A prostitution ring in Italy recruited escorts for sex with leading Italian footballers, with one of the young women falling pregnant after a party fuelled by canisters of laughing gas.
The parties in exclusive nightclubs and restaurants around Milan involved about 70 football players from several top-flight Serie A clubs, including Inter Milan, Juventus and AC Milan, according to investigators.
The players’ stimulant of choice was nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, because unlike cocaine and other drugs it does not turn up in the anti-doping tests that players have to undergo.
Police intercepted phone calls and text messages between the alleged organisers of the prostitution ring and the escorts, with one of them saying that she had been made pregnant by a client during one of the sex parties.
The woman, who has not been identified, wanted to trace the player who impregnated her.
“I’ll tell you something, but don’t tell anyone … I just took the test and I’ve been pregnant … for more than three weeks,” she said in a conversation intercepted by investigators in December.
Charges denied
Four people were arrested in Milan this week, accused of arranging parties in which the escorts were allegedly paid to have sex with footballers, professional hockey players and at least one Formula One driver.
They have been charged with aiding and abetting prostitution and laundering illicit funds. They have denied the charges.
Those under arrest include Deborah Ronchi, 38, and her boyfriend Emanuele Buttini, 37, who run a PR and event management company called Ma.De Milano.
The company allegedly made €1.2m (£1m) in less than two years from hiring out prostitutes to wealthy clients, with some of the money being sent to bank accounts in Lithuania.
The four suspects are to be questioned by Milan prosecutors on Monday.
They allegedly offered customers “all-inclusive packages” that included dinners in restaurants, evenings spent in nightclubs and sex with prostitutes in hotels.
There were two categories of hospitality in nightclubs: one was nicknamed “plebea” or plebeian, for ordinary clients, while the other was called “privé”, meaning exclusive.
‘Specialised in dealing with footballers’
Young women were sent to flirt with the customers and were entitled to take home 10 per cent of whatever the clients spent each night on drinks and food.
“They would rent a part of the nightclub. In the super privé area, a table cost €1,000 and that included four bottles of vodka. They were specialised in dealing with footballers who wanted a certain level of privacy,” Giovanni Urso, a nightclub owner, told the newspaper Corriere della Sera. He is not accused of any crime and is not under investigation.
One girl said: “The other night a footballer spent €3,000 … €3,000 and something, in fact, and I earned €400 that night.”
If they agreed to have sex with the clients, the women had to pay 50 per cent of the proceeds to the organisers of the alleged racket.
Prosecutors believe about 100 young women were involved, although not all were available for sex. Some were Italian, while others were foreign.
Some of the sex parties allegedly took place in the summer months on the Greek island of Mykonos.
None of the footballers is under investigation. In Italy it is not illegal to pay for sex with a woman as long as she is older than 18.
Several have been named by the Italian press and have threatened to take legal action for damage to their reputation.