Exclusive interview: Bernie and Fabiana Ecclestone - The untold story of a mother-in-law's kidnapping

It was on a Budapest summer’s evening that Fabiana Ecclestone took a telephone call that curdled the blood. She was out with husband Bernie, then still Formula One’s all-powerful impresario, at the opening of a Harry Houdini exhibition in the city, just a couple of days prior to the Hungarian Grand Prix. As such, it seemed an unusual time for her sister, Fernanda, five hours behind in Brazil, to be ringing. The panic on the other end of the line was unmistakeable. “Mummy was taken from the house,” came the message. “It was a kidnapping.”

Before a distraught Fabiana could assemble her thoughts on why anyone would have motive to take her mother, quietly going about her daily life in the suburbs of São Paulo, the ransom note arrived. The terms were terrifyingly specific: Fabiana was to deposit £80 million, divided up in plastic bags and bundled into black suitcases, within six days or risk consigning the hostage to the grisliest fate. “If done as proposed, your mum will not suffer anything bad,” wrote the kidnapper, from an email account in Bernie Ecclestone’s name and signed off “1533”, a code sometimes used by Primeiro Comando da Capital, the largest criminal organisation in Brazil.

“Well,” says Bernie, as he hands over the original three-page document at the couple’s Knightsbridge offices. “What would you do?”

Fabiana’s first impulse was to leap on the next plane home, but Brazilian police, whom she contacted immediately, warned that this could make her a target. The attitude of her husband was more dauntless still. Throughout his decades in charge of F1, Ecclestone had prided himself on sealing billion-dollar deals with monarchs and presidents by personal persuasion. His transformation from used-car salesman to business titan was forged largely through his powers of negotiation. He had little compunction, then, about arranging tête-à-têtes with members of the São Paulo underworld.

“Go over and see these people,” he shrugs, in a way that only a man who has lived for years with the risk of his family being kidnapped can. And what makes him think these people were in any way accessible? “They would have been if we had gone over. It probably wouldn’t have helped her mum, though. Whether they would have killed her or not, you never know.”

The threat was real enough: the men responsible had hit his mother-in-law in the face, having first pretended to deliver a parcel. A couple of days later, fearing the police were already on their trail, they sent a frightened Fabiana a chilling text, of which she has kept a screenshot. “It’s in very bad slang,” she says, “but they are telling me, ‘Are you crazy? You want us to rape your mum?’” They also sent an email with a YouTube link showing beheadings. “They said, ‘That’s how we’re going to deliver your mum’s head to your sister’s apartment.’”

On the night of July 31, 2016, nine days after the kidnapping, Fabiana's mother, Aparecida Schunk, was discovered with her captors in a rented flat in Cotia, a low-income western district of São Paulo. Fabiana, instructed by police to remain in Europe, frantically awaited updates, armed policemen from the city’s anti-kidnap division had smashed down a garage door and stormed the building. Aparecida was deeply shaken but otherwise unharmed. Jorge Eurico da Silva Faria, a helicopter pilot who had previously worked for Ecclestone and his wife, was arrested in a nearby flat in the hours afterwards. He was convicted in 2017 and sentenced to 14 years in prison.

“Mum was found in a very small room with only a mattress and one or two blankets,” Fabiana says. “They had wanted to tie her hands. She keeps having flashbacks, and the last time we were in Brazil, she experienced a panic attack. She’s 70 this year, so it’s a big trauma. Doctors warn that her blackouts will continue. She can seem fine, but then she remembers the shock of the moment they took her.”

What has not helped the family are the lurid allegations by Faria about the Ecclestones’ own involvement. Earlier this month, the former pilot used an interview from prison to make outlandish claims that not only had he been framed by police, but that Ecclestone and his wife had been behind the plot.

While Bernie dismisses the accusations as a scurrilous fiction, concocted by Faria in the hope of securing early release, Fabiana has spent recent days in much distress. At 88, he still has a sense of humour as dry as the Atacama – his first public reaction to the harrowing drama was to quip, “My friends knew I wouldn’t pay a penny for a mother-in-law” – but his concern here for his 41-year-old wife is palpable.

“She was reasonably peaceful about it until this b----- story came out,” Ecclestone says. “It’s bad enough that she has suffered so much, and then somebody comes along to say, ‘It was you who plotted it.’”

The two married in a low-key ceremony in Gstaad in 2012, after first being introduced at the Brazilian Grand Prix, where Fabiana worked as the vice-president of marketing. Today, they split their time between London, Switzerland and a coffee farm that they have bought near Amparo, 80 miles north of São Paulo. This is Fabiana’s first detailed interview of any kind and, as befitting a trained lawyer, she has come prepared, with a 1,000-page dossier of legal documents with which to refute Faria’s “lies”.

She presents her mother’s abduction as a crime that had taken years to plan. While she knew Faria well, given that he had flown VIPs to and from São Paulo’s Interlagos racetrack throughout the grand prix weekend, she soon received troubling reports about him. “In 2014, a helicopter had been hovering very low over our farm in Brazil,” she says. “It was later found a few kilometres away, having been used to transport drugs. At the time, the pilot said that he knew nothing about it. But a person came to say, ‘Be careful with that pilot. He has been investigated over the theft of a helicopter.’”

Faria, in protesting his innocence, has even alleged that Fabiana received the email from “1533” an hour and a half before her mother was kidnapped. She quickly shoots down this idea, showing that the kidnapping took place at 11.15am Sao Paulo time, and that the email did not flash up in her inbox until 8.18pm Hungarian time – 3.18pm on the east coast of Brazil.

Similarly, she ridicules Faria’s idea that her mother’s lack of physical injuries indicates that she had a hand in the plot. “Well-treated?” she says, with contempt. “Mum was smashed in the face. She had to take showers and go to the toilet with the door open. Guys would sit at the corner of her bed, minding her constantly.”

Throughout the six days that Aparecida was missing, Fabiana was inconsolable. “It was really desperate,” she reflects. “You don’t sleep, you don’t eat. In everything you do, you think, ‘Where is she?’” Ultimately, the kidnappers’ amateurishness was to be their undoing. After taking Aparecida away in her Ford Fiesta, two members of the gang left fingerprints in the car, while failing to spot that they were being filmed by a traffic camera when they switched vehicles near a busy intersection.

According to Fabiana, the motive of Faria and his accomplices all along had been to exploit her connection to Ecclestone and to lay hands on some of his estimated £2.6 billion fortune. “It was clear they wanted money from Bernie,” she says. “Seven people were arrested. The other six guys had never heard of my family. So, why else did they kidnap my mum? How else did they make the connection?”

After a high profile career in which he has forged connections with everybody from Vladimir Putin to King Juan Carlos I of Spain, Ecclestone has, for the first time, recently attempted adjusting to a quieter life. In the wake of an F1 takeover in 2017 by Liberty Media, he has been sidelined from the sport he turned into a global phenomenon and is insistent that any photograph of him now should have nothing to do with cars.

Instead, he has spent the time dealing with the fallout of a kidnapping story fit for Hollywood. “It’s a film, really,” he says. Fabiana, who has been deeply affected by it, is in no mood to be so flippant. “Somehow, you have to carry on with normal life,” she says. “Now, inside, you get frightened about things that normally you would let go past.”

“Darling, I’ll tell you one thing,” her husband assures her, in that low, icy Ecclestone tone. “No one’s going to do anything to you here.”