“An Illuminati splinter cell survived in Colmar from the end of the 18th to the end of the 19th century. The Statue of Liberty is an Illuminati totem.” This is the kind of statement that Fabrice Fourmanoir makes very seriously. This French expatriate in Sayulita, a small Mexican seaside resort, long-time antiques dealer in Polynesia and now retired, has many theories of this kind. On the Freemasons, numerology… He feverishly explains them on the phone when the Wi-Fi network leaves him alone – he has to call back every five minutes or so.
“By remaining modest, I think I am an outstanding investigator with sprawling networks,” the 66-year-old man also tells us on WhatsApp, in a burst of around twenty messages, a habit of his. To hear him say, his life is a novel: he was friends with the navigator Eric Tabarly, “practiced magic” with the writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Mexico, met Marlon Brando in Tahiti or crossed paths in New Caledonia , the DGSE agents responsible for the attack on Rainbow Warrior. “He’s completely crazy,” laughs writer Cédric Meletta, familiar with these stories since they have just co-authored a book.
Confusing Fabrice Fourmanoir. A comic book character look – panama hat always screwed on to the head, white goatee, colorful shirts. A friend request on Facebook as soon as contact is established. Sending personal photos in bursts. We would easily place him in the category of gentle crazy people caught up in conspiracy theories if he had not become the hero of a small community of very serious people. In 2020 and 2021, his “investigations” led to the declassification of two works previously attributed to Paul Gauguin. A pundit like André Cariou, honorary director of the Quimper Museum of Fine Arts, world specialist in Gauguin, attests to its credibility. In Finland, a writer, Pauliina Laitinen, is preparing a documentary on her findings.
The Getty on the mat
January 2020. The Getty Museum in Los Angeles degrades the Horned Head, acquired in 2002 for $3 million. Fourmanoir noted that the photographer Jules Agostini immortalized the sculpture in 1894… before Gauguin moved to Polynesia, where he is supposed to have created the work. In an article published in the Getty Research Journal, Anne Pingeot, honorary curator of the Musée d’Orsay, quotes him at length, mentions their correspondence and agrees with his thesis.
In August 2021, the Wildenstein Institute, publisher of recieved catalog of the works of Paul Gauguin, withdraws Tahitians, an unfinished painting on display at the Tate Gallery in London, from his online repertoire. Here again, Fabrice Fourmanoir’s research made the difference. The Frenchman noticed that the painting did not correspond to the artist’s style; Above all, it has a centerpiece, a draft of Gauguin’s letters, purchased in 1992, during his years as an antique dealer. The painter lists his works there, Tahitians is not there. The “French amateur detective”, as the Washington Post, would also have the last receipt for the works sent by Gauguin from Polynesia to Ambroise Vollard, his Parisian gallery owner. The dealer would have added six works subsequently. “Proof that Vollard had forgeries made! His crooked side,” triumphs Fourmanoir.
“The face of the good customer”
Do his fanciful exteriors mask an authentic genius investigator? Or like paranoid people who sometimes have real enemies, would the eccentric autodidact have aimed just once? Fabrice Fourmanoir is in any case aware of his power of conviction and the image he projects. The adventurer recounts with pleasure his journey, his childhood in Calais, his move to New Caledonia after his military service, his years as a tourist guide for Club Med, then as an art dealer in Polynesia. In his argument, he oscillates between gently delusional remarks – “I believe in magic and shamans” – and more refined reflections. “I don’t know how to write, but I’m a great storyteller,” he tells us. A few days earlier, he sent us a photo of himself with his hat and silver goatee, accompanied by a mischievous text: “I look like a good customer.”
Lately, the terror of modern art galleries has the Musée d’Orsay in its sights: Peace and War, sculpture from 1901, would also be a fake! The work is supposed to have been made in Polynesia and made of oak wood, but there is no oak wood in Polynesia, Pointe Fourmanoir. A frieze belonging to the same series by Gauguin, exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, was also carved from tamanu wood. Contacted, the Musée d’Orsay did not respond – the piece was purchased in 2002, for a cost never made public but estimated at around 700,000 euros.
He plans to soon attack the United States, guilty according to him of having monopolized the Statue of Liberty without ever paying royalties to its designer, the Frenchman Auguste Bartholdi. “The CIA bankrupted them because they were close to Castro,” claims Fabrice Fourmanoir about the sculptor’s Mexican family. The machinations of the CIA, one of its obsessions with the Freemason conspiracy. To Cédric Meletta, he asserts, for example, that his ear pain comes from “Havana syndrome”, an ultrasound attack that he imagines caused by the American secret service.
“Mr. Count”
The death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy is another of his favorite things. In November 2023, Cédric Meletta publishes THE Second shooter, published by Bouquins, an investigation into the assassination of the American president, shot dead on November 22, 1963 in Dallas. Jaw-breaking book with a crushing thesis: a Frenchman allegedly participated in the killing, it would be Henry Pugibet, a former Vichy soldier. On page 3, the work is presented as written “in collaboration with Fabrice Fourmanoir”. But what on earth did the “French amateur detective” do in this story, in which he also involved the publisher Jean-Luc Barré, the biographer of Jacques Chirac, director of Bouquins and now boss of the prestigious Plon editions? Almost all. Without him, there would have been no book. It was he who contacted Meletta in 2018, he who put him on the trail of Pugibet, present in Dallas on D-Day according to American documents. Where the writer carries out the work of a methodical historian, reconstructing the journey of this French aviator, founder of French-style Hitler Youth then expatriated to Latin America after the war, Fourmanoir provides the link with Kennedy.
In August 2021, Cédric Meletta, Cécile Boyer-Runge, deputy general secretary of Editis, the parent company of Bouquins, and Jean-Luc Barré were gathered at the latter’s home, on Île Saint-Louis in Paris, when Fabrice Fourmanoir appears shirtless on WhatsApp – he quickly puts on a t-shirt – to unfold his story. The plot seems to come from Treasure Island : in 2013, the antiques dealer met in Mexico a certain Santiago Pugibet, known as “Monsieur le Comte”, grandson of Henry Pugibet. Who would have told him an explosive confidence about his grandfather. In 1992, the former Pétainist soldier allegedly confessed, on his deathbed, to the assassination of Kennedy, on behalf of Allen Dulles, deposed director of the CIA.
“Reality surpasses fiction,” the self-taught detective exults today. Problem, this Santiago Pugibet only speaks to Fourmanoir. Never, during the investigation, will Meletta or Barré be able to have access to this central source. “This book provides no proof,” comments François Carlier, writer committed against conspiracyism, author of The Kennedy Assassination Explainedan opus in which he dismantles conspiracy theories: “It was the man who saw the man who saw the bear. There was no second shooter, I am categorical, but beyond of that, the trail does not convince me at all. The Kennedy assassination is detailed in barely four pages, there is no scenario behind it, it is only suppositions and suspicions.
Jean-Pierre Casamayou, former editor-in-chief of the media Air and Cosmos, specialized in aeronautics, now retired and responsible for the review of former students of the air school, also investigated the revelations of Fabrice Fourmanoir. After having discussed at length with the French family of Henry Pugibet, he concluded that the hypothesis was fanciful. “Indeed, Henry Pugibet boasted of having killed Kennedy in those around him. But he was known in the family for being a total fabrication, everyone took it with a smile. Moreover, his French family explained to me that Santiago Pugibet was not able to collect his confidences on his deathbed, since he only saw him again at his burial,” Jean-Pierre Casamayou explains to L’Express. This former soldier also wants to emphasize that Pugibet was not a “collaborator” according to his research, but a double agent of the resistance. “Fourmanoir has a taste for sensationalism, he wanted to be at the center of a new scandal after Gauguin,” imagines the retired journalist, who also often spoke with Fourmanoir.
“Affabulator”
The files are not always the same but Fourmanoir has the habit of pulling providential documents out of his hat. Example with the historian Robert Belot, author in 2010 of a catalog on the artists of the Third Republic, including Auguste Bartholdi. In 2014, Fabrice Fourmanoir confided to him his incredible discovery: Masonic inscriptions on the back of a Bartholdi family photo, found in Mexico, again. “The secrets of the Statue of Liberty”, gloats the amateur investigator. Belot devotes several pages of a book to it that he is preparing for Odile Jacob editions, before giving up. “A venal, mythomaniac, confabulator and dangerous character,” the academic says today about Fourmanoir. Before setting his sights on Meletta, the antiques dealer also tried to have his “scoop” on Pugibet published by Denis Robert, the journalist known for his revelations on the Clearstream affair. JFK in the viewfinder, was to be called the opus, envisaged by Robert Laffont then abandoned despite contact with the publisher Ariane Molkhou. “It’s old… I found his story on JFK fascinating, credible and relatively well-sourced,” remembers Denis Robert.
Intelligence agents have a name to designate people who spontaneously offer their services, towards whom distrust is required: “walk-in”, which could be translated as canvasser. Fabrice Fourmanoir also tried his luck with the author of these lines a few years ago. After a few minutes on the phone, he explained… that he was a former collaborator of Mossad, the Israeli secret service. When we remind him of these words, he doesn’t want to talk about it much anymore: “Who told you that? Let’s say that when you are an adventurer, when you like risk, you attract this kind of business.” The Kennedy assassination often attracted the attention of secret services, particularly Russian ones. In the archives transmitted by Vassili Mitrokhine, colonel of the KGB, to the British intelligence services, in 1992, we learn that the Soviet service subsidized Carl Marzani, an agent known under the code name “Nord”, the publisher ofOswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? the first book evoking a conspiracy, in 1964. In 1975, the KGB also distributed a false letter from Lee Harvey Oswald, again supporting the idea of a conspiracy. The missive is so well done that three graphologists cited by the New York Times authenticate it. At the time, the document was transmitted by Penn Jones, a self-taught detective convinced of the conspiracy, manipulated by the KGB.
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