A thug has been locked up for a blackmail plot after he demanded £30,000 and warned the victim to take the cash to a gay nightclub “if you know what is good for you”.
Billy Severgnini, aged 20, (pictured above, left) was sentenced to five years’ at a young offender institution at Northampton Crown Court on Monday after he admitted he had tried to blackmail a businessman for cash.
The court heard the victim, who is from Northampton, had been subjected to a terrifying armed robbery, in October 2011, when he was threatened with a gun at his home.
The robbery happened after decorators had carried out work at his home.
However, just four months’ later, in February last year, he then started receiving text messages threatening him and suggesting he would be targeted if he did not pay £30,000 the following day.
One sinister message said: “We are watching you and your mum, we have been for some time.”
The messages demanded he take the cash to Pink Punters, a gay nightclub in Milton Keynes, adding: “Bring the cash if you know what is good for you.”
However, the victim instead went to police, who established the phones had been topped up in certain shops and managed to identify Severgnini as the blackmailer through CCTV.
The impact of the robbery, together with the blackmail plot, saw the victim sell his house, because he “no longer felt safe at home”, shut his business down and move out of the area, the court heard.
Severgnini was also sentenced alongside another man, Richard Michie, aged 23, (pictured above, right) for a savage attack on a father and son in Thorplands, Northampton.
The court heard the men drunkenly knocked on a front door of a house in Crestwood Gardens, at about 12.30am, on August 6, last year, before Severgnini punched and kicked the owner’s son, in an “unprovoked attack”.
The victim’s father, wearing slippers and a dressing gown, then chased Michie and wrestled with him to the ground.
However, in the ensuing struggle he was then attacked and left with a broken leg.
Sentencing Severgnini for blackmail, ABH and using violence to enter a property, Judge Michael Fowler said: “You are both from backgrounds that involve disruptive education and damaged upbringings that have left the legacy.”
Addressing Severgnini, of Northcroft, Milton Keynes, he said: “It was a blackmail that involved the use of the threat of force, indeed the threat to kill, vague though it was, by suggesting that a firearm would be used and that the victim and his mother would not meet again.”
He was sentenced to a total of five years.
Michie, of Netherfield, Milton Keynes, meanwhile was jailed for a total of three years for ABH, GBH, using violence to enter a property and possession of cannabis.