
Le Milieu, also known as the French Mob or Les beaux voyoux ("the Goodfellas"), is the name given to organized crime in France. At the turn of the 20th century, local criminals became highly organized and created crime families, transforming Pigalle and the Rue Saint-Denis in Paris into hubs of prostitution during the 1910s and 1920s, while the Corsican Mafia flourished on the impoverished island of Corsica. Corsican criminals emigrated to metropolitan France in large numbers, becoming one of the major Milieu organizations on the mainland. Starting in 1930, Paul Carbone and Francois Spirito initiated the "French Connection", a heroin trafficking ring which saw heroin smuggled from Turkey into France and then into the United States through Canada. The French Connection was shut down in the late 1970s, leaving the Marseille milieu leaderless, and enabling Corsican organized crime to take the reins of the Milieu in the city. During the 1980s, the Zemmour brothers, the crime kingpins of Paris, were killed and replaced by Claude Genova, who was himself assassinated in 1994 and replaced by the Hornec brothers gang. At the start of the 1990s, cities were split up by crime families and their "godfathers", and, during the 2000s, minorities living in France were lured into the criminal underworld for conformity. During the early 2000s, North African immigrant criminals in impoverished suburbs began to extort landlords in most major French cities, and they also engaged in drug and weapons trafficking. In 2011, these gangs began to sell crack cocaine in the Paris suburbs, and they expanded into heroin and pure cocaine in 2015.