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Sunday, June 22, 1997

CHAMPAGNE-MOUTON, France -- Even in hiding, the man who once called himself ``the Unicorn'' knew how to live.

For the last four years, home was Le Moulin de Guitry, a century-old fieldstone mill and former bakery nestled between the Silver and Gold Rivers in this sun-dappled farming community in the Charente region.

Here, as far from a city as one can be in southwest France, he called himself Eugene Mallon and lived with his wife, a Swedish woman named Annika Flodin who canned homegrown fruits and vegetables, baked bread from organic grain, and sewed her own clothes.

``Here he lived very cheaply, aside from the cost of his computer equipment,'' said one of the gendarmes who, on June 13, helped roust from bed the fugitive known to Philadelphians as Ira Einhorn, the 1960s philosopher king convicted of killing his girlfriend in his Powelton Village apartment in 1977 and stuffing her body into a trunk.

Four years later, free on $40,000 bail, the Unicorn vanished, becoming the quarry in a 16-year manhunt that produced several close encounters but, until last week, no payoff. ``They were almost autonomous,'' the gendarme said of the burly fugitive and his slim, pale wife.

For many years, the two lived self-sufficient lives, usually in strikingly similar bucolic locales, keeping to themselves and surviving, by all accounts, on money provided by Flodin's wealthy Swedish family.

Einhorn's existence was a tissue of lies -- from his pseudonym of Mallon, borrowed from a Dublin bookseller, to the identities he adopted as, variously, a novelist, a stock-market analyst, and a book dealer. Flodin appeared as herself.

Prior to the French countryside, home for the couple was Ferndale House, a 350-year-old cottage in an English hamlet of rambling lanes and shoulder-high hedgerows known as South Allington, in South Devon. It was a private place where, according to Einhorn's landlord, Gerald Mannion, ``if you see someone, you say hello, but that's it.''

The man who organized the first Earth Day and the first Philadelphia be-in, then lectured about the counterculture at Ivy League colleges and forecast the future for Fortune 500 executives was ultimately forced into silence by his notoriety while on the lam.

He left it to Flodin, a highly organized woman from a family that owned high-fashion stores in Stockholm, to do most of their shopping -- and their political activism. While they shared their suspicion of a French government plan to bury nuclear waste in nearby Chapelle-Baton, it was she who handed out leaflets at the local town hall.

Einhorn, meanwhile, was busy on ``the book.'' According to Hans and Maria Das, a retired Dutch couple who befriended the ``Mallons'' in Champagne-Mouton four years ago, Einhorn claimed a British publisher was considering a manuscript he had spent years producing.

``It was all his ideas combined in one book,'' said Hans Das, a former chemist who said he enjoyed arguing with his fellow expatriate.

The couples met one market day in late 1993 and repaired to the Dases' 1920s farmhouse in nearby La Roche. They spoke French with Flodin and English with Einhorn, who seemed to understand the local language but could barely speak it.

``He had no bouche for it,'' Maria Das said, using the French word for mouth.

The Dases had heard, in this village of 1,000 people, that Einhorn was a British writer, but when they spoke to him, it was clear he was American, Maria Das said.

Over the months, it became evident that their friend was working on a grand treatise that incorporated his thinking about chaos theory, homeopathic medicine, genetic engineering and corporate power. He would travel regularly to the public library in Limoges.

The couple found the man to be engaging but demanding.

``When he came into a room,'' Maria Das said, ``it was full.''

``Full of noise,'' her husband added. ``You couldn't interfere with his point.''

The two men worked to find subjects of agreement, such as their distaste for the French government's restrictive attitude toward marijuana. Einhorn once brought over some ``so-called marijuana'' he had cultivated.

``It had no effect,'' Hans Das said. ``He was no expert grower.''

The man who called himself Eugene Mallon would go into town twice a week, at most, stopping at the local tabac for a day-old International Herald Tribune. He preferred to stay home, mowing the lawn, tending the garden, swimming in the neck-deep pond.

Flodin was seen more often, dressing with youthful flair, said Anthony Winters, a British retiree who settled nearby with his wife, Judith. Flodin biked into town, danced ballet, and demonstrated against the nuclear-waste site. Neither held a job, and many in town wondered where their money came from. Einhorn told police he was a writer, having authored three books. The gendarmerie had been told that musician Peter Gabriel might have helped him financially.

The Dases figured Flodin supported the couple's simple life, for they had been told her family owned many properties in Sweden. Maria Das said the Flodins helped their daughter and Einhorn buy Le Moulin de Guitry. The elderly couple who had rehabbed the seven-room mill sold it to the ``Mallons'' in 1993 for $130,000.

A break came in 1986, when Jeanne Marie Morrison, who had lived with Einhorn in Ireland, returned to the United States and spoke with authorities.

``She wasn't going to live her life on the lam with Ira, so she came back here,'' Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham said.

Another came two years later, when investigators learned that Canadian socialite Barbara Bronfman, ex-wife of Seagram's liquor heir Charles Bronfman, was sending thousands of dollars a month to Einhorn from her Montreal home.

Interviews after police met with Bronfman and her lawyer in Montreal in 1988 established that the Bronfmans were points in a constellation of industrialists, artists and establishment figures who had supported the hippie guru before and after his arrest.

Citing police sources, the Montreal Gazette reported that the couple posted part of Einhorn's bail in 1979, had lunch with him after his release from jail, and shared his interest in psychic phenomena. In 1972, Einhorn had listed the Bronfmans as references for his Powelton Village apartment.

It was Barbara Bronfman who gave investigators the Stockholm address of Flodin's four-room apartment in a yellow condominium on Karlsviksgatan Street. But less than 24 hours before Swedish police moved in, in October 1988, the Unicorn walked away. The police encountered a wide-eyed, bespectacled woman -- Flodin, then 37 -- who said she was his landlady.

Police warned Flodin that her boarder, who used the name Ben Moore, was wanted in the United States for murder.

Last week, neighbors remembered Flodin well but had little memory of any American boyfriend. They knew her as a pretty woman who ``always made a nice impression, a hardworking and most capable person, also nice-mannered,'' a neighbor recalled.

It was only toward the end of her 13-year stay in the building -- she was, for a time, secretary of the condominium board -- that her behavior changed, neighbors said.

``She became a bit shady and unsociable,'' said Anders Braennland, who lived across the hall.

Then she was gone.

``She moved to Denmark; that is what I heard,'' Braennland said. ``Supposedly, she was a member of some kind of sect.''

That, at least, was the rumor on Karlsviksgatan Street.

Police soon suspected that Einhorn had been more than Flodin's boarder. Months after he left Sweden, so did she. Authorities tracked her to Denmark, then to Dublin, where she had once listed a used-book shop, Cathair Books, as a forwarding address. The shop was owned by a man named Eugene Mallon.

Then they lost her.

She and Einhorn, who by then was calling himself Eugene Mallon, married five years ago in England. They lived in beautiful, rural South Devon, first in the town of Totnes, then in South Allington in 1992, according to Barry and Helen Pope, who ran a health-food store and, for a while, shared Ferndale House with the couple.

Barry Pope described Einhorn as an avid reader, a fan of American football, and a computer whiz who ran up -- and paid -- huge phone bills.

``He was mad about computers,'' Pope said. ``He was using the Internet when no one knew about it. He had lots of friends on the Internet around the world.''

When the ``Mallons'' moved out nearly a year later, they left no forwarding address. Einhorn promised to send it, but the Popes were never in contact with him again.

During this period, a Philadelphia police officer on vacation visited the real Eugene Mallon's tiny bookstore in Dublin. Mallon was not helpful regarding Einhorn, whom he had befriended in the early '80s.

A visit to the site last week revealed Mallon closed Cathair Books six months ago and had not been seen since, according to nearby shop owners. The building was boarded up.

In 1994, Flodin applied for a license in France for her red Fiat 500 with the anti-nukes ``We Stand Together'' bumper sticker. She listed her address as Champagne-Mouton, her name as Annika Flodin Mallon.

Swedish investigators came across the document this year. A question it raised was: Did Flodin live there with Mallon the bookseller or with Ira Einhorn, living under the name of his old friend?

About four weeks ago, the local gendarmerie learned that police in nearby Bordeaux were interested in the foreign couple living about two miles from the center of Champagne-Mouton. Surveillance began.

On June 12, French authorities received a telex authorizing the arrest of Ira Samuel Einhorn. That day, police went over blueprints of the property and strategies for subduing the convicted murderer.

Early the next morning, three Bordeaux officers -- brandishing .357 Magnums and backed by 11 gendarmes carrying 9mm Beretta pistols and wearing bulletproof vests -- knocked on the white gate of Moulin de Guitry for several minutes, waking the couple.

``You're here with someone dangerous,'' they told Flodin when she answered the door.

They found the man upstairs, naked, and cuffed him. Did he know why they had come, they asked.

``No,'' he said.

He denied being Ira Einhorn. Allowed to dress and find his papers, he threw on a loose gray shirt and denims. The name on his Irish passport, over a photo of Ira Einhorn, read ``Eugene Mallon.''

As Flodin shuttered and locked the house on her way to follow her husband to the local jail, she glanced back at Moulin de Guitry. A gendarme said he heard her say, ``This was paradise.''

For four hours of interrogation at the gendarmerie in Champagne-Mouton, the prisoner politely maintained he was not their man.

He was fingerprinted. The prints matched those on file with Interpol. They had been obtained years earlier, when Ira Einhorn applied for a post-office job in Philadelphia as a youth, when he was busted in 1967 for possession of marijuana near the University of Pennsylvania, and when he was booked for murder 12 years later -- after the discovery of the body of his girlfriend, Helen ``Holly'' Maddux, another wealthy young beauty who had fallen under the Unicorn's spell.

That afternoon, in the provincial capital of Angouleme, the prisoner introduced himself to prosecutor Philippe Lagarde as Eugene Mallon but he did so, Lagarde said, ``with a smile and not much conviction.''

Later, after the man now revealed to be Ira Einhorn had been transferred to a medium-security prison in Gradignan, outside Bordeaux, Flodin called Einhorn's old Philadelphia lawyer, Norris Gelman.

Einhorn, the man who ran for Philadelphia mayor in 1971 and mixed with Yippies and Harvard scholars, will probably stay in his common cell until the U.S. government succeeds in extraditing him. He was sentenced to life in prison in 1993 after a trial in absentia.

The extradition process could take from 40 days to three years, including appeals. French officials, meanwhile, are considering whether any charges would be appropriate against Flodin.

Einhorn, whom French officials would not allow to be interviewed for this article, has no phone privileges or personal effects but can wear his own clothing inside the crowded, modern prison. His wife, who declined to be interviewed, has visiting privileges. She traveled to Bordeaux on Wednesday.

Maria Das believes her friend will spend his time reading and writing -- free, once again, to be Ira Einhorn. ``Maybe it's ideal, in a way,'' she said.

``And poor Anni. She's sitting here. What is she going to do now?''

On Friday, Flodin went to market, cutting a striking figure -- 5-foot-8, in black-leather jacket, flowery tights and red, elfin boots, the bangs of her strawberry-blonde hair framing a pale but radiant face. As she filled her wicker basket with breads and cheeses, townspeople approached, shook her hand, and patted her gently. She smiled and laughed, as if it were just another day at the market.

Contributing to this article were freelance correspondents Lisa Kozleski in England, Viveka Holm in Sweden, and Diarmaid MacDermott in Ireland.