World: A Beautiful Affair

Marseille is the halfway house on the world’s main route of illicit drug traffic. Crude morphine from the Middle East is smuggled into the tough, jaded Mediterranean port and converted to heroin. It is then sent to New York by clandestine carriers as diverse as diplomatic pouches and the Air France stewardess caught three years ago with the stuff in her bra. Balding little Louis Lavalette, chief of the police judiciare for Southern France, has long had a good hunch who was behind the operation: “Monsieur Jean” Cesari, a quick-witted courtly Corsican who, in 20 years of flitting through the Marseille milieu with few visible sources of income, has nonetheless managed to acquire both a 1,000-acre Riviera estate and a handsome $50,000 villa near Aubagne guarded by five fierce police dogs.

When Lavalette’s agents seized 242 lbs. of morphine base concealed in a cargo of goatskins from Turkey eleven months ago, the chief decided enough was enough, set out to nail Cesari once and for all. He disguised a score of Marseille cops as everything from priests and petanque players to taxi drivers and dockers, often had them make quick changes at midday while they shadowed Cesari and his henchmen. Several times they discovered raw morphine on incoming freighters ticketed to Cesari’s hirelings (one shipment was packed in a carton of snails). But the police were unable to catch Cesari manufacturing heroin-until a laborer named Albert Veran laid out $15,000 for an old stone farmhouse last May.

A Veritable Factory. Veran told his neighbors he planned to raise chickens and vegetables, but in fact he soon began receiving regular visits from Cesari and curious deliveries from a variety of vehicles. Police agents furtively photographed all the visitors to the farmhouse until Lavalette had what he happily called “an international family album of drug smugglers.” Then he moved in for the kill.

Two agents with shotguns, dressed as hunters, stumbled toward the farmhouse at dusk, one carrying the other on his shoulders. Reaching the door, one shouted: “Open, quick! My friend has just been badly wounded!” Veran’s wife opened up; the agents grabbed her before she could push an alarm button, let Lavalette and 14 more policemen in. Upstairs they surprised Monsieur Jean stuffing heroin into cellophane bags destined for the U.S., and also uncovered not the usual kitchen-sink and gas-stove rig for boiling down morphine but an ultra-modern four-room assembly line-“a veritable factory,” cried Lavalette.

C’Etait Formidable. Confident that he would be dealing “not with imbecilic bandits but with sensible men who would reflect before acting,” Lavalette and his raiders carried no weapons except their prop shotguns. Living up to these expectations, Cesari offered no resistance and, as Lavalette remembered the dialogue, declared solemnly: “Monsieur, permit me to offer you my hand so that I may congratulate you and your men on your job. C’était formidable.'” Replied Lavalette: “Man cher, I accept your congratulations, and I extend you my own. Thanks to you, I have accomplished the most beautiful affair that one could imagine.”

Indeed Lavalette had, for seized in the farmhouse were 220 lbs. of morphine base and 220 lbs. of pure heroin, worth on the drug black market at least $5,000,000, and the largest single confiscation of illegal drugs ever brought off-almost three times as much in one haul as is typically seized all over the world in an average year. American narcotics agents were elated, praised Lavalette’s coup as “sensational,” since it will considerably shorten dope supplies in the New York underworld for some time.