With a permanent smile clinging to his lips and the features of a dark-haired thirty-year-old who, in Bastia, earned him the nickname of “Handsome kid”, Christophe Guazzelli wanted to become a godfather. With his older brother, Richard, and other sons of barons from La Brise de mer, he wanted to revive this Corsican criminal gang of which their father, Francis Guazzelli, had been one of the founders in the late 1970s. It is this analysis that delivered the prosecutor Isabelle Candau, in charge of the prosecution of the specialized interregional jurisdiction of Marseille, Tuesday, June 28, in an indictment at the end of which she claimed fourteen years in prison against Christophe Guazzelli. And twelve years against his brother, Richard, more discreet, “the unavoidable man in the shadows, the banker of the group”.
With twenty-one co-defendants, the Guazzelli brothers, aged 30 and 32, have been on trial since June 13 by the Marseille Criminal Court for large-scale international drug trafficking, a chain from negotiations with suppliers in Spain to for resale in the cities of Marseilles and in the districts of Ajaccio and Bastia. “This file is about imports, investment structures, modes of transport, markets, it’s hundreds of thousands of euros, tons of drugs”, estimated Emilie Ramousse, deputy prosecutor, the other voice of this indictment. In their eyes, this case illustrates “this Corsica plagued by the financial windfall of drug trafficking”.
“Never have we gone so far into the heart of a criminal group operating almost mafia”, believes Isabelle Candau. Some time after their arrest in late December 2017, the reputedly inviolable PGP phones of this tight-knit group, “coached like a football team”, had been decrypted. The messages read over two weeks of debate trace the links with other teams of European banditry, report deliveries, accounts, in complete transparency. Faced with these damning exchanges, some defendants asserted their right to silence. ” No comment “have continued to kindly oppose Richard and Christophe Guazzelli, but also Christophe Andreani, “the leader of resale markets in Corsica” against which ten years in prison and a fine of 100,000 euros were requested. Right not to answer also claimed by Ange-Marie Michelosi, whose father, killed in 2008, was presented as a member of banditry in Corse-du-Sud. Eight years in prison and a fine of 100,000 euros have been demanded against this polite boy who multiplies “with all due respect to the court…”
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