Marseille can’t escape its drug gangs Criminality thrives amid the poverty

And, perhaps most of all, the continued resilience of criminality in this city by the sea speaks to the utter inability to smash the scourge of poverty — one that ensures there’s always a willing supply of desperate young men willing to kill, or die, for the chance at a better tomorrow.

Organised crime in Marseille has a long history. Things began at the end of the 19th century, when the city acted as the gateway to France’s colonial empire. In need of cheap labour, the port attracted immigrants from southern Italy and Corsica. The first criminal gangs quickly appeared, when pimps operating in the so-called Reserved Quarter, then one of the largest red light districts in Europe, chose to join forces. Their first ringleader was a former Corsican sailor named François Albertini. Nicknamed François the Madman, he led the Gang of 21, running prostitutes in the Reserved Quarter and getting into fights with other clans.

These disputes soon turned deadly. In 1907, in an echo of today’s killings, Albertini ordered a 16-year-old pimp to murder several rivals. André Anfriani, the teenage assassin, shot three people before being arrested, tried and guillotined. By 1911, Albertini had been detained too, and sentenced to spend life in a penal colony in French Guyana. In the end, the Madman escaped and disappeared, but nonetheless succeeded in planting the seeds of Marseille’s later crime scene. The routes the Gang of 21 used to evade justice — Spain, Portugal and Morocco, or else straight to the US — would soon be employed to transfer prostitutes to brothels in Africa and South America. Over the decades to come, drugs would flow the same way.

The Twenties and Thirties were a golden age of Marseille gangsterism. Corsican clans took over the business created by Albertini, promptly diversifying their trade. Paul Bonaventure Carbone, a tattooed former sailor who took inspiration from Al Capone, became the local godfather. With his partner François Spirito, Carbone gradually gave up prostitution for more profitable businesses: nightclubs; casinos; smuggling. They also opened laboratories to refine heroin, which proved so effective that Marseille became the dope capital of the world after the Second World War.

At the same time, Carbone and Spirito became local stars, entertaining visiting journalists and sponsoring showbiz celebrities. Music hall shows and films were made about them, cheap flicks with names like Justin de Marseille. Collaborationists during the Second World War, the pair were replaced after liberation by the Guerini brothers, who were close to the local Socialist Party and took over the local nightlife. That’s even as they smuggled drugs and cigarettes into Europe from Turkey and Morocco.

From the Sixties, the growing consumption of drugs such as heroin led to the famous French Connection. The world’s premier network of drug trafficking, it was controlled by Le Milieu, a Marseille-Corsican syndicate with the Guerinis among its leaders. After their demise in the mid-Seventies — Antoine Guerini was murdered in retaliation for killing an ex-cop-turned-mobster — figures such as Gaëtan Zampa and Francis Vanverberghe took the reins. With a surname like that, the latter was unsurprisingly known as Francis the Belgian. Gradually, they gave up drugs for safer and more lucrative ventures, including robbing armoured vans and using casinos to launder money. Given the French Connection was at various times exploited by both the CIA and France’s own intelligence service, with the spooks selling drugs to fund off-the-books operations, a change of focus was probably wise.

The gentrification of the Marseille-Corsican mob left a vacuum for others to fill. Since the late-Eighties, in fact, the port’s thriving cannabis and cocaine trade has been run by what has been described as La Mafia des Cités (“The Suburbs Mafia”), originally manned by families from cannabis-growing countries such as Morocco. For his part, the pusher who hired those two doomed teenagers is believed to be a member of the DZ Mafia, one of two Cité gangs now fighting over Marseille’s drug trade. The name hints at its origins. DZ stands for Algeria — a nod to the country’s name on licence plates — and indeed many of the group’s founders come from this former French colony with strong historic ties to Marseille.

The second part of that name is important too: by adopting the “mafia” moniker, the gangsters are emphasising their credentials both as an international criminal outfit. To prove their point, they even ran a video on social media claiming they had no involvement in the recent killings, hoping to retain a degree of respectability in the districts they control. And if that hints at one similarity with the past — where Carbone burnished his reputation via music hall ballads, the DZ Mafia uses Facebook — contemporary Marseille gangsters borrow from history in other ways.

That’s clear, for instance, in terms of the way they showcase nationality. When the Corsicans were running the place, family ties were essential to the gang’s survival. Clan members were often from the same village, also a common tactic with the Cosa Nostra in Sicily. It’s a similar story today: quite aside from the reference to the DZ Mafia’s homeland across the Mediterranean, the gang is partly run from Algeria.

No less important, gang warfare in Marseille has often been waged along ethnic lines. In the Twenties, for example, black soldiers who remained in the city after the First World War took over parts of the Reserved Quarter, resulting in a deadly conflict with their Corsican rivals. A similar conflict took place in the Nineties, when members of a North African group from the city’s suburbs decided to take over the slot machines, bars and discos controlled by Corsican gangs around Aix-en-Provence. The conflict ended in 2006, when Farid Berrahma, the son of an Algerian miner, was shot nine times at a brasserie outside Marseille. In a strange way, in fact, Marseille seems to have returned to the chaos epitomised by the Ace of Clubs. Just like in the 1910s, the city lacks any single dominant crime lord. Jacques Imbert, Marseille’s last traditional godfather, died in 2019.

More fundamentally, the socioeconomic conditions that allowed those early gangs to thrive remain. Then, as now, large areas of the city are desperately poor — even if the criminals these days have swapped crumbling 18th century tenements for the concrete hell of modern housing blocks.

You can spot echoes of the past elsewhere too. In the Belle Époque, the press sensationalised the gangsters, leading to a situation where they tried to one-up each other in daring and brutality. And where newspapers once fretted about how “cinematographic methods” inspired the Ace of Clubs, their modern successors use social media in a like-minded way, advertising their crimes on Telegram.

Not, to be clear, that everything has remained the same. The wild industrialisation of the early 20th century brought an influx of firearms into Marseille, but François the Madman would surely be amazed at the availability of Kalashnikovs on the dark web. More than that, how criminality actually happens has shifted too. Quite aside from the fall in prostitution, and the rise in drug dealing, how cannabis and cocaine are sold has changed. Until the Nineties, dealers came downtown to sell in the clubs or bars they controlled. These days, punters drive to one of nearly 130 spots, spread across the underpasses and rubbish dumps of Marseille’s northern suburbs. That rendered the competition for territory even more fierce — and bloody.

The year 2023 marked a record for drug-related gang murders. A full 52 people died, most of them youngsters, after a police crackdown led to 2,000 arrests and depleted more established gangs like the DZ Mafia. But crime abhors a vacuum, and the fight to regain control of the most lucrative selling spots now rages more wildly than ever. Things have become so bad that some in Marseille are even starting to romanticise the older generation of mobsters, imagining them boasting a “code of honour” that today’s ruffians lack. That’s leavened by sentimental movies, notably Borsalino (1970) and La Scoumoune (1972), which depict old Marseille as a picaresque film set.

In truth, though, nostalgia is unwise. For over a century, Marseille has suffered beatings, shooting, stabbings. Those early prostitutes, run by men like François the Madman, were treated little better than slaves. And no matter how many thugs the authorities round up, the city’s persistent poverty means there are always people happy to take their place. Especially after a misjudged focus on developing its port to welcome oil shipments — a mistake that wrecked Marseille’s economy after the Yom Kippur War — this has become, to quote one local journalist, “a working class city with bourgeois ghettos”. It hardly helps that though the links between politicians and crime are rather less explicit than during the glory days of the Milieu, graft persists.

After Anfriani’s arrest, back at the dawn of the last century, the French government voted to reform the country’s law and order. New Mobile Brigades were established, with les flics offered a radical new technology — police cars. Nicolas Bessone, the current prosecutor in Marseille, is leading calls for similar shock treatment today. “We badly need new legislation,” he lately proclaimed, arguing that special jails for drug traffickers were sorely needed too.

Perhaps. But challenges remain. Quite aside from Marseille’s underlying socioeconomic conditions, globalisation means modern gangs now have access to faster cars, deadlier guns — and a network abroad that allows them to evade justice. There’s also a lingering distrust of the police in the areas controlled by the gangs, meaning even honest citizens are reluctant to help. That’s hardly unfair: since January, an internal investigation has been examining alleged corruption among local anti-narcotics cops.

Yet these vast hurdles aside, Bessone seems confident that victory is ultimately possible. Asked about whether the war against the dealers could be won, he was defiant: “Absolutely.” He would say that. As those two dead kids so graphically suggest, the fight against Marseille’s gangs is far from done.