Out of friends and out of luck, Carlos the Jackal spent last night alone in prison.
The world's most notorious terrorist is fat and balding. His deadliest work is nearly a decade behind him. And his old friends in Libya and Syria don't want him around.
Carlos - the most feared terrorist of the 1970s - was arrested in Sudan Sunday and sent to France Monday to serve a life sentence for killing two French agents in 1975.
The high-living, cigar-smoking master of disguises is blamed for 83 deaths and more than 1,000 injuries during his years on the loose, according to the French.
Infamous enough to be called by one name by police, Carlos pulled every terrorist trick during his 44 years: bombings, kidnappings, shootings, firing rocket launchers at airplanes and taking over embassies.
A glib bon vivant, Carlos mastered a system that is dead, and his arrest signals the end of an era. Communist governments don't exist any longer to subsidize terrorism as a political strategy.
"Carlos is basically an anachronism," says Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of operations and analysis at the CIA's Counter Terrorism Center. "The patrons dried up. . . . It's a death knell for that brand of terrorism."
When the money ran out, so did the importance of Carlos, experts say. Unlike many terrorists, Carlos did it for money and fame, not politics or religion.
"He made terrorism a business," says Stephan Meier, author of the 1992 book Carlos: Unmasking of a Top Terrorist. "He detached terrorism from ideology and made it mercenary. His motto was, `I want to be a terrorist with room service.' "
Books, newspapers, magazine articles and interviews with experts draw a picture of terrorist partial to Mercedes automobiles, silk socks and luxury hotels.
He perfected the international business of terrorism, working with almost all the major terrorist groups of the period: the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Germany's Baader-Meinhof group, the Japanese Red Army, Irish Republican Army, Basque separatists and Armenian extremists.
Carlos was born Ilich Ramirez Sanchez in Venezuela on Oct. 12, 1949. His father was a millionaire lawyer, real estate developer and, surprisingly, a Marxist-Leninist. He named his three sons Ilich, Vladimir and Lenny, after Vladimir Ilich Lenin.
As a teen-ager, Carlos received guerrilla training in Cuba and then went to college in Moscow. He moved to London in 1970 with his mother. At the London School of Economics, he seemed the classic student playboy - drinking, dancing, womanizing. The genial carouser was affectionately called `El Gordo" - Fatso.
Few suspected his secret life as a terrorist.
Some believe that he was involved with the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the Olympics in Munich in 1972. But most experts - and the Israeli government - say this is untrue.
One of his first confirmed terrorist act was a bungled attempt to kill Lord Joseph Edward Seiff, owner of the famous English clothing store Marks and Spencer, in 1973. Carlos found him in the bathtub and fired three times. He missed twice, but struck him in the teeth with the third bullet.
Seiff, a leader in the Jewish community, survived. But the incident earned Sanchez the nom de guerre of "Carlos the Jackal." Meier says a Scotland Yard agent investigating the case gave him the nickname based on Frederick Forsyth's book, The Day of the Jackal, about a well-planned assassination attempt on French President Charles DeGaulle.
Others attribute the name to British tabloid headline writers or the discovery of Forsyth's novel in Carlos' apartment. He secured claim to the name with other notorious successes:
Masterminding the seizure of the French Embassy at the Hague in 1974.
Kidnapping 11 oil ministers at an Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries meeting in Vienna in December 1975. He got $20 million in ransom.
Murdering two unarmed French secret service agents investigating the embassy takeover, wounding another, and killing his top aide Michel Moukarbal, whom he believed to be an informer.
According to the book The Terror Network, Carlos described the agents' murders in his only interview, given in 1979 to the Paris weekly al-Watan al-Arabi: "I shot three policemen in the head. There was only Michel left in the room. He came toward me with his hands over his eyes. He knew the rules of the game: a traitor is condemned to die. He stood before me. I shot into his eyes. He fell to the ground. I shot once more in his temple. . . . I jumped out of a third-floor window and walked away."
Carlos may have resented the publicity: The journalist he spoke to was later murdered; the newspaper's office was bombed.
But Carlos' most overt act of revenge came after his girlfriend Magdalena Kopp was sentenced to four years in France on weapons charges. Carlos went on a bombing spree. He planted bombs on trains and in train stations, on the Champs Elysees in Paris and at the French cultural center in then-West Berlin. The French released his girlfriend a year early. The terrorism stopped.
That was Carlos' heyday. He traveled the world with suitcases stuffed with Swiss francs, German marks and U.S. dollars.
He lived in a seaside villa in Libya and luxury apartments in Budapest and Prague. He smoked expensive cigars.
But times changed. In 1990, a grainy videotape taken several years earlier showed him begging the head of Hungarian intelligence not to kick him out of the country. A handwritten note was found saying Carlos was down to his last $15,000.
Desperate for money, he recently tried to sell his autobiography to Venice University Press. His proposal said: "I now consider myself too old to play an active role in that sort of business. I have also had numerous disillusions which have made me prefer the simple typewriter and pen to gun and dynamite."
Carlos spent his final years of freedom in an affluent neighborhood in Syria where he lived with Kopp, a former member of Baader-Meinhof, and their eight-year-old daughter.
But Syria wanted to get rid of him. Early this year or late last year, he was sent to Sudan, which turned him over the French.
Sudanese Interior Minister Tayeb Ibrahim Mohammed Khair immediately asked the United States to take his country off a State Department list of nations that support terrorism. The United States put Sudan on the list in 1993, denying it international aid. U.S. officials applauded Sudan, but didn't take it off the list.
"The arrest of Carlos serves notice to all terrorists that their crimes will not go unpunished or forgotten," says State Department spokesman Mike McCurry.Y
