Daniele Lo Presti: tale of sleaze, blackmail and organised crime

It is more than two months since Italian paparazzo Daniele Lo Presti was murdered under Testaccio bridge in Rome. Lo Presti had been due to meet friends for a run on February 27 at 5.30pm, and had been jogging on the footpath that follows the Tiber River.

He was wearing a tracksuit and trainers and had his keys around his neck. As Lo Presti ran under the bridge's grey concrete arches, someone shot him in the head at point-blank range.

The murder caused shockwaves because Lo Presti was one of the biggest names in the murky world of Italian paparazzi. Nicknamed "Johnny", he had snapped Brad Pitt in Malta; he had caught Rihanna on camera in Capri; he had taken a famous series of photographs of Sara Tommasi, one of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's bunga bunga girls, performing a striptease in front of an ATM. He worked for LaPresse agency and was considered a shrewd, savvy operator, one of a pack of surreptitious snappers who would do almost anything to get a scoop.

The immediate assumption was that Lo Presti had been murdered for invading someone's privacy. A Chinese neighbour in Via Portuense described hearing an argument, and the noisy moving of furniture in Lo Presti's flat, as if someone were searching it. There were other theories: that Lo Presti was a heavy gambler with large debts. There were rumours that one of the homeless people who lived under the bridge was a key witness.

But the notion he was killed for intrusive photographs was soon discredited: Rino Barillari, who has been snapping stars since the era of the Dolce Vita, was interviewed by the daily Il Messaggero and expressed disbelief that anyone would kill just for a photograph. Slowly, and with a sad inevitability, it gradually became clear Lo Presti was more likely a victim not of a vengeful celebrity, but of organised crime.

Lo Presti's death was the culmination of a haunting few months for Italian photography. Only a month before, the photographer Danilo Cerreti died in an unexplained motorbike crash in Rome; and earlier this year Fabrizio Corona, the so-called "King of Paparazzi" who had been on the run in Portugal, was extradited to Italy and started seven years' jail for using compromising photos to blackmail former Juventus striker David Trezeguet.