Below the ski slopes, France’s Alpine capital is torn apart by drugs warfare

With its popular ski resorts nestled in snow-capped mountains and renowned as France’s Silicon Valley, Grenoble is the last place you’d expect to find a child bleeding on the streets from a mafia hit.

But this is the new reality of the Alpine city, where tens of thousands of Britons travel for skiing holidays. Behind the picture-postcard calm of France’s “Capital of the Alps”, a drug war is playing out in plain sight.

It was here that a 13-year-old migrant boy was shot three times in the back and legs at 3am two weeks ago. The boy, thought to be called Chaouki, is believed to have been recruited by a gang in Paris and then travelled to Grenoble to be a drug runner.

“I heard five shots and someone yelling, ‘No, stop! Stop!’” student Mila Poignard says. “And then nothing.”

Chaouki, who had arrived in France as a boy from Algeria, remains in a critical condition and police believe he was shot by a rival gang. He is one of three boys shot in the past year; one died from a bullet to the head.

Known to police under multiple identities and repeatedly absconding from care, he is the new face of France’s narco-trafficking crisis: the unaccompanied foreign minors used as foot soldiers for gangs.

In Grenoble, officers routinely detain young boys aged 12 and 13 used as lookouts or couriers for gangs who deliver drugs to tourists visiting the city.

“We’ve seen a big shift,” said Étienne Manteaux, the Grenoble prosecutor, from his office. Traffickers previously used French minors as those aged under 13 cannot be prosecuted and under-18s face lighter sentences.

“But the French minors tended to talk. So they started using foreigners without papers. They are a workforce that can be exploited at will. It’s bordering on human trafficking.”

Stéphane Dezalay, an aid worker, was more blunt: “No one knows them, no one worries about them. They are perfect cannon fodder.” One undocumented youth, speaking to The Telegraph, explained the pitch: “They offered me €100 to work from 8am to midnight. You just sit there and shout if the police come.”

Marseille is France’s longstanding drugs capital, where the recent murder of a political activist’s 21-year-old brother pushed Emmanuel Macron, the president, to promise a war on drugs.

Yet Grenoble is the unlikely suspect for being one of the country’s most violent drug hubs, with more crimes per capita than Marseille (93.9 per 1,000 inhabitants versus 73.5) and gangs deploying military-grade weaponry.

In 2024, there were 48 shootings in the city. Seven drug-related murders were recorded in 15 months, along with the killing of a local kingpin near Paris.

It’s a marked shift for a city that was ranked first for quality of life last yearin the Oxford Economics World Cities Index. Now, it is been ranked as one of France’s ten most dangerous cities – nine of the top 10 are run by Left-wingers, according to Valeurs Actuelles, which crunched interior ministry figures.

For decades, Grenoble’s underworld was controlled by the “Italo-Grenoblois” network, but its last godfather, 71-year-old Jean-Pierre Maldera, was sprayed with Kalashnikov fire in March when a car pulled up beside his BMW.

His assassination came amid a ferocious battle to control greater Grenoble’s roughly 28 trafficking spots, which pull in up to €10,000 a day. “A new generation of locally raised lords of north African origin are fighting for control,” said Mr Manteaux.

The violence is increasingly brazen. Last September, an unarmed municipal worker was shot dead in broad daylight after trying to stop a convicted dealer fleeing a crash.

In February, a hooded 17-year-old armed with an assault rifle hurled a grenade into a bar in Villeneuve run by a convicted drug dealer convicted of murder, injuring 15 people. Bruno Retailleau, the interior minister at the time, called the technique “war-like” and “unprecedented”.

After a lull since April, the latest shooting suggests the turf wars are not abating.

“It’s a mini-Marseille,” said Mr Manteaux, “in that these clans have the financial clout to take over the supply chain, buying cannabis from Morocco and cocaine directly from South American cartels.”

Grenoble’s traffickers, he insisted, “are no one’s lieutenants”, answering to neither Marseille’s expanding DZ Mafia nor anyone else. Many bosses operate abroad in “uncooperative countries”, notably the UAE.

“They’re very organised,” said Myriam Munoz, the local Alliance union chief, producing a baseball cap emblazoned with a dealer’s brand, M38, plus bags, flyers and QR codes.

One flyer handed out by drug dealers in the Mistral district has a menu of hash, ecstasy and cocaine selling for €50 a gram with a QR code leading buyers to various social media platforms so they can order and get home delivery.

“Goodies, loyalty cards, home delivery. But behind the friendly façade, when young people use Kalashnikov-type weapons in the city, we’re not far off Baghdad.”

The trade is so brazen that a dealing point operates just 100 yards from the police station in the Alma estate, where a 15-year-old Tunisian minor was shot last year. On a rainy evening, a teenager stands under a red umbrella as another rifles through a bush for his stash. Around ten deals take place in ten minutes.

Opposite sits anti-discrimination charity ODTI. Its director, 78-year-old former rugby forward Claude Jacquier, was beaten with iron bars in 2020 for trying to stop dealers “cuckooing” flats he manages. “They tried to break my legs,” he said. “If I’d caught them, I’d have killed them.”

He is scathing about local authorities. “The mayor’s position is there’s no drug problem, which makes it difficult to solve.”

National police and judicial services – not the mayor – bear the brunt of the fight and are overwhelmed, he said.

Mayor Éric Piolle, who declined to speak to The Telegraph, has long been divisive. Upon taking office in 2014, the Green politician reversed a decision to arm municipal police and opposed new CCTV cameras, even suggesting selling the few that existed.

“Dealers took him at his word and from then on it’s been an open bar,” fumes former mayor Alain Carignon, who is running again next March. He promises 300 CCTV cameras, a 24-hour command centre and 150 extra municipal police.

In a recent interview, Mr Piolle denied presiding over a crime-ridden city. “There is violence linked to drug traffickers and the exploitation of unaccompanied minors. But that is not the daily experience of Grenoblois. They don’t come across dealers in the city.”

Mr Carignon scoffed: “I don’t think we live in the same city.” He said Grenoble was losing businesses and residents.

Many residents agreed. “Don’t speak to me about this mayor. He’s a catastrophe,” said Christine, a carer. “He built bike lanes to keep the bobos happy but that’s about it.”

Grocery store manager Taylor Zingnani, 21, said: “Ten years ago, there were a couple of deal spots; now they’re everywhere. I want to leave. The risk of a stray bullet is frightening.”

Back in his office, prosecutor Mr Manteaux is perplexed by the mayor’s CCTV objections. “Today we are almost blind. One of the main individual freedoms is security. Cameras help solve crimes.”

He welcomes a new narco traffic law creating a national drug prosecutor next January and pointed out that France’s struggle was part of a far wider European crisis.

France is only one front in a booming European drugs economy worth tens of billions of euros, driven by a record influx of cocaine through ports like Antwerp and Rotterdam. The same networks behind that surge fuel violence from Marseille to Grenoble, making local turf wars just one fragment of a continental narcotics market.

Yet mafia expert Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorra, says France is struggling to confront it “because it has ignored the issue for 30 years”.

Ofast, the country’s anti-narcotics office, estimates that fewer than ten major organisations now control almost all cocaine imports – what investigators describe as resembling a “French cocaine cartel”.

“These narco traffickers are seeking to install a counter-society,” said Mr Manteaux.

He echoed the president’s warning that urban “bourgeois” users fuel the violence. “We cannot deplore deaths on the one hand and continue consuming in the evenings after work.”

Mr Piolle made similar remarks at a mayors’ conference, calling for cannabis legalisation and warning that police were “bailing out the sea with a teaspoon”.

Mr Manteaux said he intended to target Grenoble’s students and affluent green-tech engineers buying cocaine, forcing offenders into rehabilitation courses. He also warned ski resorts that he would not allow them to become “blind spots” for powder of a different nature. Offenders face a €200 fine and up to a year in prison.

“I say to our British friends: enjoy our slopes. But don’t buy drugs, or we’ll come after you.”

[Source: Daily Telegraph]