How to get ahead in the Paris underworld

Simon Heffer enjoys this gruesome exposé of the 1940s French gangsters who did the Gestapo’s dirty work

DTHE KING OF NAZI PARIS by Christopher Othen 356pp, Biteback, £20, ebook £16.67

uring the four years that France was occupied, 90,000 résistants were killed by the Nazis. Millions more of the French, however, did little or nothing to disrupt German rule, and some – as Christopher Othen reminds us in this highly readable, if gruesome book – even used the occupation to build criminal empires, live off the fat of the land and make a fortune. The only consolation was almost all of them ended up in front of the firing squad, too.

The central figure of Othen’s book – his thuggish, charmless mugshot stares out from the cover – was Henri Chamberlin, alias Lafont. During the “hollow years” (those leading up to the war, when the Third Republic was in a state of near collapse) Chamberlin was in and out of prison. His main crony was a disgraced police inspector,

Pierre Bonny, once famous, then drummed out of the force in the mid-1930s for corruption.

Chamberlin’s fortunes went up several gears when the Germans came in. The Nazis’ targeting of the Jews allowed him and Bonny to get rich quick by looting Jewish property in Paris and selling it for high prices on the black market. Before long, they had amassed a gang, based at 93 rue Lauriston, known as the Carlingue – the “firm” – which was able to operate with impunity by giving the Nazis a cut of the proceeds and any intelligence they picked up about the resistance to boot.

Transformed by the Germans’ patronage from unsuccessful crooks to highly successful ones, Chamberlin and Bonny then moved up a notch, doing odd bits of dirty work for the SS and Gestapo that the occupiers would rather not be seen to do – notably killing people – or tracking down résistants, where it helped to be a native. Although relations were strained from time to time – such as when the hoods stole things they should not have done – the Bonny-Lafont gang prospered until their German masters packed up and fled Paris in

August 1944.

In doing the Nazis’ dirty work, these criminals would often revert to type. They would spare people’s lives, for example, in return for cash, or in one case – that of the duc d’Ayen – because they seemed to find him rather good company when they went to kill him (he eventually died in Bergen-Belsen the day before it was liberated). They were supplied with Gestapo identity cards, which they had only to show to the French police for the authorities to look the other way.

Chamberlin’s clout was such that he could spring anyone from prison, which meant he had the entire underworld at his disposal, and – by the end of 1940 – under his sway. Othen goes further, and argues that by 1943 Chamberlin was the most powerful Frenchman left in Paris. It was not only celebrities such as Maurice Chevalier who came to him for favours (something Chevalier tried hard to live down after the war), but even the head of the Vichy government,

Pierre Laval, on the grounds that Chamberlin had better access to the most influential Germans than he, a de facto prime minister, did. Chamberlin was even asked by the Nazis to recruit a band of North African criminals to go into the countryside around Tulle and ferret out the resistance; instead, all they did was steal, rape and murder often innocent locals.

Chamberlin’s criminal network

embraced all sorts. One was Joseph Joinovici, a Jewish scrap metal merchant, who in return for a large sum of money and other services rendered became, the Germans decided, not Jewish. Another was Alexandre Villaplana, a pied-noir who left Algeria at the age of 16 and ended up captaining France’s football team in the first World Cup in 1930. He stood to make a fortune when French football went professional in 1932, but having bought his own team he started bribing its opponents to lose, and was thrown out of the game. By the time war came he was an ex-con, facing another stretch in prison for receiving stolen goods. He was a natural fit into Chamberlin’s mob, along with other dubious characters such as Pierrot le Fou (“Mad Pete”) and, even more imaginatively, Charlot le Fébrile (“Feverish Charlie”).

Othen tells the story of these repulsive men and their exploits with brio. His book is based almost entirely on secondary sources, but when he describes the men burning all the files they had as the Allies approached Paris, it may explain why there are so few documentary sources for an author on this subject to consult. Sometimes his imagination takes over – he cannot truly know what the expressions on the gangsters’ faces were as they waited to be executed – but he captures their sordid milieu perfectly, even bestowing a certain nobility of spirit on Chamberlin as he conjures up the equanimity with which the gangster faced his eventual arrest, holed up in a farmhouse in the country just outside Paris. “I didn’t deserve this fate,” Chamberlin said as he was tied to the stake before the firing squad, “but long live France, anyway.” As he and the former French football captain were led out to their deaths, Chamberlin allegedly joked: “This is one penalty you can’t save, my friend. No need to dive.”

But then Chamberlin, for all his crudity and amorality, was blessed with some capacity as a philosopher. He realised he had lived well and that the peace held no appeal for him; he realised too, late in the day, that he had picked the wrong side, and the settling of scores would be awesome (as it was). But then he also recalled the women (he had, one of his cronies noted, worked his way through the aristocracy until all that remained for him to seduce were a grand duchess, archduchess, queen and empress – but, sadly, the border was closed), the bags of gold, the fast cars, the luxury flat, the avoidance of the four years of privation and misery inflicted on his fellow countrymen, and he seems to have decided it was a price worth paying.

Othen ties up the loose ends, explaining what became of the unexecuted, and detailing the part in French cultural history that these underworld figures played. Certainly anyone familiar with French gangster films of the 1950s, one of the most enjoyable genres in all cinema, will recognise the types whose foreshortened lives he chronicles here. To the British reader, however, it is yet another reminder of how fortunate we were that we did not have to make some of the choices forced on the French 80 years ago. The depravity outlined in these pages would not have proved entirely impossible for some of our own criminal class to emulate.

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The ringleader pulled strings for Maurice Chevalier and even the Vichy government