Foreign Crimes

Jan. 20, 2010 Updated May 21, 2010

Tony Musulin

 It’s always about the money – but was it this time? No one had heard of security van driver Tony Musulin until he drove off with $16.7 million – France’s biggest robbery ever – without having even uttered one threatening word.

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

As any French cop will tell you, the weeks before a great festive occasion – Christmas, Easter, Mothers’ Day – robbers are active people.  They target any place where there ought to be large amounts of cash – supermarkets, jewelry stores, gold bullion dealers, post offices, banks, and security vans. Always, they use guns as a means of persuasion – from ordinary hand-held pistols to Russian AK47s or Israeli Uzis, but when it comes to security vans, their favorite way of getting to the money is to blast their way through the armored steel with rocket-propelled grenades; the latter are easily obtained these days from former Communist Bloc countries.

Thursday, November 5, Christmas little over a month away, television and radio newsrooms in France hastily prepared a Breaking News item. A Loomis security van had disappeared.  So too one of the van’s three guards: The driver.

Nov. 19, 2009 Updated Nov. 7, 2011

André Bamberski

For 27 years the heartbroken André Bamberski kept an eye on the fugitive serial rapist who murdered his 14-year-old daughter. Then he arranged a vigilante kidnapping to deliver the murderer to the police. 

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins 

In the early hours of the morning little happens in the town of Mulhouse.

Mulhouse, of slightly over 110,000 inhabitants, is geographically in eastern France, in the region of Alsace, but it is often said by skeptical French that the Mulhousiens and the Mulhousiennes, as the inhabitants are called, have German hearts. The reason is that Germany starts just a few miles east of Alsace, and indeed of Mulhouse, and the Germans have therefore annexed the region three times. The first annexation had been after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war (July 1870-May1871), the second, during World War 1 (1914-1918), and the third in World War Two, after France’s June 1940 capitulation to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi army. This third annexation had lasted until the end of the war in May 1945. Since, Alsace has remained French.

During the early morning of Sunday, October 18, 2009 Mulhouse was again silent, but the silence was disturbed when the computer screens in front of the officers on duty in the police’s emergency call room flashed an incoming call.

The caller, a male, speaking with a marked Russian accent despite his flawless French, gave the cop who took the call the name of a local street: Rue de Tilleul. On that street, said the caller before he rang off, the fugitive, Dieter Krombach, could be found.

Oct. 26, 2009 Updated March 9, 2010

Treiber Police Photo

Awaiting trial for murder, Frenchman Jean-Pierre Treiber goes on the run and makes the police look like idiots.

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

Before the invention of television, head hunters rode on horseback into dusty towns and in their saddlebags were the wanted poster for the man they’d gone to find.

Today, a head hunter is a cop in a fast car with an earsplitting siren and a rotating red light, or he is cop in a helicopter equipped with infra-red camera equipment that turns night into day. And, today, because of 24/7 breaking news reports on television, the wanted poster has become obsolete because now we know the face of a man on the run like we know our own.

This became the case with the man on the picture above – Jean-Pierre Treiber – who was on the run from prison where he was awaiting trial for the kidnap and murder of two young women.

So familiar had become his face that his marked squint was even being targeted by stand-up comics and talk show hosts.

But Treiber’s story is far from something to laugh about.

March 8, 2009

The Durban Castle Steamship

Dubbed "The Porthole Murder Case" by the British tabloids, a steward was sentenced to hang for the disappearance at sea of an aspiring actress.

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

At noon, shining Chevrolets and Fords began pulling up beside the large white steamship with the lavender hull and the black and red funnel anchored along the quayside.

From the automobiles stepped middle-aged ladies in frumpy summer frocks, comfortable shoes and small feathered hats, all clutching purses in which were the medication they were certain they would need for seasickness on the 14-day voyage that lay ahead.

At the ladies' sides were their husbands; men who were also no longer in their prime wearing their double-breasted suits cut by London or New York's best tailors and their fedoras bought in Paris or Rome.

February 9, 2009

Courtroom sketch of Elisabeth Cons-Boutboul

The murder trial of Elisabeth Cons-Boutboul drew together the Paris smart set, the horse-racing fraternity, the underworld and the Roman Catholic Church. It was a case of lies, cynicism, make-believe and manipulation and as such has gone down in French legal history as one of the most enigmatic.

 by Anthony Davis

As the murder trial of 70-year-old Elisabeth Cons-Boutboul opened in Paris on March 2, 1994, the question on everyone's lips was not, "Is she guilty?" but, "Which role is she going to play?"

During her life, Madame Cons-Boutboul (pronounced Conz-Booble) had acted out a range of parts – both fact and fiction– worthy of a Hollywood star: the discreet landlady of apartments in the chic quarters of Paris; the religious bigot; the lawyer who had swindled a missionary society; devoted mother of a champion jockey; secret agent of the Vatican; doting grandmother of little Adrien; a hypochondriac riddled with imaginary cancers.

So, which was it to be: the Machiavellian fraudster, the bogus widow or the innocent victim of a fiendish plot? The list of possibilities was long: Her whole existence seemed in retrospect to have been constructed on deceit, fantasy and self-seeking to the extent that is was difficult to separate truth from fancy, reality from self-delusion.

January 25, 2009

Céline Jourdan, age 6, went missing from her home in the tiny village of La-Motte-du-Caire

Homophobia had a field day at the trial of young Céline.

by Anthony Davis

One hot summer's evening in 1988, little Céline Jourdan went missing. Her father raised the alarm at 9 p.m. but her body was not discovered until the following afternoon, only a few hundred yards from the village. The pathetic corpse had been clumsily hidden under branches alongside a peaceful mountain brook. Céline had been raped and her skull smashed with a rock. It was the 27th of July, only weeks before her seventh birthday.