THE MARSEILLE CONNECTION

Former federal prosecutor McCallion delves into the alleged ties between a Corsican drug trafficking ring and U.S. government officials in this true-crime book.

The French Connection that smuggled heroin to the United States through Marseille, France, was one of the most notorious drug trafficking operations. McCallion writes that he was curious about how the ring, run by a Corsican Mafia group known as the Unione Corse, evaded prosecution. In this book, he claims to have found the answer. The author is blessed with three compelling central figures in this narrative: William Spector, a former U.S. intelligence agent; his mysterious ex-wife, former model Patricia Richardson; and French financier Paul-Louis Weiller, one of her “mentors.” Richardson, according to the author, decided when she was young that she’d be a Bond girl with “the deadly spy skills of James Bond himself.” After Richardson left Spector in 1971, writes McCallion, Spector tried to expose alleged ties that she and Weiller had with the Unione Corse, alleging that she used Spector’s auto dealership to smuggle drugs into the U.S.: “Paul-Louis Weiller—to the best of my knowledge—is the key financier of the international drug syndicate,” Spector testified to a 1978 Congressional panel. Using this testimony and other records, McCallion claims the Unione Corse owed its impunity to a 1947 “accord” between France and the U.S. and that the mobsters’ “virtually unlimited funds helped finance [Richard] Nixon’s political rise to power.” However, his questionable evidence for this assertion is largely limited to a 1968 meeting in which Weiller agreed to contribute $2 million to Nixon’s campaign. Overall, the book does raise intriguing possibilities. However, it offers conjecture rather than a resolution of “The Major Unsolved Crime of the 20th Century.” In the end, it largely fails to support its theory that mobsters had an “unholy alliance” with the Nixon administration and the CIA.

An engaging theory that lacks convincing evidence.