Valerian Dirken is a writer, psychology buff and volunteer prison visitor. It is in this capacity that he was able to meet the famous “Little Mustapha”, as the media had nicknamed Mustapha Riffi in the 80s.
Little Mustapha was 8 years old and 1.35m tall. He is now 42 years old, 1.89m tall and still languishing in prison, currently in Marche.
It was at his request that Valerian Dirken collected this exceptional and disconcerting document which he is publishing on his own. Little Mustapha does not grow out of it.
In court, Riffi complained a lot about being publicized. In fact, Dirken explains, he is awfully proud of it. “He flattered himself that he had been introduced by the New Detective like ‘the kid who scares the police’. But the media were way off the mark. They attributed to him 80 acts of delinquency when there were many more. We only knew the tip of the iceberg.”
According to Riffi, it all started with the theft of a cash drawer from the secretariat of a school in Schaerbeek. Followed by the theft of a chest containing the Snow Classes money.
To the inevitable question: why?, Riffi evokes the death of his father, who died the previous year on the highway, driving a Ford Capri. It describes an overwhelmed mother. A violent stepfather. His childhood desire to wear designer clothes, to have “nice shoes and a Walkman”.
He evokes, finally, the humiliation of the punishments inflicted in this Catholic establishment, he who is Muslim. “My brother and I were punished by Sister Clarissa. In the evening, after chapel, we were given a cold shower before going to bed. We suffered the humiliation of remaining on our knees in the refectory during the other students, arms outstretched with two large books in hand.“
In the police stations, he played on his age to soften. It is appropriate, today, that he used his “child’s physique, very useful to go unnoticed”. “I was, he said, the most cunning to surprise people, immobilize them and dick them with Scotch. Hands behind the back for men, hands in front for women. Little Mustapha was 12-13 years old.
In reality, he confides to Valerian Dirken who meets him in the visiting room, “I had no morals. The old people, I jostled them a little. One day, to make talk about someone to whom we had entered with my gang, I grabbed his dog, I took out an Opinel and I cut off his ear in front of him. Bingo, the man spoke.”
What follows is boastfulness where remorse is absent. Riffi pulls off a theft he had never spoken about: in a Brussels hotel, a client’s suitcase containing 33 million Belgian francs – more than 2 million euros in today’s value. He claims to have put “more than a year” to spend the money, partly with girls. “I was 15, I was going to whores, I had all the girls.”
He flatters himself that at the same age, he was driving without a licence. At 16, bought a VW Golf GTI (is it likely?). At 17, was tracing at 250 km / h on the highway, overtaking on the right on the emergency lane.
On his fourth visit to the visiting room, Valerian Dirken felt increasingly uncomfortable recording criminal acts. To enter the game of a mobster seeking only to enhance himself, to star himself. The writer then tries to take a step back. Cropped, threatened to stop everything, Mustapha seems, for a moment, to speak truth. “I have come to curse life […]. I even went as far as torture […]. I had a nameless revolt against society […]. It was said of me that I operate with the face of an angel. But I’m in all the bad tricks, I have no morals and for me, it’s a pleasure to defy the ban […]. Violence is in me with an unnamed revolt.”
Valerian Dirken hardly heard him express remorse. “He justified that life gave him no gift, that he was beaten and abandoned in an orphanage. When he told me about this lady who died three weeks after an attack, it was cold. I did not feel no sympathy.”
At 42, Riffi has spent 21 years behind bars, not to mention the confinement during adolescence in a closed center. Neither the prison nor the institutions served. “In reality, says Dirken, he is very proud to have been the first child sent to prison at 12 years old. And to have been the one because of whom the Lebrun law was passed.
Riffi was released from prison in April 2021, on parole, with a 7-year suspended sentence. He had, he said, the project of looking after horses. Three months later, he fell for eleven robberies in the Carolingian region and the Namurois. We spoke to him yesterday. What he says : “When I left, I had idealized the outside. It didn’t happen as I had thought. No money. No treatment. Left to my own devices. Emotional lack. And full of setbacks, especially with my ex-wife who forbade me to see my daughter again. When you are put in prison at the age of 12, how do you expect me to become anything else?”
For the eleven hold-ups, he received, in March 2022, an additional 8 years. In addition, the 7-year reprieve has expired. Finally, another trial awaits him, at the start of the school year, for 4 armed robberies (uncontested) in Brussels. We don’t see it coming out until 2039.
Valerian Dirken is pessimistic. According to him, “Regret, a thought for the victims, no. With him, it’s only strength. I think he only works out of fear of the policeman. For me, he’s not unhappy in prison. There, he finally has a (surrogate) father: prison, and the authority that goes with it.”
“Le Petit Mustapha gamin braqueur”, by Mustapha Riffi, with rewriting and questioning by Valerian Dirken, 45 p., is available, at the price of 4 €, on order ([email protected]).