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Olli Dittrich as Leo Marchetti in Brig: »The Golden Hand«
Photo: Daniel Cloud / WDR
They are sums beyond our imagination, so it's good that someone is trying to illustrate them.
The barber Leo Marchetti says: »If you imagine a person who has 150,000 hairs on his head, and now you take 160,000, 170,000 people that I have to do their hair.
And you take a euro for every single hair, and then you do multiplication, and then you know how much money that is.”
Leo Marchetti is an Italian-born hairdresser from the Swiss canton of Valais.
As he tells it himself, he was born in the city of Brig on the same night as Gianni Infantino, the current president of the discredited sports association Fifa.
A town further, in Visp, eight kilometers away, lives the former Fifa boss Sepp Blatter.
Let's put it this way: there is probably no other region in the world (except now Qatar, of course) where more soccer official power is concentrated than in Valais.
It therefore seems entirely plausible that the well-connected star hairdresser Marchetti from Brig, sometime in 2010, when the vote on the awarding of the 2022 World Cup was due, which then, as is well known, ended in favor of Qatar, suddenly presented a laundry basket with two dozen bulging envelopes for the members of the Fifa Executive Committee had lying around in his hairdressing salon.
Very secret – and well lit
At least that's what the hair artist himself tells an investigative reporter who tracked down Marchetti, who had since gone into hiding, and secretly conducted an interview with him.
This scene is sensational: reporter and informant meet, of all things, clearly visible on a gigantic dam, the camera drone curves excitedly above them to take cool pictures of the not-so-clandestine conversation.
A wonderful tip on the form of presenter reporting that is currently widespread on television, in which the oh so covertly investigating journalist has to be staged by his camera team in front of an impressive backdrop.
The fact that the reporter has to pretend to be investigating in secret, while he is presenting every detail of this investigation in front of the camera in the most beautiful lighting, is now taking on almost schizophrenic traits, even in the public service institutions.
Documentary, semi-documentary or a lie?
The ARD program "Infantino's hairdresser - Leo Marchetti and the Fifa billions" is another persiflage with which Olli Dittrich traditionally takes aim at the attention industry in this country at the end of the year.
After the somewhat too pleasing edition "I was Angela Merkel: The Zahlemann Protocol" in December 2021, Dittrich is now putting together a series that is spectacular in two respects: he combines personal, institutional and geographical details in such a way that the whole absurd bribery scenario for the purchased World Cup from Qatar, as Dittrich spins it out, seems completely valid.
And he (with the help of the TV journalist Tom Theunissen) mixes the staging techniques of reality in a virtuoso way, as is currently practiced in documentary and pseudo-documentary television formats.
Yes, Marchetti could be the man who lets Fifa bosses polish their bald heads and twirl their moustaches.
Here the true crime docuseries about the straw man of the corruption scandal, there the glamor report about the hairdresser of the famous and rich: the film moves between these two genres.
With color-saturated, coarse-grained images, Marchetti, who has since disappeared, is traced.
And to introduce the protagonist to the audience, one falls back on a servile personality report that Swiss television allegedly filmed a few years earlier about the glamor hairdresser.
There he is celebrated as "the boy with the golden scissors" or, even more catchy, "the golden hand".
The real athlete star hairdresser Sheldon Edwards, who has enriched the football world with some dubious undercuts and rasta looks, is jubilant about the fictitious Marchetti: "He was a big influence on barbering." Image retrieved from Google Street View showing Marchetti outside his store handing an envelope to a portly person who looks like Chuck Blazer, the now-deceased ex-Fifa official dubbed "Mister 10 Percent" who played a key role in the World Cup award is assigned to Qatar.
And so Dittrich's team expertly mixes documentary and recorded material for the true-crime biopic until you really believe: the bribery barber Marchetti - whether he wanted it or not - stole the World Cup from us.
"Infantino's hairdresser - Leo Marchetti and the Fifa billions",
Monday, 11:20 p.m., Das Erste.
Then available in the media library.
