Marseille's DZ Mafia recruits children across France to kill, BBC finds

A BBC team spent months trying to get inside Marseille's underworld, and what they found was a system that lures vulnerable teenagers with cash and status, then traps them. The city's dominant crew, DZ Mafia, is now recruiting young people from all over France — not only to sell drugs, but to carry out kidnappings, torture and murder, according to the BBC. The children are seen as easy to corrupt and expendable by kingpins who run them from prison or from abroad.

The cruelty is already documented in court. In 2022, a woman who had just bought hashish on a Marseille housing estate was handed a note by her teenage seller: two 15-year-olds were being held captive and needed help. The boys had approached the gang for paid work — one handling money, the other working streets around the Frais-Vallon estate — before bosses accused them of shortfalls in takings. They were beaten regularly, forced to dance naked in front of a camera as blackmail, and one was raped, the court heard. Hours after the note was passed, the pair tried to escape from a second-storey window; one got away, the other was caught, beaten and stabbed but survived. Six men have since been handed hefty sentences.

DZ Mafia emerged victorious from a bloody turf war and is now among the most feared criminal organisations in France. Its name comes from Algeria's internet country code, and one of its founders, French-Algerian Mehdi Laribi, was detained earlier this year under a French arrest warrant. Dimitri Zoulas, who heads France's anti-drug trafficking unit, says the gang rose to prominence in 2023 as the first French outfit to market itself as a brand through video statements on social media. Its latest came in July, after intelligence suggested the mayor of a nearby town was in danger of being targeted; six masked men appeared in an online video denying the group's involvement.

The market behind that growth is booming. Zoulas says the number of cocaine users in France is expected soon to reach two million, up from 600,000 in 2017, while smuggling across the country generates €7bn (£5.9bn) a year and involves 200,000 people. Many of those moving the product are children, and authorities say the count of minors caught up in trafficking keeps climbing — more than 10,000 were involved in some way during 2025, according to official figures.

Karine Brouillard lives at the opposite end of France from the Mediterranean coast, and knows the cost up close. Her son Hugo first ran away at 15 from their village in the Nord department and was picked up by police three days later almost 1,000km (600 miles) away in Marseille, carrying money and cannabis. In 2023 he told his parents he had landed a holiday job at a restaurant near Marseille and called with regular updates — until a doctor rang three weeks later. Karine says she will never forget his words: your son arrived last night, he took a bullet to the head. Police suspect Hugo was involved with a gang and believe he was brought for help from a gang-controlled area: Quartier Nord.

Getting into Quartier Nord took resident Fadella Ouidef, a 41-year-old mother-of-four, as a guide. Thirty-seven seconds after entering one housing estate, the BBC crew was cornered — car horns sounded as teenagers at a gang checkpoint spotted the camera, and a grey 4x4 forced Fadella's Peugeot to the roadside before the driver let them leave on condition they stopped filming. Lately the gangs have been very aggressive, she said, adding that locals try to make sure young people understand what is happening is wrong. Camil, a 20-year-old who says he left the group after rising to run security in one area, described the recruitment playbook: cars, spacious apartments, drugs and prostitutes. You feel loyalty because of what they give you, he said. You'll stay until the very end, until either death or prison. Adam, a DZ Mafia member awaiting trial in prison over several murders, told the BBC by Snapchat video call that his determination and cold-bloodedness carried him up the gang's ladder.