The prince, prostitutes and a prosecutor

Prince Victor Emanuele

ROME - Even for a nation that renounced its monarchy by popular vote 60 years ago, there is a curious frisson involved in seeing the erstwhile heir to the throne locked up in jail.

"Prince" Victor Emanuele - he still uses the title and was recently addressed as "your highness" on television by one notorious brown nose - has been in jail in Potenza, in Italy's deep south, for the best part of a week.

Since his arrest last Friday he has shared a 4m-square cell with Gian Nicolino Narducci, a long-time aide also under investigation: he has taken the top bunk, as befits a "highness", though on the first night he fell out.

But by the time Somerset-born Potenza prosecutor Henry John Woodcock questioned him on Tuesday he had regained his damaged dignity.

"Everything here is marvellous," he warbled to Woodcock, "the cooking is excellent. To abstain from alcohol is a good thing, too ... "

It is possible he was being ironic.

Vittorio Emanuele Alberto Carlo Teodoro Umberto Bonifacio Amadeo Damiano Bernardo Gennaro Maria of Savoy, 69, otherwise known as Mr Savoy, is not charged with anything.

But Henry John Woodcock, the 39-year-old half-British state prosecutor of Potenza, has wiretapped his phone and believes the former prince leads a crime gang busy with illegal gambling, prostitution and more.

Last Friday Savoy was seized, driven "bent double" in a police Fiat Tipo, "as if squashed into a suitcase," he complained, from his Rome home to Woodcock's headquarters in Potenza.

Savoy will soon walk from jail a free man, once the investigators have squeezed him dry. Should charges be brought, the trial - like most in Italy - is likely to drag on for years. Yet in Italy condemnation often comes before charges; and punishment, too, in the form of public humiliation.

Yet details from the wiretaps filling the papers appear to provide startling evidence of guilt. They give a vivid impression of a man, already immensely wealthy but consumed with greed, and using his name and influence to grub money from seedy affairs, and trying to use his influence to insulate himself from attack.

This is the squalid endgame of a dynasty dating back 1000 years and that became, despite having few Italian roots, the nation's rulers.

But although Italy was stunned by the incarceration, it was not particularly surprised to hear of the reasons.

For a man routinely dismissed as an idiot, he has enjoyed a successful if chequered business career. Today the family is worth €70 million ($144 million), but other estimates put it at €450 million. The family's real estate alone is said to be worth €40 million.

Confronted with claims that he trousered a bribe of €20,000 to allow a Sicilian to run his business in Switzerland, the prince replied: "It's ridiculous to think I would dirty my hands for €20,000 ... mere pocket money."

Victor Emanuele went into exile with his father, King Umberto I, who sat on the throne for less than a month when he was 9. The family remained in Swiss exile for nearly six decades.

Victor Emanuele announced his priorities by choosing a Swiss skiing champion and heir to a large biscuit manufacturing fortune as his wife. Umberto declined to attend the wedding, and relations soured.

This week the most vitriolic criticism of the prince has come from his sister, Maria Gabriella, from whom he has been estranged for years.

"The mess was predictable," she said. "He is a simpleton, the victim of a wife only interested in money."

What was a prince to do, bereft of duty but endowed with a huge fortune?

Selling helicopters was one of the prince's successful projects, which led him into arms dealing. His wedding to Marina Doria was celebrated both in Las Vegas and Tehran, where the Shah was one of his loyal customers.

But the Savoys were never satisfied with their exile status, and lobbied for the right to return to live in Italy.

Public feelings ran strongly against the monarchy, which was blamed for siding with the Nazis and fleeing from Rome at a crucial point in the war.

King Victor Emanuele III, the present prince's grandfather, put up no resistance to Mussolini or, later, the race laws which banned Jews from attending school among other things. After Mussolini's death, the Savoys became scapegoats for the old regime.

Former Premier Silvio Berlusconi backed their homecoming, but judged it prudent to reintroduce them slowly.

By 2003, the Savoys had sworn oaths of loyalty to the republic, renounced claims to the throne, and began to feature in gossip magazines.

Early on, Victor Emanuele said he would become king "if the people want it", but settled to just milking his name, advertising shoes and pickles.

The most extraordinary figure in the whole tale is Prosecutor Woodcock. "You really are strong," a colleague told him. "If the Pope came to Potenza you'd have him locked up ... "

The son of a British naval officer and a Neapolitan mother, Woodcock became known as the "cyclone prosecutor" after taking the Potenza job in 1999 at the age of 32.

He showed a disdain for the frills of the job, refused to travel in the official limousine and arrived at work instead on his Harley-Davidson. When required in Rome, he took the bus.

In the past four years he has pulled in the blue-chip business directors and allegedly corrupt magistrates.

One minister in Berlusconi's Government called him "a madman" and the Minister of Justice himself, Roberto Castelli, Woodcock's ultimate boss, submitted him to a disciplinary inquiry when one investigation netted a close friend of a former President of Italy - so far he has come through it all smiling.

"The inquiries speak for me," he says, "I am serene." And whatever befalls the allegations against Savoy, Woodcock will have at least a footnote in history: the man who had the guts to put Victor Emanuele behind bars.

- INDEPENDENT