The operation took place Wednesday afternoon at New York - John F. Kennedy International Airport.
On the lookout, several FBI agents rushed on a 29-year-old Italian.
Disembarking from his plane, the man was put in irons then taken on board by the American police forces, under the incredulous gaze of onlookers.
Was he a Mafioso?
A terrorist ?
Neither.
Mainland digital crook, feared filibuster in the publishing world, the imprisoned individual is said to be a thief of literary manuscripts.
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The thief, in business since at least 2016, has tried, and sometimes succeeded, to get his hands on a hundred unpublished texts. Productions by Margaret Atwood, Jennifer Egan, Anthony Doerr, Sally Rooney, and Ethan Hawke as well as a Pulitzer Prize winner. But also a number of documents from lesser-known authors, even beginners. Nicknamed "The Spine Collector" (literally, "the collector of slices" of books) by part of the American press, the con artist would have stolen a still uncertain number of manuscripts of books and novels over the course of his brief, but prolific, criminal career. To garner this astronomical record, he pretended to be different publishers, as well as Hollywood personalities, according to a well-established digital phishing approach. And D'all the more convincing that the mysterious thief seemed to have perfectly mastered the codes of the publishing world. And for good reason: he was part of it.
The wolf in the sheepfold
Identified by American investigators, the “Spine Collector” was called Filippo Bernardini and worked for the British publisher Simon & Schuster, based in London.
Accused by American justice of fraud and aggravated identity theft, he faces up to twenty years in prison.
“
Unpublished manuscripts are works of art for writers who devote the time and energy to creating them.
The editors are doing all they can to protect these priceless unpublished texts
, "said Wednesday, in a statement, the deputy director of the New York office of the FBI, Michael J. Driscoll.
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To achieve his ends, Filippo Bernardini had developed a fairly classic phishing and social engineering procedure, consisting in usurping the identity of a privileged interlocutor - in this case publishers, agents and other literary scouts. - in order to be sent the digital manuscripts he coveted. Technically, it mimicked business email addresses and domain names by changing a letter or two. An
"m"
replaced by
"rn",
for example. The scammer had also developed a fake website of a New York literary agency, to which he was able to redirect two employees before stealing their credentials. And thus gain access to the company's opulent database. According to the FBI, Filippo Bernardini has created at least 160 international domain names in recent years.
Devilishly common, the process put in place by the suspect bore fruit all the more because he had a fine knowledge of the looted environment behind the scenes. He used the same fonts, the same formulas, the signatures of the different people whose identity he was impersonating. And jargon by writing in particular
"ms"
for manuscript. Other times, he recreated a fictitious exchange, but probable, between two people whose identity he had usurped, before transferring an email to his target interlocutor. Who he could keep in touch with for months. An American literary agent thus confided to
New York
magazine , in August 2021, to have been led by boat for seven months by the criminal. Other victimswere also hacked into their mailbox.
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Nebulous motivations
More than once, however, his cheeky ventures have turned into a fiasco.
In March 2017, an editor working at the Swedish house Norstedts, had received a strange request for dismissal of the manuscript of
The Girl Who Killed Blow for Blow
, by David Lagercrantz, the fifth volume of the successful saga
Millennium
.
A text under very high custody, distributed drop by drop before its publication.
And which Filippo Bernardini tried to gain access by passing himself off by email for the editor of the Italian version of the novel.
A test aborted by a simple phone call from the prudent Swedish house, which revealed the pot aux roses.
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The publisher Simon & Schuster, where Filippo Bernardini worked, said he was
“shocked and horrified”
by the affair and announced that he had suspended the suspect from all professional activity, while waiting for the American justice to continue its work.
"Protecting the intellectual property of our authors is of the utmost importance
," a spokesperson for the publishing house said in a statement on Wednesday.
We are grateful to the FBI for investigating these incidents and for bringing charges against their alleged perpetrator ”.
The motivations of the
“Collector”
remain unknown. The manuscripts he was able to consult have not been disseminated on the web, nor have they been the subject of any blackmail.
"It would be hard to try to find any real gain in this case
," observed last year, in the survey conducted by the magazine
New York
, Daniel Sandström. Literary director of the Swedish house Albert Bonniers, the publisher is one of the many victims of the pirate. "
It's less obvious to be sure, but it may be a psychological game, something to do with a feeling of power, of control
," he suggested then.
Our industry is bristling with resentment, and after all, that makes a good story too. ”
Was it industrial espionage?
Or the criminal work of a reader as technophile as he is idle?
Mystery.
The manuscript thief, at least, has been blacklisted.
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