He cites a fully qualified engineer friend unable to get an interview: “If he put Jean-Michel on his CV, it’d be a different story.”Ī poster in Marseille of Zinedine Zidane, the football star from La Castellane estate. It’s difficult, says Mohammed, to find a job if you have the wrong address or the wrong kind of name. A life of so-called néobanditisme like Remadnia’s is an enticing prospect here, where 28% live on less than €630 a month. Black, white and Arab teenagers are shimmying to bubblegum pop in the playground outside this forlorn converted boys’ school, as the mistral wind whips up dust-devils from the nearby roadworks. ![]() This is the heart of the quartiers nords, the deprived, crime-ridden northern districts that have given Marseille its reputation as France’s outsider city. We’re in the social centre at La Busserine, an estate across the road from Font Vert. Was he a decent guy, deep down? “I’m not sure you can be nice if you’re involved in things like that. He’d started designing clothes in prison. So I said to him: ‘You’re not still up to no good’? And he just said: ‘I’m a gangster now.’” Remadnia was also a father of three. ![]() A social worker, Mohammed, recalled meeting him after he got out. Known as the “Bear of Font Vert” (Font Vert being the cité, or housing estate, where he lived and ran a major drug network), Remadnia had only been released from prison last May. Cut down by 15 bullets on 7 February, out on the western edge of Marseille, the 34-year-old became the first casualty of the city’s drug wars in 2017.
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