As we caught up, the conversation inevitably turned to anecdotes about the firm hand in a velvet glove that characterizes how the government keeps things "clean."

"I got a call from a detective I know one night," Luciano recounted, "while this shady Russian was dining with his lady. He said, 'Tell her to go to the phone, there's a call for her.' By the time she got back to the table from the dead telephone, the Russian was already being escorted over the border."

I told Luciano a story that the Italian prince Pignatelli, descendant of a nine-hundred-year-old royal family, told me about the day he arrived on the train from Genoa to take over the Monte Carlo office of Prudential Bache stockbrokers. He stepped into a café near the station, and the amiable fellow beside him at the bar asked what he was doing in town. Pignatelli told him, and as he left he felt a hand on his shoulder. When the prince turned around, a police badge was flashed in his face. "All right, give me the current market price on ITT," the fellow said. Pignatelli happened to remember it, and was allowed to go on his way, having been screened for authenticity.

Some Russians have caught on to the appeal of Rampoldi, but they are the exception. In high season, Russians sometimes represent more than half the guests in the grand hotels, and the revelers tend to do their reveling among themselves. Arabian sheikhs, who have colonized the coast elsewhere, are comparatively scarce here. The story goes that when Régine ran Jimmy'z in the seventies, she thought that she would help the town out by inciting an incursion of oil money. She invited Adnan Kashoggi—kingpin dealmaker of the Middle East, who was a regular at her Paris club—and the then Prince Fahd of Saudi Arabia to come to Monte Carlo from their golden ghetto in Cannes, and they arrived with a great retinue. They all went to the casino, where they lost a huge bundle, and they never returned to Monte Carlo.

Raucous Russian revelry these days harks back to La Belle Epoque, when Slavic princes and barons drank champagne with others from the Almanach de Gotha, the who's who of European aristocracy. Luciano of Rampoldi laments that the current crop lacks glamour—that its revels lack pizzazz. "It used to be that if you wanted to do something wild and lovely," he said, "you'd have a table at Le Sporting placed right in the sea, and your beautiful woman would sit down with you and drench her evening gown while you sipped champagne together. These Russians order jeroboams of champagne, break off the tops, and splash the backsides of their girlfriends."

Next day, I was having drinks on the terrace of the Monte Carlo Beach Club when some Russians nearby ordered a slew of food and touched none of it. "They do that," a friend who is a longtime resident said. "They order whatever is most expensive on the menu anywhere and don't eat it. They ask for the costliest wines and just taste them for the sommelier—who passes the bottles on to his favorite customers."