The Case of the Peculiar Prince

FRANCE The Case of the Peculiar Prince

To ordinary Frenchmen, Prince Jean de Broglie appeared the very model of titled rectitude. Descended from one of the country's most illustrious families, De Broglie became a Resistance hero during World War II, served under Charles de Gaulle in various ministerial posts and was a key member of the French team that negotiated Algerian independence in 1962. He was a former secretary-general of Valery Giscard d'Estaing's Independent Republican Party and had held a seat in the National Assembly since 1958.

On Christmas Eve the portly 55-year-old prince was brutally gunned down on a Paris street. Since then, despite a government assertion that the case has been solved, what began as a shocker killing has grown steadily more sensational, with hints of unsavory business dealings, a secret sex life, police corruption and even a high-level political coverup. As the French press dug into the scandal with rare gusto, the case brought public trust in Giscard's government to a new low.

Within a week of the crime, Minister of the Interior Michel Poniatowski announced proudly at a press conference that "the catch of the [police] net is completed." With that, Police Commissioner Pierre Ottavioli disclosed that the mastermind of the crime was one Pierre de Varga, De Broglie's Hungarian-born partner in several questionable business enterprises. An accomplice, according to police, was another partner, Patrick Allenet de Ribemont. De Broglie had arranged a loan of $800,000 to both men to buy a Paris restaurant, La Rotisserie de la Reine Pedauque, in which the prince also held an interest. The police said that an insurance policy on De Broglie's life, taken out when the restaurant loan was granted, contained a clause providing that in the event of the prince's death, his partners were released from their obligation to repay the loan. De Varga decided to take deliberate advantage of those terms, said police. He asked a Paris police inspector named Guy Simone, who also owed money to De Broglie, to organize the job. Simone in turn recruited the actual hit man, Gerard Freche, a small-time thug with a long police record. De Varga and De Ribemont adamantly maintain their innocence; the two alleged hirelings have admitted their roles.

Skeptical Press. Almost immediately, the police version of the murder was challenged by a skeptical press and public. Defense lawyers for De Varga and De Ribemont claimed there was evidence that under the terms of the loan, the two were required to pay it even in the event of De Broglie's death. In any event, the prince had recently provided them with a second loan, and they had every reason for wanting him alive as a continuing source of revenue.

Meanwhile, fresh details about De Broglie's less than princely life continued to unfold. There were rumors that he frequented homosexual bars and sex parties. A company that he co-founded in 1969 has reportedly come under suspicion for engaging in questionable deals --possibly involving arms traffic--with Algeria. There were also whispers that De Broglie had connections with members of the underworld. A dossier crammed with accounts of De Broglie's peccadilloes circulated privately among members of the center-right legislative majority, and as a result, the prince was blackballed in his 1973 attempt to win the presidency of the Assembly's Commission of Finances.

The mounting disclosures turned the murder into a political affair. The president of the Union of Magistrates, Andre Braunschweig, charged that in rushing forward with a solution to the crime, Poniatowski had in effect tried the case without benefit of due process. In the eyes of most Frenchmen, Poniatowski at the very least knew more than he was saying--and at worst was covering up scandals involving some of his political pals. "For the first time in ten years," observed a Paris journalist, "all the press --conservative as well as centrist and leftist--are going after the story and printing what they find." The unaccustomed harmony among disparate political voices only stressed the obvious: there was a lot more to the story than the government would admit.

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