One night out, I noticed a group of bikers at a club, sitting at a table filled with bottles. Some of the younger guys ventured onto the dance floor, where a couple of girls in short skirts wearing stiletto heels were dancing on a podium. I went over and started dancing with them as well.
I was enjoying their company until someone came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around slowly and found myself facing a short, muscular guy with glasses. Without hesitating, he just smashed a bottle over my head. Afterward, he just stood there looking up at me with a sinister sneer on his face before returning to the table with the bikers.
The man who attacked me was named Thomas. He was the son of a wealthy man. While he wasn’t a patched member of neither the Hells Angels nor the Bandidos, he had strong ties to the biker scene in Odense. At the time this dude smashed the bottle over my head, I had no idea whom he was affiliated with. I was just aching for revenge.
I grabbed a beer glass from a nearby table and hid it on myself before I walked toward Thomas’s table. I put a hand on the top of my head, saying, “Ow, ow, ow!” to give the impression that he had hurt me, and I was confused as to why he had, when in actuality I wanted to lure him into a false sense of security and get close enough to retaliate.
“What happened?” Thomas asked mockingly before I produced the concealed beer glass and attacked him. Everybody at the bikers’ table got up and started hurling glasses and bottles at me and my boys.
When I had driven to the club, I had parked near the door in case I needed to retrieve any weapons from my BMW 320 convertible. With my people right behind me, I ran to the car and retrieved a baseball bat. When we turned around, the bikers were now standing outside the club, ready to rumble.
Now, if I had had any common sense, I would’ve just hopped in my BMW and fled the scene. There were now between ten and fifteen angry bikers ready to fight, and I only had about five or six younger guys backing me up. It didn’t matter because I was hellbent on getting revenge. Stop me if you’ve heard this before . . .
When I get angry, my blood boils so hot there’s usually a good reason to fear me. However, the biggest drawback to my rage is I almost completely lose touch with reality. If I fought those guys, it was highly probable I would lose badly. Fortunately, the police showed up. Imagine me being happy to see the police arrive. When they saw my face, they wanted to arrest me right away. My relief at seeing them was gone almost as soon as it had started.
“What are you arresting me for?” I asked for what seemed like the hundredth time in my young life.
“You’re causing trouble.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Well, then you have to leave.”
I was confused, but I honored their command and hopped in my BMW, and they let me leave the scene. Most of the officers knew me, and they knew I didn’t have a driver’s license. It was common knowledge around town I never had one, but in all the time I had a car, no one ever stopped me. As I drove off into the night, I was fixated on getting revenge on Thomas, but I had to think of another way besides violence.
I came up with an idea. If Thomas wanted to avoid my people beating him within an inch of his life, all would be forgiven if he paid me a one-time fee of $75,000, close to 500,000 DKK . If he paid, he didn’t have to worry about me seeking revenge anymore.
I knew a couple of the guys who had been sitting at Thomas’s table, two bikers named Madsen and Hedgehog. Neither of them was a member of a specific biker club, but they had close ties to a guy called Serge who ran one of the prominent biker gangs in Odense. I figured that I could make them the liaisons to collect the money from Thomas. I figured that Madsen and Hedgehog should have stopped this guy before he hit me, but they didn’t.
After a few days, I tracked down Hedgehog’s address and paid him a visit. I told him it was on them to get me my money. At this point, I figured my crew was strong enough to demand that price. I made it clear that if he and Madsen were unable to collect, I would instead send my people after them. At first, he didn’t want to do it. After some protracted negotiation and him realizing that he didn’t want to beef with an entire gang, Hedgehog accepted the terms.
While Thomas was partly under the protection of Serge and the bikers in Odense, attacking me in public unprovoked was such a colossal mistake that the bikers would probably agree to either hand him over or make sure that he raised the money. The conversations between me and Hedgehog went so well that it became the beginning of a close friendship.
We eventually made an agreement with the bikers that some of the immigrant boys would pick Thomas up in a van and bring him to the clubhouse in Askerød, where the negotiations would take place. If the negotiations broke down and Thomas refused to pay the $75,000, we had carte blanche to give him a severe beating, after which he was to be taken directly to Odense University Hospital so nothing could be traced back to Askerød.
However, our plans hit an unexpected snag. Serge was close friends with Bekir, so he went behind my back and contacted Bekir to find another solution. The guys from Odense agreed to give me a “present,” as they called it, but they refused to pay the agreed-upon fee of $75,000.
Bekir was also close friends with my brother-in-law Karim. The guys from Odense requested that Bekir and Karim attend the negotiations, even though I totally opposed Bekir’s inclusion in this matter. He had only one purpose in getting involved: to make sure that he cashed in, and we never saw a dime.
We had a wild card in my crew named Sanchos who was notoriously violent, temperamental, strong as hell, and extremely loyal to me. He was the most dangerous one of us all. A loner. He was one of the first ones to start attacking pubs and shit like that. He loved me because he felt like I did things fairly. Once, he met a couple of guys at a nightclub who said they wanted to fuck me up. Later, he called me and said, “I’m hiding in some bushes. I just stabbed some guys who wanted to fuck you up. I let ’em talk and talk and talk, and then I finally stabbed them.”
He was that kind of loyal to me. Eventually, I had to go pick him up after he had been hiding out for a while. He was completely covered in blood. I never found out whom he stabbed, but he was one of the reasons our crew became so feared and powerful. He had the capability to be merciless. As long as he was with us, we could be outnumbered five to one but still win the fight. However, everyone else knew this as well.
When the bikers from Odense arrived, Thomas wasn’t with them. They had sent someone else to negotiate on his behalf. I wanted Sanchos to be present at the meeting, but Bekir opposed it. Sanchos was too unpredictable, he maintained. The meeting was going to be held at the clubhouse. In the end, it was Bekir who sat down with the representative from Odense by himself.
To this very day, I don’t know if he got the $75,000, but Bekir had proven that he was the one who commanded the most fear and respect. The older, cunning man had outsmarted the young one. I was livid, but there were no noble reasons behind my rage. I was simply mad that I had lost my hand gambling in a game of money and power.
Perhaps Bekir was entitled to the money, according to the underworld’s code of ethics, and Bekir did betray me. Even if Bekir got the money, in the end, he also kept me from beating a man with connections to a bloody pulp and possibly getting into even more trouble. A source who was present at the meeting and part of the inner circle in the gang scene at the time denies that Bekir got the money. Bekir kept Sanchos away from the meeting. While I considered him an asset, in Bekir’s eyes he was just an unpredictable junkie.
From where I stood, Bekir had snaked me out of almost half a million DKK. So, we went back to the original plan in order to salvage things. Since we couldn’t get the money from Thomas, we decided to hold Madsen and Hedgehog accountable. However, Hedgehog and I had formed a friendship, and I no longer wished to extort him. I felt like he was a good person, and it wasn’t really his fault that Thomas had smashed that bottle over my head. The rest of the guys just wanted to him fuck him up and skin him for every penny. I get that. That was the original plan, but at some point, I had changed my mind. I didn’t think it was fair to hold him accountable anymore.
The fact that I suddenly reversed my original position changed my crew’s perception of me. They felt that I failed the brotherhood by allowing my friendship with Hedgehog to take precedence over the interests of the club. Some of them even suspected me of having taken money from Hedgehog without sharing. They were convinced that I had fucked them over. They didn’t understand why Hedgehog was suddenly off limits. It had to be because he’d already paid me.
Another reason why my friends began to distrust me was that Hedgehog had close ties to the Hells Angels and Black Cobra. He was an enemy who had been spared for seemingly no reason. Could it be that I was also secretly in cahoots with Black Cobra?
In an environment where conspiracy theories gained traction every time someone opened their mouth, I had made myself vulnerable and open to scrutiny. Another internal issue was that I was also better at making money than the rest of the crew. Even though I enjoyed playing the part of the generous benefactor, some of the guys were jealous of me, and if I wasn’t earning and sharing the spoils so others could benefit as well, they began to resent me for it.
Even to this day, that bothers me. Sure, I had money, but not as much as they thought. I had spent a lot of it on them: treating them to dinner, partying. If my friend needed a gold ring, I went and bought him a gold ring. I never considered them beneath me. In my heart and mind, they were my brothers, my equals. But I sensed their jealousy.
One day, I flat-out asked them, “What is it you want me to do?”
“Nothing,” they replied. But after a while, they added, “You don’t think of us as your brothers anymore.”
I wasn’t only putting out fires in-house. I was also at war outside Askerød. During the 2000s, a lot of the smaller groups that popped up in the western suburbs of Copenhagen dreamed of forming one large, organized gang. A gang that could finally compete with the older, more well-established, inner-city gangs. A gang so powerful it could simultaneously hold its own against the bikers. The Askerød Boys went from being an insignificant player to a force to be reckoned with in a relatively short amount of time.
While we were in the middle of a small-scale war with a competing gang in the outskirts of Copenhagen, that same group was making cautious proposals about an alliance. The gang, which is referred to as the Egyptians due to the ancestry of their leader (who is called The Egyptian), was at war with several other immigrant groups, especially a powerful gang based in central Copenhagen. The Egyptians wanted the Bekir Boys to enter an alliance with them and some other smaller suburban crews.
My people and I thought an alliance made sense. You can’t start selling marijuana in Copenhagen unless you’re strong. If you make a living stealing gold and selling it on the street, and someone who’s not even from around here starts selling his gold on the next corner, he’s not gonna do so in peace. It’s the same principle with weed. You can’t steal someone else’s livelihood unless you’re very powerful.
The Bekir Boys listened when The Egyptian first pitched the idea of an alliance. Back when I was a teenager, The Egyptian and I were friends. The main issue with him was he considered himself the godfather of all the suburban ghettos. He also wanted his gang to eventually surpass the Bekir Boys. This level of ambition didn’t sit well with Bekir.
The Egyptian was too extreme. He wanted to be stronger than the guys from the city. Dealing with the guys from the city automatically involves the bikers, so we would have to fight them too. We didn’t want to engage in all of that. Sure, we were doing things like running our own debt-collecting businesses, coming up with extortion schemes, and selling marijuana. But we also wanted to do so without sparking an unnecessary conflict. It seemed like The Egyptian had the intention of starting wars, and that seemed counterproductive to us.
The Egyptian was furious when my crew and the Bekir Boys both balked at consolidating our forces. Eventually, he and his boys contacted me and demanded a straight answer. We met at our clubhouse and had a discussion to clear the air . . . at least, that was the hope.
“Are you with us in this war?” The Egyptian asked.
I told him I didn’t know who sided with whom in these wars he was planning to jump into headfirst without any real forethought. I told him that we got on well with some of the guys from the city and that we didn’t want to destroy those relationships.
The Egyptian claimed that I had been brainwashed by the enemy and that I was planning to kill him. He pulled out his gun and placed it on the table in front of me.
I told him that if he didn’t put that gun away, I would shove it up his ass. He was a guest at our clubhouse, and he had better show some respect. In the end, we had to kick him out and tell him that he must be out his fuckin’ mind if he thought we had been paid to kill him. Shortly after this meeting, the hostility between my crew and The Egyptian escalated.
The following case illustrates how often completely different people somehow end up in financial or moral debt to one another in the criminal underworld. In The Egyptian’s ghetto, a group of immigrant boys stole the equivalent of $4,500 in Danish Krone from a Danish man. The boys believed he had been dealing drugs on their turf. This man happened to know a biker, whom he asked for help. The biker refused to get directly involved but recommended Hedgehog.
Hedgehog was a family man who, most of the time, led a law-abiding life. However, he had a weakness for easy money, which he usually made from dealing cocaine. After he befriended me, he often asked me for help in various business matters. When Hedgehog was tasked with retrieving the $4,500, he asked me for help.
I knew the guys who had stolen the money belonged to The Egyptian’s gang. Instead of calling them, I went over their heads and called The Egyptian directly, even though we were on bad terms at the time. Just to mock me, he told me to talk to the kids instead.
“Oh, so your little soldiers are in charge now?” I asked.
The Egyptian put one of the boys on the phone. “If you want the money, then come and get it,” the kid said.
“Oh, I’m coming.”
The complicated nature of my relationship with Bekir played heavily in this affair. I refused to go unarmed, so I tracked down Bekir in Copenhagen to ask him for a gun. He was at the gym with a mutual friend.
I said, “You have to help me get a gun. I have a problem with The Egyptian that needs solving. I’m gonna fuck him up. I have to go to his hood and get some money from him. Any of you wanna join me?”
“You’re not getting a gun, and nobody’s coming with you. We’re not going to war with The Egyptian,” Bekir answered.
“Fuck you. If you don’t wanna help, don’t. Anyone else wanna come?” I asked again.
“Let me talk to the Egyptian. I know him,” one of the other guys said.
“Okay. Talk to him.” But I quickly changed my mind. I wanted to leave right away. In my haste, I didn’t even think to arm myself first.
I didn’t drive just any car to meet The Egyptian. I rolled right into the heart of his turf in my Jaguar. I knew that I was playing with fire, but I was known for daring where others hesitated. What I failed to realize at the time was that I was driving straight into an ambush.
Three of my people followed in a car behind me, but when I arrived in The Egyptian’s territory, I didn’t bother to wait for him. I parked my Jaguar and walked straight into the heart of an unfamiliar ghetto. A group of masked men were waiting for me. I saw about forty guys with The Egyptian out in front. I walked right up to him and patted him on his stomach because everyone knew that he was always strapped.
“Are you packing?” I asked.
“What are you doing here?”
The Egyptian put his hand on his stomach and took a step back. From one of the rooftops, someone shouted, “Shoot them! Shoot them!”
Luckily, my people managed to catch up to me. The one who had the presence of mind to bring a weapon along was armed with a machine gun. He immediately opened fire at the rooftops where The Egyptian had positioned his soldiers. They fired back, aiming at me. At first, I refused to retreat because I thought they were firing tear gas at us.
“What the hell are you doing? They’re shooting live rounds! Run! They’re trying to kill you!” one of my boys shouted at me.
I didn’t know where to run. I had never been there before. If I ran blindly, I would get shot, so I sought shelter underneath a canopy roof. I knew I had to get back to my car, but I was surrounded.
My boy with the machine gun grabbed me up and got me to safety, then covered our hasty escape by continuing to fire his machine gun at the rooftop where The Egyptian’s shooters were taking cover. We all managed to make it back to the cars, but now we had to drive out of The Egyptian’s territory unscathed. This included having to drive under a couple of bridges on the way out. The Egyptian had shooters situated on the bridges who fired on us from above as we sped out of the ghetto. One of us got hit by the gunfire and nearly died. He was one of Bekir’s Boys who had actually come to help. He quit the game after that day. The second we arrived back in Askerød, some of The Egyptians rolled in behind us, guns blazing. Gunfire was exchanged, but no one was injured, and everyone adhered to the code of the streets.
Once again, Bekir had proved a hard man to figure out. He had refused to help me because he didn’t want to go to war with The Egyptian, but he had allowed one of his soldiers to ride into The Egyptian’s ghetto with me.
That wasn’t the end of it. The Egyptians had attempted to kill me because they suspected me of siding with their enemies. Mind you, I wasn’t even personally involved in the case about the $4,500. The underlying issue was that Hedgehog had ties to the bikers and Black Cobra, so in the eyes of the Egyptians, I was in league with both gangs in their fight against the Egyptians.
The fight over the $4,500 (30,000 DKK) led the Egyptians to target Hedgehog. One day when he wasn’t at home, they went to the house where he lived with his wife and children. They called him from inside the house and demanded a six-figure sum as payment for choosing the wrong side in the conflict. From that day forward, I became the protector of Hedgehog and his family. I risked my life for them, and Hedgehog will never forget how far I went to protect my friend.
Whenever people were in trouble, they called me. They were never my problems, but I didn’t care about the danger.
Hedgehog had some trouble with some immigrant dudes who extorted him because one of his friends sold weed on their turf. There was no point in going after the dealer ’cause he had no money. Hedgehog had a house, a business, and drove a Harley, so they told him to pay them. My dumbass went out there and fought his battle, and it nearly cost me my life.
Not everybody saw me as a hero. They thought I put myself and my people into a bad situation to help a friend, which led to a misunderstanding that made myself vulnerable. If anyone had wanted to spread rumors about my affiliations, the timing would have been just right to sow seeds of discord.
In any case, the dream of one great, organized suburban gang that could directly compete with both the older, larger, more established gangs in the city and the various biker gangs, was laid to rest once and for all. However, The Egyptian ultimately got his wish of waging war.