Scots gold heist widow to be sent to Italian jail after losing extradition plea

A SCOTS widow who ran a Peterhead fish business is to be sent to Italy to serve a jail term for stealing 30kg of gold.

Dorothy Fasola, 58, lost her appeal yesterday against being extradited to the country where she lived for 25 years.

She will now swap her luxury home on the outskirts of Aberdeen for a concrete cell. The Italian authorities will decide how long she must serve.

Fasola's bizarre secret life as a criminal has been making headlines in Scotland for years.

As well as her part in the gold raid, she has been convicted of a major forgery plot. And she has also been named as a suspect in a £20million jewel heist in Japan, although she has always denied any involvement.

Fasola was sentenced to four years and two months in Milan in 1998 for masterminding a 1991 armed raid on a goldsmith's workroom that netted a haul of 30kg of gold.

She had lived in Italy since 1974 after marrying career criminal Luigi Fasola.

But after appealing against her conviction and getting bail, she fled back to her homeland in 1999 and took charge of a company exporting fish to Italy.

Fasola, born Dorothy May in Aberdeenshire, played the part of an upstanding local businesswoman.

But in 2001, another Italian court convicted her in her absence of running a plot to forge Û100 bills and sentenced her to four years.

And in 2004, Japanese detectives turned up at her Scots home to look for evidence about the Tokyo jewel raid, where crooks stole an array of treasures including a necklace studded with 116 diamonds.

Fasola, whose husband died in 1985, was named in Japanese police papers about the robbery but has never been charged.

A sheriff ordered in 2007 that Fasola should be sent back to Italy.

She appealed and the case was delayed when one the judges hearing it, Lord Johnston, died suddenly.

But at the appeal court in Edinburgh yesterday, a new panel of judges upheld the sheriff's original decision.

Lord Nimmo Smith, sitting with Lord Kingarth and Lady Smith, rejected Fasola's argument that the Italians waited too long before asking the Scots courts to extradite her.

The judges also cast doubt on the crook's claim that she only came to Scotland because her daughter was studying here.

Lord Nimmo Smith said: "It is difficult to conclude that she was not also motivated by a desire to avoid serving her sentence."

He added: "To be required to serve a long sentence of imprisonment is no doubt a hardship but that is inherent in such a punishment."

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7pa3IpbCrnZOkv6V6wqhlrqNfo7K4v46smqispJ7AqXnNnq6sZ6OYvLW%2FjKCmpZxdnbKqv9NmrqKcn6x6tbuMm5xmq5WjwW59j2lrcW5j