International Journal on Criminology Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2014 | Page 5

The Global Criminality Age
first international drug control treaty, the
Hague International Opium Convention.
In 1925, the "Marseille Godfathers",
Paul Carbone and François Spirito (one Italian,
the other Corsican) held a meeting in
Egypt. They formed a prostitution, trafficking,
racketeering, and extortion partnership
and invented the first case of criminal activity
“industrialization” in the West. The
first factories producing heroine from opium
imported raw from Indochina, and later
Turkey (processed in France and distributed
in the United States) were established
in Marseille in 1937. In Chicago, Alfonse
Capone took full advantage of the perverse
effects of Prohibition, investing in the bootlegging
of black market alcohol and industrial-scale
money laundering. Following
the purest rules of an advanced free-market
economy, they set up business on the shores
of the Mediterranean and on the other side
of the Atlantic, practiced vertical and horizontal
integration, invested in research and
development, developed staff incentives,
extended their trade areas, and engaged in
tax planning. Their treatment of their competitors
seems to be the only facet of their
business that was a great deal more “final”
than in honest sectors of the economy.
At the time of the French Liberation,
their successors, the Guérini brothers,
who were more successful in their choice
of political allies during the Occupation,
made new alliances, extending their empire
and diversifying their businesses, investing
in cigarette smuggling to supplement
their international narcotics trade, swelled
by their close relationship with the New
York Godfather, Lucky Luciano. The French
Connection was born. The first international
trading agreement for the distribution of
industrially-produced heroine was made in
the 1960s.
In Marseille, it took the Liberation
to end the Carbone and Spirito Empire.
It was taken over by the Guérini Brothers
whose political alliances had been more astute.
In Chicago, Elliott Ness, a Prohibition
Bureau agent, put an end to Capone’s career
with charges of tax evasion. Franck Nitti,
then Tony Accardo, took over operations
without great difficulty, but with less provocation
and lower visibility.
The Guérini Brothers lost their
stranglehold over Marseille at the beginning
of the 1960s, after their attempt, with
others, to extend their hold over Parisian
gaming circles. The result was the "gambling
war" of the mid-1960s, resulting in
Antoine’s murder and Barthélémy’s imprisonment.
A new figure, Gaëtan Zampa,
then came onto the scene. Marseille became
the setting for a bloody gang war. In
1972–1973, Zampa’s ambitions clashed with
the aspirations of Francis Vanverberghe, or
"Francis Le Belge", who was deeply involved
in narcotics trafficking. The conflict resulted
in bloody street battles resulting in many
deaths but creating the heyday of the "scandal
papers" until Zampa’s arrest and imprisonment
in November 1983.
The first decade of this century was
particularly dark for the Marseille underworld.
On September 27, 2000, Francis Le
Belge, who had taken the Marseille Mafia in
hand despite living in Paris, was murdered.
Two years after his death, the Marseille criminal
scene burst into violence in a merciless
war between gypsy criminals, for a time led
by Farid Berrahma, the “Rôtisseur”, Corsicans
from Bastia and homegrown criminals
from Marseille. The increasing competition
between rival gangs led to revenge murders
and reckonings but they were also fuelled
by the ever-younger protagonists involved
in these rousts, who lacked the professionalism,
cool composure, and code of conducts
of the old Mafia Godfathers.
Since then, the blows inflicted by
the police to a number of gangs (arrest of
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