A former Italian employee at the headquarters of the American publishing house “Simon & Schuster” in London admitted before the New York federal court to stealing more than a thousand manuscripts of famous writers thanks to an innovative system of impersonation.
The US Federal Police (FBI) arrested Filippo Bernardini (30 years old) at John Fitzgerald Kennedy International Airport in New York and charged him with electronic fraud and impersonation of a number of personalities in the field of publishing, reports a local Arabic daily quoting AFP.
“Filippo Bernardini exploited his knowledge in the field of publishing to create a system to steal valuable authors’ works, causing harm” to the sector, Manhattan federal prosecutor Damian Williams said in a statement announcing the defendant’s guilty plea.
It is expected that on the fifth of next April, the verdict will be issued against the Italian youth, whose sentence may reach 20 years in prison, and he has previously paid compensation in the amount of $88,000 as part of these guilty plea procedures, which avoids him a criminal trial.
Bernardini, who was working for the Simon & Schuster house in London as a “rights coordinator”, admitted that over five years he had obtained “hundreds of unpublished manuscripts”, some of them by famous writers or their representatives, by writing to them from fake email addresses of officials in publishing houses or literary agents.
Bernardini registered “more than 160 fraudulent domains” on the Internet.