GSTAAD—They’re whispering that it was the biggest haul since the Brink’s-Mat gold bullion robbery of 1983. Others say that compared with the Graff swag of last week, the Great Train Robbery was a mere bagatelle. Nobody knows nuthin’, and while the fuzz remains schtum, the on-dit is that it was the greatest robbery since the Louisiana Purchase, the trouble being those who say such things think the Louisiana Purchase is a handbag sold by Dior.
One thing I love about the Swiss is the reluctance of the police to give out any information to nosy journalists, thus keeping their own embarrassment to a minimum and the criminals off-balance. When I called the local fuzz and asked about the Graff robbery, the answer was predictable: “What robbery?” I think I recognized the cop’s voice because he and I have a past. He once asked me if I knew what two minutes meant. (A grace period of two minutes is extended before a ticket is issued for illegal parking.) I told him that I could measure two minutes better than him because 120 seconds is a round in amateur boxing. I then shoved my face up to his ugly one and was issued a ticket for 100 Swiss francs for using the f-word in English. How was I supposed to know I was up against a polyglot? As a result, my love for the Swiss fuzz has slightly dimmed.
It gets worse. Back in 1973 Swiss men voted to give Swiss women the vote. The smallest canton in Switzerland, Appenzell, voted against the measure and—horror of horrors—Bern intervened, reversing the result and imposing its will on the freedom-loving male citizens. It was an outrage, and female voters in Appenzell who were not allowed to vote agreed with the men. But Bern insisted that women should have the right to vote, and it’s been downhill (according to male sources in the canton) ever since. Then came the greatest outrage of all: Pressured by successive gangster American administrations, the Swiss spilled the beans, giving up its most precious possession, banking secrecy. It was the equivalent of Italy giving up pasta, or France outlawing cheese, not to mention Greece forbidding olive oil. Banking secrecy made Switzerland rich, famous, and absolutely necessary; not even Hitler dared challenge it. But under constant Yankee pressure—they couldn’t win in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan—the Swiss caved in and Uncle Sam finally had a great victory. American slob civil servants celebrated by drinking rum and coke on the Treasury’s lawns in Washington, declaring to everyone within earshot that “We showed those Swiss peasants what we’re made of.”
I remember it well. I think it was the last time I openly cried—not for myself, of course, but for all the men and women who had made it honestly or otherwise, and had safely tucked it away in a Swiss bank while giving the finger to the bully Uncle Sam, who is obviously suffering from a mind-altering venereal disease. It was not Switzerland’s finest hour by a long shot. Here is a country that Mussolini picked to work in as a waiter and then a butcher’s assistant, a few years before becoming Duce. This is the same country that at the Yalta conference Uncle Joe Stalin proposed the invasion and occupation—ostensibly to foreclose the German option of using it to stage a final defense. And the nation that Hitler called “a pimple in the face of Europe that cannot be allowed to continue.”
