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According to testimony given before a U.S. Senate subcommittee in 1964, one of the Corsican godfathers is Marcel Francisci, 52, a flamboyant, onetime war hero (the Croix de Guerre) whose business interests include casinos in Britain, France and Lebanon. In 1968, caught in a gangland vendetta, Francisci barely escaped an ambush in a restaurant on the island of Corsica. Four months later, the men who tried to kill him were murdered in a Parisian restaurant by gunmen posing as cops. Francisci today is an elected district official on Corsica.
Other known leaders of the Union Corse, according to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in testimony before the same Senate subcommittee, include Dominique Venturi, 49, and his brother Jean, 51. Dominique's base has been Marseille, where he has been known as a political crony of Mayor Gaston Deferre, the Socialist candidate for President of France in 1969. Dominique got into the narcotics-smuggling business in 1953, and at one time ran a fleet of yachts for hauling morphine base from the Middle East to Marseille. Jean Venturi, who went to Canada in 1952 and is believed to be operating there still, is sometimes credited with pioneering the technique of hiding heroin in the nooks and crannies of imported autos.
About 10 years ago, the Union Corse began to move into the U.S. to fill the vacuum created by the partial withdrawal of the Mafia from the narcotics racket. Its chief contact in the U.S. became Florida Gang Boss Santo Trafficante Jr., who traveled to Saigon and Hong Kong to work out narcotics deals with the Corsicans and later turned up in Ecuador to check out a cocaine network in which he had been offered a partnership. The Union Corse also supplied and financed the new gangs of South Americans, Puerto Ricans and blacks, who moved into the vacant territories. All members of the milieu were instructed to avoid disturbing those Mafiosi who still continued to deal in narcotics—chiefly the capos and soldiers of the Bonanno and Gambino families.
The peace between the Corsicans and the Sicilians has endured for a surprisingly long time, but it may not last much longer. Last week representatives of the Mafia clans in New York met to consider a mass re-entry into the narcotics business. If they decide to proceed, and if approval comes from the Mafia's supreme council, the Commission, they will have to do it over the Corsicans'—and some of their own—dead bodies.