Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris (24 page)

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FTER Paulette Grippay’s black satin dress, Massu now made a second connection between the testimonies of witnesses and the contents of the suitcases found at rue Le Sueur and in Neuhausen’s attic. This was the collection of Sulka silk shirts with the monogrammed initials “A.E.,” which were identified as belonging to Adrien the Basque Estébétéguy.
Confirmation came from a tall, stocky man who arrived at the quai des Orfèvres in a new white Bentley: Henri Lafont.

Lafont was undoubtedly one of the most powerful men in Occupied Paris. This was an unexpected position for a former small-time crook who could not read or write. Abandoned by his mother at age thirteen, immediately after the death of his father, Lafont had eked out an existence on the street, stealing café chairs for resale, writing bad checks, and drifting in and out of reform schools and detention centers. His first prison sentence, begun May 15, 1919, was for theft. Ten more incarcerations would follow by 1934, for similar charges, totaling about eight years in prison.

By then, too, Lafont had worked briefly in a number of jobs: errand boy, dockworker, mechanic, car dealer, and chauffeur. He enlisted for two years in the Thirty-ninth Régiment des Tirailleurs Algériens and, later, after finishing his military service, gained work under his alias, “Henri Normand,” as manager of a canteen for the Préfecture de Police.
He had the chance to meet and befriend many policemen. In 1939, with war on the horizon, Lafont tried to reenlist with the army. His application was refused because of his criminal record. His many experiences, both on the street and in prison, however, would bear fruit during the Occupation.

Indeed it was during a prison stay that Lafont met a man who would later introduce him to the German authorities:
Max Stocklin, a tall, cultured Swiss national who had been arrested in the late 1930s for his work as an informer for the German military intelligence service, the Abwehr. When the Germans arrived in France in June 1940, Stocklin’s espionage contacts released him, and he soon recruited Lafont into the Abwehr’s champagne-swilling set then settling into the Hôtel Lutétia at 45 Boulevard Raspail in preparation for its tasks of arresting French Resistants.

By the end of June 1940, Lafont was placed in charge of a new Abwehr creation called a
Dienstelle
, or purchasing bureau, known informally as an “
Otto agency” after the Abwehr’s Hermann “Otto” Brandl, who helped establish them. These agencies bought objects in bulk, using funds provided by the French according to the Armistice, and then sold them to Occupation authorities, thereby facilitating the German exploitation of the French economy and, in the process, greatly enriching agency leaders. Lafont’s bureau, located on
rue Tiquetonne, was responsible for buying food and later clothing, furniture, and objects of gold.

Within two weeks, Lafont had established a second branch of his purchasing agency on rue Cadet, in the seized former headquarters of the Freemasons. This one would concentrate on Jewish property. Other offices opened, including a large one on rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine that focused on the purchasing of wheat, butter, and livestock of Normandy. His profits soared. Beyond that, as with the other Otto agencies, Lafont was making contact with a diversity of Frenchmen, from bankers and lawyers to art experts and black market dealers. Many of these people would later prove helpful as his own star rose in Occupied Paris.

Lafont’s real break came that same summer when he succeeded in infiltrating a Resistance cell that had eluded the Abwehr for six months.
With the help of his underworld contacts, Lafont found the group’s leader, a Belgian named Lambrecht, in Bordeaux, in a matter of days. Then, too, with his underworld methods, including a propensity to crack a whip in a man’s face and repeat “
you will talk” in his surprisingly falsetto voice, Lafont managed to learn the names of the entire organization. The Germans then arrested some six hundred Resistance fighters in Paris as well as in Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, and other parts of the continent.

The leader of the Abwehr in France, Colonel Friedrich Rudolph, an old-fashioned Prussian officer and First World War veteran, was impressed with the resourceful new hire, though he was also appalled by his vicious methods. The German leader agreed to continue employing Lafont “on condition that he does not have to see him.” The Abwehr headquarters in Berlin cabled congratulations to the Paris office for its success, and Lafont’s supervisors hosted a celebration in his honor, culminating with a visit to the brothel One Two Two.

The Abwehr had found Lafont useful indeed. In August 1940, with the approval of a high-ranking Abwehr officer, Captain Wilhelm Radecke, Lafont had been allowed into Fresnes prison to recruit criminals for the expansion of his gang. One of the first of the twenty-seven men Lafont handpicked was Alexandre Villaplane, the captain of the French national soccer team that won the first World Cup in 1930, defeating Mexico 4–1. Villaplane had fallen on hard times in the Depression and resorted to rigging horse races. Another man he selected was
Adrien the Basque, whose Sulka shirts he now identified.