Léon Ortiz

Léon Ortiz, also known as Léon Schiroky and nicknamed the "Rocambole of Anarchy", born on 18 November 1868, in Paris and death on 5 May 1955 in Wilmington (Delaware), was a French-Mexican accountant, burglar, and anarchist militant. He is particularly known for his involvement in the rise of illegalism, of which he was a prominent figure with his group, the Ortiz gang.

Orphaned from his father as a child, he grew up in poverty before gradually turning to anarchist activism. In this context, he became politically active with his friends Louise Michel, Charles Malato, and Jacques Prolo, a group that founded La Révolution Cosmopolite, a 1880s anarchist publication in France. Later, as a contributor to l'Endehors, he met Émile Henry, who became his friend. After joining the nascent illegalist movement through his contact with the Intransigeants of London and Paris and Vittorio Pini, Ortiz embarked on a significant series of burglaries and robberies with his group, the Ortiz Gang —all while evading the police across Western Europe. According to French authorities of the period, he may have funded Émile Henry to commit the Café Terminus bombing.

Arrested with Antoinette Cazal, his partner, he was put on trial and specifically targeted by the Trial of the Thirty, being one of the few to be convicted, while all other anarchists were acquitted. Sentenced to fifteen years of deportation to the Guyane penal colony, he abandoned anarchism and collaborated with French authorities there before being released. In 1901, he left France and traveled to New York. In 1925, Ortiz obtained American citizenship in Wilmington, where he died in 1955.