On January 18, 1872, off the coast of L’Estaque, fishermen caught sight of an object adrift upon the water, which they took at first to be a large balk of timber. Drawing near, they recognized a long, heavy trunk, and hauled it from the sea with great difficulty. When forced open, a bloodstained sack revealed the corpse of a man whose legs had been almost entirely severed and bent back toward his head. Commercial papers found upon the deceased established his identity: Grego Angelo, a merchant and the Marseille representative for the house of Samama the Elder of Tunis. This grim discovery was soon to bring three young men before the Assize Court of Bouches-du-Rhône.
The judicial report traces the events back to the evening of Tuesday, January 16, at approximately seven o'clock. Grego, twenty-five years of age, resided at No. 47 Rue Montgrand. During the day, he had collected funds at the Bourse and subsequently, according to the indictment cited by the journal, a sum of 4,526 francs from the merchant Milan in the Rue Paradis. Milan, testifying later, spoke of 4,525 francs; a discrepancy of a single franc thus remained between the printed accounts. Grego returned to his lodging to deposit his umbrella and his pocketbook. After that moment, no one could say where he had gone.
The following morning, Michel Samama, his compatriot and clerk, found the apartment secured only by the latch. Possessing a duplicate key, he was well acquainted with Grego’s habits: his master invariably turned the lock twice. Within, nothing appeared in disarray; the bed had not been slept in. This absence did not at first provoke an immediate alarm. Samama knew that his principal occasionally passed the night elsewhere. Yet Grego did not return, and his commercial affairs urgently required his presence. Samama questioned their circle of acquaintances, among them Raphaël Tolédano and Isaac Sitbon. Both professed not to have seen him; Sitbon even suggested inquiring whether he might be lying ill in a hospital.
When anxiety deepened, Samama sent a dispatch to Tunis. His uncle, head of the commercial house and brother-in-law to Grego, petitioned the magistrates to intervene. An examining magistrate had the safe forced open by a locksmith. The journal records the disappearance of Tunisian piastres, French gold coin, and banknotes amounting to an estimated value of some 30,000 francs, along with commercial papers and the firm’s ledgers. At that juncture, the vanished funds and account books admitted of several explanations. The discovery at sea dispelled one hypothesis, though without at once disclosing the full measure of the crime.
When the trial opened before the Court on May 20, three names stood upon the docket: Raphaël Tolédano, a broker of twenty-one; Isaac Sitbon, a merchant of twenty; and Nissim Sizouri, a porter, likewise aged twenty-one. The press portrayed them as members of the Tunisian colony in Marseille. Sitbon had fled to England; an intercepted postal letter enabled the French authorities to trace him and secure his extradition. The Gazette also makes mention of Rhamin Saada, Tolédano’s domestic servant, who had been summoned to testify but took his own life upon learning of the accusation leveled against his master.
The bill of indictment, as reported by the Gazette, wove together Grego’s disappearance, the missing funds, and the recovered trunk. It detailed the cord knotted about the neck, the wounds upon the skull, and the severed limbs hacked through to force the corpse into the chest. According to this theory of the crime, the three prisoners had contrived an assignation, lured Grego to a storeroom in the Rue des Tonneliers, and subsequently unlocked his safe with the stolen keys. The prosecution attributed the motive of illicit gain to Tolédano, identified Sitbon with a harbored grudge, and assigned to Nissim the duties of watchman and porter. This reconstruction, however, was not yet a verdict. In open court, the accused men disputed every point, each casting the principal guilt upon his fellows.
Tolédano repudiated the cupidity imputed to him, asserting that he commanded his own means and had no need of Grego’s wealth. The presiding judge brought up an encounter concerning Clémentine Rey, a young workwoman in the Samama establishment, and certain words uttered after Grego had crossed Sitbon. The court ascribed the conflict to jealousy and commercial rivalry; Tolédano denied the declarations attributed to him by Sitbon. Regarding the “trick” to be played upon Grego, one prisoner described a deliberate and premeditated plot, while the other disowned the conversation entirely.
The examinations turned closely upon the premises in the Rue des Tonneliers. Sitbon maintained that Tolédano had chosen the location; Tolédano insisted that Sitbon had preferred the site and that he had signed the lease merely as an intermediary. Both agreed that they had visited the place together, but differed as to the purpose and the origin of the scheme. Nissim admitted to having inspected the storeroom and to possessing a length of cord, yet swore that he had remained outside. He claimed to have been told of an encounter with young women, an assertion the others flatly contradicted. The presiding magistrate drew attention to the glaring inconsistencies among the three narratives.
As the interrogations progressed, material minutiae supplanted broader arguments. The prisoners wrangled over the keys, the gold, the pocket watch, the papers, and the loading of the trunk. Tolédano accused Sitbon and Nissim of carrying off the plunder; Sitbon maintained that Tolédano had pocketed the lion’s share; Nissim acknowledged receiving some 8,000 francs and the watch, though he contested the gravity of his role. A letter found within the warehouse was matched to a tear in Nissim’s coat; he pointed out the frayed pocket and suggested that the cord he carried might have retained the paper, an explanation the court left to the scrutiny of the jury. The journal refrained from treating any of these conflicting assertions as decisive proof.
The witnesses confirmed specific actions, though with varying degrees of certainty. The porter of the building recognized Tolédano, but could not discern Sitbon’s features. His daughter recalled that Tolédano had come to fetch the key. Shopkeepers identified the hemp cord and the silk cord purchased by two of the men; a whistle, sold to Nissim, was produced as an instrument of the lookout. A packing-case maker recounted the sale of the trunk, though he could not identify the buyers, who had turned up their collars and drawn down their brims. The cabman who conveyed the luggage remembered Sitbon urging the horse forward. Other witnesses identified one or another of the prisoners, yet faltered when asked to distinguish faces in the gloom or to specify which man had made payment.
A ship’s boy from a harbor boat testified to having seen Tolédano and Sitbon with the trunk upon the open water. He had offered to take them in tow, but they declined. He watched as the trunk was cast into the sea, retrieved, and cast overboard a second time, before rain and sea mist obscured them from view. Sitbon’s counsel called witnesses to demonstrate the movements of Tolédano. Some recognized Sitbon, hesitated over Tolédano, or contradicted on the stand the statements they had given during the preliminary examination.
The medical evidence introduced another species of rigor. Professor Rousset examined the clothing of the accused, concluding that the stains upon Nissim’s shirt and waistcoat consisted of human blood. Nissim contended that he suffered from scabies and had scratched his skin; the expert conceded that distinguishing a stain arising from diseased skin was difficult in certain instances, yet affirmed that these particular spots bore the character of spurting blood. Tolédano’s garments likewise displayed traces certified as blood. Sitbon maintained that he had been spattered solely while lifting the sack. The cloth bore witness to the presence of blood; it could not, of itself, apportion the guilt among the three.
The surgeon who performed the post-mortem examination described a single turn of cord without a knot, alongside multiple lacerations to the cranium. In his judgment, strangulation constituted the primary cause of death, the blows playing a secondary part. A fractured phalanx was insufficient, he held, to prove a violent struggle. He believed several persons must have acted in concert, though he admitted he could not affirm categorically that three were present; two men, in his view, might equally have accomplished the deed. This reservation carried great weight. In an affair where each prisoner imputed the fatal blows to the hands of the others, medicine illuminated the manner of death without unmasking its true author.
The public prosecutor demanded the death penalty for all three prisoners. The Gazette subsequently summarized the pleas of the defense: Tolédano was depicted as a mere tool in the hands of Sitbon; Sitbon was framed as an accessory; while counsel for Nissim pleaded his client’s subordinate station. A prisoner confined in the jail at Aix had addressed a letter to the presiding judge professing to reveal where Nissim had concealed his share of the loot, yet searches conducted in consequence yielded nothing. The report recorded this diversion without according it any credit as verified truth.
The jury retired at nine o’clock in the evening and returned an affirmative verdict. Extenuating circumstances were accorded to Nissim alone. The Court sentenced Tolédano and Sitbon to death; Nissim was condemned to hard labor for life. In the pages of the Gazette, the strongbox, the trunk, and the testimonies had passed from hand to hand with every denial; the sentence, for its part, set their fates apart.