Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (53 page)

Broome was one of the five children that Air Force Sergeant Bill Broome and his wife, Alice Thompson, raised on air bases all around America. She had a tough childhood. Her father “expected his kids to obey like his soldiers and not ask why,” Donna has said. Her younger sister, Terry, always felt he picked on her more than the others. Finally Terry ran away from their home in Greenville, South Carolina, when she was fifteen and was raped by two bikers. Her parents made clear their belief that she’d brought it on herself. Married at eighteen for less than a year, Terry then moved to New York, trying to follow in Donna’s footsteps. Terry joined Ford in 1978 but was mostly interested in cocaine and the bottle of scotch she drank each day. She tried suicide in 1980 and fled home to South Carolina in 1981 but missed the fast lane. Donna Broome meanwhile moved to Milan, and soon gave Terry a plane ticket and the hope she could revive her career in go-go Milano.

At twenty-six, though, she was too old to start over, and she wasn’t pretty enough. The day after she arrived at the Principessa Clothilde, she lost a thousand dollars—all her money—to a pickpocket. “From that moment, it was all downhill,” Donna said.

Patrizia Piazzi, an ex-model who worked with her husband, Giuseppe, at Fashion Model, says, “Terry had been very unfortunate in life. So Donna asked me if I could help her, if I could use her, and I told Donna that it was very difficult. Terry was basically hanging out in Milan, and then she got caught up in this terrible world.” Her brief sojourn in
Milano male
ended about ten weeks later.

Terry later said that before she arrived, she knew about the systematic abuse of striving models in Milan. Agents wouldn’t send a girl’s portfolio out “until they did whatever these men wanted them to do,” she said. “I heard of a couple of cases in which these men threatened to throw acid in the model’s face. One time, they threatened to throw a girl in the river.”

Yet she immediately got involved with Claudio Caccia, an insurance broker who knew Sant’Ambrogio. Within a few days Caccia took her to an overnight party at Carlo Cabassi’s villa in Casorezzo, between Milan and Novara. Model Shaun Casey frequented the place after Riccardo Gay introduced them, and she and Cabassi had a brief affair in 1982. She describes him as wealthy, very important, very funny, and “over my head.” She says: “He had bodyguards and huge dogs. Everything else in his house was dead. He was a
hunter. There were tusks, skins on the wall, major killings.” There was also cocaine, Terry said. “Enough to be offered to everyone.”

She and Caccia went to the party with Francesco D’Alessio, a rich kid who’d been abandoned by his mother at age two. He was the son of Carlo D’Alessio, Italy’s king of the horses, the owner of a hundred thoroughbreds and the head of the breeders’ union. Francesco grew up a rake and a gambler who played bridge with Omar Sharif and went to the races with Alain Delon. D’Alessio had married a model, and they had two daughters before she left him in 1983. He’d already started taking cocaine and became “a zombie,” in the words of Giuliana Ducret, doing coke until 11:00
A.M.
and sleeping until 7:00
P.M.
in the apartment he rented from Cabassi, who lived upstairs on Milan’s Corso Magenta.

The night he met Terry Broome, D’Alessio entered her bedroom in Cabassi’s villa while she was dressing and asked her to have sex. Her refusal didn’t stop him from sharing his coke with her and Cabassi. Later that night he fondled his crotch while watching her. She proceeded to go to bed with both Cabassi and Caccia.

D’Alessio asked to join the ménage but was rebuffed by Cabassi. D’Alessio had a problem Cabassi could recognize. Since his separation D’Alessio had taken to ritually humiliating women. He’d beaten his wife in a nightclub and punched an American model who’d refused to sleep with him. “He was a jerk, terrible with girls,” says Giorgio Repossi. He was certainly terrible with Terry Every time he saw her over the next two months, he would yank his crotch. He told his friends she’d taken on six men, not two, at the weekend orgy
and
that she might be a lesbian. “He would masturbate in front of people, call me a whore and a bitch in public, and tell people he was going to rape me,” Terry recalled. “At one party he came up behind me and threw himself on top of me, pinning me to the floor. He was a vicious sadistic type…. I would never
think
of going to bed with someone like that.”

But Terry wasn’t exactly genteel herself. After she got drunk one night and ripped into Caccia with her nails and teeth, she found herself passed off to Giorgio Rotti, a pudgy jewelry store owner who drove around in a Mercedes, stored the cocaine he served at parties in an emptied can of beer, and manufactured the little spoons, vials, and straws that were necessary accoutrements for hip cokeheads.

She’d become a toy to be passed from hand to hand. “I sold my soul to them for drugs, and they treated me like a prostitute,” she said. Terry Broome was “fucking everybody,” a friend of Rotti’s agrees. “She had no work, so she
started living the life. She got lost. Rotti gave her a fuck. If you didn’t get lucky, you gave her a fuck.” Though Rotti told her he’d heard the rumors she was a lesbian, he had her move in with him in June. Within a week he was financing her test pictures, giving her jewelry, and taking her to meet his parents, introducing her as his fiancée. “I understood that she was a girl who needed love,” Rotti later said.

Late in June Broome spent several coke-fueled days and nights with Rotti. They used five grams in three sleepless days and nights and showed no signs of letting up. On the third night of their run Terry and Rotti met Donna and Sant’Ambrogio at Caffe Roma, a bar owned by Beppe Piroddi, another playboy. When Francesco D’Alessio walked in, they got up and left for Nepenta.

D’Alessio was in a particularly foul mood. The day before he’d called his wife in Rome, begged her to come back, and been rebuffed. Now he turned up again at Nepenta. After he approached Broome’s table and feigned masturbating again, Terry fled to the bathroom. D’Alessio approached Rotti and Sant’Ambrogio. “Why, when the girls go out with Rotti, don’t they want to fuck me anymore?” he asked. Rotti and D’Alessio almost came to blows before the party broke around 2:00
A.M.

Back at Rotti’s apartment at the Principessa Clitoris, Terry was furious. “I had done some party scenes,” she admitted, but never with six men at once. Then Rotti turned on her, demanded the return of an engagement ring and necklace he’d given her. He went to bed. She sat up doing a crossword puzzle, snorting coke, drinking vodka, and brooding. At 5:00
A.M.
, she went looking for a battery-operated video game in Rotti’s closet. She found more coke and a chrome-plated five-shot Smith & Wesson Chief Special .38-caliber pistol. “It was irresponsible of Giorgio to leave a gun and bullets around his house,” says Pucci Albanese. “He is the only one to blame for what happened. You cannot get stoned and go to bed with a girl you’ve only met two or three times and leave a gun around.”

But he had. And now Terry decided to “straighten things out” with D’Alessio. “I only wanted to frighten him,” she said.

D’Alessio was at home with a model named Laura Royko when his phone rang. It was Terry, but she called herself Diane and asked if she could come over. Stopping along the way to sniff coke from Rotti’s fake Vicks inhaler, she reached D’Alessio’s apartment and found Royko drunk and her tormentor sniffing coke. Turning some down, she went to the bathroom and did some of her own. When she returned, the suave D’Alessio asked if she’d have sex with him. With that, she pulled out her gun and started shooting the six-foot-three
playboy at point-blank range. Two of her five shots hit him—in the head and chest. Royko, hiding in another room, started screaming. After failing to calm her, Terry ran back to Rotti and woke him up. It was 7:30
A.M.
Rotti checked his gun, found five empty cartridges, and quickly hustled Terry to the airport, where he put her on a flight to Switzerland.

Upstairs Carlo Cabassi got the news from Laura Royko. He sent a servant, who returned to inform him that D’Alessio was lying on the floor. Rushing to his friend’s side, Cabassi heard “the death rattle” and saw “on the table a paper carton with cocaine,” he later testified. “I threw the cocaine in the toilet.” He said he wanted to protect his friend’s memory. Milanese authorities later charged that Cabassi also took D’Alessio’s diary.

Later that day Terry Broome was arrested in Zurich’s Bahnpost Hotel and immediately confessed that she had shot D’Alessio “because he treated me in a vulgar way.” After months of imprisonment and questioning, a court-ordered psychiatric study said that she was impaired on drugs at the time of the shooting. Nonetheless, eleven months later she was indicted for premeditated murder. Cabassi, Rotti, and Caccia were also charged with various offenses, the most serious that Cabassi had obstructed justice by stealing D’Alessio’s diary.

Broome’s trial was held in June 1986. It was a public sensation, and Milan’s newspaper,
Corriere della Sera
, printed daily transcripts. The three playboys were described as “pallid and a little fat.” They refused to look at Terry, who was confined in a steel cage throughout the trial. With her mother and sister in court, Broome took the stand and said, “I confirm that it was I who killed Francesco.” Cabassi called his friend “a little like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Tennis players at D’Alessio’s club said that the gestures he’d made at Terry were a nervous hand twitch. D’Alessio’s father called his son “a gentle boy, always lucid, all there, nice.” Rotti testified in dark glasses, his shirt open to reveal a chest full of gold chains. “Do you consider this a normal way to live?” the judge snapped at him.

“These are people who use women as objects and display them like trophies,” Terry’s lawyer said in his plea for mercy. “She is more destroyed than the other person.” The jury apparently agreed, finding Broome guilty of voluntary homicide—a lesser charge—after eight hours of deliberation. She was sentenced to fourteen years in prison. “I’ve met better people in prison than I met outside,” she said. Cabassi, acquitted of obstruction of justice, received a suspended sentence of twenty-one months for cocaine possession. Rotti was also convicted on various charges and received a suspended sentence.

Terry Broome photographed while being extradited to Italy in 1984
Terry Broome, Matteini/SIPA

Outside the courtroom Donna Broome proved she’d learned something about agentry in her years as a model. “You want to speak to Terry?” she asked a reporter. “If you really want to, you have to pay. Money. We have lots of expenses. Terry needs things. There are already a pair of offers being considered. Call my boyfriend. Speak to him…. Money for the exclusive. Otherwise, nothing.”

A year later, in an appeal, Broome’s sentence was reduced and Caccia was given amnesty. Terry was released from prison and returned to America in 1992.

Today many modeling professionals dismiss her as a wannabe and a victim. “She was not a model,” says Giorgio Sant’ Ambrogio. “And this accident changed nothing. The same things happened all over the world, but when it happens in the model business, it’s news. Anywhere else nobody gives a shit. Ten years ago drugs were used like cigarettes. If something changed, it’s that drugs aren’t in anymore. Twenty years ago elite people used drugs. Now drugs are used by my butler and maid.”

“It was just a scandal, not a change,” says Riccardo Gay.

But in fact, Broome was a watershed. Milan’s playboy high life had been laid low. “They were like slobs, they were getting careless and sloppy, and it was not funny anymore,” says John Casablancas. “You know how these situations with drugs usually degenerate. It starts as a casual, sexy, trendy thing to do, and it ends up being vulgar. I saw Cabassi go from funny to disgusting. I think they felt they were above the law and above ethics. I avoided these people like hell. But probably this thing saved a lot of lives with those
Milano per bene
boys.”

In truth Milan had stood up and said no to the rot. “Public opinion stood on Terry’s side against this bourgeoisie type of life,” says Giuseppe Piazzi. “Terry became a hero,” adds his wife, Patrizia. “The Terry Broome affair pointed a finger at something that had been evolving for a long time.”

“Terry paid a price for a lot of victims in Milan,” Donna Broome says. “She was the one who exploded. In a way it straightened the whole city out. There was a big difference in the way people looked at models and treated models afterwards.”

Carlo Cabassi, for one, never wanted to see another model again. Following the shooting of his tenant and friend D’Alessio, he divested his interests in both the Paris Planning and Riccardo Gay agencies. “The lawyers suggested Cabassi get rid of his shares,” says Massimo Tabak. “At this point it’s easy for Mr. Gay to get the shares back—probably for nothing.” John Casablancas
agrees with Tabak’s analysis. “Every time I see Riccardo, he’s collected a few more hundred million lire to sell his agency. Then I come back six months later, and whoever bought the business is out and he bought them for peanuts. It’s his specialty to sell his agency to people, fuck everything up, get the agency back, rebuild it, and then resell it. I think that he’s done that four times.” With the proceeds he settled down with a new wife and children.