Anarchist's End

Across the French border, a stocky, handsome Catalonian, his head wound in a woolen balaclava against the biting Pyrenees winds, led a small band through a high mountain pass into Spain. Francisco Sabater had made the trip a hundred times before, and as always, he expected to arrive unannounced. But someone in France had talked, and Spanish policemen from Barcelona to the border--the "state troopers" of the Guardia Civil, city detectives, even village watchmen--were on the alert for him. For 20 years, Sabater had defied capture; for ten years he had ranked as Franco Spain's most wanted criminal.

For the stoutly independent Catalan people of his native province, the 44-year-old Sabater was a legend. A tough young leader in the anarchist movement, he fought in the Spanish Civil War with the Republican army until Barcelona fell and Franco subdued Catalonia. With other anarchist leaders, he escaped to France, set up a "school of terrorism" in Toulouse to harass Franco. Sabater's specialty was training young recruits in bombmaking and commando tactics, then leading them on raids back into Spain.

The Old Fervor. Stripped of his patriotic cause, the terrorist in time becomes a bandit. As the years went by and hopes of upsetting Franco's regime faded, Sabater increasingly forayed across the border for his own profit. He robbed the homes of the well-to-do by night, banks by day, and always managed to shoot his way out of trouble, killing seven policemen in the process. At times, flashes of the old fervor would recur: in 1949 he planted bombs in the Brazilian, Peruvian and Bolivian consulates in Barcelona, because their governments supported Franco in a U.N. debate. So astonishing were his exploits that Barcelonians finally concluded that Sabater was a myth, a scapegoat invented by the police for all their unsolved crimes.

Franco's police knew better. As Sabater's little band made its way down into the Catalonian foothills, a small Guardia Civil force surrounded Sabater's men after they had stopped for the night in a farmhouse. Sabater shot his way out.

Stampede. Three days later near Gerona, dressed in a peasant "monkey suit" of blue cotton, Sabater knocked on the door of a poor farmer named Juan Salas. "Do you have anything to eat?" he asked. "No, nothing at all," replied Salas. Sabater handed 250 pesetas to the farmer's wife and said: "See if one of your neighbors can sell you something to eat. Eggs, any thing." Sabater watched her carefully while she walked to a farmhouse half a mile away, then signaled the rest of the gang to come out of the brush and join him.

Later, as the bandits sat eating Senora Salas' potato omelets, a four-man Guardia Civil patrol stealthily surrounded the farmhouse and sat waiting for reinforcements. A barking dog alerted the bandits, and in the first exchange, two bullets caught Sabater in the foot and thigh. Sabater ordered Salas and his wife to safety in the attic, calmly dressed his own wounds with a first-aid kit he carried and, firing from windows, held off the green-uniformed policemen all afternoon. But troopers were converging on the farmhouse from every direction, and when darkness fell, the trapped bandit chief decided on a desperate gambit.

Carrying his Schmeisser submachine gun, a Colt .45 automatic, and a beltful of grenades, Sabater limped into the connecting barn and untied the cows. Then he exploded a grenade and ran out of the barn on the heels of the stampeding cattle. Simultaneously, the rest of the gang broke through the front door. Sabater alone made it through the crossfire. Reaching the police lines, he was challenged by the Guardia Civil lieutenant. Sabater coolly shot him dead and melted into the night.

No Place to Hide. Two days later, exhausted, his face covered with stubble, and his pants caked with dried blood, Sabater swung aboard a train headed for Barcelona, where he had friends and could hide out. He ordered the engineer not to stop until they got there. But, protested the engineer, the train had to switch to electrification at Massanet-Massanas. As the switch was made, Sabater leaped across to the new locomotive, warned the departing steam crew: "Reveal my presence and I'll kill you."

But Sabater knew they would have to. Working his way to the electric cab, he pointed his Schmeisser at the new engineers, asked if there were any place he could hide. No, was the answer: "Everything is full of high-tension wires." Sabater spotted their sausage-and-cheese lunches, avidly ate them. Then, as the train neared the next stop at San Celoni (pop. 5,000), Sabater ordered it slowed enough for him to drop off. He landed in San Celoni's cemetery.

As Sabater suspected, the police had been alerted by the steam crew, had turned San Celoni into an armed camp, even issued a submachine gun to the town watchman. But while police were still searching the train for him, the bedraggled, limping Sabater slipped through the police lines into town, walked up to a house, and asked the woman who answered his knock for a razor. She screamed and slammed the door. Next Sabater went into the barber shop, but the frightened barber refused to serve him. Then he tried an old civil-war comrade's house. The man was sympathetic but afraid to help. As the two argued outside the front door, Abel Rocha Sanz, the town watchman, walked up. Sabater saw his gun, pulled his own pistol and fired. Hit in the leg, Rocha fired an instant later, and Francisco Sabater, the last of Spain's great bandit-terrorists, took a full magazine of bullets in his head and body, and fell dead in the street.

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