"TERROR OF SOHO."

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 241, 11 October 1930, Page 3 (Supplement)

"TERROR OF SOHO."

NEW POLICE HUNT

LINK WITH OLD MYSTERY

At the request of the Pans Surete, searching inquiry is being made 111 the London underworld by Scotland xard ior a possible clue that may reveal the slayer ot the Spanish dancer Casimir Micheletti, who once was known as the "1 error ot Soho." , , . Micheletti was shot down by a mastery assassin in Paris, where he had been living after his deportation from London last year. . . A startling theory that is held in some quarters is that there is a close link ot connection between the dramatic snooting down of Micheletti and a London murder mystery which has remained a baffling puzzle for the past five years. One summer night in 1925 a youug Frenchman, passing through Piccadilly among the theatre crowds, suddenly threw up his arms, and before their astonished eyes, sank to the pavement, had been stabbed to death, and his mysterious assailant had disappeared. The dead man was identified as Martial Lechevalier, who was said to have been an acrobat by profession. He had, as a fact, been a prominent member of a gang of aliens, mostly French, living then in Soho and operating the Loudon end of an infamous traffic. It was known as tiie "Bogus Marriage Game," and was an ingenious mqthod of providing undesirable- French women and girls with English husbands, and thus enabling them to avoid .risk by deportation by the London police. This traffic in husbands and wives became a very widespread affair. Large numbers of French and Spanish women of a type not wanted in England were got together by Continental members of the gang operating in Paris, Marseilles, Barcelona, and other centres, smuggled into England with false passports sifter paying heavily for that privilege, _ married to Englishmen ready to sell their name and give the protection of their nationality for a £5 note to a woman they had not set eyes on before the ceremony, and whom they promptly left on its completion, and left free to ply their profession in the West End, and sometimes provincial cities, such as Manchester, Birmingham, Cardiff, and so forth. The men behind the traffic were a vicious, conscienceless lot, dressing and living well, their pockets bursting with money squeezed from the unfortunate women on whom they were battening. Chief of Gang. Martial Lechevalier, it was eventually unearthed, had been one of the chief figures in this gang. His death was the sequel to a bitter quarrel that had broken out among the members of the gang concerning the division of the spoils that were growing with such astonishing rapidity. j But there were people moving in Soho who knew all about it, and there can be no doubt whatever that one of these was Micheletti, who even at that time had earned his nickname of the "Terror of. Soho." Micheletti was one of the chief members of the Bogus Marriage Gang. It was his greed for a greater proportion of the spoils that precipitated the quarrel that led directly to the death of Lechevalier, and that mysterious affair, again, led to a bitter underworld vendetta which has gone on not alone in London, but in the underworlds of French and Spanish cities for five long years. That vendetta helped very considerably the work of the police in smashing the bogus marriage traffic gang, so far as London was concerned, at any rate, and one by one the chief actors were gradually weeded out and on one account or another deported. The vendetta itself went on. Micheletti himself was a marked man, and knew it. A number, of times his life was attempted, but his swiftness was amazing, and time and aguin these attacks developed into "stabbing affrays," from which Micheletti was : able to emerge, if not entirely unharmed, then certainly still alive. That vendetta followed "The Terror" to the narrow streets of Paris when he was forbidden to stay any longer in London. Now it has claimed him, and the death of Martial Lechevalier been avenged. Unless they\ are baulked, as they were so successfully five years ago, there is hope that the London police, as a result of the new inquiries that are going on, may now be able to clear up outstanding puzzles in the Piccadilly murder as well as assist their French comrades in the new crime arising out of it.