Chapter . . . . .9 ........................................ Contacts in France
E
ven before Cuba became a focal point on the international drug scene, the Mediterranean port of Marseille had been a center for narcotics processing and trafficking. Marseille was part of a chain of production that started in Asia: poppies cultivated and processed into opium paste in that part of the world made their way to French laboratories for conversion into heroin. Before reaching its eventual markets, the illegal heroin had first to be shipped through different transit points, and Cuba became a principal conduit through which the drug was smuggled to distributors in the United States.
In July 1930, Reginald Lee, vice consul of the British legation in Marseille, vanished under mysterious circumstances. Lee, who cultivated sleuthing as a hobby, had been on the track of drug trafficking gangs during previous consular postings in both Havana and Savannah, Georgia. Shortly before his disappearance, Lee’s detective work had led him to discover that a British ship docked in Marseille was concealing a shipment of morphine and heroin, so police surmised that he had been assassinated by members of the Marseille underworld.1 Authorities in Marseille periodically confiscated great quantities of opium, cocaine, and heroin, giving the city a reputation as a perennial haunt of criminals and outcasts. One U.S. journalist described the port as “inhabited by the French, Italians, Greeks, Poles, and Algerians . . . and the riffraff of every nation on the globe.” Moreover, drugs found “a ready market and eager buyers among the flotsam and jetsam who make up the population.”2 The size and sophistication of the Marseille drug trade was cast in high relief in November 1933, when police investigators confiscated 2,000 kilograms of opium in a nearby town.3 In March 1939, authorities found another laboratory operating in Marseille and seized 750 kilos of opium and 2 kilos of
