During the week, their working day starts at around two o’clock in the afternoon and finishes at about three in the morning. It basically involves them coming and going on their scooters or in their SmartCars between their supply point, the place where the deal is going down and their office at the local kebab shop or gym.

If I had to film them going about their business, I’d set it to the soundtrack of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.”

All their conversations revolve around money: the money they’re owed, the money they should have been paid, the money they dream about having. And then on the weekend they go and blow that very money in the clubs — the same clubs frequented by those La Défense suits, who are also their clients — except when the 1,000 euro bottle of champagne arrives at their table, they tip it upside down and empty it into the ice bucket because they don’t drink alcohol. Often, when they’re leaving the club, they get into a fight and then they’re systematically arrested and sentenced without anybody even bothering to find out if it was them or one of the suits who started it.

Like their clients, they spend their winters in Thailand, also in Phuket, but in a different part of town, namely Patong, now rechristened The 4,000, after the Courneuve housing development in Seine-Saint-Denis. The locals call them the French Arabics.

It’s holiday time over there; they don’t deal because just using gets you twenty years. In summer, they hit the bled, the village back home, with the family. They don’t deal there either, for the same reasons.

Their favourite films are Fast and Furious 1, 2, 3, etc., up to 8, and Scarface. They’re all on social media — whether they’re in the slammer or on the outside — and from their posts you’d think they were working at Louis Vuitton and studying at Harvard. They exchange grand statements in which Sunni Islam (the part relating to polygamy, mainly) is cut with Tony Montana’s cult comebacks and lines from rappers with over 500 million YouTube views.

As for their capacity for introspection, they’re like business people the world over. Grossly lacking.

. . . and I think to myself, what a wonderful world . . .

It may not sound like it, but I feel something approaching affection for some of them. They remind me of my father’s brand of right-wing anarchism and, like him, they speak the universal language: money.

So, I’d been working on phone taps for the drug squad for a while, translating the shockingly bad Arabic with which the dealers punctuated their speech, thinking nobody would be able to understand them.