Mayor of Nice Takes Flight in a Blow to French Politics : Scandal: He’s accused of skimming money, accepting kickbacks when corruption is a hot national topic.

Wars were fought, governments fell and new republics were formed in the rest of France.

But almost continuously for 60 years, unruffled and undisturbed by these outside events, the Medecin family ruled Nice, the French tourist mecca and regional capital on the Cote d’Azur.

Father Jean (The King) Medecin served 35 years as mayor. Handsome son Jacques Medecin took over where papa left off, logging 25 years at the helm of France’s fifth-largest city (population 340,000) without ever facing a serious challenge at the polls.

The only break came after World War II, when Jean Medecin was banned from public office for two years because of his participation in the collaborationist Vichy government.

It was, in French terms, a dynasty enduring enough to rival the Kennedys of Massachusetts and the Daleys of Chicago. Nice was in Medecin hands for nearly half the time it has been a permanent part of France, having been deeded to Napoleon III by the King of Sardinia in 1860.

Along the way, the Medecin clan built a political machine that controlled the southeast corner of France and could deliver enough votes to change the outcome of close French presidential elections.

In addition to being mayor of Nice, Jacques Medecin also was president of the regional council for the department, or state, of the Maritime Alps, and all nine of the region’s representatives in the National Assembly were Medecin loyalists. The mayor had national political clout.

That’s why when Jacques Medecin suddenly packed up and fled the country recently, establishing himself in self-imposed exile in a resort town in Uruguay, the world of French politics was stunned. The ensuing attention has offered a rare peek inside the occult workings of French politics in general, not just in Medecin’s stronghold in the Maritime Alps.

Back in Nice, townspeople were so accustomed to seeing a Medecin at City Hall that they didn’t quite know how to react.

“He is my god. I worship him. We owe him everything,” said a despairing Alex Ricci, owner of a popular Italian restaurant across from the Palais de Justice in the sun-dappled, ocher-tinted old city of Nice.

Jean Oltra, a burly political operative considered the mayor’s right-hand man at City Hall, started wearing two wristwatches, one set to Nice time, the other four hours earlier, to the local time in Punta de Este, Uruguay, where Medecin has set up camp. To Oltra and others here, Nice still operates on two times--French time and Medecin time.

Theories differ over what chased Jacques Medecin from his sunny bastion on the Bay of Angels.

Oltra offered one: “Jacques Medecin is a fighter, but he was broken, crushed by the harassment he suffered. Some people kill themselves in similar circumstances. Jacques Medecin is not one of them. He left.”

The mayor did owe several million dollars in back taxes, the result of a tax department investigation that traced his holdings to Beverly Hills, Panama and the Caribbean. The tax bill forced Medecin, 62, and his American wife, Ilene Graham Medecin, 42, to give up their stunning hillside villa in Nice, complete with its own underground shooting range.

French tax authorities were alerted to some of Medecin’s foreign holdings by a former California business associate, Claudette Pezanas. She was angry that Medecin had not paid her $10,000 she claimed to be owed for her role in unsuccessful Medecin business ventures to sell a bus-stop video system and portable toilets to the city of Los Angeles. So, Pezanas went on a late-night French television program and answered questions about her dealings with the Nice mayor.

After her 1985 appearance on the television program, “Droit de Reponse,” Pezanas claimed that she and her family received numerous death threats. Three years later, she was found dead in the Jacuzzi of her Palm Springs home, an apparent drowning victim but, improbably, still wearing hair-curlers and jewelry.

Palm Springs Detective Mark Harvey noted in his police report: “. . . This agency is unable to establish whether the drowning death of the victim was a homicide or an accidental death.”

At the time Medecin left France, ostensibly on an official trip to Japan, a special magistrate in Grenoble was investigating charges that he had misappropriated tens of millions of francs in public funds through such dubious schemes as a multi-continent “talent hunt” for singers for the Nice Opera.

In October, the magistrate, the equivalent of a federal prosecutor in the United States, issued a warrant for Medecin’s arrest on charges of “fiscal mismanagement.”

Among other charges, Medecin is accused of accepting kickbacks from large, government-funded construction projects in the region, including the new opera building and a convention center here, as well as skimming money from several dozen quasi-public “municipal associations” that received public funding.

In perhaps the most embarrassing episode along these lines, the magistrate is searching for 4.6 million francs (about $900,000) that was allocated to help restructure the municipal debt in Nice.

The money was traced to an account held by a woman friend of the mayor, Elisabeth Arnulf, where records showed it had been withdrawn shortly before investigators got there. Asked about the disappearing money, Arnulf said she loaned it to a boyfriend in New York but forgot his name.

A member of the moderate right political party Rally for the Republic, Medecin had also managed to frighten mainstream French political leaders by his recent flirtation with the extreme right-wing National Front party of Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Because of its large community of pieds noirs, mostly conservative former French colonists from Algeria, and an equally conservative retiree community, the Nice region was already a stronghold for the National Front. Le Pen’s opponents feared that an alliance with Medecin could give the right-wing party its first majority in a regional government.

Fueling this fear, Medecin announced earlier this year that he agreed with 99% of the ideas espoused by the National Front, which has a strong anti-Arab, anti-immigrant platform and has been accused of anti-Semitism.

After Le Pen was turned down by mayors all over France in his attempt to find a site for the National Front’s annual convention last spring, Medecin not only offered Nice but also hosted a reception for Le Pen.

Medecin’s abrupt departure from his hometown left his broad-based political machine exposed at a time when corruption in French politics is a hot topic, and not just on the Mediterranean coast.

In his controversial new book, “Impossible Inquiry,” disgruntled Police Inspector Antoine Gaudino claims that the same kind of corruption that Medecin is alleged to have practiced--accepting illegal kickbacks from government contracts and diverting funds from government-funded associations--permeates the whole French political system, all the way to the Elysee Palace, the office of President Francois Mitterrand.

Gaudino claimed he was suspended from his job as inspector of finance in Marseilles after he uncovered a scheme of false billings on government contracts that steered money to many leading Socialist Party politicians in the south of France. One of the men named in the Gaudino investigation was a former Mitterrand campaign treasurer, Henri Nallet.

Nallet was recently named minister of justice, the government position that oversees the courts.

Unlike the United States, which requires strict accounting for political financing and gives investigative agencies the power to demand party financial records, French political funding has traditionally occurred in the dark, beyond public scrutiny.

In January, the French National Assembly passed a law attempting to correct the problem by requiring more public disclosure of political contributions and allocating public money to help fund campaigns. For decades, however, the French electoral system has operated in a state of semiofficial corruption. Political parties needed money. The most common way to raise it was through kickbacks, often in the form of exorbitant consultant fees, on government contracts.

According to Gaudino, the same crimes that Medecin is accused of committing are also practiced by most of the main French political parties, including the ruling Socialist Party. He theorizes that the only reason Medecin was picked out for special attention was because, with his potential alliance with the National Front, he posed a political threat to the other parties.

“Corruption exists everywhere,” Gaudino said in a telephone interview, “but the courts are not always authorized to look into it. Today the Socialist Party is in power, and one discovers that the biggest scandals are found in the opposition. Right now, the courts are after Medecin. But they could just as easily go after the others. The same (municipal) associations that surround Monsieur Medecin can also be found around the Socialist Party in the (Marseilles) affair that I investigated.”

From his retreat in Punta del Este, Jacques Medecin sings a similar tune, claiming he is the victim of a “Socialist plot” against him.

Meanwhile, back in Nice, people await his return.

“I can’t tell you when he will come back,” said Jean Oltra. “Not tomorrow, but maybe after a year or two. But he will come back. Nice is his life, his soul, his family . . . . “