Heavy conviction of a former police officer who sells sleep in Marseille

In addition to the five years of imprisonment, including four years in prison, Gérard Gallas, who rented around a hundred unsanitary accommodations mainly to foreigners in an irregular situation or asylum seekers, including families with children, was sentenced to 75.000 euros in fines. fine and 300.000 euros in damages.

The Marseille criminal court also ordered the confiscation of two buildings and 220.000 euros seized from life insurance.

Absent when the deliberations were read, Gérard Gallas, 50, was hospitalized after being placed in detention in another case. The Aix-en-Provence public prosecutor's office clarified on Wednesday that he had been imprisoned on January 17 for rape and habitual violence against a spouse resulting in permanent disability.

Against his "manager", Ali Faissoili Aliani, 38, absent from the trial in the fall, during which he was presented as a "zealous factotum who did not hesitate to strike out against bad payers", the court handed down a sentence of four years in prison with an arrest warrant and a fine of 45.000 euros.

In all, in his own name or via real estate companies (SCI), the former police officer, who had worked for more than ten years at the Administrative Retention Center (CRA) in Marseille, owned around ten buildings in the second city of France. But only four of these buildings, in the working-class neighborhoods of the north of the city, were worth his time being judged.

Its accommodation, sometimes located in cellars, was rented for up to 600 euros, often paid directly by the Family Allowance Fund (CAF) or via a bank terminal for holders of an allowance from the French Immigration Office. .

“Impunity is over”

At the hearing, several tenants testified to the unsanitary conditions of their "accommodations", cramped rooms, sometimes blind, without hot water or heating, or even without electricity, where cockroaches and rats proliferated.

They also expressed their "fear" of the former police officer, who "threatened" them and said he was "friends with the neighborhood commissioner", while explaining that they had "nowhere else to go".

The court, which went beyond the prosecutor's requisitions, highlighted the "aggravating circumstances" linked to the "plurality of victims" and to the "great extent" of the facts, "repeated over more than three years despite many alerts.

The former police officer, who “aimed for maximum rental profitability”, “unscrupulously exploited the misery of others”, asserted the president of the court Pascal Gand.

He also underlined the "troubled personality" of the accused who, at the hearing, had presented himself as an "inspiring model", president-founder of a "traditional Catholic church, old Catholic apostolic filiation", expert in exorcism but also in martial arts.

“It is a great satisfaction for all the victims. These are invisible people who have gained visibility, despite their status as illegal aliens,” reacted Me Aurélien Leroux, lawyer for several tenants and two Marseille associations, Hospitality Network and A Downtown for All.

“This is the heaviest sentence ever handed down against a slumlord in Marseille”, a city plagued by substandard housing, with 40.000 slums, or 10% of the real estate stock, and “this decision is part of a res- le-bol in Marseille and in France", added the lawyer, recalling that this verdict comes just a few hours after the adoption in the National Assembly of a bill against "degraded housing" which provides for new tools to fight against slumlords.

“Our mobilization against the merchants of misery is bearing fruit and will be strengthened thanks to the bill adopted in the National Assembly,” reacted Benoît Payan, various left-wing mayor of Marseille who had joined as a civil party. “Impunity is over,” he said on the social network X.

Same satisfaction from the civil party associations, who praised an “exemplary” trial. “It is a verdict which shows that these people who exploit human misery will not go unpunished,” underlined Margot Bonis, of Réseau Hospitalité.