THE SPYMASTER OF MONTE CARLO: 5) "A RHYME FOR OCTOBER"

A Throwback Thursday Memoir of Intrigue & Lunacy

By the end October (2002), I felt so good about our progress in service to Prince Albert, I composed a verse:

Halloween is near, spirits and spooks versus crooks and pukes.

We’ll prevail, the bad guys will fail, they’ll end up inside the Jacques Cousteau jail.

(This was a reference to the small Monaco jailhouse situated below the Jacques Cousteau Oceanographic Museum on The Rock.)

The Monaco Palace, meantime, was a mess—according to several insiders: 

Prince Rainier had become weaker and more reclusive than ever, and demanding of his son’s presence, always a problem for Albert as the shadow of his father was huge.

Rainier's daughters, Princesses Caroline and Stephanie, despised each other and stayed away from the Palace, not wishing to be present at the same time, lest it lead to fisticuffs, as it recently had by the pool. 

On top of that, the Prince’s personal secretary, Madame Mirielle Viale, did not get along with her two assistants. 

Little wonder Albert loved getting out of Monaco every chance he could. 

When I arrived in Monaco on October 9th, Prince Albert’s close friend Mike Powers introduced me to two visiting Cuban dignitaries: 

Angel Dalmau Fernandez, deputy minister for foreign affairs, and Eumelio Caballero-Rodriguez, ambassador to France. 

They had hosted the prince’s visit to Cuba a few years earlier. 

Their chief Monaco contact, they told me as we toured the principality, was a member of Monaco’s prominent Pastor family.  And now this duo was mining Monaco for moneyed persons who wished to invest in Havana’s burgeoning tourism industry.

Next on my agenda was the assessment I had commissioned from former CIA officer Jack Platt on Russians in Monaco. 

Platt had cultivated a source within Department Six (anti-organized crime) of the Russian Interior Ministry Police (MVD).

Our source reported Russia’s perspective on the principality: 

1) Monaco is luxurious and easily susceptible to bribe money.

2) Monaco’s police have a sleepy attitude.

3) Due to tourism and casinos, the conditions in Monaco for money laundering are ideal.

This source identified the Chernoy brothers (Mikhail and Lev) as responsible for leading New Russians into Monaco.

He also reported that Monaco was now frequented by Umar Jabrailov, a Chechen hotelier thought to be responsible for the murder of Paul Tatum, his American partner in Moscow’s Radisson Slavanskaya Hotel.

Meanwhile, former CIA station chief Jerry G. reported that Patrick Maugein—French President Jacques Chirac’s bagman—had visited Baghdad three weeks earlier, ostensibly for a trade show, but in fact to sell a guidance system for SCUD missiles through Algeria to Saddam, pre-war.

Maugein and Monaco resident Rui de Sousa were engaged in an embargo-busting scam, “super-loading” oil tankers.  That is, buying oil from Iraq at $7 a  barrel, disguising it as Iranian oil, and selling it for $14 a barrel, with transfers taking place at sea in the Strait of Hormuz.

We apprised the prince of potential embarrassment to the principality if such criminal activities were exposed in the media.

Briefing Prince Albert on these developments, I chided the prince on his rather risqué cell phone greeting messages, which he changed monthly. 

The latest included the word boner, which seemed somewhat undignified for a royal.

“Hey,” the prince explained, “I needed a rhyme for October.”