Transcription
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Welcome to this new episode. Today, we're heading to Marseille. In 2025, one name keeps coming up in police reports, wiretaps, and stories from the northern neighborhoods: La DZ. Long perceived as a simple gang of idle youths, this Marseille gang slowly but surely transformed into a highly efficient criminal organization. Extortion, targeted assassinations, threats against public figures, infiltration into economic circles—La DZ is no longer a gang; it's a mafia. And at the top of this pyramid of violence, three men, all incarcerated, pull the strings from the shadows. Their names send shivers down the spines of even prison walls: Mamine, La Brute, Gaby. Three brains, three strategists, three executioners. Their tools: clandestine phones, loyal relays, unwavering determination. Their empire: the streets of Marseille and far beyond.
In this episode, we will delve into the heart of this chilling ascent, recounting how a group born in the clamor of the city became a true urban cartel capable of imposing its law with Kalashnikovs, intimidation, and settling scores. We will revisit key dates, faces, and deaths, but also the silent mechanics that transform each shooting into a message and each silence into domination.
In 2023, Marseille sank a little further into turmoil. 49 deaths were added to the long list of victims of a clan war that was festering in the city. This figure far exceeded previous records: 31 deaths in 2022, 29 in 2016. The escalation was brutal, relentless, leaving behind broken families and a city increasingly accustomed to sustained gunfire and street-level score-settling. The city of Marseille then took on the dark appearance of a narco-city, like Enverse or Rotterdam, where score-settling followed at a breakneck pace. The increasingly frequent murders testified to an unprecedented explosion of violence.
Yet, this climate was not an anomaly. It was the logical consequence of years of simmering war between gangs and cartels, where alliances were made and broken according to betrayals. Marseille had already known horror. The great "Fond Vert" war had pitted the "Résidents" and the "Bébou" against the "Remadnia" and the Marignan clan. And how can we forget the emblematic clash between the Gypsies and the "Blaqus"? Other pockets of violence had also engulfed the city: the wars between the "Blacks" and the "Oliviers A," or that of the Castellane. But in 2023, a major transformation disrupted the balance. Blood flowed more freely than before. Codes fell, rules disappeared. Behind this murderous explosion lay a simple reality: drug trafficking. In Marseille, the revenue generated reached one million euros daily—a flourishing parallel economy with titanic profits, where death often served as a medium of exchange.
At the heart of this war, two figures stood out: two men, two clan leaders, two visions of the street—Laribi and Félix Bingui. The first reigned over the DZ mafia; the second led the Yoda network. Both were charismatic, violent, feared, and both were familiar to the police services. Their names became inseparable from Marseille's narco-geopolitics.
Laribi, nicknamed "Tic," grew up in Bassens, one of the most unstable and dangerous areas of the city. From his adolescence, he plunged into trafficking. With his brother, he took control of the drug dealing point in the housing project. Barely aged 20 and 22, the two young men were already entrenched in drug trafficking, known and respected in the northern neighborhoods. Their influence quickly expanded. They forged strong ties with the Mikokouliers neighborhood. There, two ambitious young men, Sonny and his cousin Nouri, had just taken over a sales point formerly run by a former Kaïd. Medy Laribi, with his network, sold them merchandise wholesale. A collaboration was established. But in the shadows, the former boss never digested his loss of power. He harbored a cold, calculated revenge. With the help of the Laribi brothers, he planned the elimination of Sonny and Nouri. In exchange, a substantial sum was offered: €150,000. The trap closed one December evening in 2012. The two cousins were lured into the Bassens housing project under the pretext of a routine transaction. There, they fell into an ambush set by the Laribi brothers and an accomplice. The attack was violent, relentless. The two young men were murdered, then their car was set on fire. The investigation progressed rapidly. Evidence accumulated. The Laribi brothers were arrested, tried, and sentenced: 10 years for Medy, 15 for his brother. Their youth vanished behind the walls of French prisons.
When he was released from detention in 2022, Medy Laribi was no longer a simple trafficker. He was a man driven by resentment, a will to reconquer. On the other side of the city, another name was already making headlines: Félix Bengi. Since 2014, Félix had established himself within the Carmes team, an influential group in the city center. With notorious figures like DSK and Muki, he participated in several conflicts. The team sided with the Marignan clan in their war against the "Résidents" and the "Bébou"—a harsh underground war that ended with the takeover of the Busserine territory, until then dominated by Camel Rarra. But in 2016 and 2017, the police struck hard. The Carmes team was dismantled. Arrests followed one another. Condemnations fell. Félix was sentenced to 3 years in prison for criminal association and arms trafficking. Upon his release, in the early 2020s, he stepped back into trafficking with a new ambition. He took possession of the drug dealing point at the Fontaine in the Paternelle housing project. At the same time, Medy Laribi gained ground in this same housing project. The two men, who knew each other, got along. A fragile balance seemed to be established. But this balance shattered far from Marseille. In Thailand, during a vacation, the two teams found themselves in the same nightclub. The atmosphere was festive, alcohol flowed, spirits heated up. An argument broke out between Medy and Félix, apparently because of a woman. Insults flew, glances became threatening. Then a seemingly innocuous gesture changed everything: an ice cube thrown by Félix at Medy. The humiliation was public. The affront was not forgotten. That evening, in the excitement of an Asian nightclub, a war ignited—a war that the following year would bloody Marseille like never before.
Thus, a ferocious hatred was born between Medy Laribi and Félix Bingui. Back in Marseille, in the Paternelle housing project, the first tensions quickly materialized. Dealers from both camps began to provoke and challenge each other—first with insistent stares, then with fights, intimidation, and blows struck in broad daylight. The housing project gradually tipped into a climate of permanent confrontation. Medy no longer hid his intentions. He wanted to eliminate Félix from the Paternelle. Very quickly, the first gunshots rang out. Bullets whistled between the buildings, and the first bodies fell—deaths on both sides. This was the turning point, the rise of two major rival clans ready to do anything for control of the territory.
Medy lost no time. He formed a strategic alliance with several figures in the drug trade in the Bassens and Mikokouliers neighborhoods. Among them, a name that made the walls of the housing projects tremble: Mamine, a reputed killer, considered one of the most dangerous in Marseille. Mamine had honed his skills in the service of the Marignan and Rentamplant networks. With him, Medy founded the DZ Mafia, a team mainly composed of members of Algerian origin. But the group did not stop at ethnic borders. It welcomed traffickers of all origins, united by a single objective: to dominate Marseille.
On his side, Félix retaliated without waiting. He rallied around him several major traffickers opposed to Laribi. Together, they founded their own organization, the Yoda clan. Two blocs, two powers, two visions, and a city as a battlefield. Thus began a war of an intensity rarely seen in Marseille, a frantic race for territory and supremacy—DZ Mafia against Yoda. Each extended its empire, nibbling away at streets, sales points, and entire neighborhoods. Clashes escalated. Heavy weapons emerged from hiding places, and score-settling multiplied. In record time, the two clans managed to control a large portion of the city. The DZ Mafia, by force or alliance, imposed itself in 14 neighborhoods: Bassens, Fond Vert, the Castellas, Caliste, Consola, Le Mail, Les Marronniers, La Cayole, and many others. Their organization had more than 100 active members. Opposite, the Yoda clan was not to be outdone. 10 networks declared themselves affiliated with their cause, including La Burine, Félixpia, La Sauvagère, Plahou, and La Cabusselle. There too, the workforce neared a hundred members. But this war had changed its face. Unlike past clashes, the new targets were no longer just the leaders or lieutenants. Now, violence struck blindly.
The DZ Mafia adopted a strategy of total terror. The objective was clear: to terrorize the enemy, to crush them psychologically. This involved shooting on sight any individual present in an area controlled by the adversary. No distinction, no pity. To do this, the clan recruited very young killers, teenagers without attachments, without remorse. Among them, one name often circulated: Matthéo, barely 18 years old. He was one of the executioners in the service of the DZ. The modus operandi was simple: a heavily armed commando entered the enemy housing project, spotted young people around the sales points, and opened fire without asking questions. Simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time was enough to be executed.
The weekend of April 1st to 3rd, 2023, embodied this murderous madness. Three furious shootings, three deaths including a 16-year-old teenager, and 12 injured. Marseille plunged into hyper-violence. Yoda, far from retreating, adopted the same methods. They too shot on sight, struck without warning. The escalation continued. Social networks became a new weapon: Telegram, Snapchat. Both camps used them to display their show of force—videos of kidnapping, torture, murder, and intimidation. The virtual became a bloody mirror of reality. Young people, often from the provinces, who came to Marseille to make money found themselves trapped. The sanctions were brutal. Some had their legs shot, others were stabbed, humiliated, and stripped naked. Everything was filmed, edited, and broadcast—a war of images as dirty as the war on the ground.
Throughout 2023, this cycle of violence repeated relentlessly. The toll was terrible: 49 deaths, an absolute record. The French state, under media and diplomatic pressure, decided to strike hard. At the beginning of 2024, the arrests followed one another. Several dozen members of the two clans were arrested. Yoda was particularly weakened. Their number three, then Félix himself, were arrested. The latter fell in Morocco. On the other side, the DZ leaders fled, probably taking refuge in Algeria. But behind bars or on the run, ambitions did not weaken.
While heads fell on the Yoda side and the neighborhoods found an apparent calm, another power play was taking place—more discreet, more strategic. In the silence of the cells and the shadow of exile, a new era was dawning: more structured, more violent, more methodical. Once perceived as a simple, disorganized, and noisy neighborhood gang, La DZ had undertaken a slow transformation in the shadows—a meticulous, patient, and merciless transformation. In a few years, it had become a perfectly oiled criminal machine where each cog, however young or violent, had its place.
In 2024, at the head of this octopus, extending its tentacles over the arteries of Marseille and far beyond, three men pulled the strings. Three incarcerated men whose cells had become the true command centers of an empire built on fear, blood, and the fresh flesh of a sacrificed youth. Their power had not been transmitted in peace or respect for an established order. It had been snatched in screams, betrayals, and fallen bodies. The gang had metamorphoses through violence to become a fearsomely efficient organization, a mafia entity in the strictest sense. Even Medy Laribi, known to all under the nickname Tic, who had been the founding soul of the group, had ended up retreating. Sidelined, he had faded before a new generation of leaders—determined men, without limits or remorse, born in the fury of shootings and the heavy silence of prison corridors.
For a long time, La DZ had made a name for itself in drug trafficking. But in 2024, its ambitions seemed to have taken a new flight. Multiple concordant testimonies suggest the organization was now extending its activities to other spheres of crime: racketeering, intimidation, extortion. And the first concrete signs of this mutation were not long in coming.
On July 5, 2024, around 11 pm, a seemingly innocuous event struck a renowned nightclub in the Opera district. Three shadowy figures, all dressed in black, helmets firmly secured on their heads, faces masked by balaclavas, presented themselves at the entrance. Their approach had nothing festive about it. It was neither the music, nor the alcohol, nor the lights that attracted them. Their mission was simple: to deliver a message. Failing to be able to speak to the establishment's managers, it was one of the security guards who stepped forward. One of the masked men then handed him a phone. A dry, chilling voice rose: "It's La DZ, you have to pay." It wasn't a threat; it was an ultimatum, an order. Three days later, the club's managers, visibly shaken, crossed the doors of the Évêché, headquarters of the Marseille PJ, to file a complaint. An extortion attempt that was anything but isolated and that revealed a determined will to dominate the territory. Investigators accustomed to this type of maneuver, however, found themselves faced with a disturbing detail. The targeted nightclub belonged to an area long under the influence of another clan, that of Ange Toussaint Federici, nicknamed Santu, an emblematic figure of Corsican organized crime. Federici, sentenced to 30 years in prison for his role in the Marronniers shooting in 2006, embodied another time, a time when the Corsicans settled their accounts with the Marseille caïds. That era seemed over. La DZ was now imposing itself, brutally and sharply, on the vestiges of fallen empires. And the Opera attack was only a signal. Other shopkeepers, bar owners, and business managers began to speak. In La Valentine, a pizzeria owner decided to break the silence. Like others, he mentioned the same procedures: intrusion, threat, demand for payment—a simple, direct, but fearsomely effective scheme. And what worried them most was the group's audacity. No one was untouchable anymore; not even celebrities were an exception.
Marseille rapper SCH, a popular and respected figure, was allegedly the victim of an attempted blackmail. An exorbitant sum: €300,000. The artist's response was categorical: no. A few weeks later, vengeance struck. In front of the La Dune nightclub, in La Grande Motte, shots fired from a military weapon targeted some of his close associates. One dead, one seriously injured. The message was unequivocal.
The SCH case brilliantly illustrated the growing gravity of the DZ Mafia's criminal activities. Investigations conducted by the authorities quickly shed light on the true motivations behind this attack. According to investigators, it was an attempt at extortion of rare violence. Colossal sums, between €300,000 and €2 million, had been demanded from the artist under the fallacious pretext of help provided by certain individuals in his early days to make a name for himself in the Marseille music scene.
This high-profile case led in December 2024 to a vast police operation—a large-scale coordinated intervention that resulted in the arrest of 21 people, including Gaby, one of the most influential members of the criminal organization, suspected of orchestrating the extortions. The arrests took place simultaneously in several cities, including Montpellier, Martigue, and Marseille, demonstrating the geographical scope and structure of the targeted network. Among those arrested, six were already incarcerated, confirming the extent of the group's ramifications.
Behind this wave of terror, three names kept coming up in police files: Amine, nicknamed Mamine; Madon, called La Brute; and Gabriel E, aka Gaby. Three children of Marseille, three confined but active figures who continued to direct, maneuver, and sow fear from their cells. Phones introduced clandestinely, encrypted messaging, loyal relays inside and outside—the system was well-oiled. For the authorities, this trio was the mastermind behind a series of planned assassinations. The objective: to eliminate rivals, consolidate their authority, and mark their territory. Their strategy was summed up in a simple and brutal equation: inspire fear, impose domination, and constantly recruit new recruits ready to kill to make a name for themselves. This seizure of power had not only redrawn the contours of the DZ, it had shaken its foundations. But the founder seemed now relegated, exiled somewhere between Algeria and Morocco, stripped of all control. Meanwhile, his successors imposed their iron rule.
In 2024, the DZ was no longer a gang. It had become a structured, centralized, merciless organization. Each extortion, each bullet fired, each threat uttered on the phone told the story of an ascent—an ascent shaped in fear, violence, and death. And behind each operation, in the shadows of the prison's thick walls, three men continued to govern.
Nicknamed Mamine or Jalisco, Amine is not just a known figure in Marseille's drug trafficking. Over time, he has become one of its most feared faces. His name has been circulating in criminal circles for a long time, but it was under the colors of the DZ Mafia that he established himself as one of its most influential leaders. Some go so far as to speak of him as the supreme leader of this sprawling organization. On November 26, 2024, he was taken into custody as part of a judicial inquiry opened for murder, attempted murder in an organized gang, and criminal association. One case among many in which his name had already been mentioned, for Amine is not a newcomer. Several indictments, imprisonment for a triple homicide of unparalleled brutality—the bodies of the victims having been mutilated—and a central role in the clan's murderous strategy. In the PJ files, he appears as a mastermind, a shadowy, discreet but decisive man whose influence has grown over time, particularly from his cell. Thanks to a network firmly established behind bars and the systematic use of clandestine phones, he allegedly continued, or even intensified, the structuring of the DZ's criminal operations: targeted murders, assassination contracts, redistribution of roles. His hand allegedly continued to guide his own, even from within the thick walls of French prisons.
Among the figures gravitating around him, one name keeps coming up: Gabriel E, 29, nicknamed Gaby. Also incarcerated at Baumettes prison, he had recently been removed from his cell for a new custody. Proof of his involvement in sensitive cases linked to the DZ. In the hushed corridors of the PJ, he is considered an influential member of the gang's leadership and, above all, one of Mamine's most loyal lieutenants. In May 2024, a new indictment further weighed down his file. He was accused of having ordered, from his cell, the murder of a drug trafficker six months earlier. But this execution was only one episode in an already busy career. Before becoming a mastermind, Gaby, according to investigators, was a hitman. Born in Gort, but raised in the Visation district of Marseille, he had honed his skills in robberies before falling into the gears of blood. In 2019, at just 24 years old, he allegedly participated in two assassinations: the first in Marseille alongside Mamine, targeting the Kaïd Farid Tir; the second, much further north, in the commune of Kingersheim near Mulhouse. Since this double murder, Gabriel E had not known freedom. Five years of continuous detention that have in no way diminished his position. On the contrary, he is now considered a high-ranking member of the criminal group.
Another name stands out in this underground organizational chart: La Brute, whose real name is Madon, also known as Lecou. He is serving his sentence at Perpignan prison. Aged 34, this former drug trafficker close to Medy Laribi is suspected of playing a central role in drug deliveries and the recruitment of young killers. From his cell, he even allegedly coordinated a score-settling in Aix-en-Provence via a simple messaging app, Snapchat. Originally from the Fond Vert housing project and from a family itself involved in trafficking, La Brute had distinguished himself in northern Marseille by managing two strategic drug sales points. His career took a definitive turn in 2021 after the discovery of a military arsenal in a storage unit belonging to him and his alleged involvement in the murder of a young bachelorette in Septèmes-les-Vallons—a dramatic blunder that led to his pre-trial detention from which he will probably not emerge anytime soon.
These three men form the beating heart of the DZ Mafia—a criminal triumvirate coordinating murder, trafficking, and violence remotely. Behind bars, they had managed to turn their cells into veritable headquarters.
Parallelly, a phenomenon of identity theft related to the DZ Mafia is developing. A recent case involves a Marseille shopkeeper who received death threats and a demand for €250,000 from an individual falsely claiming to be from the group. The investigation revealed that the author of the threats had no connection to the criminal organization, being only known for minor offenses. Similar incidents have occurred in Septèmes and Aix-en-Provence, where individuals committed violent acts while claiming to belong to the DZ Mafia without any real connection to the organization. The multiplication of identity thefts complicates the work of investigators, who must now distinguish between the real actions of the DZ Mafia and acts of intimidation committed in its name by opportunists.
In 2025, the DZ Mafia has established itself as one of the most fearsome criminal organizations in France, transforming the landscape of organized crime with particularly violent methods and aggressive territorial expansion. The organization, which allegedly has around 1,000 active members—from lookouts to leaders, including managers and killers—now controls around a hundred drug networks. Its territory extends far beyond Marseille, covering a large part of the Southeast: Nîmes, Avignon, Valence, Arles, but also Toulouse, Dijon, and even Belgium, demonstrating a remarkable capacity for expansion. Recent communications intercepted between Mohamed Amra, alias Lamouche, and Amine reveal the scale of operations and the connections of the Marseille clan. Their exchanges via Signal show the planning of attacks, the takeover of drug dealing points, and even plans to attack the families of incarcerated rivals. The organization is also suspected in the arson of the home of a prison officer at Baumettes.
The DZ's international connections have considerably developed. It now collaborates with the Dutch mafia, the 'Ndrangheta (Italian mafia), and South American networks via the port of Le Havre. This expansion has attracted the attention of Europol, which has sent teams to Marseille to study the phenomenon. The DZ Mafia thus represents the emergence of a new form of organized crime in France, combining traditional and modern methods, extreme violence, and sophisticated communication. Its continued expansion and its ability to recruit rapidly constitute a major threat to public security, requiring a significant mobilization of national and international law enforcement forces. Amen.