"Is that the guy?" asked French police inspector Christophe Alain.
"Yeah, that's him. Let's go," replied his Italian colleague, detective Andrea Cavacece.
It was about two o'clock on a sunny afternoon last Thursday in Cannes, south of France. The two policemen were standing outside Le Jardin de la Croisette, an upmarket residence not far from La Croisette, the promenade famous for movie stars every springtime at the Cannes Film Festival.
The two policemen were watching four people, two women and two men, coming out of the residence. One of the men was elderly, with a white beard, and wore a Riviera-style sun hat, a bright checked shirt, dark trousers and sandals. He looked like a pensioner on holidays.
This particular pensioner, however, was Licio Gelli, one time head of the banned masonic lodge, P2 (Propaganda 2), onetime friend of President Juan Peron of Argentina, one-time friend of the banker-crooks Roberto Calvi and Michele Sindona, one-time Fascist black-shirt and, until last Thursday, a fugitive from Italian justice - not for the first time in his colourful life.
When asked for identification, Gelli produced false documents in the name of Mario Bruschi of Arezzo, a man subsequently discovered to be deceased. After a short while, Gelli admitted his true identity.
Gelli (79) is a bit like the alcoholic uncle who regularly turns up uninvited to ruin family celebrations. His curriculum vitae touches on some of the darkest pages of post-war Italian history. For four months from early May until last week, he had been on the run after the highest court in the land upheld both his conviction and his 12 1/2-year sentence for his part in the 1982 downfall of Roberto Calvi's private bank, the Banco Ambrosiano, which crashed in a $1.3 billion bankruptcy.
The Banco Ambrosiano scandal, however, is only one part of Gelli's history. In 1981, he made international headlines when a police raid on his office discovered a secret list of 1,000 prominent politicians, magistrates, businessmen, policemen, secret service commanders and journalists who were all members of P2. The subsequent parliamentary commission into P2 concluded that Gelli and his associates were planning some form of coup or takeover of Italy's key institutions.
P2 and the Banco Ambrosiano, however, are not the darkest pages in the Gelli story.
Investigators into one of Italy's worst post-war terrorist attacks, the bombing of Bologna train station in August 1980, in which 85 people were killed, believe he is implicated in the preparation of the attack. Originally convicted for his part in the Bologna killings, he (and a number of alleged right-wing terrorists) were subsequently acquitted on appeal.
Gelli has spent much of the last 20 years either on the run or under police surveillance. When an arrest warrant was issued for him in 1981, subsequent to the discovery of the P2 list, he was held in Switzerland.
Within days, however, he had escaped and for the next four years, he lived as a fugitive from Italian justice. Gelli and his lawyers claimed that he was in bad health, suffering from a heart condition that could only get worse in prison and which required urgent surgery.
Accordingly, magistrates released him, confining him at first to "house arrest" in his luxury Villa Wanda in the Tuscan town of Arezzo.
Remarkably, the heart condition which so concerned Gelli and his doctors in 1988 has not stopped him from running a discreet rehabilitation campaign from Villa Wanda over the last decade.
Within 24 hours of his arrest last Thursday, Gelli's physical condition worsened as he first attempted suicide (by breaking his glasses and cutting his wrists) and then suffered two apparent heart attacks which required that he be brought to hospital, which prompted his lawyer, Stefano Angolini, to describe him as an "ill man who must undergo heart surgery".
Mystery has always surrounded Licio Gelli and the latest chapter in his life is no exception. It is still not clear why authorities let 12 days pass between last April's court decision and the issuing of an arrest warrant for him.
When police finally turned up to arrest him on May 4th, he had already left the country, despite the fact that Villa Wanda was reportedly under 24-hour police surveillance. Last weekend, the Gelli story took another bizarre twist when police, armed with a search warrant, again raided Villa Wanda, this time finding no less than 160 kg of gold bars worth £1.2 million, hidden in vases of geraniums and begonias on the villa's terrace.
Authorities are still not clear where the gold came from, but the markings on it could be East European, reviving a wartime legend that it is part of a 55-ton Fascist haul that Gelli "escorted" out of Yugoslavia on a Red Cross-marked train in 1942. Gelli has always dismissed such speculation as "pure nonsense".
As of now, Gelli remains in hospital in Marseilles and both he and his lawyers appear to be preparing for a tedious extradition battle.
The Gelli story seems likely to run some more.