Former Marseille drug lord François Scapula, wanted for over twenty years, has died at the age of 78 in Marseille.
Its name evokes the French Connectiona time that in Marseille, those under 20 cannot know. When the Phocaean city was the “world capital of heroin”. The most famous of the French repentant, François Scapula died on July 7 at the age of 78, he was cremated discreetly on July 13 in Marseille, a police source told France 3 Paca, confirming information from BFMTV. The former drug lord had been on the run since his escape to Switzerland in 2000. France 3 Provence-Alpes gives you three details about “Scapu la balance”, who has just died.
A million dollar bounty on his head
Until then nicknamed “François le Brun”, Scapula earned his nickname “Scapu la balance” when he handed over the assassins of judge Pierre Michel, shot down on a motorbike in 1981 in Marseille. At the trial of Charles Altiéri, the pilot, before the Assize Court of Aix-en-Provence in 1991, Scapula lived a peaceful life in a Swiss prison. He was the one who told everything to the Marseille police. Summoned to testify before the Aix jurors, he refused to leave his cell. Too risky. A price was put on his head.
It must be said that the investigation into the judge’s death remained at a standstill for five long years. Until François Scapula was arrested in Switzerland. The repentant Marseille trafficker snitched on the instigators, his childhood friend Francis Girard known as “Le Blond”, and the little executioner hands.
He gives many other leads on international heroin networks, which contribute to the dismantling of powerful networks. “Scapu the snitch” is the man to take down for the Marseille traffickers, the Sicilian mafia, but also the American underworld. A million dollar contract is put on his head. Which apparently no one has ever touched.
The pioneer of modern drug trafficking
Born in 1945 in the Endoume district, where many of Marseille’s traffickers of the time came from, Scapula cut his teeth in burglaries, car thefts and hold-ups, before moving up the ranks in drug trafficking in the early 1970s.
With his friend “Francis Le Blond”, he set up his small business transforming base morphine into heroin, with international ambitions, supplying both the Cosa Nostra in Sicily and the Benevento clan in New York. “In another life, he would have made a great business leader.”said of him a former boss of narcotics in Marseille, Paul Grossrieder, the police officer who undoubtedly knows him best.
The business was flourishing until the fall of the “Blond” in 1981, sent to the Baumettes by Judge Michel, who was assassinated three months later. Scapula, for his part, disappeared from the radar for a few years.
Protected by Swiss justice after his escape
Arrested in a Swiss chalet-lab in 1985, with two accomplices, including Charles Altiéri, the chemist of the “Paccots gang” was sentenced in June 1987 to 20 years of imprisonment by the Fribourg court. He escaped from his semi-open penitentiary in German-speaking Switzerland in November 2000. The Marseillais did not return from a weekend of leave that he had been granted. An escape kept secret by the Fribourg justice system until October 2001, to protect the fugitive repentant.
“Scapula did not pose a danger to the population. He was not a raving madman.”explains the head of the prison service of the canton of Fribourg, Joseph Jutzet. With three-quarters of his sentence served in high-security cells, most of it in solitary confinement, Scapula was about to be granted parole.
But France had requested his extradition, he did not want to run the risk of being an easy target in a French prison, where he would have to serve a double sentence in absentia of 22 years and 15 years in prison for heroin trafficking.