Z comme Zemour
Henry-Claude de La Casinière
2002 - 58 min - Beta numérique - Couleur et Noir & Blanc - France

Although the police and the specialists of organised crime had known them for several years, the French people only discovered their name in February 1975, following a shoot-out in a Paris bar, "Le Thélème". That day, the police had decided to "go for" the Zemours, a gang of hoodlums of Jewish origin who had come from North Africa.
The arrest turned into a settling of scores. William, the head of the family, was killed along with one of his accomplices. Beyond the polemic that is always raised by this case, the public had learned from the media that the Zemours, "the last of the lords of the Paris underworld", had long dominated the scene among the capital’s hoodlums in the course of a saga punctuated by around forty assassinations.
This is the saga that we wanted to relate through the life of William, Edgar and Gilbert Zemour who finally perished by the bullets of the police or their adversaries. This story is also the story of a period which began in the 1960s at the end of the war in Algeria, at a time when the Corsican underworld "ruled" gambling, and which ended in July 1983 with the death of the last of the brothers, Gilbert. At the time when the traditional French underworld collapsed once and for all, gambling, procuring, drugs or night clubs passed into other less identifiable hands.
Apart from the testimony of Roger Le Taillanter, ex-boss of the vice squad, which runs like a thread through the tale, there are the testimonies of his colleagues Marcel Leclerc and Robert Broussard, heads of the anti-gang squad ; we also found many witnesses who were close to the Zemours, starting with Gilbert’s own son who sheds a more human light on this violent adventure.