Organised crime in Marseilles

Sciences politiques | 8 pages | 05-03-2006 | Format : | Note : Non noté |

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Résumé

Academic literature on French organised crime is scarce. Very few – if not any – criminology departments exist within French universities and higher education institutions. Moreover, public debate is centred on the issues of petty crime and unruly youths, as it was the case during the 2002 presidential election campaign. Organised crime is also presented as a foreign-originated problem , be it from Russian, Chinese, Italian or Columbian origin. However, there exists some evidence to maintain that native organised groups are present in France, especially in its South-Eastern part. For instance, the Mediterranean city of Marseilles has a tradition of organised groups that can be traced back to the 19th century. Since the end of the Second World War, these groups have fought a bloody war for the control of the Marseilles underworld. Recently, a former prominent Marseilles godfather, Jacques Imbert, who was said to be retired, was sentenced to four years in prison for cigarette smuggling, which is for some a minor sentence compared to the investigations in which his name has appeared.

Arguably, the Marseilles “milieu” is more of a set of groups than an organised and structured group, but studying it as an institution should help to highlight its main features and raise a few questions. Therefore, the approach adopted here uses a neo-institutionalist framework: the Marseilles underworld is studied as an institution, which has its own sets of rules, its power struggles, its opposition between newcomers and groups already in place, as well as its own institutional logic ...

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