Jacques Mesrine / Signed handwritten letter / Hold-up / Isolation / Prison / 1977

  

Autograph letter signed “El viejo” to his mistress Jeanne Schneider [Fleury-Mérogis Prison], Jan. 25, [19]77, 2 pages, quarto. Autograph cell address in the upper left corner.

Slight show-through of the paper in places.

A tender letter from Public Enemy No. 1, trying to make amends after a tense prison visit with his mistress, while still revealing his explosive temperament.

“Sometimes I would tell everyone to go fuck themselves just so I could be completely alone. Honestly, we’re a bit stupid. Every now and then I have to cast a little shadow over our love. To think you will never know what caused my sudden change during the visit.

Oh, nothing to reproach you for. But I am the way I am and certainly not the man you knew 8 years ago [an allusion to their joint robberies and kidnappings in Canada]. I mean the man I was 8 years ago.

Anyway, our visit ended well. Sometimes I would tell everyone to go fuck themselves just so I could be completely alone. I hope you understood the betting system. Every day the same amount is ‘placed.

’ Always check your ticket for the amount and for the horse number. But at the end of the month you will always come out ahead [.

This afternoon I was working on my model and, thinking about our ‘pleasant visit,’ I put everything together backwards.

Three hours of work to do over. Are you happy, my cow? That gets your revenge a little!

I received my indictment on the ‘hold-ups’; nothing bad¹. The press does not show any mercy to the guys from Avenue de Breteuil. They are going to get about 18 to 20 years, in my opinion². One thing, my angel: at the PMU, you can play, but don’t linger, because it’s not exactly a great crowd and someone could follow you to find out where you live. Then they could get away after!

So there you are, ‘Miss Jane’ (sic). I hope tonight you write me a nice letter telling me that you don’t like it when I scold you.

And yet I am right. Well, I’ll leave you now, placing sweet kisses on everything that is you. Kisses to the little one.”

1/ The prosecutor’s closing statement led Mesrine to be sentenced on May 19, 1977, to 20 years in prison for armed robbery, receiving stolen goods, and illegal weapons possession by the Paris assize court presided over by Judge Petit.

During this trial, a famous anecdote took place: he untied his tie, pulled out a small key, claimed it was the key to his handcuffs obtained from a corrupt guard, and then threw it to the journalists present in the courtroom, thus claiming to prove corruption in the police and judiciary.

2/ An allusion to the robbery of the CIC bank on Avenue de Breteuil in Paris by Mahmoud Philippe El Shennawy and Taleb Hadjadj in September 1975.

Mesrine was right: El Shennawy was sentenced to life imprisonment along with Taleb Hadjadj, a sentence later commuted to twenty years’ imprisonment. El Shennawy was released from prison on March 15, 1990.

Jacques Mesrine met Jeanne Schneider in 1968. She was a call girl whose pimps, according to Mesrine, were killed by him. After several thefts committed in Europe, they fled to Quebec and continued their criminal activities.

They spent several years in prison, despite the couple being acquitted in the murder of Évelyne Le Bouthillier, the owner of a motel in Percé where the Mesrine-Schneider couple had stayed on the night of the killing. Returning to France to serve her sentence at Fleury-Mérogis in early 1973, Jeanne learned that Mesrine had just been arrested in Boulogne-Billancourt and sentenced to 20 years in prison. The two lovers then maintained a romantic correspondence. Tired of this gangster life, Jeanne Schneider eventually settled down and broke off the relationship, while he was still in prison. Mesrine did not stop; he fiercely denounced his prison conditions and escaped.

He was shot dead by the BRI after 16 months on the run, on November 2, 1979, at the age of 42.