French Ex-Cop Olivier Marchal, Writer and Director of Braquo, Stands Up for His Old Friend Michel Neyret

French ex-cop Olivier Marchal, writer of the TV series Braquo, which is getting nearly as much praise as The Wire, has turned to film directing, with great success. His film Les Lyonnais, which I will clumsily translate as "The Lyon Gangsters", has already started gathering the plaudits, before its official release date of November 30th. The lead actor in the film is Gérard Lanvin, and there is a strong supporting case that includes Tchéky Karyo. 




But Marchal is also coming under fire, for standing up for his old friend Michel Neyret, the commissaire who was number two in the Lyon police hierarchy, until he was charged with offences arising from getting too close to the Franco-Tunisian Benichou gang that operates down on the Côte d'Azur. Neyret has been accused, I repeat the word 'accused', of selling information to known crooks, in exchange for luxurious holidays and fast cars, sometimes picking up as much as fifty thousand euros when he handed over interpol information on a notorious individual. How much of this is true will come out, in time. Neyret, and many other French cops, plead that that he was only using the time-honored method of throwing out a sardine to catch a shark.




Every policeman in France is lamenting Neyret's fall. For years he has been their hero, and he could do no wrong. Neyret, whom everybody describes as a good, "old fashioned" cop is accused of going over to the other side, during a three-year posting to Nice, a city in France that disgusted Graham Greene, in the 1980s, when the writer discovered the collusion between cops, criminals and politicians in the crime scene down there, especially when the collusion started affecting his own circle.  Greene's exposure of the Nice scene, a long time before Neyret was ever posted to the city, can be found in his book: On the Riviera: A Morality Tale.




In today's Journal du Dimanche, this is what Olivier Marchal had to say about his friend, Michel Neyret, who was an adviser on his film. 

"I take exception to the fact that the methods of a cop, who was lauded in the past for his crime detection record, are being condemned by the very people who owe their jobs to his record of success. It's true, that when I was a cop, we had crooked friends.  We got up at the same time as them, and that wasn't the same time of day as people who work office hours. Neyret is a great guy who over-reached himself. You can't put him in the same category as the cops in Lille, those guys (who have been accused of) pimping for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, they're the ones who make me throw up. But when you think of Michel, and then you see the other guys who are walking around free today (you have to wonder what the hell is going on...)"