The day Bekir was shot, I was still in prison. In the spring of 2001, I was getting ready to be released and was filled with great hope. I hoped for a future devoid of crime and violence and, most importantly, one that included reconciliation with Samir. Anna convinced me that I should seek peace. Samir was my friend, and I was the one to blame for what had happened.
At the same time, I felt let down by my own. Gang members usually receive financial help while incarcerated, but my crew seemingly cut me off. Right after my verdict was read, Bekir slipped me fifty Krone, ($8 USD) and that was all the money I received for the duration of my sentence. Those fifty Krone felt like a slap in the face and a message from Bekir saying that I was no longer his right hand nor the prince of Askerød. On top of that, I got almost no visits. I began to suspect that Bekir was trying to isolate me and keep me at arm’s length.
He took over the group while I was gone, you know. He had my friends served on a platter for him to control. He didn’t give a shit about me. When I stabbed Samir, I did exactly what he had wanted me to do, and now I was just a chewed-up piece of gum to him. The whole gang scene was riddled with propaganda wars. I was isolated ’cause everybody thought stabbing Samir was wrong.
On the other hand, I had a better chance of leading a life on the right side of the tracks than ever before. I had an apartment, a family, and a wife who had written me four hundred letters while I was in jail. Lately, however, there had been trouble in paradise. Anna found out another girl had visited me in prison. Anna made it clear that if I so much as touched another girl after she had devoted her life to supporting me while I was locked up, she would end our relationship.
I convinced her that there was nothing between me and the woman who had visited. She had a crush on me, since I had been cut off by my gang and had limited contact with the outside world, it was flattering that someone else aside from Anna cared about my well-being. I might’ve been tempted, but nowhere near enough to cheat on her.
On a bright, spring night in 2001, Anna and I were hanging out at the halfway house where I was kept under supervision before my final release. We shared a late dinner, and she stayed overnight. The next morning, Anna was going to work as an assistant kindergarten teacher, and I was supposed to go to the polytechnic program, where I was studying to become an electrician. I hadn’t attended school since I was kicked out of Tjørnely Elementary, but I was performing well in class. At 5:00 a.m. on May 14, my phone rang.
“Sleiman, you need to get over here. Bekir’s been shot.”
I got dressed and snuck out of a hole in the fence, which the inmates used to get in and out without the guards knowing. I wasn’t under strict supervision at this halfway house, as it was just a formality. I was only fourteen days from being released, and this was an emergency. I wasn’t upset that Samir had shot Bekir, but when my people had called and asked for me to come to Rigshospitalet, the largest hospital in the country, to demonstrate my solidarity with their leader, I was obligated to show my face. If I didn’t, I would be regarded as the one who had failed the brotherhood. The code is the code, and it’s to be followed at any and all costs.
In a situation like that, you don’t leave your own behind. You just don’t. In a way, I still loved him. I hated him too, but I didn’t hate my friends, and if they were there, I had to go too. I would lose all my friends if I didn’t show up.
I took the train and then a bus to get there. When I arrived, I saw all my people standing outside of Rigshospitalet. The cops wouldn’t let us in. We were so agitated we thought they were gonna let him die, so we ran in from all sides. Some ran up the stairs, others used the elevators. The doctors and nurses couldn’t do anything. If the cops can’t stop you, doctors and nurses sure as hell can’t either. They don’t dare to. It wasn’t exactly a friendly crowd that entered the hospital.
There are many floors, many long hallways, and hundreds of wards at Rigshospitalet, but we all had a pretty good idea where gunshot victims were treated, so after a while we found Bekir in a room with blood on his face and on his pillow. The bullet had passed through his mouth and exited through his neck. His nephew who had run after Samir was also hospitalized there, but I didn’t care about him ’cause I didn’t like him. He was new in Denmark and thought he was all that ’cause he knew taekwondo and Bekir was his uncle. He thought he could run the crew like some kind of lieutenant, so I had kicked his ass before.
I regarded Bekir as a man who kept the wheels of the war machine turning from his hospital bed, even while his family cried at his bedside. All of his relatives had come from all over Denmark. They made it abundantly clear that the bullet that had passed through Bekir’s mouth should’ve instead been fired at me. “It wasn’t his bullet,” they said. “Bekir is your friend. He protected you from Samir’s family.”
They never told me in clear terms to seek revenge, but I can read between the lines. In a way, they’re right, I thought. In their heads, this had all started with me, and therefore, it was my fault that Bekir had been shot. Forget that it was actually Bekir who had manipulated both Samir and I. I realized that I wasn’t someone they loved. I was just a tool in their hands.
From that day on, I was never truly on Bekir’s side. Unfortunately, I was too weak to completely sever my ties with him. For many years that followed, I ignored my intuition that constantly told me I needed to move on from him.
With Bekir wounded and Samir behind bars, Askerød was quiet on the surface. I was finally released from the halfway house and was living with Anna. Even though I was only nineteen and she was just twenty-one, we talked about starting a family together. Anna’s father had connections in the façade-cleaning industry, and he managed to get me a job in Copenhagen. All of a sudden, we had an apartment and two steady jobs.
Anna’s family was surprisingly supportive of me. They had initially feared I would be convicted of two counts of attempted murder because that carried a possible sentence of up to eight years in jail, and they didn’t want Anna to wait that long for a spouse. However, when the charges were downgraded to severe assault, they embraced me in every way. I loved eating breakfast with her mom and dad. For the first time, I felt like I belonged, like I wasn’t a homeless child anymore. Even though I had a family who loved me more than anything, Anna and her family gave me the kind of affirmation I had always longed for.
While I was in prison, I took up praying. Things really seemed to be looking up for me. Every morning, Anna prepared a lunchbox for me, and I was getting praised for my work. At night, when I snuck out to go see my friends, Anna would come and snatch me away from the weed, a habit I had fallen back into as soon as I was released from prison, despite all my promises to God, Anna, and my family. If I was at a friend’s place, smoking weed, she would come knocking at the door and demand: “Where’s Sleiman? He needs to come home with me right now!”
“What’s up with your old lady? Are you whipped now?” my friends asked me.
“Why are you doing this to me? You’re making me look like a fool!” I would tell Anna.
Anna didn’t care. “You’re the one making a fool out of me! You have to go to work at seven in the morning, and you’re in there smoking weed!”
At this point, I was cleaning façades at the police headquarters in Copenhagen, and Anna insisted that I show up because her father was the site manager. For the first time, I had every chance of maintaining a decent, law-abiding life. I was finally an adult, responsible for my own life with a woman who packed my lunchbox for work. The infamous Sleiman was now a part of the workforce. If I chose the wrong path now, I could no longer blame the municipality, society, or anyone else. I knew that I would never have a better chance of proving everyone who said that I was destined to fail wrong.
In the end, all the skeptics turned out to be right, and I ended up letting Anna and her entire family down. Even though Anna and I had 3,000 kroner to spend each month after taxes, even though her and her family genuinely loved me, and even though she gave me a budget for clothing, food, and fun, I didn’t have the self-control to resist once my people started calling again.
I was freaked out by the stability she brought into my life, and I was afraid that it would become boring. On the other hand, I was finally living the way I had always wanted to. I was sharing my life with someone who trusted me and accepted me for who I was. The thing was, I felt like the money I made wasn’t enough, so I started doing smash-and-grabs again. I destroyed everything I had built. When I was locked up, I had made a promise to God that I was done. A few months after I got out, I had broken all my promises.
My crew had had their eyes on a store for a while. The merchandise we were looking to steal could easily be resold on the black market for upward of $75,000 USD. We knew when the new deliveries arrived, and all we had to do was wait for them. We had visited the store several times to learn the layout, so we knew exactly where the most valuable items were. We were pros. After the burglary, we drove off with the loot on innocent-looking cargo bikes. In no time, we pulled off four or five heists.
Everyone involved in the robberies were associates of Bekir, so while he never participated or even had any knowledge of them being carried out beforehand, he was still indirectly involved. We hid all the loot in an apartment that belonged to a Danish guy we convinced to let us use it as a stash house. He was rarely home, and since only my crew had access to the apartment, we hid the stolen goods behind a dividing wall. Even though it was our score, other people in Bekir’s network knew the location of our stash house.
When Bekir recovered from his bullet wound, he once again had eyes and ears in every corner of Askerød. Bekir knew about my operation, and he demanded that I give some of the stolen goods to his son, who could use the money for school. I didn’t feel I had the right to give away the loot to someone who wasn’t involved with the operation without the consent of my accomplices, so I refused. Several disputes between Bekir and me followed.
What it all boils down to is I was the only one of the guys who dared to oppose Bekir, and because of that, Bekir didn’t like me. I was a constant thorn in his side and an obstacle towards his dominance.
One evening, Bekir invited all the guys who had participated in the heists to dinner at a restaurant called Bali in Copenhagen—all of them, that is, except for me. Bekir told me that Anna was looking for me and was worried that something had happened to me. He also told me I needed to spend some time with her. In that sense, I guess he was still kinda fatherly. But when I got home, Anna told me that she hadn’t been looking for me. She never talked to my friends. She hated them ever since they had accused her of being a snitch back when I got locked up.
It wasn’t until the next day that I figured out what had happened. All the stolen goods stashed at the apartment were gone. The rest of the crew had been at the restaurant, and I was at home with Anna at Bekir’s suggestion. In this world, you can’t call the police, press charges, or file lawsuits, so they could never prove that Bekir’s men had stolen our loot. But in my mind, there was no doubt.
Only cheap items had been left at the stash apartment, which angered me even more. I felt like they were mocking me by doing that. I picked up the leftovers and went to the clubhouse. When I got there, I dumped all of it in front of Bekir.
“Some bitches robbed our apartment. But they forgot something,” I said to him. Then I turned and left.
Bekir didn’t say anything, but a few days later, he left the country. No honor among thieves. I was the thief who was the victim of a robbery. Even though I was seething with anger over what had just happened, my dumb ass still couldn’t summon the courage to stop dealing with Bekir.
When I first met Kira, it was at the mall. She was blonde and only seventeen. I was in a committed relationship with Anna, so I just flirted with her and left it at that. Anna had her shit together. She was a girl who knew what she wanted, and she wanted kids. Although our wedding ceremony wasn’t fully sanctioned as legal, I didn’t wanna risk losing that. Kira was just fun and games.
Next, I began to lead a cell phone double life. I spoke with Kira on my work phone and with Anna on my private phone. It was only a matter of time before things went south. And they did. Anna had a friend who also knew Kira. She chose to be loyal to Anna and told her that I was seeing someone else.
I had to get in front of this, so I did what I always did: fought regardless of the odds against a successful outcome in my favor. No one knows better than I that attacking is the best form of defense, so I handed my phone over to Anna and told her to call Kira.
Anna called her and asked if she had been messing around with me. Kira said no, but she admitted that we had talked. So, I said: “There you go! I’ve talked to her, but I haven’t done anything!” But to Anna, that was worse than if I had fucked her ’cause she felt like there were feelings involved. There might have been, but not something that would make me leave Anna.
Not long afterward, my little sister Ayat was getting married in Århus. I was reluctant to go to the wedding because I felt like I was about to say goodbye to her for good. I had a hard time letting go of my younger sisters. I loved them, and they were my best friends, you know. I felt like I had taken care of them since our mother and Sarah were in the hospital and it was just the three of us in the shelter.
Just before the wedding, Anna had news for me: “I’m pregnant.”
I was over the moon. I had been hoping for this all along. Anna really wanted to go to the wedding. It was also a chance for her to meet my father again. My dad and Anna had become friends, even though I wasn’t on good terms with him. She didn’t judge him, and she tried to mend things between us. My dad really liked her. He could tell that she loved me.
Anna wore a green, velvet dress at the wedding. She was more beautiful than ever. At one point, she was walking around with my baby cousin on her arm, and the image has stuck with me ever since. That really moved me. I had always felt like I was too Danish for an Arab girl and too Arab for a Danish girl, but I had found a Danish girl who accepted me for who I was.
We spent the night together, but just as we got home from the wedding, the two planes crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Anna’s Danish girlfriends started talking ill of Muslims, and I began to sense a change in Anna as well. It became a huge deal in all of our lives—in mine, in my friends’, in Anna’s. After 9/11, the mood shifted. Everybody was like, “Immigrants are no good. Muslims are no good,” and we were constantly targeted. With the new government in place, the laws just got tougher and tougher, and we began to get harassed regularly.
However, the wedding that I remember as a joyous occasion is something that Anna recalls as frustrating. According to her, I was only there for a short while, and when I was, I seemed distracted. To make matters worse, she had to present the married couple with the jewelry that you give the newlyweds at Arab weddings because I was nowhere to be found.
Anna’s not stupid, she thought, ‘If he can’t even be at his own sister’s wedding, what’s he up to?’ She got suspicious and a few weeks after the wedding, she did some sleuthing and found out I was also seeing a girl named Kira.
Anna got hold of Kira. and they promised to be honest with each other. After a short while, there was no doubt in Anna’s mind: I was cheating on her. She went home to our apartment, packed up all of her stuff, and moved back in with her parents. Me cheating on her was the final straw.
She took the four hundred letters, which I had kept since my time in prison, with her. She went up to her parents’ summer house where we had spent a lot of time and burned all of them.
During the months that followed, I tried to get her back so we could raise our child together. For a while, Anna wavered, but at the same time, Kira was using all the tricks available in the playbook of love and war. She was crazy about me and tried her best to win me over. Even though I hoped to get Anna back, I simply couldn’t ignore Kira.
By the end of October 2001, my relationship with Anna was over. She sought to move on with her life and didn’t want to start a family with a cheater and a liar, so she went to the hospital and got an abortion.
Sarah went to the hospital to try to convince Anna to keep the baby and forgive me, but Anna refused to let her in. She also didn’t tell Sarah that she was moving to Copenhagen. I tried to find her, but she had changed her phone number. After some time had passed, she happened to run into some of my people. This prompted her to contact me again. She told me, “I just wanna live in peace. I found a new guy, and I live in Copenhagen now. Leave me be, Sleiman. And don’t hurt my boyfriend.”
That was when it finally hit me. It was over, and Anna was never coming back.
After the breakup, I smoked between ten and twenty joints a day. I committed one burglary after another, and I was either late for work or failed to show up at all. It didn’t take long for this behavior to get me fired. The company was sad to see me go, but I just didn’t feel like I was cut out for a nine-to-five. I preferred to earn my money through criminal activities.
I missed Anna so much that I bought a Pitbull puppy. One day, I left it alone for half an hour in the apartment where we stashed all our stolen goods to pick something up from the mall. When I came back, the loot was all gone and my puppy was lying on the floor, shaking and helpless after someone had mutilated it. It had to be put down. I had lost Anna, my unborn child, my job, and my dog, all one after the other. The worst part was I only had myself to blame. I could have chosen a different path, but every time, I was held back by greed, selfishness, lust, pride, or ambition.
Bekir didn’t create me. He took advantage of what was already inside me. He exploited the fact that I would do anything to make sure that everybody knew who I was. I ran every single red light. I was willing to go through anyone to achieve my goal of conquering Denmark and assuming the throne so they would all say, “Look, there’s the prince of the streets.”
I became just that. But when I did, a lot of people hated me, and very few people genuinely loved me, largely because I had caused so many people so much pain and suffering in order to earn that title.