SWITZERLAND: Murder, Foreign Style

In making plenty of money in his lifetime, burly Marcel Leopold made plenty of enemies too. Finding the methodical business world of his native Switzerland too tame, Leopold went to China in the ’30s to try his hand at turning a quick yen. As a big-time race-track and gambling operator, he made enough to build himself a skyscraper in Tientsin, and when the Communists took over, he was tough enough to endure 2½ years in a Red jail before they extracted all his profits.

Returning to Switzerland, dead broke but ahum with ideas, Leopold was unable to persuade strait-laced local authorities to set him up in a municipal casino, and was soon seeking out more adventurous governments. Last January, learning that arms were being smuggled from Switzerland to Arab terrorists in Algeria, Geneva cops pounced on four men about to board a plane for Tripoli, with suitcases loaded with dynamite. One of the four was enterprising Marcel Leopold.

A few weeks later Leopold was set free on bail, though two of his companions, both Algerian, were kept shut up in prison. Whatever the price of his freedom, Marcel Leopold was called upon last week to pay it. Bound homeward for lunch at his roomy third-floor apartment on Geneva’s sunny Cours de Rive, he staggered through the door, fell into his wife’s arms muttering, “I’ve been poisoned!”, and died.

That night amazed police described the weapon that had brought Marcel Leopold low: a hollow dart, built along the lines of a two-stage rocket, which was shot from a blowpipe to strike the murdered man’s flesh, and then released a sharply pointed lead bullet from its tip to penetrate his vitals. Had it also carried a load of deadly poison on its point? The police were not quite sure. Neither did they have an idea of who might have fired it. “All we know,” said one official spokesman, “is that this doesn’t look like a murder committed by a European.”