Free The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot by Thomas Maeder Page B

during the Occupation, the Germans had seen the value of employing Frenchmen not only as informants but as sleuths and agents in their purchasing offices, which bought or requisitioned gold, jewels, and other valuable or useful materials to fund the war and nourish the Reich. A former criminal named Henri Chamberlin, better known under his alias Henri Lafont, was the most powerful and feared of these agents, and he had rapidly earned the position of head of the French Gestapo office at the rue Lauriston, near the Etoile. A clever man, Lafont was nonetheless initially hampered by his small-time criminal experience and lack of education, but his skill as a leader emerged when the Germans persuaded him to hire the superb organizer Pierre Bonny, who had become famous as “the greatest policeman in France” during the Stavisky affair of the thirties and was later drummed out of the force after numerous scandals.
    The Lafont-Bonny gang was among the most effective weapons of the occupying forces: it was efficient, and the French were frightened and humiliated by the collaboration of their countrymen. The Germans were not particular about the methods the French sleuths used, and through dubious requisitions, outright theft, and shakedowns, Lafont’s service systematically accumulated valuables, often retaining more than the 20 percent commission authorized by the Germans. To carry out his agency’s specialized task, Lafont had originally formed a nucleus of twenty-seven hardened criminals the Germans released at his request from the notorious Fresnes prison. Adrien Estébétéguy was among the first.
    Adrien le Basque’s team was assigned to General von Behr’s Service for Recuperation of Jewish Property, which requisitioned furniture, money, apartments, and land, directly turning over 80 percent of the take to the German government and 20 percent to Lafont at the rue Lauriston. This was the theory, at least; Lafont quickly discovered that Estébétéguy not only frequently denounced Frenchmen to suit his personal convenience but also had an unpleasant tendency to substitute gilded copper for confiscated gold ingots. Lafont did not mind swindling the Germans himself, but he found it rather “indelicate” (to use his own word) for one of his own men—and one who owed him his freedom at that—to perpetrate the same frauds on his benefactor. Estébétéguy was dismissed, and though he quickly transferred his allegiance to Wehrmacht Intelligence, he realized that the Gestapo was by far the more powerful service and that the loss of its protection seriously undermined his immunity from French justice.
    On December 14, 1942, Estébétéguy and three cohorts disguised themselves as Gestapo officers and stole a large sum at the Hautefort farm of Emile Joulot in the Dordogne region. They announced they had come for Gilbert Saada, a young Jew from Nice staying with Joulot. Saada, they claimed, was suspected of owning a secret radio transmitter. While one of the gang guarded the two men, the others went off to find the radio; instead they took $2,300 in gold dollars, 530 louis d’or, $7,000 and F500,000 in paper money, and some of Saada’s silk shirts, along with a suitcase to put them in. Taking Saada as their prisoner, they drove off in a black Citroën registered in the name of a licensed Paris prostitute named Gisèle Rossmy. Saada was released in Toulouse for a promise of F200,000, which the captors said they would return to collect in one month’s time.
    In addition to Estébétéguy, two of the other false policemen, Charles Lombard and Auguste Jeunet, also happened to be members in good standing of the rue Lauriston French Gestapo. Curiously, Saada, Joulot, and several others who had been in the farmhouse during the robbery formally identified the fourth robber as Joseph Réocreux, alias Jo le Boxeur, even though he had disappeared two months