Our “Banana Vendetta” series
Yes, there are deaths. Many deaths even. A list as long as that of assassins is short. This is perhaps how we recognize the figures of organized crime. They are often incriminated, they are rarely condemned. For nearly twenty-five years in the Paris region, Yassine Cheambi on the one hand and the Benbouabdellah siblings on the other have in any case been regularly suspected when a mobster is murdered.
Mounir Benbouabdellah, known as Blond, the first to make the powder speak
This is the case that will tear the Banana team into two rival clans. But it is above all the death of an innocent young man. On September 10, 1997, Manuel Ribeiro was killed in a terrible misunderstanding at the corner of rue des Amandiers and rue des Panoyaux in Paris (XXth). The Banane team is convinced, wrongly, that these young people on scooters are rivals of Barbès (18th century) who have come to settle accounts.
The eldest Benbou takes the wheel of a Clio with his little brother Mounir on his right, armed with a shotgun. Blond shoots three times. He will get fifteen years. His eldest Zoheir will take eight years. The two brothers accuse a third man, Mounir Chérifi dit Petit Chat, of having left the weapon loaded in the vehicle (when it was not normally according to them). The person concerned will be sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment on appeal.
Less than four years later, the photo of Blond is found on all television screens during a failed escape from the prison of Fresnes (Val-de-Marne). A helicopter tries to recover the robber Christophe Khider. The ladder is too short. We leave him there but throw a Kalashnikov and a Colt at him. For 20 hours, the Parisian mobster embarks on a desperate hostage situation with a young hothead who wants to be part of it at his side.
“All of a sudden, Mounir Benbouabdellah appeared,” said the commissioner who came to negotiate. He started screaming. He had a chrome 11.43 in his hand. He stuck the cannon to my head. I wasn’t breathing… He didn’t shoot. Blond will get thirteen years.
Place des Fêtes counts its dead
At 36, after fifteen years of detention, he was released on parole and even found himself testifying on the subject in the newspaper Liberation. “Adventure” no longer tempts him, he assures us. However, a few years later in 2017, Mounir was again imprisoned. He is accused of having kidnapped and attempted to assassinate Ciabou T., an alleged member of the team from Place des Fêtes, the neighboring district of La Banane. The case is due to be tried in June.
Despite three bullets in the body, including one in the head, and left for dead in the Netherlands after being kidnapped in Brussels, Ciabou T. is still alive. In a few weeks, he will be at the assizes as a victim and as an accused since he would have taken revenge for this expedition across the Quiévrain by finding Blond’s alleged accomplice.
The great figure of the Place des Fêtes was Osman Chamsan, known as Smano. This close friend of Blond, but also of Yassine Cheambi, was executed in his car in 2008, close to his home in the 15th arrondissement. Yassine-Hanine Benbouabdellah was tried three times for this crime. In 2016, while he was wanted for the assassination of Essma Cheambi, Poub was sentenced to twenty-three years in prison in his absence. The evidence brandished by the prosecution is a magazine stub with the defendant’s DNA at the crime scene. The motive: a “commercial” dispute and the fact that Smano had a relationship with Poub’s partner. Not enough to kill someone, retort the relatives of the accused, in particular his brother Mounir.
Yassine-Hanine Benbouabdellah, who has always denied the facts, then obtains a first acquittal by proving in particular that the famous charger heel was not part of the murder weapon. After an appeal by the prosecution, the accused was again tried and again acquitted. According to our information, even the Benbou’s enemies do not all believe in Poub’s guilt in this affair.
His name comes up, however, in three other assassinations. That of Titi, from the Place des Fêtes, shot at Pré-Saint-Gervais (Seine-Saint-Denis) in May 2009 when two men on scooters passed by. An assassination on the background of narcotics? We will probably never know. We just know, according to journalists Brendan Kemmet and Stéphane Sellami, that “the holsters hit turned out to be similar, and of military origin, to those seized from the home of Éric Vidal”.
Nicknamed the Corsican, this former Place des Fêtes had been dubbed by the Banana team. What did he say to the police about Titi’s assassination? Nothing. Because the ballistic reconciliation was made after the discovery of his corpse. Éric Vidal was executed outside his home in Saint-Maur (Val-de-Marne) two months after Titi. The thesis according to which Poub would be involved in these two deaths could never be substantiated.
Ditto for the assassination of David Mouelle, known as Gorille. On October 29, 2007 in the morning, a mother called out to onlookers in front of a crime scene in Osny (Val-d’Oise). ” What happened ? Where was he found? He’s my son, he’s my child,” she repeats. Her child was executed the night of two bullets in the head. He was released from prison after a failed go-fast for which a member of La Banane had also been implicated.
The motive was never determined. Among the versions mentioned, in addition to a dispute with Nono le Barge (read below), that of an argument, ten days before this assassination, with Zoheir, the eldest of the Benbouabdellah. And once again the name of Poub came back to the ears of the investigators without any element to support an accusation.
“The police and the justice system are delirious when they cite the name of my client in all these cases, denounces Maître Bernard Ripert, one of Yassine-Hanine Benbouabdellah’s lawyers. According to them, he would be involved in a dozen cases while most of the time he was in detention at the time of the facts! »
The execution of Nono le Barge after a falling out with the Banana
If the Banana team enjoys an aura in the Parisian environment, it is also because it is attributed, rightly or wrongly, the assassination of a legend of organized crime. Nordine Nasri, known as Nono le Barge, died at the age of 33, riddled with bullets in December 2003 in Paris (VIII) while driving his 406. The epilogue, at the time, of a cascade of regulations of accounts. A few months earlier, the mobster from Nanterre (Hauts-de-Seine), close to the Hornecs and the Corsicans, had taken six bullets. Not only had he escaped, but he had managed to catch up with the shooter and shoot him. Karim Charbi, member of the Banana, will take twelve years for this assassination attempt.
Apart from the minutes, the one who is also nicknamed Nordo would have explained that his troubles had to do with an argument that occurred the year before in Spain with Samir, said Casimir, the youngest of the Benbouabdellah. The boss of Nanterre would have gotten confused with him in a nightclub between Malaga and Marbella. The next day, Nono allegedly took revenge by shooting him. At least his DNA was found in the shooter’s vehicle. Questioned by the police, Casimir will ensure that his attacker was not Nono but a Spaniard who wanted him for a girl’s story.
However, a few weeks later, in March 2002, Ali Lebsir, 26, was shot dead in Paris. Alilou was not just any member of La Banane. It was the figure of the team with Yassine Cheambi, to whom he was very close. He was wanted in two murder cases at the time. The thesis of the investigators is that Ali Lebsir would also have struck Nono during this famous night in a club. The mobster from Nanterre would have tried in the process to “make” Casimir, then executed Ali, before being in turn the victim of a first assassination attempt and succumbing to the second. Who killed Nordine Nasri? For his relatives, it is Yassine Cheambi said the Ziente. Questioned the following year by the police, the person concerned denied any involvement in this assassination.
This settlement of accounts will never be elucidated. “If he is behind this assassination, he posed as the boss that night, analyzes a source familiar with the matter. He avenged Ali, his childhood friend, but also Samir Benbouabdellah. A shame when you know the vendetta that will follow. »
Fatal poker for Zoheir Benbouabdellah
Twenty customers, seven poker players and a killer. This June 10, almost ten years ago, the Cheval-d’Or, located rue des Panoyaux, territory of the Banana in Paris (XXth), is seized with dread. It is 10:30 p.m. when a man, skinny and hooded, quietly enters this neighborhood bar. With a sure gesture, he dismisses a customer in his path and goes without hesitation towards the card lovers. He pulls out a long gun and fires three times before turning around. There is panic in the establishment. People flee, others are petrified and a man is already bleeding out. Zoheir Benbouabdellah, 38, the eldest of the siblings, has just been assassinated.
Just before the start of poker, he had asked a player to swap places with his so as not to be visible from the street. He had feared for his life for weeks, even months. According to his widow and his son, he had warned that if anything happened to him, it would be signed Yassine Cheambi or Mounir Chérifi, two veterans of the Banana with whom he had been at odds for a very long time, especially since the murder of Manuel Ribeiro.
The track of the second, called Petit Chat, was quickly ruled out. He was in Belgium at the time of the events. That of the Ziente, on the other hand, will be plowed. The killer and an accomplice, after burning the first getaway vehicle, rush into a second vehicle which then appears miraculously under the eyes of the Versailles BRI. The police were indeed monitoring the famous accomplice. The two men manage to escape.
Yassine Cheambi’s DNA will be found on the headrest of one of the vehicles. For the public prosecutor, he was “animated by a desire for revenge against the siblings, linked to the background and the blood crimes which united the two clans”. He was sentenced at first instance to twenty-five years’ imprisonment. On appeal, he was acquitted of the murder. But bails out eight years for participation in a criminal association. According to justice, the killer of Zoheir Benbouabdellah has never been confused.
