Pierre Nicoli (1929 - 1971) was a French hitman who served as the right-hand man of drug trafficker Alain Charnier during the mid-20th century.
Biography[]
Pierre Nicoli was born in Marseille, France in 1929 to a family of Italian and Corsican heritage. He became involved in a life of crime in the port city, becoming a hitman and rising to be the lieutenant of heroin trafficker Alain Charnier at the height of the "French Connection" during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1971, he murdered the policeman Lionel Gaudreau after following Gaudreau - who had been assigned to tail Charnier - into his apartment. Shortly after, he accompanied Charnier to the United States to oversee the sale of $32 million in heroin to the American Mafia, although Nicoli distrusted Nicoli's other associate, the actor Henri Devereaux.
When Nicoli discovered that his boss was being tailed by an NYPD detective, Jimmy Doyle, Nicoli offered to kill Doyle, as the Frenchmen would be out of the country by the time the NYPD found a replacement for Doyle. Nicoli went on to attempt an assassination of Doyle with a sniper rifle, but he accidentally shot a mother pushing a baby carriage. He fled from the rooftop and onto a train in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where Doyle warned a transit policeman that Nicoli was wanted by the police.
Nicoli shot the policeman after the policeman tried to arrest him, and he proceeded to hold the motorman, Coke, at gunpoint and force him to keep the train running. Nicoli went on to shoot the conductor after the conductor attempted to help his friend Coke, causing Coke to faint; the train went on to run into a barrier at 62nd Street Station, forcing Nicoli to flee on foot. When Nicoli ran down the elevated train station's ramp, he found that Doyle had chased him in a car, and, when Nicoli turned to flee, Doyle shot him in the back, killing him.
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