Petty crime has never been so low in Cannes, the deputy mayor said a few years back, after some unpleasantness during the film festival. That's true: it's the major crime you have to watch out for.
The Festival de Cannes kicks off next week and it will bring to the city of many sins a full collection of professional sinners: jewel thieves, hookers, bag-snatchers, pickpockets and pimps. Or to quote Hedley Lamarr from Blazing Saddles: "Rustlers, cut-throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers and Methodists."
Apart from Methodists, Cannes gets most of the rest. In July 2013, a man in a motorcycle helmet with an automatic pistol walked into a room at the Carlton Intercontinental Hotel and boosted €103 million ($150 million) worth of jewellery and watches belonging to the London-based, Russian-born Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev, the largest theft of jewels in French history. The jewels were to be part of an exhibition that had not yet opened; the thief struck just before the jewels were to be placed in secure display cases. The three security guards were unarmed (as most are by law in France), and the robber was gone in about a minute.
This was out of film festival time, but there were two others during that year's festival: a single necklace worth $US2.6 million ($3.4 million) lifted from the Hotel du Cap, the swankiest hotel on the Riviera, and a week earlier, a safe ripped out of the wall in the Novotel, netting $1 million in Chopard baubles. The security, in most of these cases, was a joke.
If you know your movies, you're liking Cary Grant as John Robie for this crime, and indeed the Carlton Hotel was the one Hitchcock used in To Catch a Thief in 1955. It's almost too perfect: perhaps Danielle Broussard, the teenager played by Brigitte Auber in that film, is back on the rooftops of Cannes, aged 75. More likely, said Interpol, quoting another movie, it was the gang of ex-Yugoslavs known as The Pink Panthers, ex-soldiers who are credited with a series of huge robberies in the past 20 years. A case for Inspector Clouseau, n'est ce pas?
The attraction of Cannes for thieves isn't just obvious; it's flaunted on the TV news around the world each May. The red carpet footage of gorgeous women in gorgeous jewels brings the cognoscenti, not just of the film world but of the criminal world too. The temptation to make the obvious joke here is resistible, but it is true that some of them are the same people, albeit at different levels. Cannes attracts only the greatest thieves, some of whom have their yachts moored in the bay. It's particularly attractive to Russian and Arab billionaires, some of whom sail in and load their boats with "yacht girls", who can make a lot of money during the festival's 10 days.
In fact, if you want to get to the top parties in Cannes, become a high-class hooker with a broad taste in men: you could make up to $US40,000 a night "the hard way", according to a man who was close to the action.
Lebanese businessman Elie Nahas was a festival regular until a French judge sentenced him to eight years' jail in absentia. In 2013, The Hollywood Reporter claimed Nahas had been helping to supply up to 50 women of various nationalities to rich Middle Eastern clients during the festival. One of them was his boss, Moatessem Gaddafi, who was killed with his father in Libya in 2011. The girls operate at all levels – the "putes de luxe" at $4000 a night, or the €50 street girls who come in by train – along with the north African hawkers who board in Marseille for 10 days of street trading on the Croisette. One Paris-based prostitute said Cannes "was the biggest payday of the year". Another talked of paying off the hotel concierges to be allowed to operate in the big hotels.
Nahas told The Hollywood Reporter: "Every year during the festival there are 30 or 40 luxury yachts in the bay at Cannes, and every boat belongs to a very rich person. Every boat has about 10 girls on it; they are usually models, and they are usually nude or half nude. It's drugs and drink and beautiful women. Go out on one and you'll see. The girls are all waiting for their envelopes at the end of the night. It's been going on there for 60 years."
This would be merely sordid if not for the increased security risk at Cannes. The recent terror attacks in Paris and Brussels make an attack in Cannes more likely. Cannes is already producing its own jihadists. In 2012 the French police arrested two young Cannes men who had returned from training in Syria. The investigators claim they are part of a terrorist cell based around Cannes and Torcy, an outer suburb of Paris. In November last year, prosecutors sent 20 men from this group to trial. It is not hard to imagine some of their friends wanting to make the red carpet at Cannes even redder.
It's a horrible thought, and one that must give the festival authorities nightmares.
