The book has barely reached the bookstores when the authors have already been able to add a chapter: that of the two murders committed last week in Marseille, one of a 15-year-old teenager savagely stabbed and burned alive, on Wednesday, October 2, and the other of A 36-year-old VTC driver, shot dead by a 14-year-old boy on Friday. Nicolas Bessone, city prosecutor, denounced at a press conference “a total loss of orientation that will make young people respond to advertisements, not go to harvest grapes or even sell cannabis resin at a point of sale, but rather go to take the lives of others without any remorse, without any reflection ”. and the “The role of social networks is beginning to question us”the magistrate added, highlighting the“terrifying amateurism” of these young people.
This phenomenon of very young men committing murder for nothing is the subject of Hitmen. Research on the new phenomenon of shootersthe work of three great reporters ParisianJean-Michel Décugis, Vincent Gautronneau and Jérémie Pham-Lê, written in spring and appearing on Wednesday, October 9. The three authors x-ray those whose profession is death: “shooters”, between 16 and 20 years old, sometimes without criminal records. “His actions within a team of assassins are his first exploits with weapons linked to organized crime”according to specialized police officers. These young murderers do not go to school, are unemployed and are recruited on social networks. They act as a commando: there is a driver for the car, one or two shooters, logisticians in the back to supply the weapons and steal the vehicles. They only know the nickname of the sponsor they execute the contract for, who is often imprisoned, and do not know why their target must die.
Armed branch of organized crime, hitmen have always existed, but they have mutated, with ultraviolence for the “shooters” of drug trafficking networks in accordance with their amateurism. Precipitation, improvisations, bursts of gunfire: their homicides generate numerous victims, sometimes collateral, like little Fayed, 10 years old, in Nimes, or Socayna, the 24-year-old law student, in Marseille.
From a distance, the litany of narcomicides seems confusing and absurd. Thanks to numerous new elements of research, the book by the three journalists provides a form of meaning and allows us to better understand this violence that is as endemic as it is incomprehensible. Thus, the text begins with the description of the most famous ice cube throw in French crime: the urban legend according to which two opposing mafia bosses, that of the DZ and that of the Yodas, supposedly insulted each other with pieces of ice cream. in the resort town of Phuket, Thailand, “for a girl”. This affront would have caused dozens of deaths on the sidewalks of Marseille.
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