Liz and Me and Carlos the Jackal.... WTF?*

DICK SAYS: For several months,  we've cycled up to the bucolic Parc Montsouris in southern Paris via a street that passes by the tall gray stone walls of a large prison. These aren't the walls of an architecturally impressive Medici fort re-purposed  as a prison (yes, such things exist in Italy) or the distant, mythic walls of a seemingly impregnable penal institution from the past like Alcatraz. No, these are simply enormous piles of  plain grim stones meant to keep bad guys away from the more genteel general populace. Sometimes, you'll see a van traveling to or from these selfsame walls, and if the van happens to be outfitted with windows that can open behind their latticework of bars, the prisoners will yell indistinct curses at whomever may be on the street as they pass by.  Depending on the importance of the criminals involved, the number of support vehicles varies as does the amount of machine-gun toting police scouring the street and sidewalk for other bad guys on the outside intent on aiding a jailbreak. 

Despite the siren-blaring motorcades of prison vans,  we never gave the prison much thought. But now we'll pay a bit more attention to it. It turns out that one of its current residents is none other than the infamous--and to some at least, glamorous-- international terrorist Carlos the Jackal.  You know, the guy whose sun-glassed mug everyone over the age of, say, 50 remembers seeing on the covers of important news periodicals the world over during the second half of the 1970s. Not only that, but the notorious South American recruit of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and key figure in the Black September group's reign of terror is set to go on trial next week in Paris. Who knew? Not us. When we pedal down the generally very quiet rue de la Santé, we might see a woman with a stroller flash her papers at one of the bored looking guards manning a tiny, glass-fronted office set into the prison's wall at street level. But that's the only indication that any kind of life pulsates behind the bleak stone boundaries of"la Santé ." I had a hunch that a few important mobsters were currently in residence. I also knew that the guillotine had once been in use there.  But the living, breathing Carlos the Jackal? That's almost beyond comprehension. (To be honest, when I told Liz that the Jackal himself was in residence, she responded, "I thought he was dead.")

Will anything about the rue de la Santé change once the trial begins? That's a good question.  Maybe there'll be impenetrable checkpoints everywhere and more machine-gun toting paramilitary police than you can shake your fist at. I haven't a clue. Carlos' trial is news, but it's not like, say, the Eurozone crisis. His name isn't on everyone's lips. Which is strange, of course. Not so long ago, this guy received Bin Laden-level attention. He was the mysterious, bloody-minded killer bedeviling Israel, the leadership of OPEC and frankly,  a big chunk of the West with his ultra-violent terrorist actions. 

Now he's a footnote. A significant  one to be sure. But he's been so de-fanged and de-mystified since his 1994 capture in the Sudan that these days you  can cruise right by his  current Parisian domicile and not even know he's there.  




*Carlos the Jackal (whose real name is Ilich Ramírez Sánchez) claims to own his image, so for obvious reasons  I've avoided posting a current or archival picture of him. The latest one I've seen shows a rather dapper gray-haired guy with a longish pencil-style mustache dressed in khaki-colored mufti. If memory serves, a silk ascot is tucked into his shirt.