Inside Marseille’s DZ Mafia: How France’s Most Feared Drug Gang Recruits Children to Kill

A woman in Marseille had just bought hashish from a teenage drug dealer when the boy pressed a folded piece of paper into her hand. It read: “We’re being held captive and need help. We are 15-years-old.”

That note, handed over on a housing estate in 2022, led police to two 15-year-old boys who had been held prisoner by a drug gang, beaten and sexually abused. Six men were later given heavy prison sentences for what they did to the teenagers. The boys’ story, heard in a French court earlier this year, is at the heart of a BBC investigation published on 9 November 2026 that exposes how Marseille’s most powerful drug gang, the DZ Mafia, is recruiting children from across France — not just to sell drugs, but to carry out kidnappings, torture and murder. Official figures show more than 10,000 children were involved in drug trafficking in France during 2025.

The note that exposed the cruelty

The two boys at the centre of the court case had first approached the gang themselves, looking for paid work — even though the work was illegal. One was given the job of handling money. The other worked the streets around the Frais-Vallon housing estate in Marseille.

What followed, the court heard, was months of captivity. The boys were beaten regularly and sexually abused. One of them was raped. They were filmed naked as a form of blackmail, to keep them silent and obedient. When the gang accused them of “shortfalls” in the money they were supposed to bring in, the abuse got worse.

Their escape came by chance. One of the boys managed to slip the desperate note to a customer during a drug deal. She called the police straight away. Hours later, the boys tried to escape through a second-storey window. One got away; the other was caught, beaten and stabbed, but survived. Arrests followed — and the police uncovered what had been done to them. Six men have since been handed heavy sentences.

The case shows, in one small story, how the drug gangs of Marseille now work. Children are not just helpers. They are the workforce — and they are treated as property that can be used, hurt and thrown away.

What is the DZ Mafia?

The DZ Mafia is the gang that now dominates Marseille’s drug trade. It became the city’s most powerful criminal organisation in 2023, after winning a bloody turf war against a rival group. Since then, it has become one of the most feared criminal organisations in all of France.

“DZ” is the internet country code for Algeria. One of the gang’s founders is a French-Algerian man named Mehdi Laribi, who was detained in Algeria earlier this year under a French arrest warrant.

The gang is different from the criminal groups that came before it. According to Dimitri Zoulas, the head of France’s anti-drug trafficking unit, the DZ Mafia was the first French gang to use video statements on social media to market itself as a brand. It releases polished videos boasting about its power, in the same way a company might advertise a product. Its most recent video statement came in July 2026, when the mayor of a nearby town had to be placed under police protection after intelligence suggested the group was planning to target him.

The gang does not work like a single, tight organisation. It runs more like a franchise. A network of small distributors, often staffed by teenagers and undocumented immigrants, sells the drugs and fights over territory. The bosses at the top often run things from prison or from abroad, far from the street violence they order.

Since 2024, police say about 1,000 people linked to the DZ Mafia have been arrested, and 600 have been jailed. But arrests alone have not stopped the gang from growing.

How children are recruited

The BBC investigation found that social media is now the gang’s most powerful recruitment tool. On Snapchat, TikTok, Telegram and Signal, adverts openly offer work in Marseille: drivers, couriers, lookouts — and hitmen.

The adverts promise a life that sounds like a dream to a poor teenager. One post offers €250 a day for acting as a lookout. Another offers €500 to carry drugs. Marseille’s chief prosecutor, Nicolas Bessone, told the BBC that young people are promised €200 a day — and that the reality is very different.

“This is not El Dorado,” Bessone said. “We have a lot of youngsters recruited on social media. They come to Marseille thinking they’ll make easy money. They’re promised €200 a day. But it often ends in misery, violence and sometimes death.”

The gang’s recruiters are careful. They study a young person’s hopes, weaknesses and ambitions before making an offer. A boy who wants money gets promises of cash. One who wants status gets promises of cars, flats and designer clothes. A 20-year-old who says he has left the gang told the BBC he was offered cars and a flat when he joined. A 23-year-old member of a rival gang said he was earning €3,000 a month when he was 13 years old.

Once a child is in, getting out is hard. Prosecutor Bessone explained how the gangs create fake debts to trap their recruits. “We now see how the traffickers enslave these little soldiers,” he said. “They create fictional debts to make them work for free. They torture them if they steal €20 to buy a sandwich. It’s ultra-violence. The average age of the perpetrators and victims is getting younger and younger.”

There is a cold legal reason why gangs want children. In France, as in many countries, minors face lighter punishments than adults if they are caught. So gangs use teenagers as lookouts, dealers, couriers — and now as killers. Police and judges warn that once children enter Marseille’s criminal underworld, it is very hard to get them out.

France’s National Judicial Police Unit warned in a publication on 7 October that social media and encrypted messaging services were increasingly being used to recruit young people into organised crime. Thibaut Fontaine, the head of France’s anti-organised-crime unit, said vulnerable young people were being recruited by criminal sponsors who pushed them into extremely dangerous situations.

The numbers behind the crisis

The figures from French officials paint a picture of a problem growing fast:

• More than 10,000 children were involved in drug trafficking in France in some way during 2025, according to official figures.
• 166 minors were under investigation in organised-crime cases in Marseille alone, for offences including murder, extortion and kidnapping. Thirty-six of them were younger than 16, according to the Marseille prosecutor’s office.
• 47 minors had been investigated in murder or attempted murder cases by the end of 2025, the French newspaper Le Monde reported. Among them were four children aged 14 and ten aged 15.
• France’s Ministry of Justice estimates that the number of teenagers involved in the drugs trade has risen more than four-fold in the past eight years.
• The number of cocaine users in France is expected to reach two million soon, up from 600,000 in 2017, according to Dimitri Zoulas.
• Drug smuggling across France generates €7 billion (£5.9 billion) a year and involves 200,000 people, Zoulas said.

Marseille itself is at the centre of the trade. According to one estimate, up to 20,000 people may be involved in the city’s drug industry. Last year, officials confiscated €42 million (£36 million) in criminal assets from the gangs.

A city living in fear

For the people who live in Marseille’s poor northern districts, known as the Quartier Nord, the violence is not a news story. It is daily life.

The BBC spoke to Karine Brouillard, whose son Hugo was shot dead in Marseille in 2023. Hugo had run away from home at 15, after an argument with his family in a village in northern France. He ended up in the Quartier Nord. He was killed with a bullet to the head.

Another victim was Adel, who was 15 when he died. He was shot in the head, and then his body was doused in petrol and set on fire on a beach. A group of children spotted his charred body on their way to school, at the same time as his parents were heading to the police station to report him missing. Someone had even filmed the scene.

The murder that shocked Marseille most happened last month. Mehdi Kessaci, a 20-year-old trainee policeman with no links to the drug trade, was killed. It is widely believed his death was meant as a warning to his brother, Amine Kessaci, a 22-year-old anti-gang activist and aspiring politician. Amine’s older brother Brahim, a gang member, was also murdered, in 2020.

“Should I have made my family leave Marseille? The struggle of my life is going to be this fight against guilt,” Amine told the BBC. He is now under close police protection.

Across the city, police, lawyers, politicians and community workers talk about a “psychose” — a state of collective fear and panic. A local lawyer, who asked not to be named because she feared attacks on her family, said the rule of law is now second to the gangs. She recently stopped representing victims of gang violence.

“It’s an atmosphere of fear. It’s obvious that the drug traffickers are dominant, and gaining more ground every day,” she said.

Community organiser Mohamed Benmeddour described how normal the violence has become for children growing up in the estates. “So, we have kids aged 13 or 14 who come in as lookouts or dealers. The young see dead bodies, they hear about it, every day. And they’re no longer afraid of killing, or being killed.”

During the summer of 2026, several French cities imposed night-time curfews on teenagers after a series of violent incidents linked to drug trafficking. President Emmanuel Macron held talks last week in an attempt to respond to the crisis.

What the police are doing

French police are fighting back with what they call security “bombardments” — sudden, heavy raids on high-crime areas. The BBC joined armed riot police on one of these missions in Marseille. Officers sped into a run-down block of flats as a young lookout fled on foot. In a dirty cellar nearby, they found dozens of vials and tiny plastic bags used to sell cocaine. An 18-year-old they detained begged to be arrested, saying he had come to Marseille from another city and was being held against his will and forced to work for a gang.

“We’ve closed more than 40 dealing spots, and we’ve locked up a lot of people,” said Sébastien Lautard, a regional police chief.

But many people in Marseille say police raids alone cannot fix the problem. Philippe Pujol, a local writer and expert on the drug trade who was offered police protection after Mehdi Kessaci’s murder, argues that tougher policing only treats the symptoms of a suffering society, not the causes. He blames decades of poverty, neglect and bad political decisions.

“These kids can be jerks when they’re in a group,” Pujol said, “but when you’re alone with them, they’re still children, with dreams, who don’t want this violence.”

Others want a much harder line. Franck Alissio, a local MP from the far-right National Rally party, has called for a state of emergency and far tougher rules on immigration. He claims the drug trade is run almost entirely by immigrants — a claim that is hard to check, because France does not collect official figures in that way, and one that critics say wrongly blames immigrants for a problem that affects every community in France.

Why this matters beyond France

Marseille is France’s second city and one of Europe’s biggest ports. What happens there matters far beyond its streets. The gangs that control its drug trade are part of a European market worth billions, fed by cocaine from South America and cannabis from North Africa. The methods the DZ Mafia has pioneered — recruiting children through social media, marketing itself like a brand, running a franchise of young dealers — can be copied anywhere.

For now, the people of Marseille’s poorest districts are caught in the middle. As one gang member told the BBC, the old rules are gone. “There are no more rules. Nobody respects anything these days.”

Frequently asked questions

What is the DZ Mafia?

The DZ Mafia is Marseille’s most powerful drug gang. It won a bloody turf war in 2023 and is now one of France’s most feared criminal organisations. “DZ” is Algeria’s internet country code. One of its founders, French-Algerian Mehdi Laribi, was detained in Algeria in 2026 under a French arrest warrant.

How does the DZ Mafia recruit children?

The gang uses social media — Snapchat, TikTok, Telegram and Signal — to advertise jobs as drivers, couriers, lookouts and hitmen. It promises teenagers up to €500 a day, plus cars, flats and designer clothes. Once recruited, children are trapped with fake debts, threats and violence.

How many children are involved in France’s drug trade?

Official figures show more than 10,000 children were involved in drug trafficking in France in 2025. In Marseille alone, 166 minors were under investigation in organised-crime cases, and 36 of them were under 16. France’s Ministry of Justice says the number of teenagers in the drugs trade has risen more than four-fold in eight years.

Why do gangs use children?

Children are cheaper to recruit, easier to control — and they face lighter punishments than adults if caught. Gang leaders, who often run operations from prison or abroad, see young recruits as easy to corrupt and easy to replace.

What is France doing about it?

Police are carrying out heavy raids, called “bombardments”, on dealing spots in Marseille, and have arrested about 1,000 people linked to the DZ Mafia since 2024. Several French cities imposed night-time curfews on teenagers in the summer of 2026, and President Emmanuel Macron has held talks on the crisis. But many local people say only tackling poverty and neglect in the poorest districts will fix the problem.

Conclusion

The BBC’s investigation into the DZ Mafia is a warning about what happens when organised crime finds a new, vulnerable workforce. In Marseille, children as young as 13 are being drawn into a trade worth €7 billion a year — promised easy money, then trapped by debt, fear and violence. More than 10,000 children were caught up in France’s drug trade in 2025, and the numbers are still rising.

The two 15-year-old boys whose note started this story were lucky. A stranger called the police, and their captors were jailed. Thousands of other children in Marseille have not been so lucky. Until France finds a way to protect them — and to offer them something better than the gang’s promises — the DZ Mafia will keep finding new recruits, one phone screen at a time.

Sources

• BBC News, “Inside the French drug gangs recruiting children to kill”, by James Waterhouse, Paris correspondent, 9 November 2026 (full text reproduced at NPO Reports) — https://nporeports.com/inside-the-french-drug-gangs-recruiting-children-to-kill/
• BBC News, “Panic in France as children fall victim to lethal violence of Marseille drug gangs”, by Andrew Harding, 9 November 2026 (republished by Albanian Daily News) — https://www.albaniandailynews.com/news/panic-in-france-as-children-fall-victim-to-lethal-violence-of-marseille-drug-gangs
• Brussels Reporter, “How DZ Mafia recruits young people into France’s drug violence”, 9 November 2026 — https://brusselsreporter.com/globe/2026/mafia-recruits-children-for-violence/
• BarristerNG, “Inside France’s Deadly Drug Gangs: How Marseille’s DZ Mafia Lures Teenagers Into Murder, Kidnapping”, 9 November 2026 — https://barristerng.com/inside-frances-deadly-drug-gangs-how-marseilles-dz-mafia-lures-teenagers-into-murder-kidnapping/

This article is for general information and education only. It is not legal or financial advice.