The Spine Collector

Summary

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Chameleon: "The Spine Collector" – Episode Summary

Podcast: Chameleon (Audiochuck | Campside Media)
Host: Josh Dean
Episode: The Spine Collector
Date: December 11, 2025

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Overview: The Peculiar Tale of the "Spine Collector"

This episode of Chameleon dives into the captivating and confounding story of a scammer dubbed the "Spine Collector," who stole unpublished book manuscripts by impersonating insiders across the global publishing industry. Host Josh Dean is joined by New York Magazine journalists Lila Shapiro and Reeves Wiedemann, who spent years piecing together the bizarre caper—one that ultimately entwined questions of literary obsession, industry insidership, and personal longing for acceptance. The episode explores the motives, investigation, and aftermath of this literary con and asks: Why would anyone go to such lengths for manuscripts that seemingly have no commercial worth?

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Emergence of the Mystery

• Origins of the Scam:
  • The publishing world in 2019 was rattled by a series of thefts—unpublished manuscripts stolen through elaborate impersonation schemes.
  • High-profile and unknown authors alike were targeted, casting a wide net of concern across editors, agents, and scouts.
    Lila Shapiro (01:43): “The scammer would pretend to be a publisher writing to an agent, or an agent writing to an author, or a book scout writing to an editor. And the goal every time was to obtain a copy of some unpublished manuscript, an object that in most cases has little to no value.”

Zero Financial Motive, Maximum Intrigue

• The Perplexity:
  • No manuscripts appeared on piracy sites or black markets; no clear profit motive was found.
  • Major publishing houses launched investigations, and paranoia spread in all branches of the business. Josh Dean (04:16): “There was no obvious financial motive. These manuscripts were not showing up for sale on bootleg sites.”

Journalistic Fascination & Dead Ends

• The Writers’ Perspective:
  • For Lila and Reeves, the story’s low stakes were part of its charm, especially during the pandemic. Lila Shapiro (07:55): “There was something that was like secretly gratifying to some people at least about the idea that these books were valuable enough to steal. Especially… this might be one of the only people who ever reads this book, potentially.”
• Attempts to Crack the Case:
  • Their investigation included tracking countless emails, mapping correspondences, and following up on rumors—especially about one particular book scout. Reeves Wiedemann (09:51): “We were trying to go through it and see, like, can we pick out patterns in when they're sending or who they're targeting…The spreadsheet seemed to reveal that it was totally random.”

The Scammer Targets the Investigators

• Unexpected Contact:
  • As Lila and Reeves gained notoriety in the probe, the scammer began impersonating publishing insiders to contact them directly. Reeves Wiedemann (11:21): “Whoever was doing this started impersonating people in the publishing world and contacting, I think, both of us…trying to pretend as if they were these other people in publishing sort of talking to us.”
• The Fake Meetup:
  • The scammer mockingly proposed an in-person meeting in Brooklyn, responding with crude jokes when prompted to name a location. Lila Shapiro (12:38): “And they wrote back, how about Fuck you, Hill, or can I meet you at Silly Cunt Square?...It's one of, like, my favorite lines I've ever received in an email from a source.”

False Leads & Frustration

• Suspect Cleared:
  • The "smoking gun" evidence linking the crime to an industry book scout was ultimately a misreading; publishing insiders weren’t tech-savvy enough to spot a faked email. Reeves Wiedemann (14:43): “They were sort of duped themselves by not noticing that, in fact, this email address was a fake, that it had a letter or number just off …At the same time, it was pretty deflating because…we had very little hope of actually being able to pin this on anyone.”
• Reluctant Closure:
  • The journalists’ editors pushed them to publish despite the lack of a resolution, leading to their 2023 article, “The Spine Collector.” Josh Dean (15:50): “He means the story that he and Lila published in New York magazine in March of 2023 under the perfect headline, the Spine Collector.”

An Arrest and Revelations

• The Break in the Case:
  • After publication, a cybersecurity source hinted at a concrete suspect, then the U.S. Justice Department announced an arrest. Reeves Wiedemann (18:23): “They said he arrived at JFK airport in New York City on a flight from London and was apprehended there.”
• Filippo Bernardini Unmasked:
  • Bernardini, a 29-year-old Italian in Simon & Schuster UK’s rights division, was charged with wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.
  • He had created more than 160 fake websites and emails to impersonate publishing insiders. Lila Shapiro (18:44): “Bernardini of London registered more than 160 website and email addresses to impersonate individuals.”
• No Genial Criminal Mastermind:
  • Bernardini was neither a technical genius nor motivated by money. FBI likely tracked him using straightforward digital forensics. Lila Shapiro (20:00): “…it's not like the scammer was some tech genius either who was maybe super skilled at covering up all of his tracks…”

The Psychology & Pathos of the Scam

• Longing for Acceptance:
  • Bernardini’s defense highlighted his social awkwardness, autism diagnosis, lack of connection in the publishing community, and failure to be an industry insider. Lila Shapiro (22:26): “It sort of made sense early on that like whoever was doing this wouldn't be able to just get the manuscripts the normal way that someone would do it. … the way it functions is that people kind of like each other. And so, you know, it made sense to me that this person would not be able to kind of necessarily play that game.”
• A Statement to the Court:
  • Bernardini, via a written statement read by an actor, evokes his deep love of books and his compulsion to ‘cherish’ manuscripts before anyone else: Filippo Bernardini, read by actor (24:03): “I wanted to keep them closely to my chest and be one of the fewest to cherish them before anyone Else before they ended up in bookshop. …this behavior became an obsession, a compulsive behavior.”
• A Judge’s Bewilderment:
  • Even the presiding judge expressed confusion over Bernardini’s motives. Lila Shapiro (25:41): “I have no idea what to make of this. I don't understand why anyone would steal a book. I know why someone would pirate a dvd, but why would they steal an unpublished book manuscript? I mean, it was just the sort of central source of bewilderment.”

Aftermath, Debate, and Lingering Mysteries

• Punishment and Sympathy:

  • Bernardini was sentenced to time already served, three years’ supervised release, and an $88,000 fine—then deported. Many in publishing felt the penalty was sufficient; others, especially victimized authors, felt violated. Josh Dean quoting Literary Hub (27:08): "Let him diminish and go into the West Sardinia, where he can sit by the water and read his beloved books in peace, on or after their official publication dates, of course."
  • On the other side, some authors (see Peter Baker) found the incident deeply wounding. Josh Dean reading Peter Baker (28:20): “Getting fooled into handing it over made me feel sick.”

• Copycats and Unresolved Questions:

  • Since the arrest, similar scams have reportedly continued, leading to speculation about copycats or Bernardini’s possible return. Reeves Wiedemann (29:00): “Someone continues to steal book manuscripts in this weird way…My suspicion is that we're dealing with a copycat or maybe multiple copycats who saw this game and for whatever perverse reason, decided to take up the mantle. So the mystery continues.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Lila Shapiro (04:06): “Mostly I write about horrible things, and this seemed at least kind of relatively less horrible and in a way, even kind of delightful.”
• Reeves Wiedemann (05:56): “What was so appealing and strange about it was that it just seemed to be everywhere and to no real purpose as far as we could tell.”
• Lila Shapiro (12:47): “[The scammer writes,] how about Fuck you, Hill, or can I meet you at Silly Cunt Square?... It's one of, like, my favorite lines I've ever received in an email from a source.”
• Josh Dean (15:50): “He means the story that he and Lila published in New York magazine in March of 2023 under the perfect headline, the Spine Collector.”
• Filippo Bernardini, statement read by actor (24:03): “A part of me wanted to believe that I was still one of them. And so I started cosplaying what people in publishing were doing as editor or literary agents.”
• Lila Shapiro (28:58): “There is a sort of earnest aspect of it, like reading someone still values reading.”
• Reeves Wiedemann (29:00): “So the mystery continues.”

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:40] Lila Shapiro introduces the premise through her publishing contacts.
• [02:43] Josh Dean lays out the scam’s confusion and scope.
• [09:51] Reeves describes compiling evidence and the randomness of the scam.
• [12:38] Lila recounts the absurd email from the scammer.
• [14:43] The “smoking gun” against the initial suspect is debunked.
• [18:23] The perpetrator, Bernardini, is arrested and identified.
• [24:03] Bernardini’s statement to the court is read aloud.
• [26:52] Bernardini’s sentencing and the divided industry response.
• [29:00] Ongoing mystery: reports of new manuscript thefts continue.

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Tone

The episode blends investigative suspense with a quirky, sometimes wry appreciation for the stranger-than-fiction nature of the story. There’s a tangible empathy for both the oddball criminal and the wounded victims, and a recognition that sometimes the greatest mysteries—and obsessions—are rooted not in profit, but in the simple, obsessive love of books and belonging.

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This summary captures the unfolding of the "Spine Collector" story as told by Josh Dean, Lila Shapiro, and Reeves Wiedemann, tracing the themes of deception, obsession, and the enduring, sometimes perplexing, allure of the written word.

Transcript

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[Josh Dean]

Hello.

[Reeves Wiedemann]

What is. What do you want me to say?

[Yvette Gentile]

Chameleon.

[Josh Dean]

Chameleon.

[Reeves Wiedemann]

Chameleon Weekly.

[Lila Shapiro]

I'm friends with this book scout and I'd been writing about the publishing world for a couple of years by that point. And he was like, oh my God, you have to do this story. You need to solve this case because it's driving me and everyone else I know crazy.

[Josh Dean]

This is Lila Shapiro, a features writer for New York Magazine. It was back in 2019 when a friend asked her to drinks because someone somewhere was stealing manuscripts of books that had yet to be published by impersonating a variety of figures from the industry. Editors, agents, scouts. Everyone knew someone who'd been targeted. The stolen manuscripts were from many countries, in many languages, some by massively successful authors like Margaret Atwood and Stieg Larsson and even Ethan Hawke. Others, though, were from relative unknowns.

[Lila Shapiro]

You know, he sent me a bunch of emails. He'd been impersonated and connected me with a couple of people who'd also been impersonated.

[Josh Dean]

Lila was intrigued. This was truly bizarre. The perpetrator or perpetrators seemed to be fluent in many languages and knew the lingo and the norms of the industry. The scammer would pretend to be a publisher writing to an agent, or an agent writing to an author, or a book scout writing to an editor. And the goal every time was to obtain a copy of some unpublished manuscript, an object that in most cases has little to no value.

[Lila Shapiro]

When I was talking to my source, it was like, me and everyone we know, like, we're all suffering from this. And there had been a couple of internal investigations. Some of these bigger publishing houses had tried to sort of get to the bottom of it on their own. But it was at the point where it seemed to be happening to everyone in publishing, in every sort of branch of the business.

[Josh Dean]

I remember hearing about the scam for the first time in 2020 when the new York Times published a story titled why on Earth is Someone Stealing unpublished Book Manuscripts? A story that laid out the scope of the confusing scam as well as its most compelling question. As Daniel Halpern, the founder of Echo Publishing and a person who had been both impersonated and the target of the impersonator, told the paper, the real mystery is the endgame. It seems like no one knows anything beyond the fact of it. And that, I guess you could say, is alarming.

[Lila Shapiro]

Mostly I write about horrible things, and this seemed at least kind of relatively less horrible and in a way, even kind of delightful.

[Josh Dean]

There was no obvious financial motive. These manuscripts were not showing up for sale on bootleg sites.

[Lila Shapiro]

I looked into it a little bit and I was like, there's no way I'm going to solve this story. And then my editor at the time was like, well, if you're not going to solve it, then maybe we just move on. I was in the midst of another in depth investigation, which felt at the time more pressing. But then when I found out Reeves was going to look into it, it really just seemed too fun not to join up in the project.

[Josh Dean]

Reeves is her New York magazine colleague, Reeves Wiedemann, who had also found himself pulled into the mystery of the scammer.

[Reeves Wiedemann]

What was so appealing and strange about it was that it just seemed to be everywhere and to no real purpose as far as we could tell.

[Josh Dean]

Dozens of manuscripts stolen for sure, probably hundreds, maybe thousands.

[Reeves Wiedemann]

I think it was basically impossible to ever actually figure out how many different books had been targeted and or stolen.

[Josh Dean]

Reeves entry point had also been a friend in book publishing. Those of us who write for a living all know someone like that. This was maybe a year after Lila's tip. But this friend dangled an even bigger carrot.

[Reeves Wiedemann]

She was convinced, and she said other people were convinced that they knew who it was, that there was this person who, for a variety of reasons, they all suspected, and I was told that there was proof that would be able to nail this person. I remember I was living in Los Angeles. I hadn't gotten my vaccine yet, so we were stuck inside and like having a fun, weird, strange mystery to solve. That was all email based, so it was all online. Was really tantalizing.

[Josh Dean]

This is Chameleon, the weekly show about people who wear masks. And I'm Josh Dean.

This week, the story of the spine collector, a scammer who terrorized the global publishing industry for reasons that no one could quite understand.

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[Yvette Gentile]

Chameleon.

[Josh Dean]

Chameleon. This is Chameleon Weekly.

Both Lila Shapiro and Reeves Wiedemann readily admit that the stakes of this mystery were from the very start, quite small, definitely not to scale with the size of their fascination. Some of it was the pandemic. Both of them were stuck home and bored. And this was a digital scam, which meant a digital investigation. Very doable from the comfort of your home desk. But also, they're both writers. Words are their currency. And that currency.

[Lila Shapiro]

Well, during the whole period I've covered publishing, publishing as an industry has been in such decline. And I think that there was something that was like secretly gratifying to some people at least about the idea that these books were valuable enough to steal. Especially the. Some of the books were like, this might be one of the only people who ever reads this book, potentially.

[Josh Dean]

It was also just befuddling on every level, which is like catnip to certain journalists.

[Reeves Wiedemann]

One of the mysteries that we were trying to figure out was, okay, this person must be doing something with these manuscripts. You could imagine maybe they were Trying to pirate them and sell them illegally on the dark web, or just kind of a chaos agent hacker who wants to release these manuscripts to the public for free. But. But they weren't showing up anywhere. There was some suspicion of, like, oh, is this some nefarious Hollywood producer who is trying to get their hands on books early so they could go option them for TV or movies and have some advantage there? Or was there some advantage to having this information ahead of time if you were someone in the publishing business trying to choose which books to buy and which to sell and all of that? But as best we could tell, there really was no practical benefit or advantage that this person seemed to be gaining or exploiting in any way.

[Josh Dean]

Lila, who's covered the publishing industry for years, is deeply sourced. Reeves, who has a more eclectic beat and does a wider array of investigations, brought the enthusiasm, the insatiable hunger to really dive in and try to solve this mystery.

[Lila Shapiro]

So I was pregnant and about to go on maternity leave, so I feel like Reeves did more of the heavy lifting. We can acknowledge that. I don't mind.

[Josh Dean]

They started by collecting evidence, just piles of it. Emails and email addresses, companies targeted and fake names used.

[Reeves Wiedemann]

We were trying to go through it and see, like, can we pick out patterns in when they're sending or who they're targeting or what they're going after? And so we also had this kind of elaborate spreadsheet trying to break that down. Spoiler alert. After all of that work, the spreadsheet seemed to reveal that it was totally random.

[Josh Dean]

There was, of course, the one suspect who'd been flagged to them very early on, a book scout, which is a very specific job in publishing. Book scouts work for foreign publishers and film producers and literary agencies to identify promising manuscripts, typically books that are very likely to be big sellers or which seem like they'd make good movies.

[Lila Shapiro]

So there's a suspect that people think is weird and don't really like very much. That's a large part of why he was suspect. Suspect. But then there was some, quote, evidence that a couple of people felt they had. So there was a project of being like, well, we have to, like, try to look at this evidence for ourself and understand if it stacks up or not. If it makes sense.

[Reeves Wiedemann]

You're basically told, if you can get these couple of people to talk to you, they have actual digital forensic evidence of who did this. The initial problem we ran into is none of those people would talk to us. Which, of course, gets your mind going, okay, these people do know something. And they just are, for whatever reason, are nervous and scared about telling us.

[Josh Dean]

Eventually, after kicking so many bushes, they became part of the story themselves.

[Reeves Wiedemann]

Whoever was doing this started impersonating people in the publishing world and contacting, I think, both of us separately in different ways, trying to pretend as if they were these other people in publishing sort of talking to us. And it wasn't really clear what their motivation was. They weren't really responding. Didn't seem to be trying to trick us into doing anything. We couldn't really figure out what the deal was. And so I was sitting there kind of like, oh, we gotta, like, game this out. We gotta be careful, Lila, you're about to give birth. We can't give out too much information to this person who might be kind of a crazy person. Let's like, kind of play it cool.

[Josh Dean]

Then the scammer proposed something surprising. An in person meeting.

[Lila Shapiro]

I was like, fantastic. Where should we meet? They wanted me to suggest where. I mean, I live in Brooklyn. I suggested a couple spots, maybe Carroll Gardens, maybe Cobble Hill, somewhere around there.

[Josh Dean]

These are neighborhoods in what's commonly known as brownstone Brooklyn, the leafy yuppie sections where many people who work in publishing happen to live. It felt for a few hours anyway, like this person might really come out of the shadows.

[Lila Shapiro]

And they wrote back, how about Fuck you, Hill, or can I meet you at Silly Cunt Square?

It's one of, like, my favorite lines I've ever received in an email from a source. So that was kind of the end of that. I was disappointed because I was like, really ready to just be like, I'm. I'm like, I'm gonna show up. Here I am eight and a half months pregn. Like, what are they gonna do? But then, as with so many things about this story, it was thrilling to imagine and ultimately went nowhere.

[Reeves Wiedemann]

My memory is there were maybe one or two, maybe three people that he was contacting. And I remember both of us kind of having to sit there a few times and be like, okay, okay. Like, is this real or is this fake? Obviously, once Lila was invited to Fuck youk Hill, then we knew that this was a person fucking with us.

[Josh Dean]

Reeves did finally obtain that tantalizing evidence they'd been told about in the beginning. The alleged smoking gun that would connect the whole thing back to a specific person. The name of the suspect they'd been told about right from the start. In short, some early victims who'd been targeted by the scammer, then pretending to be a book scout, managed to trace the fake Email used back to an actual email, which seemed like it was connected to a real person, a real book scout, who they decided had to be the culprit. Reeves reached out and asked for an interview. He didn't necessarily believe this was the scammer, but he couldn't rule it out either. The only option was to confront those rumors head on.

[Reeves Wiedemann]

We did, in fact, confront. I did over Zoom. The suspect that so many people had thought was the person had a very sort of tense, uncomfortable conversation with him. He kind of knew that people had suspicions about him. He denied it as credibly as he could, and ultimately, we didn't have any evidence that it was him.

[Josh Dean]

When Reeves scrutinized the evidence, he found some rather gaping holes. In particular, the email these contacts believed to be real. Assuming that the scammer had just been sloppy in his or her early period, wasn't actually real, was not quite the.

[Reeves Wiedemann]

Smoking gun that it had been made out to be. They were sort of duped themselves by not noticing that, in fact, this email address was a fake, that it had a letter or number just off. One part of this story dealing with publishing people is they are not particularly tech savvy, which is one reason that this scam was, I think, able to be as widespread as it was. At the same time, it was pretty deflating because at that point, we had very little hope of actually being able to pin this on anyone.

[Josh Dean]

Their hunt for the scammer had gone cold, and eventually the editors of the magazine lost their patience of sitting on Zoom.

[Reeves Wiedemann]

We were having a meeting, and they just kind of said, you know, the pandemic is still ongoing. The world is in chaos. We do want to try to solve this, and we want to publish an interesting story about it, but at some point, we've got to get you onto something else, and we can't have you investigating this little micro drama for years and years. So we ultimately had to sort of give up. And so we published the piece, which was, you know, in some senses, kind of an unsatisfactory, you know, spoiler to the piece. We don't solve it.

[Josh Dean]

He means the story that he and Lila published in New York magazine in March of 2023 under the perfect headline, the Spine Collector.

[Reeves Wiedemann]

I think at that point, we were running out of hope that we were going to get to the bottom of it. I think this was a moment of, like, you're just sort of even more confused. I think it was. Yeah, it was kind of in that point where we're just heading towards, like, man, I don't think we're ever going to be able to solve this. I don't think there's ever maybe gonna be a resolution to this.

[Josh Dean]

But of course, that wasn't the end. More after the break.

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[Josh Dean]

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[Josh Dean]

Welcome back to Chameleon Chameleon. Neither Reeves nor Lila was satisfied with leaving the mystery unsolved. And in the days and weeks after their story was published, sources continued to flood their inboxes with news stories of stolen manuscripts and. And occasionally with some leads, none more enticing than the one that came from a cybersecurity specialist at a major tech company that Reeves cannot name. Who told him that he was pretty sure he knew who was behind this long and confusing scam.

[Reeves Wiedemann]

He was like, I am certain that here is where they live. It was a particular zip code, not just in this particular country or this town. Here's what they do. I know some things about them. I think, for instance, he knew they were a vegan. And so I'm sitting there just kind of like scratching my head wondering what this was. We kind of tried to map that on our sort of board of people, but ultimately it was just this kind of tantalizing bit of information. But there wasn't really anything we could do about it.

[Josh Dean]

And then fast forward, five or six months later, Justice Department puts out a.

[Reeves Wiedemann]

Release that they have in fact arrested the perpetrator in this case. They said he arrived at JFK airport in New York City on a flight from London and was apprehended there.

[Josh Dean]

His name was Filippo Bernardini, a 29 year old Italian man who worked in the foreign rights division of Simon and Schuster's UK office.

[Lila Shapiro]

Bernardini of London registered more than 160 website and email addresses to impersonate individuals.

[Josh Dean]

Involved in the publishing industry to gain.

[Lila Shapiro]

Superficial access to these materials, the indictment says.

[Josh Dean]

He was charged with wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. U.S. attorney Damian Williams said this in an overbaked news release issued upon the arrest. This real life storyline now reads as a cautionary tale with the plot twist of Bernadini facing federal criminal charges for his misdeeds.

[Reeves Wiedemann]

It was vindicating for us and other people because in a lot of ways the suspect ended up fitting a little bit of the profile of the kind of person we thought it might be. He was a very low level publishing employee. He seemed to be someone who had tried to work his way up in the publishing business and not had great success with it. And then for some reasons that are still a little bit mysterious, decided to start perpetrating this scam amongst his colleagues in the publishing world.

[Josh Dean]

The FBI shared nothing of the story behind its investigation. What Had Spark did or how the Bureau solved the mystery. All Reeves could get was a pile of no comments. But honestly, given the tools at the FBI's disposal, it probably wasn't all that hard to track the Spine Collector down. Lila Shapiro gets it.

[Lila Shapiro]

I got the impression that it wouldn't really necessarily be that difficult for someone who had access to information about like IP addresses and so on. It's not like the scammer was some tech genius either who was maybe super skilled at covering up all of his tracks necessarily. What he was doing was relatively simple. I have always been curious, like, was it just like, you know, I know they talked to people, they, they interviewed people and then was it just like one afternoon they were like, all right, let's just look up all these IP addresses.

[Reeves Wiedemann]

I think we had figured that this was not someone who was really doing this for some practical purpose. We definitely felt like it must be someone who is in the publish, who knew the lingo, who knew the way that people talked, who knew how information traveled. And we also felt like it was probably someone who had struggled to be in the industry and maybe had found this scheme kind of a way of getting in and feeling like a part of this industry that, you know, the reason people get into publishing is one, it's because you love books, and two, it's because you like being in a sort of literary scene. And I think for a lot of people who are in the industry, that's what it is. And if you're stuck on the outside of that, that can feel a little bit painful. And so I think realizing that it was this low level publishing employee had not really had a ton of success, maybe a little bit awkward. It did sort of match up where we thought at least this might land.

[Josh Dean]

Bernardini was forced to stay in New York in a friend's small apartment for more than a year after his arrest until the case could be adjudicated. And Lila, who lives in New York, attended the court proceedings when the case finally wound its way through the system.

[Lila Shapiro]

One thing that came out of going to court and observing him was he was clearly very socially awkward person. It was clear that he was a person who had a real difficulty dealing with other people. And his own sort of defense was partly about that.

[Josh Dean]

Bernadini acknowledged his actions were wrong. And his defense pointed to his young age and autism diagnosis and the fact that he had never leaked or sold any of the copies. His motivation, his lawyers argued, was simply a desire to be part of the industry. No one was out of pocket. This wasn't, they said, even really fraud.

[Lila Shapiro]

And that was definitely the kind of person that we had in mind because, you know, ultimately like publishing and particularly like the world of scouting, but it's like facilitated through drinks, parties, social skills. It sort of made sense early on that like whoever was doing this wouldn't be able to just get the manuscripts the normal way that someone would do it. Like the normal way a book scout gets a manuscript early is because they are friends with tons of agents and editors and everybody's interested in getting the book's, you know, attention, money, big sales, whatever. But like the way it functions is that people kind of like each other. And so, you know, it made sense to me that this person would not be able to kind of necessarily play that game. And that definitely, you know, seemed true. I mean, and then the more we've like kind of we learned about him really was true about him. He wasn't able to really succeed in publishing. I mean, who can say what he really wanted exactly. But you know.

He was very much like at the fringes rather than at the center.

[Josh Dean]

Bernardini did address the court in a pre written statement, he said that he loved books and that his motivation in part was to steal the manuscripts so that he could, quote, cherish them before anyone else. He was contrite and apologetic and also said this read here by an actor.

[Filippo Bernardini (voice actor reading statement)]

I never leaked these manuscripts. I wanted to keep them closely to my chest and be one of the fewest to cherish them before anyone Else before they ended up in bookshop. There were times where I read the manuscript and I felt a special and unique connection with the author, almost like I was editor of that book. While employed, I saw manuscript being shared between editors, agents and literary scouts, or even with individuals outside the industry. So I wondered, why can I not also get to read these manuscripts? One day I created a spoof email address for someone I knew of in the publishing industry and I sent an email to someone else that I knew of asking for a pre publication manuscript. I wrote in the style and using the language that my former colleague had used. And when that request was successful, from that moment on, this behavior became an obsession, a compulsive behavior. Writing this now, I feel my fingers shaking as I typed this. As the thought of how egregious, stupid and wrong my actions were, I had a burning desire to feel like I was still one of these publishing professionals and read these new books. A part of me wanted to believe that I was still one of them. And so I started cosplaying what people in publishing were doing as editor or literary agents.

[Josh Dean]

His lawyer wrote in a sentencing submission that Filippo, quote, grew up as a lonely, bullied gay child in a conservative part of Italy who found comfort by burying himself in books. Honestly, the more details that emerged, the more it was hard to not, I guess, sympathize with this shy Italian.

[Lila Shapiro]

He said it was an impulsive action.

When he first wanted to do it because he was curious whether it would work. And then it did work, and then he just kept doing. Was very interesting being in court because the judge was like completely bewildered by the case and kind of kept remarking like, I have no idea what to make of this. I don't understand why anyone would steal a book. I know why someone would pirate a dvd, but why would they steal an unpublished book manuscript? I mean, it was just the sort of central source of bewilderment. And his statement didn't solve that mystery for anyone.

[Reeves Wiedemann]

He'd been caught. He recognized what he did was wrong. I think the I just love books is a little bit of a convenient explanation to give when you're being sentenced to a crime and looking for leniency. I don't know that we'll ever fully get a straight answer for him on exactly why. We've, we've asked him if he'd be open to explaining further, and so far he hasn't. So I think in some ways, at least, this will remain a beautiful, wonderful, weird mystery.

[Josh Dean]

Ultimately, Filippo Bernardini was spared any more jail time. He was sentenced to time served and handed three years of supervised release, along with a fine of $88,000. He was then deported from the US.

This is a mystery that very much still divides people in publishing. There are plenty who found the whole thing amusing more than anything, who, when the culprit surfaced and pledged his undying love for books, almost rooted for him, or at least were happy that he was let off relatively easily with no jail time and just 88,000 in damages. As Dan Sheehan wrote in a post on Literary hub Turn Filippo Loose. He's agreed to a hefty fine, been threatened by the FBI, held in custody for over a year, and publicly humiliated. That's enough. Let him diminish and go into the West Sardinia, where he can sit by the water and read his beloved books in peace, on or after their official publication dates, of course. But others, especially some of those who'd been scammed, weren't feeling so generous. This man, to some people, caused real harm. They felt violated and in some cases, humiliated. Certain authors, especially, were deeply wounded by the spine collector's antics. One Peter Baker wrote about the experience in the New Yorker in a piece titled How It Felt to have My Novel Stolen. It was the first book I'd ever tried writing, and during the previous near decade it had become an overburdened locus of my ambitions, hopes, doubts and fears. He wrote, many times I. I'd looked at the manuscript and wondered if I was fooling myself. Getting fooled into handing it over made me feel sick.

[Lila Shapiro]

I've been spending a lot of time on Reddit recently, and I don't think there's anything that happened with this story that much weirder, creepier, more perverse. Messed up things are happening every minute of the day. The thing that's charming about this story is there is a sort of earnest aspect of it, like reading someone still values reading.

[Josh Dean]

There's also this, you know, the thing.

[Reeves Wiedemann]

That remains interesting and that pops up on my radar every few months since he was arrested, which was now three years ago, is that this continues to happen. Someone continues to steal book manuscripts in this weird way. We kept hearing early on that it was happening a lot in Italy, in the Italian publishing world. And since then, I think we've just. I know I've just continued to hear people in publishing having this happen again. You know, there's obviously some chance that Filippo Bernardini really couldn't give up his favorite game and is back to it. My suspicion is that we're dealing with a copycat or maybe multiple copycats who saw this game and for whatever perverse reason, decided to take up the mantle. So the mystery continues.

[Josh Dean]

Chameleon is a production of Campside Media and Audio Chuck. It's written and hosted by me, Josh Dean and produced by Joe Barrett. Our associate producer is Emma Simonelli. Sound design and mix by Tiffany Dimmak. Theme music by Ewin Laitrimuin and Mark McAdam. The voice actor in this episode is Marco Maraglia. Our production manager is Ashley Warren. Campside's executive producers are Vanessa Grigoriadis, Matt Sher and me, Josh Dean. And finally, if I can ask a few favors before sending you on your way today, please rate, follow and review Chameleon on your favorite podcast platforms to help spread the word. I know everyone says this, but it's true. Ratings and reviews really do help, and if you have any feedback, tips or story ideas, you can email [e-mail] or leave us a message at a special number We've set up, 201-743-8368, dial plus one from outside North America. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.

[Yvette Gentile]

I think Chuck would approve.

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