Parretti Giancarlo

Italian fugitive financier whose $1.3 billion takeover of the film studio MGM in 1990 and subsequent default on an $888 million loan from Credit Lyonnais nearly triggered the giant French banks collapse in Orvieto, Italy. Parretti, who was convicted of mismanagement, perjury and witness tampering by a Delaware court in 1997, had fled to Italy just before his sentencing. In April 1998, a French court convicted him of fraud and sentenced him, in absentia, to four years in prison. If Italian authorities allow Parrettis extradition to the U.S., he faces up to ten years in prison and a $1.5 billion fine. In October 1999, he was apprehended and arrested in Los Angeles, CA. Raised on an olive farm 50 miles north of Rome, Parretti went to sea as a young man, working as a waiter aboard the Queen Elizabeth. Eagerly open to opportunity, while on board he befriended a powerful tycoon and political boss from Sicily, Graziano Verzotto. Verzotto hired him to work as a waiter and maitre d at one of his hotels and Parretti was soon hotel manager and the protégé and confidant of Verzotto. In 1975 an Italian government investigation revealed that Verzotto had taken bribes to run money for Michele Sindona, the Mafias notorious banker. Giancarlo Parretti was solicitous and helpful, and when Verzotto fled Italy, Parretti took over the management of his business interests, including the Siracusa soccer team. Parretti paid the team every week from a bag full of cash. The team eventually went bankrupt; years later the ensuing investigation would produce an indictment for fraud. Parretti was a busy man these years with more than a soccer team. He was violating public securities laws, conspiring to commit bodily harm, issuing bad checks and forming fraudulent corporations. Though few people are aware of it even today, the banking institution Credit Lyonnais, by the mid-1980s, was on its way to becoming the worlds leading lender to Hollywood studios. At the same time, Parretti was building his fortune in Europe. One of his important alliances was with Florio Fiorini, a chubby, good-humored Tuscan businessman and more. By the mid-1980s Fiorini had secretly become one of the biggest, if not the biggest, political briber and money launderer in Europe, having learned those skills from the master criminals Roberto Calvi and Michele Sindona. In 1987, with a combination of bankers, investors and various money merchants, Parretti began to put together a series of movie deals and studio investments. Whether in Beverly Hills or New York, Paris or Rome, Parretti was rarely out of the entertainment headlines in the early months of 1989. His contacts and business machinations at one time or another involved Alan Ladd, Jr, Pathe Cinema, New World Entertainment, Kirk Kekorian, Time Warner and Turner Broadcasting. In March 1990, a court in Naples convicted Parretti of fraud in connection with the bankruptcy of his Il Diario newspapers. He was sentenced in absentia to 3 1/2 years in prison and appealed. Back in the U.S., where Parretti had yet to actually put the MGM deal together, the ridicule began with such "inside jokes" as quips by Billy Crystal at the Academy Award ceremonies that the MGM lion would soon not roar, but take the fifth amendment. Giancarlo Parretti and Florio Fiorinis takeover of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer closed on 11/01/1990, Los Angeles. It was all a matter of well-placed bribes to cooperative officials of a vast global bank to floor loans of more than $ Read less