The Great Getaway

For a time last week, it looked as though they were filming a French-language version of Bonnie and Clyde, Meet the Keystone Kops at the Palais de Justice in Paris. The action, though, was real enough.

The scene began when five gendarmes escorted two handcuffed hoods and their blonde gun moll into the chambers of Judge Robert Magnan for a preliminary hearing. As was the custom at the supposedly escape-proof Palais, the handcuffs were removed from the wrists of Christian Jubin and Georges ("Jo") Segard, both 30. Segard and his wife Evelyne, 27, stood charged with 31 armed robberies. Jubin, moreover, was accused of a double murder and rape. While Judge Magnan reviewed their dossiers, Evelyne opened her purse, ostensibly to get a handkerchief. Before anyone could say "Search la femme" she whipped out a pistol. "Don't try anything," Evelyne warned the stunned guards, as she handed two other guns to Jubin and her husband. "I've got one bullet for the judge and one for myself." Within moments, the gendarmes were wearing their own handcuffs and lying face down on the floor, their mouths taped.

As news of the escapade circulated through the courthouse, a squadron of police wearing bulletproof vests and armed with submachine guns, belatedly barricaded the judge's chambers, where the trio now held nine hostages. Over the phone, Jubin's woman lawyer, Genevieve Aiche, urged her client to give himself up: "You'll never be able to escape." He refused. "If I fail," he snarled, "just put roses on my grave."

Through intermediaries, Jubin persuaded the police commissioner of the Palais to supply him and the Segards with a getaway car. They took along three hostages: the judge, a clerk and a secretary. With Jubin at the wheel, a black Renault sped off into the night, followed by two police cars and several autos filled with reporters. Unable to shake his pursuers on a wild ride through Paris, Jubin finally brought the car to a screeching halt, jumped out and yelled: "If you don't stop following me, I'll shoot a hostage." The police and the newsmen turned back.

After abandoning the Renault and commandeering a passing motorist's white sedan, the trio released the hostages unharmed. They then zipped off to their hideout--which, it became clear later, was an apartment just around the corner from the office of Premier Jacques Chaban-Delmas. While 10,000 of Paris' finest scoured the city, the Jubin gang felt confident enough to pull yet another job. They were abducting a young secretary, to use as a hostage, in her car when one of the few police units in Paris not assigned to the case apprehended them. Said one of the arresting officers: "We learned only later that we had caught the Jubin gang."

Back at the Palais, 50 of the 68 judges saw little humor in the daring escape. They met to demand better protection from les gangsters.

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