The Crimes of Paris

by Dorothy Hoobler; Thomas Hoobler

  Bonnot had moved the car up alongside them, and his two companions jumped inside. Some horrified passersby made tentative attempts to stop them, but a blast of gunshots drove them back. Bonnot, displaying the daring skill that was to win him the nickname the Demon Chauffeur, immediately made a hairpin turn that took him down the rue des Cloys, where it seemed for a moment that he would collide head-on with an approaching motor bus. He swerved, narrowly dodging a taxi in the process. Garnier and Callemin continued to fire out the windows, spreading panic through the streets.

  The wide, straight boulevards created by Baron Haussmann seemed designed specifically for a driver like Bonnot, who pressed the accelerator to the floor and never let up. Fulfilling the fantasies of countless future drivers, he avoided obstacles by jumping the curb and roaring down the sidewalk, as frantic pedestrians leaped out of his way. Anyone who might have wanted to pursue the bandits was soon left behind.

  Another sharp turn and the Delaunay-Belleville was barreling down the rue Vauvenargues, headed north toward the city gate at Clichy. A few minutes later, customs officials halting traffic there were scattered by gunshots fired from the speeding vehicle as it roared through the gate. The getaway car (a term nobody had ever used before) was soon lost from sight, heading north in the rain.

  iii

  The Paris newspapers had a field day with the latest sensational crime, and — as La Presse called them — les bandits en auto (“the motorcar bandits”). Though there were twenty thousand police in Paris, a city with a population of three million, journalists suggested that the force was undermanned in light of this new development. Most fascinating, of course, was the thieves’ method of escape; the police used motor vehicles only for transporting high officials and thus were considered powerless against this new form of crime. Moviemakers saw the dramatic potential immediately. One studio reenacted the robbery as soon as the news became public, and by the next day the film debuted at theaters throughout Paris. Though popular, it also attracted protesters, who felt that it glorified crime.

  The hunt for the thieves soon spread across national borders. The following day, the Delaunay-Belleville limousine was found abandoned in a street in the town of Dieppe, a port city on the north coast. It was assumed that the criminals had taken a boat for England, and Scotland Yard was asked to trace any passengers arriving at Southampton.

  In fact, by that time Bonnot and his friends were back in Paris, having deliberately reversed course at Dieppe and taken a train to the capital, where they were sure no one would expect to find them. The three were not ready to celebrate, however, for they were a bit disgruntled with their gains. The bank messenger’s case had contained mostly bonds and checks that would be difficult to cash, and the bills and gold coins came to a value of only about fifty-five hundred francs. Bonnot knew a man in Amsterdam who might be willing to accept the bonds at a discount, so, undaunted, they stole another car and were soon on the road to Holland. That trip proved to be unproductive, for Bonnot’s friend told him that the serial numbers of the stolen securities were being circulated to every bank in Europe. They were too hot to try to move.

  Meanwhile, having found the stolen Delaunay-Belleville and located its owner, the police tried to find where it had been kept between the time it first disappeared and the day of the robbery. As it happened, some of Georges Dettweiler’s neighbors in Bobigny had complained about the noise coming from his garage at late hours, and one of them thought he had seen the now-famous car inside. Like so many Frenchmen, the neighbor was suspicious of the Sûreté and merely told a town official about it. The official then sought to make himself a quick franc or two by selling the story to a tabloid newspaper, Le Petit Parisien. After its publication, the chief of the Sûreté himself, Octave Hamard, led a raid on the garage, arresting Dettweiler, his wife, and a girlfriend of Carouy’s. Carouy himself escaped, but Bertillon found his face, along with several aliases, in his voluminous card file, along with the notation that the missing man was an anarchist.

  The newspaper editors couldn’t have asked for a greater gift than being able to add the feared word “ANARCHISTS!” to their headlines. Even better, when Carouy’s photograph was shown to the bank messenger in his hospital bed, Caby mistakenly declared that it was the man who had shot him. Carouy was immediately named by the Sûreté as the head of the “motor bandit” gang and the mastermind behind the rue Ordener outrage.

  Carouy himself, seeing his mug shot on the front page of every newspaper in Paris, felt a little aggrieved, for he had earlier turned down Bonnot’s offer to join in the caper, feeling that it would be too dangerous. Now he needed money to leave the country, and he had no way of getting it from the three actual thieves.

  Carouy may have declined to participate in the bank heist, but his reflex was that of a habitual criminal: if he needed money, he would steal it. Along with a friend named Marius Medge, who had carried out robberies with him before, Carouy plotted what appeared to be an easy job. In the southern suburb of Thiais, Medge knew an elderly man who lived off rents from properties and reputedly kept large amounts of cash at home. His only companion was a seventy-two-year-old housekeeper. On the night of January 2, 1912, Medge and Carouy broke into the house, but things did not go as easily as they had expected. The old man unwisely resisted, and the crooks beat him to death with a hammer. To eliminate any witnesses, the burglars strangled his housekeeper as well.

  Bertillon’s lab later found fingerprints at the scene that identified Carouy as one of the perpetrators of the crime. That meant — to both editors and the Sûreté — that the anarchist gang were no longer merely thieves but brutal murderers engaged in a crime spree.

  Nevertheless, Carouy continued to elude capture. According to Ashton-Wolfe, Carouy had gone to extreme lengths to change his appearance: his “eyes were peculiarly small and round, and every police officer had been informed of this. Carouy sent a friend to buy a lancet, some cocaine, and a hypodermic syringe. When his skin was sufficiently numbed by an injection of the drug, the outer and inner corners of the eyes were slit and held apart by sticking-plaster until the slit skin was healed. The effect was extraordinary. His round eyes now appeared to be long and narrow.” 10

  Meanwhile, the newspapers called for action and got it: ten days after the Thiais murders, Hamard was given another post. Replacing him as head of the Sûreté was Xavier Guichard, widely known as a tough and uncompromising police officer. (Many also thought him crude, partly because he had never advanced beyond elementary school.) Guichard ordered a series of raids on locations where anarchists were known to congregate, including newspaper offices and social clubs. Little useful information was turned up, but Guichard could point to “successes” such as a raid on a dance in Belleville: of the fifty people in the hall, twenty-nine were arrested on charges of illegally carrying firearms. None, however, could be tied to the robberies and murders.

  Guichard got a break when he forced the still-hospitalized messenger Caby to look at photographs of some of the many known anarchists in Bertillon’s files. When the investigator turned up a picture of Garnier, Caby nearly fainted. This, he cried, was him — the man who had shot him. Hadn’t he already identified Carouy as the man? Yes, said Caby, but he was mistaken.

  Luckily for Guichard, Garnier’s girlfriend, Marie Vuillemin, had been arrested in a raid on the offices of the new anarchist magazine Lorulot had founded, L’Idée Libre. Her apartment was searched, turning up signs that Garnier had lived there, but Garnier himself was nowhere to be found. Along with Bonnot and Callemin, he had gone to Belgium, where they stole another car, driving it to Amsterdam and selling it for eight thousand francs. So far, car theft was bringing in more money than bank robberies. But they were not discouraged.

  Returning to Paris, where Bonnot checked into a hotel under the name Lecoq (in homage to the fictional detective and crook made famous by Émile Gaboriau), the three men saw Garnier’s photograph on wanted posters everywhere. Instead of fleeing the city, however, he m
oved in with a friend named René Valet in a sixth-floor walk-up on, of all places, the rue Ordener, near the scene of the original crime, as if thumbing his nose at the police. Valet was also a friend of Serge’s, who recalled that they used to meet in little bars along the boulevard Saint-Michel and discuss literature and poetry. “I can see him there now,” Serge recalled thirty years later, “standing up like a young Siegfried… his fine, square-set ginger head, his powerful chin, his green eyes, his strong hands, his athlete’s bearing.” 11 Valet owned a locksmith’s shop but had an anarchist’s spirit. Inexorably he would be drawn into the gang’s orbit by Garnier, and he would die for it.

  iv

  Bonnot meanwhile retained fond memories of his mistress Judith Thollon, who was still in jail, and even drove to Lyons with his share of the car-theft loot to see if he could hire a lawyer to bail her out. The lawyer told him that the charges against her were serious (possession of stolen property) and also let him know that the Sûreté — having apparently been tipped off by a friend of Platano, Bonnot’s “mercy killing” victim — now suspected Bonnot of being one of the auto bandits. If Judith was released from jail, it would only be because the police hoped she would lead them to him.

  Instead of lying low, however, Bonnot continued to travel around stealing cars with Garnier. Once, when a chauffeur refused to give up his automobile, Garnier clubbed the man with a log, killing him. They also shot a watchman, who survived and was later able to identify them from photographs. The newspapers didn’t shy from letting their readers know that the police continued to prove as helpless against the anarchists as their fictional counterpart, Inspector Juve, was against Fantômas in book after book.

  If that weren’t bad enough, Victor Serge decided to show where his sympathies lay and demonstrate his credentials as an advocate of illegalism. His childhood friend Raymond-la-Science had paid him a visit just before Christmas, so Serge knew exactly who had carried off the robbery in the rue Ordener. At the beginning of the New Year, he published, under his pen name, Le Rétif, an article in l’anarchie that began:

  To shoot, in full daylight, a miserable bank clerk proved that some men have at least understood the virtues of audacity.

  I am not afraid to own up to it: I am with the bandits. I find their role a fine one; I see the Men in them.… I like those who accept the risk of a great struggle. It is manly. 12

  Publishing sentiments like that only made Serge and the newspaper a prime target of police attention. At the end of January, the Sûreté staged a raid on l’anarchie’s office, arrested all eleven people inside, and seized two Browning automatics that had been stolen in an armory robbery. Rirette claimed that she had bought them from a comrade for personal protection, but the police regarded these as important evidence, since the auto bandits were the prime suspects in the theft of the cache of weapons.

  Serge was questioned by Louis Jouin, deputy chief of the Sûreté and the nominal head of the force tracking the auto bandits. Jouin struck Serge as “a thin gentleman with a long, gloomy face, polite and almost likeable.” 13 He told Serge that he identified with his cause, for he too was a man of the people. He even quoted Sébastien Faure, an anarchist writer. Though Jouin claimed to admire the ideals of many anarchists, he pointed out that the brutal actions of the auto bandits were discrediting their comrades. What about the old man and his housekeeper in Thiais, slaughtered in their beds? Was that something that made anarchists proud? Jouin promised that if Serge gave him information about the bandits, no one need ever know. In his memoirs, Serge claimed to have been “embarrassed” by the offer. He was sent back to a cell in La Santé Prison to think things over. He would remain there for fifteen months before a trial began.

  The motor bandits, meanwhile, were planning further crimes. Raymond-la-Science obtained some silver nitrate, which the thieves used to lighten their hair. Bonnot and Garnier shaved off their mustaches, and Bonnot went on a shopping spree to buy them all new suits, complete with bowler hats, that would make them seem respectable. A fellow anarchist, Élie Monier, who used the alias Simentoff, proposed that they join him in a payroll robbery in the city of Nîmes, in the south of France. On February 26, the three bandits stole another Delaunay-Belleville (evidently Bonnot favored them). The owner had planned to drive it in the upcoming Tour de France, and in the passenger compartment, the trio found an added bonus: a fox-fur-lined cloak, an overcoat with an astrakhan collar, stopwatches, and maps. 14 With these additions to their own new wardrobes, the criminals now truly resembled the wealthy, fashionable people they despised — not unlike Fantômas himself.

  Unfortunately, on their way south, the car required repairs that took several hours. It was not so easy in those days to find a place to stay on the road, and Bonnot feared that someone would notice the stolen car if they parked and slept in it, so he turned around and headed back to Paris. Once more disregarding a customs barrier, this time at the Porte d’Italie, he crossed the Île de la Cité, virtually within sight of police headquarters, turned left onto the rue de Rivoli, passing the Louvre and the Tuileries, and then headed north into the eighth arrondissement. Bonnot picked up speed as the street ran downhill, and he nearly hit a bus that was backing out of a bay at the Gare Saint-Lazare.

  Bonnot avoided the collision, but the car jumped the curb, ran onto the sidewalk, and stalled. Garnier had gotten out to turn the crank that would restart the engine when a traffic policeman walked up to chide the driver for his reckless speed. By the accounts of witnesses, Bonnot never looked up at the man, staring ahead stone-faced, waiting for the engine to roar into life. As soon as it did, he put the car in gear, and Garnier had to rush to get back inside. The policeman, naturally incensed at this blatant disregard for his authority, stepped onto the running board and grabbed the steering wheel. Garnier didn’t hesitate: he leaned across Bonnot and fired three shots into the policeman, who fell, dying, onto the pavement as Bonnot hit the gas and roared off.

  Now the car was hotter than ever, but the bandits, reluctant to abandon it, somehow hid it long enough to use for another attempted heist two days later. At midnight, they entered the town of Pontoise, northwest of Paris, somehow having learned the location of the home of a wealthy lawyer. They broke in through a side door and found a safe. Their efforts to try to move it — they apparently hoped to make off with it in the car — woke the lawyer and his wife. The lawyer looked out of an upstairs window and, as luck would have it, saw a baker going by on his way to work. He asked the baker to check to see if the door was locked. As he approached, Callemin and Garnier ran out, fired their guns into the air, and headed for the car, where Bonnot sat waiting for them. The lawyer had his own pistol and returned fire as they drove out of sight. Disgusted, the three men who had terrified all of Paris abandoned their magnificent automobile after setting fire to it.

  What had been for the bandits a comedy of errors was portrayed in the newspapers as the triumph of lawlessness over order. The anarchist gang, which was now thought to number in the dozens, had shot down a police officer in cold blood in the heart of Paris and driven off unmolested. Politicians were not immune to criticism, and the minister of the interior instructed Guichard’s boss, Louis Lépine, the prefect of police, that he wanted results tout de suite. Anyone who had ever been suspected of anarchist leanings found themselves in jeopardy. The important thing was that arrests had to be made.

  Perhaps predictably, the crackdown only heightened Parisians’ fears that a large, organized gang was roaming the streets, liable to attack anyone at any time. One right-wing newspaper declared that there were two hundred thousand criminals in the city, a horde of lawless individuals against whom the police were powerless. Such comments were echoed at the funeral of the policeman who had been shot by Garnier, where the prefect of police warned that “the criminals of Paris are numbered in their thousands.” 15

  Even though Lorulot had tried to distance himself from the crime wave by adding the equivocal slogan “Neither for illegalism, nor for hon
esty” to the masthead of his new magazine, the police kept his offices under close surveillance. They also arrested a couple of the employees on weapons charges, including a man named Eugène Dieudonné, destined to play an unfortunate role in the case.

  Still trying to turn the bonds they had stolen into cash, the auto bandits got in touch with two counterfeiters Bonnot had known earlier. They in turn found a shady stockbroker who offered them 5 percent of the face value of the bonds. Bonnot reluctantly agreed and sent the counterfeiters to Amsterdam, where the gang had earlier hidden the bonds. Returning to Paris, they temporarily deposited the haul in a luggage locker at the Gare du Nord. An informer tipped off the police, and when the two men returned to the locker, they were arrested. One of them, Alphonse Rodriguez, agreed to tell all that he knew about the gang in exchange for clemency. Shrewdly determining who the police wanted him to implicate, he identified Eugène Dieudonné, one of those rounded up at Lorulot’s magazine office, as one of the men who had taken part in the rue Ordener burglary.

  Elated, the police decided to check his statement by bringing in the bank messenger, Caby, now released from the hospital. They showed him Dieudonné, handcuffed and sitting alone in an interview room. Caby promptly declared that this was the man who had shot him — a statement that should have embarrassed the police, since this was now the third suspect that Caby had positively identified as his assailant. But of course it also meant that at last the police had one of the robbers in custody, so the next day’s papers duly trumpeted the Sûreté’s announcement that one of the gang members was under lock and key.

  If the three actual robbers had really been nothing but unscrupulous killers, they would have been delighted by this latest development. They were not. Garnier and Bonnot had made a collection of newspaper clippings about their exploits and were annoyed that anyone else should receive credit for what they had done. Garnier sent the newspaper Le Matin an open letter addressed to the head of the Sûreté, Guichard. In a missive both solemn and ominously prescient, he declared: