JAILED fraudster and bogus lawyer Giovanni di Stefano tried to ban the Sunday World from reporting the case which led to him being locked up.

In proceedings which can only be reported now, Di Stefano brazenly tried to get this paper banned from covering his trial after we had tracked him to his rundown home in Kent, England, and exposed him as a liar and fan-tasist when we confronted him outside Southwark Crown Court in London. The 57-year-old Italian was jailed for 14 years on Thursday for 25 counts of fraud and money laundering.

Di Stefano pretended to be legally qualified while claiming to represent Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and a host of underworld undesirables, from Patrick Putchy' Holland to John `Goldfinger' Palmer. But the serial spoofer made sure his own lawyers were qualified when he tried to stop the Sunday World from exposing his activities.

Di Stefano's lawyer Leonard Smith QC claimed that this reporter was harassing his client outside the courthouse and at his home in Kent when we tracked Di Stefano to a rundown farm-house where he was living while on hail. Despite insisting he was worth C700 million, we embarrassed him about his new claims that he was building a multi-million pound media empire out of an old chicken shed in Marshside in the Kent countryside. His legal team claimed our reporting had prejudiced his trial and was unfair,

SPOOFER:

Giovanni di Stefano and asked for the trial to be stopped because of our hard-hitting questions. However, in a special hearing halfway through the two-month trial, Justice Alistair McCreath refused to criticise this reporter and rejected all demands by Di Stefano to have the trial halted and this paper banned from the press gallery., Justice McCreath refused to rule on the 'content of our stories and allowed the paper to continue to report the case and Di Stefano's ludicrous attempts at evad-ing the overwhelming evidence that was stacked up against him.

Arrogant For more than three decades, the Italian fraudster and liar relied on an honorary degree from Serbian war crimi-nal Slobodan Milosevic and membership of various international law associa-tions to claim he was entitled to act as a solicitor. Sitting behind his team of lawyers, he Cut an arrogant figure until the returned guilty verdicts on all counts of deception, fraud and money laun-dering involving more than €1.3m.

He had pre-was living in run-down countryside shack convictions for fraud which he tried to hide and had been deported as an undesirable alien from the US - but for years he continued to pass himself off as a respectable lawyer chasing some of the world's most dangerous and desperate defendants. During the trial, jurors stifled laughter as they heard him describe Saddam Hussein as "a lovely man who no-one can say a word against".

And there was shock as the jury was told how Di Stefano - who has duped some mem-bers of the Irish media into treating him seriously as a lawyer - claimed he could have got Adolf Hitler off a war crimes rap as he had nothing to do with the Holocaust. But the loudmouth fraudster, who loves spoofing to gullible reporters, had noth-ing to say when approached by the Sunday World.

Ironically, the conman, who loves to mingle with underworld killers, pleaded with us to leave him alone or he would "call the police". "How does it feel to be repre-sented by a qualified lawyer?" we asked him. "Any thoughts of representing yourself or did you think you weren't up to the job?" we asked, as the so-called Devil's Advocate ran for cover. The judge told Di Stefano:

"I recognise that you did not actively seek out those whom you defraud-ed. They came to you. You did not approach them but there is more than one kind of predator. "Some predators hunt down their vic-tims, others lie in wait for them. "Your victims in this case were all des-perate people and people who, because of their desperation, were vulnerable.'

The judge also noted that "while this case is about money, it is also about some-thing different and great - it is about the real distress you caused to many people". "You had no regard for them nor for their anguish," he said. "Your only con-cern was to line your own pockets." During the trial, Di Stefano told of his links to Robert Mugabe, Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and his "friendship" with the daughter of Slobodan Milosevic.

Boasted The court was shown a 2004 BBC docu-mentary in which he described Saddam as a "nice guy" and boasted of being asked to defend killers such as Jeremy Bamber, Harold Shipman, Kenneth Noye and Linda Calvey. Di Stefano was born in the small town of Petrella Tifernina in central Italy, but moved to the UK as a boy and went to school in Wollaston, Northamptonshire. He will have no shortage of potential clients as he spends the next 14 years at her majesty's pleasure in company of fel-low fraudsters, criminals and thieves.

After the case, Det Insp Matthew Bradford, from the fraud investigation team in the City of London Police Economic Crime Directorate, said: "This is a man who courted publicity, fame and even generated notoriety and respect for his legal services - but it was all built on his lies, deception and greed. "The irony is that among Di Stefano's clients were individuals who were being prosecuted for serious criminal offences or had a criminal background - yet they themselves became victims of Di Stefano's crimes."