Organised crime in Marseilles: a neo-institutionalist approach

Résumé du document

In his book The Power Game, Hedrick Smith speaks of the foreign policy game in the United States as a "bureaucratic tribal warfare", using a tribal metaphor to describe the fierce fights which take place in Washington, DC. The notion of bureaucracy emerged in the early 20th century, with the work of a German sociologist, Max Weber, who described the process of rationalization in Western administrations. For Weber, the term was positive, but it has now negative implications, for it evokes red tape, lengthy procedures and complexity. The machinery of US national security policy is indeed bureaucratic, since it involves many agencies and governmental departments, and unlike in other Western countries, where foreign policy is run by professional diplomats, political appointees shape the US diplomacy. Since 1945, the United States has asserted itself as the policeman of the world and has generated a huge bureaucracy, along with an enormous military might: the National Security Act of 1947, under Truman, is a watershed date, from which the US never escaped its global responsibilities, even when it was willing to retreat.

Extraits

[...] When Joseph Amsellem, who had been sentenced to nine years in prison in 1988 for drug trafficking, was killed in Marseilles in March 1993, he was the passenger in a car driven by a famous lawyer, specialised in bankruptcy. In May 1994, the administrative director of a Marseilles clinic was also shot down[15]. We come back here to Raufer and Quéré's claim that the Marseilles is of a different kind, for it is able to draw on a variety of resources provided by people considered as legitimate within society, who may be more reluctant elsewhere in France. By definition, organised crime's relationship with politics is more difficult to uncover than that with civil society. [...]

[...] Tracing back their origins to the beginning of the last century, the Marseilles criminal groups rapidly rose on the international criminal scene. Racketeering, smuggling, prostitution, drug trafficking enabled them to realize large profits and to establish a firm grip on Marseilles underworld activities. These criminal groups grew in a very specific environment, which renders the Marseilles and in a larger perspective groups based in South-Eastern France groups somewhat particular when compared to other French criminal groups. It seems that criminals here have benefited at best from a general indifference and at worse from support originating from legitimate sectors of society. [...]

[...] Since then, no real scandal has shaken Marseilles' politics. However, a grim light was cast on the relationship between organised crime and politics in the department of Var, during the trial of the killers of Yann Piat, an MP who had launched an attack against what she saw as a too close relationship between politicians and gangsters. Maurice Arreckx, once a Senator and president of the local assembly, appeared before court as a witness (although he was then detained on charges of bribes). [...]

[...] Guérini worked his way to the top thanks to his alleged political connections and his American-supported activities on the docklands against the communists[4]. In 1967, Guérini was shot down by motorcycle-riding killers. A few years later, at the beginning of the seventies, Marseilles' leadership of the heroin market began to fade, as the French government came under pressure from its American counterpart to clamp down on home-grown drug traffickers. In 1972, the French Connection was disbanded, and the drug trade was handed over to other networks. [...]

[...] cit., p Michel Samson, décadence des parrains”, Le Monde, December 12th 2004 Xavier Raufer, Stéphane Quéré, Op. cit., p Nacer Lalam, Op. cit., p Ibid., pp. 362-363 Ministère de l'intérieur, lutte contre la criminalité organisée”, www.interieur.gouv.fr/rubriques/c/c3_police_nationale/c332_dcpj/La_lutte_con tre_la_criminalitee_organisee Xavier Raufer, Stéphane Quéré, Op. cit., p. [...]