From The Present: Chef De La Sureie

They Are Interesting People-

Georges waksmouth, the Chef de la Surete, of Tahiti, is a French citizen, but a true international. He is a man of average height and compact build ty T ith that suggestion of latent power behind his courteous, tolerant and understanding manner.

The Waksmouths were originally

an English family. An early Waksmouth had settled in Germany and still later the family estab lished themselves in Russia and lived in comfort until the terrible 1917 exodus of thousands of White Russians from the war zone to Europe.

Georges was born in the Ukraine in 1913 and as a child was exposed to frightful horrors and atrocities that followed the revolution.

He was four when his father disappeared suddenly in the Red uprising and after much privation and hunger he and his mother finally reached France.

His mother died there, still believing that his father- had perished. Georges was 23 before he learned differently. A French Naval Officer became interested in the name of Waksmouth.

“Quite an unusual name”, he said, “I know a Waksmouth—a ship’s Captain in China. He lost his family in the Red scourge.

Perhaps a relative?”

Georges wrote to Captain Waks mouth in China and to their mutual astonishment found they were father and son.

He then joined his father in Shanghai and here began his police career as a constable.

The ensuing years were dangerous ones amongst the ruthless Asiatic gangsters and terrorists. Eventually he became Detective Inspector and special Intelligence officer.

Later, while in Hongkong he found service with the French forces

in Indo-China and one of his most exacting tasks was to protect the Chief of the French Republic and other visiting Allied dignitaries.

When Japan penetrated deep into Manchuria and Shanghai’s inter national settlement, Waksmouth was selected for special military intelligence work. He learned that the real power behind the authori ties in Shanghai—recognised as a crime hot spot—lay in two murderous drug traffic groups bitterly jealous of each other.

Wealthy Chinese dominated 50,000 members of the gang, concealed behind a front of legitimate enter prise.

These powerful Chinese opium groups ruthlessly controlled local economy. Then upon the horizon appeared an opponent to the opium groun and just as dangerous and ruthless, matching cunning with cunning: The Japanese were chiselling in on the narcotic markets with a drug called Heroin. This constituted a most serious threat to the Chinese overlords and in the ensuing war for supremacy, Georges Waksmouth became enbroiled with open piracy, killings, slashings and hijacking.

It was a period of constantly disappearing police and informers; sometimes their bodies were found bearing grim evidence of torture.

Today, with his wife whose parents were also White Russians, and his daughter Barbara (who at the age of 5 years was safely conveyed to California for education and security), Georges can at last enjoy complete freedom in his beautiful home in Punaauia, Tahiti, which is built on the very spot where Paul Gauguin, the famous French artist formerly lived.

Charles McPhee.