To understand how hundreds of kilos of cocaine arrive at French ports, Le Monde investigated a drug trafficking network that had almost everything it needed to succeed: shell companies, identity theft, chemists and logisticians. But several mistakes led to its downfall.

Of the 28 tonnes of cocaine seized in France in 2022, 10.4 tonnes entered through the port of Le Havre, at the northern tip of the country. Faced with ever-tighter controls, a small team of drug traffickers thought they had found a sweet solution: chemically modify their cargo with sugar, and hide behind a vast network of fake companies while taking advantage of state aid during a pandemic. Their "product" became undetectable, and their partners untraceable.

The sophisticated system could have flourished, but a series of mistakes put investigators on the drug traffickers's tails.

Thanks to the "NarcoFiles", an unprecedented leak of documents from the Colombian Attorney General's office, and open-source research, Le Monde traces the history and reveals the methods of this new-style criminal organization.

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