The sight of the gun tucked into the man’s trousers told us it was time to go. We had been in one of France’s most notorious estates for several hours, trying to understand life on the frontline of the country’s spiralling drug war.
Seeing three people he did not know and a camera, he decided enough was enough. “You, where do you live?” he said, rushing towards us from the foot of a tower block where he had parked his scooter. “Don’t talk back to me, I’ll break your head in. Get out of here.”
It was a chastening exit, but one that showed us the violence we had only seen signs of was all too real.
I had been given a rare chance to visit by Siam Spencer, a freelance journalist who until recently lived here, in Les Moulins estate on the edge of sun-kissed, touristy Nice.
When she got a job in the city in 2023, Spencer asked a charity to house her, because coming from a deprived family she had no guarantor. What she did not know was the flat it provided was in an estate that had been a byword for drug violence for decades. “I looked it up on the internet,” she said. “But honestly, I thought, there would be three gunshots per month. It’s still Nice. It’s a small estate, so I didn’t mind.”
Instead, as well as rats, cockroaches, bedbugs and squatters who once broke down her door, she had to contend with the sound of Kalashnikovs outside her window. “In the first three weeks things got really hot,” she said.
On one side, Nice is the pearl of the French Riviera, a moneyed Mediterranean haven famous for the perennial blue skies that have inspired painters from Matisse to Chagall. The other side is Les Moulins. The estate of roughly 12,000 residents was built in the 1960s to house those returning from Algeria’s war of independence from France. It sits beside the beach and the airport. But few here do much sunbathing and even fewer fly out.
Living inside for eight months, Spencer discovered she looked out on to the most prolific drug dealing point on the Riviera, where up to €20,000 changes hands every day. She has written a book about the experience, La Laverie (The Launderette), named after the building outside which dealers worked. The launderette was knocked down last year, but the dealers remain. As we entered the estate in the early afternoon, they sat over its common areas, smoking joints, playing music and scanning for customers. Men drinking coffee ignored them, used to the sight.
“It’s packed with dealers. Look around you,” said Nourrédine Debbari, who was born on the estate and runs a charity supporting residents. She said the estate had five main dealing points, shared between two or three rival gang networks. Together they make about €1.5m a month, he said. “Everyone in the neighbourhood is affected by drug trafficking. They live with it. There’s no choice.”
The terrorised majority have got used to periodic killings as gangs settle scores and mark their territory. The estate has been a designated “priority security zone” for French authorities since 2013, while the then prime minister Jean Castex visited in 2020 after a spate of shootings.
But the threat is becoming scarier. Last July, seven members of one family including three children were burned to death in their flat in Les Moulins. Residents said the father was a drug dealer who was in prison, and rivals targeted his family to settle a score. Three of the arrested suspects were from the Paris region.
Across France, sophisticated international drug gangs are spreading out from Paris and the crime hotspot of Marseille to towns and smaller cities. Armed with guns flooding into the country through Marseille, and mimicking the extreme violence of their counterparts in South America, they make billions of euros every year in sales.
The country’s hardline interior minister appointed in September, Bruno Retailleau, has said France risks becoming a “Mexicanised” narco-state. The arrest in Romania last week of Mohamed Amra, France’s public enemy number one, known as “The Fly”, underscored the strength of the gangs: he escaped from a police van in northern France last year when accomplices ambushed it.
The French Riviera is an obvious target for business, being close to Marseille and famed for its wealth and hedonism. “Cocaine use is not reserved for party circles,” Damien Martinelli, the public prosecutor of Nice, told French media in January. “It’s not reserved for executives and upper-level professionals. It’s everyone.”
The Riviera has never seen such quantities of drugs and weapons washing around, customs officers and police say. Nearly 350kg of cocaine were seized in the local department last year, a record. That is probably a fraction of the amount in circulation.
Last week in Marseille, the trial began of an alleged drug ring of 22 people with links to the Italian mafia and stretching across the Mediterranean. Its alleged kingpin, named by police as Patrick V, stayed in luxury hotels in Thailand, Greece and Brazil as well as the Côte d’Azur, according to court papers. He spent an estimated €26,000 renting luxury cars from an agency in Cannes, while his wife gambled thousands in casinos around the Riviera.
Some drugs arrive in cars and speedboats from Italy, Spain and Morocco, via what are known in France as “go fasts”. “We are seeing that traffickers are taking more and more financial risks, with vehicles transporting larger quantities than before,” Éric Antonetti, head of the interdepartmental service of the region’s judicial police, said recently.
Most of the drugs go through the port of Marseille, a Nice police source, who did not want to give his name out of fear of the gangs, told the Observer. The cartels have deep connections. “These are families who know each other because they have villas in Tunisia or elsewhere,” he said. “And then they implant themselves everywhere. That is to say, links are made between Marseille, Toulon and Nice.”
At the moment Marseille’s gangs appear to be taking over from local groups. During our visit to Les Moulins, we were told that two Mercedes cars and two Yamaha TMax scooters we saw were DZ Mafia, France’s most powerful drug gang, from Marseille, arriving in the estate to take over its business. “I’m afraid things are going to heat up a little,” Debbari said. “It will heat up for a day or two. That’s all. Once they get the [dealing] network, it’s over [for their lower-level Nice rivals].”
Kingpins such as these often operate from prison, directing teams of dealers down to street level. The lowest in the pyramid are known as choufs, Arabic for lookouts.
Debbari said in Les Moulins they used to earn about €30 a day. Now it is 80 or 100. At one dealing point in particular, the dealers looked younger than teenagers.
Rudy Manna, spokesman for the police syndicate National Police Alliance, said gangs had taken to recruiting illegal child migrants for these roles. “It is meat. They know that it is going to be an absolutely horrible job, that there will be acts of torture or barbarism,” he said.
Even for children growing up in estates such as this, the temptation can be too strong to resist. Spencer said: “You have a deep anger and your parents don’t make money, and you’re fed up, and you live in Nice, where you have the Negresco, the biggest five-star hotel in France, or at least one of the most expensive, 15 minutes away.”
Abdelhakim Madi, 24, knows what it is like. He grew up in Les Moulins, dreaming of becoming a comedian. He has become a celebrity among the estate’s young people after founding a charity six years ago that does everything from giving sports and drama lessons to helping match them to jobs.
Partage Ton Talent [Share Your Talent] has touched more than 600 young people so far, and has 50 volunteers. In his brightly painted, newly renovated centre, where teenagers enjoyed the tranquility of a safe place, he said: “It’s a fight to have hope for this society, because it scares me. I only see people divided, divided. I don’t have that spirit, I don’t.”
Robert Songhor, from Association Adam, another estate charity, takes children on trips to the beach and mountains. “They are going to the snow next week,” he said. “Some of them have already been. It’s about showing them you are not ‘a youth from the estate’. You are a citizen of Nice.”
