Very strange how few min after mentioning French connection films i find this article on a film released 5 yr ago called the connection , the real story behind the French connection films.
https://www.shortlist.com/entertainm...ue-story/94769
First few paragraphs
The Incredible True Story Behind The Real French Connection
As the true, bloody tale of gangland Marseille hits cinemas, ShortList’s Alex Christian visits the French Riviera to meet the real-life players behind mob drama The Connection
"Before, it was a story of men like my father, who would keep Marseille safe and uphold the law. Now there’s none of that and the crime has gone up.” Céline Zampa’s father wasn’t a lawman. Gaëtan ‘Tany’ Zampa was the Godfather of Marseille, a key figure in La French – the criminal enterprise known by its English name: the French Connection. I’m speaking to the daughter of one of France’s most notorious gangsters in Marseille’s Le Panier district, a neighbourhood of narrow cobblestone footpaths and terraced housing, which is bristling with energy. Céline, 39, was barely a schoolgirl when her father was arrested in the fallout of the murder of Judge Pierre Michel, who spearheaded President Nixon’s war on drugs on its Mediterranean frontline.
Marseille was the world’s heroin capital in the Sixties. A postwar influx of Neapolitans and Corsicans led to a rise in organised crime and links to the Italian Mafia. From there, a conspiracy to smuggle billions of dollars of heroin into the United States developed, with Marseille providing a natural shipping point. Opium farmers in Turkey would sell their wares to the mob, extracting the heroin in labs dotted around the city, and the drug would be smuggled out of the port to the thriving US