Congrats! You have found me and the orchid!
Yesterday morning, Henry Lodeur was arrested at his home just outside of Grasse, France. He is accused of kidnapping the English professor Mark Jannick, who was reported to have boarded a plane together with Lodeur at the Lisbon airport for Maputo, Mozambique, before reappearing last week in torn clothing at a border crossing to Tanzania.
The case once again brings the southern French perfume industry into an awkward spotlight. The perfume producers’ celebrated craftsmanship appears romantic and pre-industrial. Yet, recent events considerably cracked this façade: Earlier this year, a local farmer’s lavender fields were burned down by arsonists, and just last month, a rose trader’s body was found beaten up and suspended from a beam in the roof of his house. The police consider both crimes, which are still unsolved, as unconnected to the present case but assume rivalries and cut-throat business practices at the heart of all three.
Grasse in the hinterland of the Côte Azur is known as the centre of France’s perfume production, where Lodeur’s grandfather started a modest family business when the perfume industry bounced back after the Second World War. While his grandfather was initially buying and extracting essential oils from the perfume staples jasmine, rose and lavender to sell locally, Lodeur’s father expanded the business and reoriented it towards the international luxury brands where profit margins were significantly higher than trading with the local, declining artisanal soap production of Marseille.
When his father died in 1998, Lodeur inherited his fortune, his company and the 8-bedroom house in the hills outside Grasse. He also inherited his father’s reputation to be an expert in procuring the most extravagant essential oils. Lodeur has always been an adventurous traveler and an admirer of the plant world – occupations the perfume trade both requires and enables – and himself collected most ingredients of his oils. Under his leadership, the company produced some of the most extravagant essential oils ever heard of, such as in 2011, when he commercialized “Dromadaga”, an obscenely expensive essential oil, produced from the secretions of the Madagascan Sundew (Drosera madagascariensis) which has a scent of honey and cut grass with a characteristic hint of ammonia. Lodeur cultivates the plants on his farm in Mozambique, which, however, made headlines repeatedly because of violent protests of workers and local farmers. Workers claimed to be made working up to 15 h a day manually collecting sundew secretions with medical syringes, and local farmers complained about exorbitant water use and draining groundwater reservoirs – accusations Lodeur denies.
In recent years, Lodeur’s business has been in financial difficulties. His older essential oils were still expensive to produce but were no longer selling well and he has been pressured to commercialise new scents – circumstances which the police believe to have let him into criminal activities. In mid-2017, Lodeur had met Mark Jannick in the botanical garden in Cambridge, which he manages. Jannick showed him the plant he studies, the Ghost Orchid Epipogium aphyllum, a most elusive plant, which, unpredictably appears in small patches, often in pine forests, before it disappears just as swiftly. Very few areas on the British Isles reported repeated sightings and are heavily guarded by locals. Removal of individual plants is a serious criminal offense in many English counties. The plant relies on a fungus to grow thus complicating cultivation. Yet, Mark Jannick found ways to do just that.
Lodeur was intrigued by the scarcity of the plant and its nectar’s unique smell of fermented bananas, which he claims has a rich complexity, sophisticated connoisseurs appreciate. He considers it the ideal ingredient to supplement tropical, fruity fragrances to give them a bold additional note. But, despite its market potential, a steady supply of Ghost Orchids nectar had been impossible – a challenge Jannick’s cultivation circumvents. The police consider this the key motif for Lodeur’s decision to kidnap Jannick to his farm in Mozambique to develop large-scale Ghost Orchid propagation.