Claudio Caniggia, Fabrizio Ravanelli and the fake lawyer who nearly broke Dundee

For a few strange years either side of the millennium, Dundee FC was home to an Argentine World Cup finalist, an Italian Champions League winner, and a man who called himself “the Devil’s Advocate” and claimed to have represented Saddam Hussein. None of it was quite what it seemed, and by the time the dust settled, the club was £23million in debt and in administration.

A dream to be Scotland’s Real Mallorca

The story starts with Peter and Jimmy Marr, wealthy local entrepreneurs who took over Dundee with genuine ambition — reportedly to turn the club into something like Real Mallorca, a modest provincial side punching well above its weight. In the summer of 2000 they appointed former Juventus and Sampdoria midfielder Ivano Bonetti as player-manager, with his brother Dario as assistant.

The Bonettis had never managed at anything like this level before, but they had something more valuable: an address book full of Italian football contacts. Within weeks, Dundee’s squad had filled up with signings from across Europe and South America.

The Son of the Wind arrives

The biggest name by far was Claudio Caniggia. “El Hijo del Viento” — the Son of the Wind, so nicknamed for his blistering pace — had partnered Diego Maradona up front for Argentina in the 1990 World Cup final, and Dario Bonetti knew him from their playing days in Italy. Caniggia’s career had stalled badly by 2000: a 13-month drugs ban, a release from Atalanta, reportedly close to retirement. The Bonettis' phone call changed his mind, and on what was reported at the time as a club-record wage of around £10,000 a week, he signed in October 2000.

The reaction was extraordinary for a provincial Scottish club — international press attention, replica shirts selling out so fast the club ran out of the letters N and G, even, according to a couple of colourful rumours doing the rounds at the time, a suggestion Diego Maradona himself might turn up. He never did. Caniggia left for Rangers after a single season.

The end of the Bonetti era

The football never quite matched the headlines. Results slid through 2001 and 2002, and in July 2002 the Marr brothers ended the Bonetti experiment, terminating the contracts of both brothers and a club co-ordinator in a single, brief statement. The spending, though, had already outstripped anything the club could sustainably earn back — a problem that hadn’t gone away, only gone quiet for a year.

Enter the Devil’s Advocate

By August 2003, the Marr brothers were struggling to keep the club afloat and offered a place on the Dundee board to Giovanni Di Stefano, an Italian-British businessman who presented himself as a high-flying international lawyer. Di Stefano promised to invest millions and bring in superstar players, reportedly telling the club that if the right signing cost him £1million, that would be “no problem.”

The White Feather

Di Stefano delivered, at least on the name. Fabrizio Ravanelli — “the White Feather,” so nicknamed for his prematurely grey hair — signed for Dundee in September 2003. Seven years earlier he’d scored Juventus’s goal in the 1996 Champions League final, and his CV also included Serie A titles, 22 caps for Italy, and a Premier League debut hat-trick for Middlesbrough against Liverpool.

His Dundee debut came on 18 October 2003, and that same month he scored a second-half hat-trick against Clyde in a League Cup tie played in front of largely empty stands — a surreal image given who was on the pitch, and, as it turned out, the high point of his brief spell in Scotland.

Di Stefano himself later claimed he'd also tried to lure Paul Gascoigne and Dutch international Edgar Davids to Dens Park during this spell. Neither move ever got close to happening, and given the source, both are best treated as unverified rather than fact. But by this stage of Dundee's story, that's almost beside the point — after Caniggia, Ravanelli and a director who called himself the Devil's Advocate, a bid for Gazza or Davids would barely have raised an eyebrow in the City of Discovery.

The house of cards collapses

Di Stefano’s promised millions never materialised. Six weeks after Ravanelli’s hat-trick, on 24 November 2003, Dundee announced they had entered administration with debts of around £23million, having been unable to pay several of the squad's top earners for weeks. Every one of the club's highest-paid players had their contracts terminated, Ravanelli among them — by several accounts, he volunteered to be one of those let go, in the hope it might help save the club.

Who was Giovanni Di Stefano?

The man behind it all turned out to be almost as remarkable a story as the players he'd brought in. Di Stefano had spent years cultivating a reputation as an international legal fixer, claiming links to Saddam Hussein's defence, Serbian warlord Arkan, and the train robber Ronnie Biggs, all while giving himself the title “avvocato.” He had, in fact, no legal qualifications whatsoever, and was not registered to practise law anywhere.

The Scottish Football Association refused to formally confirm his Dundee directorship at the time, aware of his previous fraud convictions, and he resigned from the board in January 2004, two months after the club he'd promised to transform went under. Nearly a decade later, in March 2013, Di Stefano was convicted at Southwark Crown Court of defrauding his own clients out of almost £1million and jailed for 14 years.

Dundee survived administration and are still playing today, but few chapters in Scottish football history are stranger than the few years when a World Cup finalist, a Champions League winner, and a fraudster posing as a lawyer all passed through Dens Park within three years of each other.