The Teenage Hitmen of Marseille's Gang Wars

The Underworld Podcast

True Crime, Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 871 Ratings

🗓️ 7 January 2025

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

You might recognize the city of Marseille as the home of one of the biggest drug trafficking operations in history, the French Connection. These days, though, it's no longer Corsican mobsters using France's second biggest city as a transshipment point to move heroin across the Mediterranean. Instead, the last two decades have seen street gangs of mostly North African teenagers warring over retail drug spots that can make over $100,000 a day. 2023 saw nearly 50 narco-homicides, as the French police call them, as a gang known as the DZ Mafia started to take control. And the violence is only increasing, as AK-47's become the guns of choice and 15 year old hitmen are hired off of telegram and paid 20,000 euros to kill other teenagers and then post about it on snapchat. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:30.2	May 14th, 2024 in northern France, Normandy. It's a Tuesday morning in one of France's quieter regions, not known for its
0:39.9	crime and chaos. A prisoner is on the move, being transferred after he's been sentenced to 18
0:46.2	months for burglary. It's a silly charge of sorts. He was caught breaking into supermarkets and
0:51.8	stealing bottles of alcohol. Not exactly Al Capone.
0:56.2	So the convoy taking him is small, only five guards or so.
1:01.1	The van transporting him is going through a toll booth, when all of a sudden it's rammed
1:05.9	by a black sedan going the wrong way.
1:09.2	From behind, a white Audi follows it, boxing it in.
1:13.2	Four men jump out, clad in all black with balaclava's covering their faces, holding AK-47s.
1:20.4	They start letting off dozens of shots.
1:23.1	It's a prison break.
1:24.4	And the man they're trying to bust out is a guy by the name of Muhammad Atra,
1:29.0	otherwise known as the Fly. He's young, about 30, and already has a bunch of convictions,
1:35.4	though none of them are for anything really big, including drug trafficking. In recent months,
1:40.9	though, he's faced some serious new charges.
1:49.5	One of those charges is for attempted murder, and the other is for helping organize a kidnapping that led to the murder of a drug dealer whose body was found burned in the back of a car.
1:55.3	That happened in Marseille, a port city in the south of France, and it's what they now call
2:00.7	a Marseille barbecue.
2:02.8	See, everything ties back to Marseille.
2:05.9	Even though Time Magazine just ranked the Marseilles neighborhood as the coolest in the world in
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