Twins.
A sibling guided spiritually by a crook father.
And "little hands", also tried for having stolen 29 priests between 2018 and 2020. Eight people appeared Monday, January 25 before the criminal court of Le Havre (Seine-Maritime) for having defrauded these men of the Church, for some of them. a very advanced age.
Amount of the loot: nearly 150,000 euros.
The oldest of the victims is 99 years old, the youngest, 71. Some priests live in retirement homes and seem a little isolated, analyzes the president of the court before which none of these civil parties appeared.
The passage of time has made these men of the Church, now far from the parsonages, prime targets for crooks.
The maneuver which relieved them of several thousand euros, for some, has for its spring one of the principles which guided all their life: Christian charity.
A flock in distress
Without knowing how he spots his prey, Kevin Gosse, 32, contacts these vulnerable men by phone under the name of Philippe Letellier, a former parishioner whose parish priest would once have celebrated the wedding.
But now, his wife died in a traffic accident, and the poor flock finds itself penniless.
Worse, hears the old priest in his handset: the widower is on the street, his parents-in-law have evicted him from the accommodation he occupied with his wife, now deceased.
The children and he sometimes sleep in the car.
A scenario well put together and repeated to all victims with sometimes some adjustments.
The sad tale almost always achieves its goal: to draw the tear and unlock the meager wallet of its victim.
When a priest is wary of this Philippe who demands transfers for the deposit of a new accommodation, the swindler brings in his “witnesses of morality”.
New appeal to the parish priest: this time, we pretend to be a banking advisor, the secretary of the prosecutor, or even a gendarme who confirms the destitution of the false father of a weeping family.
These appeals supposed to reassure men of God actually put them under pressure.
The sister of one of the priests will even have been threatened.
Another victim, warned of the scam by the investigators, will still proceed to the transfer.
Who makes the calls?
Who pretends to be a gendarme?
Who is the money for?
" It's me !
"Assumes from the box of the defendants Kevin Gosse, the" brain "of the combination.
"I fooled my whole family, I regret it a lot".
Sentenced to two years in prison in September 2019 for the same scams committed on about forty clergymen, the paunchy thirty-something tries to clear his relatives.
Because on the bench, is James, his twin brother, considered his right arm, Marine B., their half-sister, Raphaëlle L., the ex-wife of James, and Laura D., a former lover.
Sandra G., an acquaintance of this family, is also on trial.
Residents of Le Havre or its agglomeration, they live on aid or temporary work, for those who have already worked.
"I told myself that they were trafficking drugs"
The four women tried on Monday act as "little hands", understands the public prosecutor.
Sandra G., for example.
This 40-year-old woman sees for "about a year" a bank account opened in her name swell by around 4000 euros each month.
This mother admits at the bar having withdrawn in several times the sums in cash to give them to Kevin Gosse.
She only withdraws a few dozen euros each time, she says, pointing to threats made against her children by the chief con artist.
The forty-something assures that she did not know where the money came from.
Just like Marine, the twins' half-sister.
She also a mother of two, the 23-year-old young woman, would not have wondered where the money she saw spent on online poker accounts opened in her name came from.
Nor why we sometimes "knock" on the window of her apartment to give her up to 3000 euros that she carefully keeps "in a piggy bank" to give them to her brother Kevin.
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Laura, 27, was a little more worried.
Quilted black faux leather handbag screwed to the shoulder, she admits at the bar having wondered about the income of the siblings who live in the apartment next to hers.
The young woman, already in the process of over-indebtedness, describes the BMW and Mercedes driven by the twins: “I thought they had money
[…].
I said to myself that they were trafficking drugs ”.
After removing her monthly allowances from her account, Laura gets into the habit of handing her bank card to the twins so they can withdraw the cheated amounts.
She will also buy consoles at Fnac or jewelry on their behalf.
But will not get anything out of it for her, she assures, or only "meat and cereals for the children".
"If it's not pretending to be a banker ..."
Raphaëlle did not benefit from the scheme either, she tries to convince.
But unlike the three co-defendants at her side, she admits, this 31-year-old red-haired woman did make a call on behalf of Kevin Gosse.
“Hello, your account will be credited,” she reportedly told a victim.
"If it is not to pass for a banker ...", quips the president of the court.
Other “little hands” were identified by investigators.
But, warns the prosecutor, the state of health, the psychological and financial precariousness of the individuals or the lack of evidence did not allow to prosecute them.
However, Kevin Gosse does not budge: the female voices heard by priests on the phone, it is he who imitated them, he assures.
He swears that he "implicated" all this little world "without his knowledge": "I only saw the money".
"I did not realize the sums," he adds, of the loot he seems to have spent partly on scratch games or online.
"I grew up in this"
He learned everything from a veteran of the priest scam.
Between 1979 and 2014, Michel Gosse, the father of the twins, distinguished himself in the same field: rolling priests in flour.
Over the course of his 21 appearances in court, the 60-year-old will explain having been the victim of sexual abuse by men of the Church when he was taken in by the Orphelins d'Auteuil.
So the repeat offender would have transmitted his resentment to his son?
“My father did that.
I grew up in that… I would have liked to have a father who showed us school, work… ”, sighs Kevin Gosse, whose criminal record has accumulated twenty convictions and who is still the subject of an investigation for similar scams committed between 2010 and 2015.
While the public prosecutor demanded ten years in prison for Kevin Gosse to "avoid a new wave of fraud", the Havre court sentenced him to five years in prison.
James, her twin, gets two years.
Six months firm with adjustment of sentence are decided for the four women "small hands".
