Corsican mafia
| Founded | 1910s |
|---|---|
| Founding location | Corsica |
| Years active | 1910s-present |
| Territory | France, several countries in Latin America and North Africa |
| Ethnicity | Corsicans |
| Criminal activities | Racketeering, weapons trafficking, gambling, drug trafficking, assault, theft, loan sharking, fraud, bankruptcy, blackmailing, bribery, extortion, car bombing, smuggling, infiltration of politics, kidnapping, money laundering, murder, corruption, tax evasion |
| Allies | American and Russian mafia, Cosa Nostra, Ndrangheta, and Triad |
The Corsican mafia is an umbrella term for criminal groups originating from Corsica. The Corsican mafia is an influential organized crime structure, operating in France, Russia, and many African and Latin American countries. One of the most important groups of the Corsican mafia is the Brise de Mer gang.
For more details on this topic, see Union Corse.
Union Corse was the general name given by American authorities to the major Corsican gangs who organized the French Connection, a heroin trade between France and the United States from the 1960s to the early 1970s. The Corsican gang, led by the Guerini brothers (Antoine and Barthélémy, nicknamed "Mémé"), were exempt from prosecution in Marseilles from the 1950s to the 1960s. The Guerini brothers were trafficking opium derivatives that were illegally imported from French Indochina using the services of the Messageries Maritimes, a French merchant shipping company.
During World War II, the Guerini brothers had sided with the Gaullist part of the French Resistance, while the pre-war crime kings of Marseilles, Paul Carbone and François Spirito, had sided with Vichy and the Germans. In 1947, Marseilles had a communist mayor, Jean Christofol, who was backed by the trade unions. He was popular among longshoremen, transportation workers, and dockworkers. He was opposed by socialist candidate Gaston Defferre, who later became mayor of Marseilles for almost three decades. In the coming Cold War both the center-left French government and the US tried to fight communist influence in Marseilles while occasionally employing illegal means to further their goal. Marseilles was, at the time, the main trading port of the French colonial empire. The Guerini gang was employed to disrupt union and electoral gatherings, back strikebreakers and support US-funded non-communist trade unions.
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