Posted by The Secret of the Greco Family is a TV series released on Netflix in 2022. It’s a fascinating story about a well-educated family secretly kidnapping people, asking for ransom. And as often happens for crime series, what triggers the curiosity is that it’s based on a true story: the real-life family that inspired the series is the Puccio family, which acted in Argentina in the 80s. In this article, we will present the information available publicly.
You can find here the official trailer of the series.
The true story behind The Secret of the Greco Family: meet the Puccio family
Behind the events depicted in the Netflix series, The Secret of the Greco Family, are the real events of the Puccio family, a respected family living in San Isidro, Argentina, in the 1980s. The Puccio family lived in a wealthy neighborhood and looked like a typical family composed of a father, a mother, and five children. However, they secretly kidnapped rich people, asking for a ransom.
The Puccio family comprised:
- Arquímedes Puccio, the father, an accountant, lawyer, and entrepreneur born in 1929
- Epifanía Calvo, the mother
- Alejandro Rafael, the older son, a famous football player who was part of the Argentinian national rugby union team
- Silvia, daughter, a local art teacher
- Daniel, son
- Guillermo, son
- Adriana, the youngest daughter
Five children in total, differently from what The secret of the Greco Family shows (in the TV series, there are only four children). The family members involved in the criminal activities were the father, Arquímedes, and the two sons, Alejandro and Daniel. The other family members were never charged with any crime. Guillermo left the family and the country before the arrests, and nobody knows where he is now. Three accomplices were arrested together with the members of the Puccio family.
It is believed that the criminals of the Puccio family started kidnapping people while helping the secret service during the Dirty War in the late 70s, when the Argentinian dictatorship abducted thousands of activists opposing the national leaders. Later, the Puccio family reused their experience in kidnapping and established their activity, making money from the ransoms. They kidnapped four people and killed three of them.
The police arrested Arquímedes, Alejandro, Daniel, and the three accomplices in 1985 while collecting the ransom for their last victim.
The Puccio family: where are the members now?
The father, Arquímedes, and the eldest son, Alejandro, received a life sentence. Alejandro was paroled in 2007 and died in 2008 of pneumonia. Arquímedes died of a stroke in 2013 in prison.
Daniel served a few years in prison and was arrested again in 2019, in Brazil, for carrying falsified documents. He was fined for it and released.
Guillermo left Argentina in the early 1980s, before the arrests. Nobody knows if he’s alive and where he is now.
Silvia, the eldest daughter, died of cancer in 2011.
As of today, 2022, Epifanía Calvo and the youngest daughter Adriana are still alive and living in the house they always owned in San Isidro.
The Secret of the Greco Family is not the only series based on the true story of the Puccio family. In 2015 the movie The Clan already covered their story, and in the same year, the Argentinian series Historia de un clan was released, also based on the Puccio family.
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