And Starring Ann Hathaway As Herself ...

The long Vanity Fair piece on the rise and fall of Raffaello Follieri - a.k.a. Anne Hathaway's ex-beau - has me half-convinced that Follieri doesn't really belong in jail; it has me completely convinced that this story ought to be a feature film, or the very least a Lifetime Original Movie. I've blogged about the hilarity of Follieri's escapades before, but the VF profile captures what's truly fascinating about the whole thing: His apparent ability to charm anyone, anywhere, into giving him millions of dollars to sink into utterly nebulous and fantastic real estate ventures. Obviously, the story of a young Italian trading on Vatican connections and building financial dream palaces around the idea that enormous profits could be made by selling off church properties in struggling North American dioceses isn't the most representative story from the housing bubble. But the Follieri saga seems to me to capture something essential about the mania we've just passed through, in which the magic word "real estate" was sufficient to convince a seemingly endless string of players who should have known better to open their checkbooks for the charming Italian with the movie-star girlfriend. Here's a typically remarkable moment:

His dreams threatened, Follieri made the most of a modest chance. One of his staffers had a friend named Aldo Civico, a Columbia University anthropologist who had been helping the Clinton Foundation reach donors in Italy. What Follieri did next was both nervy and brilliant. He took Civico to dinner at Cipriani uptown, his favorite haunt, a few blocks from Trump Tower. At some point he intimated he wanted to make a major donation to the Clinton Foundation. No numbers were mentioned, yet somehow Civico left with the impression that Follieri might give as much as half a million dollars.

Civico contacted the Clinton camp. Soon Follieri was talking with Doug Band, right-hand man and gatekeeper to the ex-president who had played a key role in developing the Clinton Foundation. By chance, Band was going to be meeting in New York one day soon with Ron Burkle, the former president's good friend and, since Clinton's departure from the White House, his business partner. Maybe the two could grant Follieri a brief audience: that would certainly nudge this young, wealthy Italian into writing a substantial check.

... At the time, the meeting seemed a great success. Follieri was charming and charismatic, his Italian accent especially winning as he spoke of his humble hopes to serve the church by buying hundreds of millions of dollars of Catholic Church properties. True, the church would insist that the properties be put to some "reverent" use by their buyers: no nightclubs. But with the real-estate market soaring the way it was, how could they lose? Follieri left his new associates with the impression that he might soon be writing two big checks--one to the Clinton Foundation and another to one of Burkle's equity funds. But the only check that would ultimately emerge from that meeting came from Burkle's Yucaipa Companies. "Dear Raffaello.... It has been a pleasure to get to know you over the past month or so," Burkle wrote to Follieri on May 6, 2005. Five weeks later, Burkle agreed to fund a joint venture called Follieri/Yucaipa Investments L.L.C., and to commit to it the astonishing sum of up to $105 million.

Meanwhile, for those who like exquisitely uncomfortable interviews (not that we've seen any of those lately), here's Letterman pressing Hathaway to talk about her ex: