PicoBlog

Prince Albert of Monaco’s favorite intelligence operation was rooted in a lawsuit initiated by the mother of the prince’s illegitimate daughter, Jazmin Grace Grimaldi, whom Albert failed to recognize or financially support even though there was no doubt he was the father.

It started like this: Prince Rainier was on his deathbed and we, our intelligence service, felt Albert had not been properly prepared to ascend the throne and become Sovereign.

During a briefing my deputy and I cautioned him that everyone from everywhere would come out of the woodwork to make power plays following the death of his father.

“Like who?” the prince challenged.  “Hit me.”

“Tamara Rotolo,” I replied. 

It hit him harder than a slap across the face.

Tamara Rotolo was the California woman with whom Albert sired Jazmin, born March 4th, 1992. She tried to sue the Prince in California for child support but the Court ruled lack of jurisdiction.  However, Rotolo (we learned) was now trying to sue the Prince in a French court.  Would he like us to monitor this situation?

Yes, the Prince replied, please monitor.

So I introduced our monitoring technique: We would pose an operative as a book author and equip him with a backstopped legend complete with “book contract” from a reputable publisher.

The subject of the book? 

Prince Albert of Monaco. 

Our operative would contact celebrity magazines such as Paris Match and Oggi in Italy—notorious for their reporting on Monaco’s royals—and identify journalists charged with digging up dirt on Prince Albert and his family. Our operative would find out what they knew, what they were working on and (if possible) determine the identities of their sources, who would then be approached in similar fashion. 

Albert declared this plan “brilliant” and authorized us to proceed.

Within two weeks I set the basics into place and FLOATER, the codename of my operative, went to work posing as the author contracted to pen an unauthorized biography entitled Albert: Prince of Sport. He contacted Romain Clergeat, the “Prince Albert beat” reporter at Paris Match and they met in Paris.  The French journalist revealed his main sources of information on the principality to FLOATER. Next was Rome and Michaela Aurti, who had been covering Monaco’s royals for 15 years. She did the same.

When I next briefed the Prince he was shocked and awed by what we had uncovered and asked that we target some of his close personal friends who our enquiries revealed as sources for these journalists.

Albert’s Self-Appointed Gatekeepers          

We focused our attention on Steven Saltzman, son of the late Harry Saltzman who, with Albert Broccoli, had brought James Bond to the big screen. Saltzman was willing to meet FLOATER but insisted on the presence of his lawyer, Thierry Lacoste (who also happened to be Prince Albert’s personal lawyer).

This pair of Parisians, the hub of a so-called “Paris Clique,” were regarded by Monaco insiders as vultures for the control they tried to exert overt Albert.

Saltzman began by trying to corral FLOATER’s biography into his domain on the basis that he purportedly controlled all possible sources of information on the Prince. Saltzman insisted that no insider would talk to FLOATER without his permission. Lacoste backed him upon this point, asserting that both he and Saltzman were Albert’s gatekeepers.

Oddly enough, the pair suggested that they could provide information that would potentially embarrass the Prince.

Lacoste also tried to insert himself by proposing that he would become FLOATER’s legal adviser—for a fee (of course). If Lacoste’s proposal was not agreed to, “You’ll get nothing from me or anyone else.”

As theater, quite comical. In reality, most tragic.

And also not surprising based on what we already knew about this pair of hangers-on.

Rusing Nice-Matin    

Soon after, Roger-Louis Bianchini of Nice-Matin published a story about how donations to the Monaco Red Cross were regularly stolen by its administrators. We wanted to know the source of this highly accurate information.

Re-enter FLOATER, who went to see the venerable investigative reporter and returned with a full report.

On Money Laundering: “Monaco keeps its eyes shut. Nothing can change” despite Albert’s vow to clean it up, “because any deviation from the way things are done will change the climate for doing business in Monaco and that will not happen.”

Bianchini was smack on the money.

On Russian Influence: “A lot of money and people have moved into the Cote d’Azur recently.”

Again, spot on.

What we learned led to our investigation of Philippe Narmino, Director-General of the Monaco Red Cross and a very corrupt senior judge in Monaco’s judicial system. (Years later, Mr. Narmino resigned in disgrace as chief judge and was charged with corruption.)

A Flippant Remark

Other pressing matters forced me to relegate Albert’s favorite op to the backburner.

On April 26th, 2005, my deputy and I briefed Prince Albert for the first time since his father’s passing away a few weeks earlier. Meeting in our safe house, we had several items on our agenda, including his daughter Jazmin.

The Prince informed us that discreet negotiations were underway to resolve the matter. I asked if he required any further assistance from us.

The Prince replied: “Could you arrange for her [Jazmin] to have an accident?”

I thought Albert was kidding but he did not smile. I let it pass without response, resulting in a brief awkward silence.  (After the Prince departed, I said to my deputy, “Did I hear right or was that my imagination?”  My deputy confirmed we had both heard his reckless remark.)

In other times, all it took was a flippant remark by a monarch was to cause murder and mayhem.  “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” King Henry II of England was said to have uttered out loud.  Four knights subsequently obliged him by following Archbishop Thomas Becket into Canterbury Cathedral and hacked him to death with their swords.

 Backchannel

Two weeks later the Prince invited me to join him for a one-on-one 9 o’clock dinner at the Palace. I was shown by Palace staff into the parlor, filled with family photographs and sculptures and handed a Kir Royale. 

When Albert appeared he looked to me like a deer in headlamps. 

The international media had just exposed his illegitimate son, Alexandre, sired with a black air stewardess from Togo named Nicole Coste.  Albert’s lawyer, Thierry Lacoste, had botched the negotiations and a frustrated Nicole had gone public, possessed of an “African chip on her shoulder,” the Prince told me.

I asked Albert if he had other publicly unknown children I should know about for future damage control. 

He answered “no,” fully knowing there was another beyond Alexandre and Jazmin. I have since met her. She is a delightful young lady who wants neither money nor publicity and I pledged to keep her identity secret.

Due to Lacoste’s mishandling of the situation (or, as Albert put it, “he fucked up”), the Prince asked me try to resolve the Rotolo-Jazmin situation on a human level.

Thus, I contacted Tamara Rotolo. She was suspicious at first and quizzed me with questions for Albert, the answers to which only he could provide.  First question: “Where did we meet?” When I asked Albert he irritably replied, “How am I supposed to remember that?”

After a bit more effort, I finally convinced Tamara I was operating on Albert’s behalf.

Prince Albert Misses a Golden Opportunity

And so it was that I met Tamara Rotolo and Jazmin Grace the day after Christmas 2005. I took them to dinner at Stars & Bars, popular Monaco restaurant, and gifted both with silver trinkets from Tiffany. They explained to me how they had suffered a difficult time the past few months with paparazzi hanging outside Jazmin’s school and uncertainty about her status even while the Prince openly acknowledged siring Nicole Coste’s son, who arrived on this earth long after Jazmin.  Mother and daughter felt left out, ignored and hurt.  Especially Jazmin.  All she wanted in the whole world was to meet her father.  The first question she wanted to ask him:  “Do you have asthma?”  Jazmin suffered asthma.  (The answer was “yes”—the Prince told me later: As a child he had suffered asthma being around cats and in cold weather.)

When Prince telephoned me the next day and said he wanted to drop by the safe house for a martini, I mentioned that his daughter Jazmin was in Monaco and I suggested he meet her for the very first time in the privacy of our base without her mother present.  I advised him that this simple gesture would go a long way toward finalizing a solution outside of the Courts and the media, which was precisely what he professed to want.

Albert replied: “I don’t think I’m ready for that.”.

I suggested we talk it through over martinis.  But it must have frightened him off it because he never appeared nor even phoned to say he wasn’t coming. Thus, Albert missed the perfect opportunity to meet his adorable daughter—and stave off what would happen two months later.

Instead, Thierry Lacoste tacked a new condition on any financial agreement regarding paternity:  The Prince would not recognize Jazmin as his daughter until her 18th birthday.

I knew this would be a deal-breaker. As I had previously advised the Prince, recognition by her father was what Jazmin wanted most.

Blackmail?

Two months later, a quite fascinating email arrived to Lacoste in Paris and courtesy copied to me.

It was from Gavin de Becker, founder of Gavin de Becker & Associates, a well-known security consulting firm based in Los Angeles, representing Jazmin Grace Grimaldi. 

In his 14-page letter de Becker threatened that if the Prince did not recognize Jazmin and meet with her “very quickly” he was prepared to make her the poster child for abandoned children everywhere in the world. De Becker also stated Jazmin would write a book for global consumption and he would personally ensure that she got onto Oprah Winfrey’s popular television show and Larry King Live to blacken the Prince’s name as a deadbeat dad.  Accordingly, a top literary agent had already been consulted and was foaming at the mouth to get started. 

Continued de Becker:

“Perhaps a book written by a 14-year-old (her age itself being a powerful and intriguing factor) might express the heart of the matter.

“Once a reader or reviewer or interviewer gets past the fact that this particular abandoning father is one of the world’s most famous monarchs, we are left with a girl’s experience that can enlighten and help many people.  It’s a common story:  a father knows his daughter exists yet doesn’t care for her, meet her, or even acknowledge her.

“Why did that happen in Albert’s case, since he could have supported her even if he chose not to know her?  We’re told that his father prohibited it.  While one can readily accept the pressures and repressions of a public royal life, a few thousand miles away from Monaco is a young girl who knew nothing of politics, pressures, and repression.  She knew only that her father had no interest in her.  In the current situation, she watches as the negotiations indicate that her father wishes she didn’t exist at all—he actually seeks to require her by contract to be the Invisible Girl or else suffer continued financial stress.

“This very week she reads more denials of her existence in the news, quotes from her father about it being ‘impossible’ she is his daughter—public statements made on the very day she is being pressured to sign an agreement.  Another news story has a quote from her father characterizing those who make claims of paternity as “jumping on the bandwagon.”

“A problem your lawyers now face is that they have only one thing to negotiate with:  Money.  But compensatory money cannot compensate for unlove, or a father wanting her to disappear.”

De Becker had, essentially, issued the Prince an ultimatum:  Recognize Jazmin or face the PR nightmare of your life.

Albert responded by requesting that I investigate Tamara Rotolo’s media contacts in some hare-brained scheme to demonstrate she’d always had public exposure in mind. I knew this was untrue and told him so.  In fact, Rotolo had taken it upon herself to shield Jazmin from the media.  But even if this was the case, it would certainly not be a viable defense against the media extravaganza Gavin de Becker threatened and seemed very capable of implementing.

Two weeks later the Prince capitulated, telling me he would meet his daughter the following week in Paris.  He added that he thought Gavin de Becker’s letter was “soppy.”

My own view was that de Becker had written it from the heart (albeit bordering on blackmail)—and that it certainly accomplished its objective. 

I reminded the Prince to wish Jazmin “happy birthday” in case he’d forgotten, which he had. 

Thus, the crisis was averted by default.

Which is how Albert normally made decisions.

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