Pierre Michel (judge)

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Pierre Michel (July 2, 1943 – October 21, 1981) was a French magistrate. He is, after François Renaud in 1975, the second judge murdered in France after the German Occupation during the Second World War, due to his investigation and prosecution of the French Connection. The 2014 French-Belgian film La French, directed by Cédric Jimenez, is an action crime thriller centering on Michel’s investigative work, starring French actor Jean Dujardin.

Early life

Born to a family of lawyers from Metz; his father Georges studied to become a notary but did not join his elder brother Bernard’s law firm. In 1965, he started teaching natural sciences in a high school in Jarny where he met his future wife, Jacqueline, who taught history and geography. In 1973, Jacqueline was transferred to Marseille and Michel resigned from his position to join her.

Career

After starting work as an auditor, he was mentored by René Saurel. Michel would eventually become the first judge in France to carry out targeted investigations and prosecutions of the French Connection. As a trainee, he handled cases involving drug addicts. After obtaining his doctorate in law, he began his judicial career in 1974 and was appointed magistrate on December 31, 1974 in Marseille where he dealt primarily with narcotics cases involving juveniles, but notably included the mass shooting at the Bar du Téléphone. In 1977, he was asked to substitute for a colleague in charge of organized crime, but this temporary reassignment was extended and he eventually inherited the position. In the press, he was known by the nicknames “the vigilante” and “the cowboy.”

During the 1970s when Marseilles was considered the drug capital of the world, Michel dismantled six heroin processing laboratories and arrested seventy traffickers in seven years. Assisted by police commissioners Gérard Girel and Lucien Aimé-Blanc, he was at the forefront of stopping of the French Connection and utilized unprecedented and controversial methods for the time, such as arresting companions and spouses of suspected drug traffickers.

Death and investigation

On October 21, 1981, in Marseille, Michel was returning home on a motorcycle, a Honda 125 Twin, for lunch with his wife and two daughters. Unbeknownst to him, he was followed from the courthouse by two people on a Honda CB900F motorcycle. At 12:49PM, as he slowed down at an intersection on Boulevard Michelet, he was shot three times by the shooter sitting on the rear of the motorcycle. One bullet entered the shoulder, another pierced the thorax, perforating the heart and lung, another at the base of the neck, severing the spinal cord. He died instantly. The investigation was entrusted to Judge Patrick Guérin. The motorcycle used in the crime was found, 48 hours after the assassination, in the parking lot of a building on Avenue Clot-Bey, near Borely Park, after a witness remembered and reported its registration number. It was stolen a year earlier, presumably by a team specializing in theft and concealment of motorcycles. A fingerprint found on a sticker affixed to the rear grille was traced back to the owner of the bike, Charles Giardina. The surveillance of Giardina working on his bike in his garage led to two of his associates, the mobsters Gilbert Ciaramaglia and Daniel Danti, who were subordinates of the godfather of Marseille Gaëtan Zampa. The three were arrested but released for lack of material evidence.

Other leads were followed, such as the possibility of involvement from Cosa Nostra and the Camorra. Finally, by chance, during an arrest of French traffickers in Switzerland, October 10, 1985, the conspirators and assassins were revealed by François Scapula in exchange for his not being extradited to France. The trial confirmed Scapula's revelations: the killer was François Checchi, on a motorcycle driven by Charles Altiéri; François Girard and Homère Filippi, criminals associated with the French Connection, ordered the hit. On 30 June 1988, the Assize Court of Aix-en-Provence sentenced François Checchi and François Girard to life imprisonment, with an 18-year minimum sentence. Charles Altiéri, and Homère Filippi were sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment by the Assize Court of Bouches-du-Rhône on 19 April. In September 2014, François Checchi, 65, was released from detention under house arrest. At the beginning of October 2014, Charles Altiéri was paroled with the requirement he wear an ankle bracelet monitor.

Judge Michel is buried in the eastern cemetery in Metz, in the family mausoleum. The city of Metz, where he was born, honored his memory by naming a street next to the courthouse after him. A section of the courthouse in Marseille is also named after him. Michel was survived by his wife and two children.

References

fr:Pierre_Michel_(juge)#Notes_et_références

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