José Giovanni
José Giovanni (22 June 1923, Paris, France – 24 April 2004, Lausanne, Switzerland) was the pseudonym of Joseph Damiani, a French writer and film-maker of Corsican origin who became a naturalized Swiss citizen in 1986.
A former collaborationist and criminal who at one time was sentenced to death, Giovanni often drew his inspiration from personal experience or from real gangsters, such as Abel Danos in his 1960 film Classe tous risques, overlooking that they had been members of the French Gestapo.
His father, a professional gambler who was sentenced to a year in prison for running an illegal casino, owned a hotel in the French Alps in Chamonix.
In February 1944, Damiani came to Paris and through his father's friend, the LVF leader Simon Sabiani, he joined Jacques Doriot's fascist French Popular Party (PPF).
In Lyon, in August 1944, posing as a German police officer along with an accomplice (Orloff, a Gestapo agent who was shot for treason at the Liberation), Damiani blackmailed Joseph Gourentzeig and his brother-in-law Georges Edberg, two Jews who were in hiding.
After the Liberation in Paris on 18 May 1945, Joseph Damiani, his brother Paul, Georges Accad, a former Gestapo agent, and Jacques Ménassole, a former member of the Milice wearing a French Army lieutenant's uniform - all posing as Military Intelligence officers - kidnapped Haïm Cohen, a wine merchant, accusing him of being a black marketeer.
A few days later, on 31 May 1945, the same gang, still masquerading as French Army Intelligence, abducted two brothers, Jules and Roger Peugeot, electrical appliance manufacturers in Maisons-Alfort.
On 20 July 1946 Joseph Damiani was sentenced to twenty years hard labor by the Marseille Court of Justice for his participation in the German Schutzkorps and in the arrest of Frenchmen sent to the STO (Compulsory Work Service) in Germany.
On 25 May 1949 Damiani was sentenced by the Paris Correctional Tribunal to ten years imprisonment for having blackmailed at gunpoint Joseph Gourentzeig (hiding from the Gestapo under the name "André Courent") and his brother-in-law Georges Edberg in Lyon on 11 August 1944.
Finally, President René Coty remitted the sentence on 30 November 1956 and Joseph Damiani was released from prison at the age of thirty-three on 4 December 1956 after serving eleven and a half years.
On 14 October 1993, two Swiss dailies, La Tribune de Genève and 24 Heures, revealed his past and that José Giovanni was in fact the same person as Joseph Damiani, the convicted fascist militant.
