The Hélène Pastor affair: ten years of fighting for the truth
Wojciech Janowski /All rights reserved
Hélène Pastor’s son-in-law’s appeal to the Supreme Court has just been rejected. A look back at a case that caused a stir in the Principality and beyond.
Nice, 6 May 2014. Hélène Pastor, a Monegasque businesswoman whose fortune is estimated at 12 billion euros, is on her way to Larchet Hospital. As she does every day, she is visiting her son, Gildo, who had suffered a stroke a few months earlier.
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After leaving the hospital, she went to the car park to join her vehicle, driven by her driver Mohamed Darwich. That’s when shots rang out: the car was targeted by a man armed with a shotgun, who fired at point-blank range.
The attack was fatal: Mohamed Darwich died on 10 May as a result of his injuries, as did 77-year-old Hélène Pastor on the night of 20-21 May.
Surveillance cameras in the car park soon identified the gunman and his accomplice. Samine Saïd Ahmed, the presumed killer, and Alhair Hamadi, two young Comorian men from Marseille, were arrested. In police custody, it was revealed that this was not an opportunistic attack, but a planned assassination.
A “stubborn hatred” for Hélène Pastor
The two young men unanimously pointed to Wojciech Janowski, a Polish businessman and entrepreneur. Well known in the Principality, he was, among other things, co-coordinator of exchanges between the Polish National Chamber of Commerce and Monaco’s Chamber of Economic Development, set up by Michel Pastor, the victim’s brother. In 2010, he was even made an Officer of the National Order of Merit by the then President of the Republic, Nicolas Sarkozy, in recognition of his charitable commitment, particularly to children, some of whom are autistic.
But Wojciech Janowski is also, and above all, for almost thirty years, the partner of Hélène’s daughter Sylvia Ratkowski, and the father of her second child.
So what drove this former Polish honorary consul in Monaco to commit such an atrocity? Arrested on 23 June 2014, he admitted, after his sixth hearing on 26 June, that he had ordered the murder of his mother-in-law out of passion for his wife, who had been “psychologically abused by her mother.” Janowski even admitted to having been helped by his sports coach (who allegedly recruited the assailants)… before recanting.
Citing a poor command of French, even though he had not a priori asked for an interpreter, Wojciech Janowski finally maintained his innocence. But the investigators discovered that several factors were working against him. Starting with the major financial problems facing the Polish businessman, despite the fortune of his wife and family.
Even more damning, Wojciech Janowski is said to have harboured a stubborn hatred of his mother-in-law, who gave his daughter a monthly pocket money of €500,000. “He lived on this money alone. He was desperate and risked being sentenced to 30 million euros by the Polish courts [for having bought a former Polish oil refinery in 2011 without ever paying the bill, editor’s note]”, a source close to the case told Midi Libre. The daily also adds that Janowski “may also have felt humiliated by a distrustful mother-in-law who was tough on business.“
The sports coach confesses all
In addition, in the summer of 2014, Pascal Duriac, Janowski’s notorious sports coach, confessed in police custody. He revealed that he had indeed overseen the recruitment of Samine Saïd Ahmed and Alhair Hamadi, for the sum of €140,000. Duriac also confessed that his employer had also planned to have Gildo killed by “a long-range shot,” as revealed by L’Express, in a lengthy article published in 2017.
That same year, after several months of investigation, ten defendants were brought before the Court of Assizes on charges of murder, complicity in murder and conspiracy to commit a crime. Among them, of course, were the two people who ordered the ambush, as well as the gunman and the lookout, and also Abdelkader Belkhatir, Pascal Duriac’s brother-in-law, who was suspected of having put him in touch with the attackers in Marseille, as Nice-Matin. explains. “Three other people, including a former volunteer auxiliary gendarme [Omer Abale Lahore, Anthony Colomb and Salim Youssouf, editor’s note], are suspected of having acted as intermediaries or weapon suppliers“, explains the Côte d’Azur daily.
As for the last two defendants, according to Nice-Matin et Le Monde, they are “thugs from Marseille”, Francis Pointu, accused of perjury, and his neighbour, a Polish lawyer, Janowski’s niece, who is on trial for witness tampering. At her uncle’s request, Pointu allegedly paid Francis Pointu 60,000 euros to give false evidence to the examining magistrate in favour of Janowski and against Duriac.
But the Polish community remains sceptical. Many people support Janowski, particularly in Nice, as shown in a report filmed by BFMTV. The businessman is described as “a member of the family” by the president of the Amicale des Polonais in Nice, of which he is the most generous donor. It seems impossible for him, as it does for other compatriots, that a man who has done so much for others could have committed such an act. And yet he did.
A month-long trial
The trial opened on 17 September 2018 before the Aix-en-Provence Court of Assizes. A whole month of hearings followed, during which one revelation after another came to light throughout the investigation. According to L’Express, Sylvia Ratkowski confidently handed over a blank cheque to her partner every month. Janowski systematically wrote down an amount of between €200,000 and €250,000, and deposited it in Sylvia’s account at the BNP bank in Monaco. Officially, this sum was to cover their fixed costs and living expenses.
However, for a year and a half, up until the attack, of the 9 million euros that Hélène Pastor had paid to her daughter during this period, 6.5 million were transferred to Janowski’s personal account. A further million euros was also deposited in the account of a company called Firmus. A company that set aside funds for Janowski’s personal account.
Saying she was “blown away” by the extent of the embezzlement, Sylvia Ratkowski discovered all the financial deceptions orchestrated by her partner: the secret mortgage on their London home, the “forgotten” payment of Sylvia’s car insurance and her health insurance… Janowski even claimed to be paying 500,000 euros a year to finance dental study in the United States for Olivia, Sylvia’s daughter from a previous marriage, when in fact her education only cost half of that amount.
All these schemes were not enough to solve the Polish businessman’s money problems, so he decided to order the assassination of Hélène Pastor.
Janowski pleads innocence
“I’m innocent, I didn’t commit any crime, that’s all,” Janowski insisted on the stand on the first day of the trial. Le Monde covered the hearings. Defending the businessman was Mr Dupond-Moretti, a leading barrister, now Garde des Sceaux [Keeper of the Seals].
The latter began by denouncing the conditions under which his client was held in police custody, and deplored the absence of a lawyer during the first few hours. The accused had been offered one, but declined. A video screening of the police custody footage completed the task of convincing the audience that the custody process had in fact been carried out without any errors.
Janowski is not the only one to plead innocence. Samine Saïd Ahmed, the alleged shooter, also denies the charges against him. This is despite the – very – many mistakes made by the perpetrators of the ambush, including forgetting a bottle of shower gel in a hotel room just before the attack (from which DNA traces were taken), and travelling to the scene of the crime by taxi.
In contrast, Pascal Duriac pleaded guilty and added that he had acted under Janowski’s orders and control. Similarly, Alhair Hamadi admitted having acted as a lookout, but withdrew his previous statements in which he admitted having recruited the shooter.
As for the other defendants, again according to Le Monde, they seem more overwhelmed by the case than anything else. “I’m not a killer, to each his own“, says one. “I just wanted to do a friend a favour,” pleads the other.
“I don’t have my mum, I don’t have Wojciech, I don’t have anything.”
Witnesses from the scene then took to the stand to reconstruct events. One of them, as Le Figaro reports, is the man with whom Hélène Pastor last spoke before the attack. Recovering from a stroke himself, like Gildo, Philippe was smoking a cigarette in his wheelchair at the time. “Madame Pastor – I didn’t know who she was at the time – chatted to me. She asked me what had happened to me. Then she told me to keep hoping, that medicine had made a lot of progress,” he told the Court of Assizes, before explaining that he thought it was an attempted handbag snatch.
To cover up the real motives behind the attack, Janowski and Duriac allegedly promised the assailants a “bonus” in exchange for killing the driver and recovering Hélène Pastor’s handbag, making it look like a robbery gone wrong. A total bonus of 40,000 euros.
Then came the testimony of Sylvia Ratkowski, who has joined the civil action and recounted her interview with Janowski in police custody. “He told me that he had ordered the killing and that he had wanted to save me. And then I fainted,” she recalls.
The accused has since retracted his statement.”Do you think Wojciech Janowski is guilty?” Sylvia was asked. “It’s so incredible that I don’t know what to think. I don’t have my mum, I don’t have Wojciech, I don’t have anything. I’m waiting for the truth,” she replies.
Life sentence required
And the truth finally came out. After once again proclaiming his innocence, even claiming to have been threatened and extorted by Pascal Duriac, Janowski was finally cornered by the contradictory evidence raised during the investigation and trial.
Public prosecutor Pierre Cortès has called for the heaviest sentence against Janowski, who is accused of ordering the double murder of Hélène Pastor and Mohamed Darwich. Pierre Cortès even believes that the macabre plan was hatched in 2012, when Sylvia Ratkowski was diagnosed with breast cancer. The illness reminded Janowski that if his partner died, since he was not included in her will and they were not married, he would receive nothing.
Life imprisonment, with a minimum twenty-two year prison sentence, is therefore sought against him. Life imprisonment is also requested for the killer and the lookout.
For Pascal Duriac, the public prosecutor is asking for thirty years’ imprisonment. For the six others, depending on their role in the affair, Pierre Cortès is calling for sentences of between two and 18 years’ imprisonment.
Mr Dupond-Moretti made one last attempt to save his client, pleading guilty only to the murder of Hélène Pastor and not to the murder of Mohamed Darwich.
Wojciech Janowski “understood from the outset that he was being portrayed as a despicable fellow. I want to tell you about him for a moment. He was born in Communist, Stalinist Poland. He saw his mother go to prison. All his father’s property confiscated. And in the Pastor family, he became the token loser. They expect him not to be poor. So yes, he’ll invent diplomas. So yes, he’ll lie. But haven’t the rest of us ever lied? And yes, he’s going to try to exist,” the lawyer pleaded.
“My only motivation was love for my wife and the suffering of my children,” his client explained in police custody. “That is Wojciech Janowski’s motive, that is his crime,” said Dupond-Moretti.
The Court of Cassation dismisses the appeal
Wojciech Janowski was finally sentenced to life without parole. The same sentence was handed down to Samine Saïd Ahmed and Alhair Hamadi. Pascal Duriac was sentenced to thirty years in prison.
Janowski subsequently lodged a complaint against his lawyer in 2019, for having pleaded guilty without his authorisation and for “non-assistance during the investigation”, as Mr Dupond-Moretti, according to Le Monde, had only visited him twice in five years. Dupond-Moretti, contacted by AFP, reportedly invoked “lawyer-client privilege” and refused to comment on the matter.
However, the Bouches-du-Rhône Court of Assizes upheld the life sentences for the mastermind and executors in 2021 (after a postponement due to the Covid-19 pandemic).
As a last resort, the three of them and Omer Lohore, who was sentenced to six years in prison, appealed to the French Supreme Court. However, as 20 Minutes reports, France’s highest court decided to reject the appeal on 21 June. Almost ten years after the events, this decision brings to a close a case that has forever marked Monaco’s history.