Samir has never officially declared himself a member of Black Cobra. But since he was sentenced to two and half years behind bars for shooting Bekir’s nephew, a long list of news sources and magazine and newspaper articles have described him as joining Black Cobra’s fight against the Bekir Boys. The conflict between Samir and Bekir only intensified following Samir’s release from prison.
Although Samir started out wanting to avoid any association with gang life or the criminal underworld, in the end, he decided to join Black Cobra. The fact of the matter was Samir didn’t feel like he had any other choice if he wanted to protect himself from his enemies.
One hot day in July 2004, Samir came close to losing his life in a parking lot near the mall in Hundige, where at least twenty shots were fired at him from a machine gun. Samir was convinced that I was behind the attack. The police also shared his suspicions.
I was detained, and while I was in custody, Samir allegedly tried to have me killed. B.T. ran an article in 2008 with the headline “The Cobra-King: The Final Showdown,” which reproduced an alleged conversation between Samir and another member of Black Cobra who was being detained in the same facility as I was. The newspaper maintains that it obtained the recordings from the police. Samir was supposedly recorded saying: “I know he’s there. I know it, a hundred percent. Roskilde Police got him. Go for a walk at four, and see if you can find him. Keep an eye on his cell if he goes to the bathroom . . . He’s going down in there. I want you to cut him.”
Samir was right. I had been detained, but just an hour before he gave the order, the police derailed his plan by letting me go, so I avoided getting stabbed. However, it wasn’t until B.T. published the article that I found out about Samir’s assassination order.
No official suspects in the attempted assassination of Samir have been identified, but when it happened, the police immediately went looking for me. I had spent the night with friends at the clubhouse, and the police came to arrest us for suspicion of attempted murder the next morning. They had no evidence, but the circumstances pointed to me and my crew, mostly because Samir and I still had a score to settle and partly because I was part of Bekir’s crew, who had yet to get revenge for the attack on Bekir two years earlier.
However, the police’s suspicions in this particular instance were groundless. We had nothing to do with it. We had been to Nørrebro for dinner, and after that, we went to see a movie. Nevertheless, five of us were arrested on suspicion of having carried out the attack. Obviously, when the police arrest five guys, everyone will assume that one of them is guilty. The truth is they didn’t have sufficient evidence to maintain my investigative custody, so my boys were released the next day. Oddly enough, the charges against them were upheld for a year and a half.
Two days after our release, a police officer came to the club. He approached me and one of the younger Bekir Boys named Jamil and said, “You’re going to help us solve this case and put an end to this war.”
“You’ve got the wrong guy,” I said to the officer. “I’m not getting mixed up in this case, and I don’t help the police. If you need me to do your job, I’m gonna need your fuckin’ paycheck.”
“You know what, Sleiman? You’ve got a car out there, a slick BMW. It’s got a certain illegal look about it. If you don’t help us with this case, we’ll make sure your life gets really difficult.”
“Fine, pal, make our lives difficult, and then piss off.”
A couple of days later, the police made good on their threat. Sixteen officers stormed our clubhouse, where they found a sawed-off shotgun and some shells. At the same time, they paid my mother a visit and found a gun and some bullets in a room in her basement.
Hedgehog once gifted me a black BMW M5 with 507 horsepower, and I cherished that car more than anything else I had ever owned. Out of sheer frustration, the police started to employ the old Al Capone method. It had seemed impossible for them to bust my gang’s members for their other crimes, but they attempted to go after us for tax fraud and the curious fact that many of us drove cars like black BMWs and big Audis, even though we were only receiving unemployment benefits.
One day, I was walking across a parking lot with Kira when a police officer called me over to him. Meanwhile, another officer was sitting inside my car. They had pried open the lock and entered my vehicle without my consent. They told me, “You’re charged with unlawful possession of weapons.”
“What are you talking about? Weapons? I’m not armed!”
“No, but we found a gun at your mom’s place, a .45, and we’re confiscating your BMW.”
“Fuck you. Why would you do that?”
“It’s illegal, and it’s been modified to enhance the vehicle’s performance!”
After that went down, I was put on a bus. Shortly afterward, the very same police officer approached me again. He said, “I’m going to make your life really difficult. I won’t stop. I’ll keep visiting your mother, I’ll keep visiting the clubhouse, I’ll follow you everywhere until you tell us who shot Samir.”
“Are you stupid or something?” I asked him.
“You won’t be released until one of you takes the blame for these weapons. If not, we arrest your mother because the gun was found in her basement.”
I realized I was being painted into a corner and I had very few options left, so I decided to sacrifice myself. “You know what? Release my friends, then. I’ll sign a statement saying both guns are mine. Then you release the others. But I want to see that they’re released before I sign.”
The lawyers said that as long as one of the authorities signed off on everything, they would all be released. I saw all of my people walk out of the detention center free and signed a statement saying the guns were mine. After that, the officer told me that I was free to go.
I figured it was better that one of us took the fall than all of us. I took the nine-month sentence that came with signing the paper. My people all thanked me for sacrificing my freedom for theirs and doing the time for everyone else’s crime. None of those guns even belonged to me, but I was being loyal to my gang. Later, they all forgot I had stuck my neck out for them . . . again.
Just three weeks after Samir was shot, there was another standoff in the war between Black Cobra and the Bekir Boys. This time, Jamil, was the target. Everybody loved Jamil, and he had become like my little brother. I saw something in him that reminded me of myself. He had been dealt a bad hand. He was kind and full of life and innocent in a way. Sure, he was a troublemaker, but unlike some of us, he wasn’t cruel. He was still a good person. Pure inside. He seemed like he would achieve more in life than I had. But the sad reality was Jamil’s fate was headed in the same direction as mine. He had joined the rapidly escalating war, and the shots fired at Samir had to be avenged.
An attempt was made on Jamil’s life. Even though the local media intimated that Samir was behind the attack on Jamil, the attempted murder has never been solved. Within the community, no one doubted that the attack was Black Cobra’s revenge for a series of previous attacks on them.
I do think someone from our group was behind the attack on Samir, and to avoid retribution themselves, they pointed their finger at Jamil. Jamil was the new, hot-blooded kid making his way up the ranks, so he was blamed for carrying it out. The day Jamil got shot was one of the hardest days of my life. He was so happy that day. He had just gotten an Audi A3, and he was taking his girlfriend to the movies.
Jamil would come to play a central role in the gang war, and the last couple of years, he has been implicated in several serious police investigations. Back then, I wasn’t the only one who had Jamil’s back. Askerød Housing Association chairman Lone Binderup also had a soft spot for him. Like so many others in Askerød, he had been dogged by more misfortune than any young man deserves.
Jamil, his sister, and his little brother once ran through Askerød screaming, chasing after their mother, whose head had been sliced open by her ex-husband. His story is quite similar to mine. We both had violent fathers who disappeared from our lives. As a consequence, we were both forced to be the men of the family at a very early age, and deal with everything that came with taking on so much responsibility at a young age.
Jamil also developed a close relationship with Bekir.. No surprise as Bekir deliberately went after boys without fathers.
The attack on Jamil triggered a war that is still raging between the two gangs to this very day. He was only nineteen, he was popular among the young people in Askerød, and the attack on him felt like an attack on all of them. The war had gained a new generation of willing recruits, and the peace between Black Cobra and the Bekir Boys that I had originally wished for was no longer possible. It looked like Bekir had once again gotten exactly what he wanted.
After the attack on Jamil, Bekir won the boys over to his side and convinced them that Black Cobra was the enemy. I was the loser. I wanted to draw them away from Bekir, but now they were being drawn even closer to him. I could’ve just left the group. No one was forcing me to stay. But I was too weak, dug in too deep in my criminal lifestyle, and I honestly didn’t know where else to turn.
Shortly after the attacks on Samir and Jamil occurred, the frustrated police force began to resort to unconventional methods in hopes of making progress. They had no evidence, but they knew that the big players in the war were Samir, Bekir, and I, so they initiated a group mediation for us all. The police were convinced that every single incident in Askerød had something to do with the conflict between me and Samir. They thought that if only we would make up, everything would settle down. They told me that Bekir would be there too, so I agreed to come. It was my opinion that only Bekir could resolve the conflict.
The meeting was set up at the police station in Karlslunde. In the morning, the police came to pick me up. It wasn’t a question of whether I wanted to come or not. The police ordered me to go. However, when I arrived at the station, it was just me, Samir, and his brother at the mediation session. Bekir canceled on us at the last moment.
The chief superintendent, who had arranged the meeting, promised me and Samir that the police would lay off pursuing our gangs so aggressively, if we managed to make peace that day. They would put an end to the constant raids, surveillance, and persecution. Unfortunately, neither I nor Samir were willing to grant them concessions, and I refused to tell them anything out of fear that I might be accused of being a collaborator or a snitch.
The police went into this entire process knowing that none of the groups would tell them who was behind the latest shootings, but they wanted peace, and they wanted it now. They informed us that they were authorized by the local politicians to spare no effort if Samir and I refused to make peace. Despite the threats, Samir and I did nothing but scowl at each other for the duration of the meeting as if we were at a pre-prize fight weigh-in. In reality, I simply didn’t think I had the authority to make peace on behalf of the Bekir Boys. Bekir not being present was the main obstacle to reaching any peace agreement.
“Here’s what’s going to happen: You’re going to shake hands and make peace today so we can finally put an end to all this. If not, you will learn what the full force of the police is capable of,” the chief superintendent said.
“I’m not the one who doesn’t want peace,” Samir said.
“Well, it’s not me either,” I said.
“It seems like you’re the one who doesn’t want peace, Sleiman,” the chief superintendent said to me.
I was confused by this. “Why would you say that? What are you attacking me for? It might as well be them who don’t want peace,” I responded.
“So, you and your friends are not going to shoot Samir as soon as he leaves this building to avenge the attack on Jamil?” he asked me.
“No, of course not. We don’t even know who shot Jamil. Did Samir shoot Jamil?” I asked defiantly.
“No,” the chief superintendent answered.
“Then why would we take revenge on them?” I countered.
The meeting turned into a complete disaster. I was cocky that day. I didn’t have time to smoke before they picked me up, and it was so early that I wasn’t really functioning. I just needed to smoke a joint and I couldn’t, so I was pissed. It also felt wrong to be there without Bekir. In the end, the officer told me that if I took so much as one wrong step, I would have the entire police force on my back. So, I kept my mouth shut.
The war had been raging on for five years, and it had only just begun. No matter how many people were shot or stabbed or beaten over the course of our extended urban conflict, most of the cases remained unsolved.
Kurt Worsøe, who has been a local police officer in Askerød since the mid-1990s, is reluctant to provide critical information about the local criminal element. He doesn’t wish to jeopardize the confidence his sources and informants have in him. The success of his work depends on their trust. He isn’t the tough cop who investigates the shootings—he’s the one they can turn to for help. If someone is to be arrested, he calls the families. Instead of the police going to Askerød, Kurt tells the person in question to come see him, and they almost always do. He also takes care of some of their paperwork. That’s the way it has always been. At the police station, they consider it wise to have a man like Kurt, someone the young people don’t have to hide from.
That doesn’t mean he’s unaware of how bad things have been. He has a good idea what happened when I stabbed Samir, when Samir shot Bekir, and when Samir was shot in his car. He also knows more than most about what happened when Jamil was almost killed and when I was ambushed. But seeing as how most of the events haven’t led to any convictions, he keeps this information to himself, as do the other residents of Askerød.
Practically all the cases have been closed because the police have run their heads against the wall. Even when people shoot each other, they refuse to say anything, and if they do say something to the police, you can be pretty sure it’s a lie. No one wants to be a snitch.
If we do, us and our families will pay for it. If somebody snitches, someone else has an obligation to avenge it. Kurt Worsøe once told me that during the twelve years he was an officer, nobody has ever revealed anything that could be used to get someone else in trouble. Not even off the record.
Even the people in the periphery of the periphery are silent. It doesn’t matter if the police were talking to the twelve-year-olds or their grandparents, the reaction is the same: silence.