Six seconds, three dead. That brief period of time the shots lasted, but it was enough to end the lives of three young people. Their names were not released. They were between 20 and 23 years old. The ambush occurred shortly after 5:00 a.m. last Sunday. The victims had left the Miami Club nightclub, in the residential neighborhood of La Pomme, in the 11th district of Marseille. They were in a dark colored Mercedes. Two other occupants of the vehicle were miraculously saved and managed to escape.
The new reckoning took place in a theoretically quiet area and shocked the neighbors. Some bullets hit the facades of houses. “We are no longer safe anywhere,†acknowledged the district mayor, Sylvain Souvestre. On Monday night, another shooting, this time in the cité Consolat, a popular and troubled area. Result: six injured, one very serious.
Marseille, with 2,600 years of history, cannot shake off its bad reputation. Despite this, it is the favorite city of President Emmanuel Macron. He feels a weakness for her and for Naples. “I love the tragic Mediterranean cities,” he confessed to one of his biographers, Arthur Berdah. Marseille will also be the destination of Pope Francis’ first official trip to France, next September.
So far this year, the death toll in shootings linked to fights between rival drug gangs has already risen to 21 in Marseille and the department to which it belongs, Bouches-du-Rhône. Last year there were 37 deaths. The victims are getting younger, mostly under 25 years of age and even minors. In this relentless war, automatic weapons are used, with a predilection for Kalashnikov rifles, which are very accessible and reasonably priced.
The settling of accounts confronts, above all, gangs that fight for control of the territory, for the most profitable enclaves for the sale of drugs, a business that is estimated to generate 80,000 euros a day. The most powerful and bloodthirsty groups are called Yoda and Maga. The first of the names was borrowed from a Star Wars character. The perpetrators and the victims are subaltern figures. The bosses tend to hide far from France, in countries of the Maghreb or the Persian Gulf. No matter how much effort the police make, the scourge of the Marseillaise underworld, the subject of films like the French connection, more than half a century ago, which by the way began with a cold-blooded murder and the hitman later biting the tip of the baguette that he had bought. The macabre routine continues, although without the detail of the loaf of bread.
Contract killers are very young, teenagers in some cases. Some speak of “Mexicanization,” of using boys intoxicated by violence as battering rams to eliminate rivals and impose hegemony. The newspapers Le Parisien and La Provence –the great newspaper from Marseille– have recounted the experience of Mattéo F., an 18-year-old hitman, arrested on April 4 on suspicion of the murder, the day before, of Kaïs and Djibril, of 15 and 16 years, respectively. The boys were killed by six bullets. “You’re lucky he didn’t have a gun on him because he would have died shooting,” he snapped at the arresting officers.
Mattéo F. could be implicated in another six or seven settling of accounts. It is estimated that he could have collected, in total, about 200,000 euros. The fee varied depending on the job and its impact on the networks. The principals of the murders demanded that he record the crime scene for the record and post the video on the networks, as a warning. The more clicks the horror images had, the more the hitman charged. An insane calculation. Executioner with advertising cache.
The young hit man presents a unique profile. He describes him as belonging to a middle-class family. His main motivation would not be money, but a fascination with organized crime, just as other young people become fanatical about religion and become jihadists.
A researcher quoted anonymously by La Provence explained the Marseille drama this way: “When an 18-year-old boy has such an exaggerated ego as to kill in cold blood, we have lost the war; the police, the magistrates, the social actors. We must ask ourselves now, collectively, how to try to save the next generation.
