A Miserable Little Robbery

One afternoon last week, a retired businessman and his wife left their pleasant villa outside Paris to drive two of their sons back to boarding school in the family Buick. One of their two nieces, left behind, looked up from the dinner she was preparing and screamed. Two-men, heads shrouded in black hoods, had entered the house.

Swiftly and efficiently the men herded the women upstairs at pistol point, tied them with curtain cords, locked them in a bathroom, and--undetected by a private secretary asleep upstairs--systematically ransacked the house. Soon afterwards they walked away with a wad of bank notes and the French underworld's biggest haul of stolen jewelry (estimated value: $285,000) since the Aga Khan's wife was robbed of $500,000 worth on the Riviera in 1949. It was not. however, so much the size of the haul that gave the burglary its special interest as the identity of the householder and the fact that on his return in the Buick he dismissed the whole affair as "nothing but a miserable little robbery."

Politico-Religious. Shrewd, tough, fiftyish General Le Van Vien is one man who could well afford to regard the lifting of a few million francs' worth of uninsured gems as petty thievery. Not long ago he ruled supreme as czar of the underworld in French Indo-China. The sixth son of a rural outlaw who built a modest fortune on stolen water buffalo, Le Van Vien showed early promise of becoming a successful chip off the old block. In the early days of the Sino-Japanese War he left home to fight with Chiang Kai-shek's armies, but he soon found that the more peaceable job of chauffeur for the French government in Saigon gave him more time to indulge his hobby of smuggling contraband and opium. At the outbreak of World War II, he deserted the French and sold his talents to the seemingly more successful Japanese. By 1943 he had become powerful enough to organize his own private army, which he called the Binh Xuyen and rented out to the side--French, Japanese or Communist--that seemed to be ahead at the moment.

When he was working for them, the French dignified Le Van Vien's private army of 8,000 bloodthirsty gangsters as a "politico-religious organization," but Le Van Vien himself put it to more practical uses, including piracy, highway robbery, kidnaping, smuggling, pandering and an elaborate system of shakedown rackets. By the early 1950s, however, his chest adorned with France's own Legion of Honor for other services rendered, General Le Van Vien was a respectable servant of empire with a household of wives and concubines and a zoo full of wild beasts on a spacious estate overlooking the sea at Cap Saint-Jacques.

One of the most powerful men in Indo-China, the undisputed lord of every profitable vice in the land, the czar of the police force, which he bought cash-down from Bao Dai for $1,000,000, he became a close crony of France's puppet Emperor. Between them, Le Van Vien and Bao Dai, who preferred the seclusion of the French Riviera to his own embattled empire, split a daily take of some $25,000 from Cholon's infamous bordello and gambling casino Le Grand Monde, the most spectacularly profitable hot spot in the East.

Indecent--Ridiculous. After the debacle of Dien Bien Phu, Le Van Vien stayed briefly on in the new independent state of South Viet Nam, and even made a brief, last-ditch attempt to hold his ground before the moralistic new broom of Premier Ngo Dinh Diem. Then he prudently fled to Paris, taking with him one wife, a few children and an estimated 3 billion francs ($8,570,000). There in the suburbs, while the remnants of his army intrigued among themselves back home, the old buccaneer settled down to a life of refined retirement. No marquis of the old nobility could have been more indignant than General Le Van Vien when he returned from his drive last week to find his garden full of policemen and his house in an uproar. "A miserable little robbery and everyone loses his head," he exclaimed. "It's indecent and ridiculous. France shows us hospitality, and this is how we repay her. We bother the police and we worry the Minister of the Interior."

Whether or not the robbers were mere French second-story men or furtive Binh-Xuyen agents bent on some dark political mission, no one could say, and General Le Van Vien declined to guess. "I don't suspect anyone," he told the bewildered police blandly. "I didn't think there was anyone who disliked me."

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