Governance

Families of Victims Revolt Against Organized Crime

Activist and academic Fabrice Rizzoli, and victims’ families in cities like Marseille, speak out to halt drug-related violence. Meanwhile, governments seize and repurpose gang members’ assets

Families of Victims Revolt against Organized Crime

On a summer evening on August 18, 2021, 14 year-old Rayanne went out with his best friend to grab a sandwich in the neighborhood. Suddenly a motorcycle pulled up; on it were two men armed with Kalashnikows. They opened fire. Rayanne was shot five times before he could find refuge in a garage nearby. He passed away that evening. More fitting to a war zone, this is how drug-related violence by gangs torment some neighborhoods in the coastal city of Marseille, France.

In 2023, homicides by drug-gangs reached an unprecedented 49 in Marseille (a fifty percent increase from the previous year) and another 123 victims were injured. Most of them by weapons of war. Just by looking at Marseille exposes failures by the French law enforcement to protect its citizens in the fight against an increasing number of organized drug-gangs, as cocaine and cannabis consumption rises nationally. 

Drug-related violence is a thorny problem in working-class neighborhoods. Gangs use systemic violence to seek control over the urban territory and impose the law of silence. This strategy creates a security vacuum within which illegal and legal activities can coexist.

But ironically the number of victims in a small area can get so large that they can turn the tables. In 2021, the families of victims in Marseille did just that: they came together and set up a group to support each other and avoid isolation after the death of their loved ones. “Often families are ashamed to talk about their deceased, and are afraid of being judged and singled out. We realized that when we talk to people who have been through the same thing, we feel more free to speak out,” explains Rayanne’s aunt, Laetitia Linon, who became the spokesperson of the collective. And it is precisely this speaking out and defending the memory of the victims that could protect the living.

“Criminal networks desperately need accomplices in the non-criminal community for their activities, their safety and their control over the territory. If the community becomes hostile, then these criminals are in danger,” says Davide Bremi, an anti-mafia activist of the nonprofit organization Crim’HALT. “When the community stands by the memory of innocent victims, the members of criminal networks understand that for their own safety and prosperity, they cannot afford to kill another innocent.”

“If you forget Rayanne, or Fayed, a 10 year old boy killed in Nîmes in 2023, or the young Romanian girls burnt alive in Aubervilliers in 2017, you can’t create a consensus to fight organized crime,” says Fabrice Rizzoli, founder of Crim’HALT.

* **

In 2014, Rizzoli, a political scientist and lecturer, founded Crim’HALT following a recommendation by his students. “We first met in a café in Paris, then in my basement, and four of us created the association,” says Rizzoli. An expert on the Italian Mafia, he was already doing anti-mafia work in France, and was the French representative for the nonprofit FLARE (Freedom, Legality And Rights in Europe). But his interest in confronting the Mafia began at a young age in the French Riviera, where he grew up in a world of pimps, slot machine operators, and people who had been in prison. During that time, one of his friends almost got killed.

Based in Paris, Crim’HALT provides policy-makers, and most importantly civil society, with alternatives to the traditional police approach to crime, the , “though largely insufficient, “repressive approach to organized crime by the public authorities,” that is “largely insufficient,” says Rizzoli.

“The fight against traffickers is the mission of the State based on the legitimate monopoly of violence. Only magistrates and police officers can arrest traffickers. In the war on drugs, citizens have no proactive role apart from paying taxes,” says Rizzoli. However, he believes it is crucial to put citizens at the heart of the justice system to initiate a real shift in the fight against  drug-related violence and organized crime.

Rayanne’s aunt, Linon, explains that families in their group have also joined forces to campaign against the murders to make sure that justice is served for the victims. “Along with the other members, we realized that our cases were not being prioritized because they were often filed without follow-up. The files of our loved ones had a hard time until they were handed over to the criminal justice system so that the murderers could finally be arrested, which is still not the case for most of us,” moans Linon. In fact, the president’s collective had her case closed not long ago.

Erasmus-Project-Anti-Mafia-Europe
Victims’ families in Italy under the project Erasmus+ funded by the European Union. Fabrice Rizzoli is in the middle in blue t-shirt, and Laetitia Linon on the right of the group / Photo courtesy of Crim’HALT

Rizzoli contacted Linon’s collective in 2022, and traveled to Marseille several times to meet them, explaining the advocacy work of Crim’HALT. He reckons that it is “deep human work” to get in contact with the victims’ families and establish a climate of trust. Every year, Rizzoli takes victims’ families in France to Italy under the project Erasmus+ funded by the European Union, and he asserts that once they join the program, “it changes everything.”

Linon and the president’s collective traveled to Italy last year. They learned about the Italian penal system, chatted to Italian victims’ families, and talked to a repentant man who had been a murderer for the Mafia, and who explained to them his path of repentance. As part of the program, Rizzoli showed them examples of buildings which were confiscated from the Mafia and handed over to associations and people who are now taking care of the neighborhood. 

Rizzoli insists that “The only way to give citizens a role against traffickers is to entrust them with the defense of the memory of the innocent victims and the management of confiscated property.”

***

The social use of confiscated assets is a model that “makes us dream,” says Linon. She tells me that as she walked into Dan Pepe’s library outside Naples in Italy, she was struck by the images of Mafia victims aged from 7 to 80 on the entrance wall. Next to it, were children in the library, reading, resting and learning, all in the shadow of the victims who have been killed. There was an odd peacefulness about it, and a respect. “We’re not used to seeing that here in France,” she says. “I think Italy is forty years ahead of us in this respect, and we French shouldn’t be afraid to follow the example of this type of legislation, which gives hope to all the families of victims.”

Rizzoli explains that, for a long time, only 34 confiscated assets were made available to civil society from the 1,263 confiscations during the period 1982-1996. There was no Italian law to regulate the management of the assets. But in 1996, following a petition of over one million signatures organized by the anti-mafia association “Libera,” a law was passed that forbids reselling the confiscated real estate; it must be redistributed to institutions or citizens (through, for example, associations or cooperatives). Albeit far from perfect, the Italian system has made a lot of progress, and their model for restitution has been replicated by countries like France.

On April 1, 2021, after more than 10 years of fierce advocacy by Crim’HALT, the French Senate finally adopted a bill on the use of properties confiscated from criminal organizations for social purposes. With this law, assets could be transferred (the State is always the owner) to associations working with abused women, or autistic and handicapped young people, or could be used as libraries for children, to name a few. The house of the trafficker can become an emergency shelter, the apartment of the corrupt will be made available to a nonprofit.

“Thanks to the reuse of confiscated properties for social purposes, we can heal the territory from the damages caused by traffickers and criminals. When the territory is healed, the men and women living on it are healed as well,” celebrates Fabrice Rizzoli.

“Let’s face it, money is the sinews of war these days,” says Linon. “We know that drug traffickers make millions. If you take away all their money, their property, their cars, their jewelry, they’ve got nothing left: ‘The day we get our hands on you, it won’t just be prison. On top of that, we will seize everything you’ve amassed through trafficking.’ So, this message is very strong.”

In March 2023, a five-bedroom villa in Marseille owned by a couple of cocaine traffickers was confiscated under the dual supervision of the Ministries of Justice and Budget and the Agency for the Management and Recovery of Seized and Confiscated Assets (AGRASC). It is one of the first real estate properties seized in France and destined for social purposes – and the first in Marseille. But while the law is still “restrictive” in France, over 637 homes confiscated from organized crime in Italy have been made available to mayors and prefects for the accommodation of Ukrainian refugees.

In Marseille more needs to be done. “This year, as we speak, there have already been nine homicides,” says Linon. “That’s a lot less than last year, but this past week has seen an increase in the number of homicides. So we know that this summer is likely to be bloody. We hope it won’t be, but it’s off to a very bad start.” Linon and the collective of victims’ families hope that the judicial police will put in extra resources to make sure this year does not become a repeat of  last year.

“The spotlight brought on Marseille by the war between two very powerful and violent criminal networks (Maga/DZ Mafia vs Yoda) has increased police investigations, resulting in the arrest of most members of the two gangs,” says Davide Bremi. Moreover, media attention is now very high, and this is a real threat for criminal networks who need to operate in the shadows to conduct their business more profitably.

“In an ideal world, we’d like the government to give more resources to the judicial police and magistrates,” says Linon. But, at the same time, it is crucial to mobilize the public loudly to stop drug-related violence in the neighborhood, and thus fight organized crime step by step, from the ground up.

“Criminal networks thrive when both the State and the ‘good’ citizens are absent or look away. If the community, the citizens, fill the voids and inhabit every public, social and economic space, then criminal networks won’t have any place to operate in,” says Bremi.

In the words of Don Ciotti, founder of Libera (the Italian association that made possible the social use of thousands of confiscated properties): “fighting mafias is an everyday battle: it is only through the relentless, daily, inflexible practice of good citizenship that mafias can be pushed back and, eventually, defeated.”

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