"Imagine if an article comes out saying that Ofast [France's national anti-narcotics agency] imported narcotics into French territory and some people helped themselves (...) by selling the product through their own informants." On March 22, 2024, during a phone call with his wife, Hervé (his name has been changed) summed up, in a few words, the case that has been shaking the Marseille branch of Ofast for a year.

The revelations of this 60-year-old locksmith and police reservist are at the origin of a vast investigation filled with pitfalls, legal breaches and twists. At its core: the creation of a cocaine trafficking network from scratch, informants paid in kilos of product, the handling of drugs and dirty money – all under the very lenient oversight of local anti-drug police chiefs. All of it was in the hope of a career-defining bust to take down Mohamed Djeha, aka "Mimo," one of the biggest drug traffickers in France. The Marseille police crossed one red line after the other. They thought they had cleverly turned this extraordinary and appalling case into a routine corruption one: a handful of rogue officers, a few missing blocks of drugs, "business as usual." But over the course of a more than 3,000-page case file, which Le Monde was able to review, the investigation conducted by France's internal police oversight body, the IGPN, and now under the authority of the national jurisdiction for organized crime, revealed a different reality.

At the end of 2022, the American Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) provided Ofast with first-hand information: a shipment of several hundred kilos of cocaine was set to cross the Atlantic, hidden among two containers of bananas destined for Marseille. The Colombian exporter, operating through an import-export company, was a seasoned trafficker, well-known to American investigators.

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