Lefty was five years younger than I was. He grew up in Hundige but was never a part of the criminal underworld. All of that changed one day when he was wounded and almost killed in a confrontation with members of Black Cobra. He immediately joined the Bekir Boys, even though he was from Gersager Park.
Lefty was a former military sergeant, but he quickly transformed into a skilled swindler. He worked with fraud in general but specialized in tax fraud because there’s a lot of money to be made in that department, and the sentences are pretty light. Lefty, has now long since left the gang scene behind.
It took him a long time to get there, though. Lefty teamed up with me when he and Pepe were wanted by the police and needed to lie low.
One thing my new crew all had in common was all seven of us felt the need to distance ourselves from Bekir. We never liked the fact that the media called us the Bekir Boys, and the only way to get rid of that name was to come up with a new one. I decided on Bloodz. The message to Bekir was simple: you don’t define us, we’re not under you, and we don’t need you.
Bloodz was a brotherhood. The name was a reference to the guys who had shed blood for one another in the same conflict. We were blood brothers. We wanted to liberate ourselves and just live. If Black Cobra wanted to fight us, it would be because of us and no longer because of Bekir. If they wanted peace, we were ready to make peace.
That said, Bloodz wasn’t solely founded on a noble vision of confronting the sins of the past, and the name didn’t exactly promote peace, love, and harmony to the general public. We didn’t immediately desire to abandon our criminal endeavors. We were just free and independent of Bekir with no obligation to do anything on his behalf or to cut him in on anything we did.
As long as we were busy fighting one another, we didn’t make money, and when we didn’t have money, we didn’t have wisdom. ’Cause with money comes a new form of understanding. When you’ve got money in your pockets and you’re able to buy stuff, you begin to learn a few things about life. I wanted nice clothes, a house, a car, and to grow as a person, even though I was a criminal. But as long as your general keeps you hungry, you’re only concerned about making ends meet. As long as Bekir kept us in that mindset, we were never gonna be anything but failures.
I wanted Erion, Argon, Omar, and Bassim all to join our ranks, but there was one requirement you had to meet in order to become a member of Bloodz. To confirm your membership, you needed to do it with a tattooed signature on your skin. They all declined to join, and it hurt me, but I made this a requirement because I was done being a part of so-called brotherhoods where I was always doing the overwhelming amount of dirt and the rest of the crew was benefiting from the reputation, I had built for us.
Bassim and Omar were smart and really tight. They didn’t mind violence as long as they weren’t the ones getting their hands dirty. So, I told them, “If you’re gonna be a part of this, you have to pay, same as the rest of us. You have to get a tattoo. Then you’ll be a part of all for one and one for all.” They didn’t want to go through with it.
Some of them also felt that I was initiating war with the guy who had given them security and an identity. Not choosing sides early on seemed like a sensible thing to do. However, the time may come where you’ll need to change your allegiances.
One night in early 2008, Pepe, Lefty, myself, and four other guys went to Tattoo Joe’s in Copenhagen and got our Bloodz tattoos. I opted to get mine placed on my wrist. Bloodz don’t have an official leader, but I was a founding member and the most infamous one. Eventually, the Danish gang underworld took notice, as did the Danish authorities. According to them, I was now the head of his own gang at twenty-five years old.
When Bloodz first surfaced, everyone in the criminal underworld knew about it. We were among the first to actually name their gang. Back in the day, that was considered corny and wannabe American. It wasn’t how we did things in Denmark. The ones who claimed to be members of a gang were just punks. But suddenly, you had these grown men who all had Bloodz tattoos and just went all fuckin’ in. Other criminals were intimidated by this, but eventually, everyone else copied us.
The name Bloodz may have referred more to blood brothers than bloodshed, but it sounded hard, and it legitimized the adoption of the Los Angeles gang culture. A crucial part of warfare is to brand yourself as someone who’s capable of extreme violence, and it’s easier to create that kind of aura around a gang. And the media fanned the flames. Now you had Black Cobra and Bloodz, for the media it was even easier to frame the immigrant gangs in Denmark being equally as dangerous as the bikers.
Others just shook their heads in disbelief at the news of Bloodz breaking from their former affiliation. Bekir was dead certain Bloodz couldn’t make it without him.
In early 2008, Bloodz had already presented a united front, made money on debt collections and theft, and we had fun doing it. We went clubbing together, partied, and relished our independence and growing reputation surrounding the name.
I had the best connections in the marijuana scene in Christiania, and I was also the best at innovating new ways of doing business. I temporarily got myself an apartment close to Blågård’s Square, smack dab in the heart of Copenhagen gangland. Bloodz wouldn’t dream of operating there, but we hung out with all the heavyweights from the area. Meanwhile, the gang grew, and throughout 2008, more and more guys could be seen with Bloodz tattoos.
Bloodz’s first test actually came at the hands of a financial dispute and a power struggle with Bekir.
I made $55,000 selling a Mercedes to Hedgehog. Discord had already begun to rear its ugly head within the gang. A gang without capital is like a company without capital. You’re unable to pay cash or purchase in bulk, and you can’t expect credit or discounts in return. Some members felt that $55,000 belonged to Bloodz, but since it was was my sale, it was my money. I was through with being the only one who contributed while others just profited from my work.
A couple of the other members pulled off a heist, but the original idea to pull it off came from Bekir. They stole $45,000 worth of goods, but Bekir felt entitled to a cut because it was his idea. They tried to avoid a direct confrontation with Bekir and asked me to stash the goods for them so they didn’t need to involve him.
“‘Don’t you fuckin’ do that! Don’t give him any money! Just because he came up with the plan doesn’t mean it’s his money. It’s your money. Don’t give him a dime!’ I said.
I was adamant that Bloodz had to be independent from Bekir, so I agreed to hide the stolen merchandise as some members wanted to compensate him to avoid a confrontation. This pissed me off.
They wanted to give Bekir 50,000 DKK ($7,600). I don’t know what they were scared of. He hadn’t done shit but scream and shout for the last twelve years. They thought I was stirring shit up again, and in a way, they were right. I did try to cause controversy between him and us because the guys weren’t ready to cut the umbilical cord yet. They still depended on him, but I was dead set on keeping him out of our business. I didn’t have any plan for how to wean ourselves off Bekir, but I was more than ready to make one if I had to.
In September 2008, I went on a short trip to Flensburg, Germany. I had a friend who had ties to one of the biker gangs. He was an errand boy for one of the heavyweights and was possibly on his way to becoming a full-patch member. We went with this biker they called Stepdad. It was more pleasure than business. We wanted to expand our circle of friends a little, visit a few strip clubs, and party.
We ended up at a fancy apartment with two other biker gang members. While they were drinking, one of the bikers explained how he used to fight other bikers to gain recognition and eventually membership. Later, we all went to a high-class brothel where they showered, put on bathrobes, and each picked a girl on the bikers’ dime. I wasn’t in the mood to put myself in a position to possibly be ambushed again, so I just waited for the others to finish. When they came out, we all went to a bar, where we partied with a group of girls. I went back home the next day.
When I got back to Askerød, I met up with a couple of the other Bloodz, who accused me of running my own side business, spending too much time with biker gangs, and associating with Black Cobra. According to them, I hadn’t been a team player, but I could make things right by investing more money in Bloodz. I had to have some money left from the sale of my house and my Mercedes. They accused me of being greedy, but I accused them of the same sin. If I had to invest money, so did they. They had just made $45,000 on the heist idea they had stolen from Bekir!
At the same time, the old Bekir Boys and the newly tattooed Bloodz members were beginning to merge into a united crew without me. No one said anything, but slowly, I was being phased out of the same gang I had founded.
The day I came back from Germany, we had a direct confrontation at one of Askerød’s shared laundry rooms. I was being accused of swindling them. They had been working a debt collection case, but once they found the slow payers, the debt had already been settled. The other members of Bloodz were convinced that I had pocketed the reward without telling any of them.
“Don’t lie to us, Sleiman!” Baasim said.
An argument began that resulted in several Bloodz members’ hands reaching for their waists as if they were going for their guns. That really set me off.
“Oh, so that’s how this is gonna play! Give me a minute while I go grab something really quick. Then we can settle this once and for all,” I said as I went to go get a weapon.
When I returned, they were all gone. “We didn’t mean it like that,” they said on the phone later when my brother-in-law Karim called them up to hear what the problem was.
“How did you mean it, then?” he asked.
“Chill, Karim. Tell him we’ll always be there for him when he needs us. We’ll always have each other’s backs. We’re just not gonna be doing stuff together anymore.”
After that incident, I was effectively expelled from the gang. The group I had imagined as a way to get out from under Bekir’s thumb once and for all was crumbling before my very eyes. Bekir was taking over, and at the same time, yet another rumor was spreading that I was a snitch. Was there a glitch in The Matrix?
An older lady hired me to recover $75,000 (almost 500,000 DKK) owed to her by a shady businessman. If I managed to collect the money, I would get to keep half of it. I felt pressured by my old friends who thought I was out for myself to make them aid me in the case.
“There’s gonna be no standing on the sidelines while I get my hands bloody,” I told them all.
I took the lead when we met with the businessman at the harbor in the neighboring town of Vallensbæk. He didn’t have the $75,000, but we convinced him that he had better pay us with goods from his warehouse to help settle the debt. In the end, we made off with merchandise worth about $65,000 USD.
After the goods were delivered, infighting arose among the crew. One of the participants didn’t think everyone had earned an equal share. The conflict escalated because I had a potential buyer lined up already who was willing to pay us $60,000 USD for the entire lot. The others thought we could get more than that. If they forced the guy, they had squeezed to report all the stuff stolen, they thought they could also cash in on the insurance payout. I thought that was a stupid idea. It was obvious that the loot should be sold immediately for the highest amount of money available.
Things didn’t go the way I had hoped. They decided that Baasim should stash the goods in his apartment. At the time, Baasim and I had had a falling-out, and after a couple of months where the gear didn’t move, I had had enough. We arrived at an agreement. I had to send someone else in my stead to pick up the goods at Baasim’s because we were on the outs, and I might hurt him if I saw him face-to-face.
Instead, the police beat us to it. They visited Baasim and confiscated everything in his apartment. Making things worse for him, they found a receipt he had kept as proof of the retail value of all the gear in order to get top dollar for it from a potential buyer. How exactly did Baasim get the money to buy all these electronics? They also found a gun. This was during the middle of the gang war, and illegal possession of firearms was a serious offense in Denmark.
The rumor soon spread that I was the one who had ratted Baasim out to the police as punishment for not going along with my original plan. The story seemed plausible on the surface. Everybody knew that Baasim and I were on bad terms because he only wanted to plan things and play Mafia while he left all the dirty work to me. Everybody also knew that Baasim had declined my offer to join Bloodz, providing a good collection of motives supporting me as the likely snitch.
The rumor stuck, and the gossip on the street about why I would do it finished the job. I went from being crowned the prince of the streets to being accused of violating the code, so I was kicked out of Bloodz. Not even Pepe and Lefty backed me up, and over the following months, I became a pariah.
The question I asked everyone was, “Why would I send Baasim away for only four months for possession of an illegal weapon when I could’ve had you all locked up if I wanted to?” I had been in the game for thirteen years, over half my life! I could send my entire generation of criminals to jail for years with the information I could provide. Why would I suddenly go from being the man who never cooperated with the police to snitching over something petty? It simply didn’t add up.
The rumor that I was a snitch was the worst thing that could’ve happened. I was isolated and had a target on my back. Again. Nobody was willing to defend me. Eventually, I even challenged Baasim to a duel, man to man. First, I would allow the Bloodz and Bekir Boys to interrogate me or find definitive proof that I had given Baasim up. If I was revealed to be a snitch, I would die. If Baasim was revealed to have spread false rumors, he would die. He didn’t agree to the duel, but that didn’t stop the streets from talking about me.
The snitch rumor was replaced by other ones. Suddenly, I was a Hells Angel. The next minute, I had been a secret member of Black Cobra the whole time I had been part of Bloodz. Samir and I had made a deal. We weren’t Muslim—we were Jewish, and it was all part of a Jewish scheme to break up the Palestinian community in the neighborhood. Later, they claimed I was part of the AK81 gang, charged with pointing out every immigrant that needed shooting in Copenhagen. All these rumors were baseless. That was the name of the game. It was a power struggle, and I lost. I didn’t deserve to be branded a snitch, but I knew I was playing a game with a low likelihood of a positive turnout. There’s no honor among thieves.
Even Pepe was persuaded by the rumor for a while. It wasn’t until later that he realized that it was all false. They were saying I was making exorbitant amounts of money and I was holding out on the crew. But then people started accusing me of ratting out Baasim, and when you hear something like that every day, eventually you’re gonna end up thinking there’s some truth to it. Over time, more and more of them succumbed to the lies.
Bloodz continued to operate without me. Throughout the entire conflict, Bekir lurked in the shadows. Right after I had been excommunicated, Bekir came home from one of his many trips abroad and took over. My friends who had refused to be tattooed when I had first offered them membership now suddenly lined up to become members of Bloodz. The whole gang was handed to Bekir on a silver platter, and he regained his position as the leading figure of Askerød.
My expulsion from Bloodz was also the beginning of my journey of leaving behind a life of crime. Had I won the internal power struggle, it’s unlikely I would’ve ever quit the gang life. I’m thankful this all happened to me because if they hadn’t betrayed me, I never would’ve quit, and I never would’ve realized that everything I had been fighting for all along was wrong and ultimately meant nothing.