Inside the Stalker Hell of Italian Footballer Fabio Quagliarella

 

Inside the Stalker Hell of Italian Footballer Fabio Quagliarella

When Fabio Quagliarella joined Napoli in 2009, his childhood dreams came true. But the striker's solitary season at the Stadio San Paolo descended into a living hell. From crooked coppers to stalkers from hell, this is the true crime tale of a Neapolitan nightmare. In 2009, when Naples native Fabio Quagliarella signed a five-year deal to play forward for his hometown club, it seemed life couldn't get any better for him, nor for arguably Italy's most passionate football fans. But after only one season, Quagliarella was sent packing from Naples to play for archrival Juventus. The Societa Sportiva Calcio Napoli faithful—once full of unremitting love for their native son—proved they could express their unmitigated hatred with equal passion. What the fans did not know—what virtually no one, in fact, knew—until earlier this year was the torment Quagliarella was being subjected to during his time with the club. Quagliarella, now with Unione Calcio Sampdoria and a three-time Serie A Italian champion, sat down with Bleacher Report and spoke in stark detail about how a stalker was able to penetrate his inner circle and victimize him and his family for years. B/R also tracked down Quagliarella's stalker, who spoke for the first time about the verdict and the aftermath of the trial—and who had a revealing reaction to the mention of Fabio Quagliarella's name. Fabio Quagliarella walks into a side lounge area of the team hotel in Swansea, Wales, the day before Sampdoria's friendly against Swansea City. The large room has been cordoned off for our interview, though coaches and other team personnel wander in and out. Quagliarella eyes some snacks set on a table against the wall but decides against taking any. He spots the reporter in the room and gingerly approaches, introduced in Italian by the two members of the team's public relations staff who will sit in on our interview. Quagliarella is reserved and respectful. A football god to the entire region of Naples, he wanted to explain the hell he endured for years as an unsuspecting victim of a Napoli fan. The PR staff guaranteed us a half-hour for the interview; Quagliarella willingly sat with Bleacher Report for over 70 minutes before the reps wrapped us up. It's not that Quagliarella enjoys speaking about the topic; he's an introvert, and the team expressed shock that he even agreed to revisit it. But Quagliarella says he wants to take the recognition he gets simply for being a pro footballer and use that to increase awareness for a crime that he believes gets far too little attention: stalking. Quagliarella was born in 1983 in Castellammare di Stabia, a coastal town in the Bay of Naples. Like most boys from the area, he dreamed of playing for Napoli when he grew up. "This is how I always imagined it," Quagliarella says, a smile crossing his face. "I would enter the pitch as a substitute. I could feel the anticipation of the spectators as I entered the pitch. There wasn't much time left; it was an important match. "Then I would score a goal—a decisive one," he continues, the pace of his words quickening. "It would be one of those goals that—at the time—only [Diego] Maradona could score. A weird goal, something that would make people go crazy. Surely [it] would be a long-range shot—a powerful kick in the last second of an important match." His childhood fantasies morphed into real-life talent. By the time Quagliarella was 26, he was a striker for Udinese and had already played for four seasons in Italy’s Serie A. Even at the height of his fame, you'd be hard-pressed to know of his wealth and prominence on the pitch when you saw him back home. Quagliarella still lived at his parents' house and slept in his childhood bedroom. His holidays were always no-frills, low-key affairs, shared with family and childhood friends. Giulio De Riso is one of those friends. A tan, lean man, De Riso owns a Vodafone shop on the high street in Castellammare di Stabia, 18 miles from Naples. The store is a gathering spot for locals, where they can buy SIM cards or catch up on the latest happenings regarding De Riso's best friend—the local kid-made-great—Quagliarella. Fabio Quagliarella walks into a side lounge area of the team hotel in Swansea, Wales, the day before Sampdoria's friendly against Swansea City. The large room has been cordoned off for our interview, though coaches and other team personnel wander in and out. Quagliarella eyes some snacks set on a table against the wall but decides against taking any. He spots the reporter in the room and gingerly approaches, introduced in Italian by the two members of the team's public relations staff who will sit in on our interview. Quagliarella is reserved and respectful. A football god to the entire region of Naples, he wanted to explain the hell he endured for years as an unsuspecting victim of a Napoli fan. The PR staff guaranteed us a half-hour for the interview; Quagliarella willingly sat with Bleacher Report for over 70 minutes before the reps wrapped us up. It's not that Quagliarella enjoys speaking about the topic; he's an introvert, and the team expressed shock that he even agreed to revisit it. But Quagliarella says he wants to take the recognition he gets simply for being a pro footballer and use that to increase awareness for a crime that he believes gets far too little attention: stalking. Quagliarella was born in 1983 in Castellammare di Stabia, a coastal town in the Bay of Naples. Like most boys from the area, he dreamed of playing for Napoli when he grew up. "This is how I always imagined it," Quagliarella says, a smile crossing his face. "I would enter the pitch as a substitute. I could feel the anticipation of the spectators as I entered the pitch. There wasn't much time left; it was an important match. "Then I would score a goal—a decisive one," he continues, the pace of his words quickening. "It would be one of those goals that—at the time—only [Diego] Maradona could score. A weird goal, something that would make people go crazy. Surely [it] would be a long-range shot—a powerful kick in the last second of an important match." His childhood fantasies morphed into real-life talent. By the time Quagliarella was 26, he was a striker for Udinese and had already played for four seasons in Italy’s Serie A. Even at the height of his fame, you'd be hard-pressed to know of his wealth and prominence on the pitch when you saw him back home. Quagliarella still lived at his parents' house and slept in his childhood bedroom. His holidays were always no-frills, low-key affairs, shared with family and childhood friends. Giulio De Riso is one of those friends. A tan, lean man, De Riso owns a Vodafone shop on the high street in Castellammare di Stabia, 18 miles from Naples. The store is a gathering spot for locals, where they can buy SIM cards or catch up on the latest happenings regarding De Riso's best friend—the local kid-made-great—Quagliarella. In 2006, as was his custom, Quagliarella came home during Christmas break, and he and De Riso met up. Quagliarella casually mentioned that someone had recently hacked into the messenger account on his personal computer. De Riso told him he recently met a guy who could help Quagliarella out. A few months earlier, De Riso says, he received a couple of letters at his office from someone accusing him of working with the Camorra (mafia). A friend who owned the shop across the road introduced De Riso to his brother-in-law, Raffaele Piccolo, who happened to work with the postal police in Naples. Piccolo's department specialized in postal fraud and cybercrime. He escorted De Riso to the Napoli police headquarters and filed a report with him. De Riso was grateful, and the two became friendly, swapping phone numbers and promising to stay in touch. Piccolo came through again for him more recently, De Riso says, when he began receiving anonymous text messages on his cellphone, accusing him of the same thing. This time, Piccolo met up with De Riso at his shop to write the complaint, and assured him the report would be filed alongside the other one once Piccolo got back to the station, De Riso recalls. Piccolo personally scrubbed and reset De Riso's phone, the way only a cybercrime expert could. The officer now regularly stopped by the shop to chat—sometimes grabbing a bite to eat—to keep tabs on the situation. "So when Fabio told me about the problem, I said, 'I've got the person that can solve your problem!" De Riso says. "And at that moment, I introduced Raffaele to Fabio, here in the shop." Piccolo was happy to help out the local sports hero. As he did with De Riso the first time, Piccolo fixed Quagliarella's PC and took him to Naples to file his official complaint. "After he helped me sort out my PC problem, we became friends," Quagliarella says. The two exchanged numbers, and Quagliarella gave Piccolo some autographed memorabilia to show his gratitude. Two-and-a-half years later, in July 2009, Quagliarella signed a five-year, €18 million deal with his home club, SSC Napoli. The entire town—even the notorious cammorristi (Neapolitan mafia)—was united in its feelings. "We were so happy," a member of a local cammorristi, who requests we not mention his family name, tells B/R. He was taking a break from work and was with a handful of family and friends, who nodded in agreement. "We felt a lot of emotion because he's a son of this city, a son of this earth." "It was the best," De Riso concurs. "Everybody dreamed about this for two years before he came here. [Fabio] seemed like a kid: 'I'm coming back!' He was so very, very happy." "I knew of the importance of this for my city," Quagliarella acknowledges. "Napoli fans saw themselves in me. I knew I was not alone when entering the pitch, but I was there with a whole city. It was the dream of many fans, which I was realizing." Many fans, Quagliarella soon realized…except one. Quagliarella was seven years old when football legend Diego Maradona vaulted Napoli to its last league title in 1990. Maradona was the only player for whom Napoli fans had written a personal song in tribute…until Quagliarella's arrival. The media added to the accolades, referring to Quagliarella as "Masaniello," Napoli's leader during the popular revolution in the 17th century. Quagliarella shared each success with the fans: Every time he scored a goal, he would press his Napoli jersey to his lips and kiss it. "It's the team of my city," he says. "I made the dream come true, and every goal that I scored was making that dream all the more true. It was like if a fan had descended from the Curva (the corner of Stadio San Paolo, where Napoli's most rabid fans sit) to score a goal for his own team. It was the best feeling." But off the pitch, Quagliarella began to feel uneasy. In the two years prior to arriving in Napoli, while he played for Sampdoria and Udinese, Quagliarella had occasionally received anonymous text messages on his cellphone accusing him of being a drug addict, or of being affiliated with members of the cammorristi. He ignored them, along with the occasional letter that made its way into his stack of fan mail at the club, making similar accusations. A crazy fan, he thought. But when he signed with Napoli, the frequency of those texts intensified, along with strange new ones. His best friend De Riso was targeted as well. "We started receiving encrypted messages, just a sequence of letters and numbers: ABC 37 12. ABCD 37 27 12. They looked like codes," De Riso recalls. "[Piccolo] told us they were probably viruses that will infect the phone, and could steal all your data. So he said: 'Give me the phones. I'm going to clean them.'" The three met at De Riso's shop once again. Piccolo wrote up a new report from the privacy of the back office, De Riso remembers, and promised to personally file it back at headquarters. No need for Quagliarella’s presence to draw unwarranted attention, was the logic used at the time, according to De Riso. To express his appreciation, Quagliarella provided Piccolo with game tickets and sometimes signed football jerseys—whenever Piccolo would make a request. "I would sign things for fans anyway, so for me it was not a problem doing it for Raffaele, since he was helping me," Quagliarella says. Quagliarella changed his cellphone number, and the anonymous text messages stopped. But the stalker found a new, more potent way to target the hometown hero. Everyone in the community knew where Quagliarella grew up and currently lived. Letters—once, sometimes twice a week—started arriving by post in the family's mailbox, which Quagliarella's mother would retrieve, open and read. "The letters would contain pictures of underage girls naked, with the allegation that I was a paedophile for sleeping with these girls," Quagliarella recalls. "These were pictures clearly downloaded from online websites. "That was the worst for me. If I have to be honest, maybe it was worse for my mother. My parents had to deal with this much more than I did."