves, which he sometimes wrapped around his curly head. The cameras always searched and found him. Out of superstition, Ferrero performed strange gestures with his hands before games. And the way he spoke: hardly a sentence without being cursed with the use of anatomical adjectives.

It was always an unparalleled show, everyone shook their heads – and waited impatiently for the next saying. About his colleague from Lazio, the cleaning contractor and club president Claudio Lotito, who is also an eminent representative of the real satirical genre, Ferrero once said: “When Lotito goes to a wedding, he wants to be the bridegroom. If he goes to a funeral, he wants her Role of the dead. “

Ferrero grew up in Testaccio, which used to be a working-class district of Rome. The father was a bus driver, the mother had a market stall in Piazza Vittorio. The little one rarely went to school; he was drawn to Cinecittà, to the Roman film studios, at an early age. There is a rumor that the first time he smuggled himself into a delivery box with costumes – he probably spread the rumor himself.

He served himself as a “trovaroba”, as they say to those who find things and people at the last minute: furniture from the 17th century, a plumber at an inopportune time, a rare accessory for a production. And because he was always hanging around there, Ferrero also took on small extras, sometimes playing a legionnaire, sometimes a Mexican bandit. When he later married the heiress of a large cheese dairy in the area, he suddenly had enough money for his own film productions.

In 2014 the owner and sponsor of Sampdoria offered his club for free

Ferrero only got big when an old friend sold him his cinemas in need: the film producer Vittorio Cecchi Gori, once president of AC Florence, owned more than 60 of them, including the “Adriano” in Rome, an institution in a former theater. Ferrero was someone now, at least in Rome. How he paid for this cinema empire remains a mystery to this day.

In 2014, the legendary owner and financier of Sampdoria, the oil industrialist Edoardo Garrone, offered him his club, for free. Ferrero was only supposed to take on the debt: 15 million euros. In Genoa people wondered whether this Roman with the wide Roman accent and funny hair, who everyone knew he would have much rather bought AS Roma, had any money at all. Very intuitive, the Genoese are known for turning every penny. They never liked the braggart. Ferrero once acknowledged the dislike: “Who knows Sampdoria beyond Recco and Chiavari?” These are the names of two neighboring municipalities of Genoa.

He kept promising that the club would build on glorious times, the times thirty years ago when the “Samp” actually won the Italian championship and made it to the final of the European Cup the following year. That was a chimera, of course, but at least: You never got relegated from Serie A with Ferrero. And since some players turned out to be lucky and sold for a lot of money, there was usually a plus in the club books.

People in Italy have always been more generous with those in power in the world of football

Perhaps Sampdoria was Ferrero’s best business ever. Everything else failed. The airline Livingston Energy Flight, which he bought to fly as many Italians as possible on charter flights to the Caribbean, soon went bankrupt. Only two of his cinemas in Rome are still open. For others, the wind is blowing autumn leaves again under the glass front doors into the dusty checkout rooms.

The investigators from Paola in Calabria discovered Ferrero by chance. The police had found in a stolen car a briefcase full of documents, register entries, meeting minutes and bookkeeping from four companies whose headquarters Ferrero had relocated to the deep south of Italy a few years ago in order to be a little more undisturbed. Did he want to get rid of the papers with the staging that was ready for a film?

Open detailed view

For the public prosecutor, the companies and an almost infinite stack of boxes served to deceive the creditors and the tax office and to enrich themselves in the process. Ferrero had debts of 200 million euros but managed, among other things, to sign leasing contracts for a Ferrari Spider and a large yacht. Penniless, but an appearance as if he was about to buy the world.

Of course, one might wonder why he got away with it for so long, despite all the signs. People in Italy have always been a bit more generous with the powerful from the football world, these dream donors and whiskers.

Now the fans of the club, the “Doriani”, hope that the attempt that Massimo Ferrero stifled two years ago with a few sayings and superstitious gestures will be successful: Gianluca Vialli – one of the heroes from the glorious years of 1991 and 1992, as a striker at the side of Roberto Mancini, today’s coach of the Italian national team – the “viperetta” wanted to buy the club even then. Vialli had American investors on board who would have contributed the necessary money. The question now is: do they still exist, do they still want? The city rival CFC Genoa already changed hands a few weeks ago: toy manufacturer Enrico Preziosi sold to a rope team from the USA, the “777 Partners”. You dream big now.

The Ligaderby is now on the weekend in Genoa. “Derby della Lanterna” is what it is called because the lighthouse is the symbol of the port city. Ferrero will then probably be given evil banners in the ranks of Luigi Ferrari. Whereby: astonishment at this epilogue would be hypocritical, even downright daring. Ferrero was always happy to say, in a self-revealing way: “I was born and raised in Cinecittà, where reality and fantasy flow into one another.”