Chapter 1 Pride Before the Fall His friends called him Wado, but the world knew him as Baron Edouard-Jean Empain. With his longish blond hair, blue eyes, and high cheekbones, he could have been mistaken for a movie star-some people compared him to Paul Newman or Robert Redford. Tall, square-shouldered, and athletic, he had been a champion skier and horseman in his youth. Now, at age forty, he was the head of an industrial empire that comprised 174 companies and employed 136,000 workers in fields ranging from mining and metallurgy to banking, heavy construction, shipbuilding, armaments, and nuclear energy. Empain was half American and half Belgian, but his headquarters, his sumptuous apartment, and his ancestral chateau were in France, where he enjoyed a position of almost unrivaled influence. His conglomerate was so central to French economic and security interests that the papers dubbed him le Krupp francais-an allusion to the Krupp industrial dynasty that supplied armaments to German regimes from the Thirty Years' War to the end of the Third Reich. Hailed as a member of the "international gentry," Baron Empain was the first foreigner to be named a director of Le Patronat, the powerful French employers' association. His personal credo was that of the classic capitalist: "work, family, property." The stars seemed to be aligning nicely for Empain in this pivotal decade of the 1970s. He had the good fortune to seize the helm of the Empain group during the surge of economic expansion known as the trente glorieuses, France's three decades of rapid growth following World War II. The oil shock of 1973 marked the beginning of a slowdown, but for the young baron, it was another stroke of luck: In 1975 his Framatome subsidiary won a monopoly to build sixteen new nuclear plants after the government decided to base its energy needs almost exclusively on atomic power as a hedge against oil dependency. As a result, Empain became one of France's most powerful figures, known to the press as "Monsieur Nuclaire"-respected, even feared, by the country's political leadership. The authoritative daily Le Monde dubbed him "the shining symbol of transnational capitalism." Despite the rising inflation and unemployment triggered by the oil shock, it was a dynamic decade, a time of modernization, innovation, and dramatic technological advances. Under a thicket of cranes, the very face of Paris was changing. One of the biggest urban transformations of the '70s-the demolition of the historic Les Halles central food market-occasioned a massive excavation to build an underground shopping mall and a central hub joining the subway system with the suburban train network. To the west of the capital, work continued on the bristling clutch of Manhattan-style skyscrapers that loomed on the horizon at La Defense. On the Left Bank, the sleek fifty-eight-story Tour Montparnasse, the first (and so far only) skyscraper in the heart of Paris, was completed in 1973. At the Place Beaubourg, the Pompidou art center, a controversial construction wrapped in multicolored, industrial-looking pipes, opened its doors in 1977. French lifestyles were changing too. Innovative chefs were lightening the artery-clogging traditional French diet with their scaled-down nouvelle cuisine, while at the other end of the food chain, McDonald's opened its first French outlet. With the haute couture market declining, Yves Saint Laurent launched his first ready-to-wear collection. Though the cinematic "New Wave" had peaked in the late 1960s, France continued to boast a vibrant movie industry, with bankable stars like Alain Delon, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Catherine Deneuve, who enjoyed international renown. Paris's younger generation, clad in bell-bottoms, hot pants, and wide-collared shirts, jammed the discotheques and danced to the pounding beat of the Bee Gees and the Village People-along with homegrown disco stars like Claude Francois (who wrote the music for Sinatra's "My Way" and later electrocuted himself in his bathtub). It was a time of sexual liberation, carefree exuberance, and a first coming-out of gay culture. It was also a decade of dramatic political transition. The turbulence unleashed by the Paris-centered student upheaval of May 1968 had settled down, though it hastened Charles de Gaulle's departure from power the following year. His death in 1970 marked the end of an era. Valery Giscard d'Estaing, elected president in 1974, ushered in a spate of modernizing reforms, with laws liberalizing divorce, legalizing abortion, and lowering the voting age to eighteen. A bald-domed patrician and technocrat, Giscard tried to soften his elitist image by playing the accordion and inviting garbage collectors to breakfast at the Elysee Palace-quite a change of presidential style after de Gaulle's austere gravitas. Unlike Giscard, Baron Empain was not a reformer. Despite his relative youth, he considered himself an old-school capitalist who detested unions and had no qualms about laying off scores of workers at his companies. He had his share of detractors. Some saw him as a cocky rich boy, born with a silver spoon in his mouth and placed by mere birthright at the head of the powerful multinational founded by his grandfather. In a country that valued meritocracy, this titled Belgian had been handed his scepter without jumping through the requisite hoops. He held none of the advanced degrees that most of his peers had earned at France's highly competitive grandes Ecoles-in fact, his formal education went no further than secondary school. Empain was hardly the only second- or third-generation scion to head a major French company. His close friend Michel Bollore was running a major industrial group founded by his grandfather, for example, and Serge Dassault was being groomed to take over France's leading aviation firm from his long-lived father. But both men had paid their dues: Bollore boasted a law diploma and a degree from the prestigious Institute of Political Studies, better known as Sciences Po; Dassault was a graduate of no fewer than three grandes Ecoles, including the elite Polytechnique military engineering academy. Empain had the equivalent of a high school diploma. The tabloids published paparazzi photos of Empain with Brigitte Bardot and portrayed him as a jet-setting playboy. In reality, he was anything but. Inhabited by a natural timidity, he valued privacy and discretion over flashy displays of wealth. This was a man who bought his suits off the rack and cut his own hair. Though not given to introspection, he had moments of self-doubt rooted in a childhood deprived of affection from his parents-a former American exotic dancer and a hedonistic father who died young amid charges of Nazi collaboration. Empain was thereafter haunted by a secret sense of hurt and shame for which he compensated with an arrogance that the ancient Greeks would have called hubris. He took pride in his title of nobility, though it did not descend from any ancient aristocracy. His namesake grandfather was a man of modest origins who had received his barony from Belgium's King Leopold II in recognition of his accomplishments as an industrialist. It was an honorific title, conferring on its holder no domains or privileges apart from a freshly minted coat of arms. Wado, who had inherited the barony, proudly wore the family crest on his signet ring and freely used his Belgian title in France. It looked good on a business card and sounded impressive when people addressed him as "Monsieur le Baron." In reality, though, it didn't mean that much. In Belgium, as in France, the feudal rights of the old aristocracy had long since been abolished, though their titles continued to command a certain prestige. The status of nobility was diluted by the new titles that Napoleon and Leopold II handed out by the bushelful as favors to friends and courtiers-not to mention the many fake ones that social-climbing parvenus conferred upon themselves. Still, Wado's title carried a measure of distinction and he savored it. What he savored most of all, and wielded without any scruples, was power. He bragged that "everyone was on their knees" before him. "If a minister asked me for something and I said no, he didn't dare insist." Charles de Gaulle, whose orders he defied, called him an "annoying young man." The current president, Giscard d'Estaing, looked on this Belgian baron with suspicion-though he maintained friendly relations and was careful to invite him to his hunting parties at the Chateau de Rambouillet. Empain returned the compliment by letting on that Giscard was a "mediocre shot" and a "suitcase without a handle." Empain's private life was well organized-ski vacations at the chic Alpine resort of Megeve every Christmas, long sojourns in the South of France each summer, twice-a-week poker games with well-heeled friends. He had a weakness for fast cars, beautiful women, and gaming tables, but when he returned to his second-floor office on the Rue d'Anjou in central Paris, he was all business and as punctual as a Swiss chronometer. His life was carefully compartmentalized: He kept his family, his colleagues, his gambling partners, his mistresses, and his hunting buddies in separate, hermetically sealed boxes. That was how he managed his complicated existence. But sometimes complications had a way of seeping through the cracks. Consider the scene at Juan-les-Pins, on the Mediterranean coast, where Wado and his family spent their annual summer vacations in a villa rented from the American railroad heiress Florence Gould. Like Dick and Nicole Diver in Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, the Empains would pass their days on the beach hobnobbing with their rich friends. When they were not swimming or water-skiing, the men would sit at card tables under the shade of beach umbrellas, sip pastis or chilled white wine, and play poker. The women in their designer sunglasses and swimsuits would gather on their beach chairs to gossip and trade beauty tips. But there was one woman who preferred to play with the men. Her name was Shahnaz. She was a young Iranian widow from Lausanne who summered on the Mediterranean with her sisters and three kids. Shahnaz (the name means "pride of the king" in Persian) had a sultry Middle Eastern beauty-dark hair, dark eyes, olive-colored skin-and a warm-blooded temperament. One day she found herself sitting across the card table from Wado. She beat him at backgammon that day. He won the rematch. After that, they became frequent partners. When the summer was over, they continued to meet-but not to play backgammon. From those seemingly innocent seaside encounters, Shahnaz had slipped, like Alice through the looking glass, into the secret life that Wado carried on at his peril. She was not the only one. On the third weekend of January 1978, the baron joined friends for a hunting party in Sologne, a thickly forested region in the Loire valley. The snows were heavy, but the hunt was excellent: All told, the group bagged more than a hundred wild ducks. On Sunday afternoon, Wado took leave of his friends and headed back to Paris at the wheel of his midnight-blue Mercedes 450. At the risk of adding to his impressive collection of speeding tickets, he was rushing to make an important rendezvous. Not a mistress but his regular Sunday-night poker game, a ritual he wouldn't miss for anything in the world. The players met that night at the apartment of one of the baron's friends near the Bois de Boulogne in the affluent sixteenth arrondissement. It was a group of regulars, about a dozen in all, who would gather twice a week to have dinner and play cards. Among them were actor-singer Yves Montand and film producer Bob Zagury, Brigitte Bardot's former boyfriend. The others were an assortment of businessmen and merchants who had little in common with Empain apart from deep pockets and a shared passion for the card table. The players would take turns hosting the gatherings but, strangely enough, they were never invited to the baron's apartment. "He didn't receive us at his home," said one, "because we weren't his personal friends, only acquaintances with whom he liked to unwind." On this particular evening, the group sat down to dinner promptly at eight p.m., but they did not linger over coffee and digestifs. They were there to play cards. Before they gathered around the gaming table, there was an important ritual: Each man pulled out his checkbook and settled his debts from the previous game. The checks could reach the equivalent of $50,000 or more. The baron was known as a prompt payer. The first hand was dealt at nine. Wado cradled a cheap plastic lighter in the palm of his hand. It was his lucky charm. As long as he was winning, he continued to clutch the lighter. When his luck changed, he would throw it away and replace it with one of a different color. He kept a jar full of them in his apartment, like Reagan with his jelly beans. His partners had their own fetishes and superstitions. One wore the same old shirt every time they met. Another took his shoes off on the bizarre theory that shoes were bad luck. Still another ripped off his brand-new shirt and threw it in the trash can after a losing streak. The men bet high stakes, but it was not all about the money. It was about winning. And Wado had the instincts of a conqueror. One fellow player described him as "a strong-willed fighter who hated to lose." Though the men had drunk wine with dinner, everyone stuck to mineral water at the card table. In Wado's view, alcohol was the poker player's worst enemy. Poker was a sport: You had to be in top form to win. The same rule did not apply to tobacco, however, and the room was soon thick with cigarette and cigar smoke. Wado played with a rare intensity, scrutinizing every hand and placing each bet as if his life depended on it. Sitting across the table from him that night, Yves Montand noticed that one of Empain's eyes was bloodshot and wondered if he'd had an accident or a hemorrhage. Lately, he had seemed to be under pressure, worried, nervous. According to Montand, the baron was "a passionate player, lucid and cold in appearance, but all these traits disappeared when he had certain preoccupations." His main preoccupation that night was that he was losing big-time-some 200,000 francs, according to one fellow player. At around two a.m., after a particularly disastrous hand, Empain folded his cards and got up to leave, though the game was far from over. Out in the street, hoarse and coughing after hours of chain-smoking, he chucked his lighter away. "You look tired," a friend told him as he parted. He was not just tired. He was exhausted, depressed, and dreading the dreary meetings that awaited him at the office the next morning. On Monday, January 23, 1978, at precisely 10:20 a.m., the baron emerged from his nine-story apartment building at 33 Avenue Foch, a broad, tree-lined thoroughfare radiating out from the Arc de Triomphe. The modernistic concrete-and-glass structure-which some observers likened to a cruise ship-boasted a gym, a private cinema, a sauna, and an indoor swimming pool bordered by banana trees and hanging gardens. The baron's own 3,000-square-foot apartment on the ninth floor was no less luxurious, with its gray marble entry hall, atrium, and four large bedrooms. Excerpted from The Last Baron: The Paris Kidnapping That Brought down an Empire by Tom Sancton All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
