When I broached this with the Prince, Albert said, “I may have signed the order.” He didn’t know if it could be revoked, didn’t know how to find out, and didn’t seem concerned either way.
On February 6th (2006), Albert dropped by M-Base at 1:15 for a working lunch of take-out sushi, joined halfway through by JLA. We told the Prince that Minister of State Jean-Paul PROUST continued to circumvent the expansion of SIGER, in direct violation of instruction from the Prince, while continuing his effort to insert Alain MALRIC into an intelligence role.
MALRIC had apparently become chief of the police gambling division in Monaco after the French RG (domestic security) no longer wanted him around and, according to LIDDY, “didn’t know what else to do with him.”
Which meant Monaco had become a dumping ground for French rejects.
Moreover, MALRIC was allegedly passing dossiers from Monaco's police archives to the RG, without official authorization, and also to Franck BIANCHERI.
The Prince talked tough and promised to thwart PROUST from his rogue agenda with MALRIC.
I asked the Prince about two jetty towers--historical landmarks, a century old, built by Prince Albert 1st--that had just been removed from the port for no good reason.
The Prince did not have an answer, saying only it would cost two million euros to preserve them. It seemed obvious to me he had been pressured into their removal by those who stood to gain financially from this destruction of Monegasque history and culture.
I had recruited a new spy, code-named HUNT, who revealed to me the truth about SICCFIN, a four-person government team whose mission was to investigate suspicious activities within Monaco’s banking system.
According to HUNT, the banks were making a mockery of SICCFIN, and keeping it busy with bogus Declarations of Suspicion.
Apparently, if an account holder wanted to move their substantial deposit from a Monaco bank elsewhere, the unscrupulous banker would file a Declaration of Suspicion that would effectively blackball the account holder from opening accounts anyplace else.
In other parts of Europe—Liechtenstein, for example—false Declarations of Suspicion were illegal, but not in Monaco.
SICCFIN allowed itself to be manipulated by Monaco’s banks, a case of the fox looking after the chicken coop.
The other advantage of filing false Declarations of Suspicion was to generate numbers to impress the oversight folks in Strasbourg and falsely demonstrate that Monaco was doing its job, which it most certainly was not.
Only SICCFIN had the authority to deal with bank compliance officers, so the banks, essentially, policed themselves through a bankers association run by—surprise, surprise—a chairman from one of Monaco’s major banks that had been (and still was) the major center of Italian money laundering in the principality.
That was why I wanted SIGER to be able to access accounts at Monaco’s financial institutions and root out money launderers.
On February 7th, I met in M-Base with two officials from SISMI, the Italian external service, and their colleague from the Guardia di Finanza, an expert on financial crime in Italy. A liaison partnership was created.
On February 16th, an officer of SIGER arrived at M-Base with interesting news: eighteen months earlier (on July 6th, 2004) the deputy minister of the interior ministry, Didier GAMERDINGER, asked the police chief’s secretary to open a “confidential and urgent” investigation of… Robert ERINGER.
Ninety percent of such investigations were channeled to SIGER, but this one had been routed to the Administrative Division, for reasons unexplained.
All the investigation could determine, said SIGER’s officer, was that I was American, a “journalist,” that I kept an apartment in Monaco, and that the Prince visited often.
It actually looked as if the interior ministry was spying on the Prince.
If they had bothered to pop my name into an Internet search engine, such as Google, they could have done far better in their quest for information.
Their investigation reflected that I was doing an excellent job remaining invisible; almost four years on, no one, not even the police, could nail down rumors that the Prince even had an intelligence service.
But this was also typical of the Monaco police department’s sloppy investigative practices.
The Palace accountant, Claude PALMERO, continued to hamper the Prince's intelligence intelligence apparatus by not paying its quarterly invoice until the Prince ordered him to do so no fewer than three times.
SIGER finally shed light upon this: Until the Prince had arranged for me to meet SIGER’s officers, PALMERO had been acting as a self-appointed intermediary between them and the Prince. After Prince Rainier’s death, without authorization from Prince Albert, PALMERO tried to formalize the arrangement, to the extent of offering SIGER’s officers money from his own pocket. PALMERO apparently fantasized himself a super-spy. Or maybe he just liked to collect gossip about his neighbors.
When JLA arrived at M-Base to commence his working day at seven o’clock on February 22nd, PROUST’s recalcitrance was high on the agenda. Every time JLA put him in his place, PROUST would barge into the Prince’s office the minute JLA turned his back, not even waiting until Friday any more.
Thierry LACOSTE continued to be an ongoing problem, abusing his influence as the Prince’s lawyer to make money from Monaco-based clients who wanted to bring business projects into Monaco and who, through LACOSTE, got the Prince’s attention and, worse, his acquiescence.
Example: Samy Maroun was trying, on behalf of the Russian behemoth Gazprom--with LACOSTE’s help--to establish a Russian bank in Monaco.
I recommended to JLA that the Prince retain in-house Palace counsel with no conflicts of interest.
“Or,” JLA added, “at least second legal opinion to keep LACOSTE in check.”
JLA concurred with me that it made excellent sense for the Palace to create good relations with Paris Match, with whose editor he had breakfasted the day before in Paris.
It was this magazine that, after all, had choreographed the first meeting between Prince Rainier and his future bride, Grace Kelly.
But for LACOSTE, who had battled legally with the French glossy magazine, his own pride was at stake, so he poisoned the Prince’s judgment on this matter.
Very late on February 28th, JLA phoned to inform me that BIANCHERI’s removal as finance minister was imminent. He added that PROUST had said to him, “I know you have a former CIA guy working for you.”
PROUST was under the erroneous impression that JLA had brought me with him to the Palace; he did not know I operated directly for the Prince, and had been doing so for almost four years. And he was also wrong about my background. I had never worked for CIA, but as an independent contractor for FBI Counterintelligence.
So much for PROUST and MALRIC’s intelligence skills.