The Crimes of Paris

by Dorothy Hoobler; Thomas Hoobler

  François-Eugène Vidocq was truly a larger-than-life figure. In real life a criminal imprisoned many times, he changed course to become the first head of the Sûreté, France’s equivalent of the FBI, and later set himself up as a private detective. He was the model for countless fictional criminals and detectives as well. (From the authors’ collection)

  Pierre Ponson du Terrail was among the first to write novels that featured a criminal as the hero. Gino Starace, the cover artist for this later reprint of one of Ponson’s books, captured the ghoulish spirit that Parisians loved. (From the authors’ collection)

  The ultimate French criminal “hero” was Fantômas, the creation of Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, who turned out a 400-page novel every month for nearly three years. Able to change his appearance almost at will, Fantômas committed countless acts of cruelty and violence, evading his hapless nemesis Inspector Juve in every one of the books, delighting readers. (From the authors’ collection)

  Pierre-François Lacenaire, depicted here killing an old woman in her bed while his accomplice finishes off her son in the next room, became as famous for his literary work as for his crimes. “To kill without remorse is the highest of pleasures,” he wrote. “It is impossible to destroy my hatred of mankind. This hatred is the product of a lifetime, the outcome of my every thought.” (Paris Préfecture de Police museum)

  Marie Lafarge was another criminal whose self-portrayal earned her notoriety; to many, she was a saint who had been unjustly accused. Despite Marie’s protestations of innocence, however, scientist Mathieu Orfila demonstrated conclusively that she had poisoned her husband. It was the first time that the science of toxicology had been used to convict a person of murder. (From the authors’ collection)

  Joseph Vacher was nicknamed “the French Ripper,” but in fact his victims far outnumbered those of the English serial killer. Alexandre Lacas-sagne, one of the founders of French scientific criminology, convinced a jury that Vacher’s claims of insanity were unfounded. (From the authors’ collection)

  The trunk in which the body of Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé was transported from Paris to Lyons. Lacassagne performed an autopsy on the remains that conclusively identified them and led to the apprehension of Gouffé’s murderers. At the trial, miniatures of the trunk were sold by vendors outside the courthouse. (Paris Préfecture de Police museum)

  The Parisian apaches acquired a romantic aura because of their distinctive dances and styles of dress. Nevertheless, newspapers portrayed them as ruthless thugs, as in this drawing of an apache strangling a victim while the apache’s girlfriend watches without emotion. (From the authors’ collection)

  Edmond Locard took fingerprints of monkeys throughout Paris to find this particular animal, whose owner was using him as a thief. The case echoed Edgar Allan Poe’s classic detective story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Locard acknowledged that real-life detectives often followed the lead of their fictional counterparts. (From the authors’ collection)

  Alphonse Bertillon, the complicated and conflicted individual who developed the first effective system of identifying criminals. (From the authors’ collection)

  Three of the charts Bertillon prepared to categorize parts of the face: types of noses, ears, and eyes. Bertillon believed that giving names to different forms of body parts would enable police to create a portrait parlé, or “spoken portrait,” of suspects. (From the authors’ collection)

  Bertillon was the first to make detailed photographs of crime scenes as references for police investigating crimes. (From the authors’ collection)

  As criminals realized that their photographs could be used to associate them with other crimes they may have committed, they began to resist sitting for the camera. Since exposure times were longer then, it was often necessary to strap the prisoner in place to obtain a sharp image. (From the authors’ collection)

  Guillaume Apollinaire was himself a noted poet, but his contributions to art went well beyond that. His enthusiasm, generosity with praise, and openness to all forms of new art made him what one historian called a “ringmaster of the arts.” (From the authors’ collection)

  Pablo Picasso and his mistress Fernande Olivier with their two dogs. Picasso always had a variety of animals around him, including a pet mouse he kept in a drawer. (© RMN/ Droits réservés)

  A survey taken in 2008 indicated that Picasso’s Les demoiselles d’Avignon was the most frequently illustrated work in art history texts. Yet when he first showed it to friends and colleagues, their reaction led him to roll up the painting and keep it hidden for several years. (Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by Scala/Art Resource, NY; © 2008 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York)

  Two views of Octave Garnier, one of the three principal members of the Bonnot Gang. The change in appearance that he accomplished indicates how important Bertillon’s methods of identification were to the police. (Paris Préfecture de Police museum)

  Raymond Callemin, known to his friends as “Raymond-la-Science” because he inevitably found scientific backing for his beliefs. At the commune of anarchists, he introduced a “scientific” diet of brown rice, raw vegetables, porridge, and pasta with cheese. Salt, pepper, and vinegar were banned as being “unscientific,” although herbs were acceptable. (Paris Préfecture de Police museum)

  Jules Bonnot, the ostensible leader of the Bonnot Gang, the man the press dubbed “the Demon Chauffeur” for his reckless feats at the wheel of the world’s first “getaway car.” Some allege that Bonnot had been a driver for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sher-lock Holmes. (Paris Préfecture de Police museum)

  The Delaunay-Belleville that Bon-not and his cohorts used to escape from the scene of their first crime. This French marque was widely regarded as the finest automobile in the world. Purchasers had to supply their own “coach,” or upper body, so the cars were identifiable only by the distinctive circular radiator. (Paris Préfecture de Police museum)

  André Soudy, posed by a police photographer reconstructing the scene of the bank robbery at Chantilly. Though Soudy never killed anyone, he was later guillotined for his involvement with the Bonnot Gang. Several others, either peripherally involved or outright innocent, received harsh prison terms. (Paris Préfecture de Police museum)

  There were several Paris news-papers that illustrated the events of the day with drawings of crime scenes. This one depicts one of the Bonnot Gang’s most spectacular crimes: the shooting of Louis Jouin, the head of the police force as-signed to apprehend the gang. Cornered in his hiding place, Bonnot shot and killed Jouin before jumping from an up-stairs window and escaping. (From the authors’ collection)

  A newspaper artist’s rendering of the last stand of Octave Garnier and René Valet, the only members of the Bonnot Gang still at large. The two men had held at bay a force of over 700 police and soldiers for an entire day before dynamite blasts destroyed their refuge. (From the authors’ collection)

  Postcards like this one depicted the seige at Choisy-le-Roi, where Bonnot single-handedly resisted a force of at least a hundred men. Newsreel cameras recorded the scene, and when it was shown in theaters, audiences cheered whenever Bonnot appeared on a balcony to fire his rifle. (Paris Préfecture de Police museum)

  Bonnot in the morgue. He had recognized that he had become famous and wrote a testament justifying his crimes and exonerating those who were unjustly accused. (Paris Préfecture de Police museum)

  Vincenzo Perugia, the man who confessed to stealing the Mona Lisa. Had he acted alone? That was a mystery whose answer took another two decades to solve. (Paris Préfecture de Police museum)

  When the Mona Lisa returned to the Louvre, Le Petit Journal, Paris’s most popular pictorial newspaper, devoted its front page to a history of the painting from Leonardo’s presentation of it to King François I to its theft from the museum. (From the authors’ collection)

  Alphonse Bertillon’s crime scene photographs, overhead and from the side, of the body of A
dolphe Steinheil. Nearly two decades older than his beautiful wife, Meg, he had looked the other way while she engaged in a series of sexual liaisons, including one that reputedly killed Félix Faure, the president of France. (Paris Préfecture de Police museum)

  Meg Steinheil in the dock at her trial for murder. Her performance under questioning was so affecting that journalists dubbed her the “Sarah Bernhardt of the Assizes,” after the most famous actress of the day. (From the authors’ collection)

  At left, Gaston Calmette, who was shot to death in his office on March 16, 1914, by Henriette Caillaux, center. At right is her husband, Joseph, at that time the finance minister of France, who had been the object of constant attacks by the newspaper Calmette edited. Henriette explained her action by saying, “There is no justice in France. There is only the revolver.” (From the authors’ collection)

  AFTERWORD:

  THE MASTERMIND

  In 1932, the American reporter Karl Decker revealed what he said was the true story of the Mona Lisa theft. Decker was one of the most famous journalists of his time, not only reporting the news but making it as well. His best-known exploit occurred in 1897, when he went to Cuba, then under Spanish rule, and rescued the daughter of a Cuban rebel from jail. Decker smuggled her aboard a ship and brought her back to New York City, where his newspaper, the sensational Hearst-owned New York Herald, lionized both its reporter and the beautiful eighteen-year-old Cuban. The exploit was a prelude to the mysterious explosion that sank the American naval ship Maine in Havana Harbor the following year, setting off the Spanish-American War.

  Thirty-five years later, in the Saturday Evening Post, at that time one of the United States’ leading weekly magazines, Decker claimed an even bigger scoop: that he knew who masterminded the theft of the Mona Lisa. In January 1914, while on assignment in Casablanca, Morocco, Decker had met a longtime acquaintance, a South American called Eduardo who had many aliases but was known to his associates as the Marqués de Valfierno — the “Marquis of the Vale of Hell.” He looked the part, wrote Decker: “His admiring associates declared that ‘his front was worth a million dollars.’ White mustache and imperial [goatee], and a leonine mass of waving white hair, gave Eduardo a distinction that would have taken him past any royal-palace gate in Europe without the troubling necessity of giving his name.” 1

  Decker had crossed paths with Valfierno in a number of exotic places and had developed a friendship “based upon the fact that he was one of the few I have known who never bored me.” Decker had just returned from a three-month trip to the interior of Morocco and was unaware that a month before, the police had arrested Vincenzo Perugia and recovered the Mona Lisa. The marquis spoke of him as “that simp who helped us get the Mona Lisa,” and of course Decker’s curiosity was aroused. 2

  Valfierno made the journalist promise not to publish the story until he gave permission or died. It was the latter event that allowed Decker to reveal what he had been told. Valfierno began by saying that the operation had been several years in the planning. He reminded Decker that in Buenos Aires, the marquis had made a small fortune selling fake artworks that his partner, a Frenchman named Yves Chaudron, turned out. Scanning the newspapers for obituaries of wealthy men, the distinguished-looking Valfierno would approach the widow to ask if she would like to donate a painting to her church as a memorial. At the time, Chaudron specialized in painting fake Murillos — skillfully imitating the seventeenth-century Spanish painter who was famous for his religious scenes — and these were passed off to the widows as genuine.

  Valfierno felt that he was performing a civic service. “A forged painting so cleverly executed as to puzzle experts is as valuable an addition to the art wealth of the world as the original,” he said. “The aesthetic impression created is the same, and it is only the picture dealer, always a creature of commerce… who is really hurt when an imitation is discovered.… If the beauty be there in the picture, why cavil at the method by which it was obtained?” 3

  The duo graduated from bilking widows to selling copies of Murillos that they claimed were stolen. Buyers were fooled into thinking that a genuine Murillo, hanging in a church or gallery, was in fact a fake placed there after the original had been filched.

  Eventually, “filthy with money,” Valfierno and Chaudron felt that the game was getting old, and they sailed for Paris, where, Valfierno said, “Thousands of Corots, Millets, even Titians and Murillos, were being sold in the city every year, all of them fakes, but from my [point of view] this trade seemed cheap and unworthy.” 4 He added people to his organization, including an American who was well connected socially. This time, the marquis was more selective in choosing those he wished to fleece, concentrating on wealthy Americans — by nature, more gullible than Europeans — who could pay highly for “masterpieces” that had supposedly been stolen from the Louvre.

  Unlike Géry Pieret, who actually stole the Iberian heads he sold to Picasso, the marquis and his gang “never took anything from the Louvre. We didn’t have to. We sold our cleverly executed copies, and… sent [the buyers] forged documents [that] told of the mysterious disappearance from the Louvre of some gem of painting or world-envied objet d’art.… The documents always stated that in order to avoid scandal a copy had been temporarily substituted by the museum authorities.” 5

  Eventually, the marquis peddled the ultimate prize: the Mona Lisa itself, in June 1910. Not the genuine article, but a Chaudron-made copy, along with forged official papers that convinced the buyer (an American millionaire) that in order to cover the theft, Louvre officials had hung a copy in the Salon Carré. The buyer, unfortunately, was a little too free in bragging about his new acquisition, and that was why the newspaper Le Cri de Paris had printed its article — a year before the actual theft — stating that the Mona Lisa had been stolen.

  Still, it had been a disturbing experience, one that the marquis was determined to avoid a second time: “The next trip, we decided, there must be no chance for recriminations. We would steal — -actually steal — the Louvre Mona Lisa and assure the buyer beyond any possibility of misunderstanding that the picture delivered to him was the true, the authentic original.” 6

  Of course, he never intended to sell the real painting. “The original would be as awkward as a hot stove,” he told Decker. The plan would be to create a copy and ship it overseas before stealing the original. “The customs would pass it without a thought, copies being commonplace and the original still being in the Louvre.” 7 After the Mona Lisa had been stolen, the imitation could be taken out of storage overseas and sold to a buyer who was convinced he was getting the missing masterpiece.

  “We began our selling campaign,” recalled Valfierno, “and the first deal went through so easily that the thought, ‘Why stop with one?’ naturally arose. There was no limit in theory to the fish we might hook. Actually, we stopped with six American millionaires. Six were as many as we could both land and keep hot.” 8 Chaudron then carefully produced the six copies, which were in due course sent to America and kept waiting for the proper time to be delivered. Valfierno said that an antique bed made of Italian walnut, “seasoned by time to the identical quality of that on which La Joconde was painted,” was broken up to provide the six panels that Chaudron painted on. 9

  Now came what Valfierno thought was the easy part: “Stealing La Joconde was as simple as boiling an egg in a kitchenette,” he told Decker. “Our success depended upon one thing — the fact that a workman in a white blouse in the Louvre is as free from suspicion as an unlaid egg.… [It] was a uniform that gave [the thief] all the rights and privileges of the museum.” 10 Recruiting someone — Perugia — who had actually worked in the Louvre was helpful because he knew the secret rooms and staircases that employees used.

  Perugia did not act alone, Valfierno said. He had two accomplices, needed to lift the painting and its heavy protective container and frame from the wall and carry it to a place where it could be removed. Valfierno did not name them, but anyone familiar with t
he case might have remembered the Lancelotti brothers, whom Perugia had briefly implicated in the heist when he was questioned in Florence.

  The one hitch in the plan was that Perugia had failed to test beforehand the duplicate key Valfierno had made for the door at the bottom of the small staircase that Perugia used to make his escape. At the moment he needed it, the key failed to turn the lock. While he was removing the doorknob with a screwdriver, the trio heard footsteps from above, and Perugia’s two accomplices hid themselves. The plumber named Sauvet appeared and, seeing only one man in a white smock, had no reason to be suspicious. He opened the door and went on his way, soon followed by Perugia and the other two thieves. At the vestibule, luck was on their side again, for the guard stationed there had abandoned his post temporarily to get a bucket of water to clean the floor.

  An automobile waited for the thieves and took them to Valfierno’s headquarters, where the gang celebrated “the most magnificent single theft in the history of the world.” 11 Now the six copies that had been sent to the United States could be delivered to the purchasers. Because each of the six collectors thought he was receiving stolen merchandise, he could not publicize his acquisition — or even complain should he suspect it wasn’t the genuine article. It was, indeed, the perfect crime.