Three 27-year-old Marseillais were sentenced Friday to ten years in prison for the kidnapping of a trader from a town in Arles, against the backdrop of a turf war to control drug trafficking in this town of 52,000 inhabitants.
The manager of a pizzeria located in the city of Barriol, a hotspot for drug trafficking in Arles, was kidnapped in July 2021, molested and taken to his home on the pretext that he had provided information concerning the team of Marseillais in the process of taking over the drug sales network.
The defendants have always denied being the attackers of the merchant who had identified one of them as a customer of his pizzeria.
To demand their release, their lawyers had pointed out
“vast gray areas”
, in particular the presence during the kidnapping of a second team of three criminals, never identified.
The prosecutions only related to acts of kidnapping, sequestration, violent theft as well as extortion committed a few months later.
“The expansionism” of Marseille crime
The merchant, threatened, was forced to sell his restaurant at a low price, a third of the expected amount.
Even if they were not tried for the organization of trafficking in the city of Barriol, this case of violence linked to the drug trade was an opportunity for the prosecutor to highlight
the "expansionism"
of Marseille drug traffickers, always looking for new territories, beyond the cities of Marseille,
“transformed into the Wild West and where the market is saturated”
.
The prosecution highlighted
the “incredible rise”
of this team, a group of childhood friends who
“rapidly rose to prominence in the hierarchy of crime”
.
While recognizing their
“difficult life journeys”
– one of them only knew his mother late, she being incarcerated for the murder of his father – the prosecutor did not wish to retain
“this excuse which, in light of the seriousness of the facts, is beginning to no longer bear fruit
.
Two of the three defendants are also indicted for the murder of a 16-year-old teenager, a small-time trafficker in the town of Barriol, killed five days after the merchant's kidnapping.
In the attackers' vehicle, the police discovered the DNA of the pizzeria manager, which established that it had been used in his kidnapping.
On Friday, a fourth man, incarcerated at the time of the kidnapping, was sentenced to three years in prison for extortion.
The court ruled that he was indeed the author of a phone call to threaten the merchant.