I was from Askerød, and my boy Samir was from Gersager Park. Both housing developments were on blocks placed on opposite sides of Hundige train station. We were each leading figures of our neighborhoods without possessing an official title. Samir and I had become close, dating back to even before I was shipped off to Norway, and while I was there, our bond grew stronger. Samir is two years older than me, and during the months I was gone, Samir and his family helped my family. They provided my mother with occasional financial support and friendship. When I returned, Samir picked me up at Copenhagen Central Station.
However, our friendship was sealed one night when I was standing at Hundige Station with about ten of my boys. Three of the Ishøj Boys were after me. At the time I was being hunted, I was only fifteen. One of them, a man who was about twenty years old, was enamored with a Pakistani girl who instead had a thing for me. In order to get some backup for his attack, he told his friends that I was going around calling his father a drug dealer. Now the Ishøj Boys were after me, and they found me hanging out at the station.
“You’ve been telling people that my dad is a drug dealer,” the twenty-year-old said and walked right up to me.
I was used to headbutting people who got in my face, so that’s what I did. After that, I told him to fuck off ’cause I hadn’t said shit about his dad. He continued harassing me, so I headbutted him again, this time directly in the nose. He fell and passed out. At that moment, one of his buddies punched me in the back of the head. I turned around and started advancing on him, but then suddenly, there were two of them, and they both had knives, so I couldn’t really do anything.
Mind you, of all the guys with me at the station, not one of them lifted a finger to help as I was single-handedly fighting off three attackers. I was seething with rage and thought they were a bunch of cowards.
At the time, it was the trend to wear these heavy iron belts. One of the younger boys threw me his belt to defend myself with. I tried, but one of the guys stabbed me near the mouth. The tip of the blade cut through my lip and broke off, so it was stuck in my gums. Meanwhile, I was so furious I hardly noticed that I was stabbed until the police arrived and the boys from Ishøj took off.
“What happened, Sleiman?” the police asked.
“Nothing. Not a fuckin’ thing,” I answered. Again, snitching is against the code of the streets. A couple of girls arrived and cleaned my wound, and the police called an ambulance. The doctors removed the knife tip stuck in my gums, and I was sent on my way home.
Per usual, I wanted revenge. I was still furious with my boys for not helping out during the attack, and Samir agreed with me. They had betrayed me because when you grow up in the same neighborhood, you’re supposed to have one another’s backs, no matter what. That night, a boy from Hundige was attacked by a group of boys from Ishøj. According to Samir’s code of honor, the reasons behind the specific incident were completely irrelevant.
Not a single one of my boys at the station was willing to go to Ishøj with me. But Samir was. We went together and walked straight into the mall. There were about thirty to forty Ishøj Boys there. We were fearless, and that commanded respect because that wasn’t how you normally did things back then. The guards and cops prevented a fight, but Samir was the only one standing by my side. It was a huge deal for me back then, and I won’t ever forget it.
Samir was also a Palestinian refugee kid. Born in Dubai, he and his family had come to Denmark in 1987 when he was seven years old. Aside from that, he was everything I wasn’t. He was pensive and intelligent, with a calm father and a strong family. On top of that, he had a good reputation, whereas I was considered the scourge of Hundige. Samir’s house was strict, and the punishments were physical, but they weren’t a broken family. They commanded respect in the community.
I was still friends with the other boys from my gang, but I truly admired and loved Samir like the big brother I never had. Samir is a smart person, smarter than I am. I was more heart than brains, and I reacted on every impulse. It wasn’t that he didn’t have heart, but whenever we were about to do something, he was always the one to say, “Let’s just think this through.” He was an intelligent person, and he wanted to make something of himself. He got an apprenticeship, and the people at town hall saw potential in him.
After Norway, I never went back to school. The only thing I brought home with me from that trip was an irrepressible hatred for the system. Also, another important thing happened in Askerød: I started getting close to Bekir, a man who would have a decisive influence on my life and still does to this very day.
Bekir was a strong, intelligent, and charismatic man gifted with the powers of persuasion. He was a disciplined ascetic who never smoked, drank, or took drugs, even though he has been a major player in the Danish drug market for years. He was born in 1965 and used to be a militiaman in Lebanon. According to several sources, he often spoke of the battles he fought, and he didn’t let an opportunity slip by to remind us all of how brutal he could be. He came from a powerful family. In Askerød, where he had a wife and children, brothers, and nephews, he was widely regarded as a dominating figure. Bekir was used to war; he was used to controlling grown men in battle. Askerød was like a playground to him.
When my poor mother felt that she was losing her boy to the lure of the streets, she turned to Bekir. In him, she saw a man who wanted what was best for me and possessed some of the fatherly qualities her son was missing. I was out of control and could be gone for days in a row without letting her know. One day, I had been out partying for three days with some older friends in Slagelse, a city about an hour from Askerød. I met Bekir at the local gas station.
He grabbed me by the ear and asked, “What do you think you’re doing, you little shit? You can’t just disappear from home for three days at a time. That’s no way to treat your mother.”
I left the gas station unnerved. I was sort of surprised that my mother had finally found someone who could get me to listen. In a way, I was happy that someone was trying to steer me away from the path I was walking.
Bekir was also the one who had reached out to the lawyer who brought me back from Norway. While I was stuck there, Bekir also helped out my mother. I started calling him uncle, and Bekir also introduced himself as my uncle in town. Many people in Hundige actually thought he was my biological uncle. However, Bekir wasn’t your garden-variety uncle. He was more like the godfather of Askerød. Bekir was a convicted drug dealer with close ties to the biker community. He operated as a collector of debts, and rumor had it he had made a small fortune providing people with protection against assaults. He was already running the young boys of Askerød. His plan was to build a small army of child soldiers who would do his bidding in return for small rewards.
I was the one closest to him, and I learned a lot from Bekir. I learned that knowledge is power, and if anyone was disloyal to the group or tried to run a little side business, it was my responsibility to keep an eye on them and report back to Bekir. I enjoyed being his eyes and ears. I felt like I had been promoted to prince of the streets, right hand to the king of Askerød.
Supposedly, that was also how Bekir saw me. I was fearless, borderline crazy, and my sense of loyalty to the brotherhood knew no limits. I never backed down if someone from the group needed defending, and I attacked my adversaries with terrifying determination. If a member of the group was disloyal, I learned how to be ruthless. Bekir had a new name for the gang. He named it the Iron Fist, and while he ran the operation in Askerød, his close friend Serge from the biker community took care of business in Odense.
We were supposed to be a kind of tool for him. A shield unit that provided protection for the grown-ups and took care of their business transactions. He kind of started taking us under his wing. I liked it. I thought it was cool that the group had a name. We only did petty crimes—burglaries, that kind of stuff. We were willing to do anything for cash, and we wanted a shot at the big money: blackmail, collection of debts, protection. I mean, if you had a store in Copenhagen, we wanted to be able to go in and say, “If you pay us a fee every month, we’ll make sure no one messes with your store.”
The day Bekir truly became aware of my potential, it had to do with a girl. I went up to her and kissed her at a club right in front of her Pakistani boyfriend. At first, the boyfriend made no move to protest, but I took it a step further and ended up sleeping with her that night. A couple of days later, a caravan of cars drove into Hundige, filled with about forty angry Pakistani guys who wanted to get their hands on me. The cuckolded man had lied to them all. He had led his friends to believe that I was going around town spreading false rumors about him. He didn’t dare tell them that the infamous Sleiman was sleeping with his Danish girlfriend.
I managed to flee to Askerød, where I quickly assembled five or six of my own guys. I quickly got hold of an iron club, and we ran to the mall, where half of my pursuers were waiting. I didn’t care about anything, and as always, that was my strength. On a wall next to my Pakistani pursuers was a glass bottle. I crept up, aimed for the bottle, and swung the iron club at full force. The bottle broke into a million pieces that flew toward the group.
I demanded, “What do you want? What are you doing here? Are you gonna fight me over a girl?”
“What are you talking about? We’re not here about some girl. We’re here because of what you said about his family.”
“I didn’t say nothing about nobody’s family. I just fucked his girl,” I told them.
When the others realized why they really were there, they got mad. “Are we here because of some girl? Fuck him and his problem! Fuck her, man, we don’t give a shit. We’re not gonna fight a Muslim because he fucked your girl. That’s your business.”
I had gambled big and won. I think that’s when Bekir realized that I could be useful to him.
Samir and his brother Zaki didn’t like Bekir. Their father warned them about him. In his opinion, just the fact that an older man was hanging around with so many young boys was unnatural. “Sleiman, let’s bounce,” they said whenever they saw Bekir approach the other boys, who were all between fifteen and twenty years old.
Samir and Zaki weren’t exactly paragons of virtue, but they weren’t serious criminals, and neither of them had any intentions of being useful idiots to a man they considered a full-blown gangster. The two brothers were well respected, and a lot of the young boys in the neighborhood looked up to them. Consequently, they posed an obstacle to Bekir’s plan of forming a united gang under his leadership.
At night, Bekir would often visit me at home. He told my mother that he just wanted to impart some words of wisdom to her son, so she would leave us two men to talk. Looking back, I realize that I was brainwashed. He was in his thirties, and I was a teenager. He wanted Samir and me to hate each other. “Samir is a rat,” he said.
I tried to stay in touch with Samir, but something between us broke. He felt that I had betrayed him. When I had gone to Ishøj to get revenge, Samir was the only one who had backed this play. Later, Samir fell out with a couple of Turkish guys during a time when there was tension between the Turks and the Arabs in Hundige. Samir got into a serious fight with one of them who happened to be my friend. Samir wanted me to intervene and take his side because he had always been there for me. But I just wanted us all to be friends. After that, he was kind of pissed at me. We were still part of the same group, but our relationship changed.
Besides, Samir was slowly turning his back on life in the streets. He was full of ideas and initiatives, and many people expected him to be the role model who would break free from the chains of the ghetto and create a better future for himself and others. He was earning legitimate money hosting children’s discos for the young people of the community, which was a great success among immigrant teenagers. He got an apprenticeship as a mechanic, and he had a close relationship with a female social worker named Jette Sørensen. Together, the two of them established a soccer team called the Banana Boys.
For a while, it looked like the yellow-jerseyed team was exactly what the community needed to draw the young boys of Hundige away from crime. Everybody wanted to be on the team. They played well and developed a strong sense of solidarity, and Samir became the captain and unofficial leader. When TV2, the country’s second-largest television network, did a show about the Banana Boys in 1996, Samir was the face of the team.
I, of course, declined appearing on the program. The way I saw it, the show merely wanted to tell the world that everything was fine in Askerød. To me, Askerød was a war zone, and I had no interest in washing the neighborhood clean in the eyes of the public when it was festering with problems.
I played midfielder for the Banana Boys, but ultimately, I was unable to leave the street activities in the locker room. I would headbutt opponents and kick them in the back. It got so bad that they couldn’t justify having me on the team. We were supposed to be the immigrant team that didn’t do those things. Finally, Samir kicked me off the team, and yet another piece of gossip spread around the Arab village. In protest against the Banana Boys, I founded my own team called No Name.
“Samir is too powerful. Why does he get to decide? He thinks it’s his team. Is he putting aside some of the jersey money for himself?”
I even began to believe the rumors spreading about Samir.
Bekir was also whispering in my ear. A member of my family overheard him telling me to shoot Samir—not to kill him, just a shot in the leg. Afterward, my relative pulled me aside and said, “Can’t you see that Bekir is your enemy? He wants you to shoot a boy who’s older than you because he is on bad terms with his father. It’s not because he loves you, Sleiman. If he has a problem, why doesn’t he deal with it himself? He wants to use you. You are not his weapon, and you must never be.”
I was young and dumb, so I didn’t heed the warning and conflicts kept arising. At one point, I robbed an apartment in Askerød with some associates. We were caught, and rumor had it that Samir was the rat. I was unsure if the rumor was true, but it lodged inside my head along with the rest of the rumors floating around town.
Samir fixed cars. He hosted discos. He made a bit of money. Bekir didn’t like him, and people started envying Samir because he made money. Bekir spread the rumor that Samir was the one who ratted me out.