The incredible story of the Italian publisher who scammed authors and stole their manuscripts

On Wednesday, January 5, at John F. Kennedy Airport, New York City, an FBI squad approached a man: Filippo Bernardini, Italian editor, 29 years old. “Hands up!” Was the shout of the officers while the rest of the travelers who just landed looked on in amazement. The charge is wire fraud and identity theft. According to the investigation, he has been stealing manuscripts of unpublished books for five years. Ethan hawke Y Margaret atwood, among the victims.

“They were puzzling thefts, without a clear motive or reward, and they happened in the elegant and not particularly lucrative world of publishing,” he says. Elizabeth A. Harris in The New York Times. This practice has already been studied and is known as phishing: term in English that designates deception to a victim by gaining their trust, posing as a trusted person, company or service. In this case, the victims turned in their unpublished books.

Bernardini was posing as a professional editor; somehow it is. He was working as a rights coordinator for Simon & Schuster UK. The prestigious company issued a statement saying that its editors are “shocked and horrified” by the scandal and that, as a result, Bernardini has been suspended until the facts are clarified. That will be determined by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

“Custody of our authors’ intellectual property is of paramount importance to Simon & Schuster, and to everyone in the publishing industry, and we are grateful to the FBI for investigating these incidents and bringing charges against the alleged perpetrator,” the article reads. release. For now, the investigation is the defendant, not the publishing company founded in New York almost a hundred years ago, on January 2, 1924, for Richard L. Simon Y M. Lincoln Schuster.

How did Bernardini act? He sent emails posing as prominent publishers, he used slightly modified internet domain names such as penguinrandornhouse.com instead of penguinrandomhouse.com, placing an “rn” instead of an “m”. According to the investigation, it registered more than 160 fraudulent domains. The authors entered those sites, created users, passwords and their rights were easily violated.

“Bernardini left few digital crumbs online,” he says Elizabeth A. Harris. His last name was not listed on Twitter or LinkedIn. He defined himself as someone with an “obsession with the written word and languages.” According to his LinkedIn profile, he obtained his BA in Chinese from the Università Cattolica in Milan, an MA in Publishing from the University College London, and was an Italian translator for Our Story, the memoirs of the Chinese comic book author Rao Pingru.

He was clearly familiar with the industry. He used the term “ms” to refer to manuscript and knew the complex process in which a file on the computer becomes a paper artifact or an ebook. Margaret atwood, author of Maid’s tale Y Alias ​​Grace, Y Ethan hawke, a prominent Hollywood and Broadway actor and also a novelist, are the most striking cases, but there are also victims from the United States, Sweden and Taiwan, among other countries.

The scam seems to be quite clear, however the investigation is ongoing and there are several ropes to be tied up. The most important remains undisclosed: why did he do it? Once he got those unpublished books, Bernardini didn’t offer them on the black market. “What he’s been stealing,” said the literary headhunter. Kelly farber, “It’s basically a huge amount of information that any publisher anywhere could use to their advantage.”

The federal prosecutor Damian williams, in a statement announcing the arrest of the Italian publisher, said that “this real life story now reads as a warning.” Is it likely that the phishing diminish or begin to disappear from this case? Everything is possible. The truth is that Bernardini was looking for more than money with his scams. Power, maybe? It will be necessary to see what data the investigation continues to reveal.

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