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The French bring a new language to international crime; the army of ordinary racketeers, for instance, is known simply as the "milieu." The Corsican gang boss ordinarily carries his identification in plain sight—a watch-fob medallion bearing the Moor's-head crest of Corsica. Like the Mafia, the Union Corse has a code of honor, the word of a gangster is supposed to be his bond. The difference is that Mafiosi are forever doublecrossing each other—hence the present gang war in New York—while the Corsicans usually keep their word. Members of the Mafia usually submit internal disputes to other Mafiosi; Corsicans often call in expert outsiders to arbitrate their quarrels.
The strength of the Union Corse outside the U.S. is based largely on its ability to infiltrate government agencies. In France the Union Corse has, to some degree, infiltrated the police, the military, the customs service and the French equivalent of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, the SDECE (for Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionage). One of that outfit's former agents, Roger de Louette, who was convicted in Newark last April of smuggling $12 million worth of heroin into the U.S. and is currently serving a five-year prison term, testified that he imported the drugs in league with his superiors in the agency. The Corsican influence in French law-enforcement agencies is also believed to have been a large factor in the French government's reluctance to crack down on the Corsican narcotics laboratories in Marseille until drugs became a problem—and a political issue—in France.
The Union Corse's immense political influence in France stems from the Corsicans' work for the French underground during World War II—German collaborators in Marseille were regularly and efficiently dispatched—and for the French government in the postwar years. In 1948 Paris called upon the Union Corse to break a strike by Communist-controlled unions that threatened to close the port of Marseille. The Union Corse obliged by providing an army of strikebreaking longshoremen to unload the ships and a crew of assassins to gun down defiant union leaders. French government officials have not forgotten such favors.
The same kind of political fix, arranged in other ways, has kept the Union Corse narcotics network operating in Southeast Asia since 1948. A large share of the heroin used by U.S. troops in Viet Nam was supplied by Corsican-financed narcotics producers in Laos and Thailand. For about ten years following the French withdrawal from Indochina in 1954, a group of Corsican war veterans ran several small charter airlines whose purpose was the smuggling of narcotics from Laos into South Viet Nam; the lines were collectively known as "Air Opium."
In Latin America, the Union Corse is extremely influential in a number of countries, including Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Paraguay, Bolivia and Panama. In some cases, the influence has proved strong enough to protect a handful of heroin laboratories that have recently been moved there from Marseille. In Paraguay, Corsican influence is believed to have been behind the U.S.'s recent difficulties in extraditing French-born Auguste Ricord to the U.S. to face narcotics charges.