The Gaullist underworld
Sam Mute
Paris In early July, the Minister of the Interior, Gaston Defferre, issued a kind of 'order of the day' to his police forces, bidding them to cease harassing immigrants and to concentrate instead on the extreme right 'and its links with prominent politicians'. A week later there was the appalling massacre at Auriol, near Marseilles, of six members of the family of a police inspector, Jacques Massie, including the inspector himself and his eight-year-old son. The murders were Clumsily carried out and in conditions of great panic because some of the killers had been recognised despite their masks; they left a trail of clues which led to the quick round-up of seven of their number. None had criminal records, but all were members of the quaintly named Service d'Action Civique, or SAC, a Gaullist strong-arm outfit with a long history going back to de Gaulle's wartime Secret Service. The matter might have remained a sordid local affair, of the kind with which Marseilles is all too familiar, had it not been for the arrest O n a charge of complicity a few days later of the head of SAC in Paris, Pierre Debizet. With his arrest and transportation to Marseilles, the affair took on a national character with heavy, and even explosive, Political implications. Debizet is very much Part and parcel of the conspiratorial side of Gaullism. lie joined de Gaulle in London in the early days, became a member of his Secret Service and later one of the inner circle Which worked for his return to power. When this took place, he founded SAC as an electioneering machine for the General, only to resign two years later in protest against de Gaulle's Algerian policy. Unlike his friend, Jacques Soustelle, however, he did not support the military rebellion against de Gaulle and ten years later Potnpidou recalled him to undertake the urgent task of cleaning up the organisation which he had founded. What had happened in the intervening years was that SAC had been transformed into an extra-legal security force, authorised to use extra-legal methods in fighting the terrorists of the so-called secret army (OAS) launched by annY fanatics bent upon keeping Algeria French.
The old Gaullist Resistance hands placed in charge of this anti-OAS struggle there Pon revived their old wartime links with sections of the French underworld, which had proved so helpful to them during those Years. The result was that SAC card-holders included some of the most noted gangsters ill the land. At the end of the Algerian war, it at once became evident that it was easier to recruit these villains than to get rid of them after they had served their purpose. They could always plead for a degree of immunity in view of past services — as many did after the Liberation — and they retained a certain power of blackmail. The most serious damage done, however, was to the police. Not only did their morale suffer as they witnessed cases of SAC card-holders enjoying an apparent immunity from arrest, but many of their own members clearly thought that the best way to promotion, through political influence at least, was to become a SAC member. This is clearly what has been happening in Marseilles, where a high proportion of the police force belong to SAC, including the murdered Jacques Massie who was its departmental head.
The French police have, in fact, had to shift loyalties sharply several times since the war — first from Vichy and 'collaboration' to the Resistance in general which included the Communists, then to the `third force' governments engaged in a two-front war against both Gaullists and Communists, then to de Gaulle and the French Algeria lobby, to be followed by de Gaulle against the Algeria lobby, then against the far left following May 1968, only to be directed now against the extreme right — negligible electorally but dangerous conspiratorially. The message from M. Defferre, the `order of the day' which I mentioned at the beginning, is clearly intended to encourage a wave of police denunciations of fellow policemen and inevitably a full-scale purge. This has already happened in quite disgraceful circumstances within French television, and is proceeding at a gentler pace in the judiciary and in the universities. Now it is under way among the police, with left-wing police unions clamouring for the heads of their superiors. It was already proceeding in Marseilles (a city, incidentally, of which M. Defferre has been the longtime mayor), investigators having been dispatched from Paris for this purpose. It is easy to imagine the atmosphere their arrival must have created in the city, and the flood of turncoat informers it must have produced. So far no clear-cut motive has been established for Massie's murder but there has been a great deal of talk about documents he is supposed to have had in his villa in Auriol and which are now missing. Massie was an ambitious policeman already undergoing training for a higher post. Could he have turned informer to save his career?
The links between the underworld and the city's politicians are of course something of a tradition in Marseilles. It is a tradition which first spilt over from Corsica, but is now thoroughly cosmopolitan in character. Before the war the city's underworld was controlled by two rival Corsican families with one, the Guerinis, having had the foresight to establish good relations with the Resistance, surviving as a monopoly until well into the Seventies. The development of the drug traffic, however, and the loss of Algeria led to the invasion of the city by 'foreign' gangsters who challenged the Guerinis and finally wiped them out in a series of assassinations and gun battles. There are many Marseilles politicians, to say nothing of police, who now wax nostalgic about the `orderly' days of the Guerini supremacy. I would suspect that M. Defferreis among them .AsIMayor of Marseilles and as Deputy for one of its constituencies, he has fought many tough battles, especially against the Communists — battles in which every vote counted and nobody's dead grandmother was safe from disinterment to make a ghostly appearance at a polling booth. As far as is known, not all of M. Defferre's electoral agents were recruited from among choir boys.
M. Defferre is also a newspaper proprietor who has a virtual monopoly of the press in Marseilles, his only rival being the local Communist daily. He owns the morning and evening Le Provencal, which are both eminently respectable socialist dailies; but he also owns Le Meridional which is popular with the pieds noirs who have settled heavily in the area and is not above catering for their anti-Arab racial prejudices.
Meanwhile M. Defferre is conducting the investigations into the Auriol murders in exemplary fashion. His police and the examining magistrate handling the case are models of discretion and he himself is taking great care not to occupy the centre of the stage — or, indeed, any part of it. This is, of course, in sharp contrast to the way one of his recent predecessors, Prince Poniatowski, behaved at the time of the still unsolved de Broglie murder mystery, when he held a press conference to declare the mystery solved and all the guilty arrested. It now remains to be seen what will be the fate of Pierre Debizet, the head of SAC. His lawyer is adamant that, having seen the dossier, there is nothing in it that implicates her client and she appears confident that he Will soon be released. If that happens, then clearly the case will lose a great deal of its interest. If, however, the charge of complicity against him continues to be maintained then the conclusion will be that the order for the killing of Massie must have come from him. Certainly while he remains under arrest the case retains its politically explosive character.
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