In the middle of December 2010, a royal-blue, armored BMW was headed down the highway toward Askerød containing Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen. He had a lot on his mind: lousy opinion polls, constant meetings with the opposition, and an American ambassador who thought it unlikely that Rasmussen could make a comeback on the international scene after the disappointing outcome of the climate summit the previous year. When he had given his inaugural speech earlier in 2010, he had spoken of twenty-nine ghetto holes on the map of Denmark. Askerød was designated as one of these holes, and the residents were furious.
After the speech, Rasmussen went on a trip to Askerød to meet the inhabitants of a place he’d just publicly derided.
When the Danish prime minister and his escort of bodyguards stepped out of their cars and into the mud of the construction site in front of what used to be our clubhouse, the boys could hardly believe their eyes, as most people had no clue the prime minister was visiting that day. Was he lost?
The boys in the community showed him around Askerød and Jamil took point. When the prime minister visited Askerød, nobody, except the other boys, knew that twenty-five-year-old Jamil held a prominent position in Bloodz.
In the basement of the clubhouse, Lars spoke to the young men, and Jamil told him about his life. He told the Prime Minister that he owed the state $225,000 for robberies, vandalism, and other related infractions, but now he had a job as a kindergarten teacher.
Jamil told Lars Løkke Rasmussen about when he was seven, he was a soldier for Saddam Hussein. When his mother heard they wanted him to join Saddam’s personal guard, she didn’t like the idea, so she fled Iraq. That’s when his family arrived in Denmark.
“‘What happened then?’
Next Jamil relayed the story about how his dad stabbed his mom because he wanted all her money. He was then kidnapped by his father and for two years, no one in Denmark even knew where he was. Ultimately, his mother went on a mission to track him down and brought him back to Denmark at age eleven. However, by the age of fourteen he'd dropped out of school due to the lure of the streets and fast money.
Fifteen days later, the very same Jamil would play an important part in what might be considered the greatest tragedy in the history of Bloodz and Askerød so far.
When I was expurgated from Bloodz, his new and close friend Pepe was next in the line of succession, and the other members respected him because he was smart.
Pepe was no altar boy, but he wasn’t a serious criminal either. Pepee and Lefty are couple of years younger than me and belonged to the same generation as Jamil. Jamil and Pepe grew up in the same building and had been friends since they were kids.
Pepe was also there the night we had Bloodz tattooed on ourselves. His intentions were good, but Pepe suffered from the same problem as I did. He didn’t want people to be at war anymore, but for them to still have the freedom to be criminals. We wanted to steer the younger boys away from crime, but we’d been criminals for so long, we had no idea how to live on the other side of the tracks. Sure we all wanted to put an end to the war, but in our eyes, general criminal activity was almost a legitimate business in and of itself.
It was impossible to separate the war from the crime, and suddenly, Pepe found himself in a serious conflict with one of the other members. He got the feeling that Bekir somehow orchestrated the conflict. Shortly afterward, he gave up his ambition to be a positive influence in Askerød. He felt that his life was in imminent danger and decided to quit Bloodz altogether once the gang began gearing up for war against myself and Karim.
Pepe’s family knew Karim’s family from Lebanon. They stayed in the same refugee camp, and his dad loves Karim. Pepe’s dad was upset when he fell out with Karim and I, and it got to a point where his dad told him he was in the wrong and gave him an ultimatum: Either you choose your family, or you choose the shit you’re in now.
Pepe subsequently tried to steer the young boys away from crime and Bekir. But he also bad-mouthed Bekir behind his back, and that backfired on him. “I truly believed I could get that man out of the picture and slowly turn our town into something good,” he says.
Pepe also made peace with Black Cobra, resulting in threats against his family. His little brother was accosted, and hooded men assembled in front of his parents’ home. The fact that Karim had been shot also frightened him, so in order to avoid a similar fate, Pepe decided to move away from Hundige with his wife. It got to a point where he told people that he didn’t want to do it anymore. He simply didn’t want to start shooting guys he used to hang out with and risk them shooting him in return.
But the persecution did not stop. On several occasions, members of Bloodz got a hold of him, and Jamil was among the guys who were after him.
Pepe was living with his wife, and we started talking because he thought the persecution he was being subjected to was similar to what I’d been through. We became close again, but things just got harder and harder. Pepe was told that people were waiting for him outside his house. They had caught his little brother and tried to threaten him into telling them where Pepe was. They told him he was a traitor. They always rolled up in big groups, and Pepe was always alone.
After that, Pepe saw no other option available than to arm himself for protection. Pepe had his gun on him on December 30, 2010, when he went to get a haircut at a barbershop in Copenhagen where he was a regular customer. The salon was completely empty, yet the hairdresser told him that he didn’t have time for him and that he should come back the next day at 1:00 p.m. Pepe thought it strange, but he didn’t analyze the situation any further and left.
The next day, he returned with two of his friends. They parked right in front of the barbershop and went inside. Jamil was waiting with about eight other members of Bloodz and several other guys from a different gang. Pepe had barely set his foot in the door before Jamil punched him hard in the face twice.
Pepe had no idea what to do. Imagine walking into a place and realizing that it’s filled with people who want to kill you? Once Pepe heard them say ‘You’re coming with us.’ He knew what that meant. He was going to disappear from the face of the Earth, and his mom and dad would never know how it happened. He said, ‘No, I’m sick of this.’
They jumped him. Pepe pushed them away and grabbed his gun but suffered some blows to the head as they tried disarming him. He dashed out of the salon towards his car. One of his friends was with him, so they got in the car and tried to drive off, but the engine kept stalling. The men then ran out of the barbershop, caught up to them and started kicking the idle car while they shouted.
Next, they pried open the passenger side door and grabbed his friend and used him as a human shield so if Pepe took a shot, it would go through him. Pepe was cornered, and knew they had guns in their cars. He couldn’t use his car to escape anymore, so instead, he got out and ran away since luckily none of them went to get their guns out of their cars while he was trapped.
Pepe didn’t just run away: he shot four times into the crowd of pursuers as he ran to ensure he got clear. Aside from the guys from Bloodz, other people had joined the crowd outside. One of them was twenty-eight-year-old Ali Mohsen, a regular guy with a family who was just there for a haircut. He never made it inside. One of the bullets penetrated his left eye, went through his head, and out the back of his skull. He died instantly.
Pepe fled the scene. He ran down Vesterbrogade, a main street in Copenhagen that doubles as a shopping district, and into a backyard, where he dropped his gun in a dumpster. Shortly afterward, he was arrested by the police as he walked down the opposite side of Vesterbrogade.
On March 22, 2012, fifteen months after Ali Mohsen was killed in front of the barbershop. In Glostrup Court, closing arguments in the trial against Pepe were made, who was charged with manslaughter and faced fourteen years in prison. During the trial, he told the court he feared for his life. The press has covered the story extensively.
During the trial, the victim was described as a man who had nothing to do with the ambush. Meanwhile, the question of his connection to the assault has never been solved. Why, for instance, was he standing in the front line? A man who had absolutely no connection to the incident should’ve kept his distance when it looked like a bunch of men were trying to kill another one in public.
Pepe also relates how the members of Bloodz were furious to hear that he had made peace with Black Cobra. During the trial, Jamil admitted, “We’re not very happy about it when people try to leave Bloodz.”
Pepe has now been in prison for fifteen months and has lost forty-five pounds. It’s hard to recognize the once muscular young man as he sits there, a shell of his former self, while his defense attorney, Michael Juul Erichsen, demands his release.
In his opinion, there is no doubt that Jamil and the other members of Bloodz were there to do Pepe harm and Bekir was lurking somewhere in the back of it all.
Five days later, High Court Judge Jette Marie Sonne steps in to pronounce the sentence. In a way, she speaks in favor of the defense, for the court has no doubt that Pepe’s life was, in fact, in danger. Based on the evidence presented, the court takes into consideration that the accused, during the months leading up to December 31, 2010, attempted to resign from Bloodz. In this connection, the accused had made peace with Black Cobra and notified the police’s gang unit about his plans. The accused knew from his time in the gang and others who had left the group that the other members considered making peace with Black Cobra an act of betrayal. The court, therefore, maintained that the accused had a well-founded reason to fear for his life during the months leading up to the shooting.
But that was only a consolation. Even though it was a dissenting judgment because one judge and one juror didn’t believe that Pepe intended to kill, nor that he was aiming at anyone in particular when he shot his gun, the majority was of the opinion “that the accused must have realized the probability of his shots hitting one or several of the people standing on the sidewalk with the possibility of the shots being fatal.”
The court didn’t find sufficient evidence to support a claim for self-defense either. Furthermore, the parliament passed a bill in 2009 stating that a sentence may be doubled if the crime happens in connection with a gang-related showdown. This also applies if someone is carrying firearms in the street and has connections to the gang world. The law does not apply directly in Pepe’s case, but it does encumber his ability to claim self-defense.
The court sentenced twenty-six-year-old Pepe to twelve years in prison.
One would expect Pepe to be filled with a thirst for revenge and hatred toward his childhood friend Jamil, but that’s not the case. Despite all the crimes Jamil has committed, and the fact that Jamil hunted him down and might possibly have wanted him dead, Pepe still regards him as a man with a big heart. Jamil was just seduced by Bekir and the end result was incarceration. The vicious cycle of violence, death and jail time followed so many of us Arab immigrants in Denmark.