One night in January 2007, I was at a club across from Tivoli in Copenhagen with Kira and her best friend, Tina. Normally, I can drink quite a bit, but that night, for some odd reason, I was blind drunk after just one drink. Next thing I knew, I was in the bathroom, where a fellow immigrant and a gigantic guy were offering me cocaine.
The club was dark and jam-packed. In the bathroom, it was light, less crowded, and less noisy. Perhaps that’s why I remember this detail. It was a strange duo. One of them was a huge, pale, Danish-looking guy, while the other one was short, sturdy, and dark-haired. They were both elegantly dressed in all white. It was all very strange.
I turned down their offer, but they kept insisting I have some. They kept on pushing until we got into a fight. When I came out of the bathroom, I ran into Samir’s little brother, Zaki. He asked me if I needed help, which made me even more suspicious. He was my enemy, and how did he know what had just happened in the bathroom?
I went over to Kira and Tina and told them, “We have to get out of here.”
We all walked toward City Hall Square and turned a corner to get to where the car was parked. On the way, Tina wanted a burger at McDonald’s. A narrow alleyway lead into this McDonald’s, but when we tried the door, it was locked. When I turned around, I was standing face-to-face with the same dark-haired guy from the bathroom.
I wasn’t waiting for him to move, so I attacked him to gain the upper hand. Just then, three hooded men came running toward him and tackled me like I was the quarterback still holding the ball. I was now on the ground, and even more men showed up out of the night. About ten guys were now stomping on me relentlessly.
“Don’t kick him in the head! You’re gonna kill him!” Tina yelled, ran over, and threw herself down to cover me. She made sure to protect my face with her thigh so no one would kick me in the face.
After Tina jumped to my aid, the battering ceased. I was lying on the ground unconscious while Tina was making futile efforts to wake me up. One of my own attackers had reservations about jumping me and returned to the scene. He attempted to get me to come too. When I woke up, I thought he was still beating me. His face was just inches away from mine, so I grabbed him by the ears and pulled him down so I could headbutt him until his blood was pouring down on me.
“I’m trying to help you!” he yelled. The reluctant attacker got up and ran away.
We ultimately ended at Glostrup Hospital, where Kira and Tina insisted that I should be checked for internal bleeding. Physically, I was fine, but there was something I couldn’t quite put my finger on that began to trouble me. There was no doubt in my mind the entire ambush was planned, but by who and did my own people help set me up?
I began to wonder if my relationship with my friends and my crew had become so strained that they were the ones who had ordered the girls to drug me and hired the other guys to beat me up. And if so, who made the call to whom?
I wasn’t sure if the guys I considered my friends were in fact my enemies. After that, my old friends also started questioning who I really was. They overheard a phone conversation I had with my bank and misinterpreted it to mean that I had made $435,000 selling my house. They refused to believe that the outstanding mortgage had to be repaid. They thought I had hidden something from them, and I had way more money than I did. When they started accusing me of these things, I thought: Who the hell do they think I am?
The incident at the club made me see things in a different light. I used to be close to Samir, Bekir, and The Egyptian, but now they had all become my enemies. My oldest and closest friends mistrusted me, and in return, I suspected them all of trying to bring about my downfall without even knowing if any of them were truly to blame.
I had always considered my friendships as something bigger and stronger than other people’s friendships because we fought together as soldiers and risked our lives for one another. It had always been us against the world, us against the system, us against the Danes, us against the racists, us against xenophobia. Now even these friendships were crumbling. “One for all and all for one” had turned into “All against all and nobody for anybody.” Love had turned to hate. Even Jamil, whom I considered to be a little brother, had slipped out of my life, and I didn’t even know why.
They tried to make bad blood between Jamil and me so they could isolate me from the group. How did they do that? By telling Jamil that I was living a double life. That I was a multimillionaire, that I was betraying them for Hells Angels, and I didn’t care about the group.
I felt it happen, but I still hoped that some of them had love for me. But none of them did because nobody really loves anybody in that world. On the streets, there’s no real love. There are friendships based on mutual interests, but when those interests are no longer aligned, then the friendships disappear. They wanted me to go to war and kill Samir or Samir to kill me because that way they could get rid of us both. If I died, then the other boys won because Samir would be in jail. And if Samir died, the boys still won, because then I would be in jail. That was how cruel and cunning they were.
On the periphery of my group, there was a young man they called The Bornholmer because he hailed from the small island next to Sweden where the sun always shines. He was a weak and deeply indebted man who was always desperately short of money. He was trying to distance himself from the group, and I decided that this merited a punishment. The Bornholmer was running his own business on Christiania and didn’t include the group, and I decided he should pay before he left us. So, when he told me that if only, he had $7,000 in his pocket, he could produce something worth $14,000 in two weeks’ time, I gave him the money knowing there was no chance he would be able to repay it. I added a special condition: if he wasn’t able to double the investment, his debt would balloon to $70,000 (461,275 DKK).
He fell right into the trap. As I had expected him to do, The Bornholmer failed to fulfill his obligations. This led to me and my associates Omar and Baasim chasing him around Copenhagen. He gave us the slip a couple of times, but one day, we caught up to him. Someone intervened, so he was able to evade us again. He obeyed the code of the streets and didn’t report to the police that we were after him.
We drove out to see one of The Bornholmer’s gang-related friends, who was going to tell us where he was hiding out. The friend pretended to help, but he gave us the runaround. While I can respect him not snitching, he was in the way of us handling our business.
I punched and stomped on The Bornholmer’s friend in hopes he’d reveal his whereabouts. Mid-punishment, I noticed I was the only one putting in work and demanded the other two guys get their hands dirty as well. They hesitated because they usually left the bloody work to me. But this time, I wasn’t having it..
They resented me for forcing them to get their hands dirty too because I always had to do the heavy lifting. 1 was always suspected of being involved in every crime, even when I had nothing to do with it and everyone else either got to avoid suspicion or benefit from my handiwork. They wanted the money, but they also wanted to appear innocent when it came to the violence. They couldn’t have it both ways anymore.
My own friends began to fear me. They thought to themselves, if he’s capable of those things, then what will he do to us if we get on his bad side?