When I next saw my French asset codenamed LIDDY, he was brimming full of Bosna Bank revelation.
A panic-stricken Judge Philippe Narmino was reported to be moving money from different banks to Madrid, Spain. This was most interesting coupled with new intelligence from SIGER suggesting that the Miro painting he and Gerard Brianti had stolen from the Monaco Red Cross had been secreted away from the Paris gallery where it had been discovered for sale and stashed in a Madrid bank safe deposit box. Narmino had also asked Franck Biancheri to go see Minister of State Jean-Paul Proust and find out what the hell was going on i.e., why was he under such scrutiny?
A week later, Prince Albert arrived at M-Base.
I said, “No martinis, it’s wine tonight.”
“You can’t do that.”
“Okay, but I’m out of olives—it’ll have to be cocktail onions.”
Top priority item on our agenda: The Bosna Bank fax that traced to Narmino’s office fax machine. “I’m assured there are more documents coming,” I said. “Let’s be patient and see everything, investigate further, if need be, to validate what we’re given.”
I briefed the Prince on my meeting with the Luxembourg service and mentioned my upcoming meeting, in Brussels, with senior officials from Bulgarian intelligence. He expressed delight with my progress.
I told Albert I would be in the USA for the month of June.
“You can’t do that,” he said. “I need you.”
I reassured him that me deputy would be back and forth between London and Monaco and would be always available.
(In hindsight, it was that month of June when Albert drifted away from his intelligence service.)
Next day I flew to California for a well-earned vacation. It was punctuated with alarming calls from Monaco. My deputy had met with LIDDY and received new documentation on Narmino. And an informant called with an item about Theirry Lacoste’s buddy Steven Saltzman, who had embarked on a program to reform Monaco’s banking system, with the Prince’s tacit approval or not, though it seemed a ploy on Saltzman’s part to get himself named to bank boards. He had made calls to several senior bank officials inviting them to meetings at “my office in the Palace.” I checked with JLA, who told me Saltzman had neither Palace facilities nor official status. He added, however, that Saltzman was “unmanageable” and that, as the Prince’s friend, had been overtly throwing his corpulence around in a bid to line his own pockets. Another source referred to “porc.”
“What do you mean, pork?” I asked
“Pork! Pork!”
He meant pig. Such were the delights of working with persons for whom English was a second language.
Proust, said JLA, was still dragging his feet on Biancheri. Tough decisions were needed; decisions only the Prince could make—but he kept putting them off, week after week, month after month.
On June 29th I had my first indication that the knives, unsheathed and sharpened, had now been flashed. Thwarted once too many times in his bid to enrich himself on the Prince’s coattails, Thierry Lacoste had become determined—according to an excellent informant—to oust JLA.
I spent a long day in meetings with all my various assets and informants. They painted a bleak picture revolving around the same themes: Lack of progress and indecisions and everyone jealous of everyone else for access to the Prince (called Malade de la Sovereign). Despite having his special project dossiers transferred to JLA’s desk, Albert’s aide-de-camp Bruno Philipponnat had been increasing, not decreasing, his influence, spreading word that he now played a “super undercover role” doing “special international government missions.” These updates were brightened only by the occasional anecdote, like Proust apparently summoning Jean-Paul Carteron and demanding he have a say over who may attend Carteron’s summits—and Carteron storming out.
LIDDY turned up at M-Base with new documentation he’d promised on Narmino, reflecting a money trail from Saudi Arabia to Germany to Bosna Bank in Sarajevo to Privedna Bank in Zagreb, Croatia, back to Bosna Bank, and onto two numbered bank accounts in San Marino over which Narmino’s wife, Christina Giudici, allegedly maintained beneficial control. The source of these documents, said LIDDY, was a faction of the Serbian intelligence service.
“What is their motivation for providing them?” I asked.
LIDDY did not know. They had not asked for money. LIDDY confirmed for me that the French DST also possessed these documents. DST headquarters in Paris, he said, had channeled the documents to DST Marseilles for further investigation. Furthermore, LIDDY added, the Italian service was onto this (hence the same intelligence coming from POLO, who was not aware of LIDDY’s existence and vice versa), wishing to identify Italian nationals involved in the money laundering process.
I faxed the DST in Paris asking if they were in possession of the original Bosna Bank letter. I wanted to ensure LIDDY was not misleading me. And I also wanted the DST to know I knew they possessed such a document. (A return fax from Pierre de Bousquet’s chief-of-staff confirmed that, yes indeed, they possessed a copy.)
When I reconnected with JLA, I found him demoralized. “Proust has screwed the Prince,” he told me.
Albert had apparently swallowed Proust’s playbook hook, line, and sinker—a reversal of the plan he’d agreed with JLA only two days earlier. How and why could this happen? The answer is simple: Proust had been the last to see the Prince and skillfully walked away with tacit agreement.
For Albert, perpetually distracted as he was, tacit agreement was simply the easiest thing for him to do. He could not deal with the issue at hand, so to avoid confrontation he gave in—a bad decision by default, leaving JLA dangling in the wind, weary, depressed and almost ready to call it quits.
Proust’s plan was this: Yes, Franck Biancheri would step down as finance minister. But that was because he would become chairman of economic development and special advisor to the minister of state.
Moreover, the campaign to discredit JLA had already begun in earnest. The courtiers around Albert who wanted to poison his thinking against JLA knew exactly what potion to use.
That afternoon, JLA told the Prince I needed to see him with “urgent information” (the new Narmino documentation). Albert replied, “I just met him.” When JLA phoned me that evening and learned I had not seen the Prince that day, had not in fact seen Albert in weeks, he was flabbergasted.
I’d left several messages for the Prince and no call back, though we had much to catch up on—serious affairs of state. The reorganization of SIGER, although approved by the Prince and ordered by JLA through new interior minister Paul Masseron, had still gone nowhere.
On the evening of July 7th, Jean-Leonard de Massy planned to meet with newly “promoted” Franck Biancheri at seven o’clock in Monaco’s Yacht Club. We agreed on a bold plan: De Massy would mention Bosna Bank in an off-handed way and gauge Biancheri’s reaction. “Use discretion,” I advised, “and only go for it if it feels right.”
At 17 minutes past eight, I received this text from de Massy: “We need to talk!”
We met 90 minutes later at Quai des Artistes; de Massy recounted as having said to Biancheri, “Glass of champagne to celebrate?”
“Are you kidding?” Biancheri replied. “There’s nothing to celebrate. I was running a ministry of 200 people. Now I have no people, no real portfolio. The titles mean nothing—they have cast me out.”
Joined by his wife, Sylvia, the pair spat blood in unison. Disgusted, Sylvia departed.
“I’d asked you about skeletons,” de Massy said to Biancheri, referring to a period before de Massy had met me. “You told me there were none.”
Biancheri went from glum to nervous, dropping his hands between his knees, avoiding eye contact. “What do you mean?”
“You ever heard of Bosna Bank in Sarajevo?”
Biancheri hesitated. “Should I know it?”
“You were the finance minister,” said de Massy. “You should know all the banks everywhere.”
Biancheri flustered.
Unsheathed Knives
After many weeks of not seeing one another, the Prince and I finally met in private on July 12th, a 75-minute meeting in his office. Although my agenda was huge, I’d decided not to come on strong.
“I’m forever bouncing in here with facts and figures and findings,” I said. “What would you like to talk about today?”
The Prince shrugged and smiled. He apparently had nothing on his mind.
So I consulted my agenda.
SIGER: As we had discussed seven months earlier, I stressed the need for restructuring, which the prince had ordered through JLA to no avail due to Proust’s recalcitrance. I reemphasized that we had been held up in our investigations of Biancheri and Narmino because SIGER, unlike police intelligence units in most parts of the world, could not even access phone records.
Franck Biancheri: In the Prince’s mind, Biancheri’s impressive new titles were just a means to evict him from the finance ministry. He seemed oblivious to the public’s perception that Biancheri had been promoted, as spun by Proust. “Where did you hear that?” the Albert demanded. Answer: From just about everyone, except Biancheri himself, who understood what truly transpired. (Biancheri had been moved to a small office and lost his parking space. Seething, he had apparently uttered in front of my asset HUNT, “I will sit by the river and wait for the corpses of my enemies to float by.”)
Philippe Narmino: I provided LIDDY’s new documentation, adding that Slovenia’s intelligence chief had offered to assist us with this enquiry, and to provide the additional validation we needed—the very essence of why liaison partnerships are so important. I walked the Prince through the money trail and provided names of those who greased the action on Narmino’s behalf: Miodrag Maksimovic in Bosnia and Davor Holjevac in Croatia.
Next morning, I met with JLA and briefed him. I think I was the only person he trusted to make appointments with the Prince directly and then tell him honestly about our discussion and its outcome.
“Proust knows you’re out there,” JLA told me. “He still thinks you’re a CIA guy and that I brought you in.”