by Gordon Kerr
A huge manhunt was launched. Operatives of the United States Delta Force, a special operations group, joined in, supported later by United States Navy SEALS, who engaged in training and advising the special Colombian task force that was created and which became known as the Search Bloc. Later, a Colombian vigilante force, known as Los Pepes (People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar), added their weight to the search. Los Pepes were given financial support by Escobar’s rivals, the Cali cartel, and by Carlos Castaño, founder of the Peasant Self-Defense Forces of Cordoba and Uraba (ACCU), an extreme right paramilitary organisation. Castaño was also a drug-trafficker. Their campaign against Escobar was bloody and ruthless – more than 300 of his family and associates were killed and large parts of the Medellín cartel’s property were destroyed. It has been insinuated that the Search Bloc and the American forces helped the Los Pepes death squads in their campaign, either through sharing intelligence or even by participating in actions.
Pablo Escobar remained a fugitive for 499 days. But on 2 December 1993 the Search Bloc finally caught up with him. Using radio triangulation technology loaned by the United States, an electronic surveillance team located him in a middle-class barrio in Medellín. A prolonged gunfight took place on the rooftops of Medellín and Escobar was finally dispatched with gunshots to his leg, back and the fatal one behind the ear. That final wound may have been sustained during the gunfight, but, more likely, he was simply executed as he lay wounded.
The Medellín cartel was no more and the Cali cartel dominated the cocaine market until it, too, was brought down in the mid-nineties.
Jacques ‘Jacky Le Mat’ Imbert
France
Marseille has long enjoyed a reputation as one of Europe’s harder cities and Jacky Imbert, known to all as Jacky ‘le Mat’ (Mad Jacky), was one of the hardest criminals the city ever produced. He was also one of its great survivors. Against the odds, when his associates and rivals were dropping all around him, either as victims of gangland shootings or being arrested, Jacky would be left standing, defeating the assassins and duping generations of policemen.
Little is known of Jacky’s early years and the first time he appeared in any official records was in 1963 when he was a suspect in the murder of a gangster, Andreani Baptiste, outside a gaming room in Paris. In the document he is described as ‘a very dangerous individual; a veritable contract killer’, but the police failed to back up their suspicions and he was never prosecuted for the murder.
Neither did the charges stick five years later when he was implicated in the drive-by killing of another Marseille godfather, Antoine Guerini. Guerini had associated with gangsters in his youth, but had became a hero of the Resistance in the Second World War, smuggling arms into Marseille to be used against the Germans. However, at the end of the war he returned to his old ways, rising to become the dominant crime boss in the city and, according to one of the many conspiracy theories surrounding the death of US President John F. Kennedy, the organiser of his assassination. According to this theory, it was not carried out by Lee Harvey Oswald, but by members of the Marseille mob. However, by June 1967 Guerini’s grip on the city’s criminal underworld was faltering and on the 23rd of that month, two hired assassins pumped 11 bullets into him while he sat in his car at a petrol station.
With Guerini dead, everything was up for grabs and Imbert tried to take control of the city’s highly lucrative heroin trade, as well as prostitution and protection rackets, joining forces with the Corsican mobster Gaetan ‘Tony’ Zampa. Zampa, a pimp and the son of a pimp, had begun his career as an enforcer for a small but violent Paris syndicate, the Trois Canards. He had been a major force in the Marseille underworld for 20 years. Imbert and Zampa worked the French Connection – made famous by the 1971 William Friedkin film starring Gene Hackman – whereby heroin was imported from Turkey to France and then sent onwards to the Mafia in the United States. They became immensely wealthy from the drug trade, although they eventually fell out over their shares of the money they earned from extortion.
A few years after their split, in February 1977, Imbert was driving his classic Alfa Romeo onto the driveway of his home at Cassis, a commune to the east of Marseille, when he was ambushed by three gunmen who fired no less than 22 bullets into him. Miraculously, Jacky survived the attack which, police presumed, was organised by Zampa, a fact confirmed by an interview with one of the hitmen in the newspaper, Liberation. He confessed that Zampa gave them the contract and, himself, took part in the hit. As Imbert lay on the ground, blood seeping from his wounds, Zampa is reported to have ripped off his mask to let him see who had shot him. He then barked to the other men: ‘Don’t finish him off. Leave him whimpering like a dog.’
However, Imbert’s only lasting injury was a partial paralysis of the right arm. The newspaper Le Monde knew Jacky well. ‘Small matter,’ it reported. ‘He will learn to shoot with the left.’
All-out war now erupted between Imbert and Zampa and Zampa lost 11 men before things calmed down. Meanwhile, the police detained Jackie for six months, trying and failing to prove a case against him for the killings. Once again, they were unable to bring charges and he walked free. On the other hand, in 1983 Zampa was arrested and sent to prison for tax evasion and fraud relating to nightclubs he owned. On 23 July 1984, he was found hanged in his cell.
Jacky was now free to get on with his life and he lived it to the full, becoming something of a folk anti-hero. He became a champion trotting driver and an accomplished yachtsman. He earned a pilot’s licence and became a friend of the stars, most notably film star Alain Delon, the great French actor who played glamorous gangsters in fantastically popular films such as Borsalino.
He travelled to his properties in the Caribbean and Italy, purchased with the profits from the French Connection. In the 1980s, he described himself as a PR man for a Paris disco that was owned by a Russian businessman, Richard Erman. At this time, he was described in Le Figaro newspaper as ‘looking as though he just stepped off a cinema set . . . larger than life’.
The police tried to get him again in 1993. Aged 63 and known now as ‘The Boss’, he was arrested along with a dozen others in a police clampdown in Marseille. They were arrested on suspicion of armed robbery, protection, slot-machine rackets and money laundering. Meanwhile, Francis Vanverberghe, Imbert’s partner in crime, was also picked up in Paris. They were believed to be behind a dozen deaths as yet another long-running feud had raged along the Mediterranean coast over control of nightclubs. Both Imbert and Vanverberghe denied any involvement, both claiming to have retired from such activities long before.
Yet again, the authorities failed to make a case against Mad Jacky and, before long, he was back on the streets of Marseille.
It seemed as if Mad Jacky had retired. However, French police found it hard to believe and it hurt that they had been trying to nail him for decades, without success. So while they were investigating a criminal operation run by the Russian Mafia which was going to build a clandestine cigarette factory in a warehouse in one of Marseille’s suburbs, they were overjoyed when they overheard, on a tapped phone line, a conversation between Imbert and Erman that seemed to implicate Imbert in the operation. In October 2003 they raided his house and placed him under arrest.
When he appeared in court with seven other accused in November 2004, astonishingly, it was with a completely clean record. His previous convictions had all been expunged by the passing of time and various presidential amnesties. Nonetheless, the state was asking for a five-year prison term, more than for any other of the accused. Prosecutor, Marc Gouton said: ‘Everyone here has testified that without Imbert’s authorisation nothing could be done. He has a very strong character. He is not a man who takes orders. He gives orders and others carry them out.’ Gradually, however, the testimonies he spoke of were withdrawn by prosecution witnesses, leaving as the only evidence of Jacky’s involvement the telephone call with Erman in which all he said was: ‘Look, all these ups and downs, they are beginning to caus
e me problems, you get it?’
Imbert’s lawyers claimed the words were open to interpretation but they failed to persuade the jury and he was found guilty and sentenced to four years in prison for masterminding the operation. At last, they had him . . . or did they? He appealed and on 8 April 2005 the appeal court decided that the telephone evidence was not convincing, finding in his favour and clearing him of taking part in the manufacture of contraband cigarettes.
The authorities were smarting but it did not take them long to come up with another set of charges to try to bring him down. This time, he was charged with extorting £57,000 from a Parisian property developer, Pierre Ossana, and from various Marseille and Paris nightclubs during the early 1990s. He had been up to his old tricks, it seemed, even in ‘retirement’. Naturally, he denied all charges, telling a courtroom ringed by commandos from the French army: ‘It’s unthinkable I extorted money from Mr Ossuna, because he’s a friend.’ Suddenly, Mr Ossuna agreed, stating that the £57,000 was, in fact, a simple loan. ‘I knew Mr Imbert in Saint-Tropez,’ he testified. ‘He never threatened or mistreated me, nothing like that. The 540,000 francs I lent him did not disturb my lifestyle.’ Nevertheless, the judge, Domique Bréjoux, disagreed, dismissing Ossuna’s testimony as untrue.
Imbert was convicted on 6 June 2006 and sentenced to four years in prison. Defence attorney Sophie Bottai had earlier said: ‘Certainly, my client has a past, but he wants to be judged as Jacques Imbert, not as Jacky le Mat.’ Now she condemned the trial and the sentence as a sham and said she would be lodging an appeal.
So, at the age of 76, Jacky le Mat at last went to prison, after five decades of avoiding it. However, at least he was still alive and, what’s more, he had a 35-year-old wife and an 18-month-old son to prove it.
Charles Sobraj
France
Charles Sobraj is not just an extraordinary killer. He is an extraordinary man. Like Charles Manson, this charismatic, half-Indian, half-Vietnamese psychopath is the possessor of a strange power over people – the ability to bend them to do his will and to follow him blindly.
In an early instance of this, Sobraj, aged ten, persuaded his stepbrother to rob a shopkeeper. He explained to his mother how he could ‘always find an idiot to do what I wanted’ and throughout his life he did just that. Along the way, he probably killed around 30 people, mostly unsuspecting young backpackers and pilgrims who had travelled to India and the Far East in search of spiritual enlightenment and met Charles Sobraj and death.
Murder for him was no more than a means to an end. He killed in order to obtain a fresh passport, or jewels or money, in order to fund and maintain an adventurous lifestyle which took him all over Europe and the Far East for many years. ‘If I have ever killed, or have ordered killings, then it was purely for reasons of business,’ he once said. ‘Just a job, like a general in the army.’
Needless, to say, Sobraj’s childhood was unpleasant and difficult. He was born Gurhmuk Sobhraj in Saigon, in 1944, to a Vietnamese mother, Song, and an Indian tailor father. The father left shortly after Sobraj came into the world and Song never really forgave the young Guhrmak for her abandonment.
Gurhmak, however, never really gave up on his father, even after his mother married Lieutenant Alphonse Darreau, a French officer stationed in Vietnam. Instead, his father took on a heroic status in his mind and he determined to link up with him. By now, the family was living in Marseille in France and, with easy access to ocean-going ships, the young Charles would stow away on them, hoping to get to his father in the Far East. Several times he was discovered at sea and sent home to arguments, especially when his fare for the journey had to be paid by his family. Furthermore, Darreau, his stepfather, had been invalided out of the army and saw his step-son as nothing more than a drain on what little income the family brought in.
Meanwhile, in school, he was a handful. He was intelligent but intensely disobedient, and often absent from lessons. The older he got, the worse he became and his family grew tired of bailing him out of trouble until he was eventually arrested for a burglary in Paris and sent to prison for three years. It was 1963.
Life was brutal in Poissy prison and Sobraj had to learn to look after himself. It had been built in the 16th century as a convent and had cells so small that prisoners could not spend the day in them, being herded, instead, into pens. His knowledge of karate helped him get out of scrapes and his natural charm enabled him to obtain favours no one else enjoyed. He befriended a wealthy young prison visitor, Felix D’Escoigne, who provided Sobraj with emotional support and reading materials.
Paroled, Sobraj moved into D’Escoigne’s apartment and, unknown to his flatmate, started to return to the life of the underworld he had left behind when he went to prison.
He met a girl, Chantal, in Paris and to the dismay of her wealthy parents, it looked like they would marry. On the night that he was going to propose, however, he drove her to a casino in a car he had stolen earlier. Later, having lost a lot of money at the casino, he was followed by a police car because he was driving too fast. He responded by driving even faster, but crashed the car, was arrested and sent back to prison for another eight months. Chantal told everyone he had been called up to do national service.
When released again, Sobraj took up with Chantal once more. He had managed to make a lot of money from various scams while in prison and the girl’s parents, seeing that he seemed relatively wealthy, began to come round to the idea of Chantal marrying him. They married in a civil ceremony.
Chantal quickly became pregnant, but things were getting too hot for Sobraj in France. He had been bouncing cheques everywhere and it would not be too long before the police linked him to a series of burglaries from large houses, especially as he had recently visited each one of them.
So he borrowed a car from his friend Felix and he and the pregnant Chantal set out for the East, leaving a trail of bounced cheques, robberies and victims of cons in their wake. When they arrived in Bombay, Chantal gave birth to a daughter.
They began to integrate into life in India, Sobraj using his charm and intelligence to smooth his way into society. Soon they were hobnobbing with some of the wealthiest and most influential people in town and he was finding it easy to carry on with business as usual in this new environment where he was unknown and the pickings were easy.
It was 1970 and his main source of income was a stolen car racket. He would steal or fence cars in the neighbouring countries of Pakistan or Iran and bring them over the border into India, bribing border guards en route. He would then hand them over to the authorities as stolen and buy them back cheaply at auction. He then sold them for a profit to wealthy Indians or Westerners who wanted to drive a Western car.
Gambling was always Sobraj’s weakness. He had already lost large sums of money in the casinos of Paris and in India it got him into trouble once again. He lost badly at the casino in Macoa and had to sell a lot of the expensive jewellery he had acquired for Chantal over the years they had been together. What he would be able to raise would not be quite enough, however, to satisfy the casino owners which, given their capacity for violence where unpaid debts were concerned, could have been bad news. Sobraj met a man who had a plan to rob a jewellery store in the Hotel Ashoka in Delhi. The plan was to hire a room above the store, drill a hole through the roof and drop into the store below. However, the drilling was unsuccessful and they had to get in another way. They told the manager that there was a wealthy potential customer in the room and when he entered the room, they took the keys from him at gunpoint and cleaned out the store.
When Sobraj fled to the airport to make his escape, he found it to be surrounded by the police and he had to abandon the jewels as well as $10,000 in cash that he had taken from the store. He flew back to Bombay empty-handed.
Unfortunately, there had been a witness to the robbery and Sobraj fitted the description he gave. He was arrested and taken to Bombay’s notorious Tihar prison. However, as Charles Sobraj proved several times in
his long criminal career, escaping from prison was not a problem and before long he was writhing in agony, pretending to have a bleeding ulcer. They took him to hospital where they announced that it was not an ulcer but appendicitis. Amazingly, they removed his appendix and he went back to his room to recuperate from the unnecessary surgery. There, he persuaded Chantal, who was visiting him, to drug a guard for him. He told her to breathe in some chloroform to make it look like he had drugged her, too.
He escaped, but was soon picked up again and Chantal was lucky to get away with her phoney drugging. Sobraj managed to get out on bail, with borrowed money, and fled to India, heading now for Kabul in Afghanistan.
There were even easier pickings to be had in Kabul. Wealthy Westerners, mostly naive hippies who had taken the hippy trail east in search of enlightenment and, to Sobraj, conning them was like taking candy from a baby. He, Chantal and their baby lived well for a while. However, bored with life there, he decided to leave, but was arrested at the airport for unpaid hotel bills.
Imprisoned again, he dreamed up an even more dramatic escape than the one in India. He obtained a syringe with which he drew a quantity of blood from his body. He drank the blood to make it seem as if he had an ulcer and was, once again, taken to hospital for treatment. Once again, he managed to drug a guard and make his escape. He fled to Iran.
For a year, he travelled a great deal, using as many as ten different passports. From 1972 to 1973 he lived in Karachi, Pakistan, Teheran, Kabul, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Denmark. But the life had proved too much for Chantal, abandoned in Kabul, and the marriage had run its course. Chantal returned to France and never saw her husband again.