Albert Spaggiari

Albert Spaggiari (December 14, 1932 – June 8, 1989), nicknamed Bert, was a French criminal chiefly known as the organizer of a break-in into a Société Générale bank in Nice, France in 1976.

Earlier life

Spaggiari was born in Laragne-Montéglin in the Hautes-Alpes département. He grew up in Hyères, where his mother had a lingerie store.

Spaggiari is reported to have committed his first robbery in order to offer a diamond to a girlfriend. Perhaps as part of a deal made with the authorities, he would later join a paratroop regiment during the Indochina War. He was not present at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu because he was imprisoned for robbery at the time.

During the Algerian War he worked for the Organisation de l'armée secrète (OAS), a clandestine anti-de Gaulle and anti-decolonisation organization. Despite the fact that he was probably more a sympathizer than a real activist, Spaggiari was later sentenced to some years in prison for his OAS activities. During his imprisonment at the Santé, Spaggiari wrote his first autobiographic book Faut pas rire avec les barbares ("One mustn't laugh with the barbarians"). He then supported the nationalist candidacy of Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour in the French presidential election, 1965.

In 1976 he was the owner of a photographic studio in Nice, living in a house in the hills over Nice named Les Oies Sauvages. But he apparently quickly became bored with his law-abiding middle-class life. Later accounts described him as cavalier and stylish.

Heist

When Spaggiari heard that the sewers were close to the vault of the Société Générale bank, he began to plan a break-in into the bank. Eventually he decided to do it by digging into the bank vault from below. Spaggiari rented a box in the bank vault for himself and then put a loud alarm clock in the vault. He set the clock to ring at night in order to check the possible existence of any acoustic or seismic detection gear. In fact, there were no alarms protecting the vault because it was considered utterly impregnable; the door wall was extremely thick and there was no obvious way to access the other walls.

Spaggiari contacted professional gangsters from Marseille, who, after examining his plans and the site, decided not to participate in the heist. His accomplices probably were recruited through old OAS friends. His men made their way into the sewers and began a two-month effort to dig an eight meter long tunnel from the sewer to under the vault. Spaggiari had taken many precautions during this long dig. His men worked long hours continuously drilling. He told his men not to drink coffee nor alcohol and get at least 10 hours of sleep every shift to avoid any danger to the mission.

On July 16, 1976, during a long weekend due to Bastille Day festivities, Spaggiari's gang broke into the vault itself. They opened 400 safe deposit boxes and stole an estimated 30-60 million francs worth of money, securities and valuables. It was the largest heist in the history of bank robberies to that date.

According to some accounts, Spaggiari brought his men a meal including wine and pâté, and reportedly they sat down in the vault for a picnic lunch, after welding the vault door shut from the inside. The gang spent hours picking through the various safe deposit boxes. Before they left on July 20, they left this message on the walls of the vault: sans armes, ni haine, ni violence ("without weapons, nor hatred, nor violence"). This was Spaggiari's message to the world, implying that he considered himself to be something more than a common thief.

Capture and escape

At first the French police were baffled. However, by the end of October, they were closing in, and on a tip from a former girlfriend, they arrested one of the errant thieves. After a lengthy interrogation he turned over the entire gang, including Spaggiari. When Spaggiari, who had been accompanying the mayor of Nice Jacques Médecin in the Far East as a photographer, returned to Nice, he was arrested at the airport.

Spaggiari chose Jacques Peyrat, a veteran of the French Foreign Legion who belonged at the time to the National Front, as his defence attorney. Spaggiari first denied his involvement in the break-in, then acknowledged it but claimed that he was working to fund a secret political organization named the "Catena" (Italian for Chain) that seems to have existed only in his fantasy.

During his case hearings, Spaggiari devised an escape plan. He made a fictitious document which he claimed as evidence. He made the document coded so it had to be deciphered by the judge. He distracted judge Richard Bouaziz with this document and then jumped out of a window, landed safely on a parked car and escaped on a waiting motorcycle. Some reports claimed that the owner of the car later received a 5000 francs cheque in the mail for the damage to his roof.

Left-wing papers later claimed that Spaggiari had received help from his political friends, in particular from ex-OAS militants close to the mayor of Nice, Jacques Médecin. The accusations forced Médecin to go through a second round of voting at the local elections of 1977.

In 1995, Jacques Peyrat accused Christian Estrosi, French minister and former motorcycle champion, of having been Spaggiari's driver. But later Estrosi proved that on that day he had been motorcycle racing in Daytona Beach, Florida.

Life in hiding

Spaggiari remained free for the rest of his life. He was sentenced in absentia to a life in prison. Reportedly he underwent plastic surgery and spent probably most of the rest of his life in Argentina. However, it is reported that Spaggiari came several times clandestinely to France, visiting his mother or his wife "Audi". For the publishing of his last book Le journal d'une truffe he gave an interview to Bernard Pivot for the TV program Apostrophes that was reportedly recorded in Milan, Italy.

According to a CIA document declassified in 2000 and publicised by the National Security Archive, Michael Townley, the DINA international agent responsible for the murder of Orlando Letelier, a member of Salvador Allende's government, in Washington DC, 1976, was in contact with Spaggiari. Information contained in the document suggests that Spaggiari (code name "Daniel") conducted operations on behalf of DINA.

Spaggiari was said to have died under "mysterious circumstances". The press reported that his body was found by his mother in front of her home on June 10, 1989, having been carried back to France by unknown friends. However it now seems well established that his wife Emilia was with him when he died of throat cancer on June 8, 1989, in a country house in Belluno, Italy. She drove the corpse from Italy to Hyères and lied to the police (it being a criminal offence to carry a corpse).

Remains of the loot from the heist have never been found.

Works

• Faut pas rire avec les barbares (1977)
• Les égouts du paradis (1978)
• Le journal d'une truffe (1983)

Popular culture

French authors René Louis Maurice and Jean-Claude Simoën wrote the book Cinq Milliards au bout de l'égout (1977) about Spaggiari's bank heist in Nice. Their work was translated from the French into the English in 1978 by the British author Ken Follett under the title The Heist of the Century; it was also published as The Gentleman of 16 July and Under the Streets of Nice. Follett was outraged when some publishers brought it out as a new Ken Follett book, while it was, in fact, little more than a rushed-through translation.^[1]

Three movies were produced which were also based on the Nice bank robbery:

• Les égouts du paradis, a 1979 French movie directed by José Giovanni.
• The Great Riviera Bank Robbery, also known Dirty Money and Sewers of Gold, a 1979 British movie directed by Francis Megahy.
• Sans arme, ni haine, ni violence, a 2008 French movie directed by Jean-Paul Rouve.
• Le fogne del paradiso, a 2016 Italian book edited by Carlos D'Ercole.

The Canadian television series Masterminds produced and transmitted an episode titled "The Riviera Job," reenacting the story of the robbery.^[2]

A Czech movie, Prachy dělaj člověka, contains a reference to the heist, suggesting that one of the characters participated in it.

See also

• Organisation de l'armée secrète

References

External links

• Les égouts du paradis at the Internet Movie Database
• Albert Spaggiari page dealing with multimedia and detailed articles (French)