GREAT COPS TELL THEIR STORIES – N°3 | TF1 | Reportages

The series “Once upon a time: their greatest cases” invites “Great Cops”, legends in the Detective Service, to tell of the investigation that changed their lives, marked a turning point in their careers. The one that continues to haunt them today and cause them restless nights. In this 3^rd episode, Christian Flaesch, former head of the mythic 36 Quai des Orfèvres, and two other sleuths from the Paris Crime Squad, Christian Pèlegrin and Jean-Louis Huesca, remember an investigation that they carried out more than thirty years ago. The “bait” case: one of the most shocking criminal cases of the 1980s and one which inspired a Bernard Tavernier film of the same title ten years later. In December 1984, two crimes of unprecedented violence are committed in the city’s smart neighborhoods.

Even Christian Pèlegrin, the Crime Squad detective put in charge of the investigation, is stunned by such savagery: “It’s devastating! Devastating! You just can’t understand! I’d never come across anything like that before! Never in my career!” And he and his colleagues are even more stunned when they discover that the murders are the vile work of a young girl and two boys… only just adults.

The other story told in this 3^rd episode is related by Inspector Jean-Marc Bloch. In 1982, when he was rocketed to the top post of the Serious Crime Squad, the “Brigade Antigang”, he had to mobilize his entire force in an attempt to cut off the head of Direct Action, an extreme-left revolutionary group that committed a large number of terrorist attacks. The young inspector, more accustomed to chasing bank robbers and all sorts of hooligans, didn’t expect such violence and fanaticism from his new adversaries: “The Police is the enemy: there’s a hatred of the police institution, a hatred of everything the State represents. And on May 31 1983, that hatred brings about the death of two of my colleagues: Claude Caïola and Michel Gondry”. Jean-Marc Bloch relates, with emotion and skill, how, after two years surveillance, tails and failed arrests where he and his men risked their lives almost every day, he finally put Régis Schleicher, one of Direct Action’s most dangerous members and the man behind the gunfire that cost the lives of his two colleagues, behind bars.