Painting by Thomas Van Stein
It set the right tone for angels battling devils, against all odds.
It was not Halloween, but by the time Prince Albert arrived at 7:20, M-Base was filled with spooks from a dozen countries.
I eased them over one-by-one so they could shake the Prince’s hand and look him in the eye while he acknowledged that I operated in his service. (As one intelligence chief told me later: “It was very important—and necessary to proceed.”)
At ten o’clock, guests were graced with a magnificent fireworks display over the harbor.
Despite a late night, next morning started early for me—a private meeting with the chief of a Balkan intelligence service who was renowned as “the key to the Balkans.” That was the key I needed to turn.
Another liaison partnership established.
Next: the founding members of the micro-Europe intelligence association—Monaco, Luxembourg, and Liechtenstein—convened its first meeting: lunch in the open air at Quai des Artistes.
Over a bottle of cold Pouilly Fume we agreed some basic club rules:
No ties.
Excellent food and fine wine.
At the earliest opportunity, purchase a yacht as association headquarters, preferably with funds confiscated from arms-dealing money launderers.
Jocularity aside, we had good reason to band together: mutual cooperation and a united shield against shady characters who strove to park dirty money in states known as “tax havens.”
As a collective, we could alert one another, so that when a dirty client got turned away from Monaco and aimed himself toward Luxembourg or Liechtenstein, they'd be watching for him.
Luxembourg offered to host the first formal meeting, to which they would invite Malta’s intelligence service.
I would travel to Andorra and determine the disposition of that microstate’s representatives for attending an October confab.
Meantime, Jean-Leonard DE MASSY reported to me that Samy MAROUN, a shady client of Thierry LACOSTE, wanted to give him ten thousand euros “for bringing me luck.” (Word had filtered through DE MASSY's circles that he was involved in sensitive work for his blood relative, which made him more of a lightning rod than usual. Offer declined.)
The Prince and I met in private on July 12th, a seventy-five minute meeting in his office. Although my agenda was long, I had decided not to come on strong.
“I’m forever bouncing in here with facts and figures and findings,” said I. “What would you like to talk about today?”
The Prince shrugged and smiled.
So I consulted my agenda.
Jean-Leonard DE MASSY: He had found his niche with me, would make a superb asset. DE MASSY had inculcated himself with Jean-Paul CARTERON and would travel imminently with CARTERON to Slovenia, then to Switzerland. CARTERON and Samy MAROUN and others were trying to use him for access to the Prince; my service would reap good intelligence on their activities and contacts. We knew, for instance, CARTERON brokered consulships from Balkan countries, including one for Jan KERWAT, a Libyan-born Italian national who now represented Croatia in Monaco.
Sergei PUGACHEV: The Prince had already heard about PUGACHEV’s interest in contracting SBM to manage his new Moscow hotel. He concurred that I should run traces on the Russian.
Micro-Europe intelligence association: The Prince expressed great pleasure with my progress. I told him about my visit to the Vatican, where I had discovered they considered themselves a macro-state, not a micro-state, and I informed the Prince that I would visit Andorra in the coming week and try to enlist into the club that “duty free” principality high in the Pyrenees between France and Spain.
SIGER: As we had discussed seven months earlier, I stressed the need for restructuring, which the Prince had actually ordered Jean-Paul PROUST to execute, to no avail.
Operation Hound Dog: I recounted Floater’s experience with Roger-Louis BIANCHINI, of the Nice-Matin, and conveyed that reporter’s perspective on Monaco and the Prince.
Franck BIANCHERI: In the Prince’s mind, BIANCHERI’s impressive new titles meant nothing. He seemed oblivious to the public’s perception that BIANCHERI had been promoted, a tale spun by PROUST. “Where did you hear that?” the Prince demanded.
Answer: From just about everyone, except BIANCHERI himself, who understood what had truly transpired.
(BIANCHERI had been moved to a small office and lost his parking space. Seething, he had apparently uttered, “I will sit by the river and wait for the corpses of my enemies to float by.”)
On July 13th, I set out to Andorra—a seven-and-a-half road trip, reaching the Andorra Park Hotel by 3:30 p.m.
Andorra is an odd little place, more a shopping center than a country--a consumer paradise staffed by dark, ugly, misshapen natives. Even the hotel—said to be Andorra’s finest—was creepy and surreal, its service scarce and unfriendly. But I needed to see these microstates up close and personal.
At ten o’clock next morning, I appeared at a small office in Prat de la Creu, Unit # 402.
Jordi Pons LLUELLES, Andorra’s one-man Financial Intelligence Unit, greeted me. He spoke no English so his secretary, Ellie, translated.
LLUELLES seemed to grasp my position—chief of the unofficial Monaco intelligence service, responsible to the Prince—and seemed to grasp the concept—micro-European states band together to fight money laundering as a united group.
I used Andorra’s own motto—Through unity comes strength—to clarify and justify what we were attempting to achieve.
Andorra’s banking business, LLUELLES explained, derived from Spain and South America—the safe haven in Europe where Spanish speakers (read: drug cartels from Colombia) launder and/or park their revenues. Russians, said LLUELLES, had not yet discovered Andorra. He smiled a lot and pronounced this a good idea, agreeing to attend a kick-off meeting in Luxembourg come October.
Soon after I left Andorra, Jordi Pons LLUELLES telephoned Ariane PICCO-MARGOSSIAN, SICCFIN’s chief in Monaco, to report my visit and invitation to join the micro-Europe association. SICCFIN’s chief, unaware of the existence of me or a Monaco intelligence service, told LLUELLES it could not possibly be true.
PICCO-MARGOSSIAN, a former prosecutor who suffered from depression, went straight to her boss, the new finance minister, Gilles TONELLI (a poor choice as TONELLI was far out of his depth), who took it to the minister of state.
And PROUST, aghast, brought it to the Prince, who told him: “I know about this—he’s doing this for me.” Caught off guard (and hoping I had misrepresented himself in Andorra), PROUST bit his lip and retreated.
On another front, President Stephane VALERI was said by an asset to be in “a bad mood” about the Palace’s restoration of its constitutional power, punctuated in a speech just delivered by the Prince to the Conseil Nationale. Indeed, VALERI had expected to replace BIANCHERI as finance minister (as a stepping stone--in his mind--to succeed PROUST as minister of state). So sure he was that he’d be finance minister, VALERI even announced to his staff that he would soon leave the assembly to join the government. Now he blamed Jean-Luc ALLAVENA (JLA) for not getting the job.
So VALERI unsheathed his knife and was known to be keeping company with those—including Thierry LACOSTE—whose knives were already sharpened.
I already knew that, on July 9th, VALERI and LACOSTE had ambushed Albert over dinner at VALERI’s weekend home in the mountains with accusations that JLA was supposedly overstepping his bounds.
In fact, JLA had done nothing more than execute the Prince’s agenda, or decisions the Prince pretended to enjoin, hurriedly, in between frequent travels.
It was JLA’s role as gatekeeper—traditional for a chief of staff—that LACOSTE found most objectionable. This was because clients of his with frivolous projects did not meet JLA’s threshold for deserving face time with the Prince.
Unfortunately for LACOSTE, his legal career, his livelihood, was largely dependent upon his friendship with Albert.
Within days of dinner at VALERI’s home, the Prince appointed LACOSTE to the board of SBM, a move badly received by Monegasques, who suspected cronyism, and who already perceived the Prince as being physically and psychologically absent from Monaco.
And so a campaign to discredit JLA had already begun in earnest.
And those courtiers who wanted to poison Albert against his chef de cabinet knew exactly what potion to use: The Prince’s own ego.
The Prince shrugged and smiled.
So I consulted my agenda.
Jean-Leonard DE MASSY: He had found his niche with me, would make a superb asset. DE MASSY had inculcated himself with Jean-Paul CARTERON and would travel imminently with CARTERON to Slovenia, then to Switzerland. CARTERON and Samy MAROUN and others were trying to use him for access to the Prince; my service would reap good intelligence on their activities and contacts. We knew, for instance, CARTERON brokered consulships from Balkan countries, including one for Jan KERWAT, a Libyan-born Italian national who now represented Croatia in Monaco.
Sergei PUGACHEV: The Prince had already heard about PUGACHEV’s interest in contracting SBM to manage his new Moscow hotel. He concurred that I should run traces on the Russian.
Micro-Europe intelligence association: The Prince expressed great pleasure with my progress. I told him about my visit to the Vatican, where I had discovered they considered themselves a macro-state, not a micro-state, and I informed the Prince that I would visit Andorra in the coming week and try to enlist into the club that “duty free” principality high in the Pyrenees between France and Spain.
SIGER: As we had discussed seven months earlier, I stressed the need for restructuring, which the Prince had actually ordered Jean-Paul PROUST to execute, to no avail.
Operation Hound Dog: I recounted Floater’s experience with Roger-Louis BIANCHINI, of the Nice-Matin, and conveyed that reporter’s perspective on Monaco and the Prince.
Franck BIANCHERI: In the Prince’s mind, BIANCHERI’s impressive new titles meant nothing. He seemed oblivious to the public’s perception that BIANCHERI had been promoted, a tale spun by PROUST. “Where did you hear that?” the Prince demanded.
Answer: From just about everyone, except BIANCHERI himself, who understood what had truly transpired.
(BIANCHERI had been moved to a small office and lost his parking space. Seething, he had apparently uttered, “I will sit by the river and wait for the corpses of my enemies to float by.”)
On July 13th, I set out to Andorra—a seven-and-a-half road trip, reaching the Andorra Park Hotel by 3:30 p.m.
Andorra is an odd little place, more a shopping center than a country--a consumer paradise staffed by dark, ugly, misshapen natives. Even the hotel—said to be Andorra’s finest—was creepy and surreal, its service scarce and unfriendly. But I needed to see these microstates up close and personal.
At ten o’clock next morning, I appeared at a small office in Prat de la Creu, Unit # 402.
Jordi Pons LLUELLES, Andorra’s one-man Financial Intelligence Unit, greeted me. He spoke no English so his secretary, Ellie, translated.
LLUELLES seemed to grasp my position—chief of the unofficial Monaco intelligence service, responsible to the Prince—and seemed to grasp the concept—micro-European states band together to fight money laundering as a united group.
I used Andorra’s own motto—Through unity comes strength—to clarify and justify what we were attempting to achieve.
Andorra’s banking business, LLUELLES explained, derived from Spain and South America—the safe haven in Europe where Spanish speakers (read: drug cartels from Colombia) launder and/or park their revenues. Russians, said LLUELLES, had not yet discovered Andorra. He smiled a lot and pronounced this a good idea, agreeing to attend a kick-off meeting in Luxembourg come October.
Soon after I left Andorra, Jordi Pons LLUELLES telephoned Ariane PICCO-MARGOSSIAN, SICCFIN’s chief in Monaco, to report my visit and invitation to join the micro-Europe association. SICCFIN’s chief, unaware of the existence of me or a Monaco intelligence service, told LLUELLES it could not possibly be true.
PICCO-MARGOSSIAN, a former prosecutor who suffered from depression, went straight to her boss, the new finance minister, Gilles TONELLI (a poor choice as TONELLI was far out of his depth), who took it to the minister of state.
And PROUST, aghast, brought it to the Prince, who told him: “I know about this—he’s doing this for me.” Caught off guard (and hoping I had misrepresented himself in Andorra), PROUST bit his lip and retreated.
On another front, President Stephane VALERI was said by an asset to be in “a bad mood” about the Palace’s restoration of its constitutional power, punctuated in a speech just delivered by the Prince to the Conseil Nationale. Indeed, VALERI had expected to replace BIANCHERI as finance minister (as a stepping stone--in his mind--to succeed PROUST as minister of state). So sure he was that he’d be finance minister, VALERI even announced to his staff that he would soon leave the assembly to join the government. Now he blamed Jean-Luc ALLAVENA (JLA) for not getting the job.
So VALERI unsheathed his knife and was known to be keeping company with those—including Thierry LACOSTE—whose knives were already sharpened.
I already knew that, on July 9th, VALERI and LACOSTE had ambushed Albert over dinner at VALERI’s weekend home in the mountains with accusations that JLA was supposedly overstepping his bounds.
In fact, JLA had done nothing more than execute the Prince’s agenda, or decisions the Prince pretended to enjoin, hurriedly, in between frequent travels.
It was JLA’s role as gatekeeper—traditional for a chief of staff—that LACOSTE found most objectionable. This was because clients of his with frivolous projects did not meet JLA’s threshold for deserving face time with the Prince.
Unfortunately for LACOSTE, his legal career, his livelihood, was largely dependent upon his friendship with Albert.
Within days of dinner at VALERI’s home, the Prince appointed LACOSTE to the board of SBM, a move badly received by Monegasques, who suspected cronyism, and who already perceived the Prince as being physically and psychologically absent from Monaco.
And so a campaign to discredit JLA had already begun in earnest.
And those courtiers who wanted to poison Albert against his chef de cabinet knew exactly what potion to use: The Prince’s own ego.