Rich industrialist who was tortured and had his fingertip cut off by kidnappers

Patricia Empain opened locker No 595 at the Gare de Lyon in Paris and pulled out a package. Inside was the bloodied tip of her father’s left little finger, preserved in formaldehyde. She had been directed there by his kidnappers.

The ordeal had begun at 10.30am on January 23, 1978, when Baron Edouard-Jean Empain, who has died of bronchitis aged 80, left his home on the exclusive Avenue Foch in Paris, just off the Champs-Elysees. One of the richest and most influential industrialists in Europe, Empain was president of the EmpainSchneider group, employing 120,000 people in

150 companies making weapons, steel and nuclear-power equipment, and building roads and railways.

He had travelled about

50 metres when his car was ambushed by masked gunmen. He was driven to an underground car park, was handcuffed, gagged, thrown in the boot of another car and driven to a ruined house in a wood.

His captors used a kitchen knife to hack off part of his finger. They then phoned his daughter and told her where to find it. With the finger was a letter in Empain’s writing, his identity card and a demand for Fr80 million (about NZ$90m today) with a warning that, if the money was not paid, further body parts would follow.

In the days that followed, there was confusion as different groups claimed responsibility. Some suggested Empain had been taken by the German Baader-Meinhof gang, others that a Left-wing French guerrilla organisation was responsible.

Empain later described how for 30 days he was kept in a sleeping bag under a tent set up inside a building. He was held in darkness and biting cold, often blindfolded, with a chain round his neck, wrists and ankles. He was fed on a meagre diet of white beans and was humiliated; his toilet was a plastic bucket. ‘‘I was haunted by two things,’’ he said. ‘‘The first was the fear of going mad, and the second of falling ill.’’ In later hideouts he was allowed to look at the television and read newspapers, although still in chains.

On March 24, Good Friday, after two days of telephone calls and instructions to travel from one spot to another, a police officer posing as an Empain aide arrived at an agreed spot on a motorway near Orly airport, south of Paris, to deliver a holdall containing a mixture of real and fake banknotes. Four gangsters arrived and the police opened fire. In the gunfight one gang member, Daniel Duchateau, a known criminal, was killed and another, Alain Caillol, was captured. Two days later Caillol, warned by police that he could face the guillotine, called on his fellow kidnappers to free Empain.

On the evening of March 26, after 63 days in captivity, Empain was released in the suburb of Ivry-sur-Seine and given cash for his fare on public transport. None of the ransom had been paid, although Empain had signed an IOU promising it would be paid later. He took the Metro to city centre, stumbled into a tobacconist’s shop and telephoned his wife. She told police and collected him by car.

The aftermath was not as he had hoped, either at home or at work. ‘‘I expected a different kind of welcome,’’ he said, adding that it felt as if only his trusty labrador, Love, was pleased to see him.

Before long Empain and his wife were divorced. When his captors’ case came to trial four years later, it emerged the police had scrutinised his private life and disclosed their findings to his family and colleagues. They learnt he had never abandoned his playboy lifestyle nor his extracurricular romantic interests. These, as well as his passion for nightclubs and compulsive gambling, were described in lurid detail in magazine articles.

To escape the publicity, Empain left for California with only a rucksack. He returned three months later, with the intention of regaining control of his company. ‘‘I have certain scores to settle,’’ he declared. He was rejected by his former colleagues and, in February 1981, Schneider-Empain was taken over by Paribas. Yet questions remained unanswered. Why, asked Le Monde, did such an astute businessman sell his shares at ‘‘a price notoriously below their market value’’?

Edouard-Jean Empain, known to his family as Wado, was born in Budapest. His mother, Rozell Rowland, was a HungarianAmerican music-hall actress and nude dancer known as Goldie for her penchant for performing in nothing but gold paint. He was very young when she divorced his father and married the second Baron Empain, who adopted Edouard-Jean as his son.

His grandfather Edouard Empain (1852-1929), a former teacher, was a self-made industrialist and entrepreneur who developed the railways in the Belgian Congo that enabled colonial expansion, constructed the first Metro line in Paris, and built the affluent city of Heliopolis, now a suburb of Cairo.

Edouard-Jean’s childhood was described as one of ‘‘privileged solitude’’, with journeys on private trains through the Congo that would halt to avoid any disruption while he ate dinner. His education never progressed beyond the school baccalaureate.

In 1957 he married Silvana Betuzzi, an 18-year-old Italian actress. He led a carefree lifestyle that included Lamborghini cars, a string of racehorses and waterskiing.

A decade later he decided the time had come for him to take over the family business. He bought out the shares held by his sister, Diane, and threatened to sell to a rival company if his stepfather refused to stand aside. The French establishment treated the new company president with disdain, on account of his being a foreigner and never having graduated from one of the great French academies. Nevertheless, EmpainSchneider continued to expand.

In December 1982 Caillol and seven others went on trial. None were charged with kidnapping because of a lack of evidence, but they were convicted of detaining and torturing Empain. The four ringleaders were each jailed for between 13 and 20 years, while two other men and two women were given lesser sentences.

With the trial behind him, Empain embarked on a new career, running an import-export company. In 1990 he married Jacqueline Ragonaux, a former model, and they started a new life together in Monaco. She died in January and he is survived by three children from his first marriage

Empain refused to be defined by his ordeal. ‘‘To summarise the history of the Empain family by a villainous kidnapping that lasted two months, it’s a bit much,’’ he said in 2015. ‘‘I still doubled the size of the Empain group during my presidency, and the fact that today France has nuclear power is thanks to me.’’

As for his mistresses, he told Le Figaro: ‘‘I did not have more than any other [man].’’ – The Times

‘‘I was haunted by two things. The first was the fear of going mad, and the second of falling ill.’’