A haven for scams

It is a classic Italian summer staple, like watermelon and tomatoes with rice: the ‘sòla’. A word that is difficult to translate, it is more than just a scoundrel; it is also a mythomaniac – and a repeat mythomaniac at that.  Even recently, when trying to explain to an English-speaking audience the protagonist of one of my translated novels – which centres precisely on the fascinating figure of a ‘sòla’ (sòlas are always very fascinating) – I encountered serious difficulties. But don’t worry, I won’t be writing a self-review of my book here, signing off as Emilio Cresci, as perhaps Ranucci did for his on Amazon; although, let’s face it, anyone who writes books has wanted to do that at least once in their life. And yet, we’ve never dared to do so – not because we’re all irreproachable, upright souls, but rather out of a sacred fear of being found out (but we’ll come back to that later).

According to the Treccani dictionary, "sòla" is a feminine noun meaning "deception, trickery, swindle", but it also has a masculine meaning: "a person in the habit of deceiving others". The ‘sòla’ differs from a scoundrel; he is a scoundrel ‘on steroids’, a mythomaniac who consistently defrauds others, obsessively – a serial impostor. The etymology is thought to derive from ‘suola’ (from the Latin ‘sŏlea’). “In Roman slang, it referred to the sole of an old shoe or one poorly mended by cobblers to deceive customers and force them to pay for another repair”. 

There is no doubt that Rome is the Silicon Valley of con artists, and summer is their big moment, when you drive along the Aurelia or flick through the summer TV schedules of repeats, marvelling at the greatest con artist in Italian cinema: the wild Bruno Cortona from "Il Sorpasso", the one with the fake "Chamber of Deputies" sign on his car. Or the legendary Manuel Fantoni, the unforgettable con artist from "Borotalco" (whose real name is actually Cesare Cuticchia, but “how can you beat the way Manuel Fantoni pulls it off?”).

But then come the news stories that surpass fiction. Here’s Ranucci again, Sigfrido, with his friend Lavitola – a real con artist, I can tell you – and here the news, history and the judiciary will reveal how it really went; ‘sòla magistra vitae’, but it is certainly peculiar that someone who builds a name and a career for himself as a great exposer of con artists should then end up, at the very least, being conned himself—by a con artist through and through like Lavitola. 

The “Report method”, which by now was like the champenoise – the classic method of barrique-aged investigation – perhaps had a slight intoxicating effect on its protagonist. Vintage bubbles of civil society. Naturally, many then wanted to taste that nectar. So it’s not just Lavitola in the summer of the ‘self-bomb’: there’s also a ready-to-drink light wine being harvested, a ‘novello’ Château Lavitola. Older readers will recall the ‘Nano ghiacciato’, a tragic sparkling wine from the 1980s that had been invented in Veneto, sold in miniature bottles. Here is the ‘Nano’ according to the Lavitola method. Here is another great character whom Dino Risi would have loved: a certain Adriano Cappellari, a 21-year-old aspiring journalist from Enego (Vicenza) accused of staging an arson attack on his own home, in order to pose as a victim of organised crime and thus rise to ‘success’ (whatever that may mean): for a while he was placed under police protection, and the Under-Secretary for Publishing at Palazzo Chigi awarded him a prize. Giorgia Meloni praised him. Then he confessed that he’d written the fake threatening letters himself – one against himself, and then, in a climax of mythomania, against Meloni, and whilst he was at it, against the anti-Camorra parish priest of Caivano, Don Maurizio Patriciello, who subsequently gave him a proper telling-off. The telling-off given by the priest from Caivano to the young Venetian ‘bomb-maker’ (reminiscent of Romolo Valli as Father Baldini) seems to have come straight out of I Complessi or, once again, from Verdone, to stay within the realm of Italian comedy. 

But then the bomb-maker’s and journalists’ trails intersect: the young bomb-maker had also written to "Report", denouncing irregularities in the village, and "Report" had sent a film crew there, to the village. But they had no idea what lay in store for them: the Cappellari method. Not content with the visit, the young bomber had sent the village baker (the village baker!) another anonymous letter in which he threatened to blow up Sigfrido Ranucci himself, who was due to go there on 20 August to present his book in the very same village. 

The meeting was subsequently cancelled; the young man apologised, and of course his age is endearing, but naturally, as enthusiasts of journalism’s business models, one thinks of AI, newsletters… a podcast. But perhaps we’re boomers: in the end, is the choice between Substack and TNT?  

Bomb or no bomb, hoax or no hoax, there are various degrees. There are those who boast, and those who really do end up getting burned. Here is the tragic case of the ‘youngest black professor ever appointed at Cambridge’, namely the deeply sad story of Jason Arday, the lecturer who was first praised and turned into a symbol, then discredited – quite violently, in fact – to the point where he probably came to believe it would be better to end it all. Here too, investigations are underway; we’ll understand more clearly in time. Many blame the journalists – on the one hand, always irrelevant; on the other, always to blame for everything, hoaxers or not; others accuse the academic establishment, which never suspected a thing about the man’s CV – not a ‘bomb-throwing’ one, but equally explosive nonetheless: of plagiarism, which, however, may have been minor; of the plagiarised works; of him first being autistic and non-verbal, then exceptionally studious, and finally a PhD holder. 

Finally, a runner of frenzied, impossible marathons. Having escaped scrutiny and envy, he had even gone so far as to tell his own story in an autobiography. Which, naturally, contributed to the debacle. We’re still on "La scelta", Ranucci’s memoir, with its rather racy confessions about the female interns. We’re somewhere between "Cancellation – American Fiction" by Percival Everett – the novel, later made into a film, about a Black writer who, because he didn’t produce stories that were wretched enough or ‘Black enough’, was ignored by everyone, until he invented wretched, ‘ultra-Black’ adventures and finally made a splash (not in the explosive sense). But we’re also delving a little into Carrère’s "L’Adversario", because con artists always end up making a move that gives them away; they forget the detail that unmasks them, as if, deep down, they actually wanted to be unmasked, rebelling against the myth they themselves have constructed; as if there were, in the con artist of every stripe, an impulse to confess. He leaves traces, writes memoirs, scrutinises himself… like Don Draper in Mad Men, at some point he forgets the keys to the locker that holds his (fake) identity.

Now it is said – and perhaps it is true – that everyone is being far too hard on Arday: ultimately, partly to punish the ‘woke’ movement. The ‘woke’ movement, as we have come to realise, was a massive scam; it helped get the ‘scam-in-chief’, Donald Trump, elected: it divided families, shook consciences, and threw academia into turmoil – in the motherland. Here, it arrived very tentatively, like many imported phenomena. In fact, there are no known Black professors – neither marathon runners nor couch potatoes – in Italian academia (let’s not even mention autistic Black people!), where, if anything, academic posts are hereditary, as they always have been.  And after all, if ‘woke’ originated from the ‘campus left’, what sort of campuses could we possibly have here? If anything, we have Pegaso and e-campuses. A bit of ‘woke’ with an Amatriciana twist has taken hold, that’s true, in publishing, with ‘Murgism’ and ‘post-Murgism’, which have brought about repositioning and a change in the ruling classes, followed by literary hybrids, grafted onto indigenous forms, giving rise to a strand and a canon of magical realism centred on whingeing. But apart from that, what else?

It doesn’t seem like much. You don’t see many trans people about, and the debate over men’s and women’s toilets has never really taken off in a country where the main emergency is actually finding a soap dispenser that works. Defund the police? But they’re already penniless, the poor sods. Scraping the bottom of the barrel, along came – with the usual ten-year delay – a bit of George Floyd, with the police not quite knowing how to handle Black people, who sometimes end up being suffocated. “Woke 1 was crazy,” said the former firebrand MP Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was immediately accused of dismissing the phenomenon too easily. But they’re already heading towards 2, 3, 4 – who knows when they’ll reach us (and how ‘woke’ are you? Just like with the iPhone). Meanwhile, however, in Italy, as always, the reaction has arrived to a phenomenon that never actually materialised, in a country that has no stars but anti-stars, no revolutions but only counter-revolutions. So here we are, in the thick of the battle against ‘wòk’ – even pronounced with a very open ‘o’, as I heard the other day on the train: ‘it’s all the fault of wòk’ – though perhaps they were actually taking it out on the wok in which vegetables are stir-fried. 

Then, of course, America is now an exporter – not so much of ‘woke’ culture as of scams and rip-offs. The leader of the world is a first-class Manuel Fantoni, someone who claims he’ll end all the wars in the world, yet starts a new one every day. Someone who struts about and changes the name of the Ministry of Defence to the Ministry of War, and then hides in a shipping container. 

Even Silicon Valley – which used to be all ‘woke’ and is now all muscle and Trump-like – has churned out a brand-new scam. Leopold Aschenbrenner, aged twenty-four – though his age is uncertain – already dubbed ‘the Nostradamus of AI’, was, until a few days ago, yet another prodigious success story. With his clean-cut looks, a veritable cherub of finance; of German descent and a former OpenAI collaborator, he has set up a sensational investment fund specialising in artificial intelligence, called ‘Situational Awareness’. Admitted to Columbia at the age of 15, he turned down the chance to continue his studies at Yale and instead went to work with Sam Bankman-Fried – you may remember him, the curly-haired cryptocurrency tycoon, currently in prison. He then moved to OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, where he was initially sacked for leaking confidential documents.

The major financial groups couldn’t care less about this young man who is proposing investments that are far too risky, and in San Francisco he lives in a studio flat shared with a podcast studio (these days, Manuel Fantoni wouldn’t be living in a penthouse with a see-through bath, but in a podcast studio – that much is clear). 

He then writes a sort of manifesto, aptly titled “Situational Awareness”, about the glorious future that awaits artificial intelligence, and from there a host of strangers begin buying shares in his fund. Starting at $100 million, it grows to $45 billion in two years. He becomes the darling of Silicon Valley; everyone is his friend. The collapse comes just like in a film: on 30 July, as guests are arriving at his lavish wedding in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, trouble strikes too: the fund plummets by 67 per cent, and he is forced to sell almost everything.

The marriage (with a hefty sum from Anthropic) went ahead anyway, and Aschenbrenner might well bounce back, but for now he seems set to join the select ranks of Silicon Valley con artists, about whom there is a vast body of film and television, from the woman with the fake blood tests (a Disney+ series was dedicated to her) to the fraudster Anna Delvey (Netflix series) to the Israeli from the WeWork co-working spaces (Apple TV): In America, it’s clear, they know how to capitalise even on the downfall of con artists.  

And yet, who knows if a film will ever be made here about the Cefalù Bistrò, that place that’s half restaurant, half fishmonger’s. I would certainly watch it. Because it’s not just about the capital, as I heard some sceptical Milanese say this summer. They’re quite full of themselves claiming that ‘it was’ (or ‘had been’) Rome: a place like the Cefalù Bistrot could only exist at the epicentre of the graft, they say, but I have my doubts about that. Of course, a Lavitola-style Lavitola could not operate in Milan. In Milan, he would be dressed differently, have a different haircut, and the Cefalù would be called at least Cefalù Lab, or one of those trendy past participles: ‘Sgusciato’, ‘Triggered’, ‘Under Investigation’, or even ‘Cefalù Symposium’, or simply ‘Method’; and events, conversations, readings and games of burraco would be held there, courtesy of the gracious sponsor. There’d be a podcast. It would certainly offer ‘experiential menus’, and the haughty waiter would ask: ‘Do you already know what our concept is?’ ‘You’ll find our menu on the QR code, along with a survey.’ 

Milan, in fact, has attracted and created so many of them over the years – from influencers to event organisers to various champagne sabre-cutters – not to mention those clubs where business is done and young ladies are summoned; it’s a world away from Rome. Well, perhaps with a Milanese version of Cefalù you wouldn’t be able to spend all those hours chatting, because they’d ask you, ‘Would you prefer the 7 pm slot, to be freed up for 9 pm, or the 10.30 pm one?’. After all, one sensational ‘scam’ at the start of the summer was the story of that restaurant so beloved by the Milanese intelligentsia, which, it turned out, only allowed bookings online and only at the stroke of midnight – a sort of ‘click day’ – and for those who made it through the gruelling selection process, they even sadistically removed the customers’ favourite dishes from the menu because they were being posted on Instagram too much.

And through it all, people keep going there. And clicking away. Lavitola, take my advice: forget about the explosives, hire a social media manager – even one who graduated from Pegaso. Pack up and leave Rome, and open up in Milan. Forget about the fishmonger’s. It’s got to be half restaurant, half podcast studio. I’ll even give you the name – or rather, the concept. LavitoLab: listen to how well that rolls off the tongue.