The rise of Marseille’s ‘Algerian mafia’: How ruthless gang used teenage hitmen to surprise enemies and burned targets alive in brutal reign of terror that saw them take over city’s drug network in a year

The ruthless DZ mafia has taken over Marseille’s drug 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 just a few months.

The highly successful crime syndicate has an “expansionist agenda,” officials warn, often recruiting children, including middle-class ones, through social media platforms such as Snapchat to help carry out the hits.

Attracted by the high earning potential, a boy who was recruited as a driver decided reportedly helped the gang with several murders in exchange for money he spent on a car and clothes.

He told police he decided to leave the gang when he had earned enough money – as much as €20,000 – adding that at the time he felt “a little too many” people had been killed.

Prosecutors believe DZ was behind as many as 40 drug-related murders in 2023 — 80 percent of the year’s total — as it waged war against a rival gang, the Yoda.

Although the number of murders has almost halved by 2024, prosecutors have argued that this is because the group had already established its authority by instilling fear in its enemies.

DZ, short for Dzayer, which means Algeria in the Berber language, has openly claimed that violent attacks were their own since they first came to public and police attention for a gruesome murder in March 2023.

The gang posted photos of the burning body of a victim in the residential area of ​​Busserine in northern Marseille, proudly displaying their label – DZ Mafia – next to it. The gang’s campaign of terror has continued since then.

Just last month, the director of Marseille’s Baumettes prison and one of her deputies had to be removed from duty and placed under police protection after receiving death threats, with a €120,000 bounty placed on her head, according to French media.

Marseille’s infamous gangs of recent decades, made famous by the 1971 film The French Connection, are nothing in terms of brutality compared to what is now seen on the city’s streets, a top police official has said.

Bruno Bartocetti, spokesman for the police union, warned: ‘Today the way they operate is: ‘You pay or you die’. It’s much more violent. There is no room for negotiation.’

The highly successful group has also inspired copycats: criminals eager to capitalize on their fearsome reputation by extorting money from 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 via text message claiming to be from the DZ mafia if he did not pay €250,000.

Investigators later discovered that the perpetrator was a petty criminal with no ties to the gang, who wanted to use his name to raise money. The times reports.

Meanwhile, an inmate posing as a member of the gang recruited a 14-year-old to carry out an assassination of an outside rival – a murder that did not go according to plan, with a taxi driver shot dead instead.

Eager to protect its ‘brand’ after the failed hit, DZ Mafia released a bizarre video insisting it had no ties to the plot.

The menacing clip shows fifteen masked gang members surrounding their leader, who stands behind a table covered in a white sheet with DZ Mafia on it.

“We have enough men, vehicles and resources to take action if necessary,” the group’s leader said in the video, his voice digitally altered.

Marseille, France’s second largest city, has long been notorious for gang warfare and drug-related violence.

The city’s new prosecutor, Nicolas Bessone, denounced the “unprecedented cruelty” 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 hit man to kill 36-year-old footballer Nessim Ramdane “in cold blood”, he said.

The use of teenage assassins is raising fears across the country, with journalists Jeremy Pham-Le, Vincent Gautronneau and Jean-Michel Decugis labeling them as teenagers ‘spurred on by extreme violence, who think they are living in a video game but are filming it live . ammunition’.

Marseille’s drug lords have recruited small-time foot traffickers with social media advertisements, ‘outsourcing’ street dealing to young people, known as a ‘job fair’.

Bessone said young boys were now responding to advertisements not only to sell cannabis resin, but also to kill “without any remorse or reflection.”

It comes after France’s conservative interior minister declared last year that rampant drug-fueled violence in France is turning the country into a “Mexicanized narco-state.”

Bruno Retailleau recently declared war on the operating gangs after a 15-year-old boy was caught in the crossfire and killed in a massive brawl and shootout in Poitiers on November 1.

The violence broke out in front of a restaurant and culminated in a gun battle involving up to 600 people, the minister said.

“Narco scum knows no borders these days, this is not happening in South America, but in Rennes, in Poitiers, in parts of western France that once enjoyed a reputation for peace and tranquility,” the minister added.

He was speaking during a visit to Rennes, Brittany, where a five-year-old boy was seriously injured after being hit in the head by a stray bullet during a drug-related clash in October.

But less than 24 hours after Retailleau left the city, a 19-year-old died after being fatally stabbed in the Maurepas neighborhood, where police say drug crime is high.

Once mainly associated with Marseille, gun battles between drug gangs have become more common elsewhere in France in recent years, affecting cities such as Poitiers, Grenoble, Clermont-Ferrand, Valence and Villeurbanne.

In Valence, a 22-year-old man was shot dead and two others injured as they queued outside a nightclub for a Halloween party on Thursday evening; the next day, an 18-year-old was shot and killed in a suburb of the same city.

A man was shot dead in Villeurbanne, a suburb of Lyon, and in Clermont-Ferrand a teenager is in critical condition after being shot in the head.

At the start of the year, Grenoble was described as ‘the French Silicon Valley’ – the embodiment of Emmanuel Macron’s glittering ‘start-up nation’.

However, just nine months later, the city was named one of the most dangerous places in France according to The Spectator, following a summer of bloodshed that saw 19 shootings between rival cartels as they battled for control of the lucrative drug market.

In September, a father of two, Lilian Dejean, 49, was shot dead in Grenoble by a man identified by police as Abdoul D, a person 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, which is infamous for being the epicenter of the French drug 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 Asian-grown heroin into the US via a route known as the French Connection.