The Havana Conference of 1946 was a historic meeting of United States Mafia and Cosa Nostra leaders in Havana, Cuba. Supposedly arranged by Charles "Lucky" Luciano, the conference was held to discuss important mob policies, rules, and business interests. The Havana Conference was attended by delegations representing crime families throughout the United States. The conference was held during the week of December 22, 1946, at the Hotel Nacional. The Havana Conference is considered to have been the most important mob summit since the Atlantic City Conference of 1929. Decisions made in Havana resonated throughout US crime families during the ensuing decades.
Armata Corsa was an underground separatist terrorist organization in Corsica, founded in 1999 and disbanded around 2001.
Michele Zaza was a member of the Camorra criminal organisation who was also initiated in the Sicilian Mafia. He headed the Zaza clan in Naples. Zaza was known as ’O Pazzo due to his outspoken and implausible public statements. He was one of the first Camorristi to emerge as a powerful organiser of the cigarette contraband industry in the 1960s and 1970s.
Criminal organizations have been prevalent in Italy, especially in the southern part of the country, for centuries and have affected the social and economic life of many Italian regions. There are major native mafia-like organizations that are heavily active in Italy. The most powerful of these organizations are the Camorra from Campania, the 'Ndrangheta from Calabria and the Cosa Nostra from Sicily.
Corsica is an island in the Mediterranean Sea and one of the 18 regions of France. It is the fourth-largest island in the Mediterranean and lies southeast of the French mainland, west of the Italian Peninsula and immediately north of the Italian island of Sardinia, the nearest land mass. A single chain of mountains makes up two-thirds of the island. As of January 2024, it had a population of 355,528.
A series of meetings between Sicilian Mafia and American Mafia members were allegedly held at the Grand Hotel et des Palmes in Palermo, Sicily, between October 12–16, 1957. Also called the 1957 Palermo Mafia summit, the summit discussed the international illegal heroin trade in the French Connection. The FBI believed it was this meeting that established the Bonanno crime family in the heroin trade.
The French Connection was a scheme through which heroin was smuggled from Indochina through Turkey to France and then to the United States and Canada. The operation started in the 1930s, reached its peak in the 1960s, and was dismantled in the 1970s. It was responsible for providing the vast majority of the heroin used in the United States at the time. The operation was headed by Corsicans Antoine Guérini and Paul Carbone. It also involved Auguste Ricord, Paul Mondoloni and Salvatore Greco.
François "Lydro" Spirito was a French gangster. He was one of the leaders of the French Connection, and inspired the film Borsalino, which featured Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Paul Bonnaventure Carbone was a Corsican criminal involved in the Marseille underworld from the 1920s until his death in 1943. He was known as the Emperor of Marseille. Associated with François Spirito, who would become one of the leaders of the French Connection, Carbone inspired the film Borsalino which featured Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Simon Pierre Sabiani was a French businessman and politician. He served as a member of the Chamber of Deputies from 1928 to 1936.
The Unione Corse is a term designating the Corsican organized crime as a whole during the period 1930s–1970s, in the context of the French Connection, an international heroin trade network operated at that time between Turkey, Southern France, and the United States. A 1972 Time article described the "Unione Corse" as a Corsican-based unified and secretive crime syndicate akin to the American Five Families. The local situation in Southern France during this period was in reality more complex, with a nebula of mainly Corsican and Italian-French clans cooperating or fighting each other according to the circumstances and opportunities. If they constituted a key element of the wider French Connection, flooding the American market with Marseille-produced heroin from the 1950s to early 1970s, those clans remained overshadowed by the much more powerful Italian-American Mafia.
Marcel Francisci was a French politician and an alleged member of the Unione Corse who was accused of masterminding the French Connection drug network. As a young man, Francisci fought in World War II and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. Following the war, he developed a business empire that included casinos in Britain, France and Lebanon. Francisci served in the general council of the Corse-du-Sud (UDR) and was a member of the Civic Action Service (SAC), a Gaullist militia. He was assassinated in Paris in 1982.
The gang de la Brise de Mer was one of the most powerful Corsican criminal organizations. Based in Northern Corsica, the gang controls various activities in Corsica, but also in the South of France, in Paris, in Italy, in Occidental African countries, and in Latin American countries.
The Hornec brothers gang, also called "the H" or "the Montreuil gang", is a Gitanes criminal group from the region of Paris. It is the most influential gang in the French capital. They control many criminal activities in the Parisian region, and they have also good connections with the Corsican mafia, and the Maghrebian gangs.
Although organized crime has always existed in Sweden, it has risen significantly in the 2000s. The number of organized criminal groups operating in the country continues to rise. In 2018, Sweden had the highest gun deaths in total across Europe, and deaths involving guns tripled in Sweden between 2012 and 2020.
Organized crime in France is primarily based in major cities like Marseille, Grenoble, Paris, and Lyon. It is often referred to as grand banditisme in France.
Lebanese mafia is a colloquial term for organised crime groups which originate from Lebanon. Lebanese organised crime is active in the country of Lebanon itself, as well as in countries and areas with a large Lebanese community, most notably Australia, Germany and Canada, and also in the Triple Frontier in South America. Lebanese organised crime syndicates generally are active globally, largely due to the mass Lebanese population. For the past decades the Lebanese crime families had controlled 7,8% of Germany's underworld activities.
Jacques Follorou is a French journalist for Le Monde. He is the author of several books, including three about organized crime in Corsica.
The Petit Bar Gang is an organized crime group from Corsica. It gets its name from the "Petit Bar," an establishment in Ajaccio, owned by Ange-Marie Michelosi, a lieutenant of Jean-Jérôme Colonna, from whose gang it is said to originate.
Jaques Voignier, also known as Jean Pierre LaFitte, was a prolific French and American criminal and confidential informant, eventually operating as an undercover spy for the American Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) in the pursuit of criminal narcotics and mafia organizations around the world. He also worked for the and Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) to track and hunt down white collar criminals and art thieves. Notoriously, Voignier used the connections he made as an undercover operative to participate in the criminal underworld while also investigating it - but some historians suggest this was part of a deception invented by the FBI in 1951. Controversially, Voignier was also involved in the MK Ultra experiments, and was one of the two men in the room with Frank Olson on the night that Olson died.
