Jacques Mesrine

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Jacques René Mesrine [ʒak mɛsʀin, ʒak meʀin] (born December 28, 1936 in Clichy , † November 2, 1979 in Paris ) was a French violent criminal.

Because of the murders and his violence, Mesrine was public enemy number 1 in France ( "ennemi public n ° 1" ) until his death . In public he was also known as the Man with the Thousand Masks due to his ability to remain undetected by means of disguise and was stylized as the modern Robin Hood .

Life

Mesrine grew up in a middle class family. He was expelled from two schools at a young age for aggressive behavior. In 1955 he married at the age of 19, but divorced again the next year in order to go as a paratrooper in the Algerian war , from which he returned in 1959 with distinction ( Croix de la Valeur militaire ). In 1961 he married again. From this marriage there were three children.

In 1961 he was fined for the first time for illegally possessing weapons and in 1962 after an attempted bank robbery he was imprisoned for the first time with three accomplices. After 18 months in prison in Düsseldorf and Orléans, he was released from prison in 1963. His family helped him to a managerial position in an inn that soon became a hideout for criminals. He lived there with his lover Jeanne Schneider. He is said to have killed their two pimps , but their bodies have not been found to this day.

In December 1965, Mesrine was arrested again in Palma while attempting to steal political documents from the military governor's residence. The Spanish authorities suspected Mesrine was working for the French secret service.

In 1966 Mesrine opened a restaurant in Santa Cruz de Tenerife , but in the same year he attacked a jeweler in Geneva . In May 1967 he opened an inn in Compiègne . In November of the same year he was recognized during an armed robbery of a hotel in Chamonix , and in December at a tailor in Paris. In February 1968, Mesrine escaped the police and fled to Québec with Jeanne Schneider . The search for him was then stopped.

Mesrine and Schneider were initially calm and in 1969 worked for the billionaire Georges Deslauriers for five months. After he had dismissed them, they kidnapped him in June, extorted by his son Marcel 200,000 US dollars and settle illegally on the Great Lakes in the United States from. After traveling through Detroit and Cape Kennedy , they were caught in Texarkana, Arkansas and extradited to Canada , where they were sentenced to ten years in prison.

Mesrine escaped from prison in 1972 with five cellmates . He and his accomplice Jean-Paul Mercier began raiding banks in Montréal , sometimes two in a day. In the same year, the two failed in an attempt to help three other criminals to escape from the same prison in which they had been imprisoned themselves. Two police officers were seriously injured and a week later they killed two forest officers. Towards the end of the year they first moved to Venezuela . Mercier later returned to Canada, while Mesrine immediately returned to France.

In 1972, while on the run, he met the Canadian Jocelyne Deraiche, whom he himself called Joyce. He corresponded with her from prison until the end of his life. More than 180 love letters have been received from him.

In France he continued to raid banks. Mesrine was arrested in March 1973 and sentenced to 20 years in prison in May. During a trial in June 1973 for check fraud, he took the president of the court hostage; an accomplice had left the gun in the toilet. The escape succeeded again.

In the same month he stole the wages of a printing company and went on vacation to Trouville , a seaside resort in Normandy. Raids on other banks followed. He was arrested again four months later, this time at his Paris apartment .

During his stay in prison, Mesrine wrote his autobiography L'Instinct de mort (dt. The death instinct ) in 1977 , in which he openly confessed to 39 crimes. At the same time, he denounced the conditions in the high-security wards . In the same year the parliament passed the so-called "Loi Mesrine": Nobody should make any more profit by publishing their crimes.

In May 1977 he was sentenced to 20 years in prison, which he was to serve in La Santé prison in Paris. On May 8, 1978, Mesrine and two other prisoners managed to break out of prison, with the police shooting a third accomplice while on the run. This outbreak caused a scandal in France.

Mesrine continued the old business: robbery, robbery, kidnapping, murder. Again and again his disguise helped him to evade the authorities.

In 1978, among other things, the Deauville Casino , a jet-set meeting point on the Norman coast, became a destination for Mesrine. Here, too, he escaped with skill and speed. Over 300 police officers and a department of GIGN were looking for Mesrine.

On July 27, 1978, to the surprise of France, Mesrine conducted an interview with the journalist Isabelle Wangen, which was published at the same time in Paris Match and in Photo Police in Montreal. The tapes were evaluated by the police. Mesrine has been seen or suspected in Great Britain, Algeria, Canada, Sicily, and Belgium, among others. Another interview appeared in Liberation on January 3, 1979 .

On June 21, 1979, Mesrine kidnapped the millionaire Henri Lelièvre and extorted six million French francs . This made him public enemy number one.

The French press glorified him in part to a romantic rascal. Mesrine tried in interviews to convince the public of a political motivation for his actions. Mesrine was very interested in the public image of himself in the media. Critical and uncritical reports followed. Mesrine almost murdered the French journalist Jacques Tillier because he didn't like the article about him.

The French interior ministry has now asked the police to concentrate their efforts to arrest Mesrine. After investigating his apartment, the police stopped his BMW 528i with a truck on November 2, 1979 , from which police officers fired 21 shots at him. 19 bullets hit Mesrine through the windshield, mainly in the torso and head, killing him instantly. The fiancée in the passenger seat was injured.

The police rated their company a great success, other voices complain that the police did not act in self-defense and that Mesrine was "executed" by her without warning. President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing , who a few days earlier asked for the Mesrine case to be resolved, subsequently praised the police and police chief.

Media, edits, use of motifs

  • The pamphlet To Our Friends of the Invisible Collective (authors of the book The Coming Uprising ), published in 2015, begins with a quote from Mesrine: "There is no other world. There is only one other way of life."
  • Mesrine, l'évasion impossible. Comic by Lounis Chabane, Roger Knobelspiess, Jean-Louis Pelletier, Casterman , Paris 2008 (series: Ligne rouge) ISBN 2203005483
  • Some songs by the French hard rock band Trust are based on Jacques Mesrine's lyrics, such as Instinct de Mort and Le Mitard .
  • The Canadian grindcore band Mesrine is named after him.
  • The French Oi! -Band Œil pour œil released a song called Mesrine on the album Nés pour en chier .

Movies

literature

  • L'instinct de Mort , autobiography
  • Mesrine: The Life and Death of a Supercrook by Carey Schofield, 1980
  • Lucien Aimé-Blanc, Jean-Michel Caradec'h: La chasse à l'homme . 2006, ISBN 978-2-84969-047-5 .
  • Michel Ardouin: Mesrine, mon Associé . Editions du Toucan, 2008, ISBN 978-2-8100-0150-7 .
  • Philippe Roizès: Mesrine: Fragments d'un Mythe . Flammarion, 2009, ISBN 978-2-08-122924-2 .
  • Lucien Aimé-Blanc: La chasse à l'homme. La vérité sur la mort de Mesrine . Plon, 2002, ISBN 978-2-259-19706-9 .
  • Michel Ardouin: Une vie de voyou . Fayard, 2005, ISBN 978-2-213-62205-7 .
  • Michel Laentz: Jacques Mesrine: L'histoire vraie de l'ennemi public numero un . IS Edition, 2012, ISBN 978-2-36845-002-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ BMW 528i E12 - Autres E12 - E12 Une célèbre ... Celle de Jacques Mesrine: Autres E12 - E12 Une célèbre ... In: www.e12.free.fr . May 5, 2008, 7:00 p.m.
  2. ^ Comité Invisible .: To our friends . 1st edition Ed. Nautilus, Hamburg 2015, ISBN 978-3-89401-818-4 , pp. 8 ( noblogs.org [PDF; accessed May 4, 2019]).
  3. ↑ Pelletier: Foreword. He had been a lawyer Ms.
  4. ↑ In French. The comic tries, as is often intended elsewhere, to stylize Mesrine into an ultimately political fighter, the Vichy regime and its persecution of the Jews are addressed. On the whole of page 37 he reads the book Souvenirs obscurs by Pierre Goldman , also a convicted violent criminal with possibly political motivation , very large in the picture
personal data
SURNAME Mesrine, Jacques
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mesrine, Jacques René (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French violent criminal
DATE OF BIRTH December 28, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH Clichy
DATE OF DEATH 2nd November 1979
Place of death Paris