Marseille · FR
True Crime Marseille
Heroin Empires, Gangland Wars, and a King's Assassination
What's the walk about?
Welcome to Marseille, France's oldest city, a place of blue sea light, bobbing fishing boats and the grand sweep of La Canebiere. But behind those sunlit facades lies a very different Marseille, for much of the twentieth century one of the crime capitals of Europe, a city of heroin empires, Corsican godfathers, gangland wars and political assassination. On this walk we trace real, documented cases to the exact places they happened, from the courthouse of a murdered judge to the steps of the great railway station. Each stop is a true story, told with suspense but also with care for the real people involved.
What you'll see
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1
The Judge the Mob Killed - Palais de Justice
Courthouse
On 21 October 1981 Pierre Michel, the Marseille investigating magistrate who worked inside this courthouse dismantling the French Connection heroin trade and the local milieu, was shot dead from a passing motorbike as he rode his own moped home; two men, Charles Altieri and Francois Checchi, were later convicted of the killing and sentenced to life.
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2
The Emperor of the Night - Opera de Marseille
Opera house
Around this opera house spread the nightclub quarter that the milieu boss Gaetan, known as Tany, Zampa ruled as the self-styled emperor of the night, until his war with the rival gangster Jacques Imbert, called Jacky le Mat, who survived twenty-two projectiles in a 1977 ambush, was linked by police to the still unsolved Bar du Telephone massacre of 1978 in which ten people were shot dead.
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3
The French Connection - Vieux-Port
Old port
From the quays of this ancient port, Corsican clans ran the heroin network the world came to call the French Connection, refining Turkish morphine into heroin in secret Marseille laboratories and shipping it to the United States, where by 1969 it supplied an estimated eighty percent of the heroin on American streets, until the network was broken up in the early nineteen seventies.
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4
The Assassination of a King - La Canebiere
Boulevard
On 9 October 1934, on La Canebiere beside the Palais de la Bourse, the assassin Vlado Chernozemski leapt onto the running board of an open car and shot dead King Alexander the First of Yugoslavia and fatally wounded the visiting French foreign minister Louis Barthou, in one of the first assassinations ever captured on film; seven people died in all, and the gunman was cut down at the scene.
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5
The Day the Canebiere Burned - Nouvelles Galeries
Boulevard
On 28 October 1938, as a national political congress met in the city, the Nouvelles Galeries department store on this stretch of La Canebiere caught fire; blocked exits, a slow and ill-equipped fire brigade and panic turned it into a catastrophe that killed around seventy-three people, a scandal of negligence so grave that the mayor was dismissed and the French state seized direct control of Marseille.
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6
Courage on the Steps - Gare Saint-Charles
Train station
On 1 October 2017, on the forecourt of this great hilltop station at the top of its monumental staircase, a man with a knife killed two young women, cousins aged twenty and twenty-one, before soldiers on the Operation Sentinelle anti-terror patrol stopped him within moments, an attack later treated as terrorism and remembered above all for the troops whose speed prevented far worse.
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