Giuseppe Cipriani has been gone for a year from his $120 million, 800-employee US operation, but he insists he’s not on the lam or afraid to return to America because he’d be arrested when he stepped off his plane.
“I can go back. I will go back,” he swears in December’s Vanity Fair, out this week.
“I’ve lived in the United States since 1985,” Cipriani tells the magazine. “I employed thousands of people. I paid millions in taxes in the US. The crime that I was convicted of was a plea deal with [Manhattan DA] Robert Morgenthau. Usually, when you plead to something, it means you make a deal. So we made a deal. And that’s why I will go back to New York.”
Pressed during an interview in London on when that might be, Cipriani replied, “Right now, I don’t have a good feeling, so I will wait a little bit longer.”
The Cipriani empire, which started with Harry’s Bar in Venice in 1931, includes Harry Cipriani in the Sherry-Netherland, Downtown Cipriani in SoHo, as well as Cipriani 42nd Street and Cipriani Wall Street. Besides a private jet, Giuseppe has a Rolls-Royce, several Hummers and a 120-foot yacht, Gin Tonic.
In 2007, he and his father, Arrigo Cipriani, pleaded guilty to tax evasion and paid $10 million in back taxes and penalties. They’d been ratted out two years earlier by an anonymous letter-writer.
Arrigo says his problems started when Giuseppe battled for 18 months against Chelsea Piers developer Roland Betts and finally won the right to develop Pier 57. Betts was a classmate of George W. Bush at Yale and a fellow member of the Skull & Bones secret society. Although the Ciprianis eventually dropped out of the Pier 57 project, “That was the beginning,” Arrigo said. “Everything happens from that.”
Giuseppe told Fortune in 2007 that Betts’ group “had very good connections. And after they lost, we started getting visits from city and state officials.”
Betts did not return our call.