After Bernardini’s arrest, Kent Wolf, a literary agent, asked his colleagues on Twitter, “Which of us is in charge of ordering the gift basket for the poor soul everybody was fingering as the manuscript scammer?”) Like the polyglot thief, who wrote emails in at least 10 different languages, Bernardini claimed to be fluent in Italian, English, French, German, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Mandarin, and Korean. (Multiple sources pointed us to a different young Italian, but the evidence fell apart under scrutiny. Should anyone have suspected Bernardini? He did fit a certain profile: Many in publishing suspected the thief was among them, perhaps a young person on the outskirts of the industry. TAKE MY ADVICE: DROP THIS STUPID ARTICLE AND STOP WITH IT IMMEDIATELY!!! Don’t you and your friend Reeves have better stories to report? I can’t believe you’re being paid for this rubbish! How about Fuck You Hill? Or can I meet you at Silly Cunt Square? When Lila suggested Cobble Hill, they changed their mind: They reached out to us via email, pretending to be a literary scout, then an editor in the Netherlands, and eventually agreed to our offer to meet in person. If someone caught on to the ruse and tried to spoil the fun, the thief became spiteful, responding by cursing or, say, telling an editor in Stockholm, in Swedish, “Hope you die of the coronavirus.” Last spring, the thief became aware that my colleague, Lila Shapiro, and I had begun looking into the case. By 2021, the book thief had begun copying passages from freshly stolen manuscripts and sending them back to the authors themselves, for no apparent reason other than to taunt. Book auctions weren’t being disrupted.Īs far as anyone can tell, the caper itself might have been the point. And for what? The stolen books weren’t being pirated online. They made off with hundreds of manuscripts before their release, from Sally Rooney’s latest to novels that would be lucky to sell at all. The thief, or thieves, stole the digital identity of hundreds of people, writing countless emails in the idiosyncratic vernacular of the publishing world, with a real-time grasp of the industry’s information flow. For the past half decade, someone spent an incredible amount of time impersonating agents, editors, literary scouts, film producers, translators, and authors by creating fake web addresses for publishing companies - like - in hopes of surreptitiously obtaining unpublished manuscripts. Kennedy airport and charged with conducting a bizarre spree of digital robberies that has baffled the worlds of book publishing, Hollywood IP, and cybersecurity. operation, was arrested by FBI agents at John F. On January 5, Bernardini, a 29-year-old working in the foreign-rights department of Simon & Schuster’s U.K. “I like to be at the center of attention by showing people something that they don’t have.” But his experience is mostly miserable, and eventually Diego decides that the way to battle bullies is to become one himself. “I should find some time to commit a robbery,” he says. “I’m sure they wish they were me!” he writes. “Everyone says I’m gay and the school bullies want to beat me.” He experiences a rare moment of triumph when he impresses his schoolmates by obtaining a copy of the new Harry Potter. But his mom doesn’t let him wear ripped jeans or dye his hair or get a tattoo - a recipe for social exile. He’s good at school and loves two things more than anything else: the internet and books. The book was called Bulli - “bullies,” in Italian - and was an epistolary novel in the form of diary entries by a teenage loner named Diego. It was 2008, and Bernardini, who lived in a small town an hour north of Rome, wrote it for an independent publishing house in Milan using a thinly veiled pseudonym: Filippo B. Filippo Bernardini was just a high-school student when he published his first novel.
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