Amine Kessaci is 23, a deputy mayor of Marseille, a law student, and one of the most heavily protected people in France. He earned that protection the worst way possible: his elder brother Brahim was shot and burned in a car by a Marseille motorway in 2020, recruited into a drug gang as a teenager. His younger brother Mehdi — 20, aspiring police officer, no drug connections — was shot dead in broad daylight in November 2025. The killings bookend Kessaci's transformation from a grieving teenager on a housing estate into the country's most prominent anti-narco activist. From Monday, five men with alleged connections to DZ Mafia, a major Marseille-based organised crime group, go on trial in Aix-en-Provence for Brahim's murder. The three-week hearing is positioned as a test case for France's capacity to confront cartel bosses who allegedly order killings from prison cells. All five deny the charges. The French government has stated that narco gangs now pose a greater threat to national security than terrorism — a framing that has turned the drug crisis into a pre-2027 presidential election battleground, with the right and far right hammering the government's failure to act. Kessaci's diagnosis is structural, not punitive. He describes a recruitment pipeline that exploits deindustrialised northern Marseille estates where youth unemployment runs high and many teenagers leave school without qualifications. Drug gangs fill what he calls a "void" left by absent public services, selling a "capitalist lie" about €500-a-day earnings to children who watch their parents drown in debt. The reality: young dealers are the first killed, while a handful of kingpins live abroad — often in Dubai — extracting the profits. The activist's cultural critique is equally pointed. He targets the mythologisation of narco figures through TV series and social media influencers who film Dubai lifestyles with cars, apartments, and astronomical wine spending. "It's all fake," Kessaci says. He frames the fight as a "war of civilisation" — deliberately reclaiming a term dominated by the far right — centred on showing children that human life is worth more than money. His proposed solutions are social: better schools, better housing, better public services that give teenagers a reason to dream beyond the estate. Marseille's drug history runs deep. From the 1930s to the 1970s, the city was a heroin processing hub exporting to the US. The modern iteration is domestically focused — cannabis and cocaine consumed within France — but vastly more violent and more embedded in community life, with dealers running checkpoints on housing estates and recruiting children Kessaci calls "child soldiers." The annual turnover runs into billions of euros. Kessaci now heads Marseille's social housing organisation and was elected deputy mayor, giving him institutional tools alongside his activist platform. He is not alone — Farida Chater, who lost her son-in-law in a 2019 shooting, runs a youth and sports association on the Visitation estate to keep teenagers occupied and away from recruiters. But the scale of the problem dwarfs the available resources. France's cartel crisis is a product of decades of deindustrialisation, housing segregation, and public service retreat — forces that no single trial or activist, however courageous, can reverse. The Aix-en-Provence trial will test whether the justice system can reach cartel command structures or merely process their foot soldiers. Kessaci's visibility tests something different: whether a sustained public voice from inside the affected communities can shift the political frame from punishment to prevention. The narcos' response — killing his uninvolved brother — suggests they view his influence as a genuine threat to their recruitment model.
