On October 1, 1968, in the village of Elancourt in the French province of Yvelines, Stevan Marković, former bodyguard of Alain Delon, is found dead.
The body of the then 31-year-old Marković was found decomposing by a rock picker in a landfill, and immediately the bag of Aeolus was opened for a huge political scandal since the investigations reached the environment and Georges Pompidou himself, president of France from 1969 to 1974.
Charmer Alain Delon and Corsican gangster Francois Marcantoni were targeted for prosecution. Before he died Markovic had sent a letter to his brother Aleksandar where he wrote:
"If I am killed, know that it will be 100% the responsibility of Alain Delon and Godfather Francois Marcantoni".
Marcantoni was charged with murder, remanded in custody, but after a more extensive investigation by the police, no incriminating evidence was found against him and he was released. Delon testified three times in total with no evidence found against him either.
During the interrogation process, photographs of Claude Pompidou, the wife of the later president, were recovered. The chief constable Lucien Aimé-Blanc who found the disputed "pink" frames, later claimed that they were a propaganda product of Charles de Gaulle's party, and so their validity was questioned.
On January 25, 1969, Delon was called to testify for more than 24 hours at the Prosecutor's Office investigating the case. Hundreds of journalists besieged him with the issue of appearing on the front pages of the whole world:
However, Marković's name was not "clean" while he was alive. He was famous for the parties he threw and the closed circuit cameras he installed to keep documents. In fact, there were rumors that he was using this footage to threaten famous guests at the events. Among his celebrity guests was Delon's wife, Nathalie, with whom he reportedly had a brief affair.
Delon and Marcantoni as well as other mobsters, friends of the actor, were recorded at several of these parties. In other "documents" recording Delon, Markovic and Pompidou's wife in rumored cases. At that time Pompidou was "running" his election campaign.
The later president himself accused Louis Wallon and Henri Capitant of working with the state intelligence agency SDECE to set up a sex scandal against him and damage his campaign. The "scandal" had reached great proportions through Le Figaro's publications.
In fact, Charles de Gaulle had also raised the issue in the cabinet shortly before he resigned from the office of the president of the Republic.
Later investigations proved that the depicted woman in the bodyguard's orgy was a prostitute who looked a lot like the president's wife. These frames were found inside Marković's vehicle immediately after his murder.
The whole Markovic case is considered to have finally benefited Georges Pompidou to rise to power, while taking advantage of the discontent of May 1968 towards the person of de Gaulle. Until his death, he constantly talked about "skevoria" with the aim of his political extermination.
The book Les Mystères Delon by Bernard Violet recorded the whole scandal. It was the first book in modern French history to be "hunted" before it was even published as Delon, the only one alive at the time of publication in 2000, took legal action against the author. However, the book was released as usual and, as expected, became a best seller.
As for Markovic's death? It remained forever an unsolved mystery. For the record, he met Delon in the late 1950s in an outdoor fight near a movie set. Delon hired Markovic as his personal bodyguard and gradually through Delon, the Serb gained access to secular France.
It is worth noting that Delon was sentenced to four months in prison in 1969 in Italy for assaulting a photographer, while at the age of 21 he spent 45 days in a military prison for illegal weapons possession.