Joseph Damiani (22 June 1923 – 24 April 2004), known by the pen name José Giovanni, was a French writer, filmmaker, and convicted criminal. He became known for his realistic, gritty crime novels which drew upon his own personal experiences and knowledge of the French underworld.
As a young man, Giovanni was a fascist activist and Nazi collaborator during World War II, also becoming affiliated with organized crime during the same period. In 1948, he received the death penalty for his involvement in a murder case, though the sentence was commuted. Following his release from prison, Giovanni became a popular author of crime fiction beginning in the 1960s. Several of his novels were adapted into films by directors like Jacques Becker, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Claude Sautet. Giovanni also wrote original screenplays, and eventually turned to directing, helming some 17 films between 1967 and 2001. Many films written or directed by Giovanni, as well as films adapted from his books, were box-office successes, and some came to be regarded as classics of French cinema.
Giovanni's works often praise masculine friendships and advocated the confrontation of the individual against the world. Though he never concealed his criminal past, he was always careful to hide his links with the Nazi occupiers of France during World War II. His past as a collaborator was eventually exposed in 1993 by the Swiss newspapers Tribune de Genève and 24 Heures.
Of Corsican descent, Joseph Damiani received a good education, studying at the Collège Stanislas de Paris and the Lycée Janson de Sailly. 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. Damiani worked there as a young man and became fascinated by mountain climbing.
Criminal activity and collaboration
From April to September 1943, during the Nazi occupation of France, Damiani was a member of Jeunesse et Montagne (Youth and Mountain) in Chamonix, part of the Vichy Government youth movement controlled by Pierre Laval.
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). His maternal uncle, Ange Paul Santolini alias "Santos", who ran a restaurant patronized by the Gestapo, and his elder brother, Paul Damiani, a member of the Vichy paramilitary Milice, introduced Joseph into the Pigalle underworld.
In March 1944, Damiani went to Marseille where he became a member of the German Schutzkorps (SK), an organization which hunted down Service du travail obligatoire - STO (Compulsory Work Service) dodgers. He served as bodyguard to its Marseille chief and took part in many arrests, often blackmailing his victims.
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. Gourentzeig had bribed a member of the Milice - a friend of Damiani’s – in an attempt to secure his parents' release from a detention camp. They were not freed and Gourentzeig's father, Jacob, was shot by the Germans shortly after, on 21 August 1944, along with 109 Jewish hostages in the Bron (Lyon airport) massacre.
On 18 May 1945, shortly after the end of the war in Europe, 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. He was tortured until he gave them the key to his safe and a check for 105,000 francs. He was then shot and his body thrown into the Seine. Damiani cashed the check at Barclay's Bank under the identity of "Count J. de Montreuil".
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. The brothers were forced, at gunpoint, to write a letter stating that they had been in business with the Germans and in contact with the Gestapo. The gang then demanded a million francs for destroying the letter. The Peugeot brothers refused and were tortured until they revealed where they had hidden 125 Louis d'or gold coins. They were then shot and their bodies buried in the woods near Versailles.
Damiani, who had accidentally shot himself in the leg during the struggle with the Peugeot brothers, was arrested at home in early June 1945. Accad was also apprehended. On 12 June 1945 Ménassole, on the point of being arrested, committed suicide in the Rue Montmartre métro station. Paul Damiani was arrested in Strasbourg in July 1945, escaped in December and was shot dead in a gunfight between gangsters on 17 July 1946 in a bar in Nice.
Convictions and prison sentence
Following his arrest, Damiani received a series of sentence.
On 20 July 1946, he was sentenced to twenty years hard labor for collaboration with the enemy by the Marseille Court of Justice, over his participation in the German Schutzkorps and in the arrest of Frenchmen sent to the STO (Compulsory Work Service) in Germany. He was also sentenced to Dégradation nationale (deprivation of all civil rights) for life for having been a member of the PPF fascist party.
During the investigation, Damiani had admitted to shooting Roger Peugeot, but he denied it in court. On 10 July 1948, Damiani and Georges Accad were sentenced to death by the Paris Cour d'Assises for the premeditated murders of Haïm Cohen, Roger Peugeot and Jules Peugeot. Damiani escaped the guillotine when his and Accad's sentences were commuted by President Vincent Auriol on 3 March 1949 to hard labor for life.
On 25 May 1949, Damiani was sentenced by the Paris Correctional Tribunal to ten years imprisonment for having blackmailed at gunpoint Joseph Gourentzeig (then hiding from the Gestapo under the name "André Courent") and his brother-in-law Georges Edberg in Lyon on 11 August 1944.
On 14 November 1951, Damiani's sentence was reduced to twenty years hard labor. Ultimately, President René Coty remitted the sentence on 30 November 1956. Damiani was released from prison at the age of thirty-three on 4 December 1956, after serving eleven and a half years.