On an evening in May 2014, in a hospital in Nice, a woman of seventy-seven stopped to speak to a stranger. She told him he must keep hope, that medicine had made great progress. But as her car reached the exit, a man dressed in black stepped from behind a wall and fired twice through her window. Fifteen days later, she was dead.

They called her the vice princess. Her family had raised the towers of Monte Carlo and never sold a single apartment. And the man the police arrested had lived beside her daughter for twenty-eight years. The roots of the story lie in the hills above the Ligurian coast, in a hamlet called Buggio.

There, in 1873, a boy named Jean-Baptiste Pastor was born into a poor family. Nobody who knew them then would have guessed that their name would one day be spoken in Monaco in the same breath as the princes. The name itself changed; in Italy it was Pastore, and the e would disappear with time. What remained was Pastor, short and hard, the name of a man who worked with stone.

He cut stone and he laid it. The British press, looking back more than a century later, would describe him simply as a stonemason from a poor family in Liguria. When he first came to Monaco the record cannot settle. The BBC, the French press, and the news agencies say 1880; other accounts say only the 1880s.

One French history says he worked on Monaco’s building sites in those years but settled there for good only in 1926. If he was born in 1873, then in 1880 he was a child of seven. The accounts agree on where his hands went: the church of Saint Charles, the Oceanographic Museum. One later account tells it differently, that he came to Monaco with his family at thirteen and worked first as a miner before he ever took up the stone.

The ages do not fit the year of his birth, and the record leaves that puzzle open. What every version shares is a poor boy from the Ligurian hills who started at the very bottom of the building trade and climbed. Jean-Baptiste Pastor founded his own firm, dating it to 1920. Its own history says his son Gildo was helped in the business by a brother named Jean, though one French account calls Gildo the only son.

On the thirtieth of June 1943, it became a Monégasque company, the form it would keep. His most famous early work was a stadium. In 1936, Prince Louis II commissioned a sports ground, and the Pastor firm built it. The first Stade Louis II was finished in 1939 with room for twelve thousand people.

It stood until 1985, on the ground where a shopping center stands today. Then came the war. One French magazine, writing in 2013, made a blunt claim: he made his fortune because he collected all the public building sites during the Second World War. That account is the magazine’s, and no court ever weighed it.

What the record does show is that the stonemason’s firm had a way of doing business that would decide everything that followed. The rule was simple. The Pastors built, and they kept what they built. They did not sell the apartments.

They rented them. Year after year, building after building, the family collected rent and held on to the stone. Decades later, an American magazine would call it the family’s iron law: never sell, only rent. In a place with almost no land, where every square metre would one day be worth a fortune, a family that never sold would slowly come to own a share of the country itself.

Blood inherited; everyone else rented. Jean-Baptiste Pastor lived to see Monaco change around him and died in Monte Carlo on the twentieth of June 1966, at the age of ninety-three. By then the work had passed to his son. Gildo Pastor had been born in Monaco in 1910.

He understood the rule, and in the years after the war he would take that rule and the favour of a new prince and turn a family of builders into something the principality had never seen. His father had laid stone on a rock. Gildo was about to build a wall of towers along the sea, and every one of them would stay in the family. Prince Rainier III came to the throne in 1949, and the man who would build his skyline was already running his father’s firm.

Gildo Pastor was thirty-eight that year. He had married Émilie Brianti on the twenty-seventh of April 1936. In 1950, he became the consul of Lebanon in Monaco. But the title that mattered was the one nobody gave him in writing: he was the prince’s builder.

Paris Match described the relationship years later. Gildo and the prince, the magazine wrote, got along without a contract and understood each other in half words. Not friendship, it said, but a mutual respect. In Monaco, building was the prince’s business.

The prince had all power, and there was no tender. A man the prince trusted could build, and the man the prince trusted was Gildo Pastor. Rainier would come to be known as the builder prince. He wanted a modern Monaco, a place of money and light, and he had very little ground to build it on.

So the principality began to make its own. The beach at Larvotto was made by human hands in 1961. From 1966 to 1973, the district of Fontvieille was won from the sea, more than twenty-two hectares of new land where there had been only water. Gildo moved early.

After the war, he bought land along the Larvotto seafront, and he bought it cheaply. Then came the railway. The line ran along that stretch of coast, and the decision was taken to put it underground. The French writer Laurent Chabrun described the move: Gildo Pastor becomes Monaco’s first great developer.

He buries the railway and he buys up the Larvotto land at low prices. 1966 was the year everything opened. According to Paris Match, Rainier had the railway buried, and Gildo proposed to build residential towers all along the Avenue Princesse Grace. Vanity Fair put it in a single sentence: Gildo Pastor was anointed in 1966 by Prince Rainier to build the wall of high-rise buildings that would come to constitute the new Monte Carlo.

The towers went up, twenty and thirty stories at a time. Many remember that Monte Carlo, the Monte Carlo of Grace Kelly, the American actress who had married the prince in 1956. The postcards showed the palace, the harbour, the princess. Behind them, along the shore, rose the towers of the builder Gildo Pastor.

One of those towers carried the princess into its very name. On the boulevard des Moulins, Gildo built a tall apartment building and called it the Scottish, after the river that runs through Philadelphia, the city where Grace Kelly was born. According to Monaco Life, it was the principality’s first high-rise, and Grace herself was its godmother, the woman who inaugurated it. The accounts disagree on its details: one says it was finished in 1963 with seventeen floors, another says 1970 and twenty-five.

Either way, the first tower bore the name of her home river, and the princess stood at its opening. More followed. La Bahia at thirty-nine Avenue Princesse Grace rose twelve stories in 1971. The Émilie Palace at number three on the same avenue rose twelve stories more.

There were the Troccadero and the Continental, and in Fontvieille on reclaimed land the family would raise the Gildo Pastor Center, ninety thousand square metres of offices, the largest office complex in Monaco. This was the fairy tale and its machinery side by side. The world saw a prince, a film star, a harbour of yachts. The rent rolls told another story.

Every month, thousands of tenants in Monte Carlo paid the Pastors to live in the towers that framed the fairy tale. The rents were high for a reason that had nothing to do with stone. Monaco charged its residents no income tax except for the French, and foreigners paid heavily for the right to live there. As the journalist Hélène Constantin later explained, a flat in a Pastor tower was more than a home; it was the price of admission to one of the most sought-after addresses on earth, and the family that owned the towers set the price.

By the time Gildo died, the family’s holdings had reached a scale that is still hard to say aloud. About five hundred thousand square metres of rental space by the figure the French press repeated for decades; somewhere between three and four thousand apartments in a country with only about twenty thousand; about fifteen percent of Monaco’s homes by the BBC’s reckoning, though Paris Match called it a good quarter of the principality and another French magazine said a third. In 2013, when a square metre in Monaco was worth about thirty-eight thousand euros, one magazine did the arithmetic and valued the whole family’s property at nineteen billion euros. The French press would later call the family the second princely family.

A British paper would call them Monaco’s second dynasty. Both phrases captured the same thing: in a principality that the Grimaldis ruled, the Pastors owned the roofs. Gildo Pastor died on the twenty-first of October 1990 at the age of eighty. He left behind three children, a wall of towers, and a rule that every one of them had been raised to obey.

The empire was about to be cut into thirds, and the branches of the family that grew from those thirds would come to keep their distance from one another. There was Victor, the eldest, born in 1936. There was Hélène, born on the thirty-first of March 1937, and there was Michelle, the youngest, born in 1943 or 1944, depending on the record. Paris Match, describing the family, recalled an old saying from the country the Pastors came from: in Liguria, women inherit nothing; the men provide for them.

If that was ever the expectation, Hélène overturned it. She received her third. What her third contained is described differently by different sources. One account says Victor took the construction firm and a building called the Esterel, and that Michelle took the Résidence Europa and the family’s property management company, while Hélène took a large portfolio of luxury buildings run through her own company.

Hélène Constantin gave a precise figure: Hélène Pastor received a third of the inheritance, more than one thousand apartments in six buildings worth more than ten billion. The branches did not mix easily. Victor’s branch of the family, one French magazine wrote, cultivated a discretion that bordered on austerity. Michelle’s branch liked to be seen at galas.

He became president of the football club AS Monaco and a consul of Peru. The rivalry between the brothers was the kind the society pages loved. When Victor bought himself a yacht of twenty-eight metres, Paris Match recorded, Michelle immediately needed a finer one. A magazine in 2013 went further: the children of the three heirs saw one another as little as possible, and two branches of the family were very antagonistic.

Each branch built its own monument. Victor, who took over the construction firm, built the Salle des Étoiles at the Sporting Monte Carlo in 1973 or seventy-four. Years later, Bloomberg would value his branch of the family at 5. 4 billion and Michelle’s group at 3.

8 billion. Victor’s son Patrice, who took the firm over in 2002, described the family’s work with a builder’s bluntness: We are hard workers, he told a French magazine. Our trade has nothing sexy about it. Hélène kept to herself.

She ran her buildings personally. Every day she went to her office in the Gildo Pastor Center in Fontvieille, the building that bore her father’s name, which she had inherited. A source from her company later described a woman devoted to her work who came to her office every day. Vanity Fair counted about forty people on her office staff; another account put it at around a dozen companies, one for each building or block, and about eighty employees.

Paris Match left the sharpest picture of her at work. In a Chanel suit, the magazine wrote, behind a desk decorated with a photograph of her father, Hélène received her tenants for years, granting them audiences sprinkled with talk of her ancestors before treating them roughly. Le Monde called her a woman of character, dry and taciturn. Her main occupation, the paper said, was collecting the rents.

She was exacting. At the end of a lease, Vanity Fair reported, she would demand an inspection of the sink plugs and the toilet seats and send in the bailiffs if necessary. The rents themselves explain why the Pastors could afford to be hard. In 2011, according to Le Point, a flat of ninety square metres in Monaco rented for about 3,800 euros a month.

In her blocks on the Avenue Princesse Grace and the Avenue des Grands-Bretons, a four-room flat went for about fifteen thousand euros a month. By 2018, the smallest studio rented for three thousand euros, and buying cost about fifty thousand euros a square metre. The world outside Monaco barely knew her face. When she was shot, the French news agency had no portrait of her at all.

She was rarely photographed. Le Monde described a woman who walked her dog without a bodyguard and showed herself as little as possible at society dinners. Her company after her death pushed back against the idea that she was merely a recluse. She remained a well-known figure to the Monégasques, it said.

From the best-known family in Monaco after the princes, she was a pillar of the principality who was extremely generous to Monégasque associations. By one French account, Monaco had given her two of its honours: the Order of Saint Charles in 1998 and the Order of Cultural Merit in 2003. And Monaco had given her a nickname. They called her la vice-princesse, the vice princess.

It was half a joke and half the truth. In a country of two square kilometres, the woman who owned a thousand of its homes held a kind of power that had nothing to do with titles. What was she worth? Nobody outside the family ever knew for certain.

The figure most often printed was twelve billion. The BBC gave a range from twelve billion to more than twenty. An Irish paper said fifteen. Vanity Fair said as much as twenty-five.

Some of those figures were really estimates of the whole family’s fortune, wrongly pinned to her alone. The French magazine that tried to count it called the true number the best-kept secret in the principality. Before she was twenty, by the account she later gave a private detective, Hélène Pastor fell in love with a Polish barman. The detective was a man named Patrick Baqué, who began working for her in the late 1980s.

Decades later, he repeated to a French reporter what she had confided to him. She had fallen in love with a Pole, he said, a simple barman. Her father did not approve. In Baqué’s telling, the liaison did not please Gildo Pastor, and he did everything he could to separate the couple.

He sent the young man away to Germany, the detective said, and he sent his daughter to England. Hélène Pastor told me, Baqué recalled, that this separation had been a great suffering. That is one man’s memory of a story told to him in private many years after the fact, and nothing in the public record confirms it or denies it. What is certain is the child.

Sylvia was born around 1960 or 1961, and the courts would later know her as Sylvia Ratkowski-Pastor. A father who never sold a single apartment had also decided which man could come into the family, and the man his daughter chose was not good enough. Her second marriage was to Claude Pallanca, a Monégasque dental surgeon who would later serve as honorary consul general of Russia. On the first of April 1967, Hélène gave birth to a son.

They named him Gildo. That marriage did not last either. In 1989, according to Baqué, Hélène sought a divorce on the grounds of her husband’s sole fault. She suspected him of cheating on her, the detective said, and she hired him to gather the proof.

That was how he came into her life. The people who were closest to Hélène describe her in ways that do not entirely match. Claude Pallanca, her former husband, spoke about her in court in 2018. Hélène had a difficult character, he said, but she adored her children, one as much as the other.

In the same testimony, he described witnessing violent arguments between Sylvia and her mother, arguments in which, he said, Gildo had to step in. Gildo remembered a different woman, or a different side of the same one. My mother, he told a French newspaper, was a homemaker and a businesswoman, both loving and professionally tough with her children. Funny, too.

A real Italian mama. He said his two young sons, whom she looked after often, loved their grandmother madly. Sylvia, testifying in court after her mother’s death, tried to explain the woman she had grown up with. Her mother, she said, had to go from being a mother to the head of a company with enormous responsibilities at the age of fifty.

She did not really have friends. Sylvia said she had only us, her children. She described a mother who kept total discretion about her life and called their relationship, carefully, a little chaotic. A friend of Hélène’s speaking to Vanity Fair remembered something sadder.

By that friend’s account, Hélène once said simply: My daughter doesn’t like me. It is a single sentence passed on second-hand, and it cannot carry the weight of a whole relationship. But it sits beside Claude Pallanca’s memory of the arguments and beside Sylvia’s own word chaotic, and together they describe a mother and daughter who loved each other inside a family where love and money were never quite separate. Gildo said as much in his own way.

In my family, he told a French magazine, money was not made to be spent but to build new buildings. I was raised with a minimum of money. It was the creed of the stonemason passed down through three generations: you did not spend, you built, and you kept. By the late 1980s, the picture was set.

In 1988, at the age of twenty-one, Gildo oversaw the building of the Gildo Pastor Center in Fontvieille, the great office complex that bore his grandfather’s name. Sylvia too later spoke of a first experience with her mother and her brother in building that center. For a moment, the three of them worked on the same stone. Even so, the shares told the story of who held the power.

In Hélène’s own property company, according to one French account, she kept ninety percent for herself and gave her son and daughter five percent each. Her daughter, by then in her mid-twenties, had married, separated, and was raising a baby daughter of her own. And it was then, in London in the summer of 1986, that Sylvia Pastor met a man who said he had been to Cambridge. Wojciech Janowski would always remember the date: the fifteenth of July 1986, the day he met Sylvia Pastor in London.

Years later, in a police interview room, he would recite it and count the years since. Thirty years, he would say, times three hundred and sixty days. He was born in Warsaw on the fifteenth of August 1949. By the time he met Sylvia, he had been married before to a French woman, and that marriage had ended in 1986, the same year he met the Pastors.

He presented himself as a man of education and experience. He said he held a degree from Cambridge. He said he had run hotels and casinos for Grand Metropolitan and for the Société des Bains de Mer in Monaco. Years later, the claims would not survive examination.

A French newspaper in Nice reported that he had never been registered either as a student or as a graduate of the University of Cambridge. Patrick Baqué put it more bluntly: he was never a Cambridge graduate, he said, any more than he was the director of hotels and casinos. Everything was false. He also liked to tell a story about the first time they met.

When I met Sylvia in London, he would say, according to a friend who translated for him, I did not know she was called Pastor and still less that she was a billionaire. It was a romantic anecdote, and there is no way to test it. They would be together for twenty-eight years. They would never marry.

In 2006, the couple threw a party at the Sporting Club to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the day they met. The whole Pastor family was there, the same friend recalled. They had a daughter together, and Janowski raised Sylvia’s elder daughter, Olivia, as though she were his own. She would grow up to become a dentist.

The couple made their home in Monaco in one of Gildo Pastor’s towers. According to one French paper, they lived on the next-to-last floor of the Scottish on the boulevard des Moulins, the building named for Princess Grace’s river. The same paper said Hélène lived on the roof terrace above them. Other accounts place her in a different building, the Troccadero, and the record does not settle it.

But whichever floor she slept on, the man her daughter loved lived inside her family’s stone. Over the years, he built a public life that made him one of the most respectable figures in the principality. In 2007, he became the honorary consul of Poland in Monaco. He was president of the Polish Chamber of Commerce there.

In 2010, France gave him its National Order of Merit, a decoration awarded under President Sarkozy for his philanthropy. Around 2012, with Emmanuelle Falco, he helped to found a charity called Monaco against Autism, and Princess Charlene presided over it. He had business titles too: chairman of a company called Fermas, founded in 2008 to work in nanotechnology; executive president of an oil company called Hudson Oil. Each year the couple hosted Poland’s National Day reception at the Hotel Hermitage in Monte Carlo.

In June 2013, the couple gave rose bushes to the Polish embassy in Paris for a visit by Prince Albert and Princess Charlene. Vanity Fair listed the trappings of the life: a yacht, homes in London and in Switzerland, leased private jets, luxury holidays. That was the image Monaco saw: a gracious Polish gentleman, a diplomat, a holder of a French order, a friend of the princely family through his charity, a devoted partner to Sylvia. When Sylvia fell ill, a friend of his named Pota Kalwicki remembered he turned into a nurse.

A friend of Sylvia’s from the garden club described the couple from her side. Sylvia is a very gentle woman, she told a French newspaper, but easily influenced. And she was still very much in love with Wojciech even after more than twenty-five years together. Every month, Hélène Pastor paid each of her two children five hundred thousand euros, and her son later said she was watching what they did with it.

Gildo confirmed it himself. People read in the newspapers, he told a French magazine, that our mother paid us five hundred thousand euros a month, my sister and me. It was a way for her to observe how each of us managed our inheritance. Vanity Fair gave a slightly different number, about six hundred and fifty thousand dollars a month, paid into a joint account.

It also recorded what one family member called the allowance. Une choucroute, the relative said. A little pastry. That is how money looked from inside the family: half a million a month was a small sweet, a token, a way of keeping the children comfortable while the real fortune stayed in the stone.

For Sylvia and the man she lived with, it was a river, and according to the investigators who later followed it, the river did not stay where it was meant to go. A French magazine reported that Sylvia gave Janowski blank checks every month and that he filled in sums of two hundred thousand to two hundred and fifty thousand euros. The prosecutor in Marseille, Brice Robin, said that in 2013 alone, 6. 5 million moved from Sylvia’s account into Janowski’s personal account.

Another million, or 1. 9 million by a different account, went to his company Fermas. One report said that over eighteen months, 6. 5 million of the nine million Hélène had paid her daughter went into Janowski’s account.

An Irish paper said 7. 5 million of 9 million over the sixteen months before the murder. The prosecutor said Janowski had spent 8. 4 million in less than a year.

Part of the answer, according to the French press, was a debt that hung over him from his other life. A commercial court in the Polish city of Kraków had ruled against him in a dispute over a refinery deal tied to Hudson Oil. The refinery had been bought in 2011 and never paid for. Depending on the account, he was exposed to a judgment of twenty-two million or thirty million euros, and the deadline fell at the end of 2014.

An unnamed source quoted in one French paper summed up the position: he lived only on that money, the source said; he was desperate, and he risked being ordered to pay thirty million euros by the Polish courts. Other details emerged later. He had registered a house in London in his own name and mortgaged it. He had overbilled Sylvia by a million on a yacht.

He told her that her daughter Olivia’s dental studies in the United States cost five hundred thousand dollars a year, when the real cost, according to these reports, was half that. There was a second problem, and it was written into the law. Janowski and Sylvia had never married. Under the rules of inheritance, a man who is not married to the heir inherits nothing from her.

A Monégasque lawyer quoted in the French press made the point plainly: he could only have inherited if he had been married to Sylvia, and that was not the case. Sylvia, according to an Irish paper, had made her daughters her sole heirs. The whole life rested on Hélène Pastor’s money. And the one person in the family who seemed to see through him was the woman who paid the allowance in the first place.

On Friday evenings, by her detective’s account, the richest woman in Monaco grew frightened of the weekend ahead. Patrick Baqué, who had first come into her life to prove her husband’s infidelity, stayed in her service for years afterward. On Friday evening, he said, she panicked before spending the weekend alone in her apartment at the Troccadero. She was afraid that her son-in-law would corrupt the staff to harm her.

He was not her son-in-law. He had never married her daughter. But that is the word Baqué used, and it is the word the whole of Monaco would soon use. Madame Pastor, the detective said, feared her son-in-law from the first day.

Claude Pallanca, Hélène’s former husband, testified that she had taken a big dog to protect herself. Her dog was named Belle. A friend of Hélène’s told Vanity Fair that Hélène had three loves in her life: her son Gildo, her daughter Sylvia, and her dog Belle. The same friend gave Vanity Fair a sentence that Hélène had said about the man who lived with her daughter.

By that friend’s account, she said: I know a lot of things about him. He’s somebody terrible. A lawyer involved in the later case told the same magazine, more simply: she despised him. These are second-hand words from people who knew her and spoke after her death, and they should be weighed that way.

They are also not the only account. Gildo told a French newspaper that despite the detective’s reports, his mother liked Janowski well enough. The family itself does not agree on what she felt. What does seem clear is that she knew more than she said in public.

What the record holds is a dog, a detective, and a frightened Friday night. A woman whose only confidants were her children could hardly confide her fear of her daughter’s partner to her daughter. She could tell a detective. She could tell a friend.

She could buy a big dog. In January of 2014, something happened that would bring her every day to a hospital car park in Nice. Her son suffered a stroke. On the twenty-sixth of January, by one account, Gildo Pallanca-Pastor suffered a stroke that left him partly paralyzed and unable to speak.

Other accounts describe a double stroke, and one French magazine described a double cardiac arrest. He was forty-six years old. He was taken to the L’Archet Hospital in Nice, and his mother began to visit him there every day. A few days later, on the second of February, her younger brother Michel died after a long illness.

He was about seventy. With his death, Hélène became the last surviving child of Gildo Pastor. A British newspaper would call her the senior surviving member of what was in effect Monaco’s second dynasty. Michel had been the public face of the family: president of the football club, part owner of the firm EDIARD, holder of the Legion of Honour, head of Monaco’s Chamber of Economic Development for a decade.

Now the last of the three heirs who had divided Gildo’s empire was a woman of seventy-six sitting at a hospital bedside in Nice. Gildo had a young family of his own. He was married to Clémentine, and they had two sons, aged seven and five that spring. Their father lay in a hospital bed partly paralyzed and unable to speak, and their grandmother went to see him every day.

So, in the first weeks of 2014, the vice princess was burying a brother and driving each day to sit with a son who could not speak. And according to what investigators later pieced together, a plan to kill her already existed. At the center of the plan, by the investigator’s account, was a man who saw Wojciech Janowski twice a week. Pascal Doriae was a personal fitness coach, forty-six years old, originally from Melay, who worked in Monaco and in the hill town of Saint-Paul-de-Vence.

He had no criminal record. One Monaco paper said he had been the couple’s coach for twelve years. According to the prosecutor, Doriae said Janowski had had the project of killing Hélène Pastor for a long time and that he felt rejected by the Pastor family in general and by Hélène Pastor in particular. At trial, Doriae’s account of what Janowski told him was quoted in the British press.

This cannot go on, Janowski said. Sylvia’s illness has deteriorated. We have to get rid of the old woman. Can you help me?

Doriae’s brother-in-law, a man named Abdelkader Belkheir, is alleged to have put the coach in touch with men in Marseille. Through that chain, the plan reached the housing estates of the city’s northern districts. At one end stood a consul with a medal, a charity under a princess, and a reception at the Hermitage. At the other stood two young men from the northern estates of Marseille.

Between them stood a fitness coach and his brother-in-law. The first man chosen to pull the trigger, according to the prosecutor, was a volunteer auxiliary gendarme from the brigade at Lambesc, Salim Yuf. He supplied the shotgun cartridges. Then, at the last moment, he backed out.

A French newspaper described the scramble that followed. There was, according to the same paper, a deadline. The plan had to be carried out before Gildo left the hospital. The clock was her son’s recovery.

The money moved in the weeks before. The prosecutor in Marseille later laid out the withdrawals. Between the twenty-second of April and the fourth of May 2014, Janowski withdrew two hundred and fifty thousand euros in cash from an offshore account in Dubai in nine separate operations. Nine withdrawals in thirteen days.

A quarter of a million euros in notes. And then a single evening, the fifth of May, which belonged to Poland. On that evening, as he did every year, Wojciech Janowski hosted the Polish National Day reception at the Hotel Hermitage in Monte Carlo. There were two hundred and fifty guests.

According to the French press, the party was paid for by Sylvia. The consul stood among his guests at the Hermitage, the honorary representative of his country, the holder of a French order, the founder of a charity under a princess’s patronage. It was the night before the shooting. The next afternoon, two young men boarded a train in Marseille with a travel bag, and inside it was a Sornoff hunting shotgun.

In the early afternoon of the sixth of May 2014, the two men left Marseille by train. One was Samine Sed Ahmed, twenty-four years old. The other was Al-Hadi Hamadi, thirty-one. Both were of Comorian origin from the Frais-Vallon and Sabliers housing estates in the northern districts of Marseille, and both already had criminal records, including, according to the French press, convictions for aggravated violence.

The man carrying the shotgun had not been the first choice. The rush reportedly had a reason. Gildo was close to leaving the hospital. As it turned out, he would be discharged two days later, on Thursday the eighth of May.

If the plan had waited, there would have been no daily visit, no car park, no exit to watch. Security cameras would later trace their whole journey. They showed one of the men buying mobile phones and boarding the train at Marseille. They arrived in Nice at around three in the afternoon.

They rented a hotel room for nine euros. They tried to rent a scooter, then gave up on the idea and changed their plan: they would take a taxi to the hospital instead. The shooter took up a position behind a wall near the exit of the car park. They were waiting for a black Lancia Voyager, a people carrier with tinted windows.

At around four that afternoon, Hélène Pastor arrived at L’Archet Hospital to see her son. She spent about two hours at Gildo’s bedside. Outside in the hospital car park at the exit of Archet 1, her driver waited in the Lancia. His name was Mohammed Darwich.

He was sixty-four, or sixty-three by another account, a man of Egyptian origin who had worked for Hélène for fifteen years, or for twenty as his son would later say. He was her chauffeur and also her major-domo, her butler. Before she left the hospital that evening, Hélène spoke to a stranger. He was a patient, a man of forty-nine, identified at the later trial only as Philippe L.

He told the court what she said to him. She asked me what had happened to me, he testified. Then she told me that one must keep hope, that medicine had made great progress. It is the last kindness anyone recorded from her.

Then she walked out to her car. She sat in the front passenger seat beside Darwich, not in the back. By the coach’s later account, someone had already put a price on her handbag. At around seven in the evening, the black Lancia rolled toward the exit of the car park.

The lookout signaled. The shooter, dressed in black, leapt out from behind the wall. He fired once through the front passenger window. He leaned in to look at what he had done.

Then he fired a second time. The shotgun was loaded with buckshot. Through the space where the window had been, the pellets struck both people in the front of the car. The Lancia rolled on for about twenty metres and hit a parked vehicle.

Then it stopped. Her dog Belle survived the attack. Hélène and her driver would not. The two men ran.

They left on foot, their faces still uncovered. There were about a dozen witnesses, and at least two passers-by filmed the scene on their phones. The killers caught a bus to the station in Nice, missed their train, and in the end took a taxi all the way back to Marseille, a ride that cost them about five hundred euros. One officer told a Monaco paper that it bore the mark of organized crime from beginning to end.

Another said the opposite. There is a gap, he said, between the personality of the victims and the method used, which borders on amateurism. Why wait until she came out of the hospital? Why do it in front of Archet, where there are cameras and lots of people passing?

Nobody in Nice that evening could answer him. The surgeons at the Hôpital Saint-Roch counted the lead pellets in dozens, and five teams worked on the two people from the black Lancia. Hélène Pastor and Mohammed Darwich were rushed from L’Archet across Nice to Saint-Roch, and both were taken into surgery. According to the French news agency, dozens of pellets had reached vital organs.

Five specialist surgical teams operated. Afterward, both victims were placed on artificial respiration in intensive care. Hélène had been hit in the chest, the neck, and the face. Darwich had been hit in the chest and the abdomen.

She was placed in an artificial coma. They were seventy-seven and sixty-four years old. Her son was still a patient across the city at L’Archet, still struggling to speak after his stroke. Two days after the shooting, he left that hospital in the same week that his mother was fighting for her life in another one.

Monaco reacted with disbelief. Prince Albert expressed his deep emotion. The principality’s minister of state, Michel Roger, said on French radio the next morning that he was in shock, devastated by what he called a hateful act. The French politician Éric Ciotti spoke of a very violent shooting.

In the first days, some television channels suggested that the driver had a criminal past, as if that might explain why anyone would fire a shotgun into the car. His son was furious. My father is a man without a history, he told a Nice newspaper. On Saturday the tenth of May, at noon, Mohammed Darwich died.

A spokeswoman for the hospital said he had died of his wounds despite intensive medical and surgical resuscitation. The autopsy confirmed that a spray of lead shot had struck several vital organs. Hélène was still alive. At some point in the days that followed, she came out of her coma.

By the twentieth of May, the French press was reporting that she was out of the coma but that her life was still in danger. She was conscious long enough to speak to the police. An investigator from the judicial police came to her bedside. She told the investigator that she had received no threats.

Then she said something else in French, which the investigator later repeated in court. J’ai peur, she said. I am afraid. She asked the investigator to come back.

There were, she said, other things she wanted to tell. There was no second conversation. In the night of the twentieth to the twenty-first of May 2014, fifteen days after the shooting, Hélène Pastor died at the Hôpital Saint-Roch in Nice. She was seventy-seven years old.

Within days, a man offered to sell the family the name of the killer for ten million euros. He claimed to know who was behind the attack. He was arrested, jailed in Marseille, and later sentenced to fifteen months. The investigators called it a very marginal side case.

It was a false trail. She was buried in the Pastor family vault in the cemetery of Monaco. Her son later described the day to a French magazine. My mother’s burial took place in an atmosphere of drama, he said.

The cemetery where the Pastor family vault is was surrounded by the police. The number of people allowed was limited to fifty. Only close family and Prince Albert. Journalists were of course barred.

According to Gildo, Sylvia and Janowski were there among the mourners. Gildo had seen his mother in her last days, and what he remembered was tenderness. She had a very gentle manner, he told a French newspaper. She spoke to me about me, about love.

Then he said the sentence that would follow the case through every courtroom it entered: She died not knowing that the devil was sitting at our table. The judicial investigation opened on the twentieth of May, the day before she died, and it went to the organized-crime court in Marseille. The deputy prosecutor, Catherine Alexandre, set out the charges: attempted assassination by an organized gang, assassination by an organized gang, and criminal conspiracy with a view to committing these crimes. The case was sent to the specialized interregional court in Marseille that handles organized crime.

The police began with what the killers had left behind, and they had left a great deal. The two men had worked with their faces uncovered. Security cameras had filmed them at the station in Marseille on the way to Nice. And in the hotel room they had rented for nine euros, investigators found a bottle of shower gel, and on it the DNA of one of the men.

The prosecutor in Marseille described it with something close to disbelief. The two men take a shower, he said, and leave DNA everywhere. Then came the phones. Investigators went through an enormous mass of call records, by one account some three and a half million phone calls, looking for the threads that connected the men in Marseille to anyone else.

The decisive thread, according to French press reports, was a single call. About a month after the shooting, Pascal Doriae, the fitness coach, made what investigators called a compromising telephone call to a company in Monaco run by Wojciech Janowski. On Monday the twenty-third of June 2014, at two in the afternoon, the police moved. Twenty-three people were taken into custody in a single sweep.

Among them were Wojciech Janowski and Sylvia Pastor. French law allows the police to hold suspects in organized-crime cases for up to ninety-six hours before they must charge them or let them go. The prosecutor spoke the next day. Suspect financial flows have been spotted in the bank accounts of Mr.

Janowski, Brice Robin said, which deserve explanations. Asked whether this had been a contract killing, he answered carefully: One may think so. There was no known relationship between the two gunmen and Janowski, but links had appeared with two intermediaries who had been in direct contact with the two suspects. The coach talked.

Pascal Doriae, the prosecutor said, was the head of logistics, the organizer of this crime. He has admitted everything, Robin said. A man with no criminal record, who had spent twelve years training a couple in Monaco, was now describing to detectives how a killing had been arranged. The lookout, Hamadi, admitted everything.

The presumed shooter, according to a French paper, shut himself into a long silence. During the night of Wednesday the twenty-fifth to Thursday the twenty-sixth of June, Sylvia Pastor was released. No charge of any kind was brought against her. The prosecutor said she had been cleared, and he described the state she was in.

She feels betrayed by her partner, Brice Robin said. She has lost her mother. Her partner appears to be the one who ordered the murder. It is a more than difficult psychological state.

On the night of the twenty-sixth of June, a police woman asked Wojciech Janowski whether he had ordered the murder. Yes or no. The interview was filmed. Four years later, a courtroom would watch it.

Avez-vous commandité? Oui. Did you order this murder? Yes or no?

Oui. Yes. It was his sixth interview in custody. In the French legal vocabulary, the person who orders a killing is the commanditaire, the one who commissions it.

Janowski answered it with one syllable. Then, over the course of the interview, he explained himself. He said he had not gone looking for the coach. I didn’t go looking for Pascal Doriae, he said.

Pascal Doriae came to me. He said he had asked Doriae if he could resolve the problem with his mother-in-law. He said he had done it for Sylvia. He told the police woman that Sylvia had been mistreated by her mother, kept under constant psychological pressure.

He counted the years from the day I met Sylvia, the fifteenth of July 1986. There was not a day, thirty years times three hundred and sixty days. Can you imagine the number of days I scraped Sylvia up with a teaspoon? He insisted that money had nothing to do with it.

There is nothing else, he said. No money. I don’t care about money. Then he described what he had felt when he learned that Hélène Pastor was dead.

Two sensations at the same time, he said: the suffering of all of us, me included, and the feeling of relief. And then a sentence that sounded almost like a confession of something more: I killed myself by doing this. Sylvia Pastor would later describe to the court the moment he told her himself. He told me it was he who had ordered it, she said.

He had wanted to save me, and then I fainted. On Friday the twenty-seventh of June, Janowski was formally charged with complicity in assassinations and with criminal conspiracy to commit a homicide as part of an organized gang. He was sent to prison. Poland took away his title as honorary consul, the post he had held since 2007.

That same day, seven people were charged in the case, and six of them were jailed. The prosecutor in Marseille now gave his reading of the motive, and it was not the one Janowski had offered. The motive, Brice Robin said, was to get hold of the inheritance. Doriae, he said, had told investigators that Janowski had planned the killing for a long time because he felt rejected by the Pastor family.

Then the money came into focus, and with it a question of sums that has never been fully settled. Janowski in custody said he had given Doriae two hundred thousand in cash in notes of two hundred and one hundred and fifty, along with gifts worth about fifty thousand euros. Doriae, according to a Monaco paper, said he had received one hundred and forty thousand and kept fifty thousand for himself. The rest, investigators said, went to the intermediaries who paid the gunman.

The French news agency put the total paid at about two hundred and fifty thousand euros. The gunmen had been promised about one hundred thousand euros between them, according to one French paper, and only part of it was ever paid. The shooter’s own share was expected to be about twenty-five thousand. There were also bonuses.

According to Doriae’s account, repeated at trial, there were two extra payments on offer, twenty thousand euros each, forty thousand in all. One was for killing the driver, too. The other was for taking Hélène Pastor’s handbag, so that the killing would look like a robbery that had gone wrong. A handbag and a man’s life, priced the same.

There was one more allegation, and it was darker still. Doriae told investigators that Janowski had also intended to have Gildo killed by a shot from a distance. That claim rests on Doriae’s word alone. A French paper noted that no material evidence would prove it, and Janowski’s lawyers firmly denied it.

Gildo called the idea surreal, but his lawyer, Gérard Baudoux, spelled out what it would have meant if it were true. The plan, he said, if one believes certain statements, was first to get rid of Hélène Pastor and then to make Gildo disappear, so that the whole fortune would go to Sylvia and to the man who managed Sylvia’s fortune. It is a staggering, terrifying betrayal, he said. On the second of July 2014, less than a week after the filmed interview, Janowski went before the judge who rules on detention and took it all back.

His lawyer, Éric Campana, said he contested being the one who ordered the crime. He said Janowski had misjudged the meaning of the words the police used. He spoke French, the lawyer said, but did not understand all the nuances of our language. He would deny it for four years.

He would sit in a Marseille prison and insist that he was innocent, that the confession had been taken from him by tricks of language. Then, in a courtroom in Aix-en-Provence, he would have to watch himself say it. The trial opened in Aix-en-Provence on the seventeenth of September 2018, with ten defendants and a man who said he was innocent. In France, the most serious crimes are tried before a cour d’assises, a court of professional judges sitting with a jury of ordinary citizens.

This one was the court of the Bouches-du-Rhône department, and it was expected to sit for five weeks. There were about a dozen civil parties, the victim’s side of the case. Among them were Hélène’s former husband, her son, and her daughter. The family of Mohammed Darwich would be heard too.

On the first day, Gildo Pallanca-Pastor said to the press something that sounded like a warning. It is not for us to be afraid, he said. It is for the others. Janowski, nearly seventy, spoke from the dock.

I am innocent, he said. I have committed no crime. That’s all. He promised to answer every question.

Pascal Doriae confirmed every word of what he had told the police and pleaded guilty. On the twenty-first of September, Sylvia Pastor took the stand. She spoke for more than an hour. I wanted to say, she told the court, that I have lost my mother and I have lost a husband I adored.

She described the moment in custody when he told her. He told me it was he who had ordered it, she said. I asked him if he had thought of the children. He answered no.

If he couldn’t bear it, she said, he only had to walk out the door. I feel a terrible rage. I am devastated, she said. I will never forgive him.

Yes, because he lied to me. And if on top of that, he ordered it. When a lawyer for her brother pressed her, she answered with something close to despair. Do you realize what you are asking me?

It is so unbelievable that I don’t even know what to think anymore. I am waiting for the truth. And according to the Irish press, she said simply: I have lost my mom. I have lost Wojciech.

I have nothing left. Janowski, for his part, claimed the police had pressured him into the confession. The only thing they didn’t do, he told the court, was pull out my fingernails. He also said something about Hélène and her son that the Irish press recorded.

Her mother and her brother Gildo, he said, were vipers. They wanted to destroy her. On the third of October, the court watched the tape. For about two and a half hours, the jurors saw the sixth interview.

They heard the police woman’s question and the single word that answered it. They heard about the teaspoon and the relief and the man who said he had killed himself. One of Janowski’s own lawyers, Luc Ferraro, later called the video the turning point of the trial. On the twelfth of October, the advocate general, Pierre Cortès, rose to speak for the prosecution.

He spoke for about eight hours. He described a man who could not bear being un pestiféré, a piece added on to someone else’s family. He described Monaco as this confetti, this theater of vanities where fortunes, real or not, pile up. Janowski, he said, had smashed through the ceiling of indelicacy by paying hired killers in his pay with his partner’s money.

He compared the case to a game of chess. To Janowski, he said, Doriae was only a badly placed pawn that stopped him taking the queen. He asked the jurors to deliver checkmate. He asked for life imprisonment for Janowski with a minimum term of twenty-two years, and life for the two gunmen, and thirty years for Doriae.

On the sixteenth of October, the defense spoke, and the trial turned again. Janowski’s lawyers were Luc Ferraro and Éric Dupond-Moretti, who would later become France’s Minister of Justice. He stood up and said what his client had never said in court: Wojciech Janowski is guilty of having ordered the assassination of Hélène Pastor. Dupond-Moretti told the jury, I intend to tell you why these words that you were waiting for from him come out of my mouth.

He tried to say them. He wanted to, but he was not believed. Today, he said, I make myself the voice of a man who no longer has a voice. The concession covered the killing of Hélène Pastor.

It did not cover the killing of Mohammed Darwich. The defense argued that Janowski had acted to protect Sylvia from a mother it called psychologically abusive. In the Pastor family, Dupond-Moretti said, he was the resident loser, so he lied. He cheated.

He wanted to protect his love from the psychological abuse of a harassing mother. And then he named the force underneath it all: Money, he said. Money that drives you mad. Janowski wept in the dock, but the words had come from his lawyer.

He himself never confessed in his own voice during the whole of the trial. A lawyer for Gildo, Thomas Jakardi, said so afterward. It would have been good for him to acknowledge his involvement in his own voice, he said. Nothing came out of his mouth.

On the morning of the seventeenth of October, Janowski was given the last word. I have nothing to add, he said. I express my apologies to Sylvia and to my children. He said nothing to the Darwich family.

He said nothing to Gildo. Pascal Doriae in his turn asked forgiveness of every member of the Darwich family and of every member of the Pastor family. The lookout, Hamadi, said there was something he had not known about and that he held it against certain people. The jury withdrew.

After only about five hours of deliberation, a verdict. Janowski was found guilty of ordering both murders, Hélène Pastor’s and Mohammed Darwich’s. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. The shooter, Samine Sed Ahmed, was sentenced to life.

The lookout, Al-Hadi Hamadi, was sentenced to life. Pascal Doriae was sentenced to thirty years. His brother-in-law, Abdelkader Belkheir, received fifteen years. Salim Yuf, the auxiliary gendarme who had supplied the ammunition and then backed out of the shooting, received twelve years.

A man who had given false testimony to clear Janowski received two years. Janowski’s niece received a suspended sentence. Two other men were acquitted. Gildo spoke to the press outside.

It is an exemplary sentence, he said. I was always certain of Janowski’s guilt. The jury was not fooled by his final manipulation, his last-minute confession, a final attempt to escape his responsibilities. From now on, he told a Monaco paper, he will do no more harm to anyone except to himself.

His lawyers announced an appeal that same day. And the man who had wept in the dock while his lawyer spoke for him would soon be saying that his lawyer had betrayed him. Three years and a day after the first verdict, Janowski stood again in a courtroom in Aix and called the whole case a plot. In French law, a verdict from an assize court can be appealed to a second assize court, which hears the whole case again before a new jury.

While he waited, Janowski turned on the lawyer who had spoken for him. In July of 2019, he filed a complaint against Éric Dupond-Moretti, accusing him of pleading guilty on his behalf without his consent. He said the famous advocate had visited him only twice in five years. Dupond-Moretti, citing professional secrecy, said nothing.

That September, Janowski asked to be released while he awaited his appeal. Speaking by video link from prison, he repeated the words he had said on the first day. I am not guilty, he said. I am innocent.

I did nothing. The request was refused. The following year, after more than six years in custody, he asked again, offering to live in the Var on a pension of 2,500 euros a month. The appeal itself was postponed twice because of the pandemic, in March and again in November of 2020.

It finally opened on Monday the eighteenth of October 2021 before the appeal court of the Bouches-du-Rhône, sitting once more in Aix. Five men were retried. Janowski had new lawyers, Jean-Jacques Campana and Josée Lapegna. He used the first day to tear up everything his old lawyer had said.

I am not guilty, he told the court. I am innocent. I did nothing. It is a plot, a setup.

My lawyer will explain it all to you. Of Dupond-Moretti, by then France’s Minister of Justice, he said: He betrayed me. He pleaded guilty in my place. On the fourth of November, Janowski offered a new explanation for the filmed confession.

He no longer claimed it had been extracted by tricks of language. He said he had confessed to win Sylvia’s release. Sylvia was taken hostage, he said. I committed suicide.

I killed myself to save my wife. But Sylvia had already told investigators otherwise. I was already out, she had said, and he knew it very well. Then he went further and pointed at Hélène’s son.

He told the court that Gildo had been the one who ordered the killing. It was his claim alone, and it went nowhere. Gildo’s lawyer, Gérard Baudoux, answered him in the courtroom. Are you not ashamed, he asked, to say that Gildo Pallanca-Pastor could be the one who ordered the murder of his own mother?

You are contemptible. Sylvia testified again. She called what had happened a tsunami, a horror, pure madness. When he told me, I didn’t think of the children, she said, that is when I fainted.

It was too much. Asked about the allegation that Gildo might also have been a target, she said one word: monstrous. On the ninth of November, the advocate general, Pierre Cortès, spoke again. Without him, nothing happens, he said of Janowski.

Everything starts with him. Then the line that summed up the whole case: Janowski, he said, had financed the assassination of his mother-in-law with his mother-in-law’s money. The defense pleaded for an acquittal. You have no material evidence, Campana told the jury.

The verdict came on Friday the twelfth of November 2021. Janowski was again sentenced to life. So were the two gunmen. Doriae’s sentence was reduced to twenty-two years.

One of the men acquitted in the first trial was sentenced to six. Campana announced one more appeal. Whether Janowski pleads guilty or not guilty, he said, he is sentenced to life. So you can imagine that for us the fight is not over.

It was over on the twenty-first of June 2023. The Cour de cassation, France’s highest court for criminal cases, which reviews only questions of law, rejected the appeals of Janowski and the others. The convictions became final. A Monaco paper marked the end in a single sentence: Nearly ten years after the events, it wrote, this decision puts a final full stop to the affair.

In all the watching, it was easy to lose sight of the man who had been sitting beside her in the car. Mohammed Darwich had driven Hélène Pastor for fifteen years or twenty, depending on who was counting, and he died four days after the shots. He was of Egyptian origin. He was sixty-three or sixty-four.

He was her chauffeur and her major-domo. In the first days while he was still alive, television reports suggested he might have had a criminal past. His son answered them in fury. Nobody, he said, could have served the Pastors in Monaco for two decades with a record, and his father had none.

For years afterward, in the reporting, he was often the second name, the driver, the man who happened to be there. Even his surname was printed three different ways. The French courts wrote Darwich. The BBC and one English encyclopedia wrote Darwiche.

Another entry in the same encyclopedia wrote Darwish. But to the people who planned it, according to the account Pascal Doriae gave, he was not a detail at all. He was a line item. There were two bonuses on offer, Doriae said, twenty thousand euros each.

One was for killing the driver. The other was for taking Hélène Pastor’s handbag, so the killing would look like a robbery gone wrong. Two sums of exactly the same size. The lawyer for the Darwich family, Arthur Susman, put it into words at the appeal trial.

He did not exist, Susman said. He had the value of the handbag. He was completely turned into an object. A man who had worked for her family for fifteen or twenty years was, in that plan, a way of making a murder look like a mugging.

His death was meant to be a disguise. His son Wissam and his daughter Racha testified at the appeal in 2021. Wissam spoke about the figure that had been set on his father’s life. That figure is hard, he said, but I don’t think there is any soft figure in this case.

And he said the thing that the whole case seemed at times to forget: For me, he was never a detail. He was my father. When Janowski was given the last word at his first trial, he apologized to Sylvia and to his children. He said nothing to the Darwich family.

It was Pascal Doriae, the coach, who turned toward them. I would like to ask forgiveness, he said, of every member of the Darwich family. Wissam Darwich still works in Monaco. He is a concierge in a Pastor building.

He goes to work inside the stone that his father served for fifteen or twenty years. The stone that never goes up for sale. The first tower Gildo Pastor ever raised is being rebuilt, and the woman rebuilding it is his granddaughter. The Scottish, the building named for the river in Princess Grace’s Philadelphia, passed to Sylvia after her mother’s death.

She is now leading its renovation, a project of one hundred and seventy million by one account and one hundred and eighty by another, with the architects of Zaha Hadid’s firm and a local architect, François Lalamo. The work began in January of 2024 and is due to finish around the middle of 2027. When it is done, the tower will hold one hundred and forty-two flats for rent instead of more than two hundred. They will be rented, not sold.

Sylvia, who has never spoken to the press about the case, has spoken about the building. Deep in my heart, she told a Monaco paper, I didn’t want to take away my grandfather’s soul. She remembered living at his home as a child. I used to hide for hours under his desk, she said.

Her grandfather, she recalled, tested the windows at home and called them his babies. Gildo the son is in New York, or he was for many years. He was rehabilitated there after his stroke. They made a miracle of me, he said.

He has served as Monaco’s consul general in New York since 2015. He sold his electric racing team in 2020, and his companies now build machines for the moon. In 2025, his firm unveiled a lunar rover named Mona Luna. The man who could not speak in a hospital bed in Nice in the spring of 2014 is now building vehicles for space.

This affair has shattered my world, he said in 2024. Gildo and Sylvia no longer speak. The French news agency reported in 2021 that he had no contact at all with his sister. The family that kept everything inside its walls could not keep this.

The vice princess’s empire did not die with her. By the accounts in the French press, her fortune passed to her two children, and the family’s way of holding it, renting and never selling, goes on. Janowski is serving a life sentence in France. Monaco goes on building.

In 2024, Hélène’s nephew Patrice Pastor, who runs the construction firm his great-grandfather founded, saw Maritima delivered, a new district won from the sea that he had financed. Monaco now covers two hundred and eight hectares, about a fifth of it reclaimed from the water. By 2025, by one estimate, an apartment there sold on average for more than 57,500 euros a square metre. The rule the stonemason brought from Liguria still holds: never sell, only rent.

From her hospital bed in the days before she died, Hélène Pastor said one thing to the police that has outlived everything else. J’ai peur, she said. I am afraid. I want to see you again.

I have other things to tell you. Nobody ever heard the rest. And so the last gift anyone recorded from her is the one she gave away in a hospital corridor in Nice on a May evening in 2014, to a stranger she would never see again. One must keep hope, she told him.

Medicine has made great progress. Then the vice princess walked out to her car.