Villa Nice

Nice Today
Sirice the 1930S, many of Nice's hotels and villas have been converted into furnishedflats.while the concrete mixersof destiny march further and further west and up the valleys.TheVictorine studios are stili there, but plagued by noise from jets landingat Nice airport, and now used mostlyfor television commercials. Wealthy, politically conservative retirees help support an equally right-wing rentier population. AH this money floating about has
attracted the corruption and underworld activities of the milieu, previously associated only with Marseille.<br />
For decades Nice was ruled asthe personal fiefdom of the right-wing Medecin family, who pretend to be related to the Medicis, although it doesn't lookas if their dynasty will endure quiteas long. Jean Medecin reigned as mayorfrom 1928 until 1965, and was succeeded by his flamboyant son Jacques, cook, crook and anti-Semitic hosterof a National Front congress noother city would have, the man who twinned Nice with Cape Town when apartheid was stili on the books. Jacques Medecin had an edifice-complex nearly the sizeof Mitterrand's in Paris, filling Nice with huge new public complexes, and hiscronies had their fingers in ali kindsof pies- most spectacularly Albert Spaggiari, who got hold of the plans of Nice's sewer system in ordertosteal 46 million francs from theSociete Generale, and was captured by the police only to escape the courtroom by jumping out of the window on to a waiting motorcycle and making a clean getaway. In 1990 the slow, grinding wheels of French justice began to catch up with Medecin, when it was discovered, a mong other things, that money for the Nice Opera was being diverted into the mayor's bank account. He tookto his heels and hid out in Punta del Este, Uruguay, until 1995 when he was extradited to France,where he died in 1998. His sister Genevieve narrowly defeated the National Front candidate in locai government elections and took his old seat on the Conseil General of the Alpes-Maritimes departement; his successor as mayor of Nice, Honore Bailet, had some troubles of his own.especially in the form of a son-in-law accused of murderinga locai restaurant owner. In 1995 he wasousted by Jacques Peyrat, a friend of Le Pen and former Front National member who hasfound a home in President Chirac's UMP (Union pour la Majorite Presidentielle). Under Peyrat, many of the FN's ideas have been implemented into city policy. He gave Medecin a funeral in Nice's city hall when the old crook died, and now there isa proposai to name a boulevard after him.Medecin's critics, noting the billion eurosof debt he left the city, along with the millions he stole for himself, have proposed Rue Mozartforthe honour-the streetthat leads to the city's prison.