A 30-year-old Italian, a former employee of the American publishing house Simon & Schuster in London, admitted on Friday in a federal court in New York that he stole more than 1,000 manuscripts from famous writers in a sophisticated identity theft scheme, AFP reports.

Filippo Bernardini, 30, was arrested at JFK Airport in New York and charged with fraud on January 7, 2022, after he was accused of impersonating several publishing figures.

For what purpose? From the summer of 2016 to January of last year, to receive more than a thousand manuscripts of novels and other literary works of famous authors before their publication.

“Filippo Bernardini used his knowledge of the publishing industry to devise a scheme to steal valuable works from authors and thereby threaten the publishing world,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement. announced the guilty plea of ​​the accused.

The young Italian, who lives in London, faces up to 20 years in prison and has already paid back $88,000 as part of a plea deal that spared him a criminal trial.

He will be sentenced on April 5.

While working at Simon & Schuster as a “rights coordinator,” he admitted that for more than five years he had received unpublished manuscripts, sometimes from well-known authors or their representatives, writing them from fake e-mail addresses, e-mails of publishing executives or literary sources. agents

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