Hello and welcome to Season 7, Episode 7 of Bad Gays, a podcast all about evil and complicated queer people in history.

My name's Hugh Lemmy. I'm a writer and author. And I'm Ben Miller, a writer, researcher,

and member of the board of the Shvulles Museum in Berlin. So last week we talked about John Wickgift,

the Archbishop of Canterbury, who feathered his own nest while also persecuting his Puritan rivals in the Elizabethan Church

of England. Who are we talking about this week, Ben? Well, this week's story has everything. It has

fast cars, vast quantities of jewelry, casinos, the dazzling nightlife of 1920s France, and lesbian swindlers.

Sounds like a Bond film.

So I think a good place to start is with the December 5th, 1928 issue of The Guardian,

which carried the following headline.

And the story here was so important, considered so important, to the Guardian's readers,

that the Guardian had actually sent its own correspondent to France to cover the story.

Swindling charges in Paris, it read.

Woman and her former husband arrested political interest.

So in the early hours of the morning, after an all-night watch had been kept on their houses,

the police had arrested Madame Martha Hannaau, the proprietress of the Gazette du Franque and her business associate and former husband, Monsieur Lazard Bloch.

Okay.

Now, this was a stunning downfall for a woman who had once driven from her chic Paris address to her seaside villa dripped in jewels.

This was a woman who had built a several hundred million franc financial powerhouse,

and she used her newspaper, Le Gazette de Franc de Nations, to promote her get-rich schemes.

And she often advertised these schemes with photographs of world leaders, including

U.S. President Calvin Coolidge and even Mussolini.

Wow, okay.

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