When a Marseilles grocer received a death threat with a demand for €250,000 from the city’s most feared criminal gang, he sought police protection, terrified for himself and his family, knowing he could never raise the money.

The ultimatum came in a text message purportedly from the DZ Mafia, said to be the biggest crime syndicate in a city that has been notorious for gangland killings and drug-trafficking for decades. The message was accompanied by photographs of the grocer’s wife and children, his home and his shop.

The police officers reacted fast, bursting into a circus performance and bundling his family out of the audience minutes after he reported the threat on Sunday. They rushed them to a safe location at the home of relatives. They escorted the grocer, whose name has not been made public, to his shop, where he removed valuables and locked up before joining his wife and children.

A social media video was posted by DZ Mafia to deny its involvement in what its leader called an amateur imitation of its assassinationsWhen investigators identified the sender of the message, however, they made a surprising discovery. It had been sent by a known petty criminal, but he had no links with organised crime and they were certain he was not part of the DZ Mafia.Unknown to police until 2023, the gang has expanded at lightning speed over the past 18 months, gunning down dozens of rivals on its blood-spattered ascent to the summit of the Marseilles underworld.“DZ is a victim of its own success,” a judicial source said. “Like big legitimate brands, it’s being targeted by imitators trying to profit by copying the real thing. There have been several cases like this. A few months ago a jailed convict claimed to be a DZ member in order to recruit a 14-year-old as a hitman to murder a rival on the outside.”The hit was unsuccessful, however. The teenager shot dead a taxi driver who refused to wait while he carried out the planned killing, and then fled without locating the target.Police officers check the IDs of young lookouts for drug gangs at La Busserine housing estate in northern Marseille, where DZ Mafia burnt the body of one victimNICOLAS TUCAT/AFP/GETTY IMAGESPolice display 3D-printed weapons manufactured by gangs and seized during raidsNICOLAS TUCAT/AFP/GETTY IMAGESNews reports highlighting the young age of the hitman prompted DZ to denounce the “unauthorised use” of its name in a bizarre video posted on social media in October.It showed 15 masked, black-clad men, flanking their leader, who appeared behind what appeared to be a makeshift altar, covered with a white sheet inscribed with the words DZ Mafia in block capitals. The gang boss, who was not named, denied ordering the 14-year-old to carry out a killing, saying DZ had enough of its own “men, vehicles and resources to act if we had to”. Rather than disavowing the use of violence, he objected to the gang’s image being tarnished by association with such an amateurish episode. DZ, short for “Dzayer”, which means Algeria in the Berber language, has never shied away from openly claiming its attacks. The gang first appeared on the police radar when it posted pictures of the burning body of a victim in the Busserine district of north Marseilles, beside the words DZ Mafia.Prosecutors believe DZ was behind up to 80 per cent of Marseilles’s 49 drug-related murders in 2023 as it waged war against a rival gang, the Yoda. Prosecutors attributed a lessening of violence in 2024, when there were only about 20 such killings, to the fact that DZ had already asserted its dominance.Police officers in the La Castellane district of Marseilles during a visit in March by Gerald Darmanin, the French interior minister, and President Macron to as part of a battle against drug traffickingCHRISTOPHE ENA/POOL/REUTERSBruno Bartocetti, a police union delegate, said 2024 marked a turning-point for DZ, which diversified from drugs into extortion and protection rackets, targeting night clubs, shops and rappers.“The important thing for them was to bring in revenue, just like a big multinational company, so they moved into other activities, anything that could earn money.”Bartocetti, a spokesman for the Unité SGP Police-FO union, said the Marseilles gangs of earlier decades, depicted in the 1971 movie, The French Connection, had also engaged in protection rackets, but DZ was more brutal.“Today, the way they operate is: ‘You pay or you die’. It’s far more violent. There’s no room for negotiation.”• Marseilles’ drug wars between rival gangs spread across FranceDZ has also made threats against prison officers and their families to force them to allow convicted gang members access to illegal mobile phones so they can issue orders to henchmen from their cells.The director of the Baumettes prison in Marseilles and one of her deputies were removed from duty and placed under police protection this month after receiving death threats.The threats are believed to have been orchestrated by a convict, named as Gabriel O, 29, a former hitman said to be one of DZ’s three main leaders.