The Smoking Gun: Part 2

At the delicate age of seventy-three, and in suitably infamous style, notorious member of the 1960’s underworld, Jacky Imbert, has found himself cast once more into the world’s spotlight, and is reacting to unwanted police attention by vigorously protesting his innocence whilst stealing headlines by the truckload. But this time around, at his tender age, and after surviving threats, murder attempts, and several near-fatal bullet-wounds, the police are out to show him that he is wasting his once limitless energy. Ironic, considering that the underground cigarette industry is at the centre of the current storm.

The Marseille based trial centers on the fact that police claim to have successfully used a phone tap which connects Imbert to the Russian mafia via a plan to build a black-market cigarette warehouse in a suburb of Marseille. Speaking through his lawyer, Imbert has denied any knowledge of such a scheme and has pointed out that he has never been convicted of any crime.

Police have long believed that Imbert made his first moves toward infamy by becoming a contract killer in the early 1960’s. Then, in 1970, the jailing of crime boss, ‘Mimi’ Guerini led directly to a wave of shootings which left more than one hundred people dead. Police believe that, somewhere around this time, Imbert moved to a position of shared power in the Marseille underworld with fellow mobster Gaetan “Tani” Zampa (who was at the time running the Marseille part of the infamous ‘French Connection’ drug ring). It is suspected that clashes between the two men resulted in the near fatal shooting of Imbert in 1977.

At the time of the shooting, Imbert was to all intents and purposes the innocent proprietor of a night club in the Riviera resort town, Cassis. But police officers trained to pick up on small details didn’t fail to notice that within just one month of the shooting, each and every one of Imbert’s attackers had been hunted down and brutally murdered.

This in turn led to bloody, deadly mob battles, as opposing factions fought vehemently  for control of the highly lucrative area. In 1978, in a Marseille’s bar, nine people were shot dead, of which only five were known criminals. Police believe that the other four men were killed to ensure their silence.

Although Imbert has made public statements such as: “The cops always came to ask me about jobs I didn’t do. For the ones I did do, I never saw anyone,” he also claimed, many years ago, to have “retired” from the underworld.

Hollywood’s loss was Europe’s gain when Jules Dassin fled America because of the House Un-American Activities Committee blacklist at the end of the 1940s. His films helped bring the moral ambiguity of the postwar American thriller to Europe, inspiring a new generation of critics and filmmakers. Writing several years before he made The 400 Blows, François Truffaut praised Dassin for the way his films "combin[ed] the documentary approach with lyricism," a method that would inform many of the new wave films of the ’60s.