Word: marrazzo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Piero Marrazzo was forced to step down as governor of Rome's region, Lazio, on Oct. 27 after an alleged blackmail scheme set off the spiral of embarrassing revelations about his private life. Prosecutors have now opened homicide investigations into the deaths of two people linked to Marrazzo, who was first elected in 2005 after years as host of a popular consumer watchdog talk show on the RAI national TV network. Investigators say Marrazzo is not a suspect in the Nov. 20 arson that killed a Brazilian transgender prostitute known as Brenda, nor the September death of a Rome-based...
...Marrazzo's scandal is the third major public controversy in four years involving prominent Italian men and transgender prostitutes. In 2005, Lapo Elkann, the grandson of the former head of the Fiat auto dynasty Gianni Agnelli, was rushed to the hospital when he overdosed on cocaine at the Turin apartment of a transsexual prostitute. (He survived.) Two years later, photographs surfaced of Silvio Sircana, chief spokesman for then-Prime Minister Romano Prodi, having a conversation with what appeared to be a transvestite prostitute on the outskirts of Rome. Sircana insisted he was not soliciting the prostitute...
...Marrazzo, who is married with three children, admitted to paying thousands of euros to be with several South American transgender prostitutes and to using cocaine. His fall came after four Carabinieri police officers were arrested for allegedly threatening to make public the incriminating video of the encounter he had with one of the prostitutes. (See the top 10 Berlusconi gaffes...
...resignation of Marrazzo, a member of the center-left, serves the conservative Berlusconi politically. The Prime Minister can argue that he is hardly the only politician guilty of peccadilloes. Opposition supporters point out that Marrazzo rather quickly pulled out of politics after the revelations while the Prime Minister has never shown an ounce of contrition. But Vittorio Zincone, who writes on politics and culture for the weekly magazine of the Milan daily Corriere della Sera, says there is an unconscious effect on the body politic. "The Marrazzo affair solidifies for many Berlusconi's reputation as the real ladies man," says...