Murder In Marseilles (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)
episode
MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories
29 min
2 speakers
8 chapters
transcribed 12 hours ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Who was Léonce Mou and why was his clinic a target?
One morning in January of 1990, a man walked into a police station in Marseille, France, clutching a newspaper that was rolled up in his fist. He went right up to the desk and he said that he'd seen a sketch of a murder suspect in the paper that morning and he knew who it was. He then unrolled the newspaper, revealing the composite sketch that was in the paper, and he held it right up next to his own face. But before we get into today's story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right place because that's all we do and we upload two, three, even four times every week. So if that's of interest to you, please sneak into the Follow Buttons house and replace all their toilet paper with sandpaper.
Okay, let's get into today's story.
At 5 p.m. on May 18, 1988,
a 71-year-old hospital director named Léonce Mou carried his briefcase through the halls of the medical clinic that he owned in the city of Marseille, France. He was about to go home after a long, stressful day of business calls and paperwork. As he walked, he passed by various doctors and nurses who were all hard at work. And they all, you know, when they saw Leonce, they would nod at him. And Leonce, he would nod back. And at some point, Leonce turned a corner into the lobby where he saw several security officers and guard dogs were stationed right by the entrance. And they were screening each person that came inside. Now, Leonce knew that to some people, the security in this clinic might seem like overkill.
But to him, it felt necessary to keep everybody here safe. So Leonce himself was not a doctor. He was not in healthcare really at all. He was a businessman, and he'd gone into private healthcare because it was very lucrative. But in recent years, it had also become very competitive and cutthroat. There was now a lot of governmental red tape that made it nearly impossible to open new clinics in Marseille. So existing clinic owners actually had to buy other already operational clinics if they wanted to expand their businesses. And over the past few years, one of Lyons' primary competitors, a doctor named Jean Chiracchi, who owned a lot of other private clinics in Marseille, had become really, really aggressive about trying to buy Leonce's.
Leonce, though, did not want to sell. He wasn't ready to retire yet. And when he did retire, he'd considered leaving his clinic to his daughter, Catherine. She was a doctor and she had a head for business, so Leonce thought she might be interested in taking things over versus, you know, a private sale. But despite expressing his intentions to Shiraki, Sharaki had continued to pressure Leonce and try to get him to sell, and Leonce was becoming afraid of just how far his fierce competitor would go to get what he wanted. After all, Leonce knew that Sharaki was really powerful and very well connected in town, and there were even rumors that he had ties to organized crime. And so out of an abundance of caution that really came from this general tension slash fear with Sharaki,
Leonce had installed all of these security measures, the cameras, the hired guards, the dogs. He'd even replaced the windows in his office with a one-way mirror so nobody could spy on it. And so even though Leonce, to some degree, believed he was doing all this to protect the people that worked for him, it still caused a lot of tension between Leonce and his employees. It just seemed like he was becoming sort of crazy and paranoid. And because his staff clearly thought he was becoming paranoid and sort of wacky, it made him lash out at his staff, and he distrusted everybody around him. He was sort of like this grumpy old man, and he knew that A lot of the doctors probably wished he would just retire already, that he was becoming sort of a nuisance, even though to him, he was just being a responsible business owner.
What tension existed between Léonce and Dr. Jean‑Shiraki?
And so with all this tension going on inside the clinic, Leonce was beginning to get into these sort of awful fights with some of the people he worked with that just...
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who was Léonce Mou and why was his clinic a target?
0:00–4:10
2
What tension existed between Léonce and Dr. Jean‑Shiraki?
4:10–8:30
3
How did the May 18 1988 shooting of Léonce unfold?
8:30–11:59
4
Why did Detective Zerdoumi suspect a gang hit versus a business feud?
11:59–15:55
5
What new lead linked Dr. Shiraki to the murder and how was it investigated?
15:55–20:34
6
How did the 1990 “Clinic Wars” murders connect to the earlier case?
20:34–24:39
7
Who were Roger Momoli and Marcel Long and what role did they play?
24:39–29:10
8
What was the ultimate motive behind Léonce’s murder and who was the mastermind?
29:10–29:33