On the northern outskirts of Rome, dreams have the scent of money. It’s the mid-1990s. Televisions are turned on in all the small apartments in the buildings in the neighborhood, ready for the Saturday night ritual: the lottery draw. When the winning numbers are revealed, the tickets with the losing bets are tossed out, along with the scraps left on the dinner plates, and all hopes of starting over. Mario is nineteen and has grown up here in Cinisello and at the racetrack at San Siro where he bets on the horses. Things seem to take a turn for the better the moment he happens on a wacky gang that has figured out a way to rig the draws from the lottery wheel in Milan.

Fausto Gimondi has always been fascinated by technology and innovation. He was a co-founder of the website virgilio.it and others that left their mark on the Internet era in Italy. Fortuna criminale is his first novel.