Social climber's guide to Vienna - Udo Proksch affair

National Review, March 10, 1989 by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

AN ACCOUNT OF the violence and corruption practiced by friends of Austria's left-wing political elite has recently taken its place near the top of the Austrian best-seller list. Packing 672 pages of political dynamite, The Lucona Case, by Austrian journalist Hans Pretterebner, has already sold 75,000 copies. (Austria's population is less than eight million. A proportionately successful American release would have to sell more than two million copies!)

Even before the book came out, every Austrian knew its villain, the Socialist socialite Udo Proksch. His intrigues and adventures, along with multiple marriages, divorces, and affairs involving some top-drawer ladies, have long been common gossip. Son of an ardent SS man who served a two-year prison sentence after the war, Proksch is a twentieth-century combination of Cagliostro and Casanova rolled into one. Anything but handsome, neither a dazzling bon vivant nor even an elegant dresser, this short, muscular fellow has nevertheless maintained intimate friendships with members of both sexes. Perhaps because he did not have a winning personality, good looks, or a "background," he came to lust after power, money, and influence. After dropping out of school, he tramped all over Europe, involved himself in some shady businesses, served as an advisor to various Soviet intelligence services, and finally ended up the owner of Vienna's most renowned and historic cafe and pastry shop, Demel.

Now no one in London, New York, or Chicago would think to buy a cafe-patisserie as a means of accumulating riches, making political connections, and fulfilling social ambitions. But in Vienna, with its famous cafe society, the device worked, in no small part because of Udo's shrewd decision to open a private club on the cafe's upper floor. Club 45, as it was called -perhaps to commemorate the Red Army's liberation of Vienna in 1945? -attracted as members some of the highest-level officials in Austria's Socialist Party, including several current and former cabinet ministers. The Socialists enjoyed the club's exclusive atmosphere and were impressed by Udo's accounts of his experiences, adventures, and connections.

But in the end, Udo Proksch went a step too far. With the money he brought in from Demel and Club 45, he expanded the range of his investments and began building up letterhead corporations right and left. Not long after buying a bankrupt Swiss corporation with assets including an inactive coal mine and some tool sheds, he announced that his new acquisition had sold a complete unassembled nuclear power plant to an unnamed Asian nation and would be shipping the plant by boat from the Italian port city of Chioggia. Crates allegedly full of nuclear equipment and marked as "transit goods" made it past customs officials without inspection, and were loaded onto the Dutchowned transport ship Lucona. With the assistance of Austria's then minister of foreign affairs-a friend of Proksch's and a member of Club 45, who oversaw the whole operationProksch saw to it that two very special containers were placed in the middle of the boat at the bottom of the cargo hold.

Before setting sail, the precious cargo was insured for $20 million with a company owned by people close to Austria's conservative People's Party, part of what Austrians call "the Right Side of the Empire." Needless to say, if the ship sank, the insurance company and its conservative owners would have to shell out $20 million and suffer a major net loss.

And the ship did sink-in the Indian Ocean, where the waters are nearly twenty thousand feet deep and salvage operations all but impossible. Most of the Lucona's 14 crew members perished but, miraculously, five men and one woman survived and were eventually picked up by a Turkish steamer. Brought back to the Netherlands, the survivors testified thatthe ship had been rent by a powerful explosion and had sunk within a few minutes. In Rotterdani, Proksch's lawyers insisted the sinking had been an accident. Perhaps, they said, the ship had collided with a wreck (an impossibility in such deep waters).

Slowly the clouds began to gather over the head of the man who had been prepared to send 12 men and two women to their death. He and his most intimate collaborators were twice briefly arrested and questioned, but the machinery of fraud, including an endless stream of forged documents, along with continuing pressure on the judiciary from the Socialist authorities, conspired to prevent the case from going to trial. Recently a parliamentary committee was formed to investigate the affair. But Proksch, it turned out, was gone. The man who once had the support of a large sector of the mass media is today on the runprobably hiding out in Eastern Europe. Interpol is after him, but with the help of his friends in the East, he may never be brought to justice.

PAINSTAKINGLY researched over many years, The Lucona Case documents the mostly illegal and unconstitutional support given to Udo Proksch by Austria's Socialist Party. All of the author's allegations have withstood the closest scrutiny and, not surprisingly, he has yet to be sued for libel. As for what the average Austrian thinks of these revelations, Otto Schulmeister, the doyen of Austrian journalism, remarked rightly that "by now the people consider the connection between politics and crime as normal; a genuine process of fermentation can be observed in the younger generation and we are lucky that the great demagogues are not yet among us."