The 1950s French film that inspired a real-life CIA heist job
And how INTERPOL screened it for the criminal crew
If you find yourself, at the tail end of a night, slipping into the role of criminal mastermind by slotting your gathered friends into roles in your heist crew — wheelman, demolitions expert, pickpocket — obviously you’re a fan of the Mission Impossible/Oceans 11/Italian Job films that center around a crack team pulling off the Big Job.
The genre offers a nice haul: Ponytailed Val Kilmer sliding a bag (ludicrously capacious) along the bank floor in Heat. Ray Winstone in lemon budgie smugglers breaking into the safe deposit box room with his underwater pneumatic drill in Sexy Beast. Yves Montand’s alcoholic marksman refusing the aid of a tripod for his high precision rifle when shooting a slug of his own making into the vault’s opening mechanism in Le Cercle Rouge.
But the Award for Greatest Heist Sequence in Moviedom must go to Rififi.
Directed by Jules Dassin, an American expat in France blacklisted from Hollywood in the Communist purge, the 1955 film is considered the “benchmark all succeeding heist films have been measured against.”
The term “rififi,” a chanteuse explains as she belts out the title song at the Parisian cabaret, is a brazen display of force that bolsters your rep. It’s what the film’s perpetrators Joe the Swede and his Italian partner Mario hope to achieve by robbing in broad daylight a luxe jewelry store on Rue de la Paix in Paris’ 2nd arrondissement. Bumping into “Le Stéphanois,” a tough Frenchman fresh from a five-year stint in the joint, the Swede offers to bring him in on it. A snatch and grab job? Mais non, this won’t do for Le Stéphanois, a seasoned pro.
Cut to the elaborate sequence in which the crew methodically follows Le Stéphanois’s well-laid heist plans.
Breaking into the apartment above the jewelry store…
Drilling a small hole through the floor, sticking an umbrella into it, opening the umbrella to catch the debris of their growing manhole…
Filling the alarm casing with shaving foam to muffle the bell…
New recruit César the Milanese not breaking a sweat as he ratchets his circular cutter into the back of the safe to get at the diamonds while wearing a tuxedo…
The critical reception to this thirty-minute pièce de résistance?
Now that the jig was up on how to pull off a high-stakes heist (just like Fredrick Forsyth’s 1971 thriller The Day of the Jackal was a primer on forging passports), it was only natural that the CIA draw inspiration from Rififi when building a heist crew of their own.
Do you know how naive you sound, Michael? The CIA doesn’t build heist crews!
Yup, afraid they did. The job? Break into a Communist embassy in Western Europe, crack the safe where Red diplomats keep their greatest secrets, and steal from it code books that would allow the CIA to decipher intercepted enemy communications.
Declassified files show this as the agenda of an October 1960 meeting at CIA Station, Rome during the heyday of La Dolce Vita. The first order was finding two good “entry men” to break into said Communist embassy. The CIA wanted Corsicans, i.e. the type of crooks known from the French-Corsican underworld centered in Marseilles. The natural choice (given the local talent in Sicily) would be mafiosi, but if caught in the act, connections could be made to American mobsters in Italy — chiefly Lucky Luciano. The legendary Lower East Side gangster had been deported back to his motherland as an undesirable after WWII. Lucky set up shop in Naples as the Mafia’s elder statesman, and the CIA had enough business going on with him and his lot back home in New York to risk exposing their nefarious association in a botched heist.
Just as Le Stéphanois knew, the key in a heist job is finding an expert safecracker. Notes from the aforementioned CIA meeting state that the city of Milan offered good possibilities (Rififi did call him César the Milanese, after all) but indicated a strong preference for a safecracker from Trieste. After the war, the Adriatic city had a thriving black market rife with the sort of scoundrels featured in The Third Man’s Vienna. Somewhere in the mix had to be a few good crooks who knew their way around a safe.
How to find such a man?
Present at the meeting was CIA agent Hank Manfredi. In Rome under the cover of the US Bureau of Narcotics, the cigarillo-smoking agent from Brooklyn once headed the US Army’s Criminal Investigations Division in Trieste. As such, he had excellent connections in the Venezia Guilia Police Force that patrolled the city, including its grizzled Chief of Detectives who reeled off the names of three Treistinos who fit the bill:
Francesco: Petty criminal. Maintains support for ex-wife and three kids. Needs money for his mistress. Owns a locksmith shop on Corso Italia.
Guerrino: Unemployed mechanic. History of aggravated theft with an M.O. of perforating large holes into floor above shop to be burglarized.
Giovanni: Professional criminal currently smuggling mushrooms (the gourmet kind) to Yugoslavia in his Fiat 1100. Specializes in safe cracking by using an acetylene torch. Preferred method of entry: boring large holes through walls (as opposed to floors.)
Good enough for government work.
The Chief of Detectives offered to make personal introductions, but the CIA first needed background checks.
Italy’s representative to INTERPOL, the international police organization headquartered in Paris [“Connecting police for a safer world”] vetted the candidates to ensure they weren’t members of the Communist Party, as Jules Dassin had been during the 1930s:
“You grow up in Harlem where there’s trouble getting fed and keeping families warm, and live very close to Fifth Avenue, which is elegant. You fret, you get ideas, seeing a lot of poverty around you...” — Jules Dassin to The Guardian on why he joined the party.
The fate of the heist is currently lost to history, buried deep within a government warehouse.
Whoever was chosen for the job, it was recommended that they all watch Rififi, providing “excellent detail on [the] planning and execution of [a] safecracking job.” In case the film wasn’t showing at La Cinémathèque Française? The CIA would be able to obtain a print for screening from none other than the Assistant Secretary General of INTERPOL.
The CIA and INTERPOL co-hosting a screening of Rififi for criminals recruited by the Italian police? Teaching how to successfully heist an Communist embassy in Western Europe?
Who’s being naive, Kay?
Don’t think of it as admonishment, but the kind of service we deliver here at Senators Don’t Kill. The pure of heart can walk into this relationship totally naive and come out a little wiser.
Have a great week.
Couldn't love this more.