William Molinié // Photo credit: Nicolas TUCAT / AFP 7:42 a.m., March 8, 2024

Is the war in Marseille against drug traffickers being lost by the State?

This is what the magistrates of France's second city denounce, who are particularly concerned about the potential corruption of the police.

And to convince police or customs officers to provide them with a service, dealers use several methods, often persuasive. 

The alert is given.

This Wednesday, Marseille magistrates did not hide their concern about the war the State is waging against drug trafficking.

For the latter, the State is on the verge of losing the battle, describing the Marseille city as "narcoville", decimated by "narchomicides".

The fault, among other things, is the asymmetry between limited state resources and the resources of drug traffickers, who, with 3 billion euros in turnover each year, manage to bribe public officials.

Because the risk of corruption is immense when such sums are at stake. The Paris prosecutor, Laure Beccuau, was worried a few days ago about the "risk of corruption within our own institutions".

Well-established methods

To succeed in bribing police officers, gendarmes or even customs officers, traffickers use three ways.

First, the old-fashioned method.

They recruit the civil servant through pressure, intimidation, sometimes violence.

Members of the public official's family may even be kidnapped in exchange for information about an ongoing investigation or a rival clan.

Second lever, traffickers identify vulnerable police officers, those who consider themselves poorly paid, for example, or who are greedy and would be ready to earn more in exchange for a few breaches of procedure.

Finally, third and very recent mode of action: a sort of Uberization of corruption.

The phenomenon has emerged in recent years on social networks.

Dealers post classified ads on secure messaging loops.

They offer between €50 and €100 in exchange for a research sheet or a report.

Anticipate police operations

Objective for drug traffickers: to know what the police have on them in their files to better circumvent the rules.

Thus, if criminals can find out whether a particular dealer will trigger an alert when crossing a border, this will allow them to better organize their escape.

Some also want to know who denounced them.

On Instagram, discussion threads are specially dedicated to this subject, with dozens and dozens of pages of reports, all from police files or the prison administration.

The most courted public officials are customs officers and border police.

They allow criminal organizations to pass their drugs through the flow of goods.

The holy grail for traffickers is to be warned in advance of a police operation in their neighborhood to have time to store the drugs and escape before the police raid.

A phenomenon that goes under the radar

On the other hand, these methods worry the authorities because corruption is very difficult to detect.

These are generally small amounts that pass from hand to hand, with almost invisible movements in bank accounts.

And above all, today, officers can consult police files from home and transmit the information directly to traffickers, without ever having met them.

On Wednesday, the Marseille prosecutor, Nicolas Bessome called for a start before the Senate commission of inquiry. 

Registrars, prison officers, customs officers, gendarmes, police officers... the number of investigations has doubled at the IGPN between 2021 and 2022. Facts which, however, remain to be put into perspective, since the police opened 56 cases in 2022, compared to 30 the previous year. 

All this while in France, nearly 150,000 police officers have access to the files.