Dockers father and son, uncle and nephew, sports equipment agent for the City of Nantes, coatings installer, petty crook in the resale of watches and cars, ruined restaurateur, cigarette seller and hirer of hookahs in Guadeloupe, manager company in the sale of spare parts in Martinique, unemployed at RSA … In total, eleven men, aged 35 to 56, must be tried for five days in Rennes, from Monday, October 18. One of them, on the run, has been the subject of an arrest warrant since March 2020.
The investigation opened to the specialized interregional jurisdiction (JIRS) of Rennes has indeed led to indictments and then to referrals to the court of “Four dockers, five intermediaries, in contact with dockers and traffickers – the distribution channel being located largely in the Paris region, and two cocaine shippers from the West Indies”, indicates Philippe Astruc, public prosecutor of Rennes.
Two years earlier, on October 14, 2019 at 7:30 a.m., somewhere on the fourth port of France, in Saint-Nazaire (Loire-Atlantique), at the Montoir-de-Bretagne terminal, two dockers, then aged 33 and 39 years old, discussing in a Peugeot Partner. For weeks, they have taken a thousand precautions to exchange discreetly. They ignore it, but the car is sound and the whole narcotics squad of the Nantes judicial police is on the bridge.
The research and intervention brigade (BRI) is there too, but in retreat. None of the many police officers mobilized crossed the gates surrounding the port area, which covers 1,460 hectares. ” Impossible “, explains a person close to the file, two years later. “The port is worse than a city. If a police officer sets foot there, everyone knows it straight up. It is an ultra-closed world. “
Antilles Route
After months of hideouts, hundreds of hours of listening and many sleepless nights, the investigators are waiting for them and the “container”. On paper, it contains machine tools, an old generator, and copper coils. But they know it: the “box” is also loaded with cocaine.
Two pieces of information led them to spend forty-eight hours in Saint-Nazaire without moving an eyelash. First, one of the two men in the middle of a discussion in the Partner contacted his “second wife” two days earlier. At the end of the line, she found him “Weird”. “If Monday evening you haven’t heard from me, well you’re not ready to see me again …”, he told her, without further explanation.
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