Fresh Information about the Underground in France, plus MLE Dirty Linen

Just when you thought it was over, it starts all over again. Some new information to flesh out previous entries, plus a look at the libertarian movement’s dirty linen 

So here we are, back again to put the cherry on the top of the cake regarding the libertarian underground in France. Ultimately, the latter has been covered by six articles, plus this final update. Further information will assuredly come to light and I will publish it once I have enough to make up a full blog entry or when something stands out enough or grabs my attention.

The fact is that this whole topic has been swirling around in my head for a long time now, but I did not have the tools nor enough of the necessary information to immerse myself in it. So now, with a level head, I hope to carry on adding in fresh facts, names, dates, incidents … well, you know, the whole kit and caboodle.

Today I mean to focus on a few things that I stumbled across even as previous articles were appearing in print. Fresh facts, inaccuracies, plus which we will have a quick look at certain items of the MLE’s dirty linen, which we should not overlook if we want to arrive at an overall picture.

The first article to appear was a ‘Pistol or Paper?’-type article dealing with the forgery set-up. [The Libertarian Underground in France: Part One: Forgery.] Anyway, it was posted and things kept being brought to light. In fact, almost from the outset I referred to the RRN (Northern Regional Resistance) and how it was as much a forgery/counterfeiting specialist as a specialist in the theft and storage of arms. The point is that I omitted any mention or comment regarding one of the fundamental pillars of the forgery apparatus. So let us look back to the years ’43-’44 and focus on Paris, the RRN’s nerve-centre and the capital of France. In addition to passports, credentials, ausweis, passes, etc., Laureano Cerrada’s groups concentrated on forging ration cards, bread vouchers and food vouchers. On the one hand, it helped overcome the awful hunger that goes hand in hand with war-time and, by selling them on, they started to rake in huge profits. There was also help afforded to militants in difficulty, enabling them to lift themselves out of poverty by selling such forgeries. Such ration cards were in force from 1940 to 1949, so the forgery squad was able to rake in the profits for a number of years. Although not everything they produced was forged. Sometimes groups would head for the offices that issued such cards and, with the always persuasive aid of a couple of handguns or the inevitable if concealed Sten gun, they would make off with thousands of ready-printed cards. Oddly enough, we should say that Fernando Gómez Peláez was not able to attend the Paris Congress in 1945 because he was locked up in Bordeaux prison at the time for trading in ration cards. In that same city, but a few months later on, Germán Rodríguez was caught in possession of 1,700 bread ration cards and, as if that was not enough, anybody who has been following my blog entries – just to stick to the ‘thing’ linking anarchists and the shoe trade – Rodríguez was also caught in possession of 27 pairs of shoes ready for sale. I have a lot of information on this score, but I need to sort out which information relates to Cerrada and the MLE and which does not. 

Among the inaccuracies that popped up my entries, we might begin with one relating to the forgery side of things.  It transpires that the French police discovered a press being used by Spanish anarchists to counterfeit currency on a large scale at No 92 in the Rue Folie Médicour; those reports mentioned a certain Antonio Fajardo and another guy by the name of Antonio Xirardines. It is not as if the press had always taken great care when it comes to telling the truth and getting the spelling of names right, is it? Was it in France or in Spain?  You choose. Because, as it turns out, this mysterious Xirardines turns out to have been a rather more familiar name from the ranks of our bothersome illegalists. As we say, Xirardines turned out to be Antonio Verardini (we can see how one name was transformed into something different and reprinted in its second form in the wider press of the time) who had been an aide to Mera during the civil war and a regular collaborator of Cerrada’s for decades in France. That press clipping offers us a snapshot of history.

As I was saying, no sooner had my entry on the forgers been posted than other interesting things came to light. Just when you think that the range of forgeries could not go any further, you run smack dab into the imaginations of the illegalists. As I was poring over heaps of articles about forgers in France, I was struck by one that grabbed my attention. What was it? Counterfeiting old gold coins? Spanish anarchists caught up in that too? But what the hell was it all about? Anyone whose interest may have been piqued needs to be told that the article in question is entitled “Bonapartists making the counterfeiters rich”, with the even better sub-title “And filling the coffers of Spanish anarchists”. Perhaps a little word of explanation is called for here …

If you had the wherewithal, you could have bought yourself a one-kilo ingot of gold for 550,000 francs back then. With a jeweller of some repute (as in the case of Barcelona’s Martí Borrás aka “el Marras”), that ingot could be cast into 155 louis d’or coins. A bit of patina like they were well-used and all of a sudden they were worth, not 550,00 francs but 620,000 francs. The loaves-and-fishes trick may be pure religion, but, faith or no faith, you have to believe it. And given how versatile our Cerrada and his team were, I do not think it will come as a surprise to anyone. And I imagine, given that this made it into the papers, that there were more than three or four such money-spinners. 

Before I move on from the forgery set-up, I have – thanks to https://elsetaproducciones.blogspot.com/ an article about the guerrilla wars on northern Spain, the escape lines along the Cantabrian coastline and the crossing of some of its members into France, plus their connections with the Catalan CNT and the libertarian network that was operating in Andorra, people-smuggling as well as forging passports. The item dates from 1947, back when Cerrada was the bossman of libertarian illegalism in France. It is very interesting to learn that in Andorra there was an autonomous document-forgery team in operation and that it had ties to Cerrada’s groups in Paris, but at much closer quarters to the conflict zone, as it sat on the border. One of its members was Juan Mayrata Alberti (who was arrested and thrown into the Modelo prison for forging documents in 1947). José Rodríguez Pomares, who was picked up by the police in La Seo de Urgell, not only had a forgery workshop but also operated as a courier and a border guide. Other members of the network included José Mayor Segura or Antonio Fábregas Rodríguez. Oddly enough, the organization still retained a foothold in Andorra in Les Escaldes. Readers of this blog will not be surprised to find, therefore, that as far back as the days of the Ponzán network, the nerve centre of the network in Andorra was the Hotel Paulet there, so they had not gone too far. The local MLE delegates in the area were Mariano Oliveras Gil and somebody referred to as “Logroño”. 

Just to round off our look at the forgery set-up, we have already mentioned that Laureano, when first arrested in 1951, testified that his light plane had been bought with money raised by printing forged ration cards on his printing press in Bagnolet. But, as we know that was a false claim, made by Laureano to throw the police off the scent. But the printing-press was real enough. Bagnolet is within the greater Paris area and thanks to Antoni Rossi’s research into the libertarian underground in France, I discovered that it had to have been one of Cerrada’s first presses in Paris and that it was active from 1945 to at least 1947. And since we have, albeit just in passing, mentioned that light airplane, then I have to go back to that speedboat down in Sète. In Blind Spot as well as in articles I have been writing in which that vessel gets a mention, I have always assumed that it was purchased in 1947, but, thanks to a French-language text containing an interview with Javier Miguel Aznárez, I now discover that the MLE had had that speedboat since 1946 and had of course been using it to ship arms across the Mediterranean, with the route from Argelès to Rosas being one of most used. 

Now on to a topic that I am itching to deal with, given that it is so controversial, the fact that as a rule it does not get mentioned and which I can suggest may possibly merit a full article. As I was unravelling the robberies carried out in France, the groups that carried them out, the specialities of some of them, a lot of names were coming to light – the vast majority of them hitherto unknown. 

In my very first article about the expropriator set-up, I mentioned that some people/some gangs had made a speciality of stealing cars and among these were Sebastián Arjona and a gang of Italians. I have yet to make my mind up about Arjona, due to lack of information, whether he is to be counted among the Cerrada groups or in what I am calling the ‘Italian Gang’, which was not one of Laureano’s groups. Obviously it contained Italians, but it also had French and Spanish members and was known as the ‘Front-Wheel Drive Gang’ on account of the sorts of cars they used in their raids. The membership of the gang ranged from former Resistance personnel to collaborators with the Gestapo, but, politically speaking, the gang was very murky and essentially operated along mafia lines. One of its members was Giuseppe Lovera. And why do I pick out his name? Well. It turns out he was mixed up in expropriations mounted by Cerrada’s groups on at least two occasions, albeit that we can rest assured that there were others as well. For one thing, while Lovera, Arjona, Lucchetti and García were in the process of stealing a car in Paris in late 1949, the police stumbled across them, arresting all of them, except for García. Lovera was caught in possession of the revolver that had been used by José Soto (a Spanish anarchist member of Cerrada’s Paris groups) in the killing of a Paris police officer a short time before, in the course of an attempt to rob a taxi. I pressed on with my search and came across Un exile, des combats: Les anarchistes espagnols parisiens dans la lutte antifranquiste 1945/1953 – the text I mentioned earlier by Antonio Rossi. There I also stumbled upon a number of names that I had not managed to ferret out and I zeroed in on them. It was not long before a newspaper clipping was found mentioning three such names and linking them to a hold-up carried out on 30 December 1948 at a factory in Villeurbanne in Lyon. The four raiders made off with merchandise to the tune of 7 million francs. Any idea who was involved? Why, Giuseppe Lovera. The libertarians in on it with him were Juan Santaela and José Vidal (whereabouts not known) and a Felipe Gil who was later arrested in Lyon. 

But back to Lovera. The ‘Front-Wheel Drive Gang’ of which he was part was led by Abel Danos aka ‘el Mamut’. A book has been written about Danos, entitled Between the Resistance and the Gestapo. Since I have not yet had a chance to read it, I shall leave it until I can produce a complete article dealing with the subject, but I am not surprised that Cerrada’s behaviour should have sometimes prompted certain doubts, if not out-and-out opposition from the likes of Peirats and other comrades from the organization. 

And, having brought up the subject of dirty linen, and drawn by the stench of rottenness, let me delve a little deeper into the dark side.

Let us turn the clock back to 1945. Towards the end of that September the Toulouse CNT dispatched into Spain three militants meant to form a national-level defence commission. One was Ángel Marín, the defence secretary of the MLE in France at the time. They had the top-notch services of Francisco Sabaté and Jaime Pares as their guides and escorts. Everything went well until the raids on 30 October. Marín was captured in one of the raids. Quintela’s Brigada Político-Social soon discovered who it was that had fallen into its clutches. And they started to ponder their next move … Shoot him? Lock him up for life? Thrash something out? Or use him as a patsy to deceive the enemy? In stepped Eliseo Melis. Melis negotiated Marín’s release after a few months in jail and, in that regard, saved his life. But on the other, once Ángel Marín crossed back over the Pyrenees, he was boycotted and shunned inside the MLE. But that was not the end of the story because another character made his entrance. This was Miguel Silvestre Talón aka ‘el Nano’. His record was impeccable. He had been a member of the ‘Faros’ group, an expropriator, served in the Durruti Column as a militian, worked with the escape lines during the German Occupation and taken part in the liberation of Toulouse, joined the anti-Franco guerrilla war and, more recently, served as a courier between Toulouse and Barcelona. But setting foot in Barcelona carried some risks and one of those was that Silvestre had come into contact with Melis in relation to the smuggling out to France of a number of wanted individuals, his partner among them. Those contacts brought criticisms down on his head and earned him the animosity of a lot of people inside the MLE. And, to cap it all, he returned from Barcelona with Ángel Marín in March 1946. As mentioned earlier, Marín was barred from holding from any posts and kept at arm’s length from the MLE. Miguel Silvestre’s fate was a different one, although we do not now where the order came from. His body was found in the Midi Canal near Toulouse with a bullet in the head, his hands bound with barbed wire and showing signs of having been tortured. He could not have been easily overpowered as he was a former Graeco-Roman wrestling champion, or maybe his attacker was somebody who struck Silvestre as someone from whom he had nothing to fear.

Just as a lot of militants had been critical of him, many others inside the MLE could not fathom nor accept the fate he had met with. Which says something because the libertarian movement was all bluff and bluster about the execution of Melis a year later, but close-lipped and shifty-eyed when the Silvestre affair was brought up. It is worth bearing in mind also that – albeit in my view in a way completely different from the Silvestre affair – the MLE decided to bump off the infiltrator Niceto Pardillo Manzanera aka “Chaval” who had been a member of the ‘Los Maños’ group before informing on them. In June 1953, once Chaval had been released from jail a gang (that included one of the members of ‘Los Maños’, who had survived its eradication) kidnapped him and later left him for dead. But Niceto had luck on his side and managed to survive and go on the run.

But there is more. If you thought the nonsense ended there, you were wrong. 

On now to another of my obsessions – the plates for printing peseta notes, plates stolen in Milan. As already explained in my entry on the forgery/counterfeiting side of the operation, in May 1945 the plates turned up in a printshop in Milan, whereupon the guys from the Malatesta-Bruzzi Brigades contacted Cerrada, who brought them back to Paris with him. He was soon putting them to use, but the MLE did not give its approval to the counterfeiting of 5-, 100,- 500- and 1,000-peseta notes, (as part of the fight against Francoism) until a plenum held in exile in 1947. The advent of Peirats, the increasingly obviously frictions between the Montseny-Esgleas camp and Laureano and Laureano’s shady dealings with gangs such as the “Front-Wheel Drive Gang” ensured that a further plenum held in exile in 1949 resolved that the plates should be destroyed. But between that resolution and their actual destruction a number of things occurred and, with the benefit of hindsight, we might describe them as falling somewhere between hare-brained and unconscionable. For one thing, Laureano Cerrada felt that he had been betrayed by Esgleas and he felt like bumping him off, but luckily, I think, somebody close to him must have got him to think again. Later, in 1949, it was Esgleas who approached both Facerias and, later, the ‘Los Maños’ group, about bumping off Cerrada. Fortunately, both of those approaches went nowhere.

The next piece of nonsense came when one of Esgleas’s men wormed his way into the Cerrada group and, when the opportunity arose, stole the plates and took off for Toulouse as fast as he could. Once the Cerrada-ists caught on to this, they dispatched groups to track him down and I can just imagine how things must have looked to the folk who were just waiting for their train at the Matabiau station in Toulouse. Men in macintoshes, with pistols chasing other men in hats and carrying guns, first through the station and then through the adjacent streets; but, luckily, no shots were exchanged between them.

Allegedly, the plates were smashed up. Cerrada carried on counterfeiting pesetas notes. I do not know if he was able to keep up the previous pace, but he did churn out lots of them. Were all the plates broken up? I cannot tell if we will find anybody to tell us the answer to that. But we will be keeping our eyes peeled and our ears cocked.

And, just to finish off today’s entry and rather than finish up on our everyday disasters, I have made up my mind to delve a little into the life story of someone featured in the illegalist goings-on, about whom I was questioned on the Radio Canino program, since I know Juancar will enjoy that. Because I was asked on Radio Canino about José Villanueva Lecumberri, Cerrada’s treasurer and since then I have come up with something.

For openers, let us state that he was involved in the anarchist would-be Vera de Bidasoa uprising against the monarchy in 1923, as a result of which he was forced into exile in France up until the fascists’ would-be coup in 1936. In July that year he returned to Barcelona, but, given his connections and fluency in French, he was sent to Paris as one of the heads of the libertarian movement’s intelligence agency there. After the civil war was lost, he got involved with the SIA (international Antifascist Solidarity), trying to find accommodation and decent digs for the refugees flooding into France and he was one of the people on hand in 1939 when Marianet drowned in the river Marne. He made Laureano Cerrada’s acquaintance in Paris and they worked together for many years. He was a close confederate of Cerrada’s and his organization’s treasurer. As late as 1970 he was still an officer of the Paris Local Federation and he finally died in that city in 1977. A search of the internet under his name will show what very little information there is about him. In fact, there are only two ‘hits’ in Spanish and the first was written by yours truly … in short there is much work to be done there.  I was also going to mention in this article the new expropriator groups I have come across, but, given the way that this entry is expanding now, I shall hold that information over for some future part three on the expropriator set-up.

And that is all for today. See you next time!

El Salto, 29 July 2025 https://www.elsaltodiario.com/ni-cautivos-ni-desarmados/nuevas-informaciones-clandestinidad-francia-trapos-sucios-mle 

[Image: Police outline of part of the Leonese guerrilla and the movement and forgery apparatus in the Barcelona/Andorra area. source: Imanol ]

Translated by: Paul Sharkey.