News

Adrian Darmon, a long-time serving journalist and art historian who created half a dozen magazines and the artcult website in 1996, seems to have disappeared on February 18 on his way to testify before the correctional court of Toulon with the hope that the dealer who stole from him a rare Derain fauve painting between February 2 and 4, 2016, would be metted down with a harsh condemnation.

Alas, the TGV train he boarded in Paris at 6.10 a.m was left stranded in Burgundy for six hours. As a result, he arrived in court at 5.10 pm without being able to plead his cause to the woman judge who decided against all odds to close the case leaving him in disarray since then.

But was it this day that this man who predicted the World Trade disaster in a book written in 1995 which all publishers he contacted rejected on the ground that what he wrote was over-exaggerated truly disappeared ?

Before that, he had covered the Munich Olympics in full in 1972 and had been a year later the first journalist on earth to discover that Leopold Trepper, the famed chief of the Red Orchestra network during World War War Two had landed in London after being allowed to leave the Soviet Union with his wife, a scoop that earned him to be appointed correspondent in Paris by Reuters.

He could also have disappeared on September 8, 1974 when he was due to fly on the TWA Boeing 707-331 B which exploded over the Ionian Sea with 79 passengers and nine crew members aboard but that day his reservation had been cancelled at the last minute with his seat being given to someone else for medical reasons.

For several years he covered international summits attended by Henry Kissinger, Harold Wilson, Gerald Ford,Helmuth Kohl and President Giscard d'Estaing as well as cabinet meetings at the Elysée palace and other big international events or disasters, such as the March 1973 crash of the Turkish DC 10 airliner over the Ermenonville forrest which made him wander among 351 mutilated corpses but suddenly he had to resign from his post in August 1978 for family reasons which also forced him to turn down Christie's offer to become their new PR man in London.

In the meantime, he had embarked into another discreet career under the name of Michael Monboyard (the anagram of Boy-his nickname as a child in Paris- and Darmon) creating the French version of the Playgirl magazine launched by the strange Joachim Conrad, a German adventurer, the true reincarnation of marshall Goering, who embezzled millions of dollars before his small empire collapsed in 1978.

Still working as an independent diplomatic correspondent, Adrian did not go along very well with Conrad and his incredible fits of anger who wanted to be served as a king. Ordered one day to kneel before him, his response was that he had no master and he lost his job but the German woman who also worked at the Le Point magazine, called him after six months and begged him to come back assuring he was the only man of the situation.

Facing back Conrad again, his first words were that he was not coming on his knees but fate had already unravelled its doom. Soon after that, the two-year-old son of his unbearable boss drowned in a pool of water on the island of Porquerolles, his wife was raped after a row which led her to roam in the Bois de Boulogne and the woman journalist who got him reinstated died in a truck accident during the Paris-Dakar desert race.

Apparently, 1978 seemed to mark the end of his promising career but he was still alive, escaping death by a whisker when he interviewed at his home the former Iranian Prime minister Shapur Bakhtiarjust before the latter was murdered by a group of assassins sent by the Tehran's revolutionary regime.

Surely, he had had enough with international politics preferring to work for the leisure magazine « IL » which gained him access to many celebrities of the 1980's, such as Sylvie Vartan, Jean-Marie Rivière, Fabrice Emaer, the king of Paris nights,Jane Birkin or Serge Gainsbourg but his boss, jealous of seeing him becoming too popular never gave him a rise and started to humiliate him to the extent that he resigned and created in July 1982 a new concept called « Le Nouvel Homme » (New Man) with the help of a bunch of financiers who in turn came out of control to the point of obtaining his scalp three months later.

In the meantime, Adrian had lost a great opportutiny when Daniel Filipacchi, the French press tycoon, implored him to join his group but his collaborators, fearing for their jobs, never allowed him to approach their boss to conclude a deal.

Instead, Adrian worked a freelance journalist before being hired in 1984 as a corespondent for TV network after meeting a Lebanese man called Furon at the hotel Claridge in Paris. His mission was to interview exiled African former heads of state or ministers and try, if possible,  to discover the whereabouts of Umaru Dikko, a Nigerian transport minister who had escaped from his country with an estimated bounty of 1 billion dollars.

From the begining, Adrian sensed things were going wrong and that he was being used as a bait to trap Dikko. Wary ot the true meaning of his mission he alerted his colleague, a former minister once detached to the administration of an African country which had gained independence, to contact the French secret service about was going while he had been asking Furon with insistance to obtain an interview with Nissim Gaon, a Geneva based financier whose assets (800 million dollars) had been frozen by the Nigerian governement but his new boss said it was of no importance and later commanded him to wait for his call from London to be ready to come for an interview with Dikko.

Worried about the delay, Adrian called Furon at his London hotel but got an answer from an English woman asking him to leave his telephone number for a future contact, a response he found strange since he had it. A few minutes later, he learned on the radio that Dikko had been found gagged and drugged in a diplomatic crate due to be put on a plane bound for Nigeria at standsted Airport with a doctor next to him while two other men had been uncovered in another crate and at once, he thought that one of them was Furon himself.

All that business had been concocted by several alleged Mossad agents acting as mercenaries, including Furon whose real name was Alexander Barak, and the Buhari junta while the British government of Margaret Thatcher played it down in order not to strain relations with Nigeria and Israel. In fact, the plot went wrong when on a summer's day, Dikko walked out of his front door in an upmarket neighbourhood of Bayswater in London before he was grabbed by two men and bundled into the back of a transit van.

Mr Dikko had been minister for transport in the government of Shehu Shagari until it was overthrown by the military at the end of 1983. He had fled to London accused by Nigeria's new rulers of embezzlement - a charge he had always denied and the extraordinary plan was to kidnap the former minister, drug him, stick him into a specially made crate and put him on a plane back to Nigeria - alive.

At the cargo terminal of Stansted Airport, 40 miles (64km) north of London, a Nigerian diplomat was anxiously waiting for the crates to arrive. Also on duty that day was a young customs officer who was told  that there was a cargo due to go on a Nigerian Airways 707 but the people delivering it didn't want it manifested, Being ignorant of such matters, the customs officer went to check the procedure while at the same moment a missing persons bulletin alerted customs officials to the kidnapping of a Nigerian and that it was supected he would be smuggled out of the country.

The police had been alerted by Mr Dikko's secretary who had witnessed his abduction from a window in the house and hearing of the news, the customs officer then realized he had a problem on his hands especially because the cargo did not have have the right paperwork and was not marked 'Diplomatic Bag'. He thus had no choice but to get on the phone to the British Foreign Office.

The decision was taken that the crates could be opened - but it would be done by the book. By now, the crates were up on special trolleys ready to be loaded on to the plane while the Nigerian diplomat who was there to ensure the operation was getting underway started to panick. After half an hour, police arrived and they opened the first crate. Inside they found an unconscious Mr Dikko, and a very much awake Israeli anaesthetist. Mr Dikko was lying on his back in the corner of the crate. He had no shirt on, he had a heart monitor on him, and he had a tube in his throat to keep his airway open. No shoes and socks and handcuffs around his ankles. The Israeli anaesthetist was in there, clearly to keep him alive, the customs officer noticed while the kidnappers in the other crate were unrepentant. claiming Dikko  was the biggest crook in the world. Meanwhile, sensing he was in a tricky situation, Adrian swifltly summoned CNN two days later at his home to explain that he had nothing to do in this business and that his name had been used to lure Dikko into a trap.

So, when did he disappear ? Not yet in fact. Adrian was trying to get back on his feet again. In 1986, he convinced a publisher of a group of small magazines to create a big one, « Le Magazine des Sports et de l'Aventure » with 100.000 copies in circulation, a real success during three months but that rather sympathetic man, was not fit to respect printing delays and as a result, the magazine crashed down with Yannick Noah on the cover for the Roland-Garros tennis  tournament which saw his elimination in the first round. Too bad ;

Time for reflection came. He had been an art lover since the age of ten when he used to visit the Louvre museum alone and devoured books taking the opportunity as a a New York Times trainee to wander Paris admiring the windows of the big antiques shops . At nine, he had already read the two volumes of the Larrousse dictionary, all of Jules Vernes and Alexandre Dumas books and had started to copy the drawings of famous artists, notably Rembrandt, before collecting miniatures, paintings and sculptures.

The time was ripe to start a new adventure with now a magazine dedicated to the art market. Luckily, he found a publisher, Simon Blumenthal, a veteran extreme left-wing militant who had defended the cause of Algeria's independence during the 1960's before taking over an ailing publishing company. Ready to embark on his project Blumenthal helped him launch the « Art et Valeurs » magazine which soon met success from july 1988 until February 1990 before his business went into trouble when he decided to publish versions in English, Italian, German and Spanish of a magazine on furniture, a real disaster language-wise which made him lose 500.000 dollars.

Suddenly, Adrian was stranded but a gallery owner from Lille came up with a solution. He was ready to take over the magazine provided the title became his property. Adrian had no other choice to accept regarding the urgency of the matter but the man, after promising to fill the magazine with no more than five ads, then increased his adverts, making it a catalogue for his activities. Soon a feud erupted about the editorial policy of the magazine which led to its organized bankrupcy while a groupe was ready to put 1 million dollars on the table to take it over but its new owner demanded an outrageous amount to rescind the title.

Perhaps, November 1, 1991 was the date that Adrian went out of business or maybe not. A few months later the gallery owner who conned thousands of people into buying pieces of shit at tremendous prices, launched a new magazine called « Valeurs de l'Art », outrageously mirroring the title Art et Valeurs. So Adrian contacted the liquidator who told him to prosecute the crook through him but soon afterwards, his demands were rejected by a court, presumably because the latter had reversed his decision after receiving a certain pay-off under the table.

Two years later, the liquidator was jailed for strong misconduct in other bankruptcy cases but Adrian did not manage to launch another magazine. In 1996, he was however one of the first to be interested into the prospects of the Internet in convincing the Bull Group to help him create the artcult website after it had received a 832 million franc grant from the French governement to help promote new technologies but six months later, its managers found a cunning way to engulf the money and leave Adrian running the site alone. Once again, the end of 1996 seemed to mark his disappearance but he decided to fight on trying to find new partners.

A solution emerged through a partnership with a publishing group and a firm specialising in new technologies but Adrian did not know that its boss was about to leave with a golden parachute of 60 million francs. In the meantime he had been in touch with a young financier who was much interested in the venture but he told him he could no nothing since an agreement was under way.

The shock news was that the company specialising in new technologies was no longer in the race while the son of a friend he had entrusted to see this business through stole the business plan he had worked on to offer it to the young financier  he had turned down. In secret, the team of traitors acting under his name levied 3 million dollars to create their own website until their plot was foiled when his friend's son was ousted.

The new website did not survive more than a year but Adrian was left mauled until he found a new partner who said he was ready to take artcult over but once again the latter did not fulfill his promises and he had to end up his business. Two years later, the heir of a Jewish collector whom he helped to track down an important Georges Braque painting stolen by the Nazis which was held by the Beaubourg Museum received a 25 million euros compensation from the institution and offered him to invest 300.000 euros to develop artcult but in the course of negotiations the greedy heir asked 50% of shares, a demand unacceptable regarding the tremendous amount of work he had already done.

Negotiations with the artprice group had also failed as its boss finally pretended the time was not yet ripe to invest 4 million francs in artcult while in 2008 a foreign group offered to redevelop the site with the aim of creating a huge platform with sales on line before reselling it for 20 million euros but after three years it claimed it was impossible to transfer the 60.000 articles he had written into a new site.

In the meantime, Adrian had published in 2003 the dictionary « Around Jewish Art » with Edition Carnot which was set to launch an english version of the book but the group faced unexpected financial difficulties and closed down while he was prepared to publish his lexicon of Still life artists of all times. Another failure hard to swallow.

In 2007, left alone at the helm of artcult, Adrian predicted in an interview with a Belgian newspaper that the world would soon face a major economic crisis, which in fact took place in September 2008. Was it there that he finally disappeared ?

No one really knows. Perhaps it was on February 18, 2019 when he failed to arrive in court tp challenge with words well chosen the swindler from la Seyne-sur-Mer who had stolen his Derain from him and who at 73 had already been sent to prison twice for having embezzled 2 million euros from people who like Adrian had trusted him, a devil for whom Adrian wished the worst while the wife of such crook died in a car accident the day he was sent again in prison.