The BOOK THIEVES

A book fan who masquerades as a publisher, authors with fake identities, and work that’s not quite as original as it appears. Welcome to the world of literary scandals, where fact and fiction have an uncanny knack for impersonating one another.

- GENEVIEVE GANNON

On a wintry day in January 2022, a neatly dressed man in black-rimmed glasses arrived at New York’s JFK airport, ready for a holiday in the cultural heart of America. An Italian-born, bookish type with a degree in modern literature, Filippo Bernardini, then 29, of London, hungered to advance above his position as a low-level rights manager at Simon & Schuster and make his mark on the world of publishing. As he would later write in a notorious letter reprinted in The New York Times, he “cherished” unpublished manuscripts and longed to feel connected to authors. So, landing in the city of Tom Wolfe, Edith Wharton and Philip Roth would have been thrilling. It’s easy to picture him grinning as he crossed the airport concourse, practically walking on air, right up until the moment he was seized by FBI officers who had been investigating one of the biggest, strangest cons the book world had ever seen.

By the week’s end, Bernardini had been charged with identity theft and wire fraud. He was accused of impersonating publishing professionals in order to get his hands on the world’s literary treasures and faced a prison sentence of up to 20 years. As the Assistant Director of the New York FBI, Michael J. Driscoll, put it at the time, Bernardini was trying to steal other people’s literary ideas for himself. “But in the end, he wasn’t creative enough to get away with it.”