Paul Bonnaventure Carbone 1 February β 16 December was a Corsican criminal involved in the Marseille underworld from the s until his death in He was known as the Emperor of Marseille. Paul Carbone was born in the southern Corsican village of Propriano in He attended school there and was a hard-working pupil. When Carbone was 12 his father died and he left school to support his mother and two younger brothers. He took any job that he could find to bring money into the family.
When Carbone was about fifteen he moved to Alexandria , Egypt where he started pimping. Much of the money he earned was sent back to his mother in France. His success had angered some rival pimps. In , three pimps kidnapped Carbone and left him buried up to his neck in sand in the desert. Carbone and Spirito struck up a life-long friendship and business partnership.
Spirito was also a pimp and part of a network that brought women from Paris to work in Egyptian brothels. Once recovered from his ordeal, Carbone wanted to leave Egypt, and persuaded Spirito to go to Shanghai with him. There the pair got involved in opium smuggling. This lasted for about a year until the outbreak of World War I , when they returned to France to enlist. After the war ended, Carbone and Spirito left for South America. In Peru they started pimping and soon had 20 women working for them.
The Carbone-Spirito clan gained more and more influence in the Marseille underworld. By the late s, they were involved in prostitution , white slavery , protection rackets and various forms of trafficking. They were involved in drug trafficking , especially heroin and cocaine , and set up a laboratory in Bandol , near Marseille [ 4 ] to refine the raw opium from Egypt , [ 9 ] Turkey [ 10 ] and Indochina into heroin, some of which was sent to Lucky Luciano in the United States.
Owning a bar on rue Pavilion, the Amical Bar, and the Beauvau Restaurant on rue Beauvau, the empire was run from these establishments. Although Pernod Fils had been banned in France in , [ 13 ] Carbone imported it from a distillery in Tarragona , Spain. With the money made in Paris, they opened brothels all over France and staffed them with women from Europe and South America. During the interwar period , Carbone and Spirito allied with the mayor of Marseille, Simon Sabiani, and acted as his enforcers.
