Prince Albert's secrets under threat from rebel spy
From The Sunday Times
October 25, 2009
A pay dispute could mean an extremely embarrassing court case for the 'feckless'
Prince of Monaco - complete with sex tape
Matthew Campbell
Everyone wants to make friends with Albert, the prince of Monaco, the fairytale,
Mediterranean mini-state whose balmy weather and strict banking secrecy have
turned it into the playground of choice for tax exiles from all over the world.
The question of whether they like him, or simply want something from him, has
haunted the world’s most eligible bachelor ever since he was preparing to take
the helm from his father, Prince Rainier, who died in 2005.
Albert, the shy, bespectacled prince was about to become head of the Grimaldi
clan. Sipping Martinis in a flat over looking the sea, he asked Robert Eringer,
the American adviser he had hired three years earlier as his unofficial head of
intelligence, to help him find out what people thought about him, no matter how
painful.
Eringer, a former undercover FBI operative, had been in the prince’s employment
since 2002. Now Albert wanted to clean up Monaco and only an outsider could
help, launching secret investigations of officials and foreign entrepreneurs
suspected of money laundering and organised crime.
Operation Hound Dog, as Eringer named it, had less lofty goals, originally
intended to find out who in the prince’s picturesque pink palace was leaking
news to the press about him and the other Grimaldis. Later, according to Eringer,
Albert asked him “to extend this ruse to engage his many friends to find out
what they would say about him behind his back”.
Eringer hired an “operative” to pose as the author of an unauthorised biography
of Albert, the only son of Grace Kelly, the American actress, to flush out the
gossips. He even engineered a bona fide publishing contract for his mole.
Today, though, it is Eringer who is dishing dirt on the prince after falling out
with his former patron: he has taken Albert to court in California with a demand
for €360,000 (£331,000) in wages and severance pay. In order to attract the
prince’s attention, his lawsuit — a copy of which has been obtained by The
Sunday Times — lays bare some of the dirtiest secrets of the palm-fringed
principality on the Riviera.
Eringer, a writer of spy fiction and a former journalist, has pay slips to show
that he served as Albert’s tireless spymaster between 2002 and 2007.
He investigated Russian mobsters and British property tycoons. He warned the
prince about which “friends” and supplicants to avoid, including Mark Thatcher,
the son of Margaret Thatcher, the British former prime minister. He even became
embroiled in negotiations with a Californian teenager who was later recognised
as Albert’s illegitimate daughter.
Eringer paints an unflattering portrait of a feckless, indecisive prince who
quickly tired of intelligence briefings in favour of go-karting and
“gallivanting about”. Albert, says the lawsuit, had “convinced himself years ago
that attending parties was ‘working’”. The playboy prince, on at least one
occasion, asked the spymaster to “assist” a woman who had been the subject of
his amorous attentions.
As for Operation Hound Dog, it led to Paris, where an American entrepreneur
friend of Albert was said to be boasting about a video he had taken of Albert at
his 40th birthday party. Eringer said that it showed a woman performing a “sex
act” on the prince.
“This is what I have on your prince,” the American was in the habit of
commenting to friends in Monaco as he showed them the film.
The lawsuit is extremely embarrassing to a country which is trying to clean up
its act in order to be removed from the famous “blacklist” of uncooperative tax
havens issued by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. It
cast a shadow over Albert’s efforts to promote his fight against climate change
at a gathering of celebrities in Hollywood last week.
Albert’s lawyers have responded in fury to what they regard as an attempt to
extort money from the soft-spoken prince. Thierry Lacoste, Albert’s Paris-based
lawyer, said that “the majority” of what was claimed in the lawsuit was
“completely false”.
Stanley Arkin, the prince’s New York attorney, described himself as one of
several lawyers called to the defence of Monaco and its ruler. The prince, he
said, “has told us that this is baloney ... the fact that he [Eringer] received
money from [Albert] from time to time — so what?”
He called Eringer “an unworthy human being” who was trying to “extort” money
from Albert, 51, with a “made up” lawsuit. Atkin said, in praise of his client:
“This is nothing but an attempt to drag down this wonderful young man.”
Eringer, 55, was not amused at what he called “slander”. He said that he had
written several times demanding payment before launching his lawsuit. He never
had any reply.
“I look forward to testifying about the veracity of each element of my complaint
under oath in a court,” he said from his home in Santa Barbara, California. “And
I look forward to Prince Albert doing the same, under pain of perjury.”
Albert, he claims, agreed in 2002 to pay him £220,000 a year to set up an
unofficial intelligence service to fight corruption and investigate those
suspected of money laundering and fronts for organised crime.
With its casino culture, gleaming yachts and luxury real estate, the tiny
territory wedged between France and Italy has for long been a magnet for money
of dubious origins; “a sunny place”, in the words of Somerset Maugham, the
writer, “for shady people”.
When Rainier fell ill towards the end of his reign, things began to deteriorate,
according to a palace official quoted in the Eringer lawsuit.
Rainier’s fairytale romance with Kelly, whom he married in 1956, had brought a
touch of glamour to Monaco that helped to turn the tiny state into a key
offshore financial centre. The idyll faded slightly after Kelly’s death in a car
crash in 1982. As Rainier lay dying in 2005, Monaco was in trouble.
Rainier, said Claude Palmero, an accountant at the palace, “wasn’t even a shadow
of himself during the last two to three years. He wasn’t there. He could not
even discuss his own personal affairs. He signed whatever was put before his
eyes”.
Those around Rainier, who was famed for his collection of vintage cars, “were
exploiting his weakness, his ill health, his mental incapacity and running
rampant with awards and Monegasque passports and job appointments and future job
promises in Prince Rainier’s name”, according to Eringer.
Albert, who is described as being closer to his American mother than to an
authoritarian father who insisted on speaking French, decided the time had come
to stop the rot.
After Rainier was buried next to Kelly in Monte Carlo’s cathedral and Albert had
been sworn in, he held a reception at the palace to proclaim the new gospel.
It was enough to make his subjects choke on their canapés. “Money and virtue
must be combined,” he said.
To help him go after the “bad guys”, as Eringer puts it, the spymaster set up
meetings with the heads of America’s FBI and CIA, as well as briefings on
organised crime from British intelligence.
He claims to have notched up successes. Operation Scribe resulted in glowing
press coverage of the prince’s crackdown on corruption: “Monaco steers clear of
once-shifty image,” was how USA Today reported the transition. Operation Spook,
meanwhile, was used to scare away dodgy businessmen with tip-offs that they were
under investigation.
Eringer also claims that he had thwarted efforts by Russian intelligence to
penetrate Albert’s “social orbit” and helped to expose a retired American air
force colonel suspected of involvement in Russian money laundering through a
Monaco firm.
He claims that he managed to stop a corrupt Russian from becoming an investor in
Monaco’s much beloved football team and advised the prince to keep away from a
French businessman friend of Jacques Chirac, the former French president, who
Albert claimed had produced “great ideas for Monaco”. The businessman had
allegedly played a role in the Iraq oil-for-food scandal under Saddam Hussein.
One of Eringer’s constant concerns was the penetration of Monaco by freemasons.
According to the lawsuit, he briefed Albert “on the three masonic lodges in
France and their overlap with organised crime, including links to Monaco”. He
advised the prince “to curtail freemason influence in Monaco and to follow
Britain’s example of compelling those in civic jobs to declare freemason
affiliation for the purpose of transparency and to quash any attempt by
freemasons to establish a lodge in Monaco”.
He also investigated “the connection between Italian organised crime groups and
Monaco”, pinpointing which banks in Monaco were used by mobsters for laundering
money.
It was Eringer who tipped off the prince about efforts by Mark Thatcher to gain
residency in 2005, resulting in his rejection as “undesirable”.
Albert was apparently pleased with Eringer’s industry. He authorised him to set
up a headquarters known as “M-base” in an apartment block overlooking the sea.
Eringer regularly briefed Albert there during the cocktail hour.
Eringer had a “Monaco intelligence service” identity card, signed by the prince,
that urged authorities to give him their full co-operation. Albert gave him a
photograph of himself on which he scrawled “Best wishes and long life to
M-base”.
Eringer says that his running costs for some missions were supplemented with
funds from the CIA, which he accepted after consulting the prince. Albert’s only
comment was: “Make sure the French don’t find out.”
The CIA apparently found it a fruitful co-operation, delighted, no doubt, to
have gained such a toe-hold in France’s “back yard”.
“As a result of Eringer’s efforts,” says his complaint, “[former] CIA director
Porter Goss pledged to protect HSH [His Serene Highness] and Monaco, which
became accepted as doctrine within the CIA, along with [giving Monaco]
high-priority status”.
Other targets of Eringer’s intelligence-gathering were a colourful cast of
characters that could have come straight from the pages of any spy novel. One of
the Russians he investigated was suspected of several murders in his homeland.
Eringer also delved into the activities of members of some of Monaco’s most
prominent families.
He was particularly proud to have drawn agencies from other European mini-states
into a “micro Europe” intelligence union. He claims he would regularly meet the
spymasters of Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Andorra, San Marino and Malta for
weekends of wine tasting when they would share information about money
laundering and organised crime. They would also share jokes.
Italian intelligence officials told him, according to the lawsuit, that “they
were taking bets not on whether Eringer would make it through the year, but on
who would eliminate him: Italian organised crime, Russian organised crime, the
freemasons, the Monegasque establishment or the French”.
Eringer was dismayed when Albert appointed to a top government post an official
who, according to Eringer’s reports, had accepted a £2.7m bribe from a Lebanese
entrepreneur, falsely claiming that it was for the prince. The Lebanese
businessman was heard boasting: “I’ve got Albert by the balls.”
Another official was put in charge of a government department despite his
alleged involvement in the theft of a £1m painting by Miro, the Spanish artist,
that had been donated to the Monaco Red Cross. According to Eringer, another
local figure had been “involved in shredding evidence about the money left in
Monaco by 200 Jews deported from Monaco to concentration camps in 1944”.
Just as distressing for Eringer was Albert’s dismissal of Jean-Luc Allavena, the
prince’s chief of staff. “HSH finally had the balls to fire someone,” Eringer
wrote in his journal.
“The bad news: he fired the wrong person ... Allavena was the backbone of
Albert’s reign, honest and incorruptible, slogging away from 7am to midnight
most weekdays while HSH was off gallivanting.” Eringer said that he was
“mortified” when, despite all his warnings to Albert about freemasons, the
prince, a former member of Monaco’s Olympic bobsleigh team, informed him that “a
former bobsledding [colleague] wanted to create a freemason lodge in Monaco and
that he was inclined to let him go ahead”.
Albert, who had begun dating Charlene Wittstock, 31, a South African Olympic
swimmer, seemed to lose his interest in the briefings at M-base.
“HSH did not appear at a meeting ... to brief him on a very shady character who
had arrived in Monaco to deal in conflict diamonds and laundered money,” says
Eringer in one part of his lawsuit. “Instead he went go-karting.”
By the summer of 2007, Albert had reduced Eringer’s salary to £144,000 and told
him to focus exclusively on “maintaining and working the liaison relationships”
with foreign intelligence services instead of investigating money laundering
suspects. However, when Eringer sent an invoice for payment for the first
quarter of 2008 he got no reply from the palace.
Subsequent letters and telephone messages to Albert from Eringer went
unanswered, he claims. Eringer decided to cease his activities.
“Everything I did was in the service of the prince,” he writes in the suit
claiming breach of contract. “I regret nothing. I acted professionally at all
times ... we were too damned honest and efficient for our own good.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6888916.ece