Henri Lafont

Henri Lafont (born Henri Chamberlin, 22 April 1902 – 26 December 1944) was an underworld figure who headed the Carlingue, French auxiliaries to the German security services, during the German occupation of France in World War II.

His father died when he was 11 and his mother was said to have abandoned him on the day of the burial in 1912.

Left to his own devices, he frequently wandered in the Paris market of Les Halles, working as a courier or laborer.

In 1919 he was sent to a youth correctional facility

until he turned 18 for stealing a bicycle.

There, he met a German spy named Karl Hennecke and a Swiss spy named Max Stoecklin, who had been an Abwehr agent for Hermann Brandl since 1934 and escaped with them.

He returned to Paris, by then occupied, with his fellow escapees, members of the Abwehr.

On his release, he was drafted into the 39th Regiment of Algerian tirailleurs.

When he was discharged two years later he was sentenced to two years in prison and ten years of banishment from Paris for receiving a stolen vehicle.

While in prison he met two men who later became his associates, Lionel de Wiet, a cocaine addict who posed as an aristocrat, and Adrien Estébétéguy, known as "the Basque" or "Cold-Hand", a violent thug from Toulouse who served eight sentences for robbery.

He also married while in prison, at Aix-en-Provence, and later had two children.

He settled in Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, where he found work.

In early 1940, Chamberlin was running a Simca dealership as Henri Normand in the outer Parisian quarter of Porte des Lilas and made contacts among the police.

He joined a volunteer brigade but was arrested in Paris for desertion.

In June 1940, he was sent to Cherche-Midi prison, then, as the Wehrmacht advanced, to a camp in Cepoy.

Lafont later remarked: "If the guys on the other side, the resistance, had suggested something to me, I would have done it no question. But in July and August 1940, I didn't know about the resistance and hadn't seen anything. I didn't even know what it was."

Agent Max Stoecklin, his fellow prison escapee, set him up as a buying agent for the Wehrmacht, in charge of appropriating French wealth.

He made himself useful, buying everything from clothes to furniture to food, and came to the attention of Hermann Brandl, Abwehr special agent, and of captain Wilhelm Radecke of the Wehrmacht.

He moved several times and wound up at 93 rue Lauriston, the property of a Madame Weinberg before the war.

In July 1940, Lafont and Radecke recruited 27 felons from Fresnes prison.

Colonel, their superior, ordered Lafont's arrest on learning of the freed prisoners.

Radecke warned Lafont of this and suggested he find one of the leaders of the anti-Nazi resistance, former Belgian spymaster Otto Lambrecht, sought by the Abwehr, whose capture would earn the favor of the authorities.

Lafont arrested Lambrecht in the zone libre brought him back to Gestapo headquarters in Paris in the trunk of his car, bound hand and foot.

There he tortured him with his own hands.This resulted in the dismantlement of Belgian counter-espionage after the arrests of 600 people.

He joined the police and was given badge number 6474 R. He reigned over a band of a hundred-some felons and enjoyed almost complete immunity.

A system of penalties from fines to death sanctioned those who did not obey his rules.

The band was made up of gangsters and other felons, but also of corrupt policemen.

The best-known, Pierre Bonny, became his lieutenant.

Near the end of 1940, Hermann Brandl asked Lafont to smuggle an agent into North Africa, so he could install a secret emitter for communicating with German authorities.

Lafont made camp with his team at Cap Doumia near Algiers.

But two of his accomplices were arrested by the police and the mission failed.

Lafont was sentenced to death in absentia.

The Germans used the Bonny-Lafont gang to checkmate the Resistance, and they excelled at this task.

Torture was common in interrogations: prisoners' fingernails were torn out, and their teeth filed.

They were beaten, kicked, and burned with cigarettes or welding torches; water torture and electric shocks were also inflicted.

He was executed by firing squad on 26 December 1944 alongside corrupt policeman Pierre Bonny and footballer-turned-criminal Alexandre Villaplane.

Henri Louis Chamberlin grew up in a working-class environment.

His father was a typesetter and his mother a housecleaner.

After a theft of 2000 francs from the store where he worked, he was sent to a prison camp in Cayenne.

He changed his name to Norman, then Lafont.