the times | Friday May 27 2022 2GM 7
News
The motor racing mogul Bernie
Ecclestone has been arrested in Brazil
for illegally taking a gun on board a
private plane, local police said.
Brazilian police found an undocu-
mented LW Seecamp .32 pistol in the
luggage of the former Formula One
chief executive when he was travelling
to Switzerland on Wednesday.
The tiny gun, which can fit into the
palm of a hand, was found inside a shirt
bag but contained no magazine or am-
munition.
Ecclestone, 91, was arrested and
taken to a facility at Viracopos airport
in Campinas, where he acknowledged
owning the gun but said he was
unaware it was in his luggage and had
no idea how it got there. The British
After five years out of the limelight,
Kevin Spacey was again the subject of
industry speculation last week when a
trailer for his new film reached screens.
However, what was billed as a come-
back project at the Cannes festival was
overshadowed by the news that Spacey
is to face four charges of sexual assault
against three men.
Attention will now turn to whether
the 62-year-old actor will return to the
UK voluntarily. If he declines, officials
will bring extradition proceedings but
he cannot be formally arrested and
charged until a meeting between him
and Metropolitan Police detectives.
Legal representatives for the actor, who
was in New York yesterday but lives in
Baltimore, declined to comment.
Spacey lived in London for 11 years
when he was artistic director of the Old
Vic theatre and the alleged assaults
took place during his stewardship. His
most recent trip to the capital was in
February 2020.
He is accused of assaults in London
and Gloucestershire between 2005 and
- The Crown Prosecution Service
(CPS) alleges that he subjected one
victim to a fifth offence of causing him
to “engage in penetrative sexual
activity without consent”. The accusers
are aged in their thirties and forties.
Spacey, who has won two Oscars for
roles in American Beauty and The Usual
Suspects, and who also starred in the
Netflix series House Of Cards, stepped
down from the Old Vic in 2015. The Met
began its investigation two years later.
Until then Spacey’s time at the
theatre, during which he directed two
productions and starred in nine, was
seen as a commercial and critical
success. London theatregoers were so
enamoured they paid up to £2,000 a
ticket for a gala in Spacey’s honour
featuring tributes from acclaimed
actors, producers and directors and a
video message from Bill Clinton, who
called him a friend.
His fall from grace was rapid. In 2017
Spacey became one of several Holly-
wood stars to face allegations of sexual
wrongdoing in the wake of the MeToo
movement after revelations of abuse by
Harvey Weinstein, the film producer.
Spacey, who came out as gay after the
accusations surfaced, was interviewed
under caution by the Met’s complex
case team in 2019 and detectives passed
a file to the CPS last year. The evidence
was considered by its special crime
division, which deals with the most
sensitive cases in England and Wales.
Rosemary Ainslie, the division’s
head, confirmed the authorisation of
charges and said: “The charges follow a
review of the evidence gathered by the
Metropolitan Police in its investigation.
The Crown Prosecution Service re-
minds all concerned that criminal pro-
ceedings against Mr Spacey are active
and that he has the right to a fair trial.”
Once celebrated as one of the great-
est actors of his generation, Spacey has
stayed out of the limelight in recent
years. He was sacked as the star and
executive producer of House of Cards,the award-winning drama in which he
played the US president, after the
allegations against him emerged.
In 2018 a YouTube video in which he
delivered a monologue adopting the
persona of his character, Frank, went
viral. In it Spacey said: “But you
wouldn’t believe the worst without
evidence, would you? You wouldn’t
rush to judgments without facts, would
you? Did you?”
In September he was spotted filming
in Dunsmuir, a tiny canyon town in
northern California. Peter Five Eight
was described as a “cat and mouse”
thriller in which Spacey plays Peter, a“charismatic man in a black sedan who
shows up in a small mountainside com-
munity”. The film’s marketing tagline is
“The Guilty Always Pay The Price”.
The official trailer was released last
week before the film, which co-stars
Rebecca De Mornay, appeared before
buyers at Cannes.
In January Spacey was photographed
at the grave of Franjo Tudjman, the first
Croatian president, in Zagreb for his
latest project. The feature-documenta-
ry film, directed by Jakov Sedlar, is
based on the life of the president who
ruled from 1990-99 following the coun-
try’s independence from Yugoslavia.Sex charges blight Spacey’s
film comeback after 5 years
Fiona Hamilton Crime Editor
NETFLIX/REX/SHUTTERSTOCKKevin Spacey, pictured here in House Of Cards, has been charged with five alleged offences as his latest film comes outGoodfellas
star Liotta
dies in his
sleep aged 67
Keiran Southern Los AngelesRay Liotta, the Hollywood actor who
was best known for playing a mafia
wiseguy turned informant in Good-
fellas, has died at the age of 67, his publi-
cist has said.
Liotta was shooting a film called
Dangerous Waters in the Dominican
Republic when he died in his sleep,
according to Jennifer Allen. She added
that no foul play was suspected and that
the star’s fiancée, Jacy Nittolo, was with
him on the island.
Liotta, who was born in Newark, New
Jersey, and adopted at six months, had
his first big film role in the 1986 action
comedy Something Wild before playing
the disgraced baseball player “Shoe-
less” Joe Jackson in the 1989 sports
drama Field of Dreams.
Liotta shot to stardom after appear-
ing in Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese’s
1990 crime epic. He played Henry Hill,
a New York mobster who became anFBI informant after being arrested on
drug charges.
His career had enjoyed a resurgence
in recent years and he won acclaim for
playing a no-nonsense divorce lawyer
in 2019’s Marriage Story and again for
his role in last year’s Sopranos spin-off
The Many Saints of Newark.
Liotta’s co-stars paid tribute. Lor-
raine Bracco, who played his charac-
ter’s wife in Goodfellas, said she was
“utterly shattered to hear this terrible
news about my Ray”. She tweeted: “I
can be anywhere in the world and
people will come up and tell me their
favourite movie is Goodfellas. Then
they always ask what was the best part
of making that movie. My response has
always been the same... Ray Liotta.”
Jamie Lee Curtis starred alongside
Liotta in the drama Dominick and Eu-
gene and said: “His work as an actor
showed his complexity as a human
being. A gentle man. So sad to hear.”
Liotta was adopted from an orphan-
age by a township clerk and an auto-
parts owner. He had assumed that he
was mostly Italian but discovered he
was of Scottish ancestry.Ray Liotta was in
the Dominican
Republic shooting
scenes for a filmKnown as the “pocket pistol”,
the LW Seecamp .32 that Eccle-
stone is accused of carrying
weighs just under 330g and is just
over 4in long.
Ecclestone, who spent 40 years
in charge of F1 before beingBernie Ecclestone arrested in Brazil for taking gun on flight
billionaire then paid for bail, thought to
be about £1,000, and was allowed to
continue to Switzerland.
The offence can carry a prison
sentence of up to four years.
He has been married since 2012 to
the Brazilian Fabiana Flosi, 45, the Féd-
ération Internationale de l’Automobile
vice-president for sport and a member
of the World Motor Sport Council. She
is thought to have acted as his inter-
preter during discussions with police.
The couple have a son after Ecclestone
became a father for the fourth time
aged 89.
They move between Switzerland and
Brazil, where he owns a 200-hectare
estate in Amparo, 180km from São
Paulo. The couple attended several
events in May across Brazil, including
the Stock Car race near São Paulo.replaced in 2017, is 74th on
The Sunday Times Rich
List, with a net worth cal-
culated at just under £2.
billion.
The tycoon has ex-
pressed suspicions
about his security
arrangements in the
past after thieves stole
jewellery worth £25 mil-
lion from the Kensing-
ton home of his daugh-
ter, Tamara, despite a
state-of-the-art security
system.
Three Italian nationals
were jailed over raids in
2019 that targeted a num-
ber of celebrity residences
in the capital.Last night Ecclestone said that the
small gun had been packed into his suit-
case by mistake and had only ever been
used to play jokes on people.
“That is what I was doing with it a few
days ago, walking around the house
with it, jumping out on people and lark-
ing around,” he told Mail Online. “I
tucked the gun away in my shirt pocket
and forgot about it. Somehow that shirt
got packed up and was in my luggage
without me realising it.”
He said he had not been charged with
a crime. “The security and police were
very, very understanding. They knew
there was no threat and it was an honest
mix-up,” he said.
Ecclestone, Flosi, their son and
household staff stayed in the airport for
the night before catching a flight the
following morning at 5am.Laurence Sleator
Ecclestone, with wife Fabiana
Flosi, was flying to Switzerland
when the 4in pistol was found