A stain on the Riviera: the brutal world of Nice's cocaine cartels

Residents of an estate on the city's outskirts tell Richard Assheton of gunfights, arson and murder as gangs vie for control of a lucrative drugs market

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The sight of the gun tucked into the man's trousers told us it was time to go. We had been in one of France's most notorious estates for several hours, trying to understand life on the frontline of the country's spiralling drug war.

Seeing three people he did not know and a camera, he decided enough was enough. "You, where do you live?" he said, rushing towards us from the foot of a tower block where he had parked his scooter. "Don't talk back to me, I'll break your head in. Get out of here."

It was a chastening exit, but one that showed us the violence we had only seen signs of was all too real.

I had been given a rare chance to visit by Siam Spencer, a freelance journalist who until recently lived here, in Les Moulins estate on the edge of sun-kissed, touristy Nice.

When she got a job in the city in 2023, Spencer asked a charity to house her, because coming from a deprived family she had no guarantor. What she did not know was the flat it provided was in an estate that had been a byword for drug violence for decades. "I looked it up on the internet," she said. "But honestly, I thought, there would be three gunshots per month. It's still Nice. It's a small estate, so I didn't mind."

Instead, as well as rats, cockroaches, bedbugs and squatters who once broke down her door, she had to contend with the sound of Kalashnikovs outside her window. "In the first three weeks things got really hot," she said.

On one side, Nice is the pearl of the French Riviera, a moneyed Mediterranean haven famous for the blue skies that have inspired painters from Matisse to Chagall. The other side is Les Moulins. The estate of roughly 12,000 residents was built in the 1960s to house those returning from Algeria's war of independence from France. It sits beside the beach and the airport. But few here do much sunbathing and even fewer fly out.