SEPTEMBER 2019 VANITY FAIR 125
Jaguar. Knowing their calls could be traced,
the two men were careful not to contact
each other, but they had no idea how closely
they were being watched, or that their pay
phone usage was also being monitored.
Police recorded Doudou talking “percent-
ages” and “carats” and discussing the
Rapaport Diamond Price List (also known
as the Rap List). There were also references
to la grosse pierre, the 31-carat diamond ring
stolen in the second robbery.
Other members of their crew were busy
booking 16,000 euro vacations and rent-
ing Lamborghini Spiders with cash depos-
its. Their code to announce payouts over
the phone was a couplet from the French
national anthem, “La Marseillaise”: “The
day of glory / has arrived!”
On the evening of June 21, 2009, Allou
drove to Doudou’s home, alongside two
young women, in his Renault. Parking next
to the curb, he got out of the car alone and
crossed the street, looking around cagily
in all directions. Sensing that something
wasn’t right, he turned back. After driving
around the neighborhood for a while, he
returned. This time, Doudou came out of
his home to greet him with a bag contain-
ing 49,750 euros. The two men embraced.
As the money passed into Allou’s hands,
officers in ski masks swarmed them.
In February 2015, Doudou, Allou, Djennad,
and five accomplices were tried on a litany of
charges, including armed robbery involving
an organized criminal group. Because pros-
ecutors believed he was the leader of the
group and considered him a security threat,
Doudou watched the trial unfold from the
confines of a securitized glass compartment.
French courtroom reporters described
his presence as “quasi-demonic.” Prosecu-
tors detailed how they’d found a number
of the stolen jewels from the second heist
as well as 800,000 euros inside a plaster
wall in his compound. A subsequent raid
on his home uncovered la grosse in a plastic
jar of face cream—that signature Pink Pan-
thers move—buried deep within a concrete
drain pipe out back. Adding to the intrigue,
Doudou was also in possession of a fully
operational RBM 80 rocket launcher of
Yugoslavian provenance.
Doudou’s lawyers insisted that he’d
only been a middleman. He argued that
the court was trying to make him “wear a
hat that’s too big for my head.” While he
admitted that the plan had been hatched
with Djennad at La Divette and that he
was complicit in storing the take, he swore
that he’d brought the plan to others who’d
orchestrated it all.
The court didn’t buy Doudou’s version.
“He was the brains of the team,” argued Syl-
vie Kachaner for the prosecution. “He is the
one who organized everything, recruited
the robbers, gave instructions, and was in
charge of selling the jewelry.”
To this day, Doudou claims that the real
ringleader, whom he won’t snitch on, is still
free—and conceivably a Pink Panther.
At the trial, video footage of the second
robbery was played to the courtroom, show-
ing the men in their makeup and silk babush-
ka kerchiefs. Allou acknowledged being the
one dressed like Bernadette Chirac, with
a dainty little purse en bandoulière. Magis-
trates pressed him to confess that he’d been
a leader of the group. “What does it mean to
be a boss?” he replied. “If I’m the boss, me,
I send little people in to do the actual work.”
“Did another boss give you the inform-
ation?”
“I won’t name names—no hints,” Allou
replied. “I was invited and I followed and
that’s it.”
Doreen Carvajal covered the case for the
New York Times’ Paris bureau. What struck
her about Allou was his flagrant attitude, his
hauteur. “He was almost blaming it on Har-
ry Winston,” she says. “He said he’d been
invited, like it was an art opening.”
Despite his grittiness, Allou created an
oddly literary impression in the courtroom.
“He was like someone out of an old gang-
ster movie, in the way he talked,” Carvajal
says. “He took responsibility [for his part],
but wouldn’t rat on the brains.”
On the stand, Allou spoke of how he’d
changed since the heists, and not for the
better. Harry Winston had been at a dif-
ferent time for him, he said. “It was an era
when I believed in friendship more than
anything else. Now I don’t have a friend
anymore. I am alone.”
“Why do you say that?” asked the
prosecution.
“I used to have one friend,” he clarified,
“but it was unrequited. He mocked me to
my face.”
Allou and Doudou had nearly come to
blows after Allou was caught speeding with
the 40,000 euros. Doudou couldn’t believe
how careless he’d been and was merciless
in his contempt. Still, he helped find some-
one who vouched for the cash, providing
customs letters outlining the provenance
of the funds from abroad. Prosecutors
encouraged Allou to condemn his former
best friend, but he refused, speaking only
of their relationship as terminated. Of his
many ailments, he seemed more broken-
hearted than anything else.
The inside man, Mouloud Djennad,
cracked completely. In the lead-up to the
trial, he revealed to investigators that he’d
deactivated the alarm sensors in the stair-
well the night before the first robbery,
allowing the robbers to spend the night
inside, undetected. “If I hadn’t been fired,”
he added, “I think there could have been
three or four more robberies.”Unlike Allou or Doudou, he expressed
sincere regret for his actions, telling the
court that he was “ashamed every day, but
I cannot undo what I’ve done.” He’d been
cornered, he said, unable to say no. Genu-
inely remorseful, he started crying on the
stand, head in hands, after an ex-colleague
came to testify about the trauma of what
happened. “She wouldn’t even look at him;
she just walked right by him,” Carvajal says.
“He’d ruined his life for 50,000 euros.”
Djennad’s five-year sentence (three of
them suspended) ended up being lighter
than the 15 years given to Doudou, who’d
been eligible for a life sentence. Allou, who
received 10 years, didn’t seem too fazed. He
testified that he had by then “stopped think-
ing,” that he no longer thinks at all.
The prosecutor Kachaner attempted one
final time to get Allou to elaborate on his
dynamic with Doudou. “It’s a total divorce,”
he replied, enigmatically. “A divorce, as you
are well placed to know, is the law. It’s each
person for themselves.”
“No,” replied Kachaner, “because one
might think—”
“Don’t think, madame!” he retorted.
And that was that. Allou had arrived at the
end of thought. Friendless, spurned, grave-
ly ill, incarcerated again, this time awaiting
only death, Allou felt condemned to his cir-
cumstances by a pitiless world.Pascal Fourré doesn’t buy the argument
that society is to blame. On the mantel of
his office fireplace is a quote by a World War
II French resistance fighter: “It’s so easy
to accuse institutions! We don’t ask our-
selves if the disaster wasn’t caused by the
moral or general character defect, rather
than the regime.”
In June, Fourré and his team were still
hearing appeals from the fences involved in
the second robbery. “People wonder why it
takes so long,” said Fourré, his heavy-lidded
eye now recalling Peter Falk in Columbo,
“but instances of organized criminality
such as this, in the milieu of bull sharks,
require proper procedural preparation.”
Asked why so many jewelry robberies
happen in France, he pointed to studies
showing that the rate of armed robberies
are declining there, despite the ongoing pre-
ponderance of jewel-related episodes such
as the Kim Kardashian case, or the practi-
cally annual raids in Cannes, or the two hits
at the Hôtel Ritz Paris last year.
John Shaw, the insurance loss adjustor,
attributes the phenomenon to the fact that
“there are traditionally more jewelers per
head in France than elsewhere; the French
have their own jewelers just like they have
their own bakers.”
As to Doudou’s argument that he wasn’t
the ringleader, Fourré defers to the court’s
decision. He does grant, however, that