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FRANCE: Billy the Ca

4 minute read
TIME

Billy the Caïd

The trouble with 25-year-old Georges Rapin was that from childhood he could do no wrong, and knew it. His father was a wealthy Paris engineer who occasionally chided him for flunking courses, but at 13 Georges gave up on school entirely. At 18, he had his own convertible and stayed out until nearly dawn every morning.

In 1954 he got caught in a thrill burglary, and his parents quietly reimbursed his victims. He dodged jail by joining the army, but the French army, which takes all kinds, shortly dismissed him as “asocial and undesirable.” So his parents decided to buy him a couple of bars to run. When the bars failed, they bought him a book shop, hoping that the contagion of handling books might improve his mind. But by that time Georges, who had taken to wearing a shoulder holster and revolver, had already carved out another life on his own. Last week he was one of the most talked-about young men in the country.

La Croix des Vaches. In his other life, prowling about the dark streets of Montmartre, he thought of himself as “Bill,” a regular caïd (tough guy), who knew his way around the milieu, the circle of hardened characters who run Pigalle. One night at his favorite bar, the Sans-Souci, Bill happened to meet a pretty young prostitute named Dominique. Born in a village near Reims, Dominique had been taken to Paris at 18 by a pimp from Corsica. But after getting into trouble over his other line of business—lewd films—the Corsican had fled Paris. The powers of the milieu had no objection to young Bill’s taking over where the Corsican left off. For the next 18 months, as Dominique’s “protector,” Bill got a slice of her earnings in addition to the $300 a month his parents gave him.

Dominique was given to making salades (trouble), to pouring into slot machines money that should have gone to Bill, even to talking of giving up her trade altogether. Among the more code-conscious of Paris’ 9,000 prostitutes, the penalty for deserting a protector is severe: it can mean a 500,000-franc fine, underworld-enforced, or even the lifelong scar of the dreaded croix des vaches, a deep cross carved into the doxy’s forehead. Bill had even more grandiose ideas of the code of the caïd. When Dominique told him that she could not pay the 500,000-franc “fine” she owed him, he offered to help her pull off a stickup in suburban Fontainebleau to raise the money.

Rose-Colored Mules. At 2 o’clock one morning, as Bill’s black Dauphine-Gordini headed towards Fontainebleau, he jammed on the brakes on a deserted stretch of the road and pulled out his pistol. Dominique jumped out of the car as Bill started firing—five shots in all. Hit, Dominique clawed at the tar roadway in her frenzy to crawl away, was still writhing when Bill calmly dumped a can of oil over her and set her on fire. As he started back to Paris and the apartment of his “official mistress,” who was to provide him with an alibi, he could see the flames dancing in his rear-view mirror.

Only through Dominique’s rose-colored mules, which she had kicked off in her agony, were the police able to identify the charred body. The first person they went looking for was, quite naturally, her protector. At first, Bill and his mistress stuck by their story—anyone, said Bill, might have an empty oil can in his car or a bunch of 7.65 shells hidden in his bathroom. But in the end, the evidence was too much. Still the compleat caïd, who would show neither pity nor remorse, Bill made a detailed confession, blandly explained: “I knew she could never pay the fine, so she had to die.” Later, as he posed triumphantly for newsmen, swaggering Georges Rapin turned to his captors and said, “No hard feelings,” and then congratulated them on a “fine investigation.”

As the crime became the biggest story in the Parisian press, hundreds of motorists drove out to the spot where Dominique had spent her last agonizing moments, and an ice-cream vendor did a thriving business. But the milieu, mostly Corsicans and North’ Africans, whose praise Bill coveted, contemptuously thought that he had broken the code by killing his source of income instead of marking her for life. And famed Lawyer Maurice Gargon, regretting the end of penal exile in French Guiana for serious crimes, called on the government to smash the power of the milieu, which he called France’s second system of justice, with sentences “more rigorous” than the government’s.

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