The Bond Girl and the Vineyard
How a trusted financial adviser allegedly stripped the original Bond girl of €20 million, and how Italian investigators followed the money to a vineyard outside Florence.
Ursula Andress emerged from the sea in a white bikini in 1962 and became one of the most iconic images in cinema history. More than sixty years later, at the age of 90, she is back in the news under far grimmer circumstances: the victim of an alleged fraud so methodical and prolonged that she has described it as one of the most shattering experiences of her life.
The 90-year-old former Bond girl told Swiss newspaper Blick in January that she had been defrauded out of 18 million Swiss francs, approximately 20 million euros, by her long-time financial adviser over an eight-year period. The newspaper said the adviser had died in the meantime.
This week, the story took a significant turn. Italian authorities moved in.
The Seizure
Italian authorities have impounded 20 million euros worth of property, artworks and financial assets in and around Florence that were allegedly purchased with money stolen from Andress, Italy’s financial police said in a statement on Thursday.
The Anti-Mafia District Directorate of the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Florence, together with the Guardia di Finanza, ordered the seizure after an investigation that shed light on what prosecutors described as a highly sophisticated money laundering network.
The assets recovered are not abstract financial instruments. They are tangible, physical things: 11 real estate properties, 14 plots of land cultivated as vineyards and olive groves, along with artworks and financial assets in Florence and the neighboring Tuscan countryside. Whoever allegedly took Andress’s money did not hide it. They spent it, carefully and lavishly, on a slice of rural Italy.
How the Fraud Allegedly Worked
Prosecutors in the Swiss canton of Vaud built a picture of a systematic misappropriation of financial resources carried out through multiple, opaque transactions. The money was traced to Italy, where prosecutors in Florence took up the case and police began following the paper trail.
The Guardia di Finanza carried out documentary analyses, bank checks and company reconstructions, following step by step the so-called “paper trail” of the illicit money up to its final investments. The Judge for Preliminary Investigations of the Court of Florence granted the prosecutor’s request, ordering the preventive seizure of assets up to the sum of 18 million Swiss francs.
The stolen funds did not travel in a straight line. They were invested in foreign companies, used to buy assets and then channeled through transactions designed to conceal their source before eventually landing in Tuscan soil and stone. It is a pattern investigators recognize well: take money from a single vulnerable source, layer it through corporate structures across multiple jurisdictions, and reinvest it in something real and durable. Vineyards do not ask questions.
In Her Own Words
What makes this case unusual is not just the scale or the elegance of the alleged laundering. It is the personal dimension. Andress did not discover an anomaly in a bank statement. She described a sustained, intimate betrayal.
“I am still in shock,” Andress was quoted as saying. “I was deliberately chosen as a victim. For eight years, I was courted and wooed. They lied to me shamelessly and exploited my goodwill in a perfidious, indeed criminal, way in order to take everything from me. They took advantage of my age.”
Eight years. That detail matters. This was not a quick scheme. It required the construction and maintenance of trust over a long period, the kind of trust that only develops when someone manages your money, handles your paperwork, and knows the shape of your financial life better than you do. Elder financial abuse follows exactly this pattern: not a stranger with a scam, but a familiar face with a spreadsheet.
Who Is Ursula Andress
For readers who know the name but not the full story: Andress is best known as the first Bond girl, Honey Ryder, in 1962’s “Dr. No,” which featured her memorable entrance emerging from the sea in a white bikini. She went on to work with Elvis Presley in “Fun in Acapulco” and with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin in “Four for Texas.” She later transitioned to European cinema and television before retiring in the early 2000s.
She is Swiss by birth, and it was to Swiss authorities that she first reported the alleged fraud. The fact that the trail led to Florence, and that Italian investigators were willing and able to pursue it across borders, is a reminder that financial crime rarely respects the jurisdictions that are supposed to contain it.
What Comes Next
Authorities did not say if any arrests were made. The adviser at the center of the allegations has died, which complicates any prosecution significantly. Whether other individuals are implicated, and whether the seized assets can ultimately be returned to Andress, remains to be seen.
What is already clear is that the investigation represents a genuine cross-border success: Swiss prosecutors identifying the problem, Italian investigators following the money through a web of companies and transactions, and a Florentine judge signing off on one of the larger asset seizures in a fraud case involving a private individual in recent memory.
Somewhere outside Florence, among vineyards and olive groves that were allegedly bought with money taken from a 90-year-old woman over the course of nearly a decade, the Guardia di Finanza has placed its seals. The land is not going anywhere. Neither, it seems, is the case.
