The French Connection was a scheme through which heroin was smuggled from Turkey to France and then to the United States. The operation reached its peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and was responsible for providing the vast majority of the illicit heroin used in the United States. It was headed by the Corsican criminals François Spirito, Paul Carbone and Antoine Guérini, and also involved Auguste Ricord, Paul Mondoloni, Salvatore Greco, and Meyer Lansky. Most of its starting capital came from assets that Ricord had stolen during World War II when he worked for Henri Lafont, one of the heads of the Carlingue (French Gestapo) during the German occupation in World War II.
Read more about French Connection: From The 1930s To The 1950s, The 1960s, The 1970s and The Dismantling of The French Connection, Notable Gangsters in The French Connection, Films
Famous quotes containing the words french and/or connection:
“In bourgeois society, the French and the industrial revolution transformed the authorization of political space. The political revolution put an end to the formalized hierarchy of the ancien regimé.... Concurrently, the industrial revolution subverted the social hierarchy upon which the old political space was based. It transformed the experience of society from one of vertical hierarchy to one of horizontal class stratification.”
—Donald M. Lowe, U.S. historian, educator. History of Bourgeois Perception, ch. 4, University of Chicago Press (1982)
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