Monday, Mar. 29, 1971

My Friend Flic

At first glance, the scene in Toulouse one evening last week might have seemed the perfect setting for a parade. Police had cleared the streets and the crowd was packed three deep on the sidewalks. Then at nine o'clock, the street lights went out, and a Mercedes and a Renault R-16 sped by on their way out of town. In the two cars were four bank robbers, four hostages, $54,000 in ransom money and $21,800 that the daring holdup men had taken from the Societe Generate branch bank in Toulouse twelve hours earlier.

Getaway Car. When a group of masked men held up the bank, shortly after the doors had opened that morning, a bank official set off an alarm--and a bizarre series of events. Trying to escape in a gun battle with the gendarmes, one of the bandits was captured, and the other four took cover in the bank. The authorities laid siege to the building and telephoned the bandits inside to demand that they give themselves up. Instead, the robbers threatened to kill or maim the eight people still inside the bank if les flics (the cops) attacked. The holdup men also took phone calls from newsmen and radio stations and, at lunchtime, coolly telephoned a local newspaper to demand that beer and sandwiches be brought to them. Bank Manager Maurice Mazeres delivered the food and took his deputy manager's place as a hostage, while the deputy delivered to the police a note demanding the ransom money and a second getaway car with a full gas tank.

At 7 p.m., the gendarmes parked a rented Renault--with the ransom money inside--at the bank door, alongside a Mercedes belonging to one of the hostages. Then, after waiting two hours to avoid rush-hour traffic, the holdup men made their getaway with four hostages in the two cars. One hostage, a woman bank employee, was freed on the outskirts of Toulouse. A customer was released soon after. Mazeres and another employee, Mrs. Marguerite Garde, were let go near the ancient Roman city of Nimes, 140 miles east of Toulouse.

The bandits, however, had overlooked one major detail. Police still held the fifth member of their gang, who had been captured at the start of the affair. Curiously, the men never asked for his release, a request that the police would probably have had no choice but to grant. Left behind, he apparently spilled all, for within 48 hours, the gendarmes had captured three of the four robbers: Franc,ois Garcia, a Franco-Spaniard with a long police record, who had most of the loot on him; Guy Delpied and Roger Boissin, a Nimes cafe owner.

The momentary success of the Toulouse raid, however, started a rash of bank heists that brought little profit to the robbers but led to the injury of several hostages. Two bandits held up a bank in Trets, near Aix-en-Provence, and fled with $1,800 and two hostages. Trapped in a traffic jam near Marseilles, they were caught after a Shootout with police in which one of the hostages and three gendarmes were hurt. In Grenoble, two other crooks bundled a passing Peugeot car salesman into their automobile after holding up a bank. He, too, was wounded when police at a roadblock opened fire on the car. In suburban Paris, three armed men snatched a 14-month-old baby from its mother's arms and held a pistol to its neck while they looted a bank teller's drawer of $1,200. After returning the baby, they made a successful escape.

The spread of the bank mania added to Premier Georges Pompidou's alarm over increasing violence in France. After a Cabinet meeting, Pompidou instructed Interior Minister Raymond Marce'lin "to put an end to violence in the streets" and "to ensure that security of the citizens is really guaranteed."

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