Mario Scaramella was born in 1970 in Naples, Italy.    An academic by training,  he went to work in 2002 as an advisor to Italy’s Mitrokhin Commission which was investigating allegations of KGB recruitment of Italian politicians. In 2005, he contacted Litvinenko and asked him to provide information about KGB operations in Italy. He paid Litvinenko a small sum for the interview. In late October 2006, he received an email from Evgeuni Limanov, an “researcher” based in an Alpine village in France, whose “foundation” was funded by Berezovsky. Limanov claimed that he had intercepted a Russian death-list, which included the names of Scaramella and Litvinenko because they were associates of Berezovsky, who it named as the “enemy No 1 of Russia." Provoked by the “death-list,” Scaramella made an appointment to see Litvinenko. At the end of October, he flew from Rome to London, and met Litvinenko for lunch on November 1 at the Itsu Sushi. After that meeting Scaramella was contaminated by Polonium 210. It also turned out that the “death list” cited by Limanov was a fabrication. In December, after Scaramella was released from the hospital in London, he returned to Italy where he was arrested on an unrelated charge of calumny.