The Capture of the Unicorn

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The D.A., the FBI, Interpol, national police from half a dozen countries -- through the decades and across the map of Europe and Scandinavia -- they all chased Einhorn. There were stakeouts; interviews with monied acquaintances, including an international rock star and a billionaire socialite; and even a brief attempt by a vigilante cyberposse from Australia to stalk the computer junkie by Internet. Three times in those 16 years, police were close enough to feel his heat. Each time, Einhorn melted away. Now, in remote Champagne-Mouton, another chance.

At 7:30 a.m., the cover of darkness was just peeling back. The Swedish wife, Annika Flodin, 46, answered the knock. "You're living with a dangerous man," a gendarme told her. She said nothing. Quickly, they pushed past her and up the stairs, following their guns. Lying naked in bed was a white-haired 57-year-old man who insisted he was Eugene Mallon, not Ira Einhorn. Police handcuffed him, questioned him at the tiny local police station near the church, whose steeple knifes above the rooftops of centuries-old stone houses, and drove him two and a half hours to a prison near Bordeaux. Though his physical appearance had changed dramatically in his years on the lam -- he had lost 50 pounds and whacked off his long hair and beard -- his fingerprints hadn't. In Philadelphia the long-suffering DiBenedetto received a fax from the Justice Department.

13 June Interpol--France Interpol--Washington Please be advised that EINHORN, Ira, was placed under extradition imprisonment at the prison of Gradignan, Bordeaux.

DiBenedetto, who lives with his wife and daughter in a Philadelphia neighborhood of hard work and modest dreams, bought a bottle of Bordeaux to celebrate. "It was way out of my price range. About $13," says DiBenedetto, whose salary is $52,600. But he drank only one glass. He is saving the rest for the day when Einhorn is returned to Philadelphia, where, in absentia, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in 1993.

It could be a long wait. Through a messy web of international bureaucracy, politics and law, Einhorn is nowhere near being dragged home to serve his life sentence. After his extradition hearing Sept. 2 in Bordeaux, his Parisian attorney, Dominique Tricaud, who claims to have never lost an extradition case, told TIME that in 20 years he has "never been more confident about a case." The French, he says, will not send a man back to a "barbaric" country where he was tried without being present to defend himself. If Tricaud is right, the chase will be over. DiBenedetto, after finally bagging his quarry, will watch Einhorn disappear into the Impressionist painting in which he has lived for the past four years. And the charmed Einhorn, convicted of a horrific murder, will have won a sentence that defies logic and human consideration: Life in the south of France.

The story had been absolutely epic in Philadelphia, touching off endless rounds of horror and disbelief. Ira Einhorn? Peace-loving, earth-hugging Ira Einhorn? In the March 29, 1979, Philadelphia Daily News, the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island was nearly invisible under the mutant block letters at the top of Page One.

"HIPPIE GURU" HELD IN TRUNK SLAYING

Dominating the page was the man who, with atomic energy and electric-blue eyes that alternately charmed and haunted, had dominated every conversation he'd ever had. Einhorn wasn't on a weight-loss program back then. Cross a bear with a man, take away all grooming implements and you get Ira, who considered himself too mythic to bathe regularly or use his given name. Einhorn means "one horn," so he called himself the Unicorn. When it wasn't fair maidens he was after, it was the company of nags like Rubin, Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg. He ingested enough drugs to kill a whale. He organized be-ins. He called himself a planetary enzyme and "sort of smelled like a hoagie with onions all the time," as a friend puts it. For Philadelphia, a social and political backwater in which consciousness raising was a billy club to the head, Einhorn was, all alone, a connection to the psychedelic world.

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