France’s prison escape is a warning. Even gangsters are worried (2024)

Fresh out of prison, Mehdi Boulenouane, a drug lord, was worried he might be targeted. He was right: just before midday on Thursday as he walked along a busy street in a Parisian suburb a masked gunman in a passing car shot him in the head and chest. Witnesses ran from the scene, screaming, as he died on the pavement.

Such acts of extreme violence in broad daylight have multiplied in the eight years since Boulenouane, 38, was jailed. Even this hardened gang member was anxious about returning to streets where turf battles over a multibillion-pound drug trade have sharply increased the risks faced by people in his line of business. “He wanted to completely retire,” said David Metaxas, his lawyer. It is easy to understand why.

From the Riviera to the Channel, a wave of shootouts and assassinations has exposed the dark side of “la belle France” as it gears up for the Paris Olympics in July. In the city on Saturday, three armed assailants, one firing an assault rifle in the air, burst into the Harry Winston jewellers, a popular target for diamond thieves, to make off with gems whose value was not immediately made public.

Bodies have been found in car boots, children caught in the crossfire and tit-for-tat executions live-streamed on social media. Packs of abandoned drugs now wash up often enough on Normandy beaches to attract what police call “narco tourists” — people on quad bikes combing the sands for blocks of cocaine.

The surge of violent criminality was exemplified last week by the cold-blooded killing of two prison guards on the main road from Paris to Normandy, when gunmen wearing balaclavas ambushed a prison van to free a drug dealer known as “the Fly”. Three other people were severely wounded in the attack on Tuesday 65 miles northwest of the capital, which has triggered a nationwide manhunt.

The brazen morning assault followed the release of a report the same day from the senate warning that France was losing the war against traffickers. Now that America has lost its taste for cocaine in favour of fentanyl, which is cheaper and stronger, international drug dealers have turned Europe into the world’s top market for the drug — and imported the ultra-violent tactics of Latin America’s narcos.

“Processes used by South American and Mexican cartels were until now unknown in Europe,” said the report, noting how a French dock worker in Le Havre who was accused of aiding the gangs — which he denied — was found beaten to death.

The crime gangs “no longer hesitate to challenge the state, even in Europe”, said the report. Jérôme Durain, a socialist senator and one of its authors, added that corruption has “begun to spread because there is so much money” involved in the drug-trafficking business.

It has been speculated in the French press that the gunmen who carried out Tuesday’s prison van ambush may have bribed officials to tell them what time they were setting off with “the Fly” and on what route.

Corruption among French prison staff is well documented: a female warder from a Corsican jail went on trial this month for helping a gangland hitman to identify his target in an airport arrivals lounge in 2017 with a kiss on the cheek — a “baiser de la mort”, as the French press reported it.

Holland and Belgium, whose ports are also a primary destination for drugs from South America, have reported similar problems, with dock workers being bribed, blackmailed or otherwise coerced into co-operating, and customs officials also coming under suspicion.

Successive French presidents have pledged to tackle the gangs — but the amount of drugs entering the country is estimated to have risen by 500 per cent in the past 10 years, to judge by the amounts being seized: almost 93 tonnes last year, including cocaine and cannabis. Cannabis is the drug most often impounded, followed by cocaine, according to the Senate’s report. Some of the drugs entering France are in transit to other countries, investigators believe.

In March, President Macron promised an “unprecedented operation” requiring the mobilisation of thousands of police in Marseilles, the Mediterranean city beset by gangland killings and long considered the epicentre of drug trafficking.

The Olympic flame arrived on May 8 in the ancient port, where cocaine from Latin America is offloaded — and where 49 people were killed last year and 123 injured in drug-related shootings. At least one school has taken the precaution of installing bulletproof windows to protect children from stray gunfire during the frequent shootouts.

Until a few years ago, drug violence was, on the whole, limited to the largely immigrant suburbs ringing this and other big French cities, prompting conservative commentators to liken the perpetrators to “barbarians at the gates”.

These days, however, the turf wars and the “savagery”, as Gérald Darmanin, the interior minister, termed it in 2020, have spread to more tranquil corners of France.

There have been shootouts by Kalashnikov-toting bandits in the streets of Nice. Brittany, a tourist idyll known for its craggy coastline and crêpes, has also emerged as a battleground, with several gunfights reported in Rennes, the previously sleepy capital.

Bullet-riddled bodies have turned up on the streets of Toulon, a big Mediterranean naval base. In Bordeaux, beacon of the wine world, gun deaths have risen and a few years ago gang leaders used a machete to chop off the hand of one of their dealers in the street.

Le Havre, a northern French port, has become a criminal hotbed: more than 30 dock workers have reportedly been kidnapped by traffickers in the past few years to enforce their collaboration. Traffickers have become so brazen that on one occasion they broke into a high-security warehouse to retrieve packs of cocaine that had been seized in the port.

Before his trial in 2016, Boulenouane, the ex-convict murdered on Thursday, had been released on bail of £430,000 (€500,000). The sum was paid by 29 individuals with €500 notes, raising the eyebrows of court officials and prompting another investigation.

His death in the north Parisian suburb of Dugny followed three other gangland killings in nearby Sevran just ten days earlier. “We’re all completely shocked by the violence,” said Metaxas, the lawyer, adding that Boulenouane had left behind a wife and two children. “Whatever his past, this is a man who was assassinated right there on a street in Paris.”

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