V 1 N. 31 Sometimes You Get Into Stuff When You Are Not Even Trying

 

My Affair with L’Affaire Maschino

Dayton, Ohio, 1977

by George Brose

 

            Sometimes we walk on the periphery of important events without knowing it.  Other times we wet our feet and still others we become totally immersed.  This story is about the second level of circumstance.

 

            First I have to tell how my life and the other persons’ lives came to merge for a brief time.  Marie and I married in Germany in 1970, when I was still in the US Army, and a year later we found ourselves expecting a child and moved to her home town in Northwest Quebec where socialized medicine made having a child financially feasible.  We had a nice life in Noranda Quebec, despite the raging winters and hordes of mosquitoes in the summers.   We made lots of friends in fellow teachers, Quebec Separatists, runners, and the like.  One of our good friends were a French/English couple Ovide and Wynanne Bastien.  In early 1973, the Bastien moved to Chile to experience the democratically elected Socialist government of Salvador Allende.  We remained in correspondence with them and they both eventually had to flee the country after the CIA led coup d’etat that resulted in hundreds if not thousands of people being tortured, killed, or disappeared.  While they remained in Santiago after the coup, the Bastien were involved in hiding people who were being sought after by the Pinochet regime.  At the same time Ovide wrote a book about the involvement of the Catholic church and its support of the Pinochet gang.  Wynanne smuggled the manuscript out of the country, even though she was in the early stages of a very delicate pregnancy.  She had had several previous miscarriages.  But she managed to get past the authorities on her own while carrying the baby and  the manuscript of Ovide’s book which would later be published as Le Coup Divin (The Divine Coup) which condemned the Church.   Ovide was able to leave Chile before the book was published. 

 

            By 1976 I had run out of options to stay in Quebec and continue to teach and coach without getting more educational certification.  So Marie and I and our two young children Marie Dominique and Jacques Andre moved to Muncie, Indiana where I had been accepted to study Exercise Physiology at Ball State University’s renowned Human Performance Lab. 

 

            While in Indiana, we continued to be in contact with our Quebec friends through phone calls, Christmas cards, and the occasional trips back to Canada.  The Bastien had moved down to Montreal and Ovide was now teaching economics at Concordia University, and Wynanne was raising a bunch of kids at home.  

 

            Shift forward a few years to about 1978.  One summer evening in Muncie, I received a phone call from Ovide saying he was planning to be in Dayton, Ohio,  my hometown, and would he and a couple of other guys be able  to meet me there and perhaps spend a couple of nights at my parents’ house?   He knew my parents from their visits up to Northwest Quebec when we all had lived there. 

 

            “No problem,  I’ll see you tomorrow in Dayton.”  I drove over alone, leaving Marie and the children behind in Muncie, about 100 miles from Dayton.  When I got to my parents’ home there was a message to meet Ovide in downtown Dayton at a hamburger joint in the arts district.  I drove down to the place and found Ovide and two other men waiting patiently in the parking lot.  He introduced them to me, one being a Denis Maschino and the other a journalist from Agence Presse France (AFP).   They cut to the chase and told me why they were in Dayton. 

 

            Denis Maschino, a French citizen, was a student of Ovide’s at Concordia.  He had lived in Algeria, the son of a French diplomat and had met and married his wife Dalila, an Algerien citizen from a very well placed family.  Her brother was chief of the Algerian secret police.  Being a Moslem-Catholic union in a strongly Moslem country was not something that was easily accepted by Dalila’s family.     The young couple had to flee the country.   France was too close to Algeria, so they came to Canada where French was spoken in Quebec.  Their marriage had occurred in 1975, and they had been living peacefully but also cautiously in the Montreal area.  However Dalia’s family was not about to give up on this seeming disregard for her culture. 

 

            In a short time Dalila’s sister and husband moved to Montreal as well and connected with her and Denis.  However Denis was very suspect of the intentions of the sister and brother-in-law.  He would never allow Dalila to be alone with them.  But after several years of this cat and mouse game, Denis let his guard down and when the relatives came to visit one time without her guardian present, she was drugged and taken to Dorval airport in Montreal and put on a private plane and flown back to Algeria.  It was correctly assumed by Denis that Dalila’s family would finagle a divorce and marry her off to a ‘respectable’ Algerian.  He was correct in his thinking. 

 

            My first question to Ovide, Denis, and the French journalist was,  “Why the hell are you bringing this affair to my attention in Dayton, Ohio?”

 

            The French journalist answered that query immediately.   “Because the plane that flew into Montreal to bring the kidnapped Dalila out of Canada, came from a small airport near Dayton.”

 

            My response,  “Holy freakin’ tamales !”  or something close to that. 

 

            It seems that the papers that were filed by the crew when they arrived at Montreal indicated that the plane had  from Wilmington, Ohio about 30 miles southeast of Dayton.  It was at a former Ohio National Guard airbase now converted to a private airport.  The trio who had come to see me in Dayton wanted to go down to Wilmington and snoop around and find out what was going on at that former airbase.  They had the name of the pilot of the aircraft and intended to ‘interview’ him.    They were also quite concerned that they might be being followed by Algerian security. 

 

            That said, I brought them up to my parents’ home in a blue collar neighborhood in southeast Dayton and told them some story that didn’t quite jibe with the truth.  Okay, I lied.  I just told my dear parents that the lads were doing some research and didn’t have a lot of funding.   So the four of us slept downstairs on the living floor and pretended we were researching.  Actually Maschino did not want to stay in the house and possibly draw attention to them so he took the car several blocks away and slept in it.  I stayed up all night watching to see if there was any suspicious activity on our street.  My dad was not big on weapons, but he did have a 12 gauge shotgun in the basement, but I couldn’t find any shells near it.  Interpret that as you wish.

 

            The sun rose and Denis returned, and in the afternoon the three of them drove down to Wilmington to see what they could see.  When they came back late that night they informed me that they had met the pilot, but he didn’t want to be interviewed.   He was quite shocked that they knew who he was and had come 800 miles to talk to him.  By prowling several bars around Wilmington they had also found several people who occasionally worked at the airport.  They would get called when there was a shipment to be loaded.  This happened sporadically, not on any fixed schedule.  What they were loading could be anything from Mercedes Benz cars,  to sheep and guns.  You name it.  It was going mainly to the Middle East and they were paid cash under the table.

 

            In a separate incident several years later I learned that Bob, a hoodlum high school acquaintance, had gotten into some trouble running guns out of that same Wilmington airport.  I wasn’t shocked.      Hoodlum Bob is another story entirely which I may recount someday.  He was a reform school dropout who also could run a decent 440 yards in track and on relays would intimidate other runners by telling them before their turn to run on a relay that he could have them severally injured by some of his ‘friends’ if they didn’t move over when he was passing them.  They knew Bob meant it.  Bob could be counted on to run well on relays, and he didn’t need performance enhancing drugs (PEDs). 

 

            That is about all that went down with the visit of my three ‘friends’ from Montreal.   When they went back to Montreal, the story continued.  The kidnapping had become public in France, a cause celebre , and many folks from the Left Bank were staging protests about the abduction.  Jean Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir were among the leaders protesting “L’Affaire Maschino” in the streets of Paris.

 

            The Pierre Trudeau led government in Canada preferred to sweep the story under the table, because at the time, Algeria was a major supplier of oil to the Canadian nation.   The Alberta tar sands were not yet being exploited at home. 

 

            What would happen to Dalila and Denis?  Would there be a fairy tale ending?

 

            By 1988, I crossed paths with Denis Maschino a second time.  We were back in the Montreal area, and I was in the process of getting coaching certification in Canada.  You had to go through several stages of training, and in the basic one which dealt with all sports, I was in a class and the role was called, and I heard ‘Denis Maschino’ called on the attendance list.  Wow, ten years ago I had met this guy under very different circumstances.  He was there to begin his coaching certification in Karate or some other martial art.  I asked him what was going on in his life and he said he had remarried.  All the time we talked he seemed a bit evasive.  We chatted a bit more and never reconnected. 

 

            Later I met Ovide Bastien on another occasion and he told me the story.  After years of living in social isolation in Algeria with her new husband,  Dalila had gone with her family to Switzerland or France for a ski holiday.  When they let their guard down, Dalila fled and came to Canada to be with Denis.   She did not know he had remarried, and eventually she returned to France.  She continued her education and now is a professor of feminist studies at a university in France.  And thus you may conclude that life does not always have that fairy tale ending.