Hitmen: True Stories of Street Executions

by Wensley Clarkson

  One of Illich’s earliest high-profile killings occurred in Paris in the summer of 1975, when he cold-bloodedly shot dead two French intelligence agents who’d gone to his Paris flat after a tip-off from Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service. Illich also gunned down the police informer who’d betrayed him and left a message declaring war on ‘Zionist and imperialist targets in all parts of the world’.

  Five days later in London, Illich had his closest shave with authorities. Three glasses of Bacardi and Coke were found half-empty when Scotland Yard detectives arrived in the smoke-filled downstairs bar of Angelo’s Club in Bayswater. The man known to bar staff as a Peruvian economist called Carlos, and two pretty South American women who regularly accompanied him, had all vanished minutes before the detectives’ arrival.

  Scotland Yard swooped simultaneously on a network of west London flats used by the man known as Carlos – all rented by women on his behalf. Investigators uncovered a huge cache of arms, hand grenades and explosives. They also found a hit list of 500 Jewish businessmen and personalities in Britain, including politician Sir Keith Joseph, playwright John Osborne and violinist Sir Yehudi Menuhin.

  But the man then known as Carlos Martinez had vanished off the face of the earth. Carlos the Jackal actually got his nickname from the fictional assassin sent to kill President de Gaulle in Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Day of the Jackal – a copy of which was found in Carlos’ Bayswater flat. Even by 1975 his file – held by British, French and German police – was extensive. It included links to the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972.

  Carlos was also suspected of involvement in the wounding of British millionaire Edward Seiff – of the Marks and Spencer family – the following year. Then there was the seizing of the French Embassy in the Hague in 1974, the bombing of an Israeli bank in London the same year and a grenade attack on a crowded Paris café. Carlos was also sought in connection with a bazooka attack on an El Al Boeing at Paris’s Orly Airport in January 1975. Carlos had a reputation for only carrying out spectaclar attacks and prided himself on his meticulous planning and uncanny ability to slip through any security net.

  In December 1975, with security services throughout Europe hunting for him, Carlos managed to pull off his most spectacular coup when he masterminded an attack on the headquarters of Opec – the organisation of oil-producing states – in Vienna. Three people, including an Austrian policeman, were killed as his guerrillas took control of the offices and kidnapped 11 ministers.

  Calling themselves ‘the Arm of the Arab Revolution’, the terrorists demanded a bus to take them and the hostages to a fuelled plane at the airport, a condition the Austrians eventually agreed to. The aircraft first flew to Algiers, where most of the hostages were freed, then on to the Libyan capital, Tripoli, before returning to Algiers where the guerrillas gave themselves up. They were freed within a couple of days.

  One of the first real insights into Carlos’s character came from a kidnapped oil minister he held at gunpoint. Asked what he was like, the minister explained: ‘Quite charming, the kind of man that if he came home with your daughter you would be delighted.’

  But behind that charm lay a ruthless, cold individual who thought nothing of throwing a grenade into a crowded restaurant or bar. At the beginning, his killings seemed rooted in idealism, but Carlos eventually became nothing more than a hired gun. Together with another legendary Middle East terrorist, Abu Nidal, he became known as the most efficient killing machine available to terrorist groups across the globe: the Ultimate Hitman.

  Those who’ve encountered him over the past 35 years say he is an opportunist rather than a true fanatic. He is not a communist and is now even said to despise the Arabs. But his ability to seduce beautiful young women and convert them to the cause meant that at one stage in the mid-Seventies, more than a dozen different women were being interviewed by police in various parts of Europe about their links with him.

  Not surprisingly, a lot of myths have grown around the so-called legend of Carlos the Jackal. He has been credited with numerous terrorist attacks he played no part in. But security services have definitely connected him to the 1976 hijacking of a French airliner to Entebbe, in Uganda, a drama which ended with an Israeli airborne commando raid to free the hostages.

  Shortly after that operation, Carlos went to ground, living behind the Iron Curtain in both Hungary and East Germany as well as in the Middle East. There were unconfirmed sightings of him in London in 1978, and the following year he gave an interview to the Paris-based Arabic magazine, al-Watan-al-Arabi, in which he challenged authorities to try and catch him.

  Then Carlos’s fingerprints were found on a letter sent to French Interior Minister Gaston Defferre in March 1982, threatening reprisals if his then girlfriend Magdalena Kopp and another activist, Bruno Breguet, were not released. On the day Kopp and Breguet were sentenced by a French court to five and four years respectively for arms and explosives offensives, a car bomb went off in Paris killing one person and wounding 60. Carlos did not claim responsibility for that bombing, although it carried all his hallmarks. However, he did admit to bombing a French cultural centre in West Berlin in August 1983.

  A few months later, on New Year’s Eve, fifty people were hurt when bombs exploded both in Marseille’s main railway station and on board a high-speed train. Two letters claiming responsibility for the blasts on behalf of the Arab Armed Struggle were traced to Carlos, one through handwriting and the other through fingerprints, which had been on file since the killing of those two French security agents in Paris in 1975. A French court eventually sentenced him in his absence to life imprisonment for these killings.

  But even before the collapse of communism, Carlos’ terrorist paymasters were growing tired of his antics. His small, highly trained group of killers had taken to heavy drinking and hiring prostitutes, and one of their favourite party tricks was shooting up the ceilings of hotels.

  Yet both the Soviet Union and Hungary still offered Carlos a safe haven. When Hungary’s Communists fell, the new leaders found a ‘thank you’ note from Carlos to former president Janos Kadar.

  Then Carlos turned for protection to the Middle East – to Baghdad (where he is said to be a personal friend of Saddam and to have carried out a number of attacks on his behalf) and then to Damascus where he lived for some time with his German terrorist lover Magdalena Kopp and their two children, after her release from a French jail.

  Then, in 1991, with new alliances built up during the Gulf War, Carlos was told he had to leave Baghdad. He went to Libya but was turned away and then surfaced in Yemen. Security services throughout the world were shadowing his movements and he was running out of places to hide. When civil war broke out in Yemen, Carlos fled again, this time to Sudan, entering Khartoum on a false diplomatic passport. Within weeks he was being linked with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement, which was behind a number of bombings on Israeli targets in London at the time. They were rumours that Carlos had come out of self-imposed ‘retirement’ to plan some even more outrageous terrorist attacks. The world held its breath.

  Then on Sunday, 14 August 1994, the luck and cunning that had helped Carlos evade capture for so long finally ran out. Carlos was hauled out of his rented Khartoum apartment and arrested by a joint taskforce of French and Sudanese agents. He was immediately flown overnight by armed guards to La Sante Prison in Paris.

  The Sudanese happily helped the French because they believed Carlos had arrived in Khartoum to plan assaults on foreign targets in the country. Agents had him under surveillance even before the French requested his arrest. Several other people were also arrested during the raid on Carlos’s modest apartment.

  Today, Carlos’ home is a drab, grey 127-year-old prison, overlooking a tree-lined Parisian boulevard. Until Carlos’s arrival, its most famous inmate had been former Nazi collaborator Paul Touvier, who was jailed for life in April 1994 over the 1944 execution of seven Jewish hostages. Carlos lives in complete isola
tion, so he does not mingle with any of the other 1,600 inmates.

  Chapter Eight:

  CLASSY

  Sylvia Paterson was the ultimate gold-digger, who used charm and ruthless cunning to drag herself from humble beginnings right up the ladder to the richest lifestyle imaginable. Her eye for the main chance helped transform her from a scruffy council house kid into a jet-setter with two planes, two Rolls-Royces, a Mercedes and two Range Rovers. Flamboyant Sylvia drove each car with her own £20,000 personalised number plate: CLA55Y.

  Yet just months after she was born in Kent more than 50 years ago, her mother walked out on the family. Sylvia then spent a lot of time in a children’s home because her father couldn’t cope with her and her three sisters. Later she was looked after by three spinster aunts but didn’t find any real happiness until she married a soldier sweetheart called David Bardsley. The couple had a daughter, Julie, and a son, Tyrell. And Sylvia became a highly respected nurse, working alongside top doctor Patrick Steptoe when he produced the world’s first test-tube baby in 1978.

  Then Sylvia got her first real taste of the good life when she landed a £200,000-a-year job as personal assistant to a Lebanese business tycoon. Soon she was jetting around the world and discovering a lifestyle she hadn’t even known existed. Inevitably, her long absences from home put a lot of strain on her marriage and it eventually crumbled.

  Sylvia openly admitted to friends she was more in love with those material gains than her husband. She even splashed out much of her high salary on privately educating Julie, now 33, at Cheltenham Ladies College and Tyrell, now 28, at Stowe. Sylvia then started dabbling in several businesses including a property speculation company in up-and-coming Cheshire. Then she met another property developer called John Holmes by chance when she called at his dry cleaning business as a customer following her divorce in 1981. The pair hit it off immediately and teamed up to form a property company called Paterson-Holmes acquiring properties in Hale, Cheshire, and Park Lane, London.

  Sylvia impressed Holmes with her stories of jetting to New York on Concorde and he also greatly respected her business sense. ‘She is extremely clever. One of the best negotiators I have ever met,’ he later recalled. The pair talked about buying a nightclub called Yesterdays in Alderley Edge, which is near the Cheshire home of David and Victoria Beckham. They also planned to invest in a villa in France. Soon Sylvia was able to afford to buy her own £650,000 home in upmarket Wilmslow.

  Then she met retired company boss Ken Paterson at a local pub. His first wife had died a year earlier and Sylvia instantly set her sights on becoming his wife and heiress. But Ken’s son Paul and his wife Sarah almost immediately began to suspect Sylvia’s motives. Soon their relationship with Sylvia descended into utter hatred and contempt. They began trading insults in a flurry of faxes. One message from Paul and his wife Sarah to Sylvia read: ‘As soon as you cause Ken any measure of unhappiness, we will be there to comfort and support him. We will never go away.’

  Soon elderly Ken was having to see his beloved grandchildren in secret behind Sylvia’s back. His son Paul then hired a private detective to find out more about the woman he still believed was trying to get her hands on the family fortune.

  Paul and his wife Sarah even refused to attend Ken Paterson’s wedding to Sylvia the following year. And in another of their many faxes, Sylvia bizarrely claimed that her daughter-in-law had almost run her down when she was crossing a road in Wilmslow. In another fax, she called Paul and Sarah ‘wicked’ and accused them of waging a ‘futile vendetta’.

  But the last straw for Sylvia came when she discovered that her husband intended leaving his multi-million-pound fortune to his son Paul – not her. That was when Sylvia Paterson turned to her business partner John Holmes for advice. She told Holmes she wanted both her stepson and his wife to ‘just disappear’.

  To his friends and neighbours, John Holmes was a tireless charity champion who’d once splashed out £3,600 for a painting by Prince Charles at a fundraising auction. But behind the benevolent façade lurked a vicious, cold-hearted man addicted to cocaine and spanking call girls. For while Holmes’ photo regularly appeared in high-society magazines rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous at champagne charity functions, he was so proud of his criminal associates he kept a photo of the Kray twins in his bathroom.

  And none of Holmes’ influential pals from the wealthy ‘Cheshire set’ realised he’d also served time in jail for molesting a 16-year-old waitress. In August 1998, Holmes had been given a two-month jail sentence for groping the waitress during a party at a bistro in Knutsford. The court had heard how Holmes and another man tried to kiss the teenager and fondle her breasts. He’d even been placed on the sex offenders list. As one of Holmes’ work associates later explained: ‘He was completely ruthless and amoral. No one crossed him or stood in his way. He was determined to get what he wanted when he wanted it. That usually meant money and women. He loved sex.’

  Yet, ironically, John Holmes came from the other end of the social scale to Sylvia Peterson. He was born at St Mary’s Hospital, Manchester, in 1956, the youngest of the three children of the respectable Evelyn and John Holmes. His father was a Desert Rat war hero who served under Field Marshal Montgomery at El Alamein. Holmes attended Prince Charles’s school, Gordonstoun, and left with two A-levels and five O-levels. He set out to make his fortune through a plant hire company, taxi firm and property speculation. His sister Marie married former Manchester City and England player Colin Bell. His other sister, Jackie, was happily married with three children.

  Holmes eventually used funds from the sale of his father’s vastly successful tyre business to Uniroyal to start Park Dry Cleaners in Hale, Cheshire. It was such an upmarket establishment that it once got a recommendation in the pages of Vogue magazine.

  Holmes had married his wife Christine more than 20 years earlier. They had a daughter, Sophie, 17, who has a rare muscle disorder, and 11-year-old twins, Jon and Camilla. All three children went to expensive private schools. The family lived in a £1.2 million mansion in Hale, Cheshire. One of his neighbours was former soccer boss and England ace Bryan Robson. Holmes also owned a £500,000 art collection, which allegedly included works by David Hockney and Salvador Dali.

  John Holmes boasted of a personal fortune of £2–3 million. He and his wife even splashed out £10,000 to decorate one of their children’s bedrooms like the cover of an Elton John album. And Holmes still found time to have an affair with escort agency boss Audrey Clarke as well as sharing hookers with his friends and work associates and regularly picking up women in bars. Audrey Clarke’s company Class Act provided Holmes with numerous women. She’d first met him when Holmes called her agency by phone saying he ‘needed a woman’.

  Audrey arrived at Holmes’s mansion in the early hours of the morning to be greeted by a scene of complete decadence. Ladies’ underwear was draped around the bedroom. On a table were chopped-up lines of cocaine. A brunette woman was slumped in a chair with a glass of champagne in one hand and a cigarette in the other. ‘I knew straight away that Holmes was an unusual man,’ Audrey later explained.

  Holmes then waved his arm towards the rather confused-looking girl and asked Audrey if she could get rid of her. ‘At first I didn’t know what to do or say,’ recalled Audrey. ‘I was confused. I asked why he couldn’t just call her a taxi, but he just shrugged and said she wouldn’t leave. He looked so helpless that I decided to help him out. When I spoke to the girl I realised she was stoned out of her mind. But I’d agreed a fee of £300 with Holmes, and I thought, What the hell? I’ve had more unusual requests.’

  Audrey dressed the unprotesting woman and put her in a cab. Holmes then mentioned there were still a few hours left of their ‘deal’ and pointed to the bedroom. Audrey later recalled, ‘John was a gentle lover, he reminded me of a little schoolboy. I don’t know what had been going on, but he kept telling me how grateful he was to me for getting rid of the girl.’

  Afterwards Holmes and
Audrey sat chatting in the lavishly furnished lounge of his luxurious home. ‘I remember putting my feet up on a huge marble coffee table and thinking, So this is what life’s all about in the Cheshire set.’ Then Audrey cracked open a new bottle of Bollinger and poured them both a drink. It was only then that Holmes properly introduced himself. He boasted about his wealth and important connections, even pointing to a photo on the mantelpiece of himself with then Tory leader William Hague and his wife Ffion. He talked about his contributions to charity, but also hinted at many criminal connections.

  The following day Holmes rang Audrey, said his wife was still away and asked to see her. ‘He also asked me to bring along another girl for a business friend.’ The foursome ate at a local restaurant before going back to Holmes’ mansion. Holmes then left Audrey and her friend alone at the house while they went out to buy some cocaine. Audrey refused to take any drugs when they returned, but found herself intrigued by Holmes’ lifestyle.

  But as the relationship developed over the next few months, Audrey began to see her lover in a disturbing new light. ‘I realised that he used people quite ruthlessly and didn’t seem to care who he hurt,’ she said. ‘He treated his staff like slaves. Then he started to let me down. He was always late, but one night he went too far. Out of the blue, he asked me if he could whip me. I was appalled. I told him I wasn’t into that sort of thing.’

  Holmes even asked Audrey if she could provide him with a girl who might be willing. A few weeks later there was an incident in which one of Audrey’s ‘girls’ locked herself in the bathroom of one of Holmes’ apartments after being told three men in the flat were expecting to have sex with her. Audrey forgave Holmes for the incident after he apologised and said he’d been drunk. But then he upset her again by showing her a set of photos of a woman who’d been severely whipped.