what is the french connection that we talk a lot about marseille
The city of Marseille has been closely linked to the history of Marseille for decades French connectionone of the most famous and notorious drug trafficking networks in the world.
The French connection ? But what is that exactly? There French connection (French branch), sometimes also calledCorsica connection (for the Corsican sector) denotes all actors involved in the export of heroin from France to the United States, with networks mainly based in Marseille or Paris. A traffic that therefore affects Marseille in particular, since the end of the Second World War: the city of Marseille then appears as a world sector for the manufacture and trafficking of heroin.
Although the French connection is an expression often associated with Marseille, which is considered one of the main centers of this criminal organization, but has had far-reaching repercussions. Because initially, in the 1960s and 1970s, the French connection It was in fact an international criminal network specialized in heroin trafficking, operating mainly between France, the United States and Canada. French drug traffickers, in cooperation with foreign partners, controlled a vast network for importing and distributing drugs, mainly heroin, into the United States. Morphine was imported into France from Turkey, Syria, the Indo-Chinese peninsula and other producing countries, to be converted into heroin (mostly) in laboratories in southern France, and then smuggled and shipped to the United States or Canada.
TF1 just published a poll about it French connection and this drug trade, a scourge that Marseille has suffered for more than fifty years (spread in Great reports on Sunday 14 May). We find there in particular Émile Diaz, known as Milou, born in Marseille in 1943, a figure of organized crime: ” one of the last pillars of the French connection “. His wife had also spoken about it radiofrance on October 11, 2022 on a specific topic Ugly women, a life in the shadows :
« He came from a family of gangsters, gangster uncles, two of whom were killed in a reckoning. I think he started doing little burglaries, little things, from a very young age. And it went one step further until he became part of the Marseille gangster group French Connection ».
Later, Émile Diaz will have decided to tell this French connectionin his autobiography Truand, my 50 years in the Corso Marseillais environmentwritten with Thierry Colombié (ed. Robert Laffont, 2015).
In the 1960s and 1970s, when Marseille was the center of the drug trade, there were many settlements in the milieu. Among the figures of French Connectionwe also find names like Gaëtan Zampa, Auguste Ricord, Jean-Claude Kella, Jean-Paul Angelleti, Salvatore Greco, etc. In 1970, traffic in the French connection was estimated at 40 to 44 tons per year. It was extremely lucrative and was responsible for the rise of organized crime in Marseille, with significant social and economic consequences for the city.
The French connection was dismantled in the mid-1970s through international cooperation between police agencies and government agencies. In particular, the three main chemical teams supplying the market (those of Marius Pastre, Jo Cesari and the Long Brothers) were disbanded. And in 1973 there was the arrest of the “boss of the network”, Jean-Baptiste Croce, and his collaborators Joseph Mari, known as Zé le Frisé, and Étienne Mosca. But since then the conditions French connection It is still used to refer to the period when Marseille was the center of a large drug trafficking network and the organized crime associated with that period. More generally, they can also be used to designate connections or connections between French individuals or organizations involved in illegal activities.
Although this French connection has now been dismantled, our colleagues are out TF1 show in their investigation that Marseille is still plagued by drug trafficking: 130 points act are listed in the city. And in November 2022, Émile Diaz was a guest on the set of BFM Marseille explained that I will meet young people in Marseille to warn them, those who ” The Culture of Violence he then underlined. And add: They charge, they go straight into the wall (…). It’s a generation totally destroyed and totally lost ».
