Inside the life of Princess Beatrice’s troubled playboy ex-boyfriend: Paolo Liuzzo

Paolo Liuzzo was well-off, well-educated, smoothly handsome and extremely well connected — in other words, a man who had been dealt a hand of cards that can make life both worthwhile and rewarding.

Appearances, however, can be deceptive. The good fortune that the fates had bestowed, which included a few months of global celebrity as Princess Beatrice’s first serious boyfriend, could not keep pace with a fast and unravelling life.

He had a criminal record that included being charged with manslaughter and possession of cocaine and would go on to embarrass the Royal Family with lurid claims of drug-taking and hard partying.

Yesterday it was revealed that the 41-year-old bachelor’s body had been found by police in a £130-a night room in a modest hotel in downtown Miami. The time of death was given as 3.34pm.

The cause has not been disclosed because of local public records laws, but detectives said it was ‘investigated as an overdose death’.

It looked like the tragic end to another miserable tale of too-much-too-soon excess, of riches and privilege pitifully sacrificed on the altar of self-destruction.

Yet while his premature death, which happened in February but has only just been revealed, may well be as open and shut as the evidence suggests, it offers an intriguing glimpse of the magnetic, if dangerously flawed, qualities that for a time mesmerised Prince Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson.

It also shines a light on the now happily married Beatrice’s faltering early experiences of love that included not just the louche Liuzzo but also the uber executive Dave Clark with whom she split after ten years just as they were thought to be on the verge of marrying.

Certainly, the pushy and confident young man who arrived in Princess Beatrice’s teenage life back in 2005 bears little resemblance to the bearded and bloated figure of Liuzzo’s later years where a weakness for prescription medicines had led him to cocaine and harder drugs.

Reports yesterday spoke of a man who loved to gamble and to party.

“Paolo was not doing great on a personal level,” one friend was quoted saying.

“It was a very fast lifestyle, and we all feared it would catch up with him eventually. He was always borrowing money to pay off old loans. It became a vicious circle.”

Last night it emerged that he was being sued by a friend who had leant him $60,000 (£48,000) and was determined to recover the money.

It was all a far cry from the bizarre day back in 2005 when, because of his own apparent wealth, he was asked by Andrew to lend one of the prince’s model girlfriends $10,000 to rescue her from an unhappy romantic entanglement.

That, at least, was Liuzzo’s version of an extraordinary encounter with his girlfriend’s father who had awoken him as he slept in a guest room at Royal Lodge, the Duke of York’s vast Windsor mansion.

Liuzzo later recalled: “I woke about seven to a tap on my shoulder. The duke was standing over me. This was the first time he’d ever come into my room.

He said, “Paolo, take a shower. Get dressed. Then we have to speak because I need a favour to be done in New York right away.”

What unfolded, according to the italian American playboy, still sounds surreal all these years later. The girl in distress was Angie Everhart, a flame-haired American model whom Andrew referred to “a dear friend of mine who may or may not be my girlfriend”.

Liuzzo said he was asked to organise a removal team to collect the woman’s belongings while her then fiance was at work and put them in storage.

And she also needed the $10,000 in cash. The young man, who was 24 when he met the then 17-year-old Beatrice at a house party in the South of France, said that, after he had made all the arrangements, a giggling Fergie had carried out a mock knighthood ceremony, touching the bemused Liuzzo on each shoulder and proclaiming: “I name you Sir Fixit.”

News that Beatrice was dating her first proper boyfriend emerged in 2006, some six months after they had started seeing one another.

But the story that surfaced was not the romance of her first love but one of redemption. For the young man seven years her senior already had a very troubled past.

As a 20-year-old college freshman he had been charged with manslaughter after becoming involved in a fight with a fellow student who suffered a brain haemorrhage and had subsequently died.

The charge was later downgraded to the lesser offence of assault and battery when it was disclosed that, while initiating the fight, he had not delivered the fatal blow.

His punishment was to serve 100 hours of community service.

In an interview at the time he and Beatrice were revealed to be dating, he gushed about how he had not tried to hide his past from the princess who had given him a ‘second chance’ and how her parents had both been ‘very kind’.

Even so, it must have been a shock when the full extent of his murky past and criminal conviction was exposed by a routine police check.

But Andrew and Fergie let it be known that they would not start picking and choosing their daughters’ friends.

He said that the moment one of the parties arrived he had announced: We need products. We need party favours. We need ganja boy and let’s go skiing – slang for cocaine.

At the time, a family source told me that Paolo had been “very open about his background, honest about what happened to him, and knows that nothing he will ever do will make up for it”.

The relationship had become public after Andrew and Fergie had invited their daughter’s boyfriend to join a family skiing holiday in Verbier, Switzerland.

Fergie, with her own chequered love life was especially generous, observing: “We all have our own journeys and have to learn our way, but Beatrice is a sensible girl, soon to be 18, with many friends including Paolo.”

At first the young socialite was seen by the duke and duchess as something of a catch for their daughter.

But, while his parents were rich, they were not part of the old American east coast aristocracy that the royals would naturally gravitate towards.

His father’s money had come from a plastics recycling business.

Despite the family riches, when Paolo broke his shoulder during the skiing trip, he was unable to pay his hospital bill. The duchess magnanimously stepped in to meet the costs.

Matters changed when U.S. authorities said that Liuzzo was in trouble with immigration officials for breaching the terms of his probation.

He had permission to travel to Europe to work — and it soon appeared that during his stay in England he had done no work at all — but not to go on holiday and he was warned he could face jail.

Inevitably, perhaps, under such pressure the Romeo and Juliet affair petered out.

Liuzzo went home to face the music and Beatrice went back to school, to study for her A-Levels. It left some awkward questions about Beatrice’s judgment, however, and how the princess, then fifth in line to the throne, had become embroiled for her first big crush with someone so unsuitable.

Fergie said it was time to protect her daughter and herself. By the time of the princess’s 18th birthday, a lavish fancy dress affair where guests, notoriously, included the later disgraced Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein — Liuzzo seemed happily to be in the past.

He was not invited to the fancy dress party. But fast forward a year and, in a seedy kiss and tell, Liuzzo revealed how he had been summoned to meet the princess and her family two years earlier by an art dealer friend with whom he had been staying in Zurich.

According to Liuzzo, there had been a call from Fergie declaring ‘We need boys’. He told how a group of young men had driven through the night to reach Fergie’s holiday home — actually the French chateau of her old pre-marriage love Paddy McNally.

“The next thing I know, I’m dancing with Bea,” he said. “We partied into the wee hours.”

He further claimed that Fergie was determined to set him up with her daughter. ‘It was all scripted. I think Sarah chose me for Bea because I was a personality.”

Much darker allegations were to follow. He asserted that he had joined Fergie, Beatrice and her sister Eugenie, then 15, on a holiday in Jamaica where cannabis was smoked openly in front of them, hallucinogenic mushrooms taken and ‘hash cakes’ eaten.

He said that at all times during this ten-day holiday someone in the extended group had a cannabis ‘spliff ’ on the go.

He said that the moment one of the parties arrived he had announced: “We need products. We need party favours. We need ganja boy and let’s go skiing” – slang for cocaine.

“Sarah and Bea and everyone heard him.” Although he made clear that neither of the princesses took any drugs, he said that Fergie turned a blind eye to what was going on.

While Liuzzo lined his pockets with his grubby revelations, Andrew and Fergie were devastated by the betrayal.

“Bea so much wants to be like her mother yet what does she see? Her mother partying and just encouraging her daughters to do the same thing.”

Fergie, he added, was a “brilliant mother” but she “drinks like a fish.”

While Liuzzo lined his pockets with his grubby revelations, Andrew and Fergie were devastated by the betrayal.

As was poor Beatrice. For he also revealed that he had been unfaithful to her. The royal couple denied many of his claims, which included that astonishing tale of paying ‘rescue money’ out of his pocket to Andrew’s sometime girlfriend Angie Everhart.

Friends of the couple described the claims as “totally distorted, without foundation’ and ‘full of despicable innuendo.”

For Beatrice the stories were especially heartbreaking but months before they were made so graphically public, she had already moved on. in the summer of 2006, she had met a handsome young man called dave Clark, who was working for Virgin chief Sir Richard Branson’s space project.

They would remain together for ten years. Many thought there would be an engagement. instead, in 2016 they split after, it was rumoured, Beatrice issued her boyfriend with a marriage ultimatum. Within two months he was dating U.S. advertising executive Lynn Anderson, and they were engaged the following year.

Beatrice kept her hurt private but there was little doubt that she was devastated. While she was naturally delighted for her younger sister Princess Eugenie when she announced her engagement in January 2018, it was no doubt a bittersweet moment.

It made Beatrice the last member of the Royal Family of marriageable age who was still single, prompting an outpouring of sympathy from fans, who asked when she would ‘find her Prince Charming’.

A year later she was celebrating when her engagement to property developer Eduardo Mapelli Mozzi was announced.

The couple, who have a daughter Sienna, two, will mark their fourth wedding anniversary in July. As for Paolo Liuzzo, his brush with royalty hardly changed his life. instead, it lurched from one disaster to another. He was arrested in Australia in 2009 after crashing his hire car and was also found to be in possession of cocaine.

Public records show he had several brushes with police in Florida, where he lived and worked as an ‘arts consultant’, for driving offences.

Some nine days after his death, his body was returned to his family and he was buried in Brooklyn, New York.

What he was doing in a hotel room just a stone’s throw from his apartment is unknown. An online tribute book contains a solitary entry.

It reads: “My family is saddened by the news of Paolo’s passing. Our memories of Paolo during his soccer years on Long island were always joyful and fun. Our deepest sympathy to his mom and all his teammates who remember him as fondly as we do.”

Hardly much of an epitaph for a man who dated a princess.