As the scope of Robert Eringer's mission deepened, it became increasingly clear that an operational base in Monaco would be necessary---a place where Eringer and his deputy, Piers, could sleep and work and store information securely.
To this end, they found a two-bedroom, ninth floor apartment in Shangri-La overlooking the port. With the Prince's approval, Eringer signed a lease and christened it M-Base.
The Prince phoned Eringer on January 7th (2004), and scheduled their next briefing five days hence in the private apartment he kept at Park Palace, near Place du Casino in Monte Carlo. M-Base was not yet furnished, but their meetings had become too well known at Hotel Columbus; whenever Eringer arrived to check in, its general manager manifested himself to greet "the Prince's friend."
At four-thirty on the afternoon of the 12th, a Park Palace concierge saw Eringer into the elevator and pressed 13. The Prince was waiting when he stepped out.
"Isn't thirteen unlucky?" said Eringer.
"It's been lucky for me," quipped the Prince.
Prince Albert's digs away from the Palace were rather drab and tacky-a bachelor pad perhaps one notch above college dorm.
As Eringer sat at Albert's bar the Prince told him he'd once seen a ghost--"a presence by my bed"--while staying in a hotel in an old Utah mining town. "I did not sleep after that," he added. (That evening, at dinner in Café de Paris, a close friend of the Prince told Eringer "Albert hates to be alone, doesn't get enough sleep, maybe four-to-five hours a night. He'll drive down to Rascasse [a bar by the port] at one-thirty in the morning for company.")
Eringer had two main items to discuss:
1) Reporting from intelligence sources in Italy on Italian organized crime in Monaco--a sequel to a previous report hitherto unmentioned in this blog but rather explosive.
2) Eringer's report on French Masonic lodges.
The Italian report named names-an impressive document that revealed the deep roots of Italian organized crime inside the principality, along with links to several members of Monaco's Royal Family.
This was much to digest, so Eringer saved his Freemason findings for another time.
Three weeks later, Patric Maugein's name was all over the news in France. He had reportedly received twenty-five million barrels of oil from Iraq-a value of twelve and a half million dollars. The (UK) Sunday Times called it "oil on Chirac's face."
Knowing the media was about to expose this scandal, and that interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy had assembled a team of financial police to investigate him, Maugein fled to Kazakhstan, where he'd already parked ill-gotten gains, to embark on a new scheme to woo President Nazabayev.