On the streets of Hundige, we had an associate known as Baloo. It was a fitting nickname because he was six feet six, two hundred and eighty pounds, black-bearded, strong, and good-natured like the bear from the Disney movie. Baloo wasn’t a stickler for the rules and didn’t take any shit. His real name was Peter Laurents.
One afternoon in 1997, he was at work as an SSP representative at a local youth club located inside the mall in Hundige. SSP stands for School, Social Services, and Police and comprised a group of outreach street workers who dealt with the toughest kids in their respective areas. They were a buffer between the system and the disenfranchised youth that always answered to and reported back to the authorities.
On that day, Baloo saw a terrified boy running full speed through the front door of the mall and into the club. I was one of the five guys who were right on his heels, but Baloo managed to step in and block the door just before we got in. I was in front, looking up at Baloo. I was no more than fifteen years old and five feet eight, but when I realized that Baloo was going to use his superior size to keep us from entering, I went ballistic.
Baloo hung on to the doorframe and blocked the door while we pushed him. Once I started realizing we weren’t getting in, I jumped up and headbutted him. I guess my reputation has been earned.
Throughout the 1990s, Peter was one of the social workers who put his personal safety on the line in a neighborhood where a group of around fifty kids, almost always led by me, stole and vandalized their way through their teenage years. Within Social Services and the school system and among the street workers, the name Sleiman was well-known. Since Baloo also personally worked on my case, he had in-depth knowledge about me back when I was a short-fused, headbutting teenager.
Peter remembers some interesting moments where I showed him a different side of myself. One night, he was walking around the local train station with a police officer. The officer was there to check on a group of boys who were reportedly causing trouble around the station area. The situation escalated. Suddenly, the usual game of cops and robbers was reversed, and the police officer was being chased around the station by a large group of boys.
We really didn’t like that particular cop, and the atmosphere was tense. It could have gotten completely out of hand, and they were debating whom they could call for backup or pondering how fast they could run. At the last moment, I stepped in and made the mob stand down. I told them not to touch the cop with Baloo ’cause Baloo was cool with me. The guys were pissed but we all avoided any further issues with the authorities so I saw it as a win-win.
With Baloo on board, the municipality established a workshop, which the young men were supposed to help run daily. After what was once a promising start, the boys eventually began to vandalize the place, and he was forced to ban them from the workshop. He was supposed to be their ally, but instead, he became the subject of their rage. They slashed the tires on his car, and when he got new ones, they slashed those too. This happened four or five times. Once, flammable liquids were thrown into the workshop.
I wasn’t involved, but my group was. Someone was supposed to stay in the workshop at night, taking turns guarding the place, but eventually, the politicians thought it was too risky and didn’t want to take responsibility for the consequences. They were afraid that someone would get hurt.
The street workers refused to give up and approached my boys’ parents to tell them that their sons were headed down a bad path. Unfortunately, they didn’t have sufficient knowledge about the culture in these families’ households because this only made the boys despise them even more.
Suddenly, these boys had to answer to their bewildered fathers, who didn’t know any better than to beat them when they came home. The truth is that many of the fathers in Askerød were ill prepared to parent in the fashion that their sons needed. They didn’t speak Danish, they weren’t integrated into anything, so they were ashamed to face Social Services. At the same time, they were furious that the authorities dared to criticize their sons as it reflected on their failure to keep them in line. So, the boys got slapped around, and a lot of them even got their heads shaved so the community could see how badly they had behaved.
The gang culture is a brotherhood and we got our opinions from the brotherhood and not from our fathers. The truth is the street workers failed by not familiarizing themselves with our culture our how things worked with us before they acted. As a result, the boys ended up seeing the street workers as traitors as opposed to our allies.
Baloo refused to accept the boys’ reign of terror and started touring the local schools, encouraging the other youths not to be afraid of me and my crew. His message was: “Don’t let them bully you. That will only empower them more than they deserve. They’re really not that dangerous.”
From my crew’s point of view, our former buddy and confidant was now going around the city belittling them and calling them soft. This made them feel even more alienated, and they focused their hatred on Peter. The police told him to be very careful. According to their information, there was now a bounty on his head. Allegedly, the price was $3,000.
If I had to describe my situation with one word, it would be desperation—a desperation that resulted from being caught up in something he really didn’t want to be a part of.
Here’s the thing: I wasn’t the leader of the Askerød crew, but many people thought so because I always appeared to lead the way. Just like any soccer team wants the best players to join them, all the criminals in the suburbs of Copenhagen wanted me on their team. I loved being needed and in demand. I was willing to play ball. I wanted to climb the ladder and I wanted everyone to know who I was. And I succeeded at it. In the process, I earned a reputation as the worst of the rotten apples.
One day, I was sitting in court because of a fight I had been in. I wasn’t the only offender, but I tried to take the fall for the others because I was the only one under the age of fifteen, and therefore I couldn’t be punished.
“You are of no use to me,” the judge said.
Instead, one of the other boys who had already turned fifteen was convicted. After that, his parents forbade him to hang out with me. The other boys’ fathers soon followed suit. Even though I was the youngest of the lot, the parents believed that I was the bad influence on everyone else. I was heartbroken, and once again, I felt misunderstood. All I wanted to do was live up to the code of the streets and be a stand-up guy. I wanted to be the hero. That was why I had tried to take the blame in court. However, the immigrant parents in our community didn’t consider me to be hero material. Sleiman was a pariah in their eyes.
If my friends and I had to pass through the mall, they would go around it without me ’cause if their parents caught them hanging out with me, they would beat them when they came home. They weren’t allowed to hang out with the butchered woman’s son. They saw me as the bad guy, but to me, we were all the same. We were all troublemakers. We would pick a fight with whomever we could. We would bust windows, trash clubs, and beat up anyone who got in our face.
I was only fifteen when Hundige started to become too small for me. In the neighboring city of Ishøj, the immigrant community was older than in Hundige, the criminals were more established, and I befriended some of the older guys. They taught me to smoke pot, do drugs, go to nightclubs, and terrorize downtown Copenhagen. I began to carry knives and used broken bottles as weapons.
Like in most other places, the Danes controlled the marijuana trade in Ishøj. In the mid-1990s, it was the influential criminal known as The Fox who called the shots. My crew thought The Fox had too much power, and when some of his soldiers beat up one of my new friends, we decided it was time to take action. At the time, I didn’t know exactly how powerful The Fox was, but if my friends were at war, so was I, and in my haste to be the hero, I was ready to confront The Fox on their behalf.
One night, me and three guys from Ishøj went to The Fox’s apartment. We rang the doorbell and said we wanted to buy some weed, so The Fox let us in.
He asked, “What do you want?”
“To buy weed.”
“Hmm.”
“Did you just have this guy beat up?” I asked and pointed at my friend.
The Fox just looked at us with a cold expression in his eyes. We were smaller, but I was not afraid. One of his soldiers was in the apartment, and The Fox probably never imagined that an immigrant boy he had never even seen before would smash him over the head with a full bottle of wine.
“Bring it on,” he said.
I took a full step back before I slammed the bottle right in his face at full force. The Fox went down. My crew grabbed bottles as well, and before The Fox’s soldier had time to react, he too was on the floor. We threw furniture at them. Next, we emptied the apartment of marijuana, cash, and anything else of value. We left the place covered in blood and wine with two grown men lying on the floor humiliated and beaten beyond recognition.
Later that evening, we rampaged through Copenhagen. There were four or five of us, and we randomly bumped into people on purpose. We went after anyone who looked the slightest bit tough. If anyone so much as told us to watch out, they got a beating. That night, I earned my respect in Ishøj. But I also lost my last shred of innocence. We were like animals.
During the rampage, we of course avoided women and men walking with their families because even hoodlums have a code. And although I continued to spiral out of control and became increasingly violent, I developed a code of decency toward girls, which made them feel comfortable in my company. I couldn’t rationalize treating women the same way some in the community treated my sisters. Defending them and my mother’s honor is partly what led me down this path in the first place.
One of the girls remembers some of the nice things I would do for her. Her name was Thessa. Today, she is in her forties and works as a kindergarten teacher. She is a petite, attractive woman with red hair. She grew up in a middle-class residential neighborhood, but she was always drawn to the wild life. When she was fifteen, she and her friends dated hardcore criminals from Copenhagen. Some of the leaders belonged to an influential, criminal Pakistani family whose male members were in their late twenties. They were highly regarded in the immigrant community, and even though they were not from Hundige, they hung out at the local nightclub.
Thessa thought hanging out with us was exciting. She got presents and was treated like a princess with free booze and VIP access. She was suddenly around older guys who had money and would buy the entire front row at the premiere of a movie just to show off.
Eventually, Thessa began to seek out local boys her own age. One day, four Audis pulled up in Hundige, and the men from the Pakistani family jumped out. They stared at Thessa and the boys.
“Who’s in charge here?” one of them asked.
I stepped up as the junior gang leader because I always took responsibility and initiative. The men took Thessa and I aside and said, “Listen, Thessa used to chill with us. Now she’s hanging out here, and if that’s her wish, then fine. But you can’t let anything happen to her. She has to be treated really nice, and that’s your responsibility.”
I accepted that responsibility. It was a violent environment, and I never wanted women to feel unsafe when I was around.
She hung out with us for a couple of years and saw a group of boys who were out of control. We would hang out in front of the mall and smash shop windows with rocks, but not to steal. Vandalism was merely a way to kill time.
Jens Frederik Rossen was also a prominent figure in Hundige in the mid-1990s, and he became one of my enemies during the early years. When Jens Frederik was young, he thought his family was rich. His father owned several establishments at an amusement park, and Jens Frederik lived with his parents in a big house in an upper-class neighborhood.
But behind the pretty facade, there was alcohol and violence, and a life-shattering event that occurred when he was eleven years old. One day in 1986, a van pulled into the driveway of the villa, and a group of men started emptying the house
At the same time, Jens’ father just disappeared and no one’s seen him since. Story goes he owed 6 million kroner in taxes. The police never found him.
While his mother drowned her sorrows in alcohol, she once left Jens Frederik alone for ten straight days without a word. He reacted by banding together with a group of boys who all had similar stories.
They formed a community that always had each other’s backs and developed gang-like habits like beating people up and engaging in vandalism.
If we were perkere, then Jens Frederik and his friends were white trash. Without being a sworn member, he started hanging out with two different Hundige-based gangs called Psycho Kids and Power Team. He hung out with the leaders of the worst gangs. He had other people do the burglaries, while he had a knack for selling the goods. They had apartments where we sold the loot from, but Hundige Mall was the center of their criminal enterprise.
Jens Frederik and his friends all became kickboxers. They were strong, ruthless, and didn’t allow anyone to challenge their dominance in Hundige. A local pub at the mall was considered their spot, and it was there that they traded their stolen goods.
In the mid-1990s, a wave of immigrants started moving to Hundige, settling in Askerød and another housing project called Gersager Park. My friends and I were among them, and we all started hanging out at the pub when we were teenagers.
To Jens, it was simply them against the perkere. White versus black. Up until that point, they had been running things, but the immigrants steadily grew in numbers. Jens Frederik saw a bunch of Arabs, and it recognized that we had the potential to become a strong and dangerous group. I was the leader: considered the craziest, the wildest, and the most violent. Every time there was trouble, I was always ready. They would never openly admit that they were scared of us. Even though they were older, I knew they were.
One act of revenge succeeded the other in a conflict that could almost be defined as a race war. One time, my gang caught and severely beat Jens Frederik in a tunnel. Another time, his crew caught me off guard and returned the favor. One night, when Jens Frederik was standing in line outside a nightclub, I stood right behind him. It was a peculiar relationship in many ways. In times of peace, Jens Frederik and I would sit and talk to each other almost as if we were friends. Even though we saw each other as enemies most of the time, he also knew that my crew would always leave him alone if he was with a girl. You gotta have a code. But when he was alone, he could never let his guard down.
There were unwritten rules that were never violated, and in a strange way, we respected one another. But that night, in front of the club, the respect was gone, and we got into an argument. He turned his back on me, so I immediately struck him in the back of the head with a bottle. He was wearing a baseball cap, and the bottle went through, slicing his skull.
Some of Jens Frederick’s guys pinned me against the wall and beat me up until I passed out. Sounds crazy to you, but for us that was just a routine night at the club.
Today, Jens Frederick is in his early sixties, and after a life that accumulated three hundred criminal charges, four convictions for assault, and acquittal of murder, he now has a clean criminal record and runs a successful clothing company. Seems for some there is hope after gang life after all?