Chico Forti

Enrico "Chico" Forti is an Italian former sportsman and entrepreneur who, in 2000, was convicted of the 1998 Miami shooting death of Dale Pike, son of legendary Ibiza hotel owner Anthony "Tony" Pike. Forti still proclaims his innocence, claiming he's been the victim of a miscarriage of justice.

Sports Career
Forti was born and raised in Trento, Italy, the son of Maria and Aldo. Graduating from high school in 1978, he later moved to Bologna, where he attended Italy's Superior Institute of Physic Education (I.S.E.F.). From 1979, thanks to Karl Heinz Stickl, a former world champion, he began practicing windsurf, becoming a pioneer in the discipline. In 1984, while in Hawaii, he was among the first to back flip on a windsurfing board. In the same year, he designed the first windsurf jump ramp. Forti competed in a total of six windsurfing world championships (in 1985, he was the first Italian to ever compete in a windsurfing world championship) and two European championships. He also practiced base jumping, skiing, snowboarding, wakeboarding, and, in 1991, won the Italian sailing championship, later winning second place at the world championship.

TV Production and Entrepreneur Activities
In 1987, an automobile accident left Forti unable to pursue his windsurfing career. After recovering, he began writing articles for sports magazines, also becoming editor-in-chief of an Italian windsurfing magazine. All the while, he began to produce footage depicting extreme sports, creating his own production company, Hang Loose, in 1990, and broadcasting on ESPN. In the same year, he participated to and won Telemike, an Italian quiz show featuring New York-born TV host Mike Bongiorno. With the prize money, he relocated to luxurious William's Island, Miami, Florida, in 1992. After divorcing from his first wife, he remarried with Heather Crane, a former model, and fathered three sons with her: Savannah Sky, Jenna Bleu, and Francesco Luce. He became interested in real estate, buying several apartments in William's Island, and establishing an exclusive network of acquaintances, including former Florida State Senator Paul Steinberg (who became his personal attorney), and Prince Rainier of Monaco. He eventually made a suspicious deal to buy the houseboat where Andrew Cunanan, the assassin of Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace, had committed suicide in July 1997. Forti utilized the houseboat for showing in a documentary named "The Smile of the Medusa", in which it was alleged Miami Beach Police had faked Cunanan's suicide for unspecified reasons. He also arranged Miami Beach Police detective Gary Schiaffo to give him photos of Cunanan, in order to sustain his theory. When this didn't happen, the deal fell through.

Murder of Dale Pike and Arrest
Forti had possibly enlisted the help of Thomas Heinz Knott, his German neighbor and a convicted fraudster, to obtain the houseboat from Matthias Ruhel and Siegfried Axtmann, the owners of the property. Knott also introduced Chico to English-born Anthony "Tony" Pike, legendary owner of the famed Pikes Hotel, in Ibiza, which had hosted several celebrities through the years, including George Michael, Julio Iglesias, and Freddie Mercury. Pike had intentions to sell the hotel, as he was losing money at it, so Forti proposed to buy, as Knott had also done before. Soon, the two were competing to impress Tony with expensive gifts, until the latter accepted to sell to Chico, who had warned him about the possibility of Thomas being conning him. It was eventually revealed Knott had indeed been scamming Tony Pike all along, by illicitly using his credit cards numbers for lifestyle expenses up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. At that point, Chico took advantage of Tony's illness (he was suffering from AIDS at the time) to make him sign forged papers, then travelled to Ibiza with him to finalize the deal. By then, the manager of Pikes, Antonio Fernández, had grown suspicious of Knott and Forti's activities, and called Tony's two sons, Bradley and Dale, to tell them he thought Tony had been conned. Tony's older son, Dale, decided to fly to Miami to clarify the situation. When he arrived, on the evening of February 15, 1998, he was picked up at the airport by Chico, who would later lie to his wife, telling her he never caught up with Dale.

On February 16, the nude body of Dale Pike was spotted by windsurfer David Suchinsky in the vegetation near Sewer Beach, on the island of Virginia Key. He had been shot twice in the head with a .22 caliber gun, and had been dragged in the sand until the point where he was eventually found. At first, police thought the murder to be related to homosexual activities on the beach, but later changed their mind after identifying the victim through several pieces of evidence recovered at the scene. Investigators tried to contact Knott, but to no avail, instead they reached Forti, and made him believe Tony was also found murdered. At that point, he repeated the lie he had told before to his wife: that he had never seen Dale. When police discovered Forti's deceit, thanks to the airport paging service and his cell phone records, the latter presented himself to the police station, eventually admitting he had indeed picked up Dale Pike after he was confronted with evidence (though he would later claim police lied about this, saying he went to the station specifically to tell the truth, and he had intentions to do so before being confronted with the records).

Forti began alleging Knott's involvement in the murder, claiming his life, and his family's lives, would have been in danger, if he revealed details. He claimed Knott had forced him to hand over Pike to his men at the Rusty Pelican (a restaurant near Sewer Beach), otherwise he would have hurt his family (he later recanted this version, saying it was Dale Pike who asked him to go to the restaurant to meet with Knott's men, even though Pike and Knott didn't know each other personally). When police finally got to Knott, he was living in his car with only a few dollars in his pockets. He denied involvement in the murders, and indeed had an alibi for the night in question: he was at a dinner party in his house. Knott stated Forti was trying to frame him up: two nights after the murder, Chico had given to him a thousand dollars to leave town, claiming the police was searching him for the credit cards fraud. A .22 caliber gun was indeed registered to Thomas Knott, but was actually bought with Chico's money, and the seller didn't know for sure whether it was Chico or Thomas who kept it. Ultimately, the investigators decided Knott was not responsible for Dale Pike's death: he had repeatedly stolen money from Tony, but he wouldn't have risked of being indicted on murder charges for what was a relatively minor fraud. Again turning to Forti, police discovered the forged documents Chico had prompted Tony to sign, with which he basically undertook to give the multimillion-dollar Pikes Hotel, and all of his assets, to Forti, in exchange for only a couple of tens of thousand of dollars. Forti had also been involved in several real estate frauds in the Miami area, and an informant claimed he was hired by him to kill an attorney who had sued him, with the murder plan being remarkably similar to the way Dale Pike's was carried out. Amongst all this circumstantial evidence, detectives eventually found the "smoking gun": a small quantity of sand in Forti's SUV's trailer hitch, which, according to experts from the Miami University, came from the beach where Dale Pike was found murdered (Forti would later allege it was a planted evidence).

Trial and Aftermath
At his 2000 trial for murder (the felony murder rule was applied, meaning since the murder was sparked by the commission of a felony, fraud, it was first-degree regardless of the intent), Forti's defense attorneys, Ira Lowey and Paul Steinberg, attempted to argue that Chico was a rich, family man who had no motive for committing this murder, and pointed their finger towards Thomas Knott. On the other hand, prosecutor Reid Rubin described Forti as a cold-blooded con man-turned-killer. Eventually, he was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Offered a reduced sentence in exchange for information on the accomplices both the police and prosecution agree he would have needed to carry out the murder, he preferred to remain silent.

Forti still proclaims his innocence, which is also sustained by a group consisting of several Italian professionals and personalities, Chico's family and friends, his new lawyer Joe Tacopina, and a juror from his trial, Veronica Lee, who claims the trial wasn't fair, and that she was prompted by other members of the jury to vote guilty, even though she thought there was a reasonable doubt. Over the years, policemen, attorneys, and even the judge involved in Forti's case has been blamed for sort of "conspiring" against the latter. The affair has recently resurfaced into the limelight both in the U.S. and in Italy, where public opinion is divided. Nonetheless, a newly-discovered evidence proving Forti's innocence shall be required for the 2000 trial to be invalidated, and it hasn't come up yet.

Thomas Knott spent three years in prison on fraud charges, and was then returned to Germany. Tony Pike buried Dale's ashes under a tree at the entrance of the Pikes Hotel. He died in February 2019.

Modus Operandi
It was never confirmed whether Forti premeditated Dale Pike's murder or not, or if he had any accomplices. Pike was brought by car to Sewer Beach, Virginia Key, where Forti possibly shot him twice in the back of the head with a .22 caliber pistol. The body was afterwards stripped, presumably in an attempt to make it look like a homosexual-related murder, then dragged to a secluded spot in the nearby vegetation.

Known Victims
February 15, 1998, Virginia Key, Miami, Florida: Anthony Dale Pike, 42

On Criminal Minds

 * Season Five:
 * "Parasite" - While Forti has yet to be directly referenced in the show, he appears to have been an inspiration for the episode's unsub: Bill Hodges - Both were con artists-turned-killers who began defrauding people approximately in the same period, operated in the Miami area, had at least two sons, and entertained relationships with two different women at some point in their life (though, in Hodges' case, it was because of an extramarital affair). Also, both killed their respective victims in order to avoid being exposed as fraudsters.