UK newsThe businesswoman, the £17m necklace and a criminal secret
Fish trader facing Italian jail sentence named as architect of Tokyo jewel robberyIn the fish markets of Peterhead, Dorothy Fasola was well-known as the Fiat-driving seafood exporter who drove a hard bargain. But the widowed businesswoman had a secret life: as the alleged mastermind of an audacious jewellery theft in Tokyo, and as an armed robber and counterfeiter on the run from Italian justice.
Yesterday, after more than a year fighting to remain in Britain, Fasola was told she was being sent back to Italy to serve the rest of a 12-year sentence for stealing jewellery and faking US banknotes. At a short hearing at Edinburgh sheriff court, she was taken down in handcuffs after Sheriff Douglas Allan upheld two European arrest warrants issued by Italian prosecutors.
She now faces nearly five years in a Milanese jail, but in the background lies a more dramatic case. Fasola, 57, has been named by Serbian prosecutors as architect of a conspiracy to steal £20m of jewels from the Le Supre-Diamant Couture De Maki shop in the Ginza district of Tokyo, including a necklace studded with 116 diamonds, known as the Comtesse de Vendôme, alone worth £17m.
None of the jewels has been recovered and Fasola, who evaded photographers outside court yesterday by covering her face with her scarf, denies involvement in the raid. But in Belgrade last Friday, the trial began of three Serbians accused of carrying out the theft on March 5 2004, and named in the court papers was the Italian-speaking businesswoman from Aberdeen.
The special prosecutor for organised crime in Belgrade accused Fasola of organising the robbery and, with her female co-accused Snezana Panajotivic, acting as a lookout from a cafe. Their male accomplices, Djordjije Rasovic and Aleksandar Radulovic, allegedly attacked the shop's staff with pepper spray and, after smashing through reinforced display cases, stole the Comtesse de Vendôme and 20 other pieces, including a diamond ring valued at £1m.
The two men allegedly fled on motorcycles before meeting Fasola and Panajotivic and - travelling as two separate couples - flying on fake Croatian and Czech passports to Paris, where they and the jewels disappeared. In 2005, Japanese police papers alleged Fasola had recruited the gang, after she was caught on CCTV cameras allegedly scouting out jewellery shops in the Japanese capital days before the theft.
"Serbian members of the gang were in charge of the dirty jobs, but the real person behind the whole operation was Fasola," said a Serbian prosecutor's spokesman in 2005. "She was very good at covering her tracks ... It was only thanks to security cameras that Japanese police have been able to trace her and to figure out the identity of the mysterious lady."
Fasola, who comes from a family of publicans, has never been charged. In a police search of her ivy-clad home in the Aberdeen suburb of Bucksburn by Grampian and Japanese detectives in 2004, officers seized a mobile phone and computer, but failed to find convincing evidence against her.
Fasola's lawyers said yesterday she was expected to appeal against deportation. They insist it is "unjust and oppressive" to extradite her, given she was convicted in her absence - a practice illegal in Britain - for "historic" offences dating back nearly 20 years.
After she moved to Italy in 1975 with her new husband, Luigi, who died in 1985, the couple allegedly peddled stolen jewellery on an Italian cable TV shopping channel. Two women claimed rings modelled on air by Fasola had been stolen from them - on one occasion by someone posing as a nun. In December 1983, their home was raided and police seized jewels and antiques. Neither was charged at the time.
In the late 1980s, Fasola was among 10 people arrested for counterfeiting $100 bills. In June 1989, a warehouse in Milan was raided by police as a printing press noisily churned out fake notes. A police source said at the time: "She is a very clever woman and played a key role but was always careful to stay just on the margins." Again, she escaped prosecution.
But in 1991, after she had taken over a jeweller's in Milan, she was arrested again. That March, she co-ordinated a gang which faked a robbery at the New Oroitalia jewellery workshop with the knowledge of the owner, who made a false insurance claim, saying 660kg of gold had been stolen.
One of the gang, Vincenzo Mannino, turned informer and said a "40-year-old Scottish beautiful woman" named Doris organised the theft and fraud. She was prosecuted and sentenced to five years. She appealed and was released early and then - while facing a further trial for allegedly using false credit cards - fled Italy. In her absence, a Milan court sentenced her to 12 years and two months for the armed robberies and counterfeiting - which, under the Italian system of granting amnesties or cutting sentences when a new president takes office, has been cut to four years, seven months.
Backstory: A career in fakery, fraud - and fish
Born in 1949 in Aberdeenshire, Dorothy May was the eldest daughter of a publican, Alexander Shirreffs, and his wife, Dorothy. She had two younger sisters, Sandie and Deborah, and a brother, Alex.
She left Aberdeen in 1970, aged 21, to work as a travel guide in Spain where she met a visiting Italian, Luigi Fasola. In 1975, the couple married and moved to Milan, where she was accused of involvement in jewellery robberies, an insurance fraud and of faking $100 banknotes. In 1998, she was sentenced to four years for robbery and was convicted twice, in 1995 and 2001, of counterfeiting currency.
Widowed in 1985, she arrived in Scotland with her daughter, Elena, in 2001 to set up a seafood export business in Peterhead, shipping salmon and shellfish to Italy and Serbia. Prosecutors in Milan allege she fled to avoid jail. In April 2006, after allegations about her alleged role in a £20m jewellery theft in Tokyo in 2004, Milan prosecutors issued a European arrest warrant linked to her conviction in absentia for setting up a fake gold bullion robbery. Further warrants were issued in November 2006 for the alleged counterfeiting.
She appeared in Edinburgh sheriff court to face extradition proceedings in June 2006. She is expected to appeal against extradition.
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