Sobhraj, or How to Be Friends with a Serial Killer (2004)

For seven years Charles Sobhraj (63) lived in Paris as a free man, with a French passport, with two wives and two daughters. On September 22, 2003, he was arrested in Katmandu, Nepal, by police who want to charge him with two murders committed twenty six years ago. Charles Sobhraj' recent capture is opening up a Pandora's Box of a man who has been variously labeled as the most evil man of the 20th century, a serial killer, a brilliant disguise artist, a modern Don Juan who uses women to achieve his goals, an escape artist able to break out of a dozen maximum security jails, an existential animal without morality, the ultimate liar and disguise artist of our time. Sobhraj has never been convicted of even one of the alleged fifty murders he was accused of in Thailand, India, Nepal and elsewhere - most of them young backpackers on the dope and Nirvana trail of the seventies. When he was eventually captured in India in the 70s, Sobhraj avoided certain trial and execution in Thailand by contriving to have himself jailed for twenty years in India. In Tihar jail, Delhi, he became its don and patronized and won the friendship of Islamic terrorist leaders who were his jail mates. On his release he sought and was given French nationality as part of a bargain between Indian and French governments. Eventually living in Paris, he turned to arms dealing and through his jail acquaintances began supplying arms to the Taliban and other jehadi groups based in Pakistan. He even boasts of his brokerage of a possible nuclear deal with Iraq. The story of his life as a boy during the Vietnam war, his abandonment by his father, the story of his progress into crime and his trail of serial murders, the twenty years in an Indian jail and his precarious arms-dealing existence after his release make Charles Sobhraj the subject of an extreme drama of our times. Told through the eyes of his victims, a researcher who has spent 30 years on his case, the police who chased him, the women who loved him, his confidants and friends, and last but not least Charles Sobhraj himself, "Snake" reconstructs the life and journey of this fascinating and terrifying character.