Unione Corse

Unione Corse
Founding location	Marseille, France
Years active	1930s–1970s
Territory	France (mainly Corsica and Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur)
Ethnicity	Corsican and Italian French
Criminal activities	Racketeering, drug trafficking, gambling, extortion, robbery, loan sharking, weapons trafficking, pimping, fraud, murder, bribery and fencing
Allies	American Mafia; Sicilian Mafia; Camorra

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.^[1]^[2] 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.

^ Costa, De Leon Petta Gomes da (2018). Organized Crime and the Nation-State: Geopolitics and National Sovereignty. Routledge. p. 29. ISBN 978-0-429-76059-4.
^ Boittin, Jennifer Anne (2022). Undesirable: Passionate Mobility and Women's Defiance of French Colonial Policing, 1919–1952. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-82225-9.

[1] Costa, De Leon Petta Gomes da (2018). Organized Crime and the Nation-State: Geopolitics and National Sovereignty. Routledge. p. 29. ISBN 978-0-429-76059-4.

[2] Boittin, Jennifer Anne (2022). Undesirable: Passionate Mobility and Women's Defiance of French Colonial Policing, 1919–1952. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-82225-9.

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