French Connection: “I was sure that someone would speak to save their skin” says magistrate Paul-Louis Auméras in Montpellier

Paul-Louis Auméras, ancien procureur général, vit toujours à Montpellier. MIDI LIBRE – François Barrère

The former attorney general began his career in Marseille in 1971 and participated in the early days of the fight against the Marseille underworld that was flooding the United States with heroin. He had Pierre Michel as an intern, who developed a taste for this mission at his side, before becoming the investigating judge whose gangsters would want dead.

“I learned this at a correctional hearing in Béziers, where I was a prosecutor, with a sort of hubbub on the lawyers' bench. One of them came to see me while his colleague was pleading, to tell me that the radio was announcing the death of a judge in Marseille, shot dead on his motorbike. I immediately understood who it was.”

“A very bad memory”

More than forty years have passed, but Paul-Louis Auméras, 82, who ended his career as the attorney general of Montpellier, has forgotten nothing of that October 21, 1981, when he learned of Pierre Michel's death. “It's a very bad memory”. Because the two men had become friends at the beginning of their careers, and the senior magistrate always remained close to the widow and two daughters of his murdered colleague, who live in Montpellier. “We saw each other regularly in Béziers or in the Aude. This family was crucified.”

When he met Pierre Michel, Paul-Louis Auméras, whose father was from Cévennes, was a young magistrate who had launched himself into the fight against the French Connection, the Marseille gangsters who were flooding the United States with a heroin reputed to be the purest in the world. Appointed to the Marseille prosecutor's office in 1971, the deputy soon after found himself in the 7th chamber, responsible for drug trafficking, among other things.

Between 800 and 1000 deaths by overdose in New York

“From 1968 onwards, American youth dove headlong into drugs. At the time, there were between 800 and 1,000 deaths per year in the New York region. The Marseille underworld, which had always been at the heart of all imaginable trafficking, had links with Laos, Thailand, the Bekaa Valley, Afghanistan, and heroin was the one that brought in the most money: a kilo of heroin manufactured in Marseille was resold for six times its price in New York. The activity was prodigious, they exported in suitcases, cans, in Johnny Hallyday's concert amplifiers, and then in cars: they hid 100 kg in a DS."

At the beginning of the seventies, faced with the scale of the phenomenon, everything changed: a new law was adopted, which increased the sentence for traffickers from 5 years to 20 years, and under pressure from the Americans, the Ministry of the Interior sent around forty Parisian police officers to Marseille.

In the United States with the investigating judge

“Commissioner Morin organized his men like a secret service, those who were tailing people sent coded postcards, being wary of the telephone. The Americans set up a branch of the Narcotics office across from the prefecture”. In the United States, arrested French traffickers are offered deals: “It was thirty years locked in a cage, or a light sentence and a new life. One of the first to speak was the pianist at Corsaire Borgne, a very chic place in Marseille, where he provided musical accompaniment for the ladies who were stripping. I went to the United States to question with Judge Saurel to question all these traffickers."

Thanks to these internal denunciations and the field work of the new Marseille cops, justice finally seizes laboratories and dismantles networks that were previously untouchable. “The Milieu came from the Resistance, they knew about compartmentalization, counter-surveillance. It was closed, omerta reigned, and the punishment was with a Colt 45.”

“He hooks right away”

Paul-Louis Auméras remembers it : "Pierre Michel arrived at that time for an internship at the public prosecutor's office. I'm totally overwhelmed, between the international networks, the local drug addicts. I worked flat out, scratching paper like a madman, going to the hearing where the lawyers trained me, rolling me around like a pebble in the river. Pierre falls into this excitement, and he gets hooked straight away. It fascinates him, he drools over it to prepare his files, he goes to the hearing where he also has a blast with the lawyers, and it makes his skin tough." He then became an investigating judge in 1978, with an even greater commitment than during his time at the Marseille prosecutor's office.

"Kids who looked like they just came out of Buchenvald"

“If we were so harsh and violent in applying the law, it's because we witnessed autopsies of 20-year-old boys and girls who looked like they had just come out of Buchenvald, dead from overdoses, covered in pustules, because of people who had only one goal: to get high with their friends” explains Paul-Louis Auméras.

The magistrate always thought that this crime would not go unpunished. “It was too serious. I was sure that someone would talk to save their skin, or to get revenge on an adversary or a betrayal.”

The ultimately peaceful end of François Scapula, who was said to be condemned to death by several mafias that he had denounced, and who returned to end his days without being worried does not really surprise him. “Even if they were people with extraordinary personalities, this Milieu is his age and is disappearing. Especially since they didn't have a very healthy lifestyle, between high doses of pastaga and very agitated personal lives in the long term. This whole generation that had a taste for revenge has disappeared."

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