The brutal DZ Mafia has taken over Marseille’s drugs network and asserted its dominance on the city’s streets through merciless contract killings, cementing its status as one of France’s most feared and powerful gangs in a matter of months.
The highly successful crime syndicate has employed an ‘expansionist agenda’, officials have warned, often recruiting children, including from middle-class backgrounds, through social media platforms like Snapchat to help carry out the hits.
Attracted by the high earning potential, one boy, who was recruited as a driver, reportedly helped the gang with several killings in exchange for cash which he spent on a car and clothes.
He told police that he decided to leave the gang when he had earned enough money – a staggering €20,000 – adding that by that point he felt by that ‘a little too many’ people had died.
Prosecutors believe DZ was behind as many as 40 drug-related murders in 2023 – 80 per cent of the total number that year – as it waged war against a rival gang, the Yoda.
While the number of killings almost halved in 2024, prosecutors have claimed that this is because the group had already established its authority by striking fear into its enemies.
DZ, short for Dzayer, meaning Algeria in the Berber language, has openly claimed violent attacks as their own since they first gained public and police attention for a gruesome murder in March 2023.
The gang posted pictures of the burning body of a victim in the Busserine housing estate in northern Marseilles, proudly displaying their tag – DZ Mafia – alongside it. The gang’s campaign of terror has continued since.
Just last month, the director of Marseille’s Baumettes prison and one of her deputies had to be taken off duty and put under police protection after they received death threats, with a bounty of of €120,000 placed on her head, according to French media.
The notorious Marseilles gangs of past decades, made famous by the 1971 movie The French Connection, are nothing in terms of brutality compared to what is being seen on the city’s streets now, according to a top policing official.
Bruno Bartocetti, a police union spokesman, warned: ‘Today, the way they operate is: ‘You pay or you die’. It’s far more violent. There’s no room for negotiation.’
The menacing clip shows 15 masked gang members surrounding their leader, who is stood behind a table covered with a white sheet with DZ Mafia emblazoned on it
A cache of weapons and ammunition is displayed in a Snapchat post alongside the DZ Mafia tag and an Algerian flag
Police forces stand in position during French President Emmanuel Macron’s visit to Marseille last year, which focused on the fight against drug trafficking
Police display 3D printed home-made weapons that were manufactured by gangs in Marseille
The highly successful group has also inspired copycats – criminals who are keen to capitalise on its fearsome reputation to extort money out of their victims with empty threats of violence.
A grocer and his family had to be rushed to a safehouse after he received a death threat by text, claiming to be from the DZ Mafia, if he did not pay €250,000.
Investigators later discovered the perpetrator was a petty criminal with no links to the gang, who wanted to use its name to raise cash, The Times reports.
Meanwhile a prisoner who posed as a member of the gang recruited a 14-year-old to carry out a hit on a rival on the outside – a killing which didn’t go to plan, with a taxi driver shot dead instead.
Keen to protect its ‘brand’ after the failed hit, DZ Mafia released a bizarre video insisting that it had no affiliation with the plot.
The menacing clip shows 15 masked gang members surrounding their leader, who is stood behind a table covered with a white sheet with DZ Mafia emblazoned on it.
‘We have enough men, vehicles and means to act if we had to,’ the group’s leader said in the video, his voice digitally altered.
Marseilles, France’s second-biggest city, has long been notorious for gang warfare and drug-related violence.
A photograph taken in La Castellane district in Marseille, southern France, on March 20, 2024, shows a bullet impact on a Police vehicle, one day after the visit of French President Emmanuel Macro
3D-printable FCG-9 semiautomic pistol caliber carbines are presented to journalists prior to a press conference by Marseille’s prosecutor last year
The city’s new public prosecutor, Nicolas Bessone, denounced the ‘unprecedented savagery’ of brutal attacks in a speech late last year.
A 15-year-old boy was stabbed 50 times and burned alive, while a 14-year-old boy was hired as a hitman to kill 36-year-old football player Nessim Ramdane ‘in cold blood’, he said.
The use of teenage hitmen is causing fears to rise across the country, with journalists Jeremie Pham-Le, Vincent Gautronneau and Jean-Michel Decugis branding them teenagers ‘galvanised by extreme violence, who think they’re living in a video game but shoot live ammunition’.
Marseille’s drug lords have been recruiting small-time foot runners with advertisements on social media, ‘outsourcing’ street dealings to youngsters known as ‘jobbeurs’.
Bessone said that young boys were now responding to adverts not only to sell cannabis resin but also to kill ‘without any remorse or reflection’.
It comes after France’s conservative interior minister last year declared that rampant drug-fuelled violence in France is turning the country in a ‘Mexicanized narco-state’.
Bruno Retailleau recently declared war on the operating gangs after a 15-year-old boy was caught in the crossfires and killed in a massive brawl and gunfight in Poitiers, on November 1.
Marseilles, France’s second-biggest city, has long been notorious for gang warfare and drug-related violence
The violence erupted in front of a restaurant and turned into a shootout involving up to 600 people, the minister said.
‘Narco scum today have no limits, this isn’t happening in South America but in Rennes, in Poitiers, in parts of western France that once enjoyed a reputation for peace and quiet,’ the minister added.
He spoke during a visit to Rennes, Brittany, where a five-year-old boy was left with critical injuries after being hit in the head by a stray bullet during a drug-related collision in October.
But not even 24 hours after Retailleau left the city, a 19-year-old died after being fatally stabbed in the Maurepas neighbourhood, which police said is rife with drug crime.
Once mainly associated with Marseille, gun battles between drug gangs have become more frequent elsewhere in France in recent years, affecting cities including Poitiers, Grenoble Clermont-Ferrand, Valence, and Villeurbanne.
In Valence, a 22-year-old man was shot dead and two others wounded as they queued outside a nightclub for a Halloween party on Thursday night; the following day an 18-year-old was gunned down and killed in a suburb of the same town.
In Villeurbanne, a suburb of Lyon, a man was shot dead, and in Clermont-Ferrand a teenager is in a critical condition after receiving a bullet in the head.
At the start of the year, Grenoble was described as ‘France’s Silicon Valley’ – embodying Emmanuel Macron’s glittering ‘start-up nation’.
Just nine months later, however, the city was dubbed one of the most dangerous places in France, according to The Spectator, following a summer of bloodshed which saw 19 shootings between rival cartels as they battled for control of the lucrative drugs market.
France’s Minister of the Interior Bruno Retailleau said: ‘Narco scum today have no limits’ after a boy, 15, was killed in a gunfight in Poitiers on November 1
Armed police during Retailleau’s visit to Rennes amid concern over drug-related violence
In September, a father-of-two, Lilian Dejean, 49, was shot dead in Grenoble by a man named by police as Abdoul D, an individual with convictions for theft, violence, and drug trafficking.
Drug crime is rife in the city, and has been for decades due to its proximity to Marseille – notorious for being the epicentre of the French narcotics industry.
The city has been a major hub for the European drug trade since the 1960s when it was used by the Corsican mafia to smuggle heroin grown in Asia to the US in a route known as the French Connection.
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