“I was tired of surviving”: Hélène Trinidad, ex-robber of the “Amazon Gang”, says

Five lifelong friends, five stories of struggles chasing money every day. They live in the south, two of them have children, one loses aid from the CAF (Family Allowance Fund), without which she can no longer live, so the idea of ​​a hold-up will come up and go get the money where they are, in the banks. The gendarmes are going crazy, they are tracking men, in fact it is women who are carrying guns, it will last for a year, robberies in Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, in Cavaillon, in Saint-Saturnin-les-Avignons, in Carpentras.

The press talks about the Amazon gang, we fantasize about them a lot until we arrest them. At the Assises, the trial will make the headlines, it was more than 30 years ago. Hélène Trinidad, a repentant robber, who sees this sensitive affair become a cinema film, a story of friendship, of survival, of adrenaline, of fear in the stomach, of little children for whom, one day, we commit a crime, the stupidity of a lifetime. Their story, that of the “Amazon gang”, today becomes a film by Mélissa Drigeard, with Isia Higelin, Lyna Khoudri, Laura Felpin….

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Despair as a starting point

In 1989, Hélène Trinidad, a young mother of three children, found herself financially strangled. CAF cuts its allocations:“For years, I was granted poorly calculated aid, and instead of making a repayment schedule, they sweetened everything,” she explains. Only his mother, a housekeeper who “got up at 4 a.m.”can help him. Faced with the impossibility of feeding her children, Hélène considers prostitution or dealing before a childhood friend, Cathy, offers her the unthinkable: robbing banks. “Not providing for our children is the most horrible thing that can happen to a parent.”she confides.

The gears of the seven heists

Between 1989 and 1990, the gang struck at Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, Cavaillon, Saint-Saturnin-lès-Avignon, Carpentras… Seven robberies which brought in money that was quickly squandered. After the first blow, Hélène takes her children to the supermarket : “I always said no before, and that day…”, she remembers, evoking this scene in which she filled the shopping cart with toys, under the incredulous gaze of her little ones. But adrenaline becomes a drug: “We get a taste for all this money right away. It’s a spiral, a vicious circle, that we can’t stop.” The hunt intensifies until the spectacular arrest, “around thirty” armed gendarmes as if “going to war”. Hélène collapses: “When the children are taken away from you at six in the morning, and they look at you, they seem to say, but what is happening?“

A judge’s bet and redemption

In pre-trial detention, Hélène sinks into depression. But a judge makes a daring bet: to release her until the assize trial. Four to five years during which Hélène reintegrates, works, repays. At the trial, faced with the traumatized victims and a general counsel who requested ten years, the verdict fell at three o’clock in the morning: five years suspended. Today, at 61, Hélène Trinidad has repaid her debts and has continued her “odd jobs”: “As long as I can earn a living, that’s the main thing.”