“Heavy prison sentences for cocaine traffickers”
(20 minutes),
“Le Havre, ten defendants tried for drug trafficking”
(Paris Normandy),
“Port of Le Havre.
1700 kilos of cocaine seized, a gigantic network dismantled”
or
“How the port of Le Havre became the gateway to cocaine in France”
(76actu).
The press articles follow one another and are similar, all mentioning the same scourge.
To discover
TV program this evening: our selection of the day
Directed from abroad, notably Latin America, drug trafficking has exploded since 2015. In Le Havre, its first entry point into France, it operates thanks to the complicity of port agents - container crane drivers, heavy goods vehicle drivers,
“little hands”
responsible for opening containers and transferring bags... -, who then find themselves trapped in a terrible gear.
Also read: De Grace, the dark novel of dockers
Threats, kidnappings, torture
“Everyone who works at the port is surrounded by this pressure. They [the drug traffickers, Editor’s note] are so rich, they can buy whoever they want
,” confided a Le Havre dockworker in 2020.
Not to mention the threats made against their families, those who want to hang up are kidnapped, tortured, sometimes even killed.
The phenomenon appeared in 2017. Police figures show around ten kidnappings each year.
Friday January 19, 2024, after several seizures for a total of 1,700 kilos of cocaine, 19 people were sentenced to sentences ranging from 30 months to 15 years in prison, in a case of drug trafficking uncovered at the port of the ocean city.
Here, north of the mouth of the Seine, reality has long since joined, and even surpassed, fiction.
Also readDegrace on Arte.tv: Le Havre, port of anxiety
The port of Le Havre finally closed to filming
As evidenced by one of the two producers of
Grace
:
“We had done everything possible to make the port accessible to us.
The climate was tense, but they trusted us.
Everyone knows things happen.
How difficult it is not to give in to the temptation of easy money when you are offered the equivalent of a year's salary to take a bag out of a container.
In short, we managed to obtain their agreement.
And then there was an accident.
And everything stopped.
We had to go and shoot in Belgium.
»
The fiction, whose 6 episodes take place in the world of dockworkers, evokes these human dramas implicitly.
Because he fought tirelessly for the integrity of his men and against the progressive disintegration of the corporation, under the influence of drug traffickers, in particular, the patriarch (Olivier Gourmet) was assassinated on his 60th birthday.
In the process, the police find cocaine in the floor of a car imported by Jean (Pierre Lottin), the eldest child.
Also read: Panayotis Pascot: “De grace is the story of a collapse”
And Simon (Panayotis Pascot), the youngest, arrested in the first minutes of the program, gets involved in all kinds of petty trafficking, before completely switching over, thanks to his hiring as a port agent.
“Grace is not intended to judge, take sides or point fingers.
I have far too much respect for these people
,” recalls co-author Baptiste Fillon.
The tragedy of the Leprieur family nonetheless reflects that of dozens of women and men.