Evening Star Newspaper, May 4, 1930, Page 91

Fiction Art The Sundly Shaf Magasine WASHINGTON, D. C, SUNDAY, MAY 4, 1930. Features Books 24 PAGES. ALLQUIETALONG THESEINE Behind Jean Chiappe, Prefect of the Paris Police, Are Accomplishments That Rival the Best in Detective Fictim—IHis Slewthing Instincts and Preventive Methods Have Made the City by the Seine a Bad One for Crooks, From Gem Thieves to International Plotters. FEW days before Georges Clemenceau took to his bed for the last time he sent for Jean Chiappe, a stocky Corsican who stands 5 feet 3 inches tall when he takes off his bowler and his high-heeled custom-made shoes. «I wanted to shake the hand of an honest man once more before going away,” the old Tiger said when Paris’ bantam prefect of police entered his lair in the Rue Franklin. Clemenceau knew his end was near Before going he wanted to pay his fare- well respect to the little man from Napoleon’s native isle, aloof from all the wire-pulling and chicanery interwoven with government service, had always refused abject servility to the political chieftains above him, and had always stood loyally by his friends, more than once at the risk of breaking his own career. The old man of the Vendee and the middle-aged Corsican talked awhile, in that meeting of adieu, of those stirring France had called upon lead a despairing na- tion on to victory. The Tiger spoke of the “infernal regime of quick-changing interests and rampant egotism” which he found gnawing at the heart of France when he took over the control of the ccuniry. “n those war-time days Chiappe, as chief of the political bureau of the ‘ministry of the interior, was in charge of the French secret service. It was he who put barbs in the whips with which Clemenceau drove out of public life more than one prominent man suspect- ed of treasonable activities. Twice Chiappe saw the wrath of the Tiger fall upon his own friends, men with whom he had collaborated and in whose patriotism his faith was unshaken. On each occasion he steadfastly defended them rather than keep quiet and knuckle down before the then all= pcwerful President du Conseil. Clemenceau was preparing the furi- ous attack that drove Joseph Caillaux into banishment under the shadow of charges that he had dealt with an enemy. Leon Daudet, the Royalist lead- er, had written a letter to President Poincare accusing . Louis Malvy, four times minister of the interior and Chiappe’s former chief, of deliberate treason. With him he accused Leymaire, a high police functionary, another of Chiappe’s friends and collaborators, of dealing with the pacifist organ, the Bonnet Rouge. C'-menceau went for the scalps of botr these men. The war was in its fourth year and the Tiger’s wrath was shared by a large part of the nerve- wracked nation. It took courage for a friend to stand by the accused and proclaim his faith in their innocence. Chiappe did. He defended Leymaire une til the man was convicted. Before the assembled Senate, sitting as a high court, he testified for Malvy. When he left the stand he walked over to the accused politician, embraced him and gave him the acoliade. ~het brave gesture of sympathy, made in the presence of all the Senators of the republic, enraged Clemenceau. Yet Chiappe retained his position, though Malvy was banished for five vears for “violation and betrayal of the secrets of his office,” after he had been acquitted of treason. Tater on, when the passions of war-time had cooled and the Herriot government had am- nested Malvy, along with Caillaux, Clemenceau said to a friend: “Chiappe was wrong, but such abnegation and friendsbip as he showed, and the going as far in the way of sacrifice as he went, were worthy of a great man.” HIAPPE may or may not be a man of great- ness, but all Paris concedes that he is the most_efficient prefect of police the capital has had in many years. Before his appointment to that post by the President of the republic, in 1927, his reputation as a chief of detectives was second to that of no one outside the har- acters of detective fiction. As head of the Surete Generale he uncovered plots that affected in- ternational relations, drove personages of prom- inence to disgrace and ruin and more than once thrilled the reading public of every land™ Chiappe's reports three years ago on the plot to invade Spain and make an independent state of Catalonia caused diplomatic codes to elickk many an hour between Paris and Madrid and Paris and Rome. In that affair his men brought about the arrest, conviction and ex- pulsion of the famous Italian fighter, Col. Ric- Jean Chiappe, right arm of the law in Paris. Drawn for The Star's Magazine by 8. J. Woolf. By Edward Angly. ciotti Garibaldl, nephew of the liberator of Italy, and of the celebrated Spanish soldier, Col. Macia, and a number of lesser characters. Only a few months before Chiappe and his agents had uncovered a plot by Hungarian royalists to flood the continent with spurious francs. As a result ministers were inter- pellated in half the parliaments of Eu- rope, the Hungarian government was embar- rassed and two dozen men high in the political and social sphere of Budapest were put behind prison bars. One of the convicted men was Prince Louis of Windisch-Graetz, a relative of the Hapsburgs and a descendant of the Holy Roman Emperors. Another was the chief of police of Budapest, Herr Emeric von Nadossy. To prison with them went a general, a colonel, a major and some of the highest officials of the Hungarian State Cartographical Institute and others who had aided in the somewhat unskill- ful printing of 30,000 notes of 1,000-franc de- nomination. Their plot had germinated and matured for two years before it was exposed, but not two years before Chiappe knew of it. Prince Louis had barely dreamed his dream of “rehabilitating . the finances of Hungary or, at least, ruining those of France,” when word of what he was up to was whispered to the alert Chiappa. From that moment every move the prince made, in Hungary, in Austria, in Germany and elsewhere, was known to the French secret serv- ice. They did not share the secret with the Budapest government. When, finally, the Hungarians were ready to. open the. flood gates and send their counterfeit currency streaming over Europe, a Russian woman accompanied the three Budapest gentlemen who took a trunk .filled with 1,000-franc notes to Holland to put them into circulation. That woman was one of Chiappe’s agents. She waited until her three “friends” had passed their third 1,000-franc note over the counter in The Hague. Then she had them arrested. The Dutch courts sent Col. Aristide Jankovich to prison for three years for attempting to distribute the counterfeits. In Budapest the scandal quickly spread to some of the elite of the land, and even the prime minister, Count Bethlen, was accused of having known of the crime beforehand. The government barely missed tumbling from power. France threatened to withdraw her minister to Hungary, and the Bank of France was made the civil plaintiff in the court proceedings. Chiappe’s spies proved that Prince Louis and his confederates had bought their material in Cologne, Vienna, Frankfort and other German and Austrian citles. This was in 1926, when the franc was falling fast enough without any pushing from outsiders, and the world still remembered the “bear market” on francs which financiers of Central Europe had engineered in Vienna only two years before. In Berlin; Paris, Prague and elsewhere ministers were called upon to explain the affaire to their in- quisitive parliaments. Chiappe sat back in his chair and smiled. He had worked quietly on the case for many months. He had followed every step of the plot since that day two years before when a woman had gone to the Quai d’Orsay with the tale of what Prince Louis had in mind. Slx months after the Hungarian counterfeiters had gone behind the bars Chiapp: again set the diplomatic dovecotes to buszzing with his exposure of the plot to invade Spain and make the rich province of Catalonia an in- dependent republic. One day, down #n the Pyrenees, French secret service agents arrested the distinguished white- haired Catalon colonel, Francesco Maciay a former deputy in the Madrid Parliament, who has been living in exe ile in Paris under a pledge not to go near the Spanish frontier. In the hills near his villa they cap- tured his “general staff,” a band of young men equipped with uniforms, ma- chine guns, ammunition, maps, bombs and even medical equipment and a stock of flags that were to be flown as the emblems of the new republic. The next day, at Nice, near the Italian frontier, Chiappe’s men arrested Col Garibaldi, whom they accused of hav- ing posed as an anti-Fascist while lur- ing back to Italy men who were opposed to the Black Shirt regime, all the while receiving for his trouble a tidy wad of 400,000 lire from Mussolini’s organiza- tion. 11 Duce wired the Quai d’Orsay not to take action or think that things were what they seemed, promising to explain the whole situation within 48 hours. But France was at fever heat already, irri- tated by recent demonstrations made by Italians against the French con- sulate at Vintimiglia and on the streets of Tunis. Troops were being concen= trated on both sides of the Alps. Garibaldi confessed his duplicity and put it in writing. H:> was also accused of having been a party to the Catalon- jan plot and then of having tipped the Spanish police off to it. He did so withe out informing the French, who im- mediately assumed that this had been another Italian attempt to engender ill will between Madrid and Paris. Europe’s diplomatic atmosphere was heavily charged when Chiappe brought Garibaldi to Paris and confronted him with Col. Macia. The Spaniard snubbed the Italian frigidly. At the trial that followed the Spanish defendants object- ed to being put in the same defendants’ box with Garibaldi. They openly called him a coward and a stool pigeon. One of Macia’s henchmen, his black eyes flaming with contempt, screamed at the Italian from the witness stand these blistering words: “It is only out of respect for justice that I refrain from strangling you right here.” Garibaldi’s attorney described the bravery his client had shown in the war, where five Garibaldi brothers fought in the French army before their own country entered the struggle. Henrl Torres, most famous of Paris criminal lawyers, who was representing the Cat- alon patriots, cut him off with a searing sentence: “Don't raise the specters of the Are gonne,” he said, “or beware lest the dead themselves arise in winding sheets and murmur from tomb to tomb their horror and disgust of you.” During that trial Chiappe conferred one mo- ment with the French cabinet, the next with the judge, for the affair was a delicate one diplomatically. - Finally the court let pass the charge of plotting against a friendly state and sentenced both Macia and Garibaldi to prison for two months, which they had already served on the minor charge of having accumulated arms They were ordered expelled from France. Garibaldi went away quietly, spent a year in exile in South America and then was permitted to return to Italy. The world this side of the Alps has not heard of him since he crossed the frontier of his homeland. Macia, on departing for Belgium, was cheered through the streets of Paris, even by the French. Today he is still waiting in Brussels for a favor- able moment to try again to separate Catalomia from Spain. THE last feather that was put in Chiappe’s derby before he leit the Surete Generale to become prefect of police was his recovery of the priceless Conde rose diamond and other jewelry of historic and regal renown that had been filched from the treasure tower of the Chateau of Chantilly. The Conde diamond, valued at & million dollars and more, was given to the Duc d’Enghien by Louis XIV after the duc’s daring victory over the Spanish army at Rocroi in the Spring of 1643. It was stolen in October, 1926, along with a diamond-studded dagger that a bey of Tunis had givea Le Grand Conde in the seventeenth century, and a cross of diamonds a King had presented to that great warrior of France's golden age. Chiappe went to Chantilly and directed the