A well-known Italian confidence trickster popularly known as “King of the Con” was recently arrested in Rome while dressed as a Franciscan priest.
He had been attempting to fraudulently obtain a loan by presenting a driver’s license stolen from a prelate who is currently serving as a papal ambassador in Africa.
Stefano Ramunni, 61, was taken into custody along with another man who accompanied him to a post office near the Vatican to try to get the loan. (The Italian post office offers small personal loans, ranging from $3,200 to $63,000, to anyone who has a bank account.)
According to media reports, Ramunni presented himself at a branch of the postal service near the Vatican, on Rome’s Via Anastasia II, and asked to be issued a loan. He identified himself as Giuseppe Laterza, saying he was a Vatican official. Laterza, 54, is currently the Apostolic Nuncio to the Central African Republic.
Ramunni’s companion, identified as Francesco Albanese, reportedly is a 40-year-old with a previous arrest for impersonating a member of Italy’s <em>carabinieri</em>, or military police.
Ramunni has an extensive rap sheet, said to run to 29 pages, and his escapades have even been chronicled on popular Italian television programs. Local media report that Ramunni’s scam at the post office was foiled because the clerk whose window he arrived at recognised him from an episode of the highly popular TV show <em>Le Iene</em>.
She instructed Ramunni to come back the next morning to complete the transaction, and when he arrived, police were waiting to take him into custody. Reports indicate that when he was searched, other false IDs were discovered.
After appearing before a judge, Ramunni was placed under house arrest and ordered to wear an electronic monitoring device on his ankle.
This wasn’t Ramunni’s first foray into impersonating a cleric. According to a report in <em>Roma Today</em>, he once attempted to steal the identity of a 40-year-old man in the province of Bari, who’s been confined to bed for decades with a severe case of muscular dystrophy.
He presented himself to the man's family claiming to be a parish priest who had raised $1,000 for the 40-year-old's care. He asked the family to provide him the young man’s Italian identity card in order to process the donation, and then proceeded to use it to open a credit card which he maxed out before being discovered.
So prolific has Ramunni’s career as a confidence trickster been, in fact, that he apparently has attempted to fake his own death on more than one occasion, in hopes that doing so would extinguish multiple arrest warrants issued in his name.
The area in and around the Vatican has long attracted fake priests and bishops, with some simply drawn by the thrill of seeing how far they can get before they’re detected, and others who are running one con or another.
In March 2013, for example, a German man named Ralph Napierski dressed up as a bishop and managed to slip into a general congregation meeting of cardinals preparing to elect the next pope. He even got his picture taken with Italian Cardinal Sergio Sebastiani before being detected and tossed out.
In 2022, it turned out that a senior official at the Bolivian embassy to the Vatican, who was drawing a salary and living in housing provided by the embassy, was actually a fake priest who had been denounced by a Bolivian diocese five years before.
Vatican security officials and the various branches of Italian law enforcement have announced plans to step up their vigilance over potential fraud during next year’s Jubilee 2025 celebrations, which are expected to draw an additional 35 million visitors and pilgrims to Rome.
<em>Photo: Franciscan friars arrive in St. Peter's Square to attend the Inauguration Mass of Pope Francis in the Vatican, Vatican City State, 19 March 2013. (Photo by Franco Origlia/Getty Images.)</em>
