The French Connection - Vieux-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.
Sobre este lugar
The Vieux-Port, the Old Port, is the cradle of Marseille, a harbour first dug by Greek settlers around twenty-six centuries ago and still the symbolic centre of the city, lined today with bobbing boats, cafes and a morning fish market. Its openness to the sea made it one of the busiest trafficking ports in the Mediterranean, and in the twentieth century it became the hub of an extraordinary criminal enterprise. Corsican gangsters, building on foundations laid by the interwar godfathers Paul Carbone and Francois Spirito, refined morphine base smuggled from Turkey and the Near East into high-grade heroin in clandestine laboratories around the city, then shipped it across the Atlantic. By the late nineteen sixties the operation was supplying the overwhelming majority of heroin reaching the United States. It took an international crackdown, a Turkish ban on opium growing in nineteen seventy one and a wave of laboratory raids, to finally dismantle it.
Datos clave
- 80 percent — By 1969 Marseille's Corsican networks supplied an estimated eighty percent of the heroin sold in the United States.
- 6 laboratories — Six Marseille heroin laboratories were dismantled between February 1972 and April 1973 as the Connection collapsed.
- 1971 year — Turkey halted licensed opium production in 1971, cutting off the raw material that had fed the Marseille labs.
📍 Quai de la Fraternité, 13002, Marseille