The king of paparazzi

Last month, the photographer known as the “king of paparazzi”, Rino Barillari, was punched by Gérard Depardieu after snapping the actor having lunch with a woman in Rome. It isn’t the first time Barillari has been in the wars: now 79, he thinks he’s been put in hospital 164 times in the line of duty, broken 11 ribs and had 76 cameras smashed. He began as a pap in his teens, he told Tom Kington in The Sunday Times, after being dispatched to Rome to find work. “My mother said I was too smart and if I stayed in Calabria I would end up in the Mafia.” Some celebrities cooperate – “You would pose like a boxer when you saw Richard Burton, raising your fists, and he would do the same and you would have your picture.” But he has also resorted to subterfuge to snag a picture, dressing as a priest, or dating nurses to get into hospitals. What about the Princess of Wales, who died being chased by paparazzi? “It was her bodyguards’ fault,” he insists. “I cried when she died, and tied a black ribbon around the lens of my camera.”

Colin Smith was one of more than 30,000 people in the UK infected with HIV and hepatitis C by contaminated blood products in the 1970s and 1980s, says Lara Wildenberg in The Sunday Times. Diagnosed with haemophilia soon after his birth, he was entrusted to the care of the leading specialist Arthur Bloom. “We were elated,” his mother Janet recalls. “You couldn’t get a better doctor.” Colin’s father remembers Bloom calling his patients “my boys”, and coming across as “the nicest guy in the world”. At 12 months, Colin started being treated with Factor VIII, a blood product his parents were told might save his life. In fact, it was infected with two diseases that would kill him in 1990, when he was seven. Colin was in so much pain at the end that he had to be picked up using sheepskins. At the public inquiry into the blood scandal, Bloom was singled out for failing to heed repeated warnings. “We’ve always said, since day one, [Colin] was used as a guinea pig, a lab rat,” says his father. When the inquiry ended last month, other campaigners greeted the couple with hugs. “I’ve got bruises where people have just cuddled me,” Janet says. Its chair, Brian Langstaff, “came up to me and gave me the biggest real proper cuddle and he didn’t let me go. It was real feeling. He pulled away a little bit, looked me in the face and he said, ‘You’re the ones that have kept me going.’”