greatestliner.blogg.se - Fbi arrests man unpublished manuscripts

Contact information for authors, agents, and colleagues and competitors.The treasured authors in the stables of each.Simon & Schuster and the various entities which employed Bernardini from 2016 to 2021 were most likely clue-free how their intern/contractor/employee was going to school on how they operated to further his own cottage industry of manuscript theft. To the trained eye, working with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight and visibility into his activities via the indictment, his career path paints a much more nefarious picture. Granta Publications, editorial intern (2016, two months).Andrew Nurnberg Associates, foreign rights intern (2016, four months).La Nave de Teseo, literary translator, Chinese to Italian (2017, five months).Mira Trenchard, literary scouting intern (2017, two months).Pole to Win Asia, localization and QA tester (2018, three months).Hay House, foreign rights assistant (2018 to 2019 for six months).Bloomsbury Publishing, royalties assistant (2019 for three months).

Simon and Schuster, rights coordinator and rights assistant (2019 to present, 28 months).

A review of the various positions would easily check those two boxes. To the untrained eye his flea-like bouncing from one entity to another, landing often as an intern, may strike one as an individual who is simply trying to find their place within the publishing industry and expand their network. Their statement continued, “The safekeeping of our authors’ intellectual property is of primary importance to Simon & Schuster, and for all in the publishing industry, and we are grateful to the FBI for investigating these incidents and bringing charges against the alleged perpetrator.“Ī review of the period of 2016 to 2021 shows Bernardini to have bounced about with great frequency within the publishing industry, finally landing with Simon and Schuster in October 2019. The company said in a statement they were shocked and horrified. Bernardini’s targeted surveillance aided intellectual property theftĪ 29 year-old Italian polyglot, according to the NY Times, was an employee of Simon & Schuster until the firm suspended him from his position upon learning of his arrest. The document shares how he defrauded or attempted to defraud hundreds of individuals and “obtained hundreds of unpublished manuscripts during the course of the scheme.”īased on a review of Bernardini’s employment history, it appears that he launched his caper simultaneously with the launch of his career in the publishing world, following his receiving a master’s degree in publishing in 2016 from University College London. The indictment of Bernardini shares how over the course of the previous five years (August 2016 through July 2021) he created a personal ecosystem that served to dupe those within the publishing industry.

With the arrest of Bernardini, the DoJ unsealed a grand jury indictment dated July 14, 2021, of Bernardini that revealed a “multi-year scheme to impersonate individuals involved in the publishing industry in order to fraudulently obtain hundreds of prepublication manuscripts of novel and other forthcoming books.” He also set up multiple email accounts with cleverly disguised email addresses such instead of – essentially a phishing exercise where emails aren’t who they appear to be from.Īfter a year-long investigation the FBI’s cyber division unmasked him and brought him to book.On January 5, 2022, the Department of Justice (DoJ) announced the FBI’s arrest of Italian citizen Filippo Bernardini at JFK International Airport in New York for wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. He used publishing terms such as English language rights and using abbreviations like “ms” when referring to manuscripts. He sent polite emails to authors, editors, translators, and other well-connected people in the literary world, impersonating someone they knew and trusted and asked them to send him their latest drafts. He managed to steal more than 1 000 titles right from under their publishers’ noses.īernardini’s methods were quite simple. Over the past six years he has targeted big names such as Margaret Atwood, Sally Rooney, Ian McEwan and Ethan Hawke, as well as other lesser-known authors. The Federal District Court in Manhattan recently found him guilty of fraud and identity theft. The man in question is actually a bespectacled nerdy type – and the spines he collected belong to books.įilippo Bernardini (30), a junior employee at publishing giant Simon & Schuster UK, was arrested in New York early last year for stealing manuscripts of famous authors.