Once estimated to be worth $3.1 billion, Gianni Agnelli’s empire included Fiat, the Juventus soccer team, the Château Margaux vineyards, a department store, an aviation plant, and La Stampa, the Turin-based newspaper. In many ways, Lapo was the child of his grandfather, the man all Italy knew as l’Avvocato (the lawyer), who had built Fiat into an industrial complex that propelled postwar Italy into being the world’s sixth-strongest economy. Now 55 and living in Rome, Elkann is a well-known television personality and bon vivant and a sometime adviser to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. His mother, Margherita Agnelli, Gianni Agnelli’s pale, artistic, only daughter, could have had her pick of royal suitors, but instead she married a writer: Alain Elkann, the handsome, suave son of a French banker. Named for a close friend of the poet Dante, Lapo had been born into a soon-to-be-fractured fairy-tale existence.
Lapo inherited his grandfather’s suits, which he often wears with sneakers, and he emulates his speech (rolling his *r’*s), public dating habits (starlets accompanied by headlines), and taste in cars (an ever changing stable of Fiat-manufactured steeds awaiting him in cities all over Europe). “I’ve been an idiot,” Lapo reportedly said when he came to in the hospital. I have known him since he was a little boy. “He is intelligent, extremely sensitive, very amusing, and has an extremely human quality. “Lapo is like a son to me,” Henry Kissinger told me two weeks after the incident.
As he lay comatose, a major TV station interrupted its scheduled programming to report on his situation, and the hospital was besieged by friends, business associates, fans, even a Gypsy psychic, all seeking an answer to one central question: Why? Although moderate consumption of cocaine for personal use is not illegal in Italy, Lapo was guilty of something far more serious: he’d gotten caught. Lapo had been found naked and unconscious in the apartment of Donato Broco, a 53-year-old transsexual prostitute known as Patrizia, who walks the streets in one of the most notorious quarters of Turin.Īccording to police, Lapo had arrived at Patrizia’s place before midnight and partied with her and two other transsexuals until nearly dawn.
But this time, as Lapo’s family arrived at the hospital, fighting their way through a phalanx of cameras and reporters, and the Fiat brass scrambled to squelch the news, the story began to emerge in increasingly shocking installments: first, that Lapo had been admitted “for respiratory problems of pharmacological origin,” then, according to police, that he had been taken from a “woman’s apartment.” The questions everyone asked were: What woman? And where was Martina Stella, the love of Lapo’s life? Next came reports that it had been the apartment of “a South American woman.” A full day later it was revealed that the woman who had called for an ambulance was not Martina Stella or a South American. In the days when Gianni Agnelli ruled Italy, the sordid news of an overdose in the family would never have seen the light of day. In just two years he had achieved the impossible: transforming the stodgy and financially troubled auto brand into an exciting new line. The handsome, dazzling young public face of Fiat today, Lapo is worldwide director of brand promotion for Fiat Auto. He didn’t come to for three days, and by the time he awoke and began responding in three of the five languages in which he is fluent, his family had sped in from their villas and the press had announced to the world who he was: Lapo Edouard Elkann, grandson of the late Gianni Agnelli, the so-called unofficial King of Italy, who had turned his family’s automobile company, Fiat, into an international giant. They rushed him to Mauriziano hospital and rolled him into the emergency room.
The paramedics found him unconscious on the bed, and repeated injections of Narcan-the anti-overdose serum-couldn’t revive him from what would later be described as a near-lethal cocktail of cocaine and heroin. on Monday, October 10, a hysterical voice screaming, “Fast! Fast! At my house there is an important person that’s feeling bad!” The call for an ambulance came at about 9 A.M. It looked like just another overdose in the cocaine-dusted backstreets of Turin, Italy: white male, 28, comatose in a small apartment in the red-light district. In Turin, Mark Seal answers the billion-lira question: Why? Then, in October, the 28-year-old scion overdosed in the apartment of a transsexual prostitute. All eyes were on Lapo as he resuscitated the Fiat name, romanced Italy’s hottest starlet, and brightened his company’s prospects with a sleek new model, the Grande Punto. After the death of his fabled grandfather, Gianni Agnelli, Lapo Elkann became the dashing public face of Fiat, while his media-shy brother, John, took over the endangered family empire.