Édouard-Jean Empain

Arrest

In the early evening of the following day, Friday March 24, 1978, while waiting at the bar of the Orly Hilton, Mazzieri received a telephone call instructing him to fill up his petrol tank and prepare for a further excursion. Upon his return to the bar, Mazzieri received a second call telling him to head on to the A6 motorway in the direction of Paris and stop on the hard shoulder at emergency telephone point B16.

Soon after the car had come to a stop on the hard shoulder a tow truck pulled in behind Mazzieri, believing him to have broken down. Mazierri got out of the car to tell the driver of the tow truck to move along and it was at this moment that two of the kidnappers, who had been hiding nearby, made off in Mazzieri's car. The kidnappers stopped the car a few hundred metres further down the hard shoulder next to a service door in the 20m high soundproofing wall which lines the motorway. This door had already been opened by the kidnappers to aid their escape and they boobytrapped it with a grenade to prevent pursuit by the police. The kidnappers had also stationed an accomplice armed with a submachine gun on top of the wall to cover their escape and this man opened fire on the police as they attempted to pursue the kidnappers. A firefight then took place between the kidnappers and the police in which one of the kidnappers was killed and another arrested. Two police officers were wounded, inspectors Berux and Lailheugue. The man who was killed was Daniel Duchâteau, a convicted bank robber, the man who was arrested called himself Alain and was at that time unknown to the police.

On December 2, 1982, four years after the events, the trial of the "Empain affair" began. It lasted sixteen days, presided over by Judge Chavagnac. Paradoxically, the immediate focus was on the victim, not the accused. For the first time, Baron Empain saw the faces of his eight living kidnappers, six men and two women, including a pimp from Marseilles and his wife, the brothers François and Alain Caillol, Georges Bertoncini aka "Joe le marseillais", his brother-in-law Marc Le Gayan and Bernard Guillon. They seemed to him to be "little guys" of no stature. He publicly announced that he had forgiven them so that the sentence would not be too harsh, confirming what he had said at his first press conference. Indeed, on the strength of his experience of two months without freedom, he was aware of the harshness of this sentence over a long period.

The defense argued that the defendants were merely executors, intermediaries for an unknown sponsor who was too dangerous for them to dare denounce him. The defendants tried to pin responsibility for the most serious acts on Daniel Duchâteau, the kidnapper killed during the shoot-out on the Autoroute du Sud, and on another, killed during a robbery in December 1978. The discovery of plane tickets to Majorca proved that these people, who claimed not to know each other, had in fact all been there together for a week to plan the kidnapping. A court-ordered re-enactment took place on June 27, 1979, at the Savigny-sur-Orge pavilion.

During the trial, the kidnappers stated that they had chosen the baron from a list of three personalities: Marcel Dassault, Baron de Rothschild and him. Later, they would mention Liliane Bettencourt and Claude François, who lived and worked on boulevard Exelmans like Baron Empain. His habits, his precise and regular schedule and his stronger physical constitution, enabling him to better withstand detention, as well as the side alley of his home, making it easier to abduct him, determined the choice of his kidnappers. In court, the defendants apologized to the baron. The trial also gave Baron Empain the opportunity to explain himself, and thus rehabilitate his image. Then the owner of a small business with fifteen employees, he recounted his ordeal with modesty and dignity, without seeking to accuse the defendants and refusing to give "the sordid details". He adds: "It was a nightmare. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy". In fact, his invective was directed more towards those closest to him and his collaborators – the real culprits, in his view. He also explained how, after his release and before the arrest of his kidnappers, he continued to live in fear because he had signed an IOU for thirty-five million francs under threat and, failing payment, his kidnappers threatened to randomly kill strangers in the street by pinning a copy of the document on them.

The sentences handed down to the kidnappers ranged from fifteen to twenty years' imprisonment. Their accomplices were sentenced to between two and five years.