The Unione Corse is a term designating the Corsican organized crime as a whole during the period 1930s–1970s, in the context of the French Connection, an international heroin trade network operated at that time between Turkey, Southern France, and the United States. A 1972 Time article described the "Unione Corse" as a Corsican-based unified and secretive crime syndicate akin to the American Five Families. The local situation in Southern France during this period was in reality more complex, with a nebula of mainly Corsican and Italian-French clans cooperating or fighting each other according to the circumstances and opportunities. If they constituted a key element of the wider French Connection, flooding the American market with Marseille-produced heroin from the 1950s to early 1970s, those clans remained overshadowed by the much more powerful Italian-American Mafia. History French Connection The geographic location of Marseille and Corsica in the Mediterranean led them to become strategic points of the French Connection from the early 1950s up until the early 1970s. Corsican and Italian mobsters Paul Carbone and François Spirito, who dominated organised crime in Marseille in the 1930s, had laid the foundations of the French segment by setting up the first opium processing chain intended for the United States. The international drug route Turkey–Marseille–New York flourished after the early 1950s, when it was structured by mobster Lucky Luciano and the Italian-American mafia after their previous source, legal Italian pharmaceutical production hijacked by the Camorra, was shut down in 1951.Morphine base, derived from the cultivation of poppies, was smuggled in from Turkey by boat, before being transformed into heroin by local chemists in the Marseille area, and from there was shipped towards its final destination, the large and growing American market. Heroin produced at that time in Marseille was reputed to be 98% pure. It is estimated that around 80% of the heroin consumed in the United States by the early 1970s had been smuggled in from France. By the early 1960s, this figure was 90%. The French Connection was eventually broken up by French and American authorities in the early 1970s, in the context of the "war on drugs" campaign launched by Richard Nixon in 1971. French judge Pierre Michel, whose investigations were decisive in breaking up the traffic in Southern France, was assassinated in 1981 in Marseille. The French Connection was mainly managed on its French section by Italo-Corsican clans. The latter did not