Kidnapping was nothing new to the international fugitive and stick-up merchant Jacques Mesrine. By 1979, his career as a professional criminal stretched back more than 20 years, and alongside murder and robbery he had a considerable amount of experience holding wealthy individuals against their will for substantial ransoms.
Born in 1936, Mesrine had always sought out action and notoriety, inspired by the US crime fiction and box office hits that he lapped up as a child and, perhaps in some small way, the atrocities he had witnessed the Nazis inflicting on France during World War II. Despite his respectable upbringing in a middle-class amily, he was a disruptive pupil and was expelled from several chools before being drafted into the French Army for his national service. The camaraderie under pressure appealed to Mesrine, even if the discipline did not. But most of all, he thrived on the adrenaline of combat. In one of the books he would write many years later, he
