Jean-Claude LaCote: How a violent conman went from reality TV star to Europol's 'most wanted'
Agency hopes FBI-style list will help bring to justice conman sought for murder of Briton in 1996
For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails
Sign up to our free breaking news emails
Sign up to our free breaking news emails
The publicity shot for Jean-Claude LaCote’s South African reality series showed him standing before a squad car and dressed in a police-style webbing vest – every inch the officer’s friend.
Duty Calls, which ran for ten programmes, allowed the handsome TV producer to demonstrate how police “dealt with violent criminals and dangerous crime scenes”. It was a world of which LaCote had intimate knowledge.
By the time the show was aired, LaCote, 49, a charming but violent conman, had been on the run for several years for the murder of a British businessman on the Belgian coast.
Marcus Mitchell, a successful Surrey businessman and married father-of-three, was shot twice in the head in 1996 after being duped by LaCote into putting up the money for an apparently legitimate business deal to buy aviation parts.
LaCote’s publicity shot was re-released in a different context – as part of the launch of Europe’s first “most wanted” campaign.
It is some 20 years since LaCote fled the Continent to avoid the consequences for his crime. In the intervening decades, the smooth-talker escaped to Brazil, avoided extradition and, in a brazen escape, walked out of a high-security South Africa prison while awaiting trial for a string of high-profile frauds.
His girlfriend was part of a group of fake police officers who presented false paperwork in 2008 to take him out of jail for an unspecified investigation. It took South African authorities a week to realise that LaCote had gone; and, since then, virtually nothing had been heard of him.
Belgian police, who have been trying to track his movements, said they had learned of the public auction in 2013 of his seven-bedroom Johannesburg home and the Ferrari he once owned. But there is little evidence of his whereabouts with his now-wife, Hilde Van Acker, and their young child.
Three years after they went on the run, LaCote and Van Acker were convicted in their absence in Belgium for the murder of Mr Mitchell. A bag containing about £500,000 – some of it Mr Mitchell’s, some lent by business associates – was missing.
“It’s the injustice of it,” his widow told The Independent. “That man and that woman live a life of Riley and they killed my husband and the father of my children. I Google his name regularly in the hope, one day, that it will come up that he is behind bars.”
The pair were initially arrested for the murder of 44-year-old Mr Mitchell, whose body was found under a bush by schoolchildren, but they were released as Belgian officers continued their inquiries.
They fled to Brazil and then South Africa to defy all attempts at extradition and continued LaCote’s long-practised routine of fleecing wealthy businessmen.
A British court heard that, in 2003, he masterminded a crime to con £1m from Irish airline and shipping entrepreneur Noel Hanley, which was laundered through gold bullion, works of art and a new Ferrari.
Mr Hanley, who was seeking to buy four aeroplanes for a new airline, was put in touch with Roger Wilcox – who turned out to be LaCote – who offered to lend him £1.5m, but required a £1m surety. That was paid into a South African account and duly disappeared.
One of LaCote’s accomplices in that scam was convicted in 2007, while LaCote – the alleged mastermind – languished in a South African jail plotting his escape. His trial had not started by the time he walked out.
Mr Mitchell’s family say that police files opened to them show that LaCote conned Swiss and Canadian businessmen the same way, persuading his victims of his high net worth by using Lear jets and conspicuous wealth.
Belgian police who are hoping for information about LaCote said that Mr Mitchell’s only crime was that he was “a little bit naive”. LaCote “was a nice speaker with a lot of charm. He could convince anybody”, an officer involved in the hunt told The Independent.
Mr Mitchell’s family – who have not heard anything from Belgian investigators for about five years – believe that LaCote is most likely to be somewhere in Africa.
LaCote is one of 45 European criminals who feature on an EU most-wanted list, launched on 29 January by the Continent’s police agency Europol. They include Salah Abdeslam, the only survivor of the 10-strong group of terrorists who killed 130 people in Paris in November last year. One Briton, Derek Ferguson, 51, wanted for a 2007 murder in Bishopbriggs, near Glasgow, is also on the list.