The Kidnapping of John Paul Getty III

In July 1973, sixteen-year-old John Paul Getty III, grandson of oil billionaire J. Paul Getty — reputedly the richest man in the world — was kidnapped in Rome by members of the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta organized crime network and held captive for five months while his grandfather refused to pay the $17 million ransom, publicly announcing that paying would only encourage kidnappers to target his other grandchildren. The standoff became an international sensation, with the grandfather's refusal to negotiate viewed by many as grotesque indifference.

The kidnappers broke the standoff in November 1973 by cutting off the boy's ear and mailing it, along with a lock of his hair, to an Italian newspaper. The package took nearly three weeks to arrive due to a postal strike, during which time John Paul III's mother Gail remained in agonized uncertainty. The ear's arrival finally moved J. Paul Getty to negotiate. He agreed to pay $2.2 million — reportedly the maximum amount deductible on his taxes — with the remainder loaned to his son at 4% interest.

John Paul Getty III was released in December 1973 in Calabria and reunited with his mother. The kidnappers were eventually identified and several were prosecuted, though organized crime networks of that complexity were notoriously difficult to dismantle. The Getty family patriarch died in 1976, his relationship with his kidnapped grandson never fully repaired. John Paul Getty III subsequently struggled with severe drug addiction, suffered a stroke in 1981 that left him almost completely paralyzed, and died in 2011.

The case inspired Ridley Scott's 2017 film "All the Money in the World." It remains a defining example of a kidnapping made more prolonged and traumatic by the extraordinary avarice and indifference of one of the world's wealthiest men toward his own flesh and blood.