It’s late summer, and superyachts worth more than the combined economies of several small countries are wedged into Port Hercule for the Monaco Yacht Show. The signs of wealth are everywhere. One night during my visit I watch a $3 million Bugatti Chiron pull up at the steps of the Casino de Monte Carlo while commission-hunting yacht brokers knock back $30 cocktails next door at the Bar Americain.
Up by the Palais Princier de Monaco, the view is one of tradition and stability. Carabiniers dressed in starched white uniforms guard the home of Albert II of Monaco. Fluttering everywhere in the September breeze, flags commemorate the centenary of the birth of Rainier III, Albert’s father, who, with his wife Grace Kelly, transformed a shady constitutional anomaly into a tax haven and playground for billionaires.
But behind a fragrant façade Monaco is once again tainted by the whiff of scandal. And this time it centers not on the marriage or the once adventurous love life of Prince Albert but on the world’s most valuable real estate, a mysteriously leaked dossier, and allegations of corruption among Albert’s inner circle.
Even by the standards of Monaco, where the “curse of the Grimaldis” has for generations manifested in a string of unseemly scandals for the ruling family, the saga of the “Dossiers du Rocher,” as the leaked files are called, pulls at the image of the principality that Albert so anxiously projects. It’s a story that includes warring billionaires, Indian bot farms, a fatal car crash, and a still unnamed whistleblower the French media call the Raven.
Albert was already having a tricky time in 2021. He had denied allegations made by a Brazilian woman that he was the father of her daughter. (He had already accepted the “love child” claims of two other women.) He was also denying ongoing rumors of marital strife after Princess Charlene, the former Olympic swimmer whom he married in 2011, seemed to go AWOL during a trip to South Africa, her home country.
Then, in September 2021, a mysterious channel appeared on YouTube. It began hosting short films with ominous soundtracks that within a few weeks directed viewers to an anonymous website. Les Dossiers du Rocher, or “the Rock Files”, which used Monaco’s geological nickname, targeted a group of extremely well-heeled men who were seen as protectors of Albert’s interests.
The men, who became known in the press as the “club of four,” were Claude Palmero, an accountant who looked after the prince’s assets and property, as his father had done for Rainier; Didier Linotte, the president of the Monégasque Supreme Court; Laurent Anselmi, Albert’s chief of staff; and Thierry Lacoste, his personal lawyer, whose late mother, Nadia Lacoste, had been a glamorous confidante of and spokeswoman for Princess Grace.
In a kind of Wikileaks-sur-mer, the site began posting scanned and lightly redacted documents, including supposed emails and bank statements that, “if we are to believe the veracity of these documents,” as the newspaper Le Monde cautioned, accused these four men in particular of exploiting their positions and princely patronage to extract enormous wealth from Monaco’s superprime real estate market, allegations they were swift to categorically deny.
These, and further unverified documents that were passed to Le Monde in a backpack under a table in a Paris bar, tried to paint a picture of a cozy cabal engaged in a culture of collusion and corruption, with Albert himself reduced to a background role as a naïve sovereign. In one case Lacoste, the lawyer, was alleged to have pocketed more than $600,000 for his advice on a failed waterfront development after Linotte had ordered the state to pay the developer almost $150 million in compensation.
As the claims sent tremors through the principality, Albert was initially anxious to defend his friends. “I condemn this defamatory and anonymous campaign of false rumors and slander, which targets several servants of the principality,” he told the newspaper Monaco Matin after the attacks, which he dismissed as a deliberate attempt to destabilize him and the principality.
The men themselves were furious. Lacoste pointed out that the $600,000 payment was entirely legal. He tells me it was an invoice covering two years of “cross-business introductory fees” that did not relate to the development in question. Moreover, he described the Dossiers as an attempt to “discredit those close to Prince Albert who have always denounced and opposed the corruption that is slowly taking over the Monégasque economy.”
Linotte dismissed the Dossiers website as the work of “hoodlums.” He told Le Monde, “There comes a moment when you feel sick; you feel like you’re in a Netflix series… They want to get to the prince through us. It’s organized thuggery… There is no conflict of interest, no returning favors between us.” Marie-Alix Canu-Bernard, a Parisian lawyer who is representing the four men, tells me the Dossiers site amounts to no more than “a few dozen stolen emails out of thousands, assembled to make people believe in so-called influence peddling.”
Late in October 2021, just a few weeks after the leaks appeared, Jean-François Renucci, a widely admired professor of law and the vice president of the Monaco Court of Revision, was driving along the Moyenne Corniche, a road linking Nice and Monaco, when he apparently lost control of his car and crashed into a cliff. Witnesses said his car immediately burst into flames, killing him on the spot.
Renucci had also been mentioned in the Rock Files, albeit tangentially, and some of the “club of four” were quick to blame his demise on the stress of the affair. Palmero was a personal friend and said that the leaks had also come as “an enormous shock” to Renucci’s wife. “She told me that he was unable to handle the pressure,” Palmero told Le Monde in an interview, adding that Renucci had been “extremely sensitive.”
Linotte made similar noises about the possible cause of the crash, before any official investigation, suggesting that Renucci may have had a “dizzy spell” behind the wheel. “Scumbags! We’re dealing with scumbags!” he said. “I will never forgive this. I will go all the way. I’m not scared of upsetting powerful interests.”
For the rapt French media, there were echoes of the Angèle Laval affair from the 1920s, in which a small French town was rocked by a flood of poison pen letters that broke up marriages and triggered a suicide. They were written by a woman who became known as “Le Corbeau” (the Raven). A hundred years later, as the shock of the leaks and Renucci’s death continued to reverberate around Monaco, everyone was asking the same question: Who is the Raven?
Monaco’s only limitation is space. The sovereign microstate rises steeply above Port Hercule in a cluster of stucco and terracotta roofs, luxury apartment buildings towering above palaces and grand hotels. To the east the Côte d’Azur rolls toward Italy in a vision of pine forests and sparkling Mediterranean bays. As lax tax and planning laws attracted big business and big spenders, the only ways to go have been up and out (several projects have inched the principality into the slowly reclaimed sea). A square meter of Monaco real estate now costs more than $53,000—double the price in New York and almost three times that in London.
Values can go much higher. When a new penthouse apartment topped out the 49-story Odeon Tower in 2015, it reportedly went on the private market for more than $300 million. The number of cranes that dot the skyline reveal that the market has only heated up since then; in 2022 property worth $3.5 billion changed hands, more than $1 billion of it newly built. As a result, a trio of billionaire developers have become locked in a high-rise arms race.
The Odeon Tower was built by the Marzocco family, headed by Claudio Marzocco, who fled Italy for greater security in Monaco in the 1980s after he was kidnapped for ransom by the notorious ’Ndrangheta organized crime group. Antonio Caroli, who is also Italian, heads up the Caroli Group, which has operated in Monaco since the 1970s. But the biggest fish on the French Riviera is a man who has been described as the only player in Monaco with power to match that of Prince Albert himself.
Patrice Pastor commands the sprawling Groupe Pastor property empire, which was built more than a century ago by his Italian great-grandfather Jean-Baptiste Pastor (born Giovanni Battista Pastor), who arrived in Monaco in the 1880s as an orphaned stonemason. Later, Patrice’s father Victor was Monaco’s de facto developer in chief, working with the Grimaldis to build the modern principality. “For decades the Pastor family was known as the prince’s builder,” says Robert Eringer, an American writer and private investigator who ran an intelligence service for Prince Albert for the first two years of his rule, starting in 2005. “They had a virtual monopoly, and they enjoyed that.”
But Pastor’s dominance has faced a series of challenges. In 2014 news outlets reported that with Prince Albert’s reported blessing, the Caroli group won the contract for a major waterfront development, which Pastor opposed in the courts, leading to years of legal wrangling. Talking to Le Monde from Dubai with characteristic modesty, Pastor summarized his issue with Prince Albert and those who encircled him: “Everyone is aware of the crux of the matter: the methods of a small group that sets up business by taking advantage of the prince. And because I am the best in Monaco, I’m in the way.”
The Rock Files backed up this sense of Pastor taking on the prince and his entourage, with Thierry Lacoste as his main adversary. According to Le Monde, in one leaked email, dated November 2020, one of Albert’s press advisors wrote to Lacoste: “That octopus Pastor is everywhere! He has gotten his hooks into Monaco. He has gone mad, he has no limits!” Palmero, the accountant who was once considered Albert’s éminence grise, later said, “Pastor wants real power, with the government at his heel and control of the administration, while leaving the prince to inaugurate the chrysanthemums.”
It was not a total leap of imagination, then, when the whodunit gossip in Monaco began to focus on Pastor as the suspected architect of the dossier scandal. But he quickly denied any involvement. “It makes no sense that I be the one behind Les Dossiers du Rocher. I don’t care about these people!” he said last year. Paraphrasing the painter Francis Picabia, Pastor added, separately, “Those who speak behind my back are contemplated by my ass.” (When I contacted Pastor, he referred me to his lawyer, who then didn’t respond.)
If not Pastor “the octopus,” then who? The lack of clues demonstrated the likely cost and sophistication of the Dossiers leak. Monégasque investigators could only trace the domain name to Namecheap, a web hosting service based in Phoenix. Its registrant appeared to be based in Iceland, with an anonymous email address registered in India, where most of the site’s traffic also originated, leading to the assumption that bot farms, which are commonplace in India, had been used to inflate traffic data and therefore the prominence of the Dossiers site.
Lacoste hired a private security company employing former French secret service agents. It reportedly confirmed that Lacoste’s law offices had been hacked and emails spanning a decade stolen. Meanwhile supposed journalists, who turned out to be fake, contacted French newspapers claiming to have new information to share. “I don’t know who was behind the [site], but I do know that it was quite an operation and it must have been very expensive,” Eringer says. “Whoever was behind it had money or had access to money.” Lacoste tells me his investigations have put the estimated cost of the operation at between $5 million and $10 million.
As efforts to identify the Raven stalled, the affair began to strain Prince Albert’s defense of his men. Initially the only hint of reproach had been the suggestion that Lacoste should not have taken on clients in Monaco aside from the prince, because, though legal, it invited speculation about conflicts of interest. Speaking to Le Monde, Albert cited the case in which Lacoste took a fee on the $150 million judgment paid to one developer, and the fact that he represented the developer Marzocco on Monaco-based developments, saying Lacoste “should have been a little more discreet” by avoiding such optics. Lacoste, who is based in Paris, tells me Marzocco was his only other client in Monaco, and one he is proud to have supported. Asked by Le Monde whether he had been overindulgent of men like Lacoste and Palmero (who, the prince explained, worked out of the palace in the mornings but at his own accounting firm for outside clients each afternoon), Albert replied, “Perhaps… But it is also a matter of trust. I thought they were perfectly capable of dealing with all of their responsibilities.” A year or more later, with the fear of more revelations still hanging in the air, all support evaporated.
By June 2023 the so-called club of four had been effectively disbanded, with Albert asking them to stand down from their duties, as detailed in Le Monde, and the palace announcing that Anselmi had officially stepped down from his chief of staff position (to create an “academy of the sea” for the principality, a training platform on ocean geopolitics that he will steer). Albert told Monaco Matin that the affair had been “disastrous” for Monaco’s image and told Le Figaro, “When questions arise, you need to know how to change the people who surround you to find the right path again and to write a new page in your history. If confidence evaporates, you can no longer work together.”
Eringer spies a familiar pattern in the prince’s actions: naïveté followed by self-preservation. “He goes to the media and tries to put a spin on it and say it’s all untrue,” he says. “But when that didn’t work and he realized that there could be a lot of damage to his reputation, that’s the time that he finally flung them away.” Yet in doing so Albert risked creating powerful enemies in men whose loyalty to the family in some cases went back generations. Of most concern has been Claude Palmero, the accountant who, as Le Monde put it, was the “holder of all the secrets of the principality, from the prince’s private accounts to government investments.” Ordinarily he would be, the newspaper added, “the sort of person you spare.”
Palmero was reportedly given a military escort as he was expelled from the palace. Soon, as detailed in Le Monde, his homes and offices, alongside those of the other three men, were being raided by the police as part of an investigation into corruption allegations. The paper also reported the suspicion that Pastor had raised the issue of the leaks with the prince at a lengthy meeting in May and that this explained Palmero’s swift defenestration. (Albert’s spokesperson tells me the prince is too busy to respond to my questions.) Within days Palmero’s lawyer, Pierre-Olivier Sur, who also declined to answer questions, sued the prince for wrongful dismissal on Palmero’s behalf, a case that, as reported in the press, was rejected by Monaco’s supreme court in September.
At the time of writing, the Dossiers site is no longer online; it is viewable only via online archive services, but its impact is still making waves in Monaco as multiple investigations and legal cases continue. It’s far from clear how the saga will end, or who might be identified as the Raven. One thing that is clear: the sense that the whole affair has damaged Prince Albert’s standing, as well as his promise to be a modernizing prince who would shed the principality’s decades-old reputation for shady dealings and court intrigue.
This story appears in the February 2024 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
Usborne is a London based journalist who has written for The Independent, The Guardian, The Financial Times, Vogue, GQ, Tatler, and Buzzfeed.
