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Warning: Strong language and descriptions of sexual violence
Although she had just bought hashish from a drug dealer, the woman decided to call the police.
It was because, along with the illegal drugs, she had been handed a note by the young seller during their brief meeting on a Marseille housing estate in 2022.
“We’re being held captive and need help. We are 15-years-old,” it read.
The teenage dealer, a French court heard earlier this year, was one of two boys being held by a gang which they had both initially approached looking for paid work – albeit illegal.
One boy had been tasked with handling money, the other worked streets around the Frais-Vallon estate. Soon though, bosses had accused them of being responsible for “shortfalls” in takings.
What followed were regular beatings, the court was told, and being forced to dance naked in front of a camera as a form of blackmail. One of the boys was also raped.
Hours after the woman was passed the note, the two teenagers had tried to escape from a second-storey window, injuring themselves in the process. One managed to get away, while the other was caught, beaten and stabbed, but survived.
Arrests were made. Photos on the phone of one of the boys’ alleged torturers showed several other young men in a similarly distressed condition. Six men have since been handed hefty sentences for what happened to the two teenagers.
The boys’ story highlights the grip that drug gangs hold over parts of France’s second city.
While the blend of Mediterranean culture, street art and hip-hop scene has made Marseille a popular tourist destination – beyond the city centre, it is another story.
After months of trying, a BBC team managed to enter this dangerous world – centred on deprived streets and high-rise housing estates in the port city, which police do not enter lightly.
We found an environment where ruthless gangs lure vulnerable young people with promises of easy money, but end up trapping them in a world of drug dealing, brutality and exploitation.
We saw how gangs use social media to recruit hitmen and spoke to several young men caught up in the violence. From prison, one gang member accused of involvement in several murders explained how his “cold-bloodedness” had helped him rise through the ranks.
The city’s most powerful gang, DZ Mafia, emerged victorious from a bloody turf war and is now one of the most feared criminal organisations in France.
DZ is the official internet country code for Algeria, where one of the gang’s founders, a French-Algerian called Mehdi Laribi, was detained earlier this year under a French arrest warrant.
The criminal outfit rose to prominence in 2023, when it became the first French gang to capitalise on its notoriety by releasing video statements – using social media to market itself as a brand – says the head of the country’s anti-drug trafficking unit, Dimitri Zoulas.
Its most recent statement came in July, when the mayor of a nearby town had to be placed in police protection, after intelligence suggested he was in danger of being targeted by the group.
In an online video, six masked men dressed in black stood behind a table – as one of them read a statement denying DZ Mafia’s involvement.
France’s expanding illegal drugs market – which has seen a surge in cocaine imports alongside high volumes of cannabis and synthetic drugs – has also helped the gang grow rapidly.
The number of cocaine users in France is expected soon to reach two million, says Zoulas, up from 600,000 in 2017. Drug smuggling across France generates €7bn (£5.9bn) a year, involving 200,000 people, he adds.
Many of those distributing the drugs are children and the authorities say the number of minors caught up in trafficking is increasing. During 2025, more than 10,000 children were involved in some way, according to official figures.
DZ Mafia is a prime example. To reach more customers, it needs more gang members – more children.
We have found it is now recruiting young people from across France – not just to sell drugs, but to carry out kidnap, torture and murder.
They are a generation seen as easy to corrupt, but also expendable, by the kingpins who typically control them from prison or overseas.
And, as police and judges warn, once these children enter Marseille’s underworld, it is very hard to get them out.
Few know the human cost of Marseille’s gangs like mother Karine Brouillard – who lives at the other end of France, almost as far from the Mediterranean coast as you can get.
Her son, Hugo, first ran away aged 15 – from his home in a village in the Nord department – after an argument with his family. He was picked up by police three days later, almost 1,000km (600 miles) away in Marseille, with money and cannabis on him. He was taken home.
But several years later, in 2023, Hugo planned to return south, telling his parents he had secured a holiday job at a restaurant near Marseille.
“He gave regular updates,” Karine remembers. “He called me, everything was going well.”
Three weeks later, a doctor called. Karine says she will never forget his words: “Your son arrived last night. He took a bullet to the head.”
Police believe Hugo was brought for medical help from a gang-controlled area and suspect he was involved with one.
That area was Quartier Nord.
Our best way into Quartier Nord, where DZ Mafia wields power, is with the help of resident Fadella Ouidef, a 41-year-old mother-of-four who gives us a tour.
Thirty-seven seconds after entering one housing estate, we find ourselves cornered.
Car horns sound the moment Fadella’s Peugeot passes a gang checkpoint – the teenagers manning the post immediately spot our camera. “Wait, stop filming,” Fadella warns, as a grey 4×4 forces us to the side of the road.
“I’m making a report for my housing association,” she tells the inquisitive driver. He eventually agrees to let us leave if we stop filming.
It is unnerving to see a non-police vehicle move so assertively and a relief to watch it leave.
“Lately, the gangs have been very aggressive,” explains Fadella. “What we simply try to do is make sure our young people understand what’s happening is wrong.”
Fadella speaks to a wider fear among local families: that their children are enticed by huge sums of money to take a criminal path that robs them of their innocence.
Money is what led one young man to spend his teenage years with DZ Mafia.
In order for our interviewees to speak freely, or because of safety concerns, we have agreed to protect their identities.
Camil tells us he worked up the gang’s ranks to “running security” in one area it controls.
The now 20-year-old, who claims to have left the group, is highly suspicious of our presence, but agrees to tell us how the gang recruits young members.
“They know how to get inside your head. Whatever you want, they give to you,” he says. This can range from nice cars and spacious apartments, to drugs and prostitutes, he explains.
“You feel loyalty because of what they give you. You’ll stay until the very end, until either death or prison.”
Camil also gives a sobering assessment of what happens if the gang identifies a weakness in a recruit: “They’ll exploit it. You’re their bitch, it’s over.”
DZ Mafia member, Adam – not his real name – tells us he was part of a DZ Mafia hit squad when we speak to him in a Snapchat video call.
He is currently in prison awaiting trial, after being implicated in several murders.
“People noticed my determination, my cold-bloodedness and, without wanting to, I climbed up the ladder of the gang,” says Adam. “It became my place, I had to roll with it.”
During the chat, he agrees the killings he has been charged with were “quite shocking”.
“Attempts in broad daylight, in traffic jams… it can range from going to hit a guy, slap him to taking him in front of his mother and burning him up in a car. I think I have good composure, I handle it fairly well.”
We challenge Adam on whether he feels regret when carrying out such acts of brutality.
He says he is “feeling in-part guilty” but claims to have no regrets.
“If I hadn’t done all of this, there are other people who would have done that in my place, and so on. I am just another brick in the wall,” he says.
Like so many teenagers from Marseille, he knew large sums of money could be earned quickly in drug trafficking. Now in his twenties, he admits the environment he entered was a “trap”.
At a so-called deal point in a social housing estate – sealed off and controlled by DZ Mafia – price lists for cocaine, hashish and marijuana are graffitied on a wall.
The estate acts as a natural fortress for drug dealers. With one major road in and out, they can control the flow of customers and see if the police are coming.
It is not uncommon for the sound of automatic gunfire to fill the night air in these areas.
After months of negotiations, a deal-point manager from a rival gang agrees to meet us where he works.
We enter the estate early in the morning, the birdsong and children walking to school providing a stark contrast to the industrial-scale criminal operation that takes place here.
“Joe” says he was making €3,000 (£2,500) a month when he was 13. Now he says that has risen to between €5,000 and €10,000 a month.
He seems to see his life path as pre-ordained, albeit a lucrative one.
We ask Joe if he thinks about the lives lost because of the violence carried out by his gang, but the 23-year-old has also long made peace with the pain and destruction drug trafficking can cause.
“It destroys people, but we all make our own choices,” he shrugs.
The work that Joe’s gang and DZ Mafia are doing represents a threat to national security, says Zoulas, of the anti-drug trafficking unit.
There are road accidents, as well as family violence, depressions, suicides and more than 700 overdoses each year, he says, “and it distorts the economy”.
“We are heading towards a potential systemic breakdown of the criminal justice system.”
Police have had success in Marseille and other cities against drug gangs.
Criminal operations are being frustrated, more kingpins arrested and drugs seized.
Since 2024, about 1,000 individuals associated with DZ Mafia have been arrested, and 600 incarcerated, police say.
But overall, it is a battle that is becoming more arduous, rather than easier.
As gangs seek to widen their operations, or replace members who have been arrested or killed, social media has become a potent recruitment tool – especially since the Covid pandemic, when many street-drug sales jumped online.
On social media, we found countless posts advertising jobs in Marseille for aspiring drivers, couriers and hitmen, often with glamourised AI-generated images.
Nets are also being cast wider, as it becomes harder to entice young people locally because they know more about what might happen to them.
The ads can reach teenagers in most corners of France – including Paris, Nantes and Lille – and serve as a powerful pull to Marseille, and the Quartier Nord, police say.
Online advertising has also changed the typical profile of someone who would join a gang’s ranks, say law enforcement officials.
Now, it is often someone without a criminal past, but who has exploitable vulnerabilities, like having a difficult family life.
“These people are recruited by unscrupulous sponsors who send them into the lion’s den,” explains Thibaut Fontaine, the head of France’s anti-organised-crime unit.
Their lack of criminal experience, he says, makes them easier to arrest quickly.
Karine still has no idea why her son, Hugo, was shot.
Asked what she would say to gang leaders recruiting children and young men in Marseille, she says: “They destroy families. Little sisters, little brothers, grandparents. But then, I don’t think those people have a heart, really.”
The restaurant where her son said he was going to work did exist, but staff there told Karine they had never recruited anyone called Hugo.
The reason for his death almost certainly lies within Marseille’s Quartier Nord.
Additional reporting by Marianne Baisnee, Lea Guedj and Paul Pradier
