If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear a hundred battles. If you know yourself and not the enemy, for every victory you will suffer a defeat. If you know neither yourself nor the enemy, you are a fool and will meet defeat in every battle.
— Sixth-century BC Chinese General Sun-Tzu, The Art of War
For all her charms and the love she showed him, Lana could not make up for the loss of Carlos's daughter, hustled away by Magdalena Kopp to Venezuela. Little Elbita wrote letters in Spanish overflowing with childish affection for her ‘Uncle Ilich’. According to his friends, Carlos had always loved having children around and the loss of Elbita greatly affected him. Carlos made no secret of his desire for another child, and Lana was more than willing to bear him one.
Vanity had brought the forty-five-year-old Carlos to the operating theatre for liposuction a few months earlier, but now he discovered he must return to hospital if he were to have any chance of starting a second family. Doctors at the Ibn Khaldoun hospital in Khartoum had diagnosed a low sperm count, caused by varicocele in his right testicle, a condition not unusual in middle-aged men, where the veins of the spermatic cord multiply and become distended rather like varicose veins. Carlos agreed with alacrity to undergo a minor operation, all the more so given that the hot weather heightened the pain caused by the varicocele, giving rise to a dragging sensation in the affected mass of veins which doctors inelegantly likened to a bag of worms.
A short stay in hospital was no reason for Carlos to relax his guard. He was given permission to station bodyguards in the corridor outside his private room, and in another waiver of hospital rules Lana was allowed to spend the night before the operation with him. The surgery, carried out under general anaesthetic during the afternoon of Saturday, 13 August went well and Carlos was wheeled back to his room where Lana watched over him as he emerged from the anaesthetic.
Carlos had still not completely recovered his senses when a uniformed visitor walked past the bodyguards and into the private room. He introduced himself as a member of Sudan's criminal investigation department. Even in his dazed state, Carlos realised that the news that the officer imparted was worrying: Sudanese police had uncovered a plot to murder Carlos. As Carlos needed time to recover from the operation, the officer urged him to agree to be transferred under armed escort to a military hospital where he would be better protected. It was only a temporary measure, the officer assured him. His sketchy answers to the questions put by Carlos and Lana left them none the wiser about the murder plot, but Carlos could not refuse the offer of improved protection.
An armed escort awaited the couple outside the Ibn Khaldoun hospital, but it did not take them to the military hospital. Someone in authority had apparently ordered a last-minute change of plan. Instead Carlos and Lana were whisked to the Sudanese State Security headquarters. There, Dr Nafaa, a deputy director whom Carlos had never met before, gave them a few more details of the plans for their improved security. Again with Carlos's agreement, a convoy took him and his young wife to an empty villa in the Taif neighbourhood on the edge of Khartoum, which Carlos knew to be close to the home of Sheikh Hassan al-Turabi.
Carlos and Lana were far from enthusiastic about their refuge. Although the villa looked fine from the outside, it was in poor condition and shabby inside. The only possessions they had with them were what they had taken from the hospital. They spent an uncomfortable night with Carlos suffering from the stitches in his testicle. On Sunday morning both were eager to return home. But insistent questioning of the bodyguards lounging about the villa proved pointless. Nor was Carlos given any information by a doctor who called briefly to check on his recovery. The couple eventually accepted they would be spending a second night in unfamiliar surroundings. About ten o'clock that evening when the sweltering heat of the day had abated, Carlos, in no state to go himself, despatched Lana with a driver to fetch some belongings from their flat on Africa Road.
Lana did not return quickly, and, still suffering from the aftereffects of surgery, Carlos gave up waiting for her and went to bed. It was about three o'clock in the morning when he felt the breath punched out of his lungs and his limbs were pinned to the mattress. Shock and fear snapped him fully awake but he was given no opportunity to reach for the gun that he always kept by his bedside. As he writhed impotently beneath the weight of his assailants, Carlos recognised his Sudanese bodyguards among the dozen or so men crowding into the bedroom. His arms were forced behind his back and handcuffs clicked shut on his wrists. Fetters were clamped around his ankles. A hood was slipped over his head. However, the hood was too thin to stop him following what was happening.
Carlos made out a Sudanese army doctor — he noted that he bore the rank of major – approaching him clutching a hypodermic syringe. Carlos, who had never lost his childhood fear of needles, was forced to lie motionless as the doctor stabbed the needle into his thigh. Poison, he thought for a brief moment. But one of his assailants reassured him that it was only a tranquilliser. Within minutes Carlos felt its effect start to take hold as he was picked up and carried out of the villa to a waiting van. Unceremoniously, he was bundled inside and laid on a stretcher.
After a short drive at high speed through Khartoum's deserted but ill-lit streets, the van pulled up abruptly. By this time the tranquilliser should have sent Carlos to sleep, but somehow he had steeled his body to fight the drug and managed to stay awake. His mind racing for clues to his fate, Carlos heard the whine of jet engines. When the rear door opened he saw that the van was parked on the tarmac of Khartoum airport near a small plane with no markings. All he could tell was that it was an ‘executive-type’ jet. A few moments after he had been carried up the steps and the door banged shut behind him, the plane taxied to the runway and took off.
As the jet climbed sharply, the men watching Carlos finally realised that the hood was too thin. Another, woollen hood was placed over his head. When Carlos motioned that he was suffocating, the new hood was lifted slightly to free his mouth. The gesture was only a brief respite. With one more affront to his dignity, Carlos was inserted feet first into a large, thick jute sack. With only his head sticking out of the sack, leather thongs were pulled tight around his feet, knees and shoulders. (‘He was tied up like a sausage’ one of Carlos's lawyers related later.)
The last thing his abductors wanted was for Carlos to recover his strength, and throughout the six-and-a-half-hour flight no food or drink was offered to him. Still battling against the effects of the tranquilliser and trying to work out who had snatched him, Carlos heard people talking in low voices in English. ‘Well done,’ Carlos said, struggling to make himself heard above the drone of the jet's engines. ‘You must be Americans.’ But the brusque answer he received was French, and revealed a trace of Gallic pride: ‘Non. You are on French territory.’1
Carlos was in the hands of General Philippe Rondot and a team from the DST. The plane flying him to Paris was a Dassault Mystere Falcon of the GLAM fleet, the Groupement de liaison aerienne ministerielle, officially reserved for government ministers and, as was later revealed in a minor scandal, all too often used unofficially for their wives or mistresses who disdained commoner, public forms of transport.
To have the team initially speak English was a perfidious touch of Interior Minister Charles Pasqua. A country whose governments wage continuous war on perceived Anglo-Saxon linguistic and cultural imperialism had exceptionally ordered the secret servicemen to speak English, to trick Carlos into thinking that Mossad had come for him. ‘Carlos had flattered himself before his arrest that he had killed Israeli spies,’ Pasqua explained. ‘With the DST men speaking English he could think that he was in the hands of the Israelis, who are credited with this kind of operation more readily than the French.’2
But when the counter-espionage team saw that their operation was drawing to a successful close, one of them could not help crowing: ‘Ça y est, Pascal, on y est!’ (That's it, Pascal, we're there!). Moments later the Mystere landed at Villacoublay, a military airport outside Paris. Rondot handed Carlos over to a fresh DST team, who threw him into an estate car. Someone covered Carlos with a blanket, and two men sat on top of him. One of them gripped his head tightly, forcing it down against the floor of the car although Carlos was still trussed up in the jute sack.
It was not until the car was inside the DST's headquarters, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, that France formally revealed itself to Carlos as the power that had captured him. He was served with a national arrest warrant issued by Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, the investigating magistrate who had been specialising in anti-terrorism ever since the massacre at the Goldenberg restaurant in 1982.3 For the DST there was no question of Carlos going straight to prison. The sight of a cowed Carlos brought through its gates in handcuffs and shackles, nineteen years and forty-nine days after the shooting of Commissaire Herranz, Inspector Dous and Inspector Donatini, was too gratifying to miss.
In its desire to settle old scores, the DST did not hesitate to take several liberties with French law, before hastily attempting to mask its cavalier approach. According to the official records of Carlos's abduction drawn up by the DST, he boarded the flight to the Villacoublay military airbase of his own volition. In the first report, Commissaire Poussel writes that he was on duty at counter-intelligence headquarters on 15 August when at a quarter past ten in the morning he was ‘advised by our hierarchy that an individual who might be identifiable as Ilich Ramírez Sánchez alias Carlos, born in 1949 in Caracas, Venezuela, originating from Sudan, was reportedly at Villacoublay’.4
According to Poussel's report, he reached the airport at half past ten and, having found out that the traveller carried no passport nor any other identity papers, ordered his transfer to headquarters.5 Poussel's report makes no attempt to explain how he was able to check whether Carlos was carrying any documents at the time, given the fact that the suspect ‘resting’ on the tarmac at the foot of the Mystère's steps was trussed up in a narrow sack that covered him up to his neck, his hands handcuffed behind his back, and his head covered by two hoods.6
France had violated both national and international law. It had failed to demand Carlos's extradition from Sudan by legal means, and there was no French arrest warrant to justify his seizure. The arrest warrant issued for the Rue Toullier killings was out of date, and that for the Rue Marbeuf bombing – the only Carlos probe that had not been shelved – was valid only within France.
It is an interesting coincidence that Judge Bruguiere had issued the Marbeuf warrant only three months earlier, in June. By issuing a national warrant, the process of going through Interpol to obtain Carlos's extradition from Sudan was avoided. To do so would have given Carlos plenty of time to slip away.
At midday, confronting members of the DST for the first time since he had shot three of them in the Rue Toullier, Carlos was in combative mood. ‘I am an international revolutionary,’ he proclaimed proudly.7 His fingerprints were taken – something that could have been done at the jail – and compared to those found on the whisky glasses in Rue Toullier, and to those on the threatening letter he had written to Interior Minister Defferre after the arrests of Kopp and Breguet. By two o'clock in the afternoon the DST was sure it had the right man. Carlos was escorted to the maximum-security prison, the oddly named La Santé (Health) jail some way south of the Latin Quarter and Rue Toullier.
This was much too hasty, according to Yves Bonnet, the DST chief who had tried to assassinate Carlos in a Swiss Alpine resort in 1982. Elected to parliament as a conservative in 1993, he was careful not to spoil the DST's celebrations at the time of the snatch and kept his misgivings to himself. But later he gave vent to his frustration. ‘The only thing which interested us in Carlos, and which justified our arresting him instead of liquidating him physically, was the identification of his accomplices, the people who got him out of France after Rue Toullier,’ Bonnet argued. ‘Instead of bringing him back with a great fanfare, we should have concealed him somewhere and questioned him. A villain, a bastard like Carlos, we should have beaten him up and tortured him. I have no problems with him being hit with a truncheon. It would have lasted a month or three months, but Carlos wouldn't have left the DST cellars without spilling the beans. Now we will never know.’8
The news of Carlos's capture pulled Pasqua out of bed at half past four that Sunday morning. But Pasqua begrudged no one the lack of sleep. With Carlos not yet at La Santé, the Interior Minister called a news conference. Pasqua did not have to share the spotlight since Rondot had firmly declined an invitation to join him.
Pasqua spoke in the biggest and most regal reception room of his ministry. His elbows resting on a table draped in imperial red, he charged through a prepared statement, pausing only to lick his lips and to throw a commanding glance at his audience of some fifty journalists. The briefing given by the premier flic de France (France's top cop) was a crude exercise in news management. The frankest admission he made was: ‘Several times, we hoped that Carlos would be handed to us. Several times, our hopes proved vain.’ Only a brief reference was made to the ‘friendly services’ that had helped France.
The Interior Minister's version of events was that he had been informed earlier in the year of Carlos's possible presence in Sudan, and that he had then ordered appropriate measures to verify the information with ‘irrefutable proof. The previous morning, on 14 August, the Sudanese authorities told France that they had themselves identified Carlos and that they were ready to respond immediately to French arrest warrants. The DST, Pasqua concluded, had apprehended Carlos at the Villacoublay airbase. No other information would be released as the government had thrown a national security secrecy cover over the episode. In fact, Pasqua had known that Carlos was in Sudan since the previous year, obtained ‘irrefutable proof from the CIA, negotiated with the Sudanese for months, and sent a DST team to supervise his abduction in Khartoum.
Pasqua ensured that the price paid for Carlos, namely the return of two suspected murderers to Tehran and various promises made by the Interior Minister to Khartoum, stayed a closely guarded secret. Any rumour that he had paid for Carlos, be it in the form of intelligence cooperation with Sudan or anything else, he thundered, was ‘a tissue of lies, disinformation, scandalous’. Only ‘twisted minds’ could imagine that France had negotiated with Sudan. Had not Pasqua, when outlining his anti-terrorism formula in November 1986 after attacks had rocked Paris, declared: ‘Neither negotiations nor bargaining’? Pasqua's insistence that he had learned of Carlos's whereabouts only earlier in the year was an attempt to nip in the bud any speculation that Iran might have played a part in the capture.
In what was to all appearances a concerted public relations campaign, Sudan rushed to echo Pasqua's protestations. ‘It was not a deal and the aim was not to obtain grants or aid,’ declared President Hassan Omar al-Bashir, conceding however that ‘it had a positive effect on the relations between Sudan and France.’ Any suggestion that Sheikh Hassan al-Turabi might have been involved was mistaken, the President added brazenly. ‘Doctor al-Turabi does not intervene in such affairs at all.’9
So relieved was Pasqua that Sudan had at last yielded to his entreaties that he tried to redeem the country of its poor reputation. In handing over Carlos, Pasqua said, Sudan had broken with terrorism. But Washington, still no great friend of the French Interior Minister, tempered his enthusiasm with a deadpan comment that Sudan would stay on the State Department's blacklist. It was only much later that Pasqua acknowledged his debt to Washington and the Central Intelligence Agency. ‘The Carlos operation has its roots in the warming of relations between the United States and Syria,’ he admitted. ‘The United States leaned on Syria to force it to stop supporting terrorists. It's true that certain elements from the CIA helped us in pinpointing Carlos. They located him.’ But he could not resist hurriedly qualifying his gratitude. ‘We located him too,’ he added. And he was even less keen on sharing the credit with Rondot, about whom he would say nothing. On the other hand, he had no qualms about recognising the desire for revenge that had motivated the DST: ‘When a secret service is subjected to a serious setback like Rue Toullier, when that setback results in several deaths, the service must avenge itself, it must avenge its dead, it must never forget. Since Carlos killed the DST officers, it had never given up on the idea of arresting him and making him pay.’10
The DST had tasted revenge because Carlos's sponsors betrayed him. The silence of the Arab leaders who had sheltered, supported and hired him over the years was deafening. Of all his patrons, only one of his former mentors, George Habash of the Popular Front, protested at the sell-out of his movement's ex-recruit. Habash, partially paralysed by a stroke, protested at such bad manners, ‘a cheap action against an international fighter who served liberation movements. The Sudanese government could have asked Carlos to leave the country had his presence constituted a danger or had it faced any pressure.’11
Aside from the Palestinian extremists, only one other voice spoke out for Carlos. A friend phoned his elderly father, Ramírez Navas, to tell him that his son's life on the run had come to an end. Ramírez Navas broke down and wept at the news, just as he had done when Carlos had told him two decades earlier of his decision to become a guerrilla. His first call was to his estranged wife. Only atheism, and sympathy with his son's political views, the retired lawyer explained, had carried him through the constant anguish he had felt about his fate. Ramírez Navas had tried to find sanctuary in his homeland for his vagrant first-born. But his appeals to former President Ramon J. Velasquez had fallen on deaf ears, especially after France, which got wind of the attempt to give Carlos a safe haven, threatened to stop selling Venezuela spare parts for its Mirage fighter planes.
Ramírez Navas had long given up on the chances of revolution ever coming about, and over the past years he had been reduced to penning vibrant denunciations of political corruption in his homeland. He expressed his frustration in poems, including one called ‘Vindicta’, which he read only to close friends. ‘I too fight for a more just society,’ claimed the wiry Ramírez Navas, as neatly turned out in his seventies as in his more youthful days. ‘It's not that I'm tired or anything like that but I'm convinced that there are too many forces against that. The only certainty is that Ilich will die the death he wants. He may be the only one who achieves that.’12
In the days following Carlos's capture Ramírez Navas chained a heavy lock to the grey gates of his modest zinc-roofed home, in which hanging bedsheets replaced doors, and names and telephone numbers had been scribbled on the wooden walls, to share the confinement inflicted on his first-born. ‘My son is the greatest hero in the world,’ Ramírez Navas affirmed. ‘He's a great man who does everything out of conviction … I only live for my sons, my three boys, although some think I only live for one of them.’13 From jail, Carlos later sent his father a photograph of him standing in his prison cell in front of a picture of a peaceful rural scene hanging on the cell wall. Carlos scrawled a message for his father: ‘To my old man, in spiritual communion.’
Carlos's mother kept her feelings to herself. When French officers of the Brigade Criminelle flew to Caracas to investigate Carlos's youth, Elba at first rejected their summons, saying that she was suffering from the after-effects of dental treatment. But she later decided to accompany her divorced husband and Carlos's brother Lenin (a millionaire who managed a construction company) to the law courts. She had nothing to say to the French police officers, aside from affirming her right not to be interrogated under a provision in the Venezuelan constitution which exonerates citizens from testifying about relatives.14
Only Carlos's younger brother Vladimir, an engineer, was willing to talk, although he was more than guarded in his responses. ‘I don't know,’ was his stock response to the French investigators. Stretching brotherly loyalty somewhat, he said he knew little of Carlos's love affairs: ‘I only know of his relationship with Mag- dalena Kopp, a union out of which my niece Elba was born.’15
One of the first people whom Pasqua had called after hearing the good news from Sudan had been France's anti-terrorism supremo, Judge Bruguière. ‘Bonjour, Monsieur le juge. I have a parcel for you,’ the minister told Bruguière, whom he had informed three months earlier of the negotiations under way with the Sudanese. From then on the judge, who was to meet the prisoner countless times over the next few years, became the face of the French state for Carlos and as such his sparring partner.
Born in the Basque Country to a family boasting six generations of magistrates – among his ancestors were eighteenth-century parliamentarians from Toulouse who had opposed Louis XIII – the fifty-one-year-old Bruguière was not the kind to suffer fools, or contradiction, gladly. His thin lips part more willingly for a pipe or a Wild Havana cigar than to impart confidences. But when he does share a secret he mumbles it with reluctance out of the corner of his mouth. When crossed, the wrinkles on his brow deepen and his chin juts out in a prelude to a burst of ice-cold rage, which he is adept at faking if that helps him get his way.
Over the past twenty years the judge had grilled the pimps of the Paris underworld, the high-society brothel-keeper Madame Claude, Japanese gangsters, a Japanese murderer who ate his Dutch girlfriend, the last Frenchman to be sentenced to death, gun-runners frustrated in their attempt to ferry arms and explosives from Libya to the Irish Republican Army, Arab guerrillas and Libyan spies. The judge narrowly escaped an assassination attempt when a bodyguard discovered a primed grenade tied to the door of his flat by a nylon thread. ‘The risks of the job,’ Bruguière commented wryly. For ten years he had carried a Magnum .357 pistol, a type said to be so powerful that one bullet could bore its way through the boot of a Cadillac, kill the driver and smash against the engine. The gun had earned him the nickname ‘The Sheriff, not totally unsuited to a man who had on one occasion — before road-rage was given a name — brandished it to wave a motorist out of his way, and who liked to show colleagues and lawyers his quick-draw talents.
Bruguière had earned himself another nickname, ‘The Admiral’, when he commandeered a French navy warship and tried to enter Libya in order to investigate the bombing of a French DC10 airliner in September 1989. He was turned away by Colonel Qathafi. As part of the same probe, he himself piloted a Transall military heavy transport plane over the Sahara, and after handing over the controls parachuted in combat gear to hunt for parts of the downed DC10. ‘I don't keep to the beaten paths,’ the solitary judge confessed. ‘I'm subversive because I use the law, the law pushed to the limit. That necessarily leads to conflicts, institutional conflicts.’16
Carlos was Judge Bruguière's most notorious prize to date, and he had long been preparing for the confrontation. Since he had heard that an abduction was a possibility, the judge had stepped up his efforts to acquire the files of the Stasi. Two years earlier the DST chief Jacques Fournet had sent an envoy to Berlin to draw up a report summarising the contents of the files relating to Carlos. Fournet is by no means convinced that the envoy was shown all there was to see. ‘There was a kind of euphoria when the Berlin Wall fell. We all thought that all the archives had come out,’ explained Fournet, a former adviser to President Mitterrand. ‘Some did come out, but it didn't last. The Germans wanted to preserve national cohesion, and blocked the release of the files after a few months. We were able to verify lots of things, but we don't know what we didn't get. Perhaps there are files on Carlos and the KGB which will come out only in twenty years’ time.’17
Copies of the original Stasi dossiers had started trickling into Judge Bruguière's chambers in July, and he was in upbeat mood as he readied to meet Carlos – in the Palais de Justice, because the judge wanted to do battle on his own territory rather than at the prison. As the magistrate leading the investigations into all Carlos's crimes on French soil, it was Bruguière who under French judicial procedure would now be responsible for questioning Carlos about these crimes. It was also Bruguière who would gather and assess any evidence to support charges against Carlos, and then make a recommendation to the indicting chamber of the court of appeals as to whether Carlos should stand trial.
Judge Bruguière had heard about the defiance Carlos had shown at DST headquarters the previous day, but he was surprised by the bonhomie oozing from Carlos as he stepped through the armour-plated doors into the judge's chambers. He looked, the judge thought, none the worse for his first night in French custody. The moustachioed and balding visitor was dressed as if for a summer cocktail party in spotless white trousers, white shirt and a wine-coloured jacket, his hands handcuffed behind his back.18 The reputed master of disguise, said to have undergone plastic surgery, was a less handsome, podgier but still easily recognisable version of the passport mug-shots which the world's police forces had painstakingly collected.
Earlier that sunny August morning a convoy had picked Carlos up from La Santé and, sirens blaring, escorted him across Paris. The convoy's progress was hampered by a swarm of photographers and television cameramen on motorcycles. The large van carrying Carlos had several big windows and although no one could see in, Carlos was able to watch the landmarks he knew so well pass by: the leafy banks of the River Seine and their picturesque bouquinisces, and the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. Black-clad sharpshooters perched on rooftops stiffened as the van swung into the Quai des Orfevres and then entered the law courts.
The trip apparently did not ruffle Carlos. The prospect of spending the rest of his life behind bars had either not yet hit home, or perhaps he was putting on a show. Judge Bruguière had braced himself for a confrontation, but Carlos's relaxed attitude ensured a steady flow of idle banter. As the two men studied each other, Carlos was careful to betray neither fear nor anxiety.
His first words as he neared the judge's chambers were for his escort of four armed officers of the gendarmerie police, who wore bullet-proof vests over their black uniforms. ‘We too had FAMAS [assault rifles] in Lebanon. That's good,’ Carlos told them, speaking French with a heavy South American accent.
Then, catching sight of Bruguière: ‘And here's Monsieur le juge. How are you?’ Carlos called out teasingly. ‘And you?’ asked the judge. ‘Still alive, and for a long time,’ the man whose obituary had been written so many times answered with a smile. Carlos spoke with a hint of both relief and defiance, before turning to the armed officers and pointing towards Bruguière. ‘He's a star, he is!’ Carlos quipped.
Throughout the two-hour session Carlos treated the judge, with whom he shared a taste for cigars, as an equal. He talked politics, women, and philosophy, and about his memories of Khartoum. Carlos's in-depth knowledge of the state of the investigations into his past surprised Bruguière. In flippant mood, Carlos offered to take the judge out to lunch at the Lutétia, a luxury hotel on the Left Bank, to tell him about his exploits. The judge politely declined. Unabashed, Carlos confided: ‘We're cut of the same wood, you and I, we'll get on well together.’ When the judge asked Carlos which lawyer he wished to name for his defence, Carlos announced that he chose Jacques Vergès, the attorney who had represented Magdalena Kopp. ‘I nominate Vergès because he is a greater terrorist than I am,’ Carlos told the judge. ‘He is responsible for more deaths than I am. He is a terrorist who scares me.’
Carlos was less laid back when the judge formally charged him with planting the bomb outside the offices of the Al Watan al Arabi magazine in Paris in 1982, and brushed aside Carlos's allegation that he had been kidnapped from Sudan. Carlos raised his voice, insisting that he had been leaped on by Sudanese security officers who had protected him until then, that he had been drugged and then flown to Paris. But Bruguière was determined to steer clear of this legal minefield, and soldiered on as he outlined the charges against Carlos. The Carlos who emerged from Bruguière's chambers had lost much of his good cheer. ‘We're both professionals,’ the judge remarked later with a broad smile. ‘Carlos didn't confide in me, but he must have realised that he was at the end of the road. He's lucky to finish up like this, because his end could have been much darker, and more sudden.’