Crime Immemorial

As the summer of 1968 ended and autumn took hold, the City of Lights would host a mysterious murder that would eventually lead to a scandal that reached the highest levels of French government.

On October 1st, the body of thirty-one-year-old Stevan Marković was discovered in a public dump in a village on the western outskirts of Paris. He had been shot once in the back of the head, and then bludgeoned in the same wound, as though an attempt had been made to conceal the bullet hole. The body had then been placed in a sack before being disposed of in the garbage pile. It was determined that the man had been dead for approximately forty-eight hours.

The case immediately drew countrywide attention, as the victim had once worked as a bodyguard for famous French actor Alain Delon. Marković himself, who had been born in Yugoslavia (now Serbia) and had met Delon in Belgrade in the 1950s, traveled in the same café society circles as Delon, was known to be a gambler, and to associate with gangsters and drug dealers. He was also rumored to be a male prostitute.

Most germane to his murder, however, was the fact that Marković often threw lavish parties at which it was alleged that he used hidden cameras to obtain incriminating photos of his prominent guests that he later used for purposes of blackmail.

After the murder, Stevan’s brother Aleksandar contacted police and gave them a letter that Stevan had previously written to him, in which he claimed that if he turned up dead, it was “100% the fault of Alain Delon and his godfather Francois Marcantoni.” Marcantoni, a Corsican gangster, café owner, and friend of Delon’s, was in fact initially charged as an accessory in Stevan Marković’s murder, and held in custody for nearly a year, though the charges were eventually dropped due to lack of evidence.

Likewise, Alain Delon was held for questioning by the authorities on several occasions, as were many of his associates. Delon, in fact, made no particular secret of his close friendships with criminals, and some of these individuals, such as prominent French gangland figures Petit Rene and Le Coreen, would also later turn up murdered.

Because of Delon’s involvement, the public could not get enough of the story, and the fascination went into overdrive when it was discovered that Marković had possessed what appeared to be scandalous photographs of Madame Pompidou, the wife of Prime Minister Georges Pompidou, who was then running for president of France.

Georges Pompidou admitted that he and his wife knew Alain Delon well, and had attended parties given by Stevan Marković, but contended that the compromising photographs of his wife actually featured a prostitute who resembled her. He claimed that the photos were a ploy by a French espionage agency, the SDECE, to damage his reputation and keep him from winning the election. The entire brouhaha became known as the Marković Affair.
Despite the swirling accusations, Georges Pompidou eventually won his bid and became president of France in June of 1969. A later investigation into the Madame Pompidou photographs did seem to suggest that they had been faked with a lookalike, perhaps with the unwitting cooperation of the former head of police, Luicien Aime-Blanc. However, doubt still remains over the authenticity of the photos, and some researchers still theorize that the photos were genuine and that Georges Pompidou himself used his connections to have Stevan Marković killed to avoid the scandal that would ensue if the pictures went public.

Though there was no shortage of suspects in the murder, as Stevan seemed to have made many enemies over the course of his short life, his killer has never been apprehended.