THE LAST BARON

Fast-paced account of a late-1970s abduction in Paris that exposed rivalries, anger, and secrets.

Former Time Paris bureau chief Sancton was living in France in 1978 when he followed newspaper reports of the brash kidnapping of industrialist Baron Édouard-Jean Empain, whose huge empire comprised 174 companies in fields that included mining, banking, shipbuilding, armaments, and nuclear energy. Sancton’s brisk recounting of the abduction and its aftermath draws on Empain’s memoirs as well as those of Alain Caillol, convicted of masterminding the crime, who not only talked with Sancton, but eagerly gave him documents and clippings. These sources, along with trial testimony, reports, and additional interviews, enabled the author to create a palpable sense of the carrying out of the crime and Empain’s ordeal, which included the amputation of a fingertip, sent to his family. Empain’s conglomerate had been established by his grandfather, a titan of the belle epoque who managed vast holding companies and multinational investments and whose achievements included building the Paris Métro. By the end of the 19th century, Sancton writes, “the Empain group was a major player in the fields of transport, energy, finance, and civil engineering.” Born into luxury, Empain reveled in fast cars, glamorous women, and high-stakes gambling, habitually losing huge sums at his twice-weekly poker games and, in 1977, some 11 million francs at a casino in Cannes. However, the men who took part in the kidnapping, though “left-leaning and anti-capitalist,” were not aiming to make a political statement; they wanted a ransom of 80 million francs. As days turned into months, the kidnappers realized they would not achieve their goal. Sancton vividly chronicles the invasive publicity that cost Empain his marriage, the police investigators’ frustration and strategies, the machinations of rivalrous business associates who welcomed Empain’s disappearance, and the disclosures about his philandering and gambling that tainted Empain and his family.

An entertaining, well-researched tale of a late-20th-century scandal.