You Changed My Life (12 page)

Amen. What the counselor wanted, I could pretend to want, too. But in reality, I didn't see myself sticking to any protocol for one second. You'd have to be pretty naïve, really, to think that a kid who never obeyed his parents, or his teachers, or the cops could suddenly think that obedience was the key to his salvation! What arguments did anyone provide to make me believe that, anyway? None! That said, this white dude in his suit and tie was right to save his spit . . . I listened closely to his little speech. I heard the word “free.” There were four letters before that, S-E-M-I? Those I forgot right away. I also heard that I'd be sleeping where I wanted on the weekend. That meant I'd leave Corbeil-Essonnes Friday morning and not come back until Monday evening. Four days in the wild . . . I signed up right there and then.

Three weeks after the internship starts—in electrical work, just like Papa!—the counselor calls me in.

“Mr. Sellou, is there a problem with your training?”

“Uh, no . . . I don't know.”

“Well, I'm told you haven't been in four days.”

I figure it out immediately. I never went to see how to handle cables, switches, and circuit breakers. I sent a friend instead. Same height, same build: he looks like me, and I never look like myself in photos. It works like a charm until the friend skips the training . . . he might have at least told me! I'm gonna have
to set him straight. In the meantime, I owe the counselor an explanation. I try to get around the issue.

“Actually, I didn't really like the ambience, you know . . . When you start hearing racist jokes . . .”

“Well then, what do you plan on doing? If you stop attending your internship, I won't be able to keep you in the semi-free program. You'll have to go back to Fleury-Mérogis.”

Ooh . . . this whitey thinks he can scare me! He doesn't know that the bedding is softer at Fleury than in Corbeil! I swallow my pride, try to look contrite and beg him.

“Give me one week to find another internship. Please, sir . . .”

“One week, not a day more.”

Hey, hey! He thinks he's a tough guy on top of it!

“One week, I promise.”

What bothers me about Corbeil is that that there's no TV in the rooms. We get back at nine o'clock at the latest, sign the register in front of the uniformed guard with an expression that's so alert, you'd think we were in Saint-Tropez . . . The next day, the doors open at dawn to let the brave get back to the grind on time. In between, there's nothing to do. Nothing, not a thing.

I scoured the classifieds. A chain of pizza restaurants was looking for delivery boys. I'd already stolen enough motor scooters to master the art of driving and I'd run through the streets of Paris enough to know each neighborhood like the back of my hand. I got the job. For a few days, I loaded the calzones on top of the moped, I rang doorbells, furious when
nobody would buzz me in, mixed up door codes, rescued my double cheeses from crooks that refused to pay, offered margheritas to the homeless guy on the corner. I managed to get a glowing report that I handed to the education counselor with an angelic smile.

“Bravo, Mr. Sellou. I encourage you to keep trying.”

“No problem. I've even decided to move on to more serious things.”

He's amazed.

“What do you mean, Mr. Sellou?”

“Well . . . I mean that I have ambition. That I won't keep delivering all my life. I've already started helping out the manager.”

“Well, good luck. From the bottom of my heart, good luck.”

He doesn't think I'll go very far.

I played the model employee to earn confidence from manage
ment. They showed me how the chain operated, from the order stage all the way to the client's door and on to calculation of the day's receipts, every night, before closing. I moved up fast in the store that hired me. I watched closely and remembered every weakness in their system: despite appearances and the so-called lesson learned in prison, Lil' Abdel hadn't changed. He was just looking for a new way to do business.

After getting caught again at Trocadéro, I understood that I'd have to move to another business. Paris had changed since the mid-eighties and my beginnings in the watch and camera trade. Security had beefed up so tourists could take better, safer advantage of their visits, and the police, even if it had taken them a while, quickly caught on to crooks like me. And it was getting tense between traffickers, who were always wanting more. Drugs were now the best way to make a lot of money. The network created every kind of greed, and guns started
showing up. We weren't yet seeing guys walking around with Kalashnikovs like dogs in the projects—that's the norm these days—but gangs were forming little by little and they were looking for any way possible to make an impression on the others. You had to defend your territory. The North Africans didn't really mix so easily with the blacks anymore. The rise of the INF in Algeria scared the French. Newspapers reported their barbaric acts. People started looking down on us and treating us almost like savages. I really did need to find a new orientation, fast.

At Corbeil-Essonnes, I meet a druggie in the semi-free program, like me. He stole a Citroën AX to go to work. Every morning, for two or three weeks, he drops me off just outside of Paris. Then he disappears with the car. I have to take the RER again. I find myself in the place of the honest, hardworking folks who watched me sleep, spread out on the seat, just two years ago.

In his store in the Latin quarter, Jean-Marc—the manager—doesn't know what to do anymore. His delivery boys come back often on foot with their pockets empty. They swear they were mugged in a building entrance. More like they sold the moped, often in exchange for hash, kept the money, and shared the pizzas with their friends. But how could you prove it? Jean-Marc's no fool, but he has no way to take action. You can't fire a delivery guy because he was mugged. You don't file a complaint against him just because you don't believe him. Jean-Marc sighs deeply and asks headquarters to send him new mopeds ASAP. I don't join in on the pathetic business with the rest of the team, I don't say anything, but it can't keep going
on like this. I'm coming up with a new plan and these little small-time thieves are preventing me from putting it into action. I talk to the manager.

“Jean-Marc, your guys there, they're making a fool out of you.”

“I know Abdel, but my hands are tied!”

“Listen, it's really very simple. It's ten o'clock. Call them, one by one, and tell them you don't need them today. Same for tomorrow and the next day. And in three days, you send them a pink slip for unjustified absence, or something like that.”

“Okay, but who's going to make the deliveries in the meantime?”

“I'll find you some people.”

If police are sometimes incapable of stopping crooks, it's because they don't use the same methods. They don't anticipate the crime, they don't see the hit coming, they're not on a level playing field. Personally, I'm equipped to deal with these guys. Obviously: I'm one of them! They grew up in La Chapelle, Saint-Denis, Villiers-le-Bel, Mantes-la-Jolie, wherever. We all went to the same school. It's called life in the projects.

I knew how to clean house. Just like magic, those delivery boys don't claim getting mugged anymore; the receipts come back intact every evening. They're delivered by Yacine, Brahim, and a few other future accomplices. They're already playing along; they behave themselves for a few weeks. They know they can trust me to improve things soon. In the meantime, they stuff themselves with pizzas and they're already happy!

There was a TV series I loved when I was a kid:
The A-Team
. In the pizzeria scam, I'm Face, the good-looking one who does everything right, and Hannibal, the one who ends
every episode with the famous phrase: “I love it when a plan comes together.” I start replacing Jean-Marc on his days off. And when upper management gives him another store, I take his place, with everyone's congratulations. The coast is clear.

In 1991, all the accounting is still done on paper, by hand. In my little pizzeria, we use what we call masters, which are stubbed books of numbered pages that come in double. You slide in a sheet of carbon paper and that way you get a copy of the order. One copy is a receipt for the client, and the other goes back to the main office, which then knows what's been sold and therefore how much a store is supposed to have made.

My plan is very simple: to sell undeclared pizzas. When a client calls to place an order for two or three pies, you just have to ask if he wants a receipt. When it's a small family or two or three students, we don't even ask. When it's a delivery to a company, we systematically provide a receipt. That night, I slip carbon copies of the receipts and their corresponding invoices into the envelope headed for the main office. The rest is for us.

Of course, I also have to justify the use of supplies. Nothing could be simpler. Every morning, when a supplier delivers the dough, the crates of ham and liters of tomato sauce, I give him free coffee. In the meantime, Yacine and Brahim discreetly take whatever we need for our phantom pizzas from the truck. Another proven method: fake orders, all recorded in the master, of course. I pretend that a little joker named Jean-Marie Dupont from Saint-Martin calls to order himself a dozen extra-large pizzas of every combination. Except at that the address he gives, the delivery boy finds a dentist's office where nobody's ordered anything. Obviously, no one delivered anything and the pizzas were never made. Except upper management,
after receiving my report, files it unknowingly in the losses column.

Two guys come to see me at the store.

“We have a proposition for you: we have an empty store nearby. We buy a pizza oven, a moped, we hire a delivery boy. When you get calls here, you send them to us and we take care of the delivery. We split, fifty-fifty.”