More on the Libertarian Underground in France: Legal Assets and Money-laundering

Let us press on with the libertarian underground in France. 

Having dealt with the forgery teams, the teams procuring, storing and shipping arms, our focus today will be on the lawful infra-structure underpinning the entire arrangement in economic terms. Why beat about the bush? We mean to say something about how some of the money amassed from forgery or from hold-ups was laundered, where some of the arms acquired before shipment out of France were stored, how they were moved from place to place, in whose name all of this was done and how they tried to go undetected by the French authorities. Or at any rate not to draw too much attention. 

By way of context, or should there be any newcomer to these blogs whose attention has been grabbed by the subject, we are talking about France after the Liberation.

And the period we are going to concentrate on is mainly the years between 1945 and the early 1950s.
It also needs saying that in a country just emerging from the war in which it had suffered invasion, the official authorities needed time to embed themselves and consolidate their power. Added to which the gendarmes, military and those assuming such power had shared ups and downs inside the resistance with folk that from now on it would be their role to harass, people they had sometimes been through unspeakable experiences with, meaning that sometimes they might turn a blind eye or, if they were caught red-handed, saw to it that the punishments inflicted were not as severe as the might otherwise have been. All of this in the immediate post-war period, that is.

And the last piece in the jigsaw came in the form of someone with sufficient imagination and daring who happened to find himself in the right place at the right time.

Naturally, no man is an island. But if that person could surround himself with a team that was large enough, active enough and capable enough, things might begin to change. And if, moreover, that team was part of a big organization well used to struggle and life underground and to surviving, then everything was set to go.

Regular readers of this blog will know of whom I am speaking. The man in question was Laureano Cerrada, a railwayman from Miedes. In the past, we have mentioned the team he was putting together during the years of the Nazi Occupation and here he is again. And the organization in question was none other than the Spanish Libertarian Movement (MLE). The right place happened to be post-war France, more specifically the capital, Paris. Cerrada was secretary of the MLE Northern Regional which took in Paris and the country’s northern departments. He had a bunch of comrades who had been part of the resistance alongside him. He had loads of cash, raised mostly through the forging of ration cards and all sorts of documents, plus he had lots of weapons that he had been gleaning from the resistance, plus some that they had stolen from the Germans. 

What he now needed was greater control over the organization and here the congress that the MLE was about to hold in Paris in May 1945 was to be key. That congress was attended by someone who could control the MLE, but who, as luck would have it, was short of money.  And so Cerrada, on the one hand, added to his pay-roll the ‘Holy Family’, made up of Germinal Esgleas, the person concerned, and of his partner Federica Montseny. Esgleas was the bureaucrat who was perfect for running the organization and Federica, with her eloquence and her sway in the libertarian printed media, could mobilize the masses. Nor did Cerrada forget to cover the travel and accommodation costs in Paris of the delegations from the federations that backed them, or indeed, in concert with that couple of cronies, to set up brand new federations in order to guarantee their triumph. 

And as if that was not enough, Lady Luck played into Laureano Cerrada’s hand during 20 hectic days. For one thing, on 25 April, the plates used for printing Spanish peseta notes turned up in Milan. Darting off to Italy, he got his hands on them and, without stopping for breath, scurried back to Paris on 1 May to attend the opening of the MLE congress. And the congress could scarcely have gone better for him. Esgleas was appointed MLE general secretary and Paulino Malsand took charge of the Coordination Section, the one that ran clandestine activities. It was now time to beef up the team. 

In addition to the people who had been active with him in the resistance – people like Juan Sánchez, Manolo Huet, Joaquín Blesa or Liberto Ros – Cerrada now began to add several comrades from the ‘Libertad Battalion’ to his pay-roll. The Libertad Battalion had been made up of 300-400 libertarians who had fought in the resistance in France. Among the veterans from it that joined his gang were José Bañón, Francisco Martínez, Alberto Santaolaria and the guide-cum-guerrilla Ramón Vila. José Villanueva Lecumberri deserves a separate mention. He was to be Laureano’s personal ‘purse-holder’. He was the organization’s treasurer, the bagman. 

As we have said, arms were one thing but personnel was another. The next step, then, was to broaden the infra-structure. For a start the best possible accommodation had to be sought for members of the team and their families. Which is where the so-called hotels – actually blocks of apartments – came in. We tracked some of them down in Paris. There was the Hôtel des Vosges in the Passage Goix where one of the clandestine presses and a pretty sizeable arms dump were discovered in 1949. There was the one on the Rue Rebeval where in 1951 two Flemish 17th century tapestries stolen by the expropriation teams were uncovered in 1951. Or the one at 12 Rue Bichat. The latter just happened to be the headquarters of the Paris CNT. And, outside the capital there were a few more: like the one bought in the French Cerdagne in Mont Louis, accessible by train from Toulouse, which route and hotel were regularly used by the action groups bound for Spain and which the was run by Constancio Durban who had been to the fore in the Second World War escape lines. Like Ramón Vila, in 1946 Durban declined the medals and decorations awarded to him by the Allied armies for his resistance activities. There was also the Lux Bar Hotel/restaurant at No 15 in Perpignan’s Rue Maréchal Foch; it was run by Alberto Ballesteros who was the border delegate in charge in the Pyrénées Orientales area. In addition to all of these, we ought to highlight a significant range of safe houses, especially in Paris itself, but also in cities near the Spanish border where there was a strong libertarian and guerrilla presence.

We can be sure that there would have been more such hotels in Toulouse and Lyon and Marseilles, albeit that I have not yet been able to track them down. 

And how was movement of all these weapons to be managed? What they came up with was not bad. For one thing, they bought and managed a number of garages where they could repair, buy, sell, lease and install hidden spaces in vehicles. One such garage was on the Rue Douane in Paris. Another one that cropped up was at 35, Rue Rebeval, operating as the Rebeval Aéromécanique company. These were garages complete with workshop and office premises. And the man fronting them? Félix Castro Salgado, from the Paris CNT. 

In addition they set up the odd haulage firm, such as the one trading as Rapid Paris. And how do we know that this was one of Cerrada’s stable? Well, if we run an eye over its partners, we find Eduardo Rey Vicente Gallego and José Calpe. Those names have a familiar ring to them, right? Well yes, they were part of the gang that was arrested in the clandestine printworks in the Passage Goix. That company was launched in July 1948 with 4,500,000 francs of capital investment and it was based at 50, Rue Vergniaud in Paris. Besides a hangar and a garage, it also had a fleet of five lorries and one van, three mechanics and several drivers. It was launched in 1948, by which time there were certainly others in operation, which I have yet to track down. Its Spanish equivalent was the Galicia Transport Firm (See the link at https://www.elsaltodiario.com/ni-cauivos-ni-desarmandos/la-empresa-de-transprtes-galica-sa)

Of course, whilst these were for overland transport, we must not forget the Vedette speedboat that Cerrada  bought in Marseilles in 1947 from the US Army to handle marine transportation, and his acquisition of that Norecrin light aircraft, used in the attempt to drop bombs on Franco in San Sebastián Bay in 1948. That plane had set him back 1,600,000 francs, paid for with the proceeds of the February 1946 armed robbery in Paris and it the bill of sale had been made to the name of Georges Fontenis, the then general secretary of the French Anarchist Federation. The Norecrin was used to carry people and gear on various occasions back and forth through France. 

We know from Laureano Cerrada’s own mouth while under arrest in 1951 when he was explaining to police where he got the money from to buy the Norecrin, he claimed it was the proceeds from forgery of ration cards on a press that he owned on the Rue de Dhuys in the Bagnolet suburb of Paris. We know that the plane was not bought with such money and his claims about that press, of which we were unaware, we cannot be sure about. And since we have mentioned presses, there was a legally registered printworks known as the Imprimerie Nouvelle, based at 21 Boulevard de Grenelle in Paris and it had been launched in November 1951 by one of the partners in Rapid France, the Frenchman Raymond Raganaud. Remember that by that time Cerrada had been jailed for counterfeiting. It is no accident that one.  Laureano’s people set about setting up a printworks and another press came out of that.

I don’t quite get the connection between the libertarian underground in France and the footwear trade, but it is worth highlighting. For a start, there was a shoe factory with warehouses on the Place Denfer-Rochereau in Paris and it was run by Cerrada’s friend and collaborator Pedro Moñino aka ‘el Zapatero Cojo’. Not that that was his only venture into footwear: Teófilo Navarro aka Negro (another member of the action groups) ran a shoe repair workshop on the Avenue Paul Sejourné in Toulouse and was also in charge of a shoemakers’ co-op launched thanks to funding from Cerrada. Plus which we find the firm of Etablissement Semel et Cie. Specializing in sandal-making, using a range of materials. To my surprise one of the partners here turned out to be one Manuel Huet. Might it be another person sharing the same surname and forename? The date on which that form was launched was in October 1946. We know that that same year Manolo had been pretty busy in the French capital. My doubts evaporated once I saw the address that Huet used to give as his own. Listed alongside Manuel were Pedro León and Aline Semel. In late January 1947, Huet was to hand his part of the firm over to Madame Semel, as did Pedro León and both men cut ties with that company. Switching to another business sector, we have the allusion in Le Populiare newspaper of 15 February 1952 to some company that Cerrada himself had set up in the city of Reims – albeit that I do not have the name of that company as yet. In that case it was a firm linked to electrical rewiring of private homes; it was set up in 1947 and at the time that he was arrested in 1951 he still held a fair number of shares in it.

We are also aware of the financial aid the organization fed to a number of cooperatives employing comrades in the construction sector or the Aymare colony.

As for the laundering of counterfeit currency, that was handled in several different ways. For one thing, in post-war France, the paper available in France was unsuited to counterfeiting the peseta, as Verardini correctly explained: “The thing was not to resort to the modus operandi of individual trading of note for note, but rather to use the pertinent connections in order to exploit the services of the Mint, and every country has one, devoted solely to refreshing the notes in circulation by means of discarding those that were in a sub-standard condition. The modus operandi consisted of swapping the defective notes for counterfeit ones. It was an operation carried out through feeding those defective notes into an incinerator. The staff involved in that substitution demanded a fee of 20% to 40% in any country. Likewise in Spain under the dictatorship, or so the professionals tell us. It was an operation that it was not mounted on the spur of the moment but through bargaining over a given amount and then implemented gradually, day by day”. 

When good quality paper could be got, then note could be traded for note and used for purchases, or issued to teams who may or may not have been related to the organization so that they could pass the forged currency, the way that “el Maño” did with the Argentineans, when they traded each 500-peseta note for 1,000 actual francs. 

It ought to be emphasized that much of the efforts made by Cerrada and his teams were always designed to support the action groups. True, this entire web may be rather reminiscent of the tangle of corruption that have been emerging in the East and elsewhere, or in certain organizations with Mafia connections. But there is one point, and a not insignificant one, in my view at any rate, and which puts a different complexion on things. Most of the money stolen, counterfeited or the proceeds of fraud, did not go to feather the nests of the leaders and members of the apparatus, but was used to bolster the organization, sort out the CNT’s press and propaganda balances, boost the broad mass of prisoners and dependents, or the cooperatives founded by MLE personnel. Of course, everyone will draw his/her own conclusions there, as likely to be as legitimate or mistaken as any of mine. Nor is there any denying – Cerrada himself used to bemoan the fact – that some of his ‘front men’ (anarchists like himself) gathered up whatever funds they could, headed off to South America and ended up as prosperous businessmen. 

From El Salto, 23 March 2025 https://www.elsaltodiario.com/ni-cautivos-ni-desarmados/seguimos-clandestinidad-francia-aparato-legal-blanqueo 

Image: Laureano Cerrada (with the X), behind him Federica Montseny and Germinal Esgleas (with the hat). Source: Imanol

Translated by: Paul Sharkey.