Leading a secretive life, he is widely held to have been the main perpetrator of two bomb attacks, which sought to exacerbate tensions between Romania and Austria-Hungary in the buildup to World War I.

Briefly emerging as a drill instructor for the White movement in Vladivostok, he made efforts to settle in the Empire of Japan, but was chased out for engaging in fraudulent business deals.

Though credited in some biographical records as a native of Orhei (Orgeyev),[3] he was in fact from the nearby village of Marcăuți;[4][5][6] both places were at the time Russia's Bessarabia Governorate (Orgeyevsky Uyezd).

[6] Writer Ion Călugăru recounts that Cătărău lived in Dorohoi as Burghele's servant, spending his free time terrorizing high school students and courting maids, before he finally "disappeared" from town.

[5][6] According to Porsenna, his friends, who took into consideration his unusual largess, always suspected that he was a Romanian spy—and also believed that he was a male prostitute;[7] lawyer-adventurer Ioan Timuș reports that there was another stated source of income, since Cătărău also organized fundraising efforts for stirring up an anti-Russian revolt in Bessarabia.

[1][3] In Bukovina, which was in the non-Hungarian, "Cisleithanian", half of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, Romanian community leaders also described the "criminal act" as intolerable, condemning foreign attempts to exacerbate ethnic tensions in Transylvania.

[2] Porsenna claims to have met him on Calea Victoriei, Bucharest, already in a concealing disguise: "blonde wig, yellow mustache and eyebrows, monocle, an extremely elegant suit (apparently, the bombing had paid well)!

Beyond his new attire and gait, Cătărău made little effort to conceal himself, informing Porsenna that the Romanian state had no real interest in apprehending him; he also claimed to have obtained Swiss citizenship, which granted him additional protection.

[24] Romanian journalist Em C. Grigoraș, reporting the claims of unnamed sources among the Siguranța staff, suggests that Cătărău's getaway car was provided by Internal Affairs, and that intelligence officials had pretended not to understand the queries sent in from Austria-Hungary.

[9][17] Meanwhile, police released the initial working suspects, including Romanian artist Silvestru Măndășescu and Russian migrant worker T. Avramov (also known as "Măndărăchescu and Avram"),[2] whose identity papers were allegedly used by Cătărău and Kiriloff to fend off suspicions.

[27] The press also reported that an inventive Serbian police officer tricked Hungarian detectives by announcing Cătărău's capture in Skopje, collected the large reward, and swiftly disappeared.

[28] Coprian allegedly informed other accomplices that Cătărău and Kiriloff had sailed out of Constanța at night, disguised as part of a regular crew; the ship captain objected to their presence, and wanted them "thrown into the sea" at Istanbul, but the other sailors stood by the escapees, and they continued their journey unharmed.

The local Romanian consulate refused to welcome him there, but covered most of his expenses in return for an affidavit, which included details on his being a Siguranța operative; the latter institution had reportedly obtained him a Bulgarian passport.

[32] In her 1935 memoir, the unidentified female accomplice reports that a man from the Black Hundreds had personally arranged Cătărău and Kiriloff's escape from Bucharest, and that a "great power" protected them as they sailed out of Romania.

[6] More in detail, the PNRR promised universal suffrage, wealth redistribution, immediate land reform, and application of the homestead principle in agriculture, as well as allusing to a "second point" of policy, which remained unpublished.

Cătărău switched his allegiance to Soviet Russia and reemerged as a figure in the Bessarabian Bolshevik underground, and took part in the clandestine effort to Bolshevize the various troops still stationed in the region.

[5][14] Reportedly, in his bid to join the new Bessarabian army, Cătărău failed to convince the officers, but the lower ranks responded positively to his request of "aiding and enlightening" the masses.

[14][40] According to scholar Charles Upson Clark, he was actually successful at demoralizing and dividing the Bessarabian self-defense forces, increasing the likelihood that the state would crumble and exposing it to the danger of being engulfed by a Greater Ukraine.

[42] Military historian Vitalie Ciobanu argues that some of the Republic's main problems of maintaining authority stemmed from Cătărău's activity in Chișinău and from the parallel appointment of Stabskapitän Anatol Popa as head of the Bălți garrison.

[41] Nevertheless, when similar events in Chișinău led the Republic to proclaim a state of emergency in December, one of the regimental battalions patrolled the city streets alongside loyalist units.

Pântea noted the possibility of discontent and even rebellion in the Moldavian ranks, so he appealed to outside help and enlisted a unit of Amur Cossacks for logistical support and potential intervention in case of trouble.

As a pro-Entente daily, Mișcarea retorted: "Let's remind them that [Cătărău] is by now a member of the Bolshevik government in Moscow, his work carried out under the authority of Mr Hellferich and Rakovski.

"[57] In July 1918, Gazeta Bucureștilor published a letter supposedly sent by Cătărău, in which he described himself as a "mere instrument, back when I was carrying out that strike on Debrecen", adding: "In fact, Bolshevik gazettes have been shedding light on [my] crime.

[10] Others attest his slow crossing of Siberia during the Russian Civil War—reportedly, he carried with him the gemstones he had stolen, baked into a loaf of bread (he privately confessed to murdering the baker), and avoided conflict with either the Reds or the Whites by pretending to support either side, "depending on context.

[13] Another Romanian travel writer, Radu D. Rosetti, was told that Cătărău, already subsidized by Soviet Russia and trafficking in stolen jewelry, had been seized as he tried to smuggle a precious Buddharupa out of the country, then expelled as a nuisance.

He had integrated it into a bait-and-switch confidence trick, whose intended victim, a Sino-Japanese antiques dealer, reported him to the Police Affairs Bureau; Japanese counterintelligence already had him under its watch as a potential spy.

In early 1920, Cătărău was jailed in Nice for stealing jewels from his American fiancée,[5][10] or, according to Porsenna: "while on the French Riviera, after the war, he stole the diamond necklace of some coquettish old lady.

When, in 1935, Naum Nartsov produced a Soviet account of wartime events, he described Cătărău as an "international spy", and identified him as an inspiration behind the Moldavian Democratic Republic, itself condemned as a "bourgeois nationalist" entity.

[5] In April 1937, Universul daily published a telegram that Cătărău had sent from Saint Luke's Hospital in San Francisco, in which he claimed that he was on his deathbed, and asked for a clump of Romanian soil to be scattered on his grave.

[7] In its editorial comment on these developments, Universul noted: "In fact, Ilie Cătărău was never officially arrested, and his case has slowly faded off from the shelf of sensational newspaper topics, to where it is now completely forgotten.