Tommy Recco, France's Most Dangerous Man

Tommy Recco, France's Most Dangerous Man For more than sixty years, one man occupied the darkest corner of the French penal system, not because the law demanded it, but because the evidence left no other choice. Joseph-Thomas Recco, known to France as Tommy, known to the prison system as Geronimo, was convicted of seven murders across two separate periods of violence and spent sixty-two years behind bars, making him the longest-serving prisoner in the history of the French republic.His story begins on the sun-bleached coast of Corsica, in the fishing harbours and clan codes of a world that operated by its own laws. It moves through a first murder committed in panic, a fifteen-year imprisonment that produced a model prisoner good enough to fool a parole board, and then the catastrophic unravelling of two years of freedom in which he killed six more people, including an eleven-year-old girl who had made a phone call to her mother.The Curse of Geronimo is the full reckoning with a life that resists every simple verdict. Drawing on court records, forensic evidence, criminological research, and the decades of legal proceedings that followed his second conviction, Fintan Grey reconstructs the case that changed French sentencing law and still haunts the families of those it destroyed.Some men are remembered as monsters. Tommy Recco was something more troubling: a man.