Sex, drugs, aggravated theft and extortion with priest: released from prison

Luca De Biase, 30 years old, from Giugliano in Campania, was released from prison and entrusted to a community in Gaeta, where his sentence was due to end in October 2026.

The case involving Soussi Kharbouch, 35, and Luca De Biase, 26 at the time, both residents of Naples, told a story of sex, drugs, blackmail, weaknesses, love and cassocks. Because the victim of the aggravated theft and extortion carried out by the two is a former assistant priest who decided to leave the cassock after that experience.

It was the end of November 2015 when Kharbouch and De Biase, professional escorts, were arrested in Modena after a thorough investigation by the Carabinieri of the Grosseto investigative unit.

The two men offered sexual performance in exchange for money through an Internet site that the 40-year-old priest had come across: he had contacted them and they had met in the city. He had rarely given in to his weakness, probably without thinking about the consequences of his misplaced trust.

The two had filmed and photographed him during those red-light encounters and had kept images and videos, he had not even noticed that all this had happened. Once the chalice that he jealously guarded, not only for its real value but above all for its sentimental value, had disappeared, he had asked for that object back.

In fact, the thirty-seven-year-old had inserted some precious stones that had belonged to his mother into the silver cup. And during that bad evening, when the priest had probably been stunned with drugs, a computer had also disappeared.

The theft of the chalice had shocked the community of believers who were unaware of the background against which the theft had matured. Then however the requests of Kharbouch and Di Biase had become more and more pressing: they wanted money to return the chalice to the assistant priest but above all they asked for ever higher sums of money in order not to publish the risqué images they had taken.

In the end, they were sentenced, with a final sentence of the Supreme Court in 2019, to 6 years in prison. De Biase, after the final sentence, was transported to prison in Poggioreale, where he appointed the lawyer Massimo Viscusi, who first had him transferred to the prison of Sant'Angelo dei Lombardi, and then had him entrusted to a community in Gaeta, seeing his requests accepted by the Surveillance Court of Avellino, three years before the end of the sentence, scheduled for 2026.

The news hit the national headlines, also because of the huge theft, of around 50.000 euros.