Stavisky Affair - Stavisky

Stavisky

Serge Alexandre Stavisky (1888–1934), who became known as le beau Sacha ("Handsome Sasha"), was a Russian Jew born in modern-day Ukraine whose parents had moved to France. He tried various professions, working as a café singer, as a nightclub manager, as a worker in a soup factory, and as the operator of a gambling den. In the 1930s he managed municipal pawnshops in Bayonne but also moved in financial circles. He sold lots of worthless bonds and financed his "hockshop" on the surety of what he called the emeralds of the late Empress of Germany — which later turned out to be glass.

Stavisky maintained his façade with his connections to various people in important positions. If some newspaper tried to investigate his affairs, he bought them off, sometimes with large advertisement contracts, sometimes by buying the paper.

In 1927, Stavisky was put on trial for fraud for the first time. However, the trial was postponed again and again and he was granted bail 19 times. He probably continued his scams during this time. One judge who claimed to hold secret documents was later found decapitated.

Faced with exposure in December 1933, Stavisky fled. On 8 January 1934, the police found him in a Chamonix chalet agonizing from a gun wound. Officially Stavisky committed suicide but there was a persistent speculation that police killed him. The latter is the theory proposed by Janet Flanner, writing as Genêt, in her "Letter from Paris" column in the New Yorker. Fourteen Parisian newspapers called it suicide and eight did not. The distance the bullet had traveled led Le Canard enchaîné to propose the tongue-in-cheek theory that he had "a long arm".