Back in Bordeaux, Judge Gentil had his eye on three big fish: Banier, de Maistre, and President Sarkozy, whom he suspected of soliciting large, and illegal, political donations from the Bettencourts. Sarkozy would have to wait: As long as he occupied the Élysée Palace, he enjoyed immunity from prosecution. But there was an election coming up in 2012 and the polls were not looking good for the incumbent. Banier and de Maistre were easier targets.
—
Monday, December 12, 2011, six a.m. In the predawn darkness, two official cars turn onto the rue Servandoni, their headlights cutting through a fine drizzle. They stop in front of a five-story town house. Four Financial Brigade officers sporting police armbands emerge from the front vehicle; two uniformed gendarmes from France’s military police force climb out of the second. Police Captain Cyrille Rongier rings the doorbell. After a long moment, a groggy male voice answers the intercom. “Police, open up!” says Rongier, waving his badge before the security camera. Once the officers are buzzed in, they wait in the dark, damp courtyard for someone to unlock the door to the building.
Upstairs in their fourth-floor bedroom, François-Marie Banier and Martin d’Orgeval begin to stir. His eyes still adjusting to the light, d’Orgeval steps into the adjoining bathroom and splashes water on his face while Banier sits on the edge of the bed and starts to dress. The two men are neither surprised nor anxious, just fed up with the early-morning police visits that have occurred periodically since the beginning of the affair. They assume that this is yet another search for documents or artworks. The intercom buzzes again. “Open up the door,” barks an impatient officer.
Martin takes the elevator to the ground floor and unlocks the front door. He is surprised to see six officers waiting in the courtyard—two men and two women from the Financial Brigade, plus the two gendarmes. He recognizes Captain Rongier from previous visits. Tall and trim, with a gaunt face and glasses, Rongier shakes Martin’s hand with a formal courtesy. “Good morning, Monsieur d’Orgeval,” he says. “We’re going to go upstairs and explain why we’re here today.”
As he led the officers to the elevator, Martin noticed one detail that was different from the earlier encounters with Rongier: Today he was wearing a bulletproof vest. Had he expected a violent reception?
D’Orgeval escorted the group to the fourth-floor dining room, where they were soon joined by Banier. With a gesture that was almost Kafkaesque in its chilling banality, Rongier pulled out an arrest warrant and announced that the two men would be taken into custody and escorted to Bordeaux on the orders of Judge Jean-Michel Gentil. Then, as if to soften the blow, Rongier admired d’Orgeval’s photos of boxed butterflies that hung on the dining-room wall. “They weren’t here the last time,” he remarked.
This made no sense, thought Martin. If the judge wanted to interrogate them, why didn’t he simply issue a summons? They would have willingly traveled to Bordeaux. But Gentil was playing hardball. His intention, Martin guessed, was to show the couple that he was in charge and had the power to do whatever he wanted with them.
Banier and d’Orgeval hastily packed overnight bags with toiletries, a change of clothes, and a few books. Both men were frisked for “dangerous objects”—there were none—and escorted to the waiting vehicles. They were bundled into separate cars and driven to the headquarters of the Financial Brigade, a modern ten-story concrete-and-glass building near the bustling Chinatown sector of eastern Paris. The address seemed ironically fitting: 122 rue du Château des Rentiers—a rentier being someone who lives on unearned income, like rent, interest, or dividends. During the twenty-minute drive, Martin pulled out his cell phone (which would soon be confiscated) and canceled the flight to New York that he and Banier were scheduled to take later that day.
The two men were put into separate holding cells on the sixth floor of the Financial Brigade Building. Martin stretched out on his narrow bunk, began to read the book he had brought—Images de pensée by the German philosoper Walter Benjamin—then fell into a deep sleep. Banier, meanwhile, exercised his right to request a medical exam; after a ten-minute visit, the doctor declared him fit for detention and prescribed tranquilizers. Angry and depressed, Banier waved away the midday meal.
Martin was awakened shortly afterward by the arrival of a cellmate, a burly black man in his midtwenties with arms as big as hams. He said he had been arrested at six a.m. for using counterfeit credit cards. What was Martin in for?
“Abuse of weakness.”
The other man scowled. “What’s that?”
Martin gave a succinct explanation.
“So the daughter was jealous? And the mother, how many zeros did she give you? She gave you a lot, four zeros?”
“Something like that,” said Martin.
—
At two p.m. the pair were driven to the Palais de justice on the Île de la Cité, the oblong island in the middle of the Seine that includes some of Paris’s most visited sites: the Notre-Dame Cathedral; the Sainte-Chapelle, a world-renowned marvel of Gothic architecture and stained-glass artistry; and the Conciergerie, the legendary prison where Queen Marie Antoinette was held before her beheading in 1793. During the French Revolution, the Conciergerie was considered the antechamber to the guillotine; very few prisoners got out alive.
Fortunately for Banier and d’Orgeval, their destination was the more prosaic Dépôt, the underground cell-block complex for prisoners awaiting court appearances. After a short stay there, they were handcuffed, tethered, and led separately through the labyrinthine warren of passageways known as the souricière—the mouse nest.
They were escorted to the office of a judge who formally remanded them into custody and ordered their transfer to Bordeaux by a special unit of the gendarmes on December 14—two days away. In the meanwhile, they would remain incarcerated in Paris.
The detainees, still handcuffed, were hustled into an armored van flanked by two motorcycle escorts with sirens blaring. Destination: La Santé, Paris’s oldest and most notorious prison. A lugubrious hulk of stone and brick built under the reign of Napoleon III, La Santé—it means “health” in French—was the site of countless beheadings until capital punishment was abolished in 1981.
Banier and d’Orgeval were kept in the so-called VIP wing, away from the hardened criminals who dominate the inmate population. But not that far away: The cell next to Martin’s was occupied by Ilich Ramírez Sánchez—alias “Carlos the Jackal,” the Venezuelan terrorist who had masterminded some of Paris’s bloodiest bombings in the 1970s and ’80s. Banier’s neighbor was more genteel: He was Vicomte Amaury d’Harcourt, then eighty-seven, scion of one of France’s most aristocratic families, who had helped a friend arrange for a gardener to murder his wife with a sawed-off shotgun in 2008.
“It was a violent experience,” recounts d’Orgeval, who was accused in his own right of obtaining gifts worth more than €3 million from the heiress. “You’re in prison, they take away your shoelaces and belt so you won’t hang yourself. The hardest thing was the arbitrariness of it all. We weren’t sure when they would let us out. It could have been months.” The only peaceful moment, he recalls, came late at night, when he heard “in the middle of the grave silence a supernatural, spiritual chant, a beautiful male voice, the prayer—the muezzin—which I realized could only have one effect on us prisoners: to save us. I understood the influence of Islam in prison.”
On December 14, after two nights in jail, the two men were taken to Orly Airport. Escorted by six uniformed gendarmes and handcuffed like common criminals, they boarded a commercial Air France flight for Bordeaux, much to the amazement of their fellow passengers. Once arrived at the Bordeaux courthouse, the detainees were obliged to hide their faces with blankets to avoid being snapped by the gaggle of paparazzi who awaited them—obviously tipped off by the authorities.
After another long wait in holding cells, they were called separately before Judge Gentil. Banier, who went first, recalls that the judge was hostile from the beginning, hectoring him in a “high, grating voice” and berating him for placing his coat on an empty chair. To each man in turn, Gentil read out the charges—fraud, abuse of confidence, abuse of weakness, money laundering—and informed them that they were mis en examen, that is, formally placed under investigation for suspected wrongdoing, one step short of a criminal indictment. Banier was ordered to put up bail in the amount of €10 million; d’Orgeval’s payment was a comparative bargain at €1 million.
Never one to hold his tongue, Banier protested before the judge “the extremely brutal way” that he and Martin were imprisoned, contested all the charges, and denounced the whole procedure as a “scandalous machination.” Looking back on the incident, Banier’s lead lawyer, Pierre Cornut-Gentille (no relation to Judge Gentil), says there was “absolutely no reason” to arrest his client. “He wasn’t a fugitive from justice, he was in his own home.” The flight to Bordeaux in handcuffs was intended to “humiliate and intimidate” the two men, says the lawyer, still bristling with indignation. “You can’t do that in any democratic country.” He tells me Banier’s legal team is planning to bring a case against France before the European Human Rights Court for “violation of liberty.”
—
Things had gone downhill for Patrice de Maistre since he was unceremoniously fired from Madame Bettencourt’s employ after seven years of devoted service. His ouster had been one of Françoise Meyers’s key demands when the reconciliation pact was being hammered out in the fall of 2010. “Either you become an obstacle, or you lie down and take it,” Pascal Wilhelm told de Maistre at the time. The financier had little choice but to lie down. At Liliane’s insistence, he was paid a generous severance, plus €500,000 for his legal bills. But the episode left a bitter taste in his mouth. “I was on the wrong side, I was no longer wanted,” he said. “I took that with a lot of resentment.”
But his troubles were just beginning. Not only was de Maistre suspected of exploiting Madame Bettencourt and engaging in quid-pro-quo deals with Éric Woerth; he was presumed to be the main conduit for political payments to President Sarkozy. When Nanterre prosecutor Philippe Courroye was still in charge of the original abuse case, he had apparently bent over backward to make sure de Maistre was not interrogated, even though he was Liliane’s closest adviser and one of the people most deeply involved in her affairs. According to Courroye’s rival, Isabelle Prévost-Desprez, the prosecutor had specifically instructed the Financial Brigade detectives to leave de Maistre out of the investigation. She and other jurists involved in the case were convinced that Courroye was thereby attempting to protect his friend Sarkozy.
In fact, Courroye did have de Maistre briefly detained and questioned in July 2010, but that was in the context of his investigation into suspected tax evasion, which had no link to the president. In any event, de Maistre enjoyed no special treatment once the affair was transferred to Bordeaux. On the contrary, Judge Gentil was gunning for him.
—
Wednesday, December 14, 2011, 6:50 a.m., Air France 977 touches down at Charles de Gaulle Airport after a seven-hour flight from Libreville, Gabon. The Boeing 777 taxis slowly to Terminal F. Patrice de Maistre, carrying a black canvas satchel, disembarks and treks with his fellow passengers down the long corridor toward the passport control area. Exhausted by the overnight flight, he is eager to get home after this quick round trip to attend a board meeting of one of the African companies in which he has interests.
Led by Commandant Didier Cheneau, three detectives from the Financial Brigade intercept the financier and present him with an arrest warrant issued by Judge Gentil on December 9, the same day as Banier’s warrant. Following the same scenario, they load him into a waiting van and take him to a judge, who certifies his detention. Like Banier and d’Orgeval, de Maistre is then locked up behind the grim walls of La Santé to await his transfer to Bordeaux.
Fortunately for de Maistre, he had to spend only one night in prison, and he was spared the handcuff treatment on the flight to Bordeaux. But his reception by Gentil on the afternoon of Thursday, December 15, was no more cordial than Banier’s. The judge laid out the charges against him—abuse of weakness, complicity in fraud, abuse of confidence, and money laundering—then put him under formal investigation. In addition, he was placed under judicial supervision and ordered to pay a bail of €2 million.
Three months later, de Maistre was back behind bars—but this time it was no overnight affair. On March 23, 2012, under the guise of pretrial detention, Judge Gentil had him locked up in Gradignan Prison near Bordeaux and kept him there for an excruciating eighty-eight days. It is hard to see why the sixty-three-year-old financier and yachtsman, alone among the Bettencourt defendants, warranted such a prolonged incarceration. He was hardly a menace to society. What Gentil really wanted, it seems, was to squeeze de Maistre until he coughed up the information that could nail Sarkozy.
The president sensed the danger. On December 14, 2011, the day de Maistre was first detained, Sarkozy summoned his key advisers to an emergency meeting to weigh the latest developments in the Bettencourt case. According to one attendee, Xavier Musca, who had replaced Claude Guéant as the Élysée’s chief of staff, Sarkozy was worried about the press campaigns seeking to implicate him in the scandal and sought advice on how to organize his defense. A key subject of discussion at this and two subsequent meetings was the arrest and interrogation of Patrice de Maistre. Would Gentil manage to extract anything incriminating out of the financier?
—
There were several reasons why a judge like Jean-Michel Gentil might have had it in for the president. One was Gentil’s hard-line stance against corruption. Another was Sarkozy’s crusade to abolish the whole corps of juges d’instruction, the five hundred or so investigative magistrates who, in the president’s eyes, were too independent and often abused their far-reaching powers—mainly by going after politicians like himself. Sarkozy’s proposal to replace them by government-appointed prosecutors was met by angry protests from the magistrates’ unions and finally put on the shelf. But Sarkozy’s verbal sallies against the judges, like his aborted attempt to obliterate them, fed what the Nouvel Observateur called a “hatred of rare intensity between the magistrates of France and the Élysée.” Thus the transfer of the Bettencourt dossier to Gentil and his two fellow judges was seen by many in the profession as their chance to exact revenge on a president who had declared a veritable war against them.
Gentil wanted to know whether de Maistre had given political money to campaign treasurer Éric Woerth or directly to Sarkozy, in spite of the financier’s repeated denials. According to accountant Claire Thibout, as noted, Madame Bettencourt had handed de Maistre an envelope containing €50,000 on January 18, 2007. On the morning of January 19, de Maistre and Woerth met in a café near Sarkozy’s campaign headquarters. Did de Maistre slip the cash to Woerth on that occasion?
Shortly after this meeting, de Maistre began to draw far greater sums from Madame Bettencourt’s Swiss accounts. On January 30, 2007, he had flown to Geneva and instructed René Merkt, Madame Bettencourt’s Swiss lawyer, to have €400,000 in cash delivered directly to the family mansion in Neuilly. Merkt called on the services of COFINOR, a Swiss company specializing in discreet cash transfers. On February 5, 2007, a COFINOR courier arrived at the Bettencourt mansion with a briefcase containing €400,000 in crisp new bills. That was just the first tranche. Between that date and December 2009, COFINOR made seven deliveries, totaling €4 million, all on de Maistre’s personal orders.
Under questioning, de Maistre claimed that he had acted on Madame Bettencourt’s instructions and that all the cash had been given to her. Inexplicably, he claimed to have “destroyed” all the receipts and told investigators he didn’t know what she did with those considerable sums. An analysis of her account books and expenses for the period indicated that these Swiss funds had not been used by the heiress. So what happened to the €4 million?
The obvious suspicion was that at least some of that money went to Sarkozy. To date there had been no concrete proof, but the magistrates noted a number of intriguing coincidences. On February 7, 2007, for example, two days after the first €400,000 delivery, de Maistre and Worth had breakfasted together. Then at 7:20 p.m. the same day, Woerth met with Sarkozy at his campaign headquarters. Later that month, in the heat of the election campaign, Sarkozy himself had made at least two visits to the Bettencourt home, feeding suspicions that he received money directly.
Some observers went as far as to speculate that the money was for Sarkozy’s personal use. “For his campaign? Not at all,” says Judge Isabelle Prévost-Desprez. “I am convinced that it had nothing to do with that. It’s for his watches, his suits, all that. . . . I really think it’s personal.” Prévost-Desprez had no proof of this, of course, but she was not alone in thinking that perhaps some of the money wound up in Sarkozy’s pocket.
Under Gentil’s repeated interrogations, de Maistre never provided a clue about where the money went. For nearly three months, he stuck to his story: Claire Thibout’s €50,000 claim was a “lie,” and the €4 million in cash went to Madame Bettencourt. On June 14, 2012, hoping to shed some light on this murky episode, Gentil organized a confrontation between de Maistre, Merkt, and COFINOR president Vahé Gabrache via an audiovisual link between Bordeaux and Lausanne. Gabrache confirmed the seven cash deliveries, three of which went directly to de Maistre. Merkt said the requests for funds always came from de Maistre, not from Madame Bettencourt, and that he had never before been asked to send cash to the Bettencourts. Neither Merkt nor de Maistre could provide any motive for the deliveries.
Gentil became impatient with de Maistre. “Wasn’t it simply because all the cash received between 2007 and 2009 was intended to be distributed secretly with total opacity?”
“No!” replied de Maistre. “The answer is no.”
Gentil persisted: “At the time, Liliane Bettencourt wasn’t capable of remembering her request, which is curious to say the least. Today, Liliane Bettencourt doesn’t even know who you are. Didn’t you simply use this system . . . to secretly obtain €4 million for your own personal ends, knowing that Madame Bettencourt would not even remember it?”
“That’s absolutely wrong,” de Maistre protested.
—
Four days after this confrontation, Gentil finally ordered de Maistre’s liberation. There was clearly nothing more to be gained from keeping him in prison, although the judge exacted an additional bail payment of €2 million, on top of the €2 million that he had required when de Maistre was first arrested in December. That made a nice round sum of . . . €4 million.
Though Gentil failed to break de Maistre, he had learned enough to go after the president himself as soon as time and circumstances would permit. He was still playing hardball.