Police screw-up or “That stupid bastard would have ended up in jail anyway”

As a cop, Philippe Meyer* killed a 17-year-old black teenager by shooting him in the head in 1993. His son is trying to make amends for his act.

*Philippe and Gaël Meyer's names have been changed for the version published on the True Story Award website.

Wings, an anchor and a sword. On the officers’ white hats with black borders there are also two acanthus leaves. The division marches in unison. White gloves, white shirts, jackets closed with four gold buttons, a row of four men advance towards the centre of the Balard Hexagone, the headquarters of the Ministry of the Army. A five-star General pins a small red, white and blue rectangle on the chest of the first one on the left. At 31, Gaël Meyer had just “taken up arms”. He has been promoted to the rank of officer in charge of the Commissary. His father, Philippe, is bursting with pride. In the third row, dressed in his Sunday best, a dark grey suit that is too big on him, he wouldn’t have missed this for anything in the world. Philippe, the former cop sentenced to eight years in prison in 1996 for having killed Makomé M'Bowolé, a 17-year-old black minor in his custody, is seeing his progeny decorated by the State that condemned him in the Court of Assizes. Here are the father and son, crude symbols of the fallen angel and redemption, united in a Marseillaise played by the brass band of the national air force.

The day before, I’d met them in a bar near Châtelet, in the centre of Paris. “Look at him,” Gaël calls out, pointing to his father, “he thinks he’s intelligent but he doesn’t even know how to use a cell phone.” “Bloody idiot,” retorts Philippe Meyer, trying not to snigger, his head bent over his son’s smartphone. They go into Chez Denise, a typically Parisian restaurant, exposed beams and red checked tablecloths. Opposite me, two sturdy men, round faces, rough features. One is 61, the other 33. Hair cut very short – Philippe has brown hair, Gaël is blond –two types of hair that seem to have lost the war against time. But while we can make out the baby face that Meyer’s son had up until recently, the father gives the impression of always having had a scoundrel’s face. It must be his black pupils and bulging eyes. Sitting at the table, Philippe Meyer talks about his cancers, of the skin and colon, which, according to his oncologist, are now no more than a distant memory. Gaël is lively, chatty, the opposite of the man I met six months earlier, in April 2018. At that time, his ex-wife had accused him of rape and started a lawsuit against him in Great Britain. He hasn’t seen his sons in two years. He had defended himself without a lawyer against one of the biggest London firms. And he’d proved the accusation was false. He tells his father that he now hopes to get custody of his children.

In the early morning of April 6, 1993, around 4:30, the police on night duty in Paris’ 18th arrondissement arrest Makomé M’Bowolé and Alioum Gaye, both 17, and Sori Kamara, aged 18. The policemen had caught them with 120 cartons of Dunhill cigarettes. The three were held in custody at the Grandes-Carrières police station. Around 5:30, the officers notify Makomé’s parents that he’s been arrested. Looking at the policemen, his mother lets out a world-weary sigh: “again”.

Arriving around 9:20, Philippe Meyer, an Inspector in the second division of criminal investigations, is made aware of the arrest that night. A colleague has taken Makomé’s statement, Meyer is going to take the statements of Alioum and Sori. At noon, the Public Prosecutor asks Philippe Meyer to release the three of them. Alioum’s father collects his son at 12:30 and gives him a thrashing in front of the police station. Philippe Meyer keeps Sori in custody, even though he should have been released. He swears that the Public Prosecutor’s stand-in had told him to “Keep him anyway until 7:00PM, to teach him a lesson.” While the Inspector is at lunch, the manager of a small company tells the police that he’s had 120 cartons of cigarettes stolen. The company is located not far from the place where the three clowns were arrested. Completely illegally, Philippe Meyer decides to re-interview the two remaining young men in custody. At 4:00PM, he has Sori brought up from his cell. According to his statement, Sori admits that Alioum and Makomé were behind the theft. At 4:15PM, Makomé is interviewed once more in Meyer’s office.

The teenager vehemently denies the theft. Tempers quickly flare. The young man insults him. Meyer threatens to “thump him one”. Makomé hits back with “If I run into you in the street, I’ll put your lights out, I’ll floor you.” Guirec Blochet, a trainee Inspector, who has come into the office to make some photocopies, is a witness to the scene, and helps Meyer tackle the 5’8”, 150lbs of muscle that has suddenly stood up as the Inspector approached him.

Alerted by the noise of the altercation, José Ruiz, the Chief of Police, goes into the office, recommends that Meyer give Makomé a verbal warning for contempt, then leaves. The teenager fires back with “You play the big man because there’s two of you, but outside, it ain’t gonna be the same, I’ll find you.” Meyer turns towards his desk, apparently looking for the paperwork needed for the verbal warning. One of the drawers opens slightly. The cop sees his Manurhim [gun], a model made for the “special police”. He grabs it and walks over to Makomé. After that, everything happens in less than thirty seconds. Drained of anything that remained of his self-control, Philippe Meyer, holding the gun in his right hand, points it at the kid. “You see,” he shouts, “with this, I take down six bastards like you every day, and afterwards I jerk off and I’m happy for the rest of the day.”

Makomé tries to get out of his chair but the Inspector pushes him back down several times, using his left arm. Alerted by the noise, Thierry Guigno, a colleague of Meyer, goes to the doorway of the office. Blochet goes over to him and gestures him to leave. The young trainee thinks that Meyer is bluffing, that his gun isn’t loaded or that it’s a fake. He does not imagine for a second that the barrel contains six bullets ready to be fired. Meyer always claimed that he didn’t know either. Standing facing Thierry Guigno, Guirec Blochet hears an explosion behind his back, like the sound of a firecracker. From his own office, José Ruiz thinks that a phone book has fallen with a thud on to the floor. Blochet turns around. Philippe Meyer is standing opposite Makomé M’Bowolé, who is slouched in his chair, his head thrown back. A small red hole has formed above his left eyebrow. A calibre 357 Magnum bullet has just struck the wall at a height of three and a half feet, just behind the corpse of the young boy from Zaire.

This homicide unleashes three days of clashes in the 18th arrondissement. Inspector Philippe Meyer becomes the symbol of police “screw-ups”. Between April 4th and 7th, 1993, in addition to Makomé, two other men have been shot in the head and killed by the police. Charles Pasqua, re-elected Minister of the Interior only a week earlier, decides not to back up his men and to show “no pity”: Police Chief José Ruiz is suspended. Philippe Meyer is indicted for first-degree murder and placed in detention pending trial at the Fleury-Mérogis prison. Gaël is eight years old and will not see his father for three years. “At the beginning, no one really explained to me what had happened. I was told that he was away on vacation, and then that he was in prison to be protected from bad people. I only learned the details at the trial.”

In 1993, Gaël’ parents were already divorced; he was living with his mother and saw his father once every two weeks. Prison put an end to those meetings. His “hero” had disappeared. With no protection, he took one knock after the other. First, at school: “When I went to elementary school and secondary school, we lived near the ghetto. And I was the son of a cop who had gunned down a 17-year-old black boy. It wasn’t easy. I had to defend myself. Sometimes I got my face bashed in, sometimes I bashed their faces in.” Then, at home. His stepfather wasn’t affectionate: “Punches in the stomach or shoulder. He twisted my ankle, my arms, my wrists. Wherever you couldn’t see it much.”

When his mother suggested he change his last name, as if to wipe out the last traces of Meyer, who was ruining his life, Gaël was against it. He writes to his father once a week. Philippe sends him a letter almost every day, but refuses to allow him to visit him in prison.  “He thought that prison wasn’t a place for a kid of 8.”

Today, Gaël calls Philippe “dad”. But their relationship seems more like friends. Living in Brussels for the past four years, Philippe stays with his son’s friends when he comes to Paris. A month ago, he was at Nicole’s place, the mother of “Mat’s” first girlfriend, when he was a 14-year-old youngster. At Chez Denise, the two are unsure whether to order the 1.2 kilo (2.75 lb) steak and insist we share the house terrine of paté as an appetiser. “This here is a typical French place,” Philippe remarks. “Not the kind of place to bring one of those ball-busting vegetarians.” Recently, Philippe met “little Audrey”, an 18-year-old student in a bar in Brussels. She’s the daughter of two police lieutenants: her parents tried to dissuade her from seeing the former cop. Philippe sniggers: “I’ve really been demonized.” To his son: “But you know, women, at that age, are attracted to what’s forbidden…”

Gaël has inherited Philippe’s “passion” for women. When he was 20, he had fun sleeping with his father’s “birds”. “One day, I’m driving a girl and Gaël in the car,” Philippe says. “I’m tired, it’s dark, I pull over and park to grab a few winks. And he bangs the broad on the back seat. Except that the girl belonged to one of the pimps in Pigalle. They wanted to smash Gaël’s face in.”

Helped by the alcohol, impossible to stop the Meyers from talking. Memories, a few celebrities. Gaël: “I was 8; dad had just got home from prison, I was in a cooking competition for school children from the Ile-de-France. I got into the final, and one of the judges was [the famous singer] Carlos. Before the tests started, he comes over to me and says with his big mug: ‘You know, all that stuff they say about your dad, don’t believe it. He’s a good guy, your dad.’”

While he was a policeman, Philippe doubled his salary by acting as a bodyguard for politicians or show biz stars, from Simone Weil to Johnny Hallyday. “I met Carlos through Johnny’s band. We went to the wild parties together.” He apparently took great pleasure in escorting VIPs: “You followed motorcycles that cleared the road for you at 200-300km per hour [125-165 miles per hour], you went through the toll booths at 160… [100 mph] Yeah, I made out pretty good.”

“At that speed, you’d better be able to judge distance like you were a compass,” Gaël comments.

“Or even like a Meyer!” The men give each other a high five to show their appreciation of the play on words.

“That runs in the family. We’ve got good eyes. That’s why we’ve always been good shots,” Gaël states.

“Yeah. Except for me, that one time.”

I admit that the joke made me smile. The bottle of red wine, beer and coffee with calvados loosened their tongues, and increased the Meyers’ ability to always laugh at the most terrible things, even when it’s about a tragedy that dramatically changed their lives. Then I felt embarrassed, full of shame. At the time, I kept it to myself.

Born in Kinshasa in 1976, Makomé M’Bowolé didn’t know his father, who died when he was 6 months old. His mother, who didn’t have the means to take care of him, entrusted him to her brother-in-law who was heading to Paris. Makomé was 5 years old. Abandoned, from the age of 7, he spends his nights roaming through the public gardens of the capital alone. Placed in a foster home in Montgeron, in the Essonne, near Paris, the boy is a failure at school, resistant to authority, regularly expelled.

At 16, Makomé M’Bowolé steals scooters and clothes. His adopted father – his uncle – reacts by beating him. In April of 1993, in the family apartment in the 20th arrondissement, where the electricity has been cut off for several months, Makomé sleeps in the living room. He prefers hanging around outside, even if it means robbing a small business to flog cigarettes and make a bit of money. For the job where they took the cartons of Dunhills, Alioum Gaye was sentenced to four months in prison and Sori Kamara to eight months for breaking and entering, both suspended sentences.

On April 6, 1993, a phone rings in London. Booto M’Bowolé, the older sister of Makomé, lives in the English capital with her husband at the time, with whom she had left her native Zaire. “Makomé, was nicknamed ‘Mundele’, because he had very light hair when he was born. My cousin called me, she’d seen it on TV, and told me: ‘Mundele, he’s dead, he got shot at the police station.’ I didn’t understand a thing. I went outside, barefooted. It’s cold in England in April.”

Arriving in Paris the next evening, she joined the rest of the family at the morgue. Despite the twenty-five years that have passed, Booto M’Bowolé has unforgettable memories of her brother’s death. Head held high, she tries to mask her African accent, which gets stronger as her sadness grows. Her clear voice shakes from time to time, falters over a stifled sob. “When I talk to you, now, it’s painful, everything comes back. I see it all, I can see the sheet. We couldn’t get close to Makomé, we looked at him through the glass partition. I can see him there. (She sketches out his body with her hands.) His head is bandaged. Do you know why his head was bandaged up? And Philippe Meyer, does he know why his head was all bandaged up?” Her brother would be 42 today.

When he is incarcerated at Fleury-Mérogis, Philippe Meyer is plunged into a deep depression. Makomé’s face, the impact of the bullet above his left eye, the blood running down his face and the sound of his brains falling out haunt him almost every night. Dr. Cousin and Dr. Dubec, psychiatric experts, find he has “sincere remorse” and “a desire not to avoid his responsibility, even though he explains the facts as a regrettable accident.” He ends up accepting a prescription for Prozac, which he takes every day, as well as Xanax and a sedative. But he doesn’t take the pills and hides them in his cell. After one month in jail, in May of 1993, he takes them all at once. The dose isn’t strong enough. He will never try again. He has a son waiting for him outside.

For a little more than three years, until his trial, Philippe Meyer is locked up with prisoners who were “kept separately”, in a special wing of Fleury-Mérogis’ building D1, that is also known as the “VIP section”. There, he is with policemen, politicians, lawyers, names associated with major financial or political scandals, everyone who wouldn’t last a week with the rest of the prisoners.

Geneviève Duverger was a yoga teacher at Fleury for seven years. Her course was part of an “optional elective for the first year of general studies diploma in Clinical Psychology at the University of Jussieu”, offered to some of the prisoners, including Philippe Meyer.

The sixty-something woman wears her thick, wavy, chestnut brown hair pinned up with barrettes. She wrote down her memories on two separate pieces of paper. On the first, she drew a large “plus sign” and noted “Meyer’s superior intelligence”, which often showed through insightful comments: “Without having studied it, he spoke like a man who knew the philosophy of yoga very well. He had an instinctive type of intelligence.” On the other paper, the “minuses” included his “smooth-talking” side.

At the end of each class, he would seek out his teacher. “That bothered me because I was afraid that the prison staff would think I was having an intimate relationship with him. Rumours are the worst thing, especially in a prison environment.”

“He told me he was in love with you,” I revealed to her.

She burst out laughing, as if astounded by her former student’s capacity to caricature himself: “That damned Philippe Meyer. He’s got nerve. That’s part of his personality. You know, gangsters have that kind of charisma… Some middle-class women volunteer in prison to slum it with the criminals, when their husbands stay in town.” She pauses, then concludes with playful forcefulness: “I was not a volunteer.”

Geneviève Duverger testified at Philippe's trial. “The great mystery, where he’s concerned, is how a man who is so calm, with so much self-control, was able to lose his temper like that.”

When delving into Philippe Meyer’s file, reading the witness statements of his colleagues and superiors, and the reports of psychiatric experts, the inspector was not in the least trigger-happy. An old-fashioned kind of cop, he kept a network of informants going who helped him solve several big cases.

Jean-Yves Liénard, a renowned lawyer, remembered this famous case very well when he saw me in his office in Versailles a few months before he died, at the age of 76: “Did he fire intentionally or accidentally? I don’t know. And to tell you the truth, I couldn’t care less. In my opinion, Meyer doesn’t know either. Even under torture, he wouldn’t be able to tell you.” “Sometimes,” he says in a mysterious tone of voice, “you just have to accept that the truth remains well and truly buried.”

During the trial, from April 12-15, 1996, Liénard concentrated on a very simple defence: “His service record was completely correct, he was a good cop, without previous incidence of violence, under extremely difficult working conditions, in a lousy police station whose premises were shot to hell, which could result in what today would be called a burn out. Which resulted in this unfortunate act.”

On the other hand, the prosecutor, Francis Terquem, maintains that it is quite impossible to believe that Meyer did not do it on purpose. A co-founder of SOS Racism, the lawyer took charge of defending M’Bowolé’s family. In an Italian restaurant, just behind his office, he orders a carafe of white wine. “The facts were just outrageous! Makomé was obviously the symbol of a typical ball-buster, black, without an ounce of culture, who left school before he got thrown out, and who spent his time pissing off people. Standing in front of him, an alcoholic, moron of a cop. That was France in the 1990s.”

Philippe Meyer was known to be an incompetent member of the police force. “He was a catastrophe,” recalls his former Chief of Police, Denis Martin. “With his lateness and sloppy procedures, he always put me in an awkward position vis-à-vis his colleagues.” In 1990, his constant lateness and aversion to the typewriter caused his Police Chief, José Ruiz, to write on Meyer’s official appraisal that he was “dead weight” in the police force. Five days before the tragedy, he noted that his officer rarely arrived on time in the morning. The Police Chief is quite clear: Meyer “has no place in his department”.

According to Terquem, Meyer wanted to push hard. “He has Makomé in his office, his parents haven’t arrived, and he says to himself: ‘I’m going to break him, I’m going to get him to confess, if I crack the case, it will pacify my superiors.’ He gets worked up, takes out his gun, and it goes off. That’s why it was voluntary. Because of his intent.” He stops for a moment to refill his glass of white wine. “The Police Department isn’t satisfied with just recruiting imbeciles, it arms them as well.”

During the trial, Terquem plays the racist crime card. With hindsight, he admits that it’s difficult to pin that label on Philippe Meyer. “It’s not just him who’s racist, it’s the entire situation. At that time, all the police officers had formerly been in Algeria.”

Arriving at Uccle, a community in the south of Brussels, to visit Philippe Meyer at the beginning of August, I ask the taxi driver, Murat, if he knows the place where I need to go. “Oh, yes,” he replies, impressed. “That’s an expensive area. Especially the Avenue de Fré, there it’s really classy. I don’t know who you’re going to see, but it won’t be some nobody.”

His black sedan soon pulls up in front of a pretty, dark brick house, set between an architect’s house and the Saint-Job d’Uccle Orthodox Church. Ivy covers half of the façade. Once through an iron gate, I knock on the front door. An elderly woman comes to open it. She’s as bent over as a hunchback. She can barely keep her right eye open. A disgusting smell rises from her pitiful body.

“Oh, yes. You’re the journalist! You’ve come to see Philippe Meyer, right? Come in, he’s upstairs.” In this house that definitely has charm, with its large rooms, white tiles and wallpaper, another smell hits me: cat piss. As if a pack of furious felines had soiled the walls. There are actually only three of them. In the kitchen, plastic bags are piled up, and the contents of the litter tray is all over the floor.

On the second floor, Philippe Meyer is waiting for me on the landing. “So you met Madame Foster? The poor women, she’s starting to go senile.” He goes into a room that is wedged under the roof, about 322 square feet. There’s a kitchen that is rather tidy, a living room area with an armchair, a small futon and an old TV. A ladder is used to climb up to the mezzanine. You’d think you were in a student’s studio apartment. The skylight above the bed leads to a narrow, private terrace that looks out over a stunning view of the garden. An arbour is set over a wicker chair that has a romantic country look.

Philippe Meyer is wearing a large white T-shirt with a flag of Canada on it, and a pair of Converse trainers. He’s not at all as dashing as during our previous meetings. “My life really bores me to death!”

In one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods of Brussels, he lives on welfare and keeps a woman of 86 company, a woman who is losing her mind and lets him live there for free. In exchange, he takes care of her paperwork and does the shopping.

He pours himself a Martini [vermouth], gets me a Coke. We talk about his trial again. For twenty-five years, he’s been claiming that it was Makomé, in the heat of the moment, who grabbed the Manurhin [the gun] and released the safety catch. “But you know that the version I gave, I imagined it, because I still can’t say how that shot got fired, even today. I heard a “bang” and realized that a fire had been shot when I saw the red hole and blood flowing. I didn’t want to kill him. You’d have to be a psychopath to do something like that.”

The prosecutor asked for a ten-year jail sentence for him. The jury sentenced him to eight years for “assault and bodily harm resulting in accidental death”. In his room, Philippe Meyer rolls himself a joint: he could never swallow that conviction. “I paid for other people. I was abandoned by my superiors,” he insists. His lawyer, Liénard, reacts with a malicious smile: “Seeing yourself as the victim is common amongst the convicted. My colleague, Lemaire, and I were absolutely delighted with the decision, which we couldn’t even imagine would ever happen.”

The ex-cop wanted to be tried for involuntary manslaughter, that is to say, not sent to the Court of Assizes, where he risked a sentence of twenty years in jail, but to criminal court, where he’d risk getting eight years in prison. His lawyer: “Involuntary manslaughter, is something like a car accident: you’re driving home with 2.5 grams of alcohol in your blood and you knock down a pedestrian. That’s involuntary manslaughter. Not a policeman who fires directly at a guy’s head.”

As for Gaël, he wants to believe his father’s version: “We’ve talked about it many times. But ever since I’ve learned how to use guns, I tell myself that you really have to be very dumb to do what he did. Taking out a gun to impress a guy, putting your finger on the trigger…” Philippe Meyer is the kind of person who complains. Even when he plays the introspection card – and he hardly shines at that game – the victim is always him too, even if only a little. Does he regret his act? Yes, obviously. But especially because he tells himself that today he wouldn’t be far off retirement and he would have finished up as an officer in the crime squad, not rotting in some crazy old lady’s house. Does he manage to think about what might have caused him to carry out that appalling act, brandishing his gun at a young kid at a police station? “It was a time when I was undoubtedly laying it on too thick, and the fact that I’d had a drink or two… I wasn’t pissed but that must have removed whatever was left of my self-control.” Does he think about the boy he killed? No. He was haunted by him at the very beginning, then he preferred not imagining what he might have become, to spare himself the insomnia. “Anyway, that stupid bastard would have probably ended up in jail.”

After having a second Martini, Philippe suggests we go get a bite to eat. We leave his room and go downstairs and run in to Madame Foster. The old woman shouts out: “Did it go well with your IT friend?”

“You’re getting confused, Madame Foster. Maurice is a journalist, he’s writing an article about me.”

“Oh, yes, sorry, what am I thinking? Things get mixed up in there,” she says, tapping her forehead.

Madame Forster always allows her handyman to use her Toyota Yaris. “When I take her to the bank or shopping, I roll the windows all the way down, because of how she smells,” Meyer explains to me.

“Why don’t you get her someone to help with the housework? At least to clean the kitchen?” I ask, overwhelmed again by the filthiness of the place.

“I’ve tried several times. But she’s stubborn. She’s afraid of getting robbed.”

“So why don’t you call Social Services?”

“Because she’s not completely senile. She’s afraid of ending up under the legal guardianship of her nephews. And that wouldn’t do me any good either. Here, at least I have a roof over my head.”

Meyer, who has a knack for surprising people, takes me to eat at Chez Krikou, a Congolese restaurant. The owner greets him, Philippe is a regular. He orders two beers and two crispy chicken dishes that are fantastic. His time in prison interests me. When he was sentenced, he was sent to the detention centre at Melun. Gone the VIP quarters. Meyer is worried. They spit at him as he walks by. The first week, he almost never comes out of his cell. When he goes to eat, he holds the fork so the prongs stick out between his fingers. He escapes an attempt on his life. Even that, he talks about with derision: “I’m in the gym, a guy suggests we have a game of ping-pong. We play, I suggest a re-match, the guy says no, there’s something he’s got to do. He gets out of there real quick. In the time it takes me to put away my racket, two big Blacks show up, one on each side of me. The first one has his hand in his pocket, as if he has a knife, so I smash his face with my racket, his jaw makes a cracking sound and I get the hell out of there.”

As he’s speeding away, he runs into Michel, known as “the Yugo”, who asks the former cop, in his duck-like voice: “So, copper? You got problems?” Meyer shows him the racket head that’s hanging off its handle. “Next time, you should play baseball.” Michel had come to defend Meyer, on behalf of a certain “Paulo”, a Corsican, the leader of a group of bank robbers. The two men met a while ago and got along. The former cop would get his protection. To the other prisoners who are looking for a fight, Paulo will say: “That cop, he’s down. And you don’t hit a man when he’s down.”

Philippe gets out in 1998, after five and a half years inside. Gaël: “Well, I knew I wouldn’t be alone anymore.” Return to real life wasn’t easy. Philippe goes back to Ghyslaine, “Gigi”, his girlfriend, who waited for him outside all those years he was in jail. She and Philippe met three months before the “screw-up”. Gigi had just been arrested in the middle of the night, drunk, in the centre of Paris. Philippe, on duty that night, goes to see her in her cell. She’s half undressed; he helps her put on her clothes. He calls her in a week later on some made-up pretext or other. Their affair begins. She’s ten years younger than him.

Except that Gigi has serious mental problems. “That’s probably also why she stuck by me, in spite of me being in prison,” Philippe concedes. “Gigi was really something,” Gaël recalls. “Everything was going well, then suddenly, it all went to pieces.” The two men prefer to laugh about it today. One morning, Philippe and Gaël go down to buy some bread. They go back upstairs twenty minutes later and find Gigi sloshed in the living room, holding a rifle, aiming at Mat. Fortunately, she didn’t know where the bullets were. She and Philippe would break up in 2000.

Professionally as well, he is disillusioned. “When you’ve been in prison, you obviously pay for it twice,” his son says, defending him. “He wants to work in security but he’s denied the clearance because of his police record.” One night in 1999, Philippe is taking a walk with Gigi in Pigalle, the neighbourhood of his old police station, the Grandes-Carrières. He runs into one of the godfathers of this ‘territory’, ‘Justo le Tanche’. The gypsy makes him an offer: “Listen, Philippe, you’ll do what your friends do: “You’ll take over a bar with your bird, and you’ll manage the bar with your bird.”

At the end of August 2018, I meet Philippe again in Pigalle, his territory. He’s been a cop. He’s been a thug. We’ve hardly walked a few meters up the Boulevard de Clichy when a woman who is standing at the door to entice clients in stops him: “Oh, Philippe! How are you?” The scene is repeated a good dozen times. Here, people who already knew him when he was a policeman call him by his first name, or by his nickname, “Paco”. It was S. who gave him that nickname. A girl who is fifteen years younger than him, who started selling her body in Pigalle. Just after his affair with Gigi is over, Paco falls in love with her. They would stay together for seven years. Today, she’s a waitress in a trendy bar. She refused to talk to me about her former lover.

Meyer spends ten years in Pigalle. He manages a dozen or so strip joints, sex clubs that have become rarer today. In front of Pussy’s, we run into Sofiane, the manager. Philippe explains to him that I’m a journalist, that I’d like to go inside. Sofiane agrees, because in Pigalle, you don’t refuse Paco much. But he dodges questions, looks away. At the entrance, under the nauseating purple neon lights, a big brute is talking with a young mixed-race girl who is perched on high heels and wearing a skin-tight, silvery dress. “No, who do you think I am? Of course, I ain’t wearing any underwear!” The guy leads us inside. Low lights, poles for the dancers. At the bar, two young women in their twenties, both wearing cut-off tops and mini-shorts.

This is how things went – and still go – for a client who ventures into a dive like this. Walking through Pigalle late at night, drunk, you let yourself be drawn in by a woman at the door who explains that inside, a cocktail costs 10 euros and a private show, 20. You hit it off with one of the hostesses, pay for a round, a second, and then, come on, she’s nice, this girl, you’ll get a bottle of champagne – in reality, a sparkling wine worth 3 euros – and you’ll go to a room upstairs for a striptease like the ones you see in gangster films. When it comes time to pay, you notice in tiny print on the bill that the gin and tonic wasn’t 10 euros as you were told, but 80 euros. The bottle costs 200, like the strip show. So while you expected to pay 200 euros at most, you end up owing 800. You protest, come on, really. Then one of the big guys from the entrance shows up. It is politely explained to you that you either break into your piggy bank or he’ll break your arm. So you take out your credit card, pay 200 euros at the till, and the bouncer accompanies you outside to a cash machine so you can get the remaining 600 euros. And have a good night.

That’s how Philippe lived: off the naivety of the clients. When Philippe begins this job, Gaël is 12. Until he’s 15, he spends most of his nights with his father among the prostitutes and pimps. He hardly ever goes to school. Philippe introduces his son to everyone: “Here’s my progeny,” he states with pride. Gaël giggles as he remembers those years: “The girls who worked for Paco adored me. I was a little boy with blond hair and blue eyes, I was popular.” But when he was 15, Gaël begins to distance himself from Philippe: “He wasn’t a father, more a kind of mentor.” He starts hanging out with a small gang from Lagny-sur-Marne and sells hash. When one of his buddies is about to get nicked, Mat drops out.

Coming close to a life that promised to end in prison, Gaël tries to get himself together. With the support of his paternal grandparents, he gets an apartment and starts studying to be a chef. “That quickly bored me to death.” He tries to get a technical degree, then a BEP (Vocational diploma), then a CAP (professional qualification), gets kicked out each time. From 16 to 19, he works at night in Parisian cafes. He discovers the world of the jet-setters and takes cocaine with TV reality stars. “One day, I got fed up. I told myself I had to stop the stupidity.” In 2004, he gets an apartment with his father and goes back to high school. At 19. “I suffered a lot because there was such a gap between me and the others, and not just because of the difference in age. Even today, when I meet someone, I never go into detail.”

He starts his last year of school at the age of 22. He doesn’t go to classes, still works in bars to put some cash aside and gets his Bac (High School Diploma) in 2007. His relationship with his father is strained. Gaël is well and truly fed up with his shenanigans. He registers for his first year at the Sorbonne to study Economy and Management, doing the course by correspondence, and goes to London to improve his English. There too, he earns his living as a barman. Three years after his arrival, he leaves with a degree in Economy from Birkbeck College. In 2014, he discovers he has a gift for mathematics and earns a Masters in Finance at the prestigious University of Cambridge, then a PhD.

Reconciled with his father since 2009, after the death of his two paternal grandparents, Gaël returns to France at the end of 2015. Without really intending to, he is caught up in the patriotic fervour that was dormant in him. After the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan, he does not wish to “stand by and do nothing”. At the age of 30, the man who always had a horror of any form of authority, even more so anyone in uniform, becomes a reservist in the French army. And in 2018, he is an officer in charge of the Commissary in the army headquarters.

Gaël has restored the family image. He is, almost unwillingly, the symbol of order, respect for authority, propriety, excellence. The exact opposite of his father. Denis Martin, Philippe's former superior, who was also a friend from high school, says of him: “Already at the time, his life was all about cigarettes, whiskey and birds. He didn’t make an effort.” The son of a couple of leather workers who absolutely adored their son, Philippe, the “black sheep”, concedes: “I never wanted for anything. I had the parents everyone would have liked to have.”

After eating at the Congolese restaurant, Philippe goes down the street. “This is where I normally get my weed.” A police car goes by. We get back into the Yaris. At this point, Philippe has taken the wheel after a pint of beer, two Martinis and a joint. We go into a beer bar in Brussels. Philippe shakes the bouncer’s hand, gives the servers a peck on the cheek; they all seem to know him very well; they all call him “Paco”. Gaël had warned me: “He’s a real character. He’s got lots of charisma. A magician when it comes to relationships. The only thing he succeeds at really well. He’s constantly broke, but always drinking with his buddies.”

The next day, I ring Mona’s bell; she’s his best friend. She’s 32 and lives alone. After a career as an actress in Paris, with bit parts in movies and children’s shows, she came back to live in Belgium, where she works as a physiotherapist, specializing in Indian massage. She’s the one who introduced Philippe to the producer Victor Shapiro, who is none other than her brother, so that he could make a movie about his life based on a script written by the former policeman. In her living room, an old radio is playing “Radio Nostalgie” in the background.

Mona met Philippe at Pépette et Ronron, a bar in the capital. She was drunk, so was he. They talked. After about five minutes, Meyer had told her everything: Pigalle, the boy he killed, the book he wants to publish, prison, his life as a cop.

Mona was taken aback. But that doesn’t prevent them from being friends. “Philippe is a really good friend. When I need him, just like that, he comes and gets me in his car. We like to party, get wasted. He always goes over the top, but he’s a nice guy.” Her friends don’t understand: “They say: ‘But Mona, why do you hang out with that guy? He bumped off a kid. And he did it because he was black, as well!’ Me, I reply: ‘Oh, it’s OK. He would have bumped him off even if he’d been white.’”

Mona is the only person who knows a different Meyer. On the evenings when he invites her to dinner in his studio, he cooks for her and the waterworks start; he cries like a baby thinking about Gigi, who committed suicide a few years after they broke up, about Gaël, who didn’t have the childhood he deserved, about his parents, whom he’s afraid of having disappointed. But not about the “kid” he killed. That would be too much for one man to bear.