The Real French Connection

While doing research (that mostly went unused) for a post on my Wasteland site I learned about a thing called the French Connection.

If you're a film buff, or like director William Friedkin (The Exorcist), then you may have seen his 1971 movie The French Connection. There was a time in San Luis Obispo when Corrie and I were sure we were leaving for New York, and The French Connection was in town and playing in a special screening, and Corrie and I went along with many of the math folks I knew, mostly faculty. I remember joking with Corrie mostly that "that's where we're gonna be living", because much of the movie was shot in Bed-Stuy. I think because of a trip to McCarthy's beforehand, and maybe also a few bongloads before that, the meat of the movie was maybe lost on me.

Then I found out there was a thing historically they called the French Connection.

So...there was a gangster Frenchman who worked with the Nazi occupiers and used his position to steal as much cash as he could get his hands on. He spent the first decade or so after the war setting up his organization, funded by that money, that had operations in Turkey and a source in French Indochina (Vietnam, Lao, you know...).

Their business was product; their product was heroin.

The raw opium was harvested in South-east Asia, processed into heroin in Turkey and in the southern French seaport of Marseilles, and was then shipped from Marseilles to the States.

The first bust of a heroin "refinery" in Marseilles was in 1937. Even that early it was the smart choice, what with the huge port.

The French Connection was the group that pretty much brought all of the East Coast's heroin into the country, by way of Asia and Turkey, through Marseilles.

The film depicts characters based on real people involved with the investigation on both sides of the law. The eventual dismantling of the syndicate probably led to the rise of the Afghan prevalence in the heroin trade.

There's got to be a good story in there somewhere, right?