control the whole traffic and participated in it in response to a call for tender from the Sicilians in New York. According to scholar Laurent Mucchielli, they rather constituted the local segment of a vast international network and were commercial partners, or even subcontractors, of the much more powerful Italian-American Cosa Nostra. Influence and structure In 1972, a year after the release of the film The French Connection, a Time magazine article mentioned the existence of a unified crime syndicate composed of about fifteen Corsican families, including the Francisci, Orsini, Venturi and Guerini clans, operating in the manner of the American mafia families. The article claims that "the Union Corse is more tightly knit and more secretive than its Sicilian counterpart", family ties creating bonds between the members, which are not only stronger but allow protection against outsiders trying to either infiltrate or gather information about any of the members. According to the article, the symbol of the Unione Corse was the same as the symbol for Corsica, the Moor's head, a depiction of a black human head with a rag tied around the forehead, on a white field. A member of this society may wear it as a pendant or a watch fob. Although they concede that Corsican clans participating in the French Connection enjoyed relative impunity until the early 1970s, most French and American observers believe that the existence of a Corsican crime syndicate as described by Time magazine is an exaggerated account of the reality of that time, as there was no such thing as a pyramidal Corsican mafia run by a single board of directors and deeply infiltrated into the state. Investigative journalist Jacques Follorou writes the local situation was characterized by a "galaxy of separate clans, sometimes allies, sometimes enemies, which have taken advantage of particular historical circumstances to flourish, and who know how to make some relations with the political and administrative apparatus in order to protect themselves." According to Mucchielli, the hierarchy of this multitude of networks was based "on authority and prestige [and] the principle of vendettas (...) [They were organised] as competing families which have in common only their origin and the fact that they occasionally join together to make a good deal. If the initial French official response to the French Connection was seen or exploited by the American authorities as evidence of relations between local political elites and the