It’s a well-worn story: the anti-corruption crusader who, once in office, becomes even more corrupt than his predecessor. But that simple narrative quite aptly describes the argument of a recently updated book on David Rachline — the vice president of France’s Rassemblement National party and the man once considered Marine Le Pen’s “best friend.”

Les Rapaces (The Birds of Prey) is French journalist Camille Vigogne Le Coat’s two-year-long investigation into Rachline’s management of Fréjus, the southeastern French city where the party’s vice president has served as mayor since 2014. Here, near the blingy Côte d’Azur, Rachline, who is close to both Le Pen and her protégé Jordan Bardella, reportedly perfected the art of patting the right backs and stuffing his own pockets: a system of clientelism nicknamed the “Varois Mafia,” after the southeastern department (Le Var) where Fréjus is located.

As Le Pen appeals her conviction for embezzlement of European Parliament funds, handed down last Monday by a French court, Le Coat’s book offers a window into how the far-right party allegedly organizes corruption on a local level. While the Rassemblement National — down from its leadership to its local affiliates — presents itself as an anti-system party, spared from the corruption roiling the political establishment, Le Coat argues the opposite: once in power, the Rassemblement National doesn’t just perpetuate tired corruption schemes but builds on them.

“And what if David Rachline weren’t an isolated man, a black sheep, but the symptom of a greater illness within the party?” Le Coat asks in the intro, published before Le Pen’s conviction last Monday.

Far from Brussels, where Le Pen’s party was found guilty of siphoning roughly €4 million of European Parliament funds in order to fund party activism, Le Coat suggests that the Roman town of Fréjus served as a laboratory for the far right’s misappropriation of public funds. In her analysis, Rachline — who reached office in 2014, taking over from the discredited former mayor Élie Brun, himself convicted of an “illegal conflict of interests” — was central to the scheme.

At the time, Rachline was a twenty-six-year-old Rassemblement National activist, quickly rising in the party as a “Mariniste” (supporter of Marine Le Pen). He split the vote between Brun and another candidate of the traditional right to become mayor of Fréjus. Months later, he ran for senator in the Var, becoming France’s youngest senator and one of the first two to ever represent Le Pen’s far-right party.

Fréjus wasn’t always a bastion of the far right. This city of 57,000 people in the former Communist-led region once known as the “Red Var” is nestled just inland of the glitzy coast, roughly halfway between the beaches of Saint-Tropez and Cannes. The Var’s agricultural and industrial hinterland contrasts with the resort-lined coastline. But starting in the 1980s, this traditionally left-leaning rust belt has increasingly gravitated toward the far right.

As Le Coat painstakingly reveals, Rachline was able to ride popular discontent in this hollowed-out region to rapidly ascend to dominance. But his rise came at a cost.

Once in office, according to Le Coat’s telling, Rachline nearly immediately began to grease the elbows of the same power brokers his predecessor once frequented, including the discredited former mayor himself. She says that like Brun, Rachline nuzzled up to construction magnate Alexandre Barbero, owner of a dozen companies in the region, who began to pile up contracts with the city — exploding its debt and paving the city in ugly concrete.

Le Coat began to investigate Rachline after learning of his cash purchase of a €15,000 Hublot watch from a famous Cote d’Azur jeweler in 2015. The watch, paid for by his valet, “speaks to a system,” Le Coat writes. “It was the first element of proof of a vast corruption mechanism operating in Fréjus.”

Rachline’s clientelist networks weren’t only limited to Barbero, Le Coat writes. Nor were his luxury tastes limited to this flashy wristwear. Various interviewees who spoke with Le Coat recall his multiple-day parties, choice outfits, or the suspicious payment of small expenses with €500 bills — all or most of cash flow presumably funded with taxpayer money.

As Rachline consolidated power and influence, he wielded it against minority groups and low-income habitants of the coastal city. The mayor of Fréjus, according to Le Coat, frequented right-wing hooligans such as the infamous Groupe Union Défense (GUD); jokingly employed Nazi salutes with advisors; and used Fréjus municipal cops like personal enforcers while funneling money into a fleet of video surveillance–equipped police vehicles.

The result of his mandate: not the economic temperance guaranteed by the far right, but a billowing debt of more than €150 million.

This dangerous cocktail, Le Coat suggests, could be quickly put in place across France if a Rassemblement National candidate were to win the presidency in 2027. Rachline’s “manner of running Fréjus, by recuperating the old networks and clientelism of the traditional right [and exerting them] in an antisemitism and racism-fueled climate, is that which Marine Le Pen’s party could extend throughout France if it were to take power,” Le Coat warns.

It’s unlikely, though, that Rachline will be the Rassemblement National candidate in 2027. Earlier this year, the mayor was summoned to appear in court at the end of September on suspicion of “illegal conflicts of interest,” linked to his role at the head of two companies responsible for city management.