Travel: Escaping to the Scented Islands (Part 7)

Then, in 1971, an airport opened on the north-eastern coast of MahÈ. Tourist infrastructure soon followed: hotels, souvenir shops, ferries, casinos, helicopter tours. Joe Laurence, Seychelles News Agency Five years later, in 1976, England gave the islands independence. But the micro-state got off to a rough start: Just a few months after James Mancham took office as the nation's first president, he was overthrown in a coup organized by Seychelles' socialist prime minister, France-Albert RenÈ.

In time, RenÈ's foes obtained the services of a famed Irish-South African mercenary, "Mad Mike" Hoare, who served as a model for a Richard Burton's character in the Hollywood soldier-of-fortune drama,The Wild Geese. In November 1981, Hoare and a band of aging guns-for-hire chartered a plane from South Africa to Seychelles, packing AK-47s in their luggage and posing as members of a rugby-and-drinking club.

The would-be counter-coup went bad when they landed at the airport near Victoria, the islands' capital. After a brief fire fight that left one customs inspector dead, Hoare and most of his men escaped by hijacking an Air India jet. The South African government paid a R43 million ransom, news reports at the time claimed, to ensure the release of five mercenaries and a South African intelligence officer who'd been left behind.

RenÈ hung onto power with support from James Michel, who was his finance minister and then vice president. He also relied on an Italian named Giovanni Mario Ricci, another in a long chain of outsiders who came to Seychelles to make new lives.

Ricci became RenÈ's friend, advisor, financial backer, and fixer.RenÈ's government teamed with Ricci in 1978 to create Seychelles' offshore financial centre. The Seychelles Trust Company was a joint venture between Ricci and the Seychellois government and held exclusive rights to incorporate offshore companies in the islands.

RenÈ and Ricci created what was, in essence, the world's first socialist tax haven.

By 1981, the year of Mad Mike's failed coup, Ricci had taken sole ownership of Seychelles Trust Company. From his base in Seychelles, Ricci established business interests in as many as two dozen countries around the globe, associating himself with what historian Stephen Ellis calls"some distinctly unusual companies." One was a firm called International Monetary Funding, or IMF, which seemed be named in an effort to mimic the International Monetary Fund.

Ricci was also accredited to Seychelles as a diplomat representing the Sovereign Order of the Coptic Catholic Knights of Malta. It turned out that the order had nothing to the do with the Vatican's venerable Knights of Malta order of chivalry. Instead it was a commercial company based in New York City. Via this manoeuvre, Ricci snared a diplomatic passport and use of a diplomatic pouch, which allowed him to move documents around the world undetected.

Years later it would emerge that Ricci, like many foreigners who come to Seychelles, wasn't exactly what he passed himself off to be.

The father of Seychelles' offshore industry had, in fact, been a financial criminal before he found a home in the islands — and may have been connected to the Italian Mafia, one U.S. ambassador to Seychelles believed. Ricci had been convicted of fraud in Italy in 1958 and, later, of possessing counterfeit cash in Switzerland, and had come to Seychelles after being expelled from Somalia under mysterious circumstances.

RenÈ later claimed that he had asked Italian officials whether Ricci had a criminal record, but "they told us that they had nothing on him."

And then there is the case of reputed Czech mob boss Radovan Krejcir arrived in Seychelles 2005 seeking asylum, after jumping out a bathroom window back in Prague to escape police who were investigating him on murder and money laundering charges.

Krejcir now claims he provided financial support to leading Seychellois politicians and, in return, they offered him and his family a new identity. He stayed on the islands for two years, but decided to leave as the Czechs pressed Seychelles to extradite him. He later lamented that it was so boring in Seyechelles, it was like being a prisoner in paradise. He headed to South Africa on a Seychellois passport under the name Egbert Jules Savy.

Krejcir is currently behind bars in South Africa as authorities decide whether to send him back to the Czech Republic to stand trial or to try him in South Africa on kidnapping and assault charges in connection with a botched $2 million crystal meth deal. "I am no angel,"he said in his defence. "But I'm not the devil."

So the idyllic turquoise waters and white sandy beaches continue to attract pirates, tourists and money launderers alike. Still, these islands deserve to be on your bucket list.