The World: The Milieu of the Corsican Godfathers

The eyes in the walnut face held his. “I am the head of the Union Corse.” The Union Corse! More deadly, and perhaps even older than the Unione Siciliano, the Mafia. Bond knew that it controlled most organized crime throughout metropolitan France and her colonies—protection rackets, smuggling, prostitution, and the suppression of rival gangs.

—Ian Fleming, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

THE Union Corse, an organization that originated in the parched hills of Corsica but is today centered in Marseille, rules more in fact than even James Bond imagined in fiction. It dominates the worldwide trafficking in narcotics, and in particular controls the supply and processing of heroin flowing into the U.S. from France, South America and Southeast Asia. Though it is relatively weak in the U.S., the Union Corse is far more powerful than the Mafia in many parts of the world.

As an organization, the Union Corse is more tightly knit and more secretive than its Sicilian counterpart. U.S. agencies have been able to obtain information from all levels of the Mafia clans in the U.S., but not from the Union Corse. “When the Mafioso is spilling his guts,” says one U.S. intelligence official, “the Corsican is still silent—refusing even to give you his name.” In the early 1960s, for instance, a Union Corse member who called himself Antoine Rinieri was arrested in New York with a suspected narcotics payoff of $247,000 in cash. In the Corsican tradition, he refused to give his real name or explain what he was doing with the money. His silence caused him to be sent to jail for six months for contempt of court. At the end of his term, the U.S. deported him but, since it could prove no link between the $247,000 and dope trafficking, the government was forced to give him the money back—with interest.

In France, the very existence of the Union Corse is still denied, in much the same way that the Mafia was often dismissed as fictional in the U.S. two decades ago. “The structure is a myth,” says a senior French cop. With five gang murders in Marseille in the past six months alone, that notion is beginning to change.

In many respects, the Mafia and the Union Corse are similar. Both are divided into a number of families—the Mafia into about 24 in the U.S., the Union Corse into about 15 in France. The best-known of the Corsican families are the Francisci, Orsini, Venturi and Guerini clans. The identity of some of the clans is so deep a secret that a member could be marked for death for discussing them. And in the matter of exterminating informers, the Union Corse is said to be quicker and more deadly than the Mafia.

The Corsicans have spread around the world for much the same reason Sicilians came to the U.S.—hopeless poverty at home. “We see our sons as they leave as young men and when they come back to retire on their pensions,” says a Corsican detective in France. Often smuggling is the only way that Corsicans can make a living.

The French bring a new language to international crime; the army of ordinary racketeers, for instance, is known simply as the “milieu.” The Corsican gang boss ordinarily carries his identification in plain sight—a watch-fob medallion bearing the Moor’s-head crest of Corsica. Like the Mafia, the Union Corse has a code of honor, the word of a gangster is supposed to be his bond. The difference is that Mafiosi are forever doublecrossing each other—hence the present gang war in New York—while the Corsicans usually keep their word. Members of the Mafia usually submit internal disputes to other Mafiosi; Corsicans often call in expert outsiders to arbitrate their quarrels.

The strength of the Union Corse outside the U.S. is based largely on its ability to infiltrate government agencies. In France the Union Corse has, to some degree, infiltrated the police, the military, the customs service and the French equivalent of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, the SDECE (for Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionage). One of that outfit’s former agents, Roger de Louette, who was convicted in Newark last April of smuggling $12 million worth of heroin into the U.S. and is currently serving a five-year prison term, testified that he imported the drugs in league with his superiors in the agency. The Corsican influence in French law-enforcement agencies is also believed to have been a large factor in the French government’s reluctance to crack down on the Corsican narcotics laboratories in Marseille until drugs became a problem—and a political issue—in France.

The Union Corse’s immense political influence in France stems from the Corsicans’ work for the French underground during World War II—German collaborators in Marseille were regularly and efficiently dispatched—and for the French government in the postwar years. In 1948 Paris called upon the Union Corse to break a strike by Communist-controlled unions that threatened to close the port of Marseille. The Union Corse obliged by providing an army of strikebreaking longshoremen to unload the ships and a crew of assassins to gun down defiant union leaders. French government officials have not forgotten such favors.

The same kind of political fix, arranged in other ways, has kept the Union Corse narcotics network operating in Southeast Asia since 1948. A large share of the heroin used by U.S. troops in Viet Nam was supplied by Corsican-financed narcotics producers in Laos and Thailand. For about ten years following the French withdrawal from Indochina in 1954, a group of Corsican war veterans ran several small charter airlines whose purpose was the smuggling of narcotics from Laos into South Viet Nam; the lines were collectively known as “Air Opium.”

In Latin America, the Union Corse is extremely influential in a number of countries, including Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Paraguay, Bolivia and Panama. In some cases, the influence has proved strong enough to protect a handful of heroin laboratories that have recently been moved there from Marseille. In Paraguay, Corsican influence is believed to have been behind the U.S.’s recent difficulties in extraditing French-born Auguste Ricord to the U.S. to face narcotics charges.

According to testimony given before a U.S. Senate subcommittee in 1964, one of the Corsican godfathers is Marcel Francisci, 52, a flamboyant, onetime war hero (the Croix de Guerre) whose business interests include casinos in Britain, France and Lebanon. In 1968, caught in a gangland vendetta, Francisci barely escaped an ambush in a restaurant on the island of Corsica. Four months later, the men who tried to kill him were murdered in a Parisian restaurant by gunmen posing as cops. Francisci today is an elected district official on Corsica.

Other known leaders of the Union Corse, according to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in testimony before the same Senate subcommittee, include Dominique Venturi, 49, and his brother Jean, 51. Dominique’s base has been Marseille, where he has been known as a political crony of Mayor Gaston Deferre, the Socialist candidate for President of France in 1969. Dominique got into the narcotics-smuggling business in 1953, and at one time ran a fleet of yachts for hauling morphine base from the Middle East to Marseille. Jean Venturi, who went to Canada in 1952 and is believed to be operating there still, is sometimes credited with pioneering the technique of hiding heroin in the nooks and crannies of imported autos.

About 10 years ago, the Union Corse began to move into the U.S. to fill the vacuum created by the partial withdrawal of the Mafia from the narcotics racket. Its chief contact in the U.S. became Florida Gang Boss Santo Trafficante Jr., who traveled to Saigon and Hong Kong to work out narcotics deals with the Corsicans and later turned up in Ecuador to check out a cocaine network in which he had been offered a partnership. The Union Corse also supplied and financed the new gangs of South Americans, Puerto Ricans and blacks, who moved into the vacant territories. All members of the milieu were instructed to avoid disturbing those Mafiosi who still continued to deal in narcotics—chiefly the capos and soldiers of the Bonanno and Gambino families.

The peace between the Corsicans and the Sicilians has endured for a surprisingly long time, but it may not last much longer. Last week representatives of the Mafia clans in New York met to consider a mass re-entry into the narcotics business. If they decide to proceed, and if approval comes from the Mafia’s supreme council, the Commission, they will have to do it over the Corsicans’—and some of their own—dead bodies.