SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD ... BUT WHO DESERVES JAIL?

PARIS. Another hot, muggy August day on my quiet rue Censier. Quiet? Less than two months ago, fire killed Balthazar, the brilliant young handicapped lad living below my apartment. I can still hear the running footsteps and shouting, as firemen raced about vainly trying to find the toxic black smoke.
Last Monday, a low-flying helicopter deafened strollers below by flying circles above our street for three hours. Thirty-five cops ran here and there, blocking off the whole Mouffetard district.
This time, nobody died. But three young kids ruined their lives. They tried to rob a bank 50 meters down rue Censier on the corner of rue Monge. Two of them were 17, one a girl. They didn’t wreck their lives by dying physically, but by dying socially. They had already started years before. The 17-year-old boy had appeared in court 41 times before this; the girl half a dozen times. Good-bye career, good-bye life.
Call them the Kids Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight. In fact, they didn’t shoot at all, and at least one gun was fake. It seems they gave little thought to preparation or consequences. The kids just thought the corner Fortis Bank looked like easy pickings.
The would-be Dillingers tried their hold-up with a clumsiness that would be touching were it not so dumb. Dillinger bragged he could rob a bank and get out in 90 seconds. These kids, once inside the bank, fiddled and dithered until the police came, alerted by a secret alarm. The three found, as they should have known, that there was almost no cash with the tellers. So they tried to access the safety-deposit boxes, wasting precious minutes.
At this writing, one armed robber is still on the loose. But the two “juveniles” are in the “cooler” during a heat wave of 40 degrees C.
Two observations on this sad little episode.
First, why is there currently an epidemic of kids trying to rob French banks? One of several reasons: a relentless crop of films glorifying bank-robbers. The French Dillinger was Jacques Mesrine, an expert in helicopter prison escapes and deadly gun-play. He died in a hail of police bullets in 1979. Since then, media and film-makers have made him into a romantic hero, a cult killer admired for his marksmanship and nose-thumbing at cops. So far, he has been the “hero” of four movies – two this year.
Poor suburban kids here are wowed by all this, as they are by a plethora of violent TV shows flashing guns. They follow the media on criminals not just to find role models, but thrills. And especially to learn how French laws give even ultra-violent juveniles almost guaranteed impunity. This is their core education in life. Absentee fathers, plus overwhelmed, often illiterate mothers, run-down, crime-infested housing make their lives a bleak landscape of ignorance, hopelessness and twisted values. Robbing banks looks like a quick fix for bad luck and low self-esteem.
A horrible, and now common, modus operandi is the use of increasingly young, pretty females as decoys, bait or bank “door-openers.” Emotionally fragile girls get sucked into this through thrill-seeking, ignorance, emulation, or “love” for some youthful cowboy gang-leader. They often have to stay in the game because of threats against them, and their families. In the boys’ eyes, they are simply dispensable tools – “stupid sluts.”
Second, how does the Censier-Monge incident fit into the current banking mess? Besides youth crime, there’s another category of people that many suspect are guilty of financial turpitude: maybe some top bankers and hotshot market traders? This year alone, one such trader, Jérôme Kiervel, “lost” 4.28 billion euros for this bank, the Société Générale. His ultimate boss, bank president, then chairman, Daniel Bouton, tried to shuffle away from responsibility for months. Finally, public outrage forced his resignation.
Both men now walk free. Maybe – presuming innocence – they should. But one cannot resist comparing their fate to that of the amateur-hour kid-show, the Censier-Monge trio. Assuming cops catch the third man, the kids will all, at the very least, face courts. The older one will do time. And they didn’t manage to steal a centîme.
What has each group, kids and big bankers, cost investors and/or taxpayers? With helicopters, cops, court costs and legal aid, the state will probably spend more than a quarter-million euros “defending” against the kids a bank branch with virtually no money to take.
Meanwhile, in January 2008, Bouton’s Société Générale announced an historic loss of about seven billion euros, partly to risky investments that prudent bankers wouldn’t touch. At bank annual meetings in France and Belgium (including the Fortis Bank, now BNP), shareholders saw another dimension. Remembering the billions “lost” by their trusted managers, they shouted down top bankers with cries of “robbers!” and “bandits!”
Who are the real robbers here? Who are the bandits? Dumb kids or dumb bankers? I have no idea. Just asking.
Another quiet day on rue Censier. Quiet enough to brood on the scales of justice – which always seem to tip toward the powers-that-be.

Keith Spicer
August 24, 2009