French punk rocker gets suspended sentence after 30 years on the run after €2m bank heist

A French punk rocker who handed himself in 30 years after committing a €2m bank heist, saying he could no longer bear his guilty conscience, has been handed a suspended sentence.

Gilles Bertin was given a five year suspended sentence by a judge in Toulouse, southwestern France, meaning he can walk free and return to Barcelona, where he lives with his partner and son.

The prosecuting magistrate had asked for five years in prison, saying that time and remorse were not enough to exonerate Bertin.

But the verdict was met with applause from supporters of the singer, who said he handed himself in because: "I had to pay my debt, I no longer had the choice." 

Bertin, 57, was the lead singer in Bordeaux-based punk group Camera Silens, with some dubbing him France’s answer to Sid Vicious and the Sex Pistols.

The group had a cult following in the 1980s from anarchists and far-Left fans in tune with its nihilism.

Then in April 1988, Bertin and some band members – mostly drug addicts, and several infected with the HIV virus – mounted a major armed robbery with the aim of spending the cash before they died.

They successfully pulled off the heist, stealing 12 million francs (almost €2 million) from a Brinks deposit in Toulouse, western France. No-one was injured in the robbery. 

In jeans and a grey shirt, Bertin told the Toulouse court that the heist had taken two years to prepare in order to avoid violence. Despite their anarchist ways, the court was told that the band carried out a “quasi-military” operation to such an extent that police first through they were dealing with hardened gangsters.

Click Here: COLLINGWOOD MAGPIES 2019

However, the group then gave the game away somewhat by ringing the local newspaper to boast of their feat.

All were caught within a year except one suspect, Gilles Bertin.

Hardly any of the money was retrieved and some of the anarchist robbers died from AIDS-related symptoms. Others spent short spells in prison and returned to unglamorous jobs.

But Bertin evaded capture, and spent almost 28 years on the run, living in Portugal and Barcelona, Spain, where he has a girlfriend and young son.

He received a 10-year sentence in absentia in 2004.

Then, in a coup de theatre two years ago, he decided to turn himself in.

Before his trial, he told the BBC that his decision to come clean came after a near-death experience with hepatitis.

After hospital staff in Barcelona saved him free of charge, no questions asked, he realised that he had contributed nothing to society.

"I realised I had to tell the truth and come clean about my past," he said.

"This is the final stage of a long ordeal that I have to go through…But I am really doing this for my seven-year-old son. He still doesn’t really understand what I did during my nearly 30 years on the run – but he needs to know,” he said.

Bertin insisted there was nothing romantic about the robbery, or the life he led afterwards, which meant losing touch with another 31-year old son and his sister.

"In hiding, unable to talk about yourself or to people from your past, including my son, constantly on the look-out in case the authorities find you – and on top of that I was seriously ill."

Looking back, he said: ”I made mistakes but I am not that same person now – at 57 I am more mature and have nothing to do with that period in my life.

"Hopefully I will be able to explain to my son the choices that I made back then.”

In court, his lawyer, Christian Etelin, said he could have “calmly waited for his case to pass the status of limitations (in 2024)” given that there was “very little chance” that police would have seized him at the bar where he had been working for years with his partner and her family.

“But to lie about his story had become unbearable for him. He came to forget his past to find a future.”

However, the prosecuting judge called for five years, saying that he was “astonished to hear that the seriousness of the charges should be washed away by time or the redemption of the accused.”