Princess Beatrice’s former boyfriend turned up dead in a Miami hotel earlier this year from a suspected drug overdose, Florida cops confirmed to The Daily Beast on Wednesday.
Cops said they were called to a downtown hotel room on Feb. 7 at the citizenM Miami Worldcenter, where the 41-year-old Paolo Liuzzo was discovered and pronounced dead at 3:34 p.m.
An official cause of death is yet to be released, but Miami cops said his death is being “investigated as an overdose death.” Cops did not say whether foul play was suspected or not.
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Insiders told The Sun that Liuzzo, who began dating Beatrice in 2005 when she was 17 and he was 24, had long struggled with drugs and had plunged into a “vicious cycle” of gambling-related debt.
“Paolo was not doing great on a personal level,” one friend told the British tabloid. “It was a very fast lifestyle and we all feared it would catch up with him eventually.”
Liuzzo famously went on a skiing trip with Beatrice, Prince Andrew, Sarah Ferguson, and others from the royal family in Switzerland. The couple split by 2006, however, after their relationship caused a media frenzy in Britain—especially after it was revealed that he’d been charged with manslaughter for the death of a fellow student at the College of the Holy Cross in 2002. That charge, stemming from a fatal fist fight, was ultimately lowered to an assault charge and Liuzzo never went to prison.
After splitting with the princess—Andrew’s eldest daughter, and ninth in the line of succession to the British throne—Liuzzo was arrested again in 2009 after he crashed a rented Audi into traffic lights in Australia.
Beatrice, now 35, has not publicly addressed her former beau’s death. She’s since married the multi-millionaire property developer Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, with whom she has a daughter, Sienna.
The Daily Mail reported Liuzzo’s death certificate said he’d been working as a consultant in the art industry and never married. His body was transported to his native New York, where a funeral was reportedly held on Feb. 16.
