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TechnoratiFrench prison governor jailed for affair with femme fatale inmate
A French prison governor who fell in love with a notorious inmate has been jailed and fined for giving her preferential treatment. Florent Gonçalves wrecked his career and ended up on the other side of the bars after he fell for femme fatale Emma Arbabzadeh, who was in prison for entrapping a Jewish youth in an extortion plot that ended in his death.
A court in Versailles on Wednesday sentenced Gonçalves to one year in prison plus one year suspended and fined him 10,000 euros. They also banned him from ever again holding a public-service job.
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Although sex with a prison inmate is not illegal in France, the court convicted him for “carrying on a correspondence” with Arbabzadeh and granting her favours, notably giving her a mobile phone sim-card and money and setting up a Facebook page for her under the name, Fleur d’Orient (Oriental flower).
At the time Gonçalves, now 42 years old, was France’s youngest prison governor, living in an 120-metre-square apartment that went with his job at Versailles women's jail, had lived with the same woman for 12 years and had a six-year-old daughter.
But he lost it all thanks to his affair with Arbabzadeh, a 21-year-old of Iranian origin who had been jailed for her part in one of France’s most notorious cases of kidnap and extortion.
After working with Gonçalves at the prison, the young femme fatale requested an interview with the governor, according to Le Parisien/Aujourd’hui newspaper. She asked to be transferred and, when he asked if she had any complaints about her treatment, said she had fallen in love with him and that it would thus be unwise for her to stay under his supervision.
The couple subsequently had sexual relations twice in the prison’s computer room, made phone calls to each other at night and continued to keep in touch after Arbabzadeh was finally transferred to another prison in the Paris region.
Arbabzadeh had been sent to prison for nine years for entrapping Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old mobile phone salesman, on behalf of the so-called Gang des Barbares (Gang of barbarians), in 2006 when she was 17 years old. After 24 days in captivity, Halimi was found dumped on a railtrack with signs of torture on his body. He died on the way to hospital. Gang leader Youssouf Fofana was jailed for life and 25 other people were convicted as accomplices. The abduction and killing were found to be a hate crime because they believed that rich Jews would pay for Halimi’s release. |
Gonçalves insists that he was not manipulated.
“We fell in love with each other and, in reality, it was the governor who seduced Emma,” he told RTL radio, adding that “I have enormous support on Facebook.”
Emma Arbabzadeh was sentenced to an extra two months in prison and eight months suspended at Wednesday’s trial.
Also in the dock was Olivier Pinson, a warden and trade unionist who tried to blow the whistle on the warden’s affair but ended up falling for Emma himself, becoming an accomplice before being demoted by the governor who had become jealous of his apparent closeness to the object of both men’s affections.
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