On August 3rd (2006), Jean-Luc Allavena (JLA) phoned me from the Spanish island of Ibiza, on vacation with his family. A new police chief had been decided upon: Andre Muhlberger, from the Alsace region, with experience in Marseilles and Toulouse.
Muhlberger would commence his duties on September 1st and JLA intended to introduce us during his first week on the job and include him in our executive circle, which now included interior minister Paul Masseron.
JLA told me that Stephane Valeri was in “a bad mood” over the Palace’s restoration of its constitutional power, punctuated in a speech just delivered by the Prince to the Conseil Nationale.
Valeri had expected to replace Franck Biancheri as finance minister (a steppingstone—in his mind—to succeed Jean-Paul Proust as minister of state), even announcing to his staff he would soon leave to join the government—and now he believed JLA was to blame.
So, Valeri had unsheathed his own knife and was known to be keeping company with those—including Thierry Lacoste—whose knives were already sharpened.
I already knew that three weeks earlier Valeri and Lacoste had ambushed the Prince over dinner at Valeri’s weekend home in the mountains with accusations that JLA was supposedly undercutting the boss.
In fact, JLA had done nothing more than execute the Prince’s agenda, or decisions Albert 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 because clients of his with frivolous projects did not meet JLA’s threshold for what was deserving of face time with the Prince.
Unfortunately for Lacoste, his legal career and livelihood was largely dependent upon his Palace connection.
Within days of dinner at Valeri’s home, the Prince appointed Lacoste to the board of SBM, a move badly received by Monegasques, who (correctly) suspected cronyism, and who already perceived their Sovereign as being physically and psychologically absent from Monaco.
At 12:30 a.m. on August 22nd, the Prince came to M-Base and we talked for almost two hours in the quiet of night—the first and only time Albert was not interrupted by the singing of cell phones. We discussed a variety of topics, starting with his recent travels in the USA, where he’d visited Mount Rushmore, and my experience infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan in the late 1970s. It was a good warm up for the topics that followed.
The Prince was pleased to learn Paul Masseron, the new interior minister, had been to our safehouse and that soon-to-be police chief Andre Muhlberger would follow.
Philippe Narmino: The proof was in. I presented our new documentation to Albert, explaining that Slovenia’s intelligence chief played back to me the precise routing of the funds without me ever telling him that element of our investigation. The Prince nodded grimly and told me he would act, and asked me, should he offer Narmino an explanation for sacking him?
“No, just dismiss him,” I said. “He should come to you for explanation. When he does, just show him the documents.”
And finally, funding: I made my case, again, that our whole team was working overtime. We’d built a solid little service from scratch on a shoestring, an investment in the Prince’s future. With my name out there now, I probably needed a bodyguard, but I couldn’t justify the cost in view of other needs. Albert agreed to increase our budget by 25 percent.
Despite so positive a meeting, I think I understood his psyche by now, jotting in my journal: A2 does not really care, he’s just going through the motions.
Even with increased funding, I wrote myself a note to terminate my service to the Prince on June 30th, 2007, five years after it began, giving myself ten months to establish a Micro-Europe intelligence association and the restructuring of SIGER.
And just two weeks later, after bouncing through London to Washington D.C. to California and back again to London, then a delayed EasyJet flight from Luton to Nice, I scribbled: My heart no longer in this.
I’d long since lost faith in the Prince’s ability to take decisive action; I was tired from travel, weary from the constant carping of others, and I no longer enjoyed spending time in Monaco, everybody stirring it up against everybody else.
As George Bernard Shaw wrote, “Never wrestle with a pig—you get dirty, and the pig likes it.”
I was especially weary from investigating internal government corruption. It belonged in the realm of law enforcement, not intelligence, even if the Prince needed this kind of intelligence to establish the fundamentals necessary to go forward. That’s why I was delighted to meet Monaco’s new police chief, Andre Muhlberger.
Four of us assembled in M-Base at 7:30 in the morning on September 14th: JLA, Masseron, Muhlberger and me.
I briefed Muhlberger on my mission then focused on the importance of reorganizing SIGER to become the official arm of what I was doing, akin to the UK MI5/Special Branch model. Masseron told us that Proust had shared my name with him and Alain Malric, but that he, Masseron, had not let on that he was in regular contact with me. We agreed that the existence of our executive circle be kept secret from the minister of state.
Incredibly, when I returned to Monaco on October 12th nothing had yet been done about reorganizing SIGER.
The Prince must have known that he always had the power to make things happen, fast, simply by picking up the phone and demanding it be done. But instead he permitted petty people to play politics over everything and impede his stated wishes.
Much later, when Nicolas Sarkozy was elected president of France, he immediately took control and demonstrated leadership, yet as an elected president of a republic he possessed less power than an absolute monarch. When Sarkozy decided that France’s two internal security services, the DST and the RG, should merge into one agency, both institutions resisted with multiple reasons why this was not possible. Sarkozy did not waffle and allow his plans to be stalled by bureaucrats. He said, I don’t care, that’s what I want, do it, NOW. And it was done. And everyone knew not to mess with Sarkozy thereafter.
Even after our last meeting, when I’d provided the latest documentation on Philippe Narmino and Albert resolved to act and remove Narmino from his job as chief of Monaco’s judicial system, he had done nothing. And now we had word that Narmino, understanding we were on his trail, was trying to start his own intelligence service with the deputy interior minister, a man named Gamberini who had been retired from Monaco’s police force for refusing to allow private security guards to unlock the bathroom door behind which banker Edmund Safra asphyxiated to death from smoke inhalation. Gamberini had just been rehired (by Narmino) to run the judiciary police.
Meantime, Minister of State Proust had been back in the Prince’s office to take another bash at me, bolstered by the new finance minister, Gilles Tonelli. According to JLA, who’d heard about it from Masseron, Proust had “cast negativity” on my mission and questioned the wisdom of my contact with “international organizations.” Albert had apparently replied, “I hear you.”
I tried to reach the Prince but could find only his secretary, Madame Viale. “How’s everything going?” I asked.
“I’m trying,” she said.
Discerning exasperation in her voice, I knew precisely what she meant.