Generally speaking, I’m working on four to five cases at any one time. They’re usually the result of a tip-off by a rival who wants to set up his own business, or a local resident fed up with the constant comings and goings of dealers outside their place.

One of these cases was generating a lot more work than the others. The protagonists, of Moroccan origin, spoke only in Arabic, which meant I had to translate the whole recording and not just a few words here and there as was usually the case.

It involved short-supply-chain dope dealing, straight from small grower to consumer, a far cry from the Go Fast trafficking convoys and their elaborate protocols. Dealers from outside the usual criminal milieu, and denounced not by a competitor but by a neighbour back in the bled because of some dark history involving a fresh water spring. Shades of Marcel Pagnol’s Jean de Florette, you might say.

The grower, Mohamed Benabdelaziz, lived in Oued Laou, a small Moroccan village that occupies a strategic position on the coast, at the foot of the Rif mountains with its cannabis plantations, 40 kilometres from the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. On a little parcel of just six hectares, he was growing khardala, a high-yield variety of grass — shortish plants, weighed down with flowers, very rich in THC — which he was harvesting himself and, rarer still, from which he was then extracting the resin and pressing it, all himself. Once the drugs made it to Spain, he was paid the entire sum owing for the cannabis in Morocco via a saraf — banker in Arabic — who discounted the amount payable. Having paid Mohamed in advance, the saraf would then be responsible for recovery from the French wholesalers via debt collectors who were as discreet as they were respected. These collectors worked for a number of drug traffickers but also for retailers who had nothing to do with that world. Once the money had been recovered, it was used to buy electrical household appliances or cars that were reimported back into the country, thereby evading the ultra-strict currency exchange controls imposed by Morocco to protect its economy.

It all operated within a sealed, exclusively Moroccan environment where everybody knew each other both in France and back in the bled. A short sale-and-laundering process, completely modelled on the real economy. From farm to table, just like the champagne socialists’ baskets of organic vegetables.

Mohamed Benabdelaziz, the producer, had his drugs transported by his nephew, a twenty-four-year-old Frenchman originally from Vitry on the outskirts of Paris.

When I first started listening to this family, the drugs were loaded onto a truck transporting vegetables. The truck crossed the border at Ceuta thanks to the complicity of a customs official cousin, then headed across Spain towards France, all the way to the banlieue where the wholesalers were waiting with their teams to sell it across Paris (business line).