Case reopened in death of countess

As the night rain fell on the veranda of the luxury villa, the Italian countess stepped on to the wall guarding the cliff's edge. Her head swimming from a cocktail of whisky and sleeping pills and suffering from "weak nerves", she plunged to her death.

It sounds like the opening of a bad novel. And now it appears the accepted truth about the death of Countess Francesca Vacca Agusta in 2001 may indeed be a fiction. The brother of the fashion model-turned-wealthy-countess has called for the case to be reopened, claiming his sister didn't jump but was pushed.

The gruesome mystery gripped Italy for months after the widow of the aristocratic helicopter tycoon Count Corradino Agusta fell 80m to her death in the millionaire's playground of Portofino, on Italy's northwest coast.

The inquiry was told there were only three people in the house - her Mexican lover, Tirso "Tito" Chazaro, her maid, Susanna Torretta, and a Polish domestic.

The countess supposedly fled from the house on to the veranda in a drunken rage, mounted a small wall at the edge of the veranda and, slipping on wet leaves, toppled over the edge.

But now the dead woman's brother, Domenico Vacca Graffagni, believes Chazaro - the man revealed to be sole heir to her 50 billion euros ($95 billion) fortune, pushed her. He is demanding the inquiry into his sister's death be reopened.

The ingredients of wealth, aristocracy and blood would be enough to sustain the average mystery novel, but in the case of Countess Agusta there is more. Her marriage to the count broke down in 1985, though they never divorced. She took up with Maurizio Raggio, who was in charge of the personal finances of Bettino Craxi. Craxi (prime minister during the 1980s, leader of the Socialist Party and patron to rising businessman Silvio Berlusconi) was the political boss at the centre, years later, of the so-called "Tangentopoli" ("Bribesville") corruptions investigations that convulsed Italy in the early 1990s. Craxi fled to Tunisia where he died in exile in 2000, convicted of corruption in absentia.

As the Tangentopoli scandal consumed almost all of Italy's established political parties, Countess Agusta and her well-connected lover did not escape the investigators' attention.

They alleged the countess was the holder of Swiss bank accounts used by Craxi to launder some of the dirty money from businesses craving political favours that came sloshing through his office. To avoid prison, in 1994 Agusta and her lover fled to Mexico but were extradited to Italy to answer their accusers.

Convicted of his role in the affair, Raggio was sentenced to 40 months in prison for money laundering and managing Craxi's dirty money.

By the time of her death, the countess' affair with Raggio was over and she was living with Chazaro, now accused of involvement in her death.

Graffagni told Italian daily La Repubblica: "The inquiry was closed in a hasty fashion because of absence of proof, relying too readily on 'reasonable doubt'."

He declined to preview the new evidence he intends to present to the inquiry if and when it re-opens, but it is plain the Mexican is in his sights. "It was manslaughter," he maintains. "He [Chazaro] beat her ... Certainly he didn't mean to kill her. But that evening things didn't go the way the Carabinieri said. My sister was not drunk and she did not slip on wet leaves on the veranda."

Three weeks after her fall the Countess' naked body washed up on a beach on the French Riviera.

When the last of the many wills she apparently wrote was opened, the sole beneficiary was Chazaro. The will was challenged by Maurizio Raggio; in a secret out-of-court settlement Chazaro took 60 per cent and Raggio (said to be the only man able to access some of the secret accounts where the Countess had secreted her money) took 40 per cent, including the Villa Altachiara.

- INDEPENDENT