Gunther III was the stuff of legend.
The German Shepherd reportedly inherited someplace between $400 and $500 million from a rich German countess named Karlotta Liebenstein within the early Nineteen Nineties.
The story went that Liebenstein had misplaced her 26-year-old son to suicide, and having no different human on this planet, left her huge fortune to a canine.
The press billed Gunther III because the richest pet on this planet — and he lived the life.
In 2000, it was extensively reported that Gunther had bought Madonna’s Miami mansion for $7.5 million. Then, later within the decade, the pup supposedly purchased a Tuscan villa and a nightclub and soccer group in Pisa.
There was steak, caviar, yachts, non-public jets, Lamborghinis and servants — together with designated head caretaker Maurizio Mian — with loads of media consideration in addition.
“I wished to be a tick on that canine’s ass for the remainder of my life,” Lee Dahlberg, a spokesperson for Gunther, says in a brand new four-part Netflix docu-series, “Gunther’s Hundreds of thousands,” out Wednesday.
However Gunther’s fabulous life was a load of canine crap, the brand new sequence reveals.
There truly was no bereaved countess. Mian, a college professor with psychological well being issues, was an inheritor to an unlimited Italian pharmaceutical fortune. Trying to keep away from paying taxes, his mom had funneled tons of of thousands and thousands of {dollars} to a dependable good friend in Germany by way of Liechtenstein, a well known tax haven, and the Bahamas.
When the good friend fell in poor health and died in 1992, Mian got here up with the thought with a view to proceed to flee the tax man: Go away all the cash to a canine.
It was “low grade comedy,” monetary crime professional Jack Bloom says within the docu-series.
Gunther III was only a canine that had as soon as belonged to an previous girlfriend of Mian’s.
“He was very affectionate. He was a really particular canine,” Mian says within the sequence. “It was additionally a rigorously curated resolution, a monetary artifice for taxes … after which all the media fell in love with this story of the countess and the canine.”
The doc’s director, Aurelien Leturgie, informed The Put up that whereas Mian willingly participated within the filming, he was an unreliable supply. He was susceptible to what Leturgie dubbed “Maurizio moments” when he would make up issues out of skinny air, like that Gunther had been cloned.
“It appears to us that there was a deeper private journey for him,” the docu-series’ government producer Emilie Dumay informed The Put up. “These are the subjects we reveal on this sequence. Actually attending to know Mauricio and why he was doing all of the issues he was doing, and telling the tales and creating these fantasies.”
Mian first used Gunther III within the mid-’90s to advertise the drug Fosamax, claiming that it was the “miracle remedy” for the German Shephard’s osteoporosis.
As soon as Gunther’s quarter-hour of fame in Italian media had wound down, Mian wouldn’t have it. So he pulled an excellent larger stunt by buying Madonna’s waterfront Miami mansion in 2000 for $7.5 million beneath the Gunther Company title.
Mian then held castings to usher in a supergroup of fashions who would stay within the mansion with Gunther and current the picture of a lavish and glad life-style to obsessed paparazzi.
All on Mian’s tab, the engaging singles performed with, bathed with and cared for the canine because the group partied collectively and posed for picture ops. Behind the scenes one thing a lot stranger and alarming was happening. Mian’s alleged purpose was to create a micro-utopian society of human euphoria that was centered across the canine.
The rotating group of 5 attractive women and men — which included Mian’s ex-wife, Carla Riccitelli — have been allegedly a part of a weird and sometimes sexual experiment performed and totally funded by the “mad scientist” Mian, as Leturgie known as him, and a doctor.
Predicated on the lie that the countess had a want after her son’s suicide to be taught extra about what makes individuals glad, Mian introduced in a group of researchers to review and movie these residing within the mansion together with their interactions with Gunther.
In accordance with the documentary, they have been allegedly inspired to freely have intercourse with each other whereas abiding by 13 commandments — equivalent to that science is king and sexuality must be brazenly expressed — that have been mentioned to return from the countess herself.
“There have been undoubtedly some cultish components to it,” Dumay mentioned.
“[It was a] wild, orgy-esque, Caligula state of affairs,” Dahlberg, who lived in the home at one level, says within the sequence.
In 2001, Mian and Gunther returned to Italy, the place Mian began a brand new group with native expertise that he dubbed the Magnificent 5. It included Fabrizio Corona, a media persona who, years later, can be sentenced to jail for tax evasion and fraud associated to compromising images of a few of Italy’s most high-powered figures.
This go round, members have been allegedly required to put on cumbersome plastic temper readers draped over their chests. The dystopian system — which lit up in numerous colours and volumes for feelings being felt, together with sexual emotions — may solely be altered after an analysis by Mian’s researchers.
At some unknown level, Gunther III died.
He was seamlessly changed by a string of almost equivalent German shepherds — Gunther IV, who lived till 2005, Gunther V, who lived till 2018, and present mannequin Gunther VI.
“We all the time wanted to have one canine that was clearly appointed because the inheritor,” Mian says of the development.
Within the early 2000s, the Gunther Belief purchased a nightclub in Pisa — renamed the Bow Lab — which Mian supposedly used to helped him to recruit new our bodies.
“It allowed him to ask lots of people,” one other ex-partner, Christina Mian, says within the doc. “He may observe them and see in the event that they have been suited to his ‘life-style’.”
Mian inflated the general public spectacle increasingly more, having Gunther supposedly purchase a soccer membership and appoint an grownup movie star as a pacesetter of their group.
“There was a necessity to speak about [sexuality] in a extra scientific means and fewer indignant or moralistic,” Mian says within the doc. “So the canine made some strikes that have been a bit peculiar.”
In that very same timeframe, Mian additionally tried suckering media into believing that the kid he had with Christina Mian was actually fathered by Gunther to create a superhuman race.
Mian, who was by no means charged or convicted of any crime, defended his actions: “Now we have not finished something mistaken, besides to keep away from taxes by way of a technical system,” he says within the doc.
In 2020, it was revealed that Alarico Sgroi, the Tuscan breeder whom Mian had been funding to advance Gunther’s bloodline since 2012, had truly been elevating animals in horrific circumstances. Police rescued over 50 canine from Sgroi that yr. Mian claimed to haven’t recognized of the circumstances.
Gunther VI at present lives in Italy with Carla and is doing properly, in keeping with Leturgie. Mian, who’s properly into his 60s, nonetheless helps take care of the shepherd.
“He’s very properly taken care of,” Leturgie says. “He’s pampered and beloved and is a cheerful canine.”
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