Auguste Ricord, nicknamed Il Commandante, was one of the founding members of the French Connection, a mafiosi-type organisation involved in heroin trade, based in France in the 1950s and 1960s.
An agent of Henri Lafont, a member of the Carlingue (the French Gestapo), under the Vichy regime, he used part of the funds stolen by the Carlingue during the war to create drug laboratories near Marseille. Heroin was refined there before being exported to the US.
Auguste Ricord was arrested in 1972 in Asuncion, Paraguay and then extradited to the US. He was sentenced to 22 years in prison and spent 10 years in jail until pardoned. He then returned to Paraguay in 1983 and died two years later.