Two years of suspended prison time were requested on Tuesday against the current number two of the Bordeaux judicial police and a former subordinate, tried in Paris for complicity in drug trafficking between Guyana and mainland France with a view to making seizures, and make numbers.
The prosecution highlighted the “important” and “abnormal” role of Stéphane Lapeyre, former head of the operational division of the Narcotics Office (Ocrtis, now Ofast) and his subordinate Jocelyn Berret, in the context of an importation of “hatted” cocaine in 2013, but passed under the radar of the judicial authorities.
An operation that does not appear anywhere in the procedure
In this case, “we are not in a controlled delivery operation”, argued the deputy public prosecutor Hervé Tétier, in reference to this police technique consisting of letting drugs cross the borders to dismantle, downstream, resale networks. The two police officers had called on an “informant”, responsible for convincing a Guyanese just released from prison, Jean-Michel L., to go to Suriname to buy 14 kg of cocaine to be sent via air freight from Cayenne, to at Orly airport. And this without it appearing anywhere in the procedure.
Large denominations in his bag (nearly 80,000 euros), he was assured that he had “no need to worry about customs” if he passed through a specific portico indicated by “Marc”, false identity of the ‘informant. The investigation did not make it possible to know whether this money came from the traffickers or from “Marc” himself, nor what happened to the merchandise once recovered. After having sold a small part of it, Jean-Michel L. claims to have returned almost all of it to the informant, which the latter denies.
“Lack of perspective and discernment”
The informant always denied having only obeyed orders. The police denounced at the trial a “manipulator” who had taken numerous liberties without informing them.
A three-year suspended sentence was required against the informant, accompanied by a fine of 30,000 euros, the amount he received following the operation. Against Jean-Michel L., in connection with an “already structured” network of traffickers, the public prosecutor requested three years in prison, two of which were suspended.
During the trial, divisional commissioner Stéphane Lapeyre, now stationed in Bordeaux, admitted to having “lacked perspective and discernment” in the management of this operation. He spoke of this “hunter’s instinct” which animated the Drugs Office at the time, and which “perhaps biased our judgment a little”.
A joint customs fine of nearly 745,000 euros was finally requested against five defendants, including Stéphane Lapeyre and Jocelyn Berret.