A Town Called Angers

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Many of the assaults took place in an apartment in the gleaming modern development of Angers' Saint Léonard neighborhood, a magnet for young professionals. Residents spend afternoons at the Angers Tennis Club and children ride their bicycles along manicured pathways. To avoid the formation of impoverished ghettos in Angers, the city's socialist officials have for years settled low-income families like that of Franck V.'s among far wealthier residents, and heavily subsidized their rent. Franck and Patricia conducted their trade from their three-bedroom apartment in a four-story building on Rue Maurice Pouzet. Customers came and went, but the neighbors never pried. Now, there is a sense of shame among residents at having failed to notice the nightmare in their midst.

When Time visited the building recently, neighbors brushed aside questions, some closing their doors without a word. On the door of Franck V.'s old apartment, the current tenants have pasted a handwritten notice reading: "Ssh! Baby asleep, don't ring the bell." The community still seems unable to express its unease. "Everyone is horrified yet no one knows how to speak about it," says Saint Léonard's Roman Catholic priest, Father Charles de Bodman.

Police are still searching for a group of men, who the children say arrived at Franck V.'s apartment in suits and ties, with their faces hidden behind masks — a striking contrast to the largely uneducated, unemployed defendants who fill the courtroom in rumpled sweatshirts and scuffed sneakers. Franck V.'s lawyer Pascal Rouiller says he is convinced

	In France, a woman is always thought of as a mother, so it's almost impossible to think of her sexually assaulting children — MONIKA PASQUINI, attorney

the men were part of a sophisticated network of pedophiles who tapped into Angers' underbelly as word of the prostitution ring spread. They brought in customers who "had money, made appointments, and were punctual," Rouiller says.

One man paid €458 for one sexual assault on a child, and Franck V.'s wife, Patricia, regularly took in about €1,200 a month. "Franck had telephone calls from the whole of France," says Rouiller. "He's a poor miserable man with no intelligence. He had no reason to have contact with people in Montpellier or Lille." Much like the pedophilia scandal that rocked Belgium in 1996, Angers is awash in suspicions that a wider ring of wealthy customers was among the child rapists, and is still at large. Franck has admitted caressing and touching children, but denies raping them. That distinction could halve his prison sentence from 20 to 10 years. Franck has not named his missing customers, but Rouiller hopes their identities will emerge during the trial, which is expected to end in late June.

The brute violence and numbing banality of the crimes has jolted even seasoned lawyers and child advocates. "Their children were just a way of supplementing their income a little," says Yves Crespin, attorney for l'Enfant Bleu, a child-protection association in Bagnolet. "Parents and their friends were smoking cigarettes in the next room while men raped their children and the children were crying," says Alain Fouquet, lawyer for 11 of the allegedly assaulted children. "It was like a bridge party, or teatime. It's monstrous."