The whistling starts the moment a hooded lookout spots our car, and soon the shrill warning signals echo all around the neighbourhood.
As the watchers encircle us, photographing our number plate with their phones, the streets are almost deserted – for few residents in this French suburb dare to venture outside these days.
Eventually, however, we see two local women passing by, so we park up and approach them. Although the cold eyes of eight or nine drug-trafficking henchmen are boring into them, they are brave enough to vent their despair.
Pushing her baby daughter in a buggy, Kenza, 23, says the shootouts began a month ago. The other night she was awakened at 2am by the rattle of gunfire.
‘When I was growing up here it was lovely, but now it’s just terrifying,’ she says, casting a nervous glance at the lookouts. ‘I’m desperate to move, but the council won’t rehouse me.’
The other woman, Dominique, 58, a driver for the disabled who has lived here for 40 years, tells me how the interior of her car melted the other day when four vehicles beside it were fire-bombed. The violence began when two local dealers were shot by rivals, forcing their gang to flee their patch. This sparked a turf war that is becoming ever more vicious, Dominique says.
‘When those two boys were wounded, I was the only one who went to tend to them because I have first-aid training, so now they at least treat me with respect,’ she tells me.
‘But most folks go out only when it’s essential, because they fear being caught in the crossfire.’
A tribute to Anis, a bright, sporty 15-year-old boy who – by every available account – had nothing to do with drugs
In this suburb, she says they see about 50 drug transactions a day, with dealers selling everything from heroin to cannabis.
‘They do it quite openly. We get all types driving in here for their supplies,’ she says. ‘Often the buyers are middle-class professionals. They hand over wads of cash and take their stash, but nobody dares to report them. After my neighbour was seen talking to the police, his car was torched.’
By now it is time for us to leave, for the young men – uniformly dressed in hooded puffer jackets, bleached jeans and trainers – are prowling ever closer.
But for their uncomfortable presence, the women’s stories would be difficult to believe.
For we are not on some blighted sink estate in the margins of Marseille or Paris. This is an outwardly genteel suburb of Saint-Nazaire, a seaport on the French Atlantic coast seemingly far-removed from the mainstream drugs trade.
Until very recently, Prezegat was a much sought-after district with its rural surrounds and handsome, pastel-coloured chalets. Even the flats in its four unprepossessing high-rise blocks were desirable. Imagine a pleasant backwater on the outskirts of Southampton, say, or Bristol.
But sleepy Prezegat is the latest battleground in a murderous power struggle between drug gangs, which is now spreading to every corner of France.
The crisis has become so acute that – following a spate of executions – interior minister Bruno Retailleau warned the country had reached a ‘tipping point’ earlier this month.
Declaring that ‘narco-enclaves’ were everywhere, he warned that France would fall into their grip – like nations in Latin America – unless the government fought fire with fire.
‘Either we mobilise all our forces for this great battle… or [we must face] the Mexicanisation of the country,’ proclaimed Retailleau. ‘That is the choice before us.’
His warning met with outrage from the Liberal-Left.
Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of the hardline socialist party La France Insoumise, dismissed his remarks as ‘dangerous and inflammatory’. Similar howls came from the French Communist Party, while the Greens have said the drugs epidemic should be handled as a national health emergency rather than a crime explosion.
Such pussyfooting cuts no ice with Republican M. Retailleau. Along with the new justice minister, Didier Migaud, he has proposed a raft of tough new measures. They include setting up a drug-busting organisation like the US Drug Enforcement Agency, seizing suspected traffickers’ property, and even deploying a French investigative magistrate to Colombia – capital of the world’s cocaine market.
These proposals will be considered in January by the French Senate which, in its own damning report, described a nation ‘submerged by drug dealing’.
With typical fanfare, President Emmanuel Macron responded last summer with what he called an ‘XXL’ crackdown on drug gangs. Hundreds of officers stormed towns and cities across France, making dozens of arrests and seizing caches of drugs and weapons. However, this has had no long-term effect. If anything, the violence has worsened.
After being shot, Anis lived for 48 hours, with his mother at his bedside, before doctors told her they could do no more. His life-support machine was turned off
Tributes for Anis included an autographed football shirt laid out in a shopping mall in the central town of Poitiers
Journeying this week through La France Profonde – the Gallic heartland synonymous with games of boules and beret-clad men in tabacs – I saw how drugs are destroying the fabric of Middle France.
It is a sad fact that much of the £3billion industry – largely centring on cannabis and cocaine – is controlled and staffed by traffickers of Moroccan and Algerian heritage. Yet, as politicians point out, these traffickers and dealers are not the only destructive forces. Their clients, who come from every rung of French society, must share the blame in this unfolding catastrophe.
And, as recent surveys show, drug abuse is now alarmingly commonplace in France. Almost half the population have tried cannabis and one in ten – almost seven million people – smoke it regularly. A further 600,000 admit to the frequent use of cocaine.
The revelation that some members of the French establishment use and allegedly deal in street drugs has undermined the government’s crackdown.
Last month, MP Andy Kerbrat, 34, was found with 1.35 grams of 3-MMC – a cheap synthetic version of cocaine – which he had just bought from a Paris street dealer.
Kerbrat happens to be a member of La France Insoumise – the party that most fiercely decried the interior minister for his ‘Mexicanisation’ warning. He says he will seek addiction treatment.
A string of local officials have also been implicated in recent drugs cases. Among them is Jamilah Habsaoui, 46, the socialist mayor of Avallon, a small town in central France, who was charged with trafficking after police allegedly found 70kg of cannabis and almost a kilo of cocaine in a house she owns. She denies the accusation and her brother’s lawyer has said the drugs were there without her knowledge.
The latest damaging – and highly embarrassing – affair came a fortnight ago, when a valet to the French prime minister was arrested for possessing 28 canisters of cocaine in the baggage compartment of his motor scooter.
Experts ascribe the spiralling number of cases to various factors including the cheapness and easy availability of drugs flooding into ports such as Le Havre.
They also point to the malaise of a country where living standards are declining and many youths’ prospects are bleak.
As for why pushers are increasingly infesting the provinces, that comes down to basic economics.
Big city markets are at saturation point and the fast, efficient French rail network and autoroutes bring most small towns within easy reach.
Since the municipal police are usually unarmed and Nicolas Sarkozy closed many community police stations during his term as president, ending in 2012, traffickers also have an easier life out in the sticks.
The trend is like County Lines in Britain – on steroids. For the provincial gangs in France are even more ruthless and they are armed with Kalashnikovs rather than knives.
Among their unlikely new haunts is Grenoble, ‘Capital of the Alps’, ranked the world’s best city for quality of life by the Oxford Economics global index.
With rival gangs fighting to control a vibrant trade bolstered by the 65,000-strong student population, Grenoble’s prosecutor Eric Vaillant recently reported shootings there ‘every two or three days’.
Another new provincial battleground is Rennes, a handsome north-western town that once seemed immune from drug crime. This week, a boy aged five was clinging to life after being shot in the head when his father’s car was caught up in a high-speed chase.
Meanwhile, in Marseille, cradle of Europe’s drug trade and the scene of The French Connection movie, a recent orgy of violence makes the award-winning film seem tame.
The murderous power struggle between drug gangs is now spreading to every corner of France (file image)
The first victim of tit-for-tat murders last month was a 15-year-old enforcer for the Algerian-run DZ Mafia, a notoriously brutal clan. He was reportedly recruited on the internet with promises of big rewards – like many impressionable youths. Despatched to assassinate an enemy gang member, he was captured, stabbed more than 50 times, then doused with petrol and burned alive.
From a prison cell, where he continues to operate using a smuggled phone, a DZ chief then ordered this atrocity to be avenged. A 14-year-old boy was offered 50,000 euros to carry out the reprisal.
Having tracked down his intended targets, the boy told his taxi driver, Nessim Ramdane, to wait for him until the hit was completed. When the 36-year-old cabbie refused, the boy turned his gun on him and killed him.
Shrines to these blameless casualties of France’s drug war – ‘collateral victims’ in cold judicial terminology – are to be found all across the country these days.
But perhaps the saddest story I have heard in the past week was marked by the wilting flowers, rain-sodden teddies and autographed football shirt laid out in a shopping mall in the central town of Poitiers. The display was a tribute to Anis, a bright, sporty 15-year-old boy who – by every available account – had nothing to do with drugs.
On October 31, after arriving home from his Roman Catholic high school, he played football in the park with his friends, then went to a Halloween party in the community centre.
At about 10.45pm, he phoned his mother, Naima, to say he was buying a kebab on his way back to their flat. It was the last time she heard her only child’s voice.
When the phone rang again, it was Anis’s uncle, telling her something terrible had happened. She arrived at the mall to find Anis lying outside the kebab shop. Blood from a bullet wound at the back of his head trickled between the concrete flagstones.
When a masked, black-clad gunman had emerged from the shadows and let rip with a hunting rifle, four of Anis’s teenage friends – all equally innocent – had also been hit. But, unlike him, they survived.
Police quickly established that the 25-year-old gunman, named only as Issachar P., was an outsider suspected of selling drugs in the suburb of Couronneries. As they hunted for him, he turned himself in to police in Paris.
So why, if Anis and his pals were uninvolved, did the suspect target them? Gazing solemnly at the shrine, Rudy, 28, a restaurant chef, told me the back story.
Shortly before the shooting, he said, Issachar had been humiliated by a gang of local drug pedlars. To ward him away from their patch they stripped him to his under-shorts and beat him up.
Seeking revenge, it is claimed, the interloper stalked the mall – close to their dealing point – and opened fire, hitting Anis as he emerged with his supper.
Rudy said he had been in the kebab shop when the shots were fired and emerged to see the boys lying on the ground.
Describing the aftermath as a ‘scene from a gangster film’, he said: ‘[The suspect] had seen the gang who beat him up and surely knew that Anis and his pals were nothing to do with it.
‘He just shot at the first group of boys he saw.
‘That’s why people here are so outraged. If he had shot bad guys, there wouldn’t have been much sympathy. But everyone knows what decent lads they were.’
Not long ago, he said, an atrocity such as this would have been unimaginable in Poitiers.
‘There is a crisis in France that is bigger than just drugs,’ he explained. ‘It’s about the general climate of the country.
‘France is a depressed nation. The ambience in towns like ours has totally changed.’
Anis, however, was not without hope. He was studying hard and doing work experience at a bakery – close to where he was attacked – whose staff spoke highly of him.
He lived for 48 hours, with his mother at his bedside, before doctors told her they could do no more. It was time to turn off his life-support machine.
‘He was her whole life and now she is broken – demolished,’ says Naima’s attorney, Yasmina Djoudi, who stayed with her at the hospital. As the lawyer also represents young criminals sucked into the drugs trade, she knows all sides of this story and adds: ‘France is becoming a very sad place.’
Regrettably it is. Law-abiding Gallic citizens must pray that the promised purge by the government returns their benighted neighbourhoods to serenity. And us Britons, too.
Otherwise, how long before a narco-state, effectively under the yoke of bloodthirsty Latin American-style cartels, looms across the Channel?