The sun-soaked, Phoenician-founded port of Marseilles has long been famous for its succulent  bouillabaise, formidable soccer talents, and, in long-ago decades, blood-thirsty gang vs gang subculture. But while the cocaine trade of the ‘sixties and ‘seventies, as dramatized in the iconic film The French Connection, has faded from public awareness, it never went away.

What goes underground eventually will surface. This year, from mid-April into May, prisons all over France holding drug kingpins have been battered by a blitzkrieg of attacks—Molotov cocktails, AK-47s, drones, torching of officials’ cars, and death-threats and rape-threats to guards, particularly those in charge of the caids, as gang leaders are called.  

The brazen openness of this well-organized onslaught is impressive. In over 100 acts of violence, bullet-riddled walls and burned cars are systematically tagged with the letters DDPF, standing for ‘Defense of the Rights of French Prisoners’. If elements of the extreme Left (although it is hard to tell what’s Left and what’s Right some days) apparently support the DDPF,  protesting overcrowding and other mistreatment (just try Louisiana’s prisons, folks) police spokespersons point to a separate organization as puppetmaster of the DDPF: the DZ Mafia, so named for ‘Djazaïr,’ aka Algeria. A brilliant branding move.

Acccording to the government, ca. 2.7 million people of Algerian origin live in France—all too many segregated from the main stream, in socio-economically disadvantaged cités. (Euphemism, there.) Algeria is France’s colonial wound that unlike Vietnam, which was cleverly handed off to the Americans, never stops bleeding. But that is another story.

The DZ has a grip on deprived teenagers’ ambitions, as well as on all the traditional Mafia core businesses: prostitution and extortion for example, and drug-running above all. Because DZ Mafia works on a decentralized franchise model, pinning down and prosecuting major actors isn’t easy. The police are further frustrated by France’s notoriously lenient judicial sentencing. Often it’s in the front door, out the back.

In addition to organizing the attacks on the prisons from within, the kingpins run their businesses and order assassinations using contraband phones. DZ Mafia thus succeeded in wiping out a rival gang, Yoda, after dozens of murders.  The organization is rapidly spreading beyond Marseille, throughout France. And while putting the kingpins in high-security solitary can cut off their phone access, it also creates a power vacuum that quickly attracts fresh talent from the decentralized DZ Mafia franchises.

The new Interior Minister, Bruno Retailleau (Macron’s umpteenth appointee to that hot seat) faces a daunting challenge: how to rein in the DZ Mafia, strengthen the hand of the justice system, and at the same time avoid infuriating many Algerian-identifying and other Muslim-identifying citizens of the Republic?