Monsieur Gun, Chechnya Days, Wildcards?
All things you can read about on the internet...
Howdy, and welcome to the third edition of the Footnotes Newsletter, where I check in with you every Friday to rundown my news (news I’m following, news I’m running away from, news about me) and point you in the direction of some worthy reads.
This week — An alliance between French fascists and terrorism, a story of National Front arms trafficking from the 90s, and a secret dining club for Parisian judges gets busted. Plus, I still try to learn Linux?
Let’s get started.
Claude’s Curious Career
Claude Hermant, a 54 year old man known in Lille for selling guns and his involvement in the fascist movement in the North, has been in prison since January of 2015 for his involvement in a large arms trafficking network. Around 500 guns were involved in the ring that he was a part of. In 2019 he was sentenced to 7 years in prison and a fine of 30,000 euros for his involvement in this trafficking. I’ve talked about arms traffickers and the political links many of them have in France before in this newsletter, but reading about Hermant really knocked me out.
The reason for that is that the guns Hermant was trafficking ended up in the hands of Amedy Coulibaly, who killed five people between the 7th and the 9th of January, 2015, in France. Coulibaly was a close friend of the Kouachi brothers, who attacked the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo at the same time — Coulibaly claimed to have synchronized his attacks with them.
It’s for his involvement in this that Claude is in prison now. The guns Coulibaly used in his two attacks dated from the 60s in then Communist Czechoslovakia; they had been decommissioned then sold in lots and “reactivated” by Hermant. The story gets murkier and stranger when you look a little deeper. Hermant is known for his involvement in fascist circles in Lille dating back decades, reported La Voix du Nord. After time in the French Foreign Legion, he did security in the 90s for Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, and he was a mercenary with a definite political leaning, fighting in Angola, the Congo, and Croatia. Before he was arrested, and between arms deals, he worked in a french fry shop, where the court alleged he had a workshop in which he would re-militarize decommissioned guns, including those which ended up in the hands of Coulibaly.
In his testimony, reported Slobodna Dalmacija, he recounted his years as a military instructor in the Croatian Liberation Movement in the winters of 1992, 1994, 1995, and 1996 to 1997. He also admitted to participating in the fighting himself. In his unit he served under Marty Cappiau, a Belgian with notorious links to the Croatian underworld. Cappiau, who died in 2001, worked for a company called Joy Slovakia, which was a front for the large-scale arms trafficking network headed by another Belgian called Jacques Monsieur.
Hermant’s links run deep.
One of the most striking pieces of his testimony is his claim that he was an informant for the Lille police. Charlie Hebdo reported that Hermant was indeed a “former informant” for both Customs and the Gendarmerie. The court rejected these claims by Hermant, who said “I sold weapons for my cover,” and that “the [intelligence] services were on to it.” Charlie Hebdo calls this a fable, but notes that it was “borne out to a certain extent by the gendarmes who appeared in turn on the witness stand but succeeded in saying nothing.”
Hermant also claimed to do business with a customs agent named Sebastian L. An investigator claimed that Sebastian L. didn’t fit the profile of a reseller of guns, but this surprised Hermant’s defense lawyer Maxime Moulin (himself a regional counselor for the National Rally), who cited text messages between the men that would seem to indicate otherwise:
- SL : And the calibre, do you have it? Because I have friends who want the good stuff. They’ve got the dough, that’s not the question.
- Claude HERMANT : What’s the new one you want?
- SL : 9mm
- SL : The Czechs have the dough
Okay, but will he take a Czech?
Marty Cappiau, Chechnya, and the National Front
Marty Cappiau, who Claude Hermant served under in Croatia, had a colorful history himself. In the mid 1990s he was mixed up in an arms deal with the National Front.
The story was told in a 1997 article in Libération by Didier François, a long time war reporter who co-founded SOS Racisme in 1984, and was taken hostage in Syria in 2007, then again by ISIS in 2013. He was released both times, the second after about a year.
Our story starts with a guy called Bernard Courcelle, who was the head of the National Front’s security at the time. War was raging in Chechnya, where the Russian Federation had sent troops in to “restore constitutional order” to the would-be breakaway republic. In 1993, Courcelle, a lover of the Caucuses, and his brother Nicolas, donated money to the organisation SOS Chechnya to fund a visit to Paris by Chechen president Dzhokhar Dudayev.
When Radio Courtoisie, a Parisian radio station hosted by one Pierre de Villemaret, hosted the president of SOS Chechnya, Marie Benningsen, to talk about the ongoing war, Villemaret introduced Benningsen to Courcelle. Courcelle made it clear he was ready and willing to help the cause however he could.
Soon after making this contact Courcelle went to Chechnya with a camera crew under the auspices of “making a report on the Chechen resistance,” where he filmed one of President Dudayev’s press conferences.
There he met Shamil Basayev, the head of the Chechen armed forces. Courcelle told Basayev he could put him in touch with someone who could get him guns. Basayev was enthusiastic and sent "aide-de-camp Ilias” (probably Ilyas Akhmadov), who spoke French, to Paris where he stayed in Courcelle’s apartment. It was Orthodox Easter, and the time when the National Front had its annual parade in front of the statue of Joan d’Arc outside of the FN’s headquarters in Nanterre. Coucelle (our FN security man, if you’re having trouble keeping up with the names) took Ilyas to march in the parade. Then, back at his apartment he introduced him to the ballistician Fabrice Bodet.
It was Bodet who introduced Ilyas to our old friend Marty Cappiau around the same time Claude Hermant was serving under him in Croatia. By mid May 1996 a deal was set up between Cappiau and the Chechens. On the 21st of May in a bank in Zagreb, Ilyas signed a transfer order for $400,000 (ten times more than the initial sum that had been discussed, by the way). The order was made out to Joy Slovakia, Cappiau’s front company.
Three days later, Cappiau wrote to Ilya and assured him that if anything went wrong he’d be reimbursed in full. A second payment of $600,000 was due by the end of the month to the traffickers, who promised delivery of the weapons 15 days after they got the payment. On the 31st of May the Chechens paid the money to an account recently opened in a Geneva bank under the name of a business called Liffey SA.
It was then that the pressure from the Russians in the Chechen war was at its highest, and Ilyas was desperate to get the weapons. But in a murky series of events, surprise surprise, the arms vanished. Ilyas went searching frantically across half of Eastern Europe before he finally found them in East…Africa, in Uganda where they were being packed in customs.
At that point it was August, and the Chechens had taken Grozny, ending the war. Ilyas was urgently recalled to the country. The weapons never made it to the Caucuses after all. And the money was never reimbursed. The intermediary blamed the wholesaler; Courcelle took offense at the idea that he’d touched the money, but some acid tongues whispered that the money was used to finance the FN security forces, including militias (more on this story in next week’s newsletter).
Who knows what really happened…Courcelle called that theory “pure fantasy.” But somebody, somewhere, knows…
Al Capone Restaurants in Paris
L'Annexe, a restaurant in the 4th arrondissement of Paris on the île de la Cité, was closed down last Sunday. It was serving ten people food inside, none wearing masks. For the moment this is restricted in France. L'Annexe is right across from the Court of Appeals and so when the police came in to fine the fine diners, there was at first an argument from the judges, who questioned the police on whether or not they had the authority to fine them.
They did, and all 10 men were fined 135 euros. The restaurant will be closed for 15 days.
The restaurant is also very close to the local prefecture. “I’ve also seen police going to buy something to eat there as well as people being at tables. That’s never posed a problem…,” Amandine, who lives on the boulevard Saint-Michael, told Le Parisien.
Lassé, a patron of the restaurant, complained “if this crisis continues, we’re going to create Al Capones of catering.”
Footnotes
At the end of last month a mayor in Puybarban, a town in the Gironde department in Southwest France, found a 1.5 kilo bag full of cannabis leaves at a trash collection point next to a cemetery. The police found out who the guy was, and will be pressing charges against him for illegal dumping.
Somebody please save Jordan Peterson from his daughter.
John Ganz’ series on the Third Republic is very interesting. A taste from the (for now) unpaywalled version:
In the 1880s, there was still very little organized antisemitism in France. To be sure, Jews faced significant deal of personal prejudice fueled by religious sentiment, but the ideology that centered the Jews in world affairs was not yet a mainstream presence in French politics.
French president Emmanuel Macron met for the first time with Bah N’Daw, Mali’s transition president, on January 27th. Macron is the first head of state N’Daw has met with outside the Economic Community of West Africa States. The day before the visit the National Committee for the Salvation of the People, the organ which the military had established to force out ex-president Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta last August, was formally dissolved. A sign that international recognition is coming for the coup government?, asks Le Point.
I’m moving at a glacial pace learning Linux. I’m trying to wrap my head about wildcards, which shouldn’t be difficult but I always get to this point when learning about something related to computers. I’ll try to push through this week and have something interesting to report next week on the topic.
Biden National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan announced that the U.S. will end “offensive operations in Yemen.” Questioned whether that would include actions against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula he said “it does not extend to actions against AQAP.” Expect this war to “end” the same way $1400 + $600 equals $2000.
Thysia Huisman is raising money for a translation of her book ‘Close-up,’ which was published last year in Dutch. It tells the story of how she was drugged and raped by the modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, and about her brief time in Paris. It was there that she was brought by Brunel in the fall of 1991, for a week of late parties with rich businessmen…“Every night was the same you know there were like parties going on,” Thysia told me last November. “They always started…in Brunel’s apartment and they would always invite…this group of rich older businessmen and some, like one of them was Epstein, and there were like, always some men from Saudi, I think it was Saudi Arabia, Middle Eastern. And they always had a kind of entourage, really really young girls, from Eastern Europe…from Russia, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia.”
Check out her Gofundme and chip in, getting this book is an important document to have out in English, not to mention a translation will finally let me read it without having to learn Dutch, not that I’m averse to the idea.
Ryan is still not smoking, good for him…looks like he might stick with it which makes reporting on it boring…gotta’ find some other friend hoping to shed a vice…
Until next week, share or get fined 135 euros.
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