Alexandre Villaplane

In his career he appeared for Sète (1921–1923 and 1924–1927), UC Vergèze (1923–1924), Nîmes (1927–1929), Racing Club de Paris (1929–1932), Antibes (1932–1933), Nice (1933–1934), and Hispano-Bastidienne (1934–1935). He was capped 25 times for the France national team, played for the France national team at the 1928 Summer Olympics, and was the captain of the France national team at the 1930 FIFA World Cup. At the latter he earned the accolade, which was considered to him, at the time, the greatest moment of his career. He played for Antibes in the first French professional championship in 1932–33. The League was divided into a Northern and a Southern section with each section made up of ten teams. Antibes finished top of the table in the Southern section and played Lille from the North for the Championship. Antibes won the match and the French league but were stripped of their title after being found guilty of match-fixing. The Lille manager was given a lifetime ban, but Villaplane, who was strongly suspected of fixing the matches, received only a small penalty. Villaplane then joined OGC Nice for the 1933–34 season. Having lost interest in his career and having become a regular horse race-goer, he made one last attempt to resurrect his career with the Bordeaux Second Division club Hispano-Bastidienne, but he ended the season in prison, having been sentenced for his part in a horse race-fixing scandal.

At the beginning of World War II, Villaplane became involved in the Parisian black market and in racketeering the local Jewish population. He was sentenced in 1940 to two months imprisonment for possession of stolen goods. Through his criminal background, he came to the attention of the French Carlingue, an organisation formed by the German Reich Security Main Office to conduct counter-insurgency operations against the French Resistance. The group, which was made up of collaborating criminals, was known colloquially as the French Gestapo. It was jointly run by two Parisian gangsters, Henri Lafont and Pierre Bonny. Members utilised their criminal expertise and networks for the Nazi security services in occupied France and Vichy. Villaplane specialised in racketeering gold merchants. In 1942, he left Paris for Toulouse to escape the Germans. His former teammate Louis Cazal obtained new identity papers for him and he returned to Paris. He was arrested by the SS in 1943 for the theft of a quantity of precious stones and imprisoned at the Compiègne camp; Lafont succeeded in obtaining his release. Villaplane then became Bonny's chauffeur and then, in 1944, head of one of the five sections of the North African Brigade, a criminal organization made up of North African immigrants who collaborated with the Nazis through anti-Resistance activities. The fierce character of his recruits earned him the unflattering nickname of "SS Mohammed". He obtained both the rank and uniform of an…