In November 2017, the serial bank robber, jewel thief, and gangster Rédoine Faïd had only just arrived at the Réau prison, located north of Paris, when prison officials noticed drones circling the skies over the central courtyard.
During his first several weeks in the prison, Faïd appeared to be a model inmate. He chatted with guards and obeyed the rules. But Eric Vallet, a senior prison officer, wasn’t fooled. The new inmate had already escaped prison once, in 2013, after using explosives to blast his way through five walls of the Lille-Sequedin penitentiary, in northern France. In Faïd’s excessive politesse at his new facility, Vallet discerned a plot being hatched.
“He is extremely dangerous,” Vallet told his superiors at Réau prison in the spring of 2018. “It’s just a matter of time before he attempts an escape that will be extremely violent.” On the morning of July 1, 2018, as Faïd was being led from his cell in solitary confinement to a visiting room, an Aérospatiale Alouette II helicopter was heading toward the prison. Inside were two armed and masked men who had gained access to the helicopter by posing as flight students. A pilot, whom the men had taken hostage, manned the controls.
As the helicopter descended into the prison courtyard, Rachid, one of Faïd’s brothers, allegedly used a circular power saw to blast through the prison wall in order to extract him. Within minutes, Faïd was airborne. As he ascended over the prison walls, inmates roared in approval.
Faïd’s daring escape is now the subject of a highly publicized, seven-week-long trial underway at a maximum-security court on the Île de la Cité, in the heart of Paris. If convicted, Faïd, who has already spent roughly half of his 51 years behind bars, faces a life sentence.
Trim and fit, with a closely shaved bald head, Faïd seems to relish the attention the trial has generated. On a recent day in court, dressed simply in a T-shirt and dark pants, he joked with his co-detainees about a young woman who he claimed had flirted with him before the day’s proceedings began.
Since his trial began on September 5, Faïd’s long career in the world of le grand banditisme, or organized crime, has gripped France. Citing increased security risks, scores of police officers and French Special Forces are on hand at Paris’s Palais de Justice in the event that Faïd resorts to violence or stages another escape attempt.
More than a dozen lawyers have been cycling through a roster of witnesses that includes prison officials, a Corsican Mafia don, the kidnapped pilot, and Faïd himself. Eleven other defendants, including two of Faïd’s brothers and two of his nephews, are also facing charges, but it’s Faïd, the so-called getaway king, who has taken center stage.
Rédoine Faïd was airborne. As he ascended over the prison walls, inmates roared in approval.
Born in 1972 in the gritty Paris suburb of Creil, Faïd committed his first theft at age six, in a fashionable store where the security guard taunted Arabs like him as “little merguez,” a slur referring to a kind of sausage found across North Africa. His parents were hardworking Algerian immigrants, but Faïd couldn’t resist the lure of crime.
“I was twelve years old and I knew that robbery would be my career,” he writes in Outlaw: Author Armed & Dangerous, a ghostwritten, Q&A-style autobiography published in French in 2010, then translated into English in 2020. By age 14, he had committed nearly 80 robberies.
In the mid-1990s, while in his 20s, Faïd set his sights on banks. He bought a shotgun, several Beretta pistols, and a holster, much like the one Clint Eastwood wore in Dirty Harry. Police estimate that Faïd and a loyal crew, whose numbers varied depending on the job, had robbed around 30 banks within a few years, stealing millions. He moved to an apartment in the upscale neighborhood of Chantilly, where he was living with the bankers he robbed.
Eventually, Faïd sought out more complex jobs, feeling content that he “brought something scientific to bank robbing,” as he writes in Outlaw. He progressed to A.T.M.’s, memory chips, and computer microprocessors.
His book is filled with practical tips and snippets of wisdom he picked up on the job, including how to mount a successful surveillance operation, the mental game of robbing banks, and the logistics of surviving while on the lam.
Faïd shunned alcohol, drugs, and prostitutes. His vice was the heist, and he was the star of his own productions. As a boy, Faïd idolized the outlaws of Hollywood crime films. In his autobiography, Faïd writes that movies were “a dream” and “a lesson in gangsterism.” His crew cribbed tactics from Point Break (they once robbed a bank while disguised as former French presidents) and Reservoir Dogs (they used color-coded names for each other).
His friends nicknamed him “Doc,” after Steve McQueen’s character Doc McCoy in The Getaway. He watched Scarface 10 times, memorizing the lines and repeating them during robberies.
The person whom Faïd reveres the most is the director Michael Mann. He’s called Mann his “professor” and a “mentor.” (Mann gave a blurb for the back cover of Outlaw, writing, “This guy is incredible.”) The director’s paean to gangsters, Heat, became a template for Faïd’s most daring and dangerous exploits. According to his book, it inspired three major heists he and his crew pulled off in less than 24 hours in 1996, which netted close to $1 million.
Faïd felt content that he “brought something scientific to bank robbing.”
By the time Faïd was 23, he was a millionaire. He was also on the French police’s radar. He fled briefly to Algeria and began plotting the heist that would push him up into the “league of champions” of gangsterism.
In 1997, following his heroes from Heat, Faïd had his crew wear ice-hockey masks to rob an armored van in Paris. Equipped with a rocket launcher, machine guns, and assault rifles, Faïd pulled off the crime, but not without taking a bullet to the shoulder. French papers commended the crew’s “professionalism,” and imitators across Paris soon cropped up.
Faïd’s fortunes soon faltered. He was arrested in 1998 for armed robbery and sentenced to 19 years in prison. Released in 2009 on good behavior, Faïd was picked up within a year, after a botched robbery attempt resulted in the death of a French police officer.
Three years later, in 2013, he staged his first prison escape. He was caught six weeks later, on May 29, while trying to obtain fake documents in order to leave France. After his second escape, in 2018, he went missing for 95 days. Police eventually found him holed up in an apartment less than a mile from where he grew up.
Prison did not dull Faïd’s immense charisma. On a recent day in court, he taunted a police officer standing nearby. “You better let me go,” he chid. “I like escaping.”
Jacques Mariani, a well-known Corsican mobster called to testify, said meeting Faïd had been “an honor.” Upon receiving this endorsement from one of France’s most notorious organized-crime bosses, Faïd turned to the public gallery and broke into a huge smile.
A conviction could keep him behind bars for decades—unless he escapes first.
Scott Johnson is a longtime foreign correspondent who worked as Newsweek’s bureau chief in Baghdad, Mexico City, and Cape Town. He’s the author of two books, The Wolf and the Watchman and The Con Queen of Hollywood, and currently lives in France