Acclaimed writer of Saint Peter's Banker, the story of rogue Sicilian financier Michele Sindona – banker to the Mob and the Vatican.
Widow robber and embezzler.
Harvard Professor of screenwriting.
Government Informer.
Pretender to the throne of Sicily.
Head of DFJ Italia, a Ponzi Scheme investment firm in Southern California, catering to a variety of newly minted millionaires, including porn stars, outlaw bikers, career mafia soldiers, actors and athletes.
Dead at fifty-three under mysterious circumstances.
Luigi DiFonzo was all of those and more. Starting life in a den of cruelty and neglect, he escaped and erased his past but never forgot the pain, turning those childhood wounds into an inhuman drive for both financial success and living as if he was the star of his own fabulous film.
And with his Southern California Ponzi scheme masquerading as a boutique "investment fund" called DFJ Italia, Luigi cast himself in his greatest leading role, playing "Don Gino", an exiled Sicilian count ready to rain riches across Laguna Niguel with his exclusive access to tax-free shelters, the international bond market, and rare earths and minerals.
Unfortunately for Luigi's employees at DFJ Italia – Ken Kuczwaj, Guy Scarpelli and the rest of the staff – they had no idea about their boss's actual identity, his nefarious intentions and the fact that the DFJ Italia in actuality was an FBI sting operation about to go horribly wrong. DFJ Italia was set up by Luigi DiFonzo and Angelo Ales in conjunction with three FBI offices, with the mission to infiltrate the Hells Angels and the Los Angeles Mafia. But Ken ,Guy and the rest of the employees would find out both too soon and too late, when they were forced into a whirlwind of group survival because "Don Gino's" antics had set off the SEC, the FBI, the mafia, The Hells Angels, the Orange County Prosecutor's Office, and the worried investors who started to ask questions about their rapidly dwindling millions.
Written with the full cooperation of those who knew Luigi DiFonzo best, Emperor of Orange County is the first full-length investigation into one of the most surreal, hysterically funny, and simultaneously tragic criminal enterprises of the 1990s.
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Nicholas Mennuti is the writer of the espionage thriller Weaponized (Mulholland Books/Little Brown), which had film rights purchased by Universal Pictures and Scott Stuber and Scrap (NeoText). Nicholas's short stories have appeared in AGNI and Conjunctions, and he has written about the intersection of technology and entertainment for the Huffington Post. He is also a graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts Dramatic Writing program.
