A gripping tale of grit and greed from the backstreets of Paris

Ever since the end of the French masterpiece Le Bureau, I have been looking for a thriller of comparable intensity to commit to. I may just have found it, again on SBS. And again, it’s French but global in scope, and again, like Le Bureau, dominated by the figure of a loner. Who can forget the beaky Malotru, the rogue spy who refused to play by the rules? 

This time, our hero is not a spy, but someone with a much less glamorous job description: a senior customs inspector, Simon Weynachter, played with a melancholy quality (for reasons that soon become apparent) by well-known actor Vincent Lindon, whose weary, weathered visage has graced many feature films.

And this time, the narrative is not fictional, but based on the true story of a crime described, perhaps with a touch of hyperbole, as the scam of the century. Or maybe it was at the time.

Of Money and Blood tells the story of two petty crim Tunisian Jews from the working class Paris suburb of Belleville: Fitoussi (the flamboyant front man, played with swagger by Ramzy Bedia and Bouli (David Ayala as the math brains) who hit upon the idea of creaming off billions in VAT from a fake carbon tax scheme they set up in partnership with a handsome playboy trader Jerome Attias (based on the equally suave real-life fraudster, Arnaud Mimran), who is intent on a get-rich-quick scheme to prove himself to his father-in-law, a scion of the Jewish establishment.

One of the many layers of tension written into the taut, fast-paced scripts is the cultural collision between the streetwise Sephardi swindlers and the showy Ashkenazi businessmen, which I have not seen deployed in a drama before.

Always big noting himself, Attias boasts of funding his friend Netanyahu’s political campaign; in real life, Netanyahu, who has been photographed holidaying with Mimran, denies the amounts involved.