Con artist pleads guilty in phishing plot that duped authors

NEW YORK — A yearslong saga that ensnared the publishing world culminated in a New York courtroom Friday when a con artist pleaded guilty to a plot that defrauded scores of authors by duping them into handing over hundreds of unpublished manuscripts. Filippo Bernardini, an Italian citizen who had been working in publishing in London, pleaded guilty to a single count of wire fraud in connection with a phishing scheme that baffled the book world for years. “Filippo Bernardini used his insider knowledge of the publishing industry to create a scheme that stole precious works from authors and menaced the publishing industry,” Williams said in a statement. Bernardini created fake email accounts by registering more than 160 internet domains that, prosecutors said, “were confusingly similar to the real entities that they were impersonating, including only minor typographical errors that would be difficult for the average recipient to identify during a cursory review.” He impersonated hundreds of people over the course of the scheme, obtaining more than a thousand manuscripts through his deceit.