On November 1st (2005), inside our safe house, M-Base, I had my first meeting with Jean-Luc Allavena—or JLA, as I came to know him. He is tall and lean with a boyish shock of walnut hair he continually shakes or wipes from his eyes.
He learned from me, for the first time, the existence of the Prince’s unofficial intelligence service. I briefed him on our genesis and mission.
This astonished JLA.
Why?
Because less than one week before, Minister of State Jean-Paul Proust had pigeonholed him and proposed… the formation of a Monaco intelligence service!
Clearly, Proust had finally learned of my service to the Prince—and had embarked on a plan to vanquish it with a service of his own.
But JLA had already “connected the dots,” as he put it, and understood that “the information networks at the Palace need cleaning out.” (As one of his final duties as lame-duck chef de cabinet, Raymond Biancheri, Franck’s father, had weaseled an honor for his son—Plenipotentiary—and leaked news of it to the media even before it was signed by the Prince.)
I briefed JLA on our most sensitive cases of internal corruption: Finance minister Franck Biancheri and senior judge Philippe Narmino. I pointed out that the police should be given the responsibility of investigating internal corruption, not my intelligence service, but the police department was a shambles and needed a new chief. I also proposed enlarging SIGER and providing it with better resources to tackle corruption properly. (It did not even possess a fax machine.)
I moved on to foreign residents, and how UK national Simon Reuben had been expelled from principality yet was able to buy his way back into residency in Monaco through a Palace contact, leaving the police department demoralized and appalled; and how Umar Djabrailov, a Chechen and alleged murderer of Paul Tatum, had managed to quash his persona non grata status in Monaco; how Italians engaged in criminal activities queued up for citizenship in Monaco as protection from prosecution in Italy.
Incredulous and appalled, JLA concurred with me that a zero-based review within the Palace and at all government ministries would be a sensible way to proceed.
During the next two weeks, JLA told me, he would move from Paris to Monaco and take up his duties officially on November 15th. We agreed to meet in Paris before then.
When I met with police Captain Yves Subraud that afternoon, he had some interesting news: Earlier in the week Minister of State Proust requested police files on our various targets.
Proust had also snagged the Prince with his idea of creating an intelligence service. He and his allies, including Franck Biancheri, had become determined to hijack the flow of intelligence having taken a hard look at what the Prince pledged to change, realized intelligence was the means—and wanted to commandeer and control it.
Albert and I met that evening at nine o’clock for a working dinner at Fusion. At my suggestion the Prince had phoned Monaco Mayor Georges Marsan to warn him off a dirty Romanian named Franck with whom Marsan had been associating. As expected, Marsan was totally awed.
The Prince was reaping the benefits of a good intelligence service: A feeling of empowerment. Knowledge is power, I reminded him.
So, the Prince asked me, what should he do about Proust’s insistence on creating an official intelligence service?
My answer: Tell him you are one step ahead—that you already have a plan to enlarge SIGER, the police political unit. It needed two additional officers, greater operational security and more equipment. Voila—an official intelligence service—one that the unofficial service (his own ) had already co-opted!
“Organize this with JLA,” he instructed.
Operation Scribe: Underway with USA Today, which I had contacted for publishing a positive newspaper article on how Prince Albert of Monaco was cracking down on corruption.
Next day, Minister of State Proust moved in on JLA, pushing for an intelligence service that would be run by his crony Alain Malric, a Frenchman who headed gambling enforcement for the police department. We already knew that Malric was corrupt, took bribes and had passed police data on Stephane Valeri to Franck Biancheri.
Malric was a Freemason in GLNF, the same lodge as Proust. Malric, Proust and Franck Biancheri were a troika and, while Biancheri was not actually a Freemason, he apparently wanted to be, so Proust had taken him under his wing to become a member of a Freemason-extension group based in Paris-based called Club 100, previously called Horizon 2000. As its name suggests, it comprised of a hundred “outsiders” accepted by the Freemasons.
This was a brazen attempt to both politicize and hijack the intelligence apparatus.
JLA put him off, saying the matter would be considered and revisited at the end of November. JLA agreed that my idea of building SIGER into something bigger and better was the great way to circumvent Proust’s plan while also improving an already existing unit.
Paris
I presented myself at Lagardere Media for an 8:30 breakfast meeting with JLA. As I stood at the open French windows of JLA’s expansive office and admired a view of golden sunlight upon the Arc de Triomphe, I wondered if this poor fellow knew what the hell he was getting into, moving from a high-powered corporate job in one of the world’s most beautiful cities to a cutthroat royal court inside a gossipy, malicious hurricane of exploiters, working for a man who cared more about his next date than affairs of state.
JLA’s last day in this office would be the following week. A secretary brought in breakfast: coffee, orange juice, croissants, brioche, butter, and jam.
I provided JLA with various dossiers.
Regarding Philippe Narmino: He had already blackened the name of the current Chief of Judicial Services and jostled him out of position to make room for himself, expecting his own appointment to that top job any day.
With reference to SIGER: Its officers operated in fear of retribution for investigating corrupt government officials. They needed protection, insulation and autonomy to investigate without fear of losing their jobs or being transferred to traffic control. They needed greater powers to inspect records and question suspects and witnesses. JLA concurred.
I briefed JLA on our liaison partnerships with the CIA, MI6 and DST, and our new program—now that Albert was the Sovereign Prince—to cultivate relationships with other intelligence services.
I also warned JLA about Thierry Lacoste’s conflicted interests in Monaco. JLA assured me that while Lacoste had been the Prince’s lawyer and confidante in the past, he would now return purely to his role as lawyer. I had my doubts.
Monaco
On November 21st, JLA and I had a working lunch of take-out pizza at M-Base in Monaco. He had just fired three persons at the Palace, including Raymond Biancheri.
The knives came out of their sheaths that night.
Top of the agenda: Philippe Narmino. He expected to be appointed chief of judicial services. I advised against it. How could the Prince put a crook in charge of Justice? My advice: Take a stand, send the right signal to everyone—do not make this appointment.
Second: The restructuring of SIGER. I ran through my notes of what needed to be done and promised a written report. JLA concurred with my plan, as had the Prince.
Third: Franck Biancheri. Pending my final written report, it was already clear Biancheri would be removed as finance minister—it was just a question of when. Proust had already been told to expect this; the minister of state was surprised but had held his tongue.
The crunch had come to harness all we had on Biancheri for a final report.
Meantime, we received reports from an extremely reliable source that Biancheri was feeling “completely destroyed.” It would have been the perfect time for me to recruit him. Biancheri realized the Prince knew the truth about his corrupt activities and he seemed ripe for rehabilitation—anything that could save him in the Prince’s eyes. Biancheri knew a lot. We could have used his knowledge. But only Albert could decide whether Biancheri should be brought to M-Base and turned around to cooperate with us. My own view? If we could not arrest and prosecute him, we might as well benefit from what he knew. With Biancheri blowing the whistle, we could have taken down the whole rotten gang, not least because by this point he had almost broken contact from kingpins Michel Pastor and Gerard Brianti.
At 5:15 p.m. on December 6th, the Prince and JLA arrived at M-Base. I had two written reports ready for them to read. The first dealt with Franck Biancheri, a four-page, single-spaced document that they read in front of me.
They had, of course, already heard much it of it orally, during several briefings. But nothing compared to seeing it fully structured in black and white.
When he finished reading, the Prince looked at me, then at JLA, and said quietly, “We should make Biancheri ambassador to Uganda.”
Unfortunately, the Prince declined the chance to cultivate Biancheri and “turn” him, as he was concerned about my exposure through such tactics. I still think of this as a missed opportunity.
Next: My written report on how to revamp SIGER.
The Prince and JLA nodded to each other once they finished reading.
Albert’s next stop, along with JLA: A six o’clock meeting with Minister of State Jean-Paul Proust, specifically to discuss the minister of state’s desire to create his own intelligence service.
Before departing, the Prince urged me to proceed quickly with a final, written report on Philippe Narmino. “The French,” he said, were pressing him to appoint Narmino chief of judicial services. (As I later discovered from DST chief Pierre de Bousquet de Florian, this was utter nonsense. It was corrupt French Freemasons who were pushing for this appointment.)
At ten past nine, the Prince phoned me, having just finished his meeting with Proust. He and JLA had shot down Proust’s plan to create an intelligence service under Alain Malric.
“He needed resuscitation,” the Prince told me excitedly, enjoying the thrill of finally taking charge. “He looked as if he was having a coronary.”
When the Prince returned to our safe house 20 minutes later, I stood outside the elevator awaiting him with a celebratory martini in hand.
Inside, sitting at the bar, Albert replayed it for me: Proust claimed to have consulted France’s interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin on his plan and received their blessing. When told by the Prince to expand SIGER instead, Proust said, of course we can do that, but we need an international department. His idea: Bring in three French intelligence officers to handle liaison.
I shook my head and reiterated the hazards of permitting another country to co-opt the Prince’s intelligence service.
Then I put Albert to work signing a dozen first day-of-issue envelopes with Monaco postage stamps bearing his likeness—Christmas gifts to our network of assets, informants and others who assisted our service with logistical support.