Punk robber walks free after turning himself in for 1988 raid
A FRENCH punk rocker who handed himself in nearly 30 years after committing a €2million (£1.7million) bank heist, saying he could no longer bear his guilty conscience, was handed a suspended sentence yesterday.
Gilles Bertin received the five-year suspended jail term from a judge in Toulouse, south-west France, meaning he can walk free and return to Barcelona, where he lives with his partner and son.
The prosecuting magistrate had asked for five years in prison, saying that time and remorse were not enough to exonerate Bertin. 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 Bordeaux-based 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 Eighties from anarchists and farleft 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 Brink’s 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 gave the game away somewhat 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 received a 10-year sentence in absentia in 2004. Then, two years ago, he decided to turn himself in.
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 realised he had contributed nothing to society and wanted to make amends for his son.