Tapping phone calls, paying informers, planting microphones, trespassing, purchasing information obtained illegally; it’s all in a day’s work for today’s paparazzi. Some have even faced jail for their unscrupulous methods. If they are prepared to take such momentous risks, it is because the rewards are huge. Some of their stolen images sell for tens, even hundreds of thousands of euros.
We meet the photographers prepared to go to extreme lengths to shoot celebrities and politicians unaware, including Antonio Zappadu the man responsible for the images of Italian president Berlusconi partying with prostitutes in his villa in Sardinia. An unacceptable breach of Berlusconi’s privacy, or did the world have to right know what was going on?