Filippo Bernardini, a former publishing employee who pleaded guilty in a fraud case in which the government accused him of stealing more than 1,000 manuscripts, avoided prison on Thursday but was ordered to be deported.
He was also ordered to pay $88,000 in restitution to the biggest name in publishing, Penguin Random House, to reimburse the company for legal and expert fees it paid as a result of the scheme.
For more than five years, Mr. Bernardini impersonated publishing professionals in the pursuit of unpublished manuscripts. He would pretend to be a specific editor, for example, and would email that person’s authors to ask for their latest drafts. The government said he impersonated hundreds of people.
His motivation was always mysterious. He was gathering information, but it was not clear how he might make money with it. Stolen manuscripts cannot be easily sold or published under another name.
In a letter this month to Judge Colleen McMahon of Federal District Court in Manhattan, Mr. Bernardini said he had stolen the manuscripts because he wanted to read them.
“I never wanted to and I never leaked these manuscripts,” he wrote. “I wanted to keep them closely to my chest and be one of the fewest to cherish them before anyone else, before they ended up in bookshops. There were times where I read the manuscripts and I felt a special and unique connection with the author, almost like I was the editor of that book.”
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan had asked that Mr. Bernardini receive a prison term of at least one year for his extensive and long-running scheme.
“His impersonation and theft caused real reputational, emotional and financial harm to his victims,” the prosecutors wrote in a letter to Judge McMahon. “He continued in this criminal conduct for years, even as his victims confronted him, accusing him of theft and crimes, and even as his scheme attained public notice.”
Mr. Bernardini, 30, an Italian citizen who lived for many years in the United Kingdom, was sentenced to time served — he has been living under pretrial supervision in Manhattan since his arrest last year, with a curfew and an ankle bracelet monitoring his location. The court ordered him deported to the United Kingdom or to Italy.
Benjamin Weiser contributed reporting.
