Marseille: Lenny, child injured during the Clos La Rose massacre, became a foot soldier of narcobandism

Because he was the youngest victim of Marseille drug trafficking, Lenny very early understood the violence of drug trafficking. Without being able to escape the spiral of delinquency which led him, sixteen years later, to appear in court. In 2010, his story shocked Marseille and shone the spotlight on what would be called, a decade later, “narchomicides”.

Lenny was 11 years old when one day in November, while he was ringing the bell at his sister's house at building 41 in the city of Clos la Rose, in the 13th arrondissement, the passengers of a red car shot him, seriously injuring him in the throat, jaw, one hand and one foot.

The child had no connection to trafficking. He was just trying to quickly take cover, terrified by the shooting which had just cost the life of a 16-year-old teenager sitting in a city watchman's chair. “I didn’t see the weapon, I only saw the flames,” he would later testify.

Drug turf war

Lenny is today a strong guy, aged 27, employed as a cleaning agent, he indicated before the Bouches-du-Rhône Assize Court, in Aix-en-Provence, where he has been on trial since the end of September for his peripheral role in a drug turf war between two Marseille cities.

Four of his co-defendants are answering for the kidnapping and attempted assassination, on June 21, 2021, of a young lookout employed at a deal point in the La Paternelle city.

Lenny was, according to the prosecution, part of the team supposed to take the place of the eliminated watcher. Prosecuted for repeated criminal conspiracy, violations of drug and weapons legislation, he appears free.

“I was hooked”

From the age of 12, barely recovered from severe injuries which required a month of hospitalization, a long rehabilitation and today earned him the status of disabled worker, the teenager had a series of caravan thefts, damage and outrages...

The general counsel was surprised to find him, in June 2021, a lookout in La Paternelle, a city then in the grip of a conflict between two gangs. A few months earlier, one of his best friends had fallen victim to the bullets of drug trafficking. “I was strongly affected but not surprised,” he said of this assassination.

Shouldn't the violence suffered as a child have kept him away from deal points? “When we don't have money... There, I take 200 euros in not even five hours,” explains the accused. To a personality researcher, he described his journey: “At 15, I was caught up in the desire to make easy money. A big guy from the neighborhood offered me a plan, in drugs. I wanted to show that I was valiant.” He confides that the homes he was sent to at the age of 14 “encouraged” him to delinquency: “I didn’t care about the rules.” Prison will be worse. When the president talks about one of his detentions, he comments: “Yes, I was dealing in prison.”

Leave Marseille

Today, Lenny no longer wants to talk about the assassination attempt he suffered as a child. In 2016, heard as a witness at the trial of the perpetrators of the Clos la Rose shooting, he nevertheless declared to the jurors: “It changed the course of my life, for the worse.” The teenager he had become explained that “before, things were going well, then I stopped school and football and since then I have done nothing”.

His lawyer, Mr. Frédéric Coffano, sees this childhood trauma as the reasons for Lenny's slide into delinquency. And he underlines the desire displayed by the young man to turn the page.

“It’s in the past, I’ve grown up,” the accused told the court. He even seems to regret his refusal of psychological follow-up: “I thought that psychologists were for crazy people”. His project is “to work, have children and leave Marseille”. The Assize Court's requisitions are expected on Monday and the verdict on Tuesday or Wednesday.