World: Le Beau Cat Man

It was the sort of night that society columnists dream of. On the seafront terrace of a colonnaded mansion at Cap Ferrat, Mary Lasker widow of U.S. Advertising Tycoon Albert D. Lasker, was dining quietly with two good friends: Gérald van der Kemp, curator of the Versailles Palace, and Anna Rosenberg. President Truman’s Assistant Defense Secretary. At nearby Eze-sur-Mer, U.S.-born Prince Youka Troubetzkoy and his beautiful princess. Sparkplug Heiress Marcia Stranahan, had left their sumptuous Villa Mayou to attend a formal dinner dance given by Boston Financier Serge Semenenko aboard Sir Bernard Docker’s yacht Shemara. In the warm Mediterranean darkness, the surf pounded restlessly against the rocky Riviera coast. and the Riviera’s storied second-story men went silently to work.

Eight servants were in the house at the time of Mrs. Lasker’s dinner; yet no one saw the front door open, heard footsteps in the bedrooms upstairs, had the slightest idea that jewels worth $120,000—and Van der Kemp’s key to his apartment in the Versailles Palace—were being stolen. In the Villa Mayou. the Troubetzkoys’ cook, maitre d’hōtel and two royal poodles watched a Belgian bicycle race on the television set in the servants’ quarters; they were unaware of the agile figure who scaled the Villa’s facade, tiptoed into Princess Marcia’s boudoir, tiptoed out with $14,000 in gems. Not that anyone cared. Said the prince the next day: “Such things do happen, you know. At least now I know what to buy my wife for her next birthday.”

For the Riviera, the two jewel burglaries were little more than routine. Only some 1,500 assorted flics patrol the world’s most fashionable resort strip—and most cops are too busy unsnarling traffic and directing tourists to have energy left over for chasing crooks. As a result, in the past month alone, there have been seven major heists, worth $400,000.

In Cannes, three hooded bandits carrying submachine guns stole $40,000 in gems from a jewelry store while scores of tourists, out for their midafternoon promenade, watched spellbound. In Nice seven hoods burst into the Casino, shouted “Hands up” in a French accent, took $4,000. At Beaulieu thieves even burgled the city hall, escaped with $450 in cash and stamps. One untouched enclave: Monte Carlo, perhaps because Princess Grace once romped cinematically around the Riviera with retired Cat Man Gary Grant as he unraveled a series of robberies in Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief.

Last week the harried flics finally struck back. Detectives found a cool million dollars worth of hot ice stashed away in the Antibes apartment of a young (25) schoolmarm named Hélène Chambovet, who explained delicately that “my friend Sacha told me to keep them for him.” Sacha. arrested in a dawn raid on a Paris apartment, turned out to be Nicolai Gontscharow, 31, a handsome, suave, international cat man known on the Riviera as “le beau Sacha.” Caught trying to sneak out a window (with a suitcase containing $10,000 in cash), Sacha claimed he was a simple jewelry salesman.

Tall and blond, he did not look much like Cary Grant but as a thief, his record was more impressive; police claimed Sacha was the leader of a gang of jewel thieves that have lifted several million from the mansions and hotels of France, Belgium and Germany since 1953. Said an exuberant Riviera police chief, hoping some of the month’s robberies could be traced to le beau Sacha: “We have trapped a very big bird, undoubtedly the most important in the last 30 years.”