The ‘perfect’ kidnap had a fatal flaw

Press, 4 August 1977, Page 17

The ‘perfect’ kidnap had a fatal flaw

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ROBIN SMYTH,

“Observer,” London

Seven faces starkly lit by a Spanish police cameraman’s flashbulb and $1,600,000 in ransom in Swiss bank vaults are all there is to show today for the perfect kidnapping that was seen as the spearhead of a terrorist offensive against Europe’s business executives.

Just three weeks after the release of Luchino Revelli-Beaumont, the 58-year-old managing director of Fiat in France, in exchange for a S2M ransom, the police of three countries — France, Switzerland, and Spain — are claiming to be rounding up most of the kidnap gang.

One Italian and six Argentinians who were living as political refugees in Spain, have been seized in Madrid. One of the Argen-

tinians, Horatio Rossi, a 41-year-old former follower of the Argentinian dictator, Juan Peron, organised the plot, according to French police.

Rossi’s wife has also been detained for questioning about money in her bank accounts. The Rossis have a luxury seaside villa on Spain’s Costa del Sol. All the Argentinians lived lavishly and ran sports cars. Two of them, according to the police, took part in 1963 in an armed bank hold-up in Buenos Aires in which two bank employees were killed.

Hector Villaion, an Argentinian businessman living in Paris, has been arrested and charged with complicity in the kidnapping. And Hector Aristy, the former Ambassador of the Dominican Republic and a close friend of the

kidnapped man’s family, is still being held in Fresne prison on suspicion of having singled RevelliBeaumont out as the victim. Police in France are still searching for the isolated house within 200 miles of Paris where the Fiat executive was held in a windowless cellar — for 89 days and subjected to a political trial by young jailers who posed as militant leftists. The French crime squad is more than ever convinced that the Fiat kidnapping was a criminal act — with the window-dressing of politics. However, the French-

based section of the gang — the young jailers, whose political convictions may have been as false as the heavy accents in which they spoke four languages — have yet to be identified. It is thought

that they were hired for the occasion in Paris and , have already been paid off with part of the missing quarter of the ransom. Another trouble sign that there is a wider conspiracy involved is the discovery in the houses of the arrested men of pass-

ports stolen from South American embassies in Brussels and Rome. Such evidence that there is part-time criminal labour in Europe ready to be conscripted by gangs of kidnappers is one of the

shadows over the victory of the three police forces. The arrests have coms as a relief to the French businessmen and their families who saw the Fiat affair as the model for Italian-type seizures of business executives to blackmail enormous ran-

soms out of French companies. To avoid setting a precedent, Fiat in Italy officially denied having contributed to the RevelliBeaumont ransom. Has the round-up of the Argentinian gang proved

conclusively that this kind of crime does not pay? Unfortunately, the police disclosures show that the Argentinians mpde astonishingly elementary mistakes. Imitators may be tempted to follow in their footsteps — cutting out the errors. The Argentinians suc-

cessfully managed the first phase of their operation. They seized RevelliBeaumont at gun-point from the hall of nis Paris apartment on April 13 and drove him to a house outside Paris where he was

kept blindfolded for much of the time, watched by masked guards. The contacts with the family were tortuous but were never broken by the police. Albert Chambon, a former French Resistance leader and an ambassador in South America, who

acted as the family’s intermediary, has now been charged with shielding a criminal because he did not inform the police of his meetings with one of the gang. The 68-year-old Chambon, one of whose hurried negotiations was conducted in the nave of Notre Dame cathedral, claims that his friend’s life was at stake, and that the smallest sign of police surveillance would have been fatal. If found guilty, Chambon could be heavily fined and sent to jail for up to three years. It was when it came to the collection of the ransom that the Argentinian organisation broke down.

Four of the leaders came from Spain to receive the two suitcases packed with dollar bills from representatives of the family on a bridge in the centre of Geneva. All four arrived at the ransom rendevous packed intb a small, bright yellow car. It was plain to the Swiss police taking up the trail after RevelliBeaumont’s release three days later that four men in a cramped, strikinglycoloured, four-seater with two large suitcases were not aiming to cross the frontier. Sure enough, it was discovered that they had all checked into the same Geneva hotel under assumed names and nationalities the night before. There, they had rung their families in Spain, giving the numbers to the hall porter who had noted

them down. The same names were found in the registers of other Geneva hotels during an earlier unsuccessful attempt by the family to lodge the ransom in a numbered Swiss account. Scrupulous Swiss hall porters had noted the phone calls.

All Geneva banks were asked to give the names of foreigners who had hired safe deposit boxes after the handing-over of the ransom. The dollar bills were found packed into three of them. So little did they suspect that the game was up that some of the Argentinians were found on the night of their arrest in possession of $lOO bills from the missing quarter of the ransom — although they knew that the numbers had been taken before the notes were handed over. — O.F.N.S. Copyright.