The trial on Monday of a small-town mayor and her deputy for complicity in drug trafficking appears to illustrate the scale of France's drug dealing problem, highlighting how drug barons have encroached upon some rural French communities and even held sway over their elected representatives.
France is "submerged by drug trafficking", according to a particularly alarming investigative report delivered by a group of French senators on May 7.
Just one week later, a notorious French drug baron was freed by gunmen in a spectacular attack on a prison van that killed two police officers, wounded three others, and shocked the nation.
Now the story of a small-town mayor on trial for complicity with drug trafficking appears to illustrate the scale of France's drug dealing problem.
Nineteen people went on trial in Paris on Monday in connection with drug trafficking in the northern French town of Canteleu, home to 14,000 residents in the Normandy region.
The defendants include the town's former Socialist mayor, Mélanie Boulanger, elected in 2014, and her deputy, Hasbi Colak. Both are accused of “complicity in drug trafficking” of cocaine, heroin and cannabis.
A town under control
The Canteleu affair began on September 25, 2019, when police officers stopped two men in an underground parking lot in the northern Paris suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis. One man had just supplied the other with 2 kg of 80% pure cocaine in exchange for €50,000 in cash. Yassine D., aged 34, was stopped at the wheel of a Citroën Berlingo registered to a kebab restaurant in Canteleu. The manager of that restaurant was none other than Colak, who was then Canteleu's deputy mayor in charge of economic development.
Canteleu, in Normandy, has been the centre of a vast drug trafficking operation run by the Meziani family for some fifteen years, according to the police.
Police investigators estimate that the Mezianis make more than €10 million profit a year from their business, largely due to the import of cocaine. “There's a very significant influx of cocaine into France, so the product has to be able to flow. In some areas, cocaine has supplanted cannabis," said Jérôme Durain, a Socialist Party senator and co-chairman of the commission of inquiry into drug trafficking.
In Canteleu, part of this trafficking took place in the Cité Verte, a housing project in a poor neighbourhood where the Meziani family were raised. Colak knew some members of the Meziani family and they used his position as an elected official to facilitate their business.
According to court documents consulted by FRANCE 24, on December 10, 2019, Colak informed then mayor Boulanger that the “bosses” of the Cité Rose, another housing project considered a hotbed of drug trafficking, were unhappy at not being informed about the installation of video surveillance cameras.
On January 29, a drug dealer was arrested in the area, sparking the traffickers' wrath. Boulanger appeared to apologise to Colak over a wiretapped phone line: “They didn't tell me they were going to make the arrest so quickly.”
On February 7, a new arrest set off a firestorm between the traffickers and the mayor's team, who were accused of having “given the green light”. Once again, the mayor was asked where she stood: “I'm willing to work with them (...) You can say it comes from ‘people in the church’, just don’t say ‘it’s coming from the priest'.”
After another police operation in a bar frequented by drug dealers, one of the kingpins actually used Colak's direct telephone line to negotiate with the mayor. “After a long conversation, Mélanie Boulanger agreed to call the police commissioner to stop the patrols,” the investigators wrote in the referral order accessed by FRANCE 24.
“It was clear that Hasbi Colak had links with the Canteleu traffickers. He relayed to Mélanie Boulanger their requests, their recriminations and sometimes pleaded their case."
Standing alone against drug barons
After a three-year investigation, Boulanger and Colak were indicted at the end of April 2022 for complicity in drug trafficking. They deny most of the charges against them. Since her election in 2014, Boulanger had publicly alerted national authorities to the rise in drug trafficking in her city, as reported in Le Monde. “Traffickers and troublemakers are steadily gaining ground,” she wrote in 2017 to the then French interior minister, Christophe Castaner.
Other letters followed, to no avail. The lack of response to her letters raises questions as to whether Boulanger gave in to pressure from traffickers due to a lack of support from the authorities.
At the time of her indictment, Boulanger, who has since resigned, read a statement to the judge in which she underlined her isolation as an elected official in her fight against crime. Presumed innocent, like her deputy, she is expected to explain herself more fully at her trial.
As for the Meziani family at the heart of the affair, one of the brothers, Aziz, is being tried in absentia. He has sought refuge in Morocco, where he has built a lavish villa and is reported to live a quiet life. And for good reason: Morocco rarely extradites French-Moroccan citizens.
Another brother, Montacer, did not appear in court on June 5. "Noting that Montacer Meziani's hospitalisation prevented his appearance in court," the court ordered a medical examination to determine whether he would be fit to stand trial by July 11, after which date he would automatically be released, the legal time limits authorising his continued pre-trial detention having expired.
But prosecutors fear that once out of prison, Montacer would find refuge in Morocco like his brother Aziz, the other presumed head of the network.
An older brother of Aziz and Montacer Meziani, who was sentenced in 2004 to ten years' imprisonment for drug trafficking in another case, is also presumed to be on the run in Morocco, the court recalled in its summary of the facts on Tuesday.
(With AFP)
This article has been translated from the original in French.
