“We’re looking for a lookout. Profile: Young, physiognomist, knowledge of two wheels valued, respectful of customers. Working hours from 10.00 a.m. to 10.00 p.m. (adapted to the sales times). Price 100 euros/day. »
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It’s one of those social media announcements that lure drug “squads” into Marseille’s trap. In this large French port in the Mediterranean Sea, a key stop on the world cannabis routes, around thirty young people were killed in drug trafficking in 2022, around fifteen more in 2023, including three on Monday.
Zacharie*, 19, couldn’t resist. Attracted by the mirage of easy money, he “came” from the Paris region after failing his high school diploma to stand guard at one of the city’s 130 drug stores. “The pay is bigger here,” he told the court.
In recent years, traffickers in Marseille have increasingly used very young workers from other regions of France, who are often weak and more easily expendable.
And many “find themselves reduced to a state of quasi-slavery, confiscated, even tortured,” warns the President of the Marseille Court, Olivier Leurent.
In France’s second largest city, the level of drug-related violence is comparable to that of the ports of Antwerp (Belgium) and Rotterdam (Netherlands), academic Jean-Baptiste Perrier points out. The threat of “Mexicanization” worried judges.
The traffickers “can no longer recruit enough Minots (“small” speaking in Marseille, editor’s note) in the housing estates of Marseille because the latter believe that they are not paid enough at the risk of being killed”, explains an investigator from the criminal police to AFP. “So they recruit elsewhere. »
The very sophisticated networks use all the company’s codes: “We outsource the work and these young recruits can’t provide any information through the network in the event of an arrest,” explains Tiphanie Binctin, deputy director of AFP’s strategy department at the Office of Narcotics (Ofast ).
Recruitment gauges are elegant and neatly arranged with cannabis leaves at the four corners of the screen.
Like this other one on Snapchat looking for “quick wits looking for #Marseille #favelas” to do the “chouf,” sound the alarm by shouting “arah” or “charcoal” at the sight of cops. sell when they are more seasoned. Locally they are called “jobbers”.
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Up to €80,000 per day
Most get off at Saint-Charles station. From the forecourt, your gaze heads south, where the Calanques massif offers its Instagrammable turquoise coves.
But they take the VTC the other way, towards the northern districts, because almost no subway or tram services serve those areas.
Marseille, trying to make up for a historic delay in equipment, is divided in two with its affluent southern and central north districts, where between village squares and large sets there are pockets of poverty that are among the worst in Europe.
Les Rosiers, Les Micocouliers, Les Oliviers, La Marine Bleue, the city is full of towns with rural names that are actually plagued by traffic where sometimes even the traffic is filtered by traders.
Some transaction points can earn up to €80,000 per day. In a recent raid, police saw up to 12 customers queuing. France is one of the biggest cannabis consumers in Europe and is second to none when it comes to cocaine.
The town of La Paternelle is currently at the center of a bloody conflict that is increasingly affecting minors: a 17-year-old lookout was lynched there in February and another 16-year-old was shot dead in early April.
Photo CHRISTOPHE SIMON / AFP
Relatives of youths who were recently killed in the port of Marseille demonstrated on April 3rd.
Here, a signposted path amidst small colorful and dilapidated buildings leads to “Yoda”, one of the outlets.
The prices hang on the walls: “Shit, Weed, Coke” to choose from. The crowing of many roosters in the wild dominates in this labyrinth of narrow streets perfect to escape from police raids who carry out a strategy of harassment.
Today, 40% of the minors brought before the Marseille courts for drug trafficking come from outside the city. They come from the Paris region, particularly from the Val-d’Oise, but also from the Hérault, the Alpes-Maritimes in southern France or the Rhône Valley.
“Better do that than the hustler”
“I had to be able to work to get my daughter back, which was better than being the hustler,” said Cindy*, 21, in her testimony to an immediate hearing.
With his adult companion Ilyes*, they hitchhiked from their village in the Hérault and then took the train. They slept in a hotel in the center, “one person from (the town of) Bassens takes us all to one place”.
Some are less well off, sleeping on a balcony, in a basement or in a garbage room.
During the “holidays” from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. or 5 p.m. to midnight, they earn an average of between 100 and 200 euros, sometimes significantly more. Reduced to the hourly rate and with the associated risk, “that’s pure exploitation,” emphasizes child judge Laurence Bellon.
“But they see the profit over the week or month, for example €1,400 per week for seven consecutive days. And some, it must be said, see themselves making a lot of money,” notes Marseille prosecutor Dominique Laurens.
Like this 16-year-old teenager from a neighboring country who came “to enjoy life” and was arrested with two kilos of cannabis, a very large amount that “proves that he is already very involved”, according to the judge.
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The Debt Trap
For many, the trap closes quickly: they are accused of not having given the warning in good time, not having counted the bills quickly enough or having a more or less fictitious guilt.
“They have fewer resources and connections to the neighborhood, they are paid less, treated less well. And they relapse because if they are arrested with cash and products after the network demands reimbursement,” explains lawyer Valentin Loret.
Recently, a released minor was put on the train to go home, but the dealers were waiting for him at the nearest station. He had a debt to pay.
Marseille “it’s not an Eldorado, it’s violence, torture and barbarism, bogus debt, it’s at the mercy of the network,” stresses Bouches-du-Rhône police chief Frederique Camilleri.
Since this phenomenon began in 2019, a 16-year-old teenager who ran away from his home in Chartres (centre) had ended his stay in Marseille in a coma, burned with a blowtorch for selling a few bars. Shit” without permission. One of his torturers, a minor at the time of the incidents, was sentenced to 10 years in prison in November.
Cases are bordering on human trafficking, for the judge for children.
Like this one: In 2020, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, teenagers recruited through the networks are quickly kidnapped upon arrival, beaten, tortured for no apparent reason other than to subdue them.
One of them, then 15, was raped and forced to perform oral sex by a young dealer, a justice source reports. He is then sextape blackmailed into shutting up, which is usual.
A dozen people, including minors, are implicated in this case, from the alleged rapist to a landlady worthy of a Zola novel, accused of forbidding the two victims to go out and take a shower.
And there are dead, like this 20-year-old from Seine-Saint-Denis near Paris, whose bullet-riddled body was dumped on a vacant lot in La Paternelle.
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“Tramps in Luxury Clothes”
Are a few hundred euros worth it?
“They fit into this logic of having branded clothes, that’s the only identity trait that they highlight” to feel they exist, analyzes Laurence Bellon, who sees that many start studying from the age of 11 break off years.
“They are vagrants in luxury clothes,” says a lawyer, annoyed that his client neither assesses the seriousness of his case nor the risk of reprisals, but instead struts around in a very expensive white tracksuit.
All question the role of series like “Narcos”, influencers, social networks that instill the idea of success through looks and money.
These young people are unknown to local social actors and are more difficult to care for. Many end up turning to their parents, the police, or anyone else.
In December, a youth jumped on a bus, asked passengers for help, and said he was being kidnapped. In January, another escaped onto a city rooftop and called for help, a police source lists.
“Mexicanization”?
According to the prosecutor, Marseille is still a bit of a “pilot” and this phenomenon of transient drug workers has now spread, particularly to Lille (north) or to small towns in France in Brittany (north-west) or in the Vaucluse (south) .
Currently, the labor shortage is so great that traffickers also recruit migrants, sometimes minors, Algerians or Nigerians, some of whom initially think of being hired on construction sites on a daily basis, stresses Me Loret.
Because traffickers use all means of recruitment, from social media to traditional methods (word of mouth, posters at bus stops, etc.), the police have difficulty tracking down the networks.
The public prosecutor’s office fears “that we are still experiencing an aggravation of the situation here, with a shift like that experienced by certain countries in South America, a Mexicanization” – even if the number of deaths is not comparable.
“It’s more than lawlessness, I don’t know how to describe it. It sometimes reminds me of the image of Brazil, there are places where there are complete divisions between the beautiful neighborhoods and those experiencing extreme poverty, hyper-violence, “supports Judge Laurence Bellon.
Zacharie got away with it. Arrested in Marseille after just three days, he was sentenced to house arrest along with his very mobilized mother.
“He was caught early in his criminal career, he had a clean record and there was a certain pedagogy of punishment: he was spared the prison shock,” estimates his lawyer Me Matthieu Kraif.
In addition, he is not allowed to appear here for three years because, as the public prosecutor ironically said at the hearing, “the climate here doesn’t suit him”.
*The first names of these youths have been changed to avoid putting them at greater risk of reprisals.