AFP, published on Thursday, December 23, 2021 at 1:07 p.m.
A stone’s throw from the Center Pompidou, a thirty-something girl leaves a restaurant and finds her young dealer from the Parisian suburbs. Three 20 euro bills for a gram of cocaine, which she quickly shoves into her bag. Nathalie *, a police officer in civilian clothes, does not miss a beat of the scene.
The brigadier, stationed at the Anti-Crime Brigade (BAC) of Paris Center (1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th arrondissements), had followed the trafficker, a 17-year-old minor, spotted a few minutes earlier at the exit of a underground station.
“He was with his nose on his cell phone, seemed to be looking for a street and checking around that he was not being observed. This time it worked but nine times out of ten it didn’t work,” she explains for justify his intuition.
Alone, she gives up calling the buyer but pursues the dealer’s “filoche” in the Paris metro, joined by her two colleagues, Major Lucas * and Brigadier-chef Li *.
The trio finally handcuffs the young man on the RER C platform that he was about to borrow to return to his parents’ home in Val-de-Marne.
Without resistance, he takes out the goods hidden in his boxers. In total, a dozen cocaine capsules, a few bags of crack and ecstasy pills.
“Delivery people on foot is less frequent because it is more risky. The chances of being checked for other offenses are greater,” notes Major Lucas.
– More women –
A little later, a second crew of the Bac spotted a city car parked roughly on a end of the sidewalk on rue Saint-Denis, in the tourist district of Les Halles.
Its driver enters the lobby of a building, discreetly followed by the police who had the door opened by a resident who arrived at the same time.
Through the glass door to the stairwell, they observe the transaction on the first floor landing and pick up the man on the way back.
On him, about forty sachets of 3-MMC, a synthetic drug in particular popular with the gay party scene, with a retail value of nearly 1,500 euros.
“We do an average of thirty cases of drug deliveries per month”, explains Lieutenant Maxime, head of the BAC and the territorial contact brigade (BTC, in uniform) of Paris Center.
The “Uber Shit” type delivery networks, which existed before the health crisis, took advantage of the two confinements to increase their clientele and adapt their methods.
“They have integrated more and more women, novices little or not known to the services, and have stopped using their” war “vehicles (stolen, Editor’s note), in poor condition, replaced by small rental cars”, develops the officer.
“We have seen mothers, students, who have started to deliver because the crisis has created misery”, reports “Boubou”, an experienced “baqueux”.
– Locate “the nurse” –
The delivery man, a small hand in the service of traffickers, is often the gateway for the police officers of the Initiative Investigations Brigade (BEI) responsible for tracing part of the organization.
“We use our phone, our nonsense, our bank accounts, we search our homes”, lists Brigadier Antoine *.
The objective is to locate “the nurse”, the place of storage of the drug, generally installed in the districts of the north-east of the capital or in Seine-Saint-Denis.
This is where the delivery man supplies himself before going to the address that the customer has communicated by encrypted messaging to a call center, whose numbers circulate on social networks such as Snapchat or TikTok.
“In the majority of cases, the investigation stops at the customer-delivery level but we are increasingly trying to identify the nanny and the call center”, underlines Commissioner Hélène Thorel, head of the investigation service. close to Paris Center.
In September, his investigators seized in one of them more than 500 pouches of a gram of cocaine, worth 36,000 euros at retail. Two months later, she was replaced by another nanny where 8,000 euros in cash were discovered.
However, insists Thorel, the EIB is not a specialized group, like the narcotics brigade, and must deal with other crimes of equal priority.
“I like to do + stups + but you have to make choices”, reasoned Antoine. “There is no victim, there is no empathy like with a 65 year old lady who had her bag ripped off.”