Blackmail – Lorenzo –A case study


Blackmail can come in many forms. What would be a devastating revelation to one person may not bother another. At ABCIPI we are prepared for and capable of facing any blackmail threat with an efficient and effective challenge.

The Mark

Lorenzo was a businessman from Rome who had grown his business up to a company that employed more than 200 people, at various locations in Italy. His business was in logistics and his fleet of 50 haulage trucks were a familiar sight on Italian roads. Lorenzo was a family man with two grown-up sons who worked with him in the business and twin daughters who were still at school. Lorenzo was a strong Catholic and the family had a very active life within their local church.

The Sting

It was just before his wife and he were going to celebrate the 30th wedding anniversary that Lorenzo had a letter in the post with a postmark of Naples, the city in which he had grown-up. Thinking that it was a letter of congratulations, he opened it, smiling. The smile soon disappeared from his face when two grainy photographs fell out of the envelope. They were extremely lewd photographs of a couple engaged in very explicit homosexual sex. One of the men in the photos was, unmistakably, Lorenzo. Lorenzo ran to the bathroom was physically sick. It was the next day that he called us. We had worked with him in the past to check out businesses is that he was planning to work with. When he arrived at our office in Rome Lorenzo was a mess. He had clearly not slept and he looked exhausted.

The Action

We immediately got our team onto it. Unusually, and to make life more difficult for us, the blackmail letter has come through the post, rather than over the Internet but although we are at the cutting edge of the investigating and solving of cybercrime, we are still very much traditional private detectives so investigating a blackmail letter received in the post in the old- fashioned way, was not a problem for us. Lorenzo explained to us that as a very young man he had been involved in a brief homosexual relationship with a young man in Naples during a riotous summer carnival. He was not even aware that the photographs had been taken but did admit that the amounts of wine consumed might have had something to do with that. We reassured Lorenzo as much as we could and started work on his case.

The Remedy

First we contacted our team in Naples who through working with the local police discovered that several other people in the city had received similar blackmail threats. Working together our team, the Postal Service and the police soon tracked down where the letters had been posted, within the city. It was then just a matter of waiting for another letter to be posted. Private detection activity can involve long hours of non-activity, but as all the letters had been light blue, it was a matter of waiting until someone with a light blue envelope approached the box and then following them back to where they lived. Police forces are very overstretched, everywhere, so it would be very difficult for them to have carried out this type of very time-consuming investigation. However, because we were collaborating with them once we had an address they were swift to arrest the man who had been responsible for the blackmail.

The Outcome

It turned out that all the photographs had been taken at the carnival. Some were of homosexual activities some of heterosexual activity and some of other illegal acts. It was clear that the blackmailer, having fallen on hard times, had decided to use the photographs to try and exact money from his victims.

As usual once the case went to court we were there to support the police and Lorenzo was able to go ahead with his 30th wedding anniversary safe in the knowledge that the life he had led in his youth, would forever remain secret.