They were called the “Devil’s couple.”

They had become multimillionaires after clinically murdering a British businessman and pulling off a string of frauds in France, Germany, Belgium and Ireland.

Last week, the Devils’ luck finally ran out.

After 23 years on the run Jean-Claude Lacote, 53, and Hilde Van Acker, 56, arrived back in Belgium to face life sentences for murder.

They were both extradited from their final hiding place in Abidjan, the economic capital of Ivory Coast, which overlooks the Ebrie Lagoon.

During their decades of freedom, Lacote, a French national, and Van Acker, from Belgium, often lived a life of luxury, flitting between mansions and collecting high-performance cars. They funded this lifestyle primarily through a series of crimes.

One man however was determined to pursue them. This was a Dublin businessman called Noel Hanley, who had been fleeced of €1.5 million by Lacote in a business deal that originated in Waterford.

Hanley was relentless in pursuit of a dangerous convicted murder and his accomplice. How his path first crossed Lacote, how was he defrauded, and what he did next is an extraordinary story.

It can be found in various overseas court documents, and in Hanley’s own words over the years.

Already international documentary makers are working to tell a story on the screen of a twisted tale of criminality and deviousness that crisscrosses the world.

Hanley was one of the few prepared to take on the Devils. But just how did he ever get involved with them?

****

In January 2007, Noel Hanley took over Euroceltic Airways the only airline operating out of the South East of Ireland. A London-based businessman called Diran Kazandjian had founded the airline in 1999 and it ran daily flights between Waterford and London-Luton.

Kazandjian had become a millionaire from running one of the first mail-order PC manufacturers in the early 1990s. He was married to an Irish woman called Jennifer and together they had launched Euroceltic.

Six weeks after they began trading, foot-and-mouth disease was discovered in Ireland. Then came the September 11, 2001 attack, draining cash flow as they were trying to build up the business. The airline had stuttered along, prompting Kazandjian to eventually put it up for sale.

Hanley ran an international shipping company called Global Ocean Technologies when he took over the small airline. A group of Waterford-based businessmen also stumped up money to keep the airline going, but Hanley controlled the business.

He switched its base to Waterford and set up a small aircraft maintenance operation in Waterford Airport. It was the boom and millions were being ploughed into the airport, which was described locally as a “credible alternative” to Dublin and Cork with plans to attract one million passengers a year.

In a July 2002 interview with The Irish Independent Hanley explained that his investment in Euroceltic was both a defensive and opportunistic move. “I was running a shipping business from Waterford and it was a very handy direct link to the UK,” he said. “We were afraid if the airline went, we would have to go back to flying from Dublin and a number of Waterford business people felt the same way.”

“The airport was built 12 years ago, it was where Ryanair started and then BA ran flights from there, but nothing ever got going very well,” Hanley said.

“Waterford was going nowhere, the train takes three hours to get there, the road service is horrendous. It didn’t seem to be developing. It might sound a bit generous, but I thought I could do my bit.”

Within a few months, Euroceltic was doing 3,000 to 3,500 passengers a month. It won two Public Service Obligation (PSO) contracts from the state, which were due to allow it more than double in size and open up a range of new routes.

A time of optimism

“At the moment we have two Fokkers and we are buying four from Aer Lingus at the cost of €10 million,” Hanley explained.

“They are the Fokker 50 that Aer Lingus used on the PSO routes and still owns. Aer Lingus is preparing them for us at the moment and we should have them within the next few months.”

Hanley said his plan was to grow Euroceltic by serving airports that were too small for larger Boeing planes. It was a time of optimism for smaller airlines.

Former school teacher Pádraig Ó Céidigh, a dynamic Galway-based businessman, had bought Aer Arann in 1994.

From a tiny base in Connemara serving three Aran islands, he had transformed it by 2006 into a regional airline that carried one million people a year and had sales of €100 million a year.

Hanley figured he could do for the South East what Ó Céidigh had done in the West. He knew the shipping business and the airline game had some similarities.

“I run ships around the world. I have a ferry business in New Zealand and others around the world,” he said.

“I do a lot of work for the Irish government mapping work for the Government Information Services. Part of the work is telecommunication cable-laying.”

He also worked on wind farms, an emerging sector in Ireland. Hanley had not always been a businessman.

“I am a vet but was always messing with machinery and that is how I got into shipping,” he said.

“I’ve lived in the UK for a while and in South America and have returned here in a semi-retirement capacity, I suppose,” he added.

“I have a jet kept in Waterford, which is partly how I got to see what was going on at the airport. To get this business up and running has cost me a few million, and by the time it’s finished I’d say it will take a lot more,” he added. “But it should be a valuable company at the end of the day.”

Hanley had a plan. Now all he needed was the money to buy some more airplanes.

****

Euroceltic needed $3 million to buy its first tranche of aircraft from Aer Lingus. It had its PSO contracts in the bag so it was not an overly risky investment. The plan was to raise finance off the back of these contracts and the potential of Euroceltic to grow.

Aer Lingus required a $590,000 deposit up-front with the remainder payable on delivery of the aircraft.

A clause in the deal said that Euroceltic had to take delivery of the aircraft by June 30, 2003 or the deposit was to be increased by another $100,000. Later this was extended until July 4.

Noel Hanley paid the $590,000 initial deposit. He had another $600,000 but he needed to find a way to make up the balance.

An aircraft broker referred him to a South African businessman. This businessman advertised his services on the internet as Roger Wilcox.

Wilcox, it would turn out, did not exist. It was just one of many aliases used by Lacote, who was known to other victims as Roger Baudry, Erroll Little and Reginald Little as well as by fellow criminals by his nicknames Light, Smokey and Eye.

It would be some time yet before his unwitting Irish partners realised who they were really dealing with.

“Wilcox” said he owned a financing company in South Africa called Cp Corpcan.

He said his firm could advance $3.5 million to Euroceltic on the deposit of security of $1.75 million into either the airline or Hanley’s bank account in Johannesburg.

Thereafter this $1.75 million would be put into an escrow account.

To raise this money AIB agreed to advance Hanley $1.15 million against a mortgage on his house.

A condition of the advance, AIB said, was that this money was put into the account of a solicitor until the whole of the purchase price was received.

Daniel Joseph Hanley, known as Joe, was Noel Hanley’s brother. He is a respected solicitor who runs with a sister an experienced firm called Hanley & Lynch based in Dublin 6.

Noel Hanley’s $600,000 plus the $1.15 million went into his solicitor’s account. In total now $1.75 million was there.

His Irish partners did not like this as they had no control of the account.

‘Wilcox’ suggested it was time to put this money into an account in South Africa, in preparation he claimed for the finance to be raised from his company.

He opened a bank account in an Absa Bank, a South African listed financial services company, and called it Euroceltic Airways.

It was, however, in the name of Lacote who had sole signing powers on it.

His Irish partners did not like this as they had no control of the account.

It was agreed that a foreign bank accountant controlled by Joe Hanley was the better way to do things.

On June 23, 2003 Andriette Fourie, an assistant to Tim Hewan, a banker in Absa’s private bank division, opened an account for Joe Hanley.

Hanley transferred $1.75 million from his solicitor’s client account to the Absa account.

Time had now passed. Under the contract, a payment of $100,000 was due to Aer Lingus as Euroceltic was not ready to close the deal.

So far so good. Lacote, however, was now ready to swoop.

****

On June 30, a fax of a letter was sent from the Mostyn Hotel in a Georgian building near Hyde Park in London.

The letter was addressed to Andriette Fourie and instructed Absa to transfer $1.75 million out of Absa into another account in Coutts & Co in the name of “Storacar / client account Joe Hanley”.

The letter ordering this transfer purported to be signed by Hanley, but it would later turn out this signature was a forgery.

Fourie informed her boss of the letter by fax. Hewan said this was not acceptable and he rang the number on the letter.

He spoke to an individual he believed was Hanley – but who it would turn out was not – and told him the bank could not transfer money without original documentation.

He also said that the bank account required some money to be left in it if it was to remain open.

Hewan had never met or spoken to Hanley before but was now openly discussing his bank account over the phone to London.

Forged signature

Later on June 30, a second attempt was made to transfer a slightly less amount of money – $1.74 million -– out of Absa to Coutts. Another letter came in – again with what would turn out was a forged signature.

Hewan again rang back the number on the letter and said that original documents were needed.

Luckily he said his nephew was due to fly from London to South Africa so he suggested to the caller that he should give him a signed original letter instructing the transfer.

Hewan picked up his nephew from the airport and dropped off the letter at the bank’s office to be dealt with.

An Absa employee, however, noticed that the Hanley signatures did not match and refused to authorise any payment.

Calls were again made to the man claiming to be Hanley in London. New documents were faxed to London for completion.

There were two pages to be filled in a form known as a 702. The first page was for the customer name, address, etc. and details of where the money was to be transferred to.

The second page was for signatures to authorise the transfer.

The mysterious party in London – whoever they were – remained eager to transfer money on, but they were not there yet.

****

Joe Hanley was not in London on June 30. He was on holidays in the South of France, so it could not have been him giving instructions or getting his own signature wrong.

“Wilcox,” who was really Lacote, rang Hanley and said he needed some documents to be signed in relation to the deal.

He said his secretary was in Paris and would Hanley pop up to see her and sign them. Hanley signed two regular loan agreements. However, he did not sign another document presented to him.

This document was unusual as it was not clear what it was for (it would later turn out it was the second page of the 702 document required to transfer money out of Absa).

The pressure was now on to close the deal with Aer Lingus by raising finance from Euroceltic’s purported South African partner.

Noel Hanley told his brother that his partner “Wilcox” was insisting he travel to South Africa to sign the relevant forms needed to close the deal.

A Nick Havvas, an associate of Lacote who said his name was “Peters”, showed up to meet Joe Hanley in South Africa. Over the course of July 4, various documents were presented to Hanley to sign.

“Wilcox” kept sending them back to be resigned on various pretexts that they were not filled in correctly.

The forms were actually filled in correctly – but Lacote was building things up to taking his chance by creating false problems relating to issues specific to South Africa.

“The scene was now set for Lacote to misappropriate the balance on the account”

South African Supreme Court judgement

The South African Reserve Bank approved money transfers out of the country and this complexity was now artfully used by Lacote to keep sending the forms back for resigning. Deliberately he was making things more confusing.

Finally Lacote had what he wanted – a second page of the 702 document with the phrase “$100,000 USD Deposit see page 1” written on it and a correct signature secured.

According to a later Supreme Court of South Africa Judgement in November 2013, which examined the affair, “the scene was now set for Lacote to misappropriate the balance on the account”.

At first, things proceeded as expected. The $100,000 intended for Aer Lingus was transferred to it. When Noel Hanley heard this, he told his brother. The deal appeared to be moving ahead.

There was now $1.65 million in the Absa account. Lacote lured his marks in by continuing to appear to be pressing ahead with his part of the financing deal. In reality he was now ready to go.

On July 8, 2003 an imposter rang Fourie claiming to be Joe Hanley. This person told her to prepare to make a second transfer. Nick Havvas showed up at the bank with an open Fedex envelope which contained a 702 form supposedly sent from Europe authorising another transfer.

There was, however, an alteration on the second page. Where it had read US$100,000, it was changed by writing a ‘1’ before the ‘100,000’ and changing the original ‘1’ into a ‘6.’

Just like that, Lacote had created a document with a genuine signature that was authorising the transfer of US$1,600,000 out of the Irish business venture’s account and into his grasp.

The transfer was cleared. LaCote had the money.

It was only on July 25, 2003, 17 days later, that it was realised that the money was gone and, what was more, Wilcox did not exist.

The Devil had struck again. But who was he?

****

Marcus Mitchell was a Surrey businessman and married father-of-three. He was tricked by Lacote into putting money into an aviation parts business.

Along with his blonde accomplice Hilde Van Acker, Lacote cheated the businessman out of €500,000. He was one of only many who had been conned by the convincing duo as they roved around Europe.

After he realised the con, Mitchell confronted Lacote. He was shot twice in the head in May 1996 and his body hidden.

Children discovered Mitchell’s body buried under a bush in the sandy dunes of the Flemish resort of De Haan. Van Acker and Lacote were arrested and questioned.

Under questioning, Lacote claimed he was “an informant of the French secret services, the British MI5 and German customs”.

The authorities granted Van Acker and Lacote conditional release after several months as they gathered more evidence. Lacote was represented in his pleadings by a Belgium lawyer named Pierre Chevalier.

Van Acker and Lacote fled Belgium as soon as they could. In his haste, Lacote left his LearJet behind. First they went to Brazil, then South Africa.

In October 2000, Belgian media reported that Chevalier, by then a politician, had represented Lacote. There was a scandal and Chevalier resigned from a junior government position. He was later cleared of any wrongdoing in the affair.

Lacote had used him, as he had done and would do with so many others.

****

By 2000, Jean-Claude Lacote was in South Africa and ready for his next incarnation: reality television.

He became the producer of a reality series called Duty Calls, which claimed to show how police “dealt with violent criminals and dangerous crime scenes”.

The show ran for ten programmes. In publicity shots for the show, Lacote posed by squad cars dressed in police-style clothes. He revelled in his role mixing with top cops from South Africa’s anti-corruption Scorpions division.

In 2006, Duty Calls director Cedric Sundström told Cape Town newspaper The Saturday Star that Lacote was a “very charismatic high-flyer” who always dismissed the rumours circulating about him.

“He told me that it was a case of mistaken identity, and I believed him because, after all, he wasn’t in hiding: he was holding press conferences, conducting interviews and working with the police,” Sundström said.

“Why would I kill the guy who owed me the money?”

Jean-Claude Lacote

Lacote played upon his bad boy image. In a 2000 interview, he admitted he had appeared in courts in France and England, but claimed this was due to “tax issues arising from his father’s Swiss gold export business.”

He dismissed the suggestion that he himself had defrauded at least a dozen businessmen there.

In another interview, he denied murdering Mitchell.

“This guy owed me €500 000,” he lied. “In my country, they have a saying that you ‘don’t kill your banker’, so why would I kill the guy who owed me the money?”

Lacote was charismatic, popular, and prepared to splash his cash around. He became friends with many policemen and political figures. He claimed to have been trained as a commando in France, to own a castle in Scotland and to be giving away part of his fortune to buy cars to help South African policemen catch more criminals.

This closeness was later suspected to be one of the reasons it proved so hard for the Belgians to extradite him from South Africa. But there was never any evidence proving this. The first attempt to bring him to justice by Belgium was in 1999, but Lacote defended the action and years went by.

Duty Calls started showing in Europe on the Reality TV channel, rubbing salt into the wounds of his victims.

Even putting LaCote on the EU’s most wanted list achieved little. He was free and enjoying himself as a minor celebrity and multimillionaire.

Noel Hanley, however, was determined to change that.

Old-school

Fourteen years ago, only a few years into my journalism career, I interviewed Noel Hanley in relation to his relentless pursuit of Lacote.

By 2006, Hanley was three years into chasing him.

“I am a bit old-school. I have a well-established sense of outrage against people trying to screw me,” he told me.

Pursuing Lacote had taken its toll. His life, he said, had become “like scenes from a movie… like living in the centre of a Jeffrey Archer novel”.

Hanley told me he had hired private detectives to pursue Lacote to a seven-bedroom mansion in Johannesburg.

Lacote had by then begun collecting Ferraris, and Hanley’s private sleuths watched as he came and went, flitting between parties and business meetings.

Hanley had tried reporting Lacote to the police in South Africa, but they appeared disinterested to him. Belgium was rumbling on with its attempts to extradite Lacote, but it was treading water.

Hanley decided to take things into his own hands.

He hired lawyers and secured a freezing order on Lacote’s assets, after he explained how he had been defrauded in Ireland.

While the cops appeared disinterested, being taken on in the civil courts was another matter. Suddenly, Lacote was under pressure.

Back in England, Hanley went after Lacote’s alleged accomplices. He complained to the authorities that he had been the victim of fraud, and they took action.

In October 2007, an English businessman called Allan Cowen of Lyndale Avenue in Cricklewood was found guilty of transferring criminal property.

Noel Hanley’s money had been transferred into a Coutts bank account owned by Cowen’s car storage company Storacar based in Buckinghamshire.

In Cowen’s trial in Southwark, Crown Court Prosecutor Paul Cavin said: “It was in that account for a day before Coutts began to receive instructions by fax from Mr Cowen to send it here, there and everywhere.”

“For example, £700,000 went to an expensive car dealership in Germany to pay for Ferraris. Thousands more went to an art gallery in Canada and to a gold bullion dealer in Threadneedle Street, in central London.|”

“All, say the Crown, designed to launder the money, or wash the dirty money.”

Cowen was found guilty of one count of arranging or facilitating the acquisition of criminal property and eight counts of transferring criminal property.

Retribution had been served to one criminal, but the mastermind remained free.

****

In February 2007, Lacote was arrested in Johannesburg on a string of fraud charges and denied bail because he was a flight risk. Hanley had instigated the charges against him, before others came on board too.

French businessman Georges Sleiman, who claimed to have been swindled in a similar scam, joined in as did a South African businessman who said he had lost millions.

As he awaited trial, in February 2008, Lacote walked out of prison and disappeared. It took his prison warders a week to notice he was missing.

Lacote had been booked out of prison by two men and two women dressed as police officers who said he was needed for questioning “for an investigation”.

The video footage, when it later emerged, showed that one of the women looked like Hilde Van Acker, but it was impossible to be sure.

‘‘I will see Lacote face justice. What beggars belief is how is it possible that a man can be put in prison and simply walk out.”

Noel Hanley

South African newspaper The Saturday Star broke the story, forcing the Department of Correctional Services to confirm Lacote had escaped.

It said it was investigating the matter “starting with video footage”. An internal investigation was launched into whether there were “officials who may have colluded with the fraudsters”.

The entire thing stank. Noel Hanley was furious. He decided to put a bounty out that was payable to anyone with information that led to the return to prison of his nemesis.

‘“I will pay one million rand (€170,000) for anything which leads to Lacote’s recapture and his being brought to book for what he has done,” Hanley told The Sunday Business Post.

“It has taken me nearly six years to get this far, and he walks out of what is supposed to be a maximum security prison.

‘‘I will see Lacote face justice. What beggars belief is how is it possible that a man can be put in prison and simply walk out.”

****

In January 2016, The Independent in London interviewed the widow of Marcus Mitchell. “It’s the injustice of it,” she told the paper.

“That man and that woman live a life of Riley and they killed my husband and the father of my children.”

“I Google his name regularly in the hope, one day, that it will come up that he is behind bars.”

Noel Hanley went back into business. Like for most entrepreneurs, the financial crisis was not easy but he kept going.

In 2010 he was embroiled in a legal dispute with National Irish Bank involving a company used to buy a roll-on roll-off ferry.

Gradually, he went back under the radar, where most other small to medium-sized businessmen or women always are.

On November 21, 2019, Jean-Claude Lacote and Hilde Van Acker were both arrested in Ivory Coast.

Lacote had been running a small regional airline in the west African country, ironically like Hanley had hoped to.

Lacote, however, has links to war-torn parts of the Congo, so it is possible there was more being transported on his flights than just passengers.

Lacote was convicted in absentia of murder in 2011 by a court in Bruges. Along with Van Acker, they both have the right to request a retrial.

“I blindly followed someone without knowing what I was doing.”

Hilde Van Acker

As she awaited extradition back to Belgium, Van Acker did a self-serving interview with the Belgian broadcaster VTM from her prison.

“I blindly followed someone without knowing what I was doing,” she complained.

“I didn’t even know I was convicted of the murder at the time. I am happy to finally be able to return but I am afraid of public opinion in Belgium.”

“We have been waiting for this moment for 23 years,” Martin Van Steenbrugge, commissioner of Belgium’s federal police, said.

So have many others including Noel Hanley and his brother Joe.

I contacted Joe last Thursday, asking to speak to Noel.

Joe Hanley said he would pass my number on. He was on his way to Andorra and didn’t want to comment himself.

A Belgian documentary maker, Joe Hanley said, had already been touch.

Lacote’s arrest is big news in Belgium, and has been picked up by many international publications. But the role of one Irishman in taking on a master criminal is less well known.

At the time of going to press, Noel Hanley had not called. He was both brave and relentless in his pursuit of a highly manipulative and dangerous criminal.

Hopefully, he will when he has time. Perhaps, he just wants to move on. Or perhaps he is saving his story for a Netflix series.

Undoubtedly, there is a movie in all this.