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CANNES - You do not have to go very far from La Croisette in Cannes - where last week the likes of Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and Audrey Tatou smiled and waved for the cameras - to find a different Cote d'Azur.
A few hundred metres away is the Rue Latour Maubourg and the Barracuda Bar, which, with its selective door policy, lack of windows and high number of very attractive, very alone young women is, as its publicity says, perfect "for an intimate evening".
Or you can stray a little further afield, perhaps into the narrow alleys near the station, to find the Golden Gate, which, notes one gay guide, is "more hetero than homo depending on the night" and boasts "a big dance floor, two bars and a backroom with video screens".
Neither features in the tourist brochures, nor in the mythology that surrounds the Provence coastline. This is supposed to be the land of men in unbuttoned white shirts leaning on Lamborghinis, of beautiful, sophisticated women, of champagne parties on multimillion-dollar yachts, of lavender plantations and villas perched on red cliffs above the blue waters. This is not supposed to be where the badly decomposed body of an elderly British aristocrat turns up in a litter-strewn ditch.
Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 10th Earl of Shaftesbury, whose murderers were given a 25-year prison sentence at Nice High Court on Saturday, was a regular both at the Golden Gate - "we saw him whenever he came to Cannes", said the bar's owner - and at Le Barracuda, where he spent the evening before his death in November 2004.
Indeed, the Golden Gate was where he met the women who ended up luring him to his death.
In 1961 and aged 22, Shaftesbury inherited his ancestral title and 3640ha estate in Dorset, southern England. He developed a taste for exotic women and high living at an early age. As a teenager at Eton, he wrote mockingly of women from his own background, describing them as "round-shouldered, unsophisticated garglers of champagne". After finishing his education at Oxford, the earl, then 28, married an American divorcee 12 years his senior, who divorced him 10 years later for adultery.
Shaftesbury, who had inherited a property portfolio of which the furniture alone was worth £3 million, then married Christina Cassell, the daughter of a Swedish ambassador, who bore him two sons, Anthony and Nicholas. The couple stayed together until 2000 when, badly affected by the death of his mother, he moved out of the ancestral home and returned to what has been described, with some understatement, as "a bachelor lifestyle".
In 2002 an article in the Daily Telegraph described the 1.85m earl, then 63, dressed in an open-necked pink silk shirt and gold chain, frolicking in a bar in Kensington with a 29-year-old former pin-up girl. There were many, many other women. In court his 27-year-old son was presented with an unpaid bill by one madam. On his mobile phone was a number for a well-known pimp in Nice, a key centre for East European-run prostitution rings. One of the many women who came into the earl's life was Jamila M'Barek.
M'Barek grew up in a tough northern French town, the daughter of a violent, drunken miner. Her mother fled with her children to her native Tunisia when M'Barek was 6. She left home with little education and with nothing more than, as her sister later said, "her natural attributes" to make her way in life.
The two met in February 2002 when the earl called Catherine Gurtler, who advertised her escort business in the International Herald Tribune. M'Barek, Gurtler said, "had one goal in life ... to make money". In this she appears to have succeeded. During the four-day trial the court heard astonishing details of the life of a £1000-a-night call-girl, with lovers, supposedly including a string of film stars, across Europe. When she wasn't working for agencies, she was working in hostess bars. "She just wanted to take advantage of the earl as much as possible," Gurtler said.
The earl reportedly lavished huge sums on his new love. In October 2002, after they were married, M'Barek convinced her husband she was pregnant with his child. As a result he changed his will to leave her £4 million ($11 million) of property in France and Northern Ireland. The flat in Cannes was hers.
It was in the Golden Gate bar, in April 2004, that Shaftesbury came across his last lover, Nadia Orch, 33. Soon he decided to divorce M'Barek and moved in with Orch in a stone cottage near Vance. Just over six months later, he was dead.
On November 3, Shaftesbury arrived in Nice for 10 days' holiday with Nadia in Antibes. Yet Nadia, angry after a row with the earl over his alcoholism, did not want to see him. He headed instead for Cannes, started drinking and telephoned a fortune-teller, Martine Dupre-Cordier, in nearby Menton. Drunk, though lucid, he hired a taxi for £203 and spent an hour with Dupre-Cordier. The session cost £34, though he offered the fortune-teller more. The earl wanted to know if Nadia would fall pregnant and if the child might be a girl. He also said that he wanted to divorce his wife. "He seemed to think [the divorce] was a fait accompli," Dupre-Cordier said. "When I told him that it might not be as easy as that, he said he had not come to hear bad things."
The earl returned to Cannes and headed to Le Barracuda, drank until the small hours and checked into the £130-a-night Hilton hotel on the seafront. In the morning, he telephoned Nadia to tell her that he had arranged to have lunch with his wife to finalise divorce proceedings. The rendezvous would take place at the hotel, as the earl only wanted to meet in a public place. But for an unknown reason, the earl headed to the flat he had bought his wife at the foot of La Californie. M'Barek's brother Mohammed, a former semi-professional footballer with a history of mental illness, had arrived from his home in Munich a few hours earlier and was waiting.
M'Barek said her husband turned up drunk and dishevelled and attacked her brother, who had retaliated by grabbing the earl's throat. There was never any intention to kill him.
The prosecution said the earl had been lured to his death because M'Barek, 45, did not want him to renege on an earlier pledge to bequeath to her property in Ireland, along with a monthly pension worth up to £7000. The police produced a secretly recorded conversation in which M'Barek spoke of what appeared to be a £105,000 cash payment to her brother - "the price of the contract", a senior officer said - and mobile phone records showing the former call-girl had visited the site where the earl's body was found, two days before the murder.
The earl's son Nicholas Ashley-Cooper recalled "a gentle soul who suffered from alcoholism and depression. He used alcohol as a way of curing the pain and loneliness of his childhood."
His father remained kind and warm-hearted. "We never stopped trying to help my father and protect him from the world around him."
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