Punk bank robber back from the dead

PARIS • A French punk rocker who handed himself in nearly 30 years after committing a two million euros ($3 million) bank heist, saying he could no longer bear his guilty conscience, was handed a suspended sentence Wednesday.

Gilles Bertin received the five-year suspended jail term from a judge in Toulouse, southwestern France, meaning he can walk free and return to Barcelona, where he lives with his partner and son.

The prosecuting counsel had asked for five years in prison, saying that time and remorse were not enough to exonerate Bertin.

However, the verdict was met with applause from supporters of the singer.

“I had to pay my debt, I no longer had the choice,” he said.

Bertin, 57, was the lead singer in the Bordeauxbased punk group Camera Silens, with some dubbing him France’s answer to Sid Vicious and the Sex Pistols. The group had a cult following in the 80s from anarchists and far-left fans in tune with its nihilism.

Then in April 1988, Bertin and some band members — most drug addicts and several infected with HIV — mounted an armed robbery with the aim of spending the cash before they died. They pulled off the heist at a Brinks deposit in Toulouse. No one was injured.

Despite their anarchist ways, the court was told that the band carried out a “quasi-military” operation to such an extent that police first through they were dealing with hardened gangsters.

However, the group then revealed themselves by ringing the local newspaper to boast of their feat.

All were caught within a year except Bertin, who spent 28 years on the run, living in Portugal and Barcelona.

He told the BBC that he first headed to Portugal where he opened a record store. After 10 years he thought French police were on his tail so he headed to Barcelona with his Spanish girlfriend.

Before his trial, he told the BBC he came clean after a near-death experience with hepatitis. After hospital staff in Barcelona saved him, he realized he had contributed nothing to society and wanted to make amends for his son.

“I realized I had to tell the truth and come clean about my past,” he told the broadcaster.

He then made a phone call to one of France’s most well-known criminal lawyers, Christian Etelin, before crossing the border by train to Toulouse. With his lawyer, he later turned himself in at police headquarters.

“This is the final stage of a long ordeal that I have to go through,” he told the BBC. “However, I am anxious. It gives me vertigo thinking about it especially as I know I risk a 20-year prison sentence.

“But I am really doing this for my seven-year-old son. He still doesn’t really understand what I did during my nearly 30 years on the run but he needs to know.”

He said he did not believe what he did was romantic.

“There was nothing romantic about what I did,” he told the BBC. “In hiding, unable to talk about yourself or to people from your past, including my son, constantly on the lookout in case the authorities find you — and on top of that I was seriously ill.

“Back in the late 70s and early 80s I was an angry young man, a nihilist, an anarchist on a destructive path and in revolt against society. You have to understand the context back then.

“I made mistakes but I am not that same person now — at 57 I am more mature and have nothing to do with that period in my life.”

Gilles Bertin