A man accused of numerous literary heists by allegedly impersonating others in the industry to amass a veritable library of unpublished works is arrested.
Filippo Bernardini, an Italian citizen working in publishing in London, was arrested Wednesday after arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, said Damian Williams, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York in a statement.
For years, the publishing industry has been baffled by an international phishing scheme in which someone with apparent inside knowledge impersonated an editor or an agent — by setting up a fake email account — and attempted to trick an author or an editor into sending links to unpublished manuscripts. Works by Margaret Atwood and Ethan Hawke were among those targeted.
"Bernardini allegedly impersonated publishing industry individuals in order to have authors, including a Pulitzer prize winner, send him prepublication manuscripts for his own benefit," Williams said in the statement. "This real-life storyline now reads as a cautionary tale, with the plot twist of Bernardini facing federal criminal charges for his misdeeds."
It said Bernardini "used fraudulent, look-alike, domains to impersonate individuals involved in the publishing industry to gain surreptitious access to these materials," and that over the years he "impersonated, defrauded, and attempted to defraud, hundreds of individuals."In the indictment, Bernardini was described as working in London for a "major, international, US-based publishing house." A LinkedIn profile for a Filippo B.
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