During his news conference on Tuesday, President François Hollande, in one of his very few comments related to the revelations of his relationship with the actress Julie Gayet, dismissed the suggestion that there had been any failure in his personal security arrangements during their secret meetings.
“My security is ensured everywhere,” said Hollande, “at every moment, during all my travels, public and private.” However, Mediapart has gained further evidence that clearly demonstrates the very close links that the apartment used by Hollande, 59, and Gayet, 41, for their secret encounters has with several individuals implicated in organised crime in Corsica.
The disturbing connection raises very serious questions about the danger, such as blackmail, that the French head of state was exposed to, and whether this was due to a failure on the part of the presidential security team.
The fourth-floor apartment, in a residential building on the rue de Cirque in central Paris, close to the presidential offices, the Elysée Palace, was lent to Gayet by her friend and fellow actress Emmanuelle Hauck.
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Following Mediapart’s initial revelations this weekend of Hauck’s intimate relations with several people connected to the Corsican criminal underworld, the presidential office confirmed to both Mediapart and French daily Le Monde that no investigation had been made into the apartment’s occupants or their entourage.
Denis Roux, who headed the French presidential security team (the Groupe de sécurité de la présidence de la République), the GSPR, from 1999 to 2002, told Mediapart that this demonstrated “a lack of caution”. Another former GSPR head, whose name is withheld, said he would have placed the apartment under surveillance. “We would have carried out an investigation on those who go there,” he added. “I would have said to the president ‘this is what we have’”.
Hauck's former husband and father of her children, Michel Ferracci, whose name still appears on the letterbox of the apartment lent to Hollande and Gayet (see photo below), was given an 18-month suspended prison sentence in November 2013 for his role in a fraud and tax evasion scam by the management of the Cercle Wagram gambling club in Paris, of which he was a director. During the trial, Ferracci’s suspected links to organised crime in his native Corsica were presented to the court, as also were the links between the gambling club and one of the most notorious Corsican criminal gangs, the ‘Brise de Mer’.
After Hauck’s separation from Ferracci, she became the partner of François Masini, another Corsican with alleged links to the Brise de Mer gang and who was shot dead in the north of the French Mediterranean island in an ambush on May 31st 2013. The Corsican underworld has a long-established reputation as being amongst the most ferocious and feared among French criminal gangs.
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Mediapart has now gained access to documents from the judicial investigation into the Cercle Wagram that show that Gayet’s friend Emmanuelle Hauck was also in regular contact with Jean Testanière, the former general secretary of the Cercle Wagram gambling club and who was sentenced last November to two years in prison, one suspended, for ‘abuse of trust’ and ‘association with a criminal gang’.
According to the lead judge during the trial, Testanière played “a quite essential” role in the system of fraud established at the Cercle Wagram. The magistrates in charge of the investigation which led to the trial, Serge Tournaire and Hervé Robert, concluded in their case notes that the gambling club was controlled “since several years by individuals affiliated to Corsican gangs, such as the brothers Jean-Angelo and Francis Guazzelli, and Richard Casanova”. All three belong to the Brise de Mer, so-called after the name of the bar where they regularly met in Bastia, in north-east Corsica, and which means 'sea breeze'.
Emmanuelle Hauck, who appeared as an actress in the a French television series about the Corsican criminal underworld, called Mafiosa, did not respond to Mediapart’s requests for an interview.
In transcripts of police phone taps carried out during the investigation into the Cercle Wagram, Hauck’s former husband Michel Ferracci is recorded as telling Jean Testanière that he is concerned about the background of a man who had become intimate with the actress. Ferracci told Testanière that he did not want his children from his relationship with Hauck to be brought up “by a gangster”.
A trail of bloody crime
During the recorded conversation, Testanière was heard trying to reassure Ferracci by indicating that the actress described her new companion as having “an entourage similar to that of Michel”. The police notes that accompany the transcriptions include the observation that what Testanière said in fact served only to add to Ferracci’s concerns “because he fears that this is ‘people with whom he is not happy’”, a suggestion that the “entourage” may be from a rival gang.
In another transcript of a conversation between Ferracci and Testanière secretly recorded by police the following day, Ferracci indicated that he believed he had discovered the identity of Emmanuelle Hauck’s new companion. The police notes read: “Michel adds that this person knows the brother of ‘his friend’ […] whose name he does not want to pronounce on the phone.”
The police suspected the “friend” Ferracci referred to is Jean-Angelo Guazzelli, suspected by police of being a leading member of the Brise de Mer gang. Guazzelli, an olive oil producer, was sentenced in November 2013 to three years in prison, one suspended, and handed a 100,000-euro fine for his part in the Cercle Wagram scam.
Several hours after the tapped conversation between Ferracci and Testanière, the police recorded another between Testanière and Emmanuelle Hauck, in which Testanière assures the actress that “our friend” – whose name he insists must not be pronounced – gave her his full support. She then asked whether Ferracci had approached “our friend”, and was told that he had not because he was afraid.
The transcript appears to suggest that the man described as “our friend”, who the police suspected was Jean-Angelo Guazzelli, had given his benediction to Hauck’s relationship with her new companion, although why this would be necessary is unclear.
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After her separation from Ferracci, Hauck lived with François Masini, who was linked by police to several cases of armed robbery and who was described in a judicial report as being “close to the Brise de Mer”. Masini, who was once wounded in a shooting in Bastia in October 1993, died when his car was riddled with bullets on May 31st 2013 at San-Nicolao, in northern Corsica. His official death notice referred to Hauck as his partner.
Masini’s assailants managed to escape, and the Bastia-based police investigation into his murder is ongoing. According to French daily Le Monde, Hauck has been questioned on three occasions as a witness to the case.
Shortly after Masini’s murder, four men were assassinated in another shooting during the night of July 2nd in Casabianca, also in northern Corsica. Three of the victims, who were the object of police surveillance, were reported by regional daily Corse-Matin as being close to Masini and also previously to a local businessman, Christian Leoni, suspected of links with the Brise de Mer gang and who was himself murdered in October 2011.
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The question begs as to whether François Hollande himself knew anything about the dangerous individuals connected to the woman who lent him and Julie Gayet her apartment for their secret liaison. As does also the question of whether the French president’s dedicated security team, the GSPR, had any knowledge of the links. Was the head of the GSPR, Sophie Hatt, informed of Hollande’s visits to Hauck’s apartment when he was escorted only by his two closest ‘shadow’ protection officers?
Contacted by Mediapart, Hatt and the GSPR declined to comment on the issue.
Denis Roux, a former GSPR chief who served in the post between 1999 and 2002, told Mediapart that he believed there had been a “lack of caution” on the part of the security team. Asked whether he would have allowed a president under his protection to use an apartment where Ferracci’s name appeared on the letterbox and which also had connections to Masini, he said: “You can’t swear to anything, I don’t have my head above the handlebars. But I think that during my time the president would not have gone there, I’d have done the utmost.”
'Imagine if it concerned a group of Jihadists'
Another former head of the GSPR, who asked not to be named, said he would have taken the precaution of placing the apartment under surveillance. “We would have carried out an investigation on those who go there,” he added. “I would have said to the president ‘this is what we have’. It happened to me that during official travel or private trips I said ‘Don’t go there’ because there was a risk. For example, that microphones were placed in a hotel that we hadn’t checked out. After that, the president alone is the judge [of the matter]. Whatever the precautions suggested by the GSPR, he has his margin of opinion.”
René-Georges Querry, who headed an official security service for senior public figures between 1992 and 1995, said he would not have considered the apartment on the rue du Cirque as necessarily representing a danger. “You can’t constantly move in a sterilized environment,” he commented. Asked whether it was probable that the GSPR had no knowledge of the connections with Masini and Ferracci, he said: “To want to carry out an investigation means leaving traces and placing the discrete nature of the president’s private life in danger. To carry out an investigation you have to look up the files. Now, if the security agents got into the Stic [confidential French police criminal information] database, for example, they did so on the sly in dubious conditions that you wouldn’t have failed to denounce. And if it was revealed, it would have caused a state scandal, ‘private investigations carried out by spooks’. So they took the risk, that’s all.”
Meanwhile, a former ranking police officer with political links to former conservative president Nicolas Sarkozy, and whose name is withheld, claimed the GSPR would be guilty of having made “a heavy” mistake if no investigation into the apartment was carried out. “It’s a basic piece of work,” he said. “Even if Monsieur Ferracci has never occupied the apartment, his name is on the letterbox. A simple check allows it to be run past the records. Imagine if it concerned a group of Jihadists.”
The police officer said he believed interior minister Manuel Valls would have known about the connection between Hollande and Gayet’s secret meeting place and the Corsican underworld. “Manuel Valls is necessarily aware,” he said. “If he doesn’t head the police, who does? [GSPR chief] Sophie Hatt worked for [former socialist prime minister] Lionel Jospin at the same time as did Valls, there are connections of fidelity, of loyalty.”
That accusation is dismissed by French journalist Philippe Durant, whose investigations into the workings of the official French VIP security and protection groups were published in his book, Haute Protection, in 2010. “A sine qua non condition for [GSPR] security officers is that they don’t pass information up above, otherwise it would no longer be about protection but rather espionage,” he said. “They know everything but say nothing. It’s their integrity. I don’t see how that could be passed on up to the ears of Manuel Valls.”
Contacted last weekend by Mediapart, a spokesperson for the interior ministry said the GSPR had “complete autonomy in the way it works”, adding that this was “reinforced” by past situations where the French president was from a rival political camp to that of the government. “It is inconceivable that the minister of the interior would be aware of a president's private life,” the ministry official added.
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English version by Graham Tearse