An illegal alien, working as a gardener, is confronted by immigration officials and arrested for deportation - not exactly front page news in San Lorenzo Valley real estate, now or in 1933. But this particular man had once been known as Pierre Dupres, the "Phantom Bandit" of Paris.
More surprising to the unsuspecting Ben Lomond Home residents whose gardens he had pruned and weeded, he had once been the subject of international headlines. Decades before, Dupres had been one of the few men ever to successfully escape the notorious French penal colony of Devil's Island.
Known locally as Amato Desederio, he had arrived in the Valley in 1922. For the next decade he lived quietly, almost invisibly, never attracting notice or running afoul of the law.
But in 1932 he moved briefly to Sausalito and then to San Francisco, where he was noticed by agents of the United States Immigration Service. But when they moved to deport him, Desederio pleaded that he was not French but Italian.
Desederio was allowed to return to his Ben Lomond Home while his case was considered, but immigration officials did not forget about him. Over the next year they pieced together a remarkable amount of information about Dupres/Desederio from official records on three continents.
The name Desederio was but another of many aliases used by the man who had been born Desiderato Felice Trabucco. His birth records were destroyed, but police logs indicated he had been born in France of Italian parents in 1879.
A Long Criminal History
There were plenty of records for officials to review. By the age of 18, Trabucco had been arrested for abuse of confidence and larceny. These were followed by a long string of charges and imprisonments that earned him his "Phantom Bandit" nickname.
Finally, in 1905 the French courts sentenced him to life imprisonment on Devil's Island for highway robbery, grand larceny and attempted murder. Devil's Island, located in French Guiana on the northeast coast of South America, was perhaps the most feared and infamous prison in history.
Founded as a French colony in 1763, within the first year 10,000 of the first 12,000 settlers had died. Scorched by a blazing sun, drenched by torrential rains, swarming with disease-carrying mosquitoes, those trying to carve a foothold in the jungle also faced army ants and man-eating piranha.
The surviving colonists retreated to three islands offshore, which they called the Isles du Salut, or Islands of Salvation.
To a later generation of prisoners they were known as the Islands of Death. In 1852 the French government converted the settlement to a penal colony, which included not only the three islands but the buildings on the mainland.
However, the appalling conditions soon extended the fitting name of one of the three islands, Devil's Island, to include the whole complex of prisons.
At first no French convicts were sent there, as conditions were deemed too severe for anyone not born to a tropical climate. But in time Devil's Island became reserved for political prisoners such as Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer wrongly accused of treason, or for spies and the worst sort of criminals.
Escape Considered Impossible
Many had attempted escape, only to perish in the jungle or open sea. Desederio planned his escape for two years, then took two more to hoard food and secretly build a raft in the jungle. Finally, in 1911, he and 12 companions made their break, rowing at night towards Venezuela using pieces of wood as paddles.
"It was 44 days of hell," he recalled decades later from his Alameda jail cell, "watching my fellow convicts go crazy and jump into the ocean, delirious for lack of water." Some deserted to small islands along the way; some were taken by the sharks used to feeding on the corpses of deceased prisoners which were dumped in the bay.
Eventually only Desederio and one companion made it to Caracas. Several years later Desederio arrived alone in New York, where shortly thereafter he was arrested on a robbery charge.
"I was wild with fear that my identity would be discovered," he stated in his recollection, "but the police let me go when they found I had nothing to do with the robbery. Being released put new spirit into me. After that I was happy and I worked hard, asking little of life" as he worked as a gardener.
Understandably, Desederio was desperately afraid of being handed over to the French and returned to Devil's Island, so the fact that he altered a few details of the story might come as no surprise. In truth he had not been released by the New York police; instead he served three more years in Sing Sing prison for the robbery under the name Francisco Engnetto.
When he moved west in 1922, he landed in Santa Rosa long enough to get picked up there on still another burglary charge, for which he served three months. It was only then that he drifted to Ben Lomond, where he apparently laid his criminal habits to rest once and for all.
Native Son Deported to Native Land
Whether it was a much-delayed epiphany that set him at last upon the straight and narrow is impossible to say. There are gaps in Desederio's story where other names and misdeeds might have gone undiscovered by federal sleuths. Or perhaps it was just the passage of time; by the time he settled into a Ben Lomond Home, Desederio was in his 40s and 50s, an age at which criminals often forsake the misdirected habits of youth.
In any case, Italy was not inclined to embrace someone else's geriatric problem child, and France, which would soon shut down its penal colonies altogether, no longer had the taste for Javert-like revenge. Desederio's lawyer finally managed to produce testimony from relatives and friends in Italy that he had been born there. That was enough for him to be issued an Italian passport and be deported to Genoa.
With the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini in full swing, that may have been punishment enough for any remaining debt to society he still owed.
As for Devil's Island, it was shut down once and for all as a prison in 1946. It was later promoted as a winter resort for tourists, who may now skim across the shark-laden waters in commercial shuttles to enjoy pleasant guided tours at the European Space Agency's satellite launching station.
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