By the mid-1980s they had succeeded, scattering Maurizio's cousins to the four corners of the globe and booting chairman Aldo Gucci out of his office without even a chance to clear his desk.All this was not enough for Patrizia, who felt excluded from many of Maurizio's power games and furious at the string of mistresses he insisted on parading around New York, Milan, Rome and St Moritz. Insisting that he prove his love for her, she forced him to buy a fabulous three-masted schooner he could not afford, the Creole, and then made him spend millions of dollars redecorating it.Shortly afterwards she left him anyway, complaining that he was consumed by a "paranoid exultation of power". Over the next decade, she played the role of carping bitch, poisoning her children against their own father and complaining endlessly about the intolerably puny terms of her divorce settlement. "How am I supposed to live with only three trillion lire in the bank, a house in Rome and one in New York?" she once lamented on an Italian chat show.

"I do have two daughters to take care of, you know."When Maurizio was murdered on March 27, 1995, her reaction was less than tender. "On a human level I'm sorry, but from a personal point of view I can't really say the same thing," she told reporters besieging her at her sumptuous home in Milan. Her first act on hearing the news was to beat a path round to Maurizio's house to ask his fiancee, Paola Franchi, for the return of a sweater belonging to her daughter Alessandra. The two women were seen studiously avoiding each other at the funeral, and have had nothing to do with each other since.The key to the alleged conspiracy was Patrizia's friendship with a Neapolitan medium called Pina Auriemma, whom she had met years before on the island of Ischia and subsequently helped set up two unsuccessful Gucci shops in Naples. Auriemma, prosecutors say, put her in touch with a Milan hotel porter called Ivano Savioni who in turn introduced her to two underworld types, Orazio Cicala and Benedetto Ceraulo, who allegedly acted as driver and gunman in the attack.The plot appears to have unravelled in the past few months as the conspirators decided they wanted more money out of Patrizia - the initial fee is believed to have been 600 million lire, or around pounds 250,000 - and she refused to give it to them. Prosecutors say they caught up with the gang as they were plotting another murder, this time of Patrizia herself. It seems Messrs Savioni, Cicala and Ceraulo were not as well-versed in the ways of the Milan underworld as they might have been, and they ended up blabbing much of their story to a police informant.

Patrizia denies the charges and claims that although she repeatedly said she wanted her husband dead, the gang acted entirely of its own accord and came to her afterwards to demand money.Patrizia's reaction to her arrest was stone-cold. "You've come because of my husband's murder, haven't you?" she murmured through the entry-phone to the policemen waiting below. She packed her things in a Gucci suitcase - what else? - and drove off to San Vittore prison in a flamboyant fur coat. "I wouldn't wear that in jail if I were you," the arresting officer advised her. She heeded his advice, and paid him to give her his unassuming trenchcoat instead.Patrizia once remarked how the Guccis have followed the well-worn pattern of many family dynasties: the first generation builds, the second consolidates, and the third destroys. Sure enough, the company is now in outside hands, and the family is a basket case caught in the full glare of publicity.