City that has tried to shed image of corruption is hosting the trial of one of France’s most lucrative drug rings, which operated from a tower block ‘fortress’

The trial of one of France’s most lucrative drug rings has opened in the port city of Marseille, exposing the grim reality of life on a housing estate known as southern France’s biggest cannabis “supermarket”.



Twenty-eight people are on trial accused of being part of a drug-dealing network based in a high-rise tower block, Tower K, in the La Castellane neighbourhood where the French footballer Zinedine Zidane grew up, but which is now blighted by gangs, poverty and unemployment.

More than €1.3m in cash was found on the estate when police raided the drug network in 2013. Investigators said that at one point the gang’s turnover was as much as €50,000 a day, with customers queueing to make purchases from sophisticated “counters” inside the block, both “wholesale” and for personal use.

The accused range from top dealers to hooded young men who were allegedly paid as lookouts as well as “drugs nannies” – respectable residents of the block, seen to be above suspicion, who were allegedly called on to secretly hide drugs, money and arms in their apartments.

Nordine Achouri, 33, known as Nono, the alleged baron in charge of the gang, appeared in court charged with buying, stocking, processing and selling drugs, which he has denied. He allegedly relied on a sophisticated hierarchy beneath him and never used credit cards, paying for everything with cash, including the purchase of a racehorse, shares in snack bars, luxury sports cars and watches. In 2013, he survived a murder attempt when he was shot at in a car.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Philippe Vouland, lawyer of alleged drug gang leader Nordine Achouri, speaks to the press at the Marseille courthouse. Photograph: Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP/Getty Images

The tower block was described as the biggest sales point for cannabis and cocaine in the region, and was run by various rival gangs who often waged score-settling wars among themselves. These feuds were so violent that earlier this year police believed Marseille gangs had recruited Balkan mercenaries to fight for them. In February, just before the prime minister, Manuel Valls, visited the estate, gunmen in a drug turf war shot at a police car and residents reported young hooded gunmen on scooters firing Kalashnikovs into the air.

La Castellane was described as a kind of concrete fortress where customers were made to form orderly queues. Meanwhile, lookouts wearing balaclavas and using walkie-talkies controlled everyone who came and went from the estate. Police said the dealers saw the estate as “impenetrable to any authority of the French state”.

The court heard how one “drug nanny”, a mother, was paid €500 a week to keep 17kg of drugs and a pistol hidden for the gang.

The estate was built on a hill overlooking the city in the late 1960s and houses 6,000 to 8,000 people. It has 40% unemployment, a high poverty rate and two-thirds of young people there leave school before taking the baccalauréat. Tower K is slated for demolition later this year.

Marseille, which has seen several new museum projects and a rise in tourism, has worked hard to shed its old image as a city of gangs, drugs, corruption and political clientelism.



After the second world war, local gangs known as the “French Connection” ran vast illegal laboratories processing heroin coming in from Turkey and the east. By the late 60s, about 80% of heroin in the US was trafficked from Marseille. In 1971, the figure of the Marseille drug baron was immortalised in the Hollywood film the French Connection.

Marseille is no longer a heroin or drug-processing capital, but it remains at the centre of the trade in cannabis coming into Europe through Spain from Morocco. The city is also a key point in the cocaine smuggling route into Europe from South America through west Africa. Local dealing and heavily armed gangs on poor housing estates have now become the focus of police.

The trial continues until 7 October.

