Monsieur X: The incredible story of the most audacious gambler in history

By Jamie Reid

SHORTLISTED FOR THE TELEGRAPH SPORTS BIOGRAPHY OF THE YEAR AWARD 2019

Monsieur X is a dazzling tale of glamour, riches, violence and ultimately tragedy.

Patrice des Moutis was a handsome, charming and well-educated Frenchman with an aristocratic family, a respectable insurance business, and a warm welcome in the smartest Parisian salons. He was also a compulsive gambler and illegal bookie.

Between the late 1950s and the early 1970s, Des Moutis made a daring attempt to beat the French state-run betting system. His success so alarmed the authorities that they repeatedly changed the rules of betting in an effort to stop him. And so a battle of wills began, all played out on the front pages of the daily newspapers as the general public willed Des Moutis on to ever greater triumphs.

He remained one step ahead of the law until finally the government criminalised his activities, driving him into the arms of the underworld. Eventually the net began to close, high-profile characters found themselves the target of the state's investigation, and people began turning up dead...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Mar 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9781472942319

Jamie Reid

Jamie Reid is the author of the non-fiction books A Licence to Print Money, Blown and Doped, the winner of the 2013 William Hill Sports Book of the Year award. A life-long betting and racing enthusiast, he has been a regular contributor to the Financial Times supplement How To Spend It, and has also written for the Guardian and the Independent on Sunday, as well as a wide range of magazines.

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Prologue

1974

It was cold in Paris in the Parc de Saint-Cloud at twilight on a winter’s day. In summer the gardens of the former royal château on a hillside overlooking the Seine were a favourite setting for picnics, games and family outings. But by half-past four on a December afternoon the children’s play area by the northwestern entrance was deserted. The smart mothers and nannies had all swept up their charges and set off back to their haute bourgeoisie homes in the suburbs. Other than a gardener making a bonfire of old leaves there were just a few solitary dog-walkers and a middle-aged man in an old rugby shirt and a pair of tracksuit bottoms.

The 54-year-old had been coming to the park for years, running miles along the manicured pathways and over the forested hillside that covered more than a thousand acres between Saint-Cloud and Garches. He was proud of his fitness and routine. It reassured him of his readiness for the battle and his ability to live ‘like an English milord’, smoking five Havana cigars a day yet retaining the energy of a much younger man. He wasn’t about to stop now, he’d assured friends, despite all the rumours and the stories in the press. But on his own in the fading light, with the smell of bonfire smoke hanging on the frosty air, he found it harder to dispel the tension and the mounting fear of arrest or worse.

The man slowed down as he reached the crossroads by the ornamental fountain and the little café that was closed and boarded up now until the spring. After satisfying himself that he was alone and not being followed, he turned left down a gravelled path that led to a viewpoint beside some wooden benches and a green painted wicket fence. The city lay stretched out before him with the Bois de Boulogne and the Eiffel Tower in the foreground and Sacré-Cœur on the far horizon. This was his home. This was where he had grown up and been educated, married and had children. He knew its offices and boardrooms, its bedrooms and salons, cafés, restaurants and bars. He knew all the racetracks too and all the leading owners, trainers and jockeys.

He’d made the running in his time. He’d set the pace and maintained it for almost fifteen years. Taunting and outwitting a massive bureaucratic monolith and leaving it chasing his shadow. At the highpoint of his success they had called him the ‘Prince of Gamblers’ and a ‘modern-day Robin Hood’. But he had ended up becoming the reluctant leading man in an increasingly dangerous roman noir from which there seemed to be no escape. And if the tip-offs he’d been given were correct, he was starting to believe that he might have run his race.

There had already been two deaths – one a jockey, the other a gangster in Marseille – and now the French champion jockey was in the Santé prison, with more arrests expected soon. People were asking, who was the mastermind? And when would he be unmasked? The story was all over that morning’s papers, the sensational news of the police swoop on the ‘Mafia du Tiercé’ sharing top billing with reports of President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s forthcoming trip to Guadeloupe and the Sûreté Nationale being on the lookout for Lord Lucan. When would they come for him? he wondered . . . and who would come first?

Down below he could see lights coming on in the houseboats on the Seine, and a barge heading downstream towards Sèvres. The noise of the rush-hour traffic drifted back up the hillside. Commuters hurrying home to the comfort and warmth of wives, husbands, lovers, family and friends. Good food, sex and untroubled sleep. Pleasures he could no longer count on.

He took one last, long lingering look at the city lights. Then he turned away and began to run back down the empty path towards the dark places beneath the trees.

Chapter 1

1950

It was the last weekend of August and Deauville was packed with well-to-do families and gambling high rollers in town for the climax of the summer season. The weather, as so often on the Normandy coast, was variable, but early each morning strings of superbly bred racehorses came down into the town from the racecourse stables to enjoy a canter by the water’s edge. Later on, children cavorted happily on the sandy beach and ran screeching in and out of the waves indifferent to the temperature and the Channel breeze. Adults posed elegantly behind windbreaks or stayed lounging around the swimming pools at the Normandy and Royal hotels, interrupting hands of bridge and gin rummy for cocktails at the pool bar or a round of golf on the slopes of Mont Canisy.

As was the case every year at Deauville, people-watching was a major pastime. The composer Vincent Scotto, who had written the music for the films of Marcel Pagnol, caused a sensation by strolling up and down the wooden boardwalk, accompanied by a pet lion cub with whom he later shared a drink at an outdoor table at the Bar du Soleil.

Another to make a big impression was King Farouk of Egypt, who arrived in a red Bentley and was staying at the Hôtel du Golf. The moustachioed overweight monarch was a compulsive gambler who spent his afternoons at the races and his nights at the casino. On the evening of Saturday 26 August Farouk and his entourage turned up late for the Grand Prix de la Chanson in the casino ballroom. Other guests, all attired in evening dress, looked on in astonishment as the gluttonous potentate proceeded to devour an entire gigot d’agneau and a couple of lobsters which were served to him on a special table at the front of the room. The occasion culminated in a concert by Maurice Chevalier, but the King was more interested in cards than chansonniers and left for the gaming tables halfway through.

Farouk and the exiled King Peter of Yugoslavia were two of the biggest players, and losers, at the casino. But out at the racecourse, La Touques, on Avenue Hocquart de Turtot, it was Prince Aly Khan, one of the richest and most successful racehorse owners in the world, who made the headlines. Aly, who was the eldest son and heir of the ‘old’ Aga Khan, or Aga Khan III, was a debonair playboy as renowned for his gambling as he was for his pursuit of beautiful women. In Deauville that August he was accompanied by his second wife, the Hollywood actress Rita Hayworth, who he had married the previous year.

Aly had bought Hayworth a few racehorses as a present and on Sunday 27 August one of them, a colt called Skylarking, won the Prix de Saint-Arnoult, while her filly Double Rose finished second in the Grand Prix de Deauville, the climactic race of the meeting. The sun refused to shine but a huge crowd still came out to the racecourse to watch. It was the usual mix of comtes and concierges, chancers and gigolos. The serious owner–breeders were there in their hats and suits with their well-worn binocular cases. Their wives and mistresses were there too, in black cat-eye sunglasses by Lanvin and Dior, and then there were the curious once-a-year racegoers tempted away from the beach by the prospect of celebrity. Double Rose did her best, leading the field for much of the race until she was unable to match Baron Guy de Rothschild’s three-year-old colt Alizier in the home straight.

Aly Khan and Rita Hayworth were waiting for Double Rose in the unsaddling enclosure in front of the old half-timbered Norman weighing room. Aly, hatless but dapper in a lightweight jacket and cravat, was debriefed by the filly’s trainer Alec Head while La Belle Rita, wearing one of her New Look cartwheel hats, stroked Double Rose’s ears and patted her svelte and shimmering coat.

After the racing was over, Hayworth returned to her father-in-law’s villa outside Trouville while Aly Khan joined a small group of fellow turfistes in the Normandy hotel’s ground-floor bar. The intimate, club-like room with its oak panelling and comfortable leather chairs was the ideal setting in which to enjoy a post-race whisky avec des glaçons and a smoke and to conduct a review of the day’s action and make a tally of who owed what to who.

Aly Khan may have been the only royalty present but the others were all members of le monde and the French moneyed upper class. There was the Comte de Kerouara, an aristocratic Breton racehorse owner and breeder who owned a half-share in the jewellers Van Cleef and Arpels. There was the textile tycoon Roger Saint, a prominent owner and gambler and a partner in Établissements Saint Frères, which was the biggest jute manufacturer in France. There was Saint’s and the Comte’s trainer Georges Pelat, a rumbustious character originally from the southwest whose passions included rugby and bull-fighting and who ran horses both on the flat and over jumps. And then there was the man doing the accounting albeit discreetly and with a light touch.

Patrice Jean Henry des Moutis shared the same background and social circle as the rest of them. The 29-year-old had been born in Paris in 1921 and grew up in the smart surburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. Patrice’s father, Henry des Moutis, was a wealthy insurance broker with offices in the capital. But the family roots were partly in Normandy, where they owned a summer house near Sées in the valley of the Orne, and partly in Brittany. Earlier generations of the Des Moutis clan included imperial grandees, generals, diplomats and admirals of the fleet.

Patrice was one of six children – three boys and three girls – and the boys all attended the prestigious Paris day school, the Lycée Janson de Sailly on the Rue de la Pompe. But in 1939, as war with Germany looked increasingly inevitable, Patrice and his younger brother Gilbert were sent away to a boarding school, the Lycée Montesquieu, near Le Mans. It was not a happy experience. Patrice was extremely bright but he railed against the petty rules and close confinement of boarding-school life. A report in March 1940 warned that his work was ‘superficial’ and that a ‘big effort’ would be necessary if he was to improve.

Patrice’s older brother François had been called up and was an officer serving with the 104th French infantry regiment when the Germans invaded in May. On 13 June 1940 François des Moutis died a hero’s death in a rearguard action at Luzancy, a village in the department of Seine-et-Marne 63 kilometres north of Paris. He was 27 years old.

After the French surrender and the establishment of Marshal Pétain’s puppet government, Patrice returned to Paris and in 1941 he was admitted to the École Centrale, which was one of the Grandes Écoles, or elite universities, that were at the summit of the nation’s hierarchical education system. In peacetime or war, the Grandes Écoles were designed to groom high flyers to become the civil servants who would run the country, intellectuals who would pronounce on its spiritual wellbeing, or industrialists who would drive its economy.

The École Centrale was an engineering school founded in the nineteenth century and situated next to the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers on the Rue Montgolfier. Along with Patrice’s father, former students included Gustave Eiffel, André Michelin, Armand Peugeot and Louis Blériot, who was the first man to fly the Channel.

Patrice, who became Pat to his friends, studied mathematics and engineering, graduating with honours in the wartime class of 1943. It may have been the lowest point of the Occupation, with the French economy on its uppers but, then as now, a Grande École diploma was seen as a certain passport to future success. Other notable Grandes Écoles graduates that year were a future Prime Minister of France, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, a future Finance Minister, Félix Gaillard – who would also serve briefly as PM – and the future founder of L’Express magazine, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber. All three of them would remember Patrice des Moutis.

After the Liberation Patrice worked as a risk assessor in his father’s firm, taking over the reins of the business in 1948. By then he had proposed to Marie-Thérèse Queret, an attractive, self-possessed blonde debutante from the same Breton and Norman nobility as himself. Marie-Thérèse was assured that she had made the perfect marriage dreamed of by every girl of her class in that era. Patrice had money, brains and social cachet. He was six feet tall with dark brown hair, blue eyes, a firm jaw and an aquiline nose. He wore tailormade suits from Sulka on the Rue de Rivoli, white or blue Charvet shirts with a Charvet tie, and black, handmade brogues. He was an inveterate smoker who always had a Gauloise or Dunhill in his hand but he kept himself fit too: running, cycling, riding, skiing in winter and playing rugby and tennis. In private he was loving and tender. In company he could be funny and seductive and always seemed to be at the centre of every conversation, radiating energy and charm.

But all of these personal and financial skills only described one half of Patrice des Moutis. He was also a passionate devotee of horse racing, having first learned about it at his father’s knee at the family house in Normandy, and he was a consummate gambler. Patrice didn’t believe in luck or chance. He liked playing bridge, and was happy to spend a sociable evening at the tables, but generally he disdained casino games in favour of the horses. He based his wagering on his knowledge of people and form and on his mathematical grasp of odds and percentages. No matter how many respectable business meetings and working lunches he attended as an insurance broker in Paris, he was always yearning to get back to his first love: Longchamp in the spring; Auteuil and Chantilly in June – along with trips across the Channel to Epsom and Royal Ascot; Longchamp again in the autumn; and, before that, the sacrosanct summer pilgrimage to Deauville.

When the gentlemen in the Normandy Bar had settled their accounts that August Sunday evening in 1950 the meeting broke up. Not that anything as vulgar as money changed hands there and then. That would come later after la rentrée when everyone had returned to Paris at the end of the holidays. For now some of them agreed to reconvene that night for drinks and dinner, cards or baccarat in the casino. Patrice des Moutis was eager to get back to the villa he and Marie-Thérèse were sharing with her parents fifteen minutes outside town. He hurried down the Normandy’s front steps and crossed the little square to where his car was parked in front of the restaurant Chez Miocque. But just as he was about to open the door three men got out of an adjacent black Citroën Traction Avant and blocked his path.

A quick glance told Des Moutis that the men were unlikely to be guests at the Normandy hotel. Their suits, hats and shoes looked too old and worn – evidence of the grinding austerity that, outside of the gilded world of horse racing, still held the French in its grip five years after the war had ended. One of the men held out a warrant card which proclaimed that he was Commissaire Roger Taupin of the French gambling police, the Police des Courses et Jeux.

‘Can I help you?’ Patrice asked politely. Taupin, who had a tight mouth and hair en brosse, replied that the police would like to ask him a few questions. Patrice asked if it could wait, explaining that his wife would be expecting him and he really should be going. But Taupin was insistent. They needed to talk now, he said, holding open the back door of the Traction Avant.

Patrice des Moutis was cornered. ‘Very well,’ he said. But he couldn’t think how he could possibly be of assistance. Glancing over his shoulder to make sure that none of his racing friends were watching, he climbed reluctantly into the back seat of the Citroën.

Deauville’s office of the Police Judiciaire was about a ten-minute drive away, in a half-timbered building in a side road not far from the roundabout that led up to the racetrack. Patrice was shown into a small bare interview room at the back. There was just one high window, which didn’t look as if it was opened very often, and the air was close and smelled of stale cigarette smoke and sweat. Less than half an hour ago, Patrice reflected, he’d been in Deauville’s best hotel drinking pre-war Scotch with Aly Khan.

Commissaire Taupin sat down at a table. Patrice took the chair on the other side, while the other two men remained standing. Des Moutis lit up a Gauloise, sat back in his chair and crossed his legs. ‘Now then,’ he began. What was this all about?

‘You know what it’s about,’ replied Taupin primly. Patrice said he hadn’t the faintest idea. The commissaire said he wanted to know about the men Des Moutis had just been talking to in the Normandy hotel. ‘Friends,’ explained Patrice. ‘Fellow racing lovers. Very distinguished men, some of them. Men who appreciate discretion.’ As he was sure the commissaire and his colleagues would understand.

Taupin wasn’t impressed. He dared Patrice to deny that his ‘friends’ were all high-stakes gamblers on the horses. ‘I confess,’ said Des Moutis with a smile. They were in Deauville, after all. Was betting on racing now a crime? ‘Maybe not,’ said Taupin. As long as their betting was conducted through the proper channels. ‘Ah, yes,’ said Patrice. ‘The Pari-Mutuel.’ ‘Of course,’ said Taupin. ‘The PMU. The correct way.’ Patrice des Moutis shrugged his shoulders and nodded. ‘The French way,’ he agreed.

‘But you and your friends,’ continued Taupin, leaning closer, ‘I think you prefer another way?’ Patrice admitted that some of the gentlemen in question might have bookmaking accounts in England which, as free citizens, was their right. ‘What about the accounts they have with you?’ asked Taupin. The commissaire had got up out of his chair now to come round and perch on the edge of the table, and his two colleagues moved in closer too. ‘I beg your pardon,’ said Patrice, looking confused. ‘Don’t treat us like fools, Monsieur,’ said Taupin. ‘We know all about you. You’re one of the biggest bookmakers in France.’

Patrice laughed, made a face and threw up his hands as if the accusation was absurd. It was ridiculous, he said. The commissaire and his superiors had been misinformed. Whatever they’d been told, it was a complete fantasy, an invention. Of course gossip and rumour were widespread in racing, but he wouldn’t have expected the police force to be taken in.

It was a good act. The lines had been well rehearsed and, to the untutored eye, it was a flawless performance. But it was a lie.

Patrice des Moutis wasn’t just a punter. For the last few years the former Grande École student with the brilliant future had seen a way to make betting as much of a sure thing financially as insurance: by acting as a private bookmaker to racing swells like Aly Khan, Roger Saint, the Comte de Kerouara, and his other companions in the Normandy Bar. This would have been considered louche enough for someone of Patrice’s background in England, where it was at least within the law, but in France there was another problem altogether. Ever since its inception, the French had modelled their racing industry as closely as possible on the pattern long established across the Channel. With one exception: in France bookmaking was illegal.

Whereas the first official race meeting at Newmarket took place in 1671, and the first Derby was run at Epsom in 1779, there was no organised programme of horse racing in France until the early nineteenth century. It owed its birth to a group of Francophile Englishmen led by Lord Henry Seymour, who was the second son of the Marquis of Hertford and lived all his life in France. In company with assorted French aristocrats they formed the Jockey-Club de Paris, valuing (like their counterparts in Newmarket) breeding, wealth and good form – in the social sense as well as knowledge of the Turf – as the most important qualities in aspiring members.

A governing body called the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Amélioration des Races de Chevaux en France was set up and, in 1836, they presided over the first running of the Prix du Jockey Club, or French Derby, at Chantilly. More big races followed, and at the outset the training centres at Chantilly and Maisons-Laffitte resounded with English voices as trainers, jockeys and stable lads were lured across the Channel by the prospect of employment. They were accompanied by English bookmakers, alive to new business, who opened premises on the grand boulevards in Paris. The bookies, who soon had local rivals to contend with, set up brightly painted betting booths in caravans on race days at places like the Champ de Mars, the future site of the Eiffel Tower, and trade boomed.

But skulduggery was never far away in nineteenth-century racing, and most of it emanated from plots and conspiracies involving betting. French church and civic leaders held the bookmakers responsible – they were mostly Englishmen, after all – and accused them of having a vested interest in seeing that horses they had laid large amounts of money on didn’t win. To counter the criticisms, an enterprising Catalan émigré called Joseph Oller proposed an alternative pool-based system that he termed the Pari-Mutuel – pari being the French word for a bet or a wager.

Oller, who had run an English-style fixed-odds bookmaking business on horse racing and cock fighting in his native Spain, suggested replacing the bookies with an operator acting as a stakeholder with no individual interest in the outcome. The more bets there were on a race the larger the pool would be and, after the operator had taken out a percentage to cover their profit and expenses, winning punters would share the rest in proportion to their stakes. When the favourite won, the payout would be lower; but if a rank outsider won and relatively few punters had backed it, the payout could be huge.

Informed gamblers were unimpressed, pointing out that they couldn’t be sure what odds they’d get paid out at when they placed a bet, and that the odds on a fancied horse might get shorter and shorter because there would be no competition from bookmakers willing to take it on. They also objected that the Pari-Mutuel operator’s take might comfortably exceed a traditional bookie’s profit margin or ‘over-round’.

But while bookmakers continued to lay the odds on the racecourses in Britain – and were permitted to offer credit-account, though not cash, betting facilities off it – in France the authorities preferred Oller’s system. Not that the inventor was able to profit from it for very long. The French racecourses, run by various sociétés, or local management committees, decided that betting rights at the tracks belonged to them, and in 1874 they had Oller committed to prison for fifteen days for ‘illegal bookmaking’.

Oller suffered a further blow in 1887 when his partner, the Frenchman Albert Chauvin, set up a Pari-Mutuel business of his own, offering an improved system for calculating odds and paying dividends. That same year the National Assembly, going through one of its periodic spasms of moral rectitude, decided to impose a wholesale ban on racecourse gambling. But when attendances plummeted and the racetrack managements and their aristocratic patrons protested, parliament backed down, to Albert Chauvin’s advantage. In 1891 the government outlawed all fixed-odds bookmaking and awarded Chauvin’s company the monopoly right to run Pari-Mutuel pool betting in France.

With Chauvin having put him out of the bookmaking business, Joseph Oller devoted the rest of his life to becoming an impresario in partnership with the entrepreneur Charles Zidler. In 1889 they opened the Moulin Rouge in Pigalle, which soon became the most famous cabaret in the world, and four years later they opened the Olympia, the first Parisian music hall. Oller, who described the Moulin Rouge as ‘a temple dedicated to women and dance’, died in 1922 and was posthumously immortalised by the great screen actor Jean Gabin in Jean Renoir’s 1955 film French Cancan.

At the time of his death Oller was a wealthy man, but his estate was still only a fraction of the fortune that it could have been had his one-time partner not effectively hijacked the concept of pari-mutuel betting. From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century Chauvin’s family devoted themselves to turning their Compagnie du Pari-Mutuel into one of the biggest and most cash-rich businesses in France, one from which the government’s tax collectors would profit handsomely. In 1930 the company was reborn as the PMU, or Pari-Mutuel Urbain, after the legislators gave them the right to organise betting off-course in approved outlets in towns and cities, as well as on the course. By then the day-to-day running of Oller’s and Chauvin’s creation had passed into the hands of a dedicated administrator and civil servant who was as indifferent to the attractions of racing and gambling as a man like Patrice des Moutis was enamoured of them.

In the years to come the name of André Carrus would frequently be mentioned in the same breath as that of Des Moutis. But if one was a Robin Hood figure intent on taking on the system, the other was the sheriff and state’s bookmaker determined to bring him down.

Chapter 2

By the time Patrice finally left Deauville police station the beach was deserted but the cafés were buzzing and the restaurants filling up with hungry Sunday evening diners. Driving back along the coast towards Villers-sur-Mer, the sun slipping low over the horizon, Des Moutis felt pretty sure that the police had no concrete evidence with which to charge him. Neither did he believe that any of his clients would have willingly incriminated him and, by implication, themselves in illegal betting. He suspected it was more of a warning shot ordered from higher up the chain of command.

Patrice always maintained that he was not a bookmaker in the British sense of the word; more a commission agent taking and placing bets for friends. The principal illegal bookmaker in France after World War II was François Spirito, a Marseille gangster and former business partner of the Corsican Godfather Paul Carbone, who was killed in a train crash in 1943. Spirito took over Carbone’s book and related rackets in Paris and