Kids found Adel’s body on their way to school. His parents were about to report him missing. He was burned and slumped over, his knee up like he was chilling on a Marseille beach. He was just 15. Someone shot him in the head, covered him in gas, and lit him up.
Someone even filmed it. It’s a nasty trend of shoot-and-burn killings tied to Marseille’s fast-changing drug scene. Social media is making it worse, and more kids are getting sucked in. They’re forced to do dirty work.
It’s a mess,” said a gang guy, lifting his shirt to show bullet scars from when rivals tried to kill him.
France’s Justice Department says the number of teens dealing drugs has jumped a lot in the last eight years. I joined a gang at 15. It’s all different now. No rules. The bosses use kids, pay them nothing, and they kill for no reason. “It’s crazy,” said the guy, now in his early 20s, who goes by The Immortal.
Around Marseille, cops, lawyers, politicians, and community folks are talking about a psychose – a city-wide freak-out. They’re arguing over whether to crack down harder or try new ways to help people in poverty.
People are scared. The drug dealers are in charge, and they’re getting stronger, said a lawyer who didn’t want to be named to protect her family. The gangs are stronger than the law. Until the government gets its act together, we have to be careful, she said. She stopped representing gang violence victims. This summer, some French cities made teens stay inside at night because of the drug violence.
President Emmanuel Macron held a meeting to discuss it all. There’s so much competition in the drug game that people will do anything, said Mohamed Benmeddour, a community worker. Kids as young as 13 or 14 are lookouts or dealers. They see death every day and aren’t scared to kill or die.
The current scare in Marseille started when Mehdi Kessaci, a 20-year-old cop in training, was killed last month. He had nothing to do with drugs. People think it was a warning to his brother, Amine Kessaci, a 22-year-old anti-gang speaker and politician. Under police protection, Kessaci told the BBC he felt awful. Should I have moved my family out of Marseille? I’ll always feel guilty about this,” he said.
Amine Kessaci got attention in 2020 when his older brother, Brahim, a former gang member, was killed. We’ve been living with this craziness for years. Our lives have always been risky. But since COVID, both those doing the crimes and the victims are getting younger, he said.My little brother was innocent. There used to be rules. You didn’t kill in public or burn bodies. First, you shot someone in the leg to scare them. Now, they just kill.
The French police are doing big security sweeps in Marseille’s bad areas because the violence is so bad. One gang, the DZ Mafia, is the boss, but it’s like a franchise. Most workers are teens and illegal immigrants. They fight over turf.
About 20,000 people are involved in the city’s drug trade. The cops took €42 million in criminal money last year.
Social media is full of videos of gang members with guns shooting in Marseille’s cités—tall buildings where many poor people live.
Recently, we went with armed cops on a security sweep.
The cops sped to a run-down building as a teen gang lookout ran away. The cops chased dealers up the stairs.
We’re trying to shut down drug spots. We’ve closed over 40 and arrested a bunch of people, said Sébastien Lautard, the regional police chief.
Cops pinned an 18-year-old against a door in a nasty basement with cocaine and plastic bags. He told them he was forced to work for a gang. They took him away.
This isn’t a good life. Kids are recruited online and promised €200 a day, but it usually ends in violence or death, said Nicolas Bessone, chief lawyer.
Bessone thinks the drug trade is worth €7 billion nationwide. He’s worried about online recruiting and more teens being forced into it.
The dealers make up fake debts and make kids slaves. If they steal, they torture them. Both those doing the crimes and the victims are getting younger, he said. He wants people to stand up to the crazy and fight back.
The lawyer who didn’t want to be named talked about a kid who was forced to deal drugs, abused, and whose family was threatened. TikTok has drug ads with emojis. Others recruit workers for €250-€500. Franck Allisio, a politician running for mayor of Marseille, wants the government to do more. We need to bring order back. We need to stop being soft and give the cops and courts more power,” he said.
Allisio also said immigration is bad and that most dealers are immigrants. That’s hard to prove. He said the government has wasted money in poor neighborhoods and blamed families and schools for letting kids join drug gangs. Philippe Pujol, a local writer who knows a lot about the drug trade, is being protected by the cops after Mehdi Kessaci was killed. People are scared. I’d rather be safe,” he said.
Pujol thinks stronger policing only helps a little. He says poverty is a monster caused by corruption and bad politics. These kids might act tough, but they’re still kids with dreams who don’t want to be part of the violence, Pujol said.
