They must have wanted Zoe all along.
At the time, it felt typical. The defining moment of my life, and it hadn’t even been about me. So I applied for a credit card, got it a week or so later and booked a flight to Paris. I wanted to go and make it about me. I wanted my fucking life back.
HENRI CARON, Business associate of Jean Boivin:
The first thing you must know about Jean Boivin is that this was no builder, no property tycoon, not as La Croix or Les Echos would have you believe. This was a rock star. A man who was able to live a life without limits, fearlessly and guided by his own principles. He said, “Bien faire et laisser dire.” [Do well and let (them) speak.] I know him first by reputation alone, as a man famous in Paris for growing roses from goat shit.
There was not the property, not the plot that he could not buy for nothing and sell for a ransom. Everywhere, this image follows him like a chorus—the playboy, the beautiful woman on each arm, the yachts and the cars and the magnums of Krug. He is a celebrity. He married one of the most beautiful women in all of France, Juliette Dupuis, an actress who was sleeping with Fran?ois Truffaut at sixteen, a siren, a muse of Godard. The face a generation of schoolboys saw when they closed their eyes and clutched on to their pillows. And all of this, yes, while the rest of us go blind in sawdust, building and rebuilding, selling for fractionally more than we buy. We look at this man who succeeds without sweat and think we might just as well piss into our violins for all the good it does us.9
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
Reading up about Boivin felt like watching the bathwater go. Circling a drain, going round and round, getting lower and lower, but I couldn’t stop myself. I joined the library in Ambleside, got online for the first time in months, and started reading everything I could find about him. I was running French articles through Google Translate, so some things stuck better than others, but he was shady with a capital shhh. He’d been some real estate guru, buying up all these old ruins in France for nothing, renovating them and then selling them on at a fat profit. From what I read, it sounded like he’d come from nowhere, just arrived on the scene as this fully formed success story. Everything he touched turned to gold, and it sounded like he spent most of the time touching himself.
HENRI CARON:
To buy low, to renovate cheaply and sell high, this cycle that possessed my every waking hour, Boivin accomplished in his sleep. When he triumphed against me at auction for a shit pile he then sold for three times his price of asking, I knew that my every waking hour was no longer enough. I drive out to this property to see, to sit at the feet of this master, to find out what I’m doing wrong. The problem is that from the driver’s seat of my car, a shit heap the property remains. It is only then that I understand Jean Boivin. He is a man with two feet in one shoe, making two jobs appear as one. He is a man who makes black money bright again.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
At the time, I couldn’t tell if it was the subtlety of the French press or my poor translation skills, but it felt like there was a story underneath the story, something the writers were hinting at but wouldn’t or couldn’t just come out and say. I read it like the suggestion that Boivin was involved with big organized crime on the Continent, and that’s what it turned out to be. He was cleaning Mafia cash through all these dodgy real-estate sales.
HENRI CARON:
Sometime later, I even have course to meet the man and shake his hand, and I learn then that this Boivin is himself an illusion. He has been constructed like the fa?ade of a building. He has been thrown together with plywood and paintwork, quickly and cheaply, like one of his own properties. He is playing the role of a tycoon designed by those who do not know such men. The outward appearance is close, but these walls, they are not load-bearing. There are no rough edges in his fingernails or in his speech, no calluses on his hands.
He is fat with easy life, with no interest in property, no knowledge of the market or passion for its nooks and crannies. He is a charlatan. I know then that nothing good will come from knowing this man, and when our brief talk turns to shared interests, joint ventures, you see, like this I decline. I go back to my sawdust and my clapboard and my minuscule percentages. I tell people that this Jean Boivin is a personification. He is a walking bubble, a talking boom. And when he goes bust and this bubble bursts, he will take everyone down with him. And so it is.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL VICTOR BISSET, Gendarme:
Jean Boivin was arrested for tax evasion in March 2011. This was a small charge, instigated to force his hand into three courses of action. The first, to cease his money-laundering activities and sever all ties with certain illegal business associates. The second, to allow the Gendarmerie greater scrutiny of his finances. And the third, to encourage him to work with us in a larger investigation into organized crime. It was surmised that Boivin had unique insights into black money, where it was being moved from and who it belonged to, and this proved to be the case. When his situation was made clear to him, the choice between a life in prison or cooperation with law enforcement, he decided that his loyalty to his former associates only stretched so far.
By agreeing to cooperate, he was allowed a limited bail with assets frozen. We believe that this is when he initiated his plan to make use of the final item he had of value, his life insurance policy. If he appeared to die and could somehow claim on this policy, he could be a rich man again, free of the police and his paymasters, free to disappear with five million euros and carte blanche. The only confoundment was that his death would have to be gruesomely convincing to prevent his former associates from getting suspicious. And so too would the deaths of anyone who wanted to join him in this next life, namely his two children, Alex and Lucille.10
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
If Boivin wanted to fake his own death, the deaths of his two kids, then he needed three look-alikes, people who could believably replace them.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL VICTOR BISSET: