Some may say that May 2012 was truly spring for Sleiman. When he was a kid, he won hip-hop contests in Vejle with his friend Aiman. Throughout his career as a criminal, he has often tried to make something of his music, and it has been his life’s dream for music to help him escape the world of crime. Others have also noted that he may have something that could attract a larger audience.
Sleiman recorded a couple of tracks with the hip-hop group Kaliber, who have made quite a name for themselves in the Danish underground scene and won radio station P3’s up-and-coming artist prize in 2012. Along with his friend, Kaliber member, Jesper “Livid” Helles, Sleiman writes the lyrics that are about life as a criminal and an immigrant in Denmark. Their song “Alt Det Øjet Ikke Ser” (“All the Things the Eye Doesn’t See”) was recently picked as February’s best track by the hip-hop site Det Sorte Får (The Black Sheep) and has become a hit on YouTube. For the first time in his life, Sleiman has gained respect for doing something good.
August
It is the most beautiful August evening one can imagine. Hundige is bathed in a soft, golden sunset, and seven men are driving around the streets of the residential neighborhood while shooting a music video for my new song called “Bad Boy.”
Kaliber was the hot, new name on the Danish hip-hop scene. Their song “Vest for København” (“West of Copenhagen”) now has over 5.2 million views on YouTube, they’ve enjoyed huge success on the Danish festival stages by that summer, and had a record deal with Sony. The details of the contract remain a secret, but it was the largest contract ever signed with a rap group in Denmark, allowing the members of Kaliber to live off their music. That’s the same path I dreamt of following, and suddenly, that dream wasn’t a distant fantasy.
Jesper is an intelligent man with tattooed biceps without a single ounce of fat on his body. He’s still as broad as he is tall. He earned his mass working out to fend for myself when he was living that gang life.
At the time, he wrote most of the lyrics to Kaliber’s songs, and was considered one of the promising talents on the Danish rap scene. Back when Jesper was a teenager growing up in Ballerup, west of Copenhagen, and on his way to becoming a career criminal, he heard about me.
I was already considered a legend. Every town west of Copenhagen has guys like that. I had a reputation as a brutal guy, but I was also respected because he knew how to make money. My peers viewed me as a jet-set gangster who drove big cars and went to all the fancy clubs in Copenhagen.
Jesper and I met for the first time in 2009. People had heard my music and contacted Jesper because they thought I had potential but I didn’t quite know how to improve on my own.
Jesper’s job was to make my music more accessible. My lyrics were a bit too wrapped up in clichés about the light at the end of the tunnel. Jesper told me my lyrics need to be concrete and create images in people’s minds. People need to understand my story ’cause nobody wants to hear about my struggle when they don’t know what that struggle is. I had to make songs that were concrete, relevant, and intelligent.
We recorded a song called “Alt Det Øjet Ikke Ser” together. Jesper became a role model for my life. This time, our friendship wasn’t based on a continuing criminal enterprise or a code that states we can only be true friends if we’re each prepared to take a bullet for one another when push comes to shove.
All of the members of Kaliber came from violent backgrounds. Jesper grew up in a regular family of schoolteachers and engineers, but during a teenage rebellion that lasted way longer than it should have, he became part of Ballerup’s underground. All his friends were from the streets, he didn’t have much contact with the ordinary world, and he still feels like a guest in it.
Jesper’s own attempt to escape the criminal world was a mini version of what I was trying to do. He backslid once. In 2005, after he got his first record deal, he returned to the street once that initial deal ran its course.
While I wasn’t a member of Kaliber, we shared certain commercial interests and I brought them authenticity and street credibility while they helped to develop me and aided me in improving my craft.
There was a drawback in trying to integrate me into Kaliber as they were on the way up and finally finding success. Most of Denmark at the time saw me as a man who helped brutalize and change Denmark for the worse. Even though the immigrant gangs have never achieved the same level of power as the biker gangs, from the perspective of the general public, I helped make the already pervasive gang culture in Denmark more vicious.
We came with our Middle Eastern traditions and a different approach to revenge due to our honor system. As a result, the violence became more brutal. Suddenly, there was no more man-to-man fighting in the club. Now, we rounded up all of our boys and stomped on the guy outside. Now it was all about being flashy and flamboyant, about being recognized in the streets and showing off your success in the media.
Normally, criminals try to stay under the radar, but it became more brutal and more glorified at the same time because the immigrants took pride in it. In turn, the bikers also had to escalate their level of violence to match us. This ultimately resulted in the amount of gun violence skyrocketing. I was often used as a scapegoat for this shift in culture as if I singlehandedly made it all happen as opposed to just being involved with the era.
Because of my reputation and my many enemies and detractors, Jesper initially had his doubts about letting me become too closely linked to himself and Kaliber. That made it difficult to appear as my ally.
It was a difficult situation for me, but we continued to work together as I tried to turn my life around and in the process, inspire others that seek to do the same thing. If I managed to change some people’s minds about me in the process? That would be even better.
Bekir has been the most important figure in the gang war in Askerød. Without his influence, Samir and I never clash, the boys of Gersager Park and Askerød never would’ve turned into Black Cobra and the Bekir Boys, and peace would have settled in Hundige much sooner.
At one point, he was like family to me. I called him uncle, and I looked up to him because I thought he was going to save us. I thought he would take us to new places and make our lives better. But when I got older and saw the truth, I realized that he wasn’t fighting for me. My friends and I were like a piece of barren land that no one wanted. He ripened us, and he could have sown something good and turned us into beautiful flowers that others could have enjoyed. Instead, he planted evil. Everything was about his revenge. About his attempt to make himself known as a king.
After Pepe and I both left Bloodz, Lefty stepped up and became the leader of the gang. For some time, he was wanted by the police abroad and couldn’t return to Denmark, but Bekir provided him a place to stay, and for a while, they were close. Eventually, things went south between them, and in 2011, Lefty attacked Bekir’s son and served a sentence for aggravated assault.
Bekir didn’t create me, nor did he make Samir the president of Black Cobra. Even if Samir did turn to Black Cobra to be protected from Bekir, Samir subsequently worked his way up to become the president.
His activities in the gang suggest a personal motivation for which Bekir can’t be held accountable. During the period where Samir has been the dominating figure, Black Cobra has been involved in several homicide cases, and Samir himself has multiple assault charges on his résumé. While we’re all in the shadow of Bekir, we are the architects of our own lives and build our own futures.
During the last couple of years, gang-related crime rates in Denmark have dropped slightly. The Hells Angels have been temporarily weakened because many of their leading figures have recently been incarcerated. In the meantime, Bandidos have rearmed and linked some of the immigrant groups to the gang, forcing Hells Angels to do the same. This is an example of how the process of integration within the criminal world has, sadly, proven much more successful than in the rest of society. Danish gang members and new Danish gang members are fighting one another from all sides and constantly creating new alliances. Within that space, people are waiting for the cold war between Hells Angels and Bandidos to explode into something that could become very serious. Then it will not merely be the Hells Angels at war with the Bandidos—the two biker gangs will have each of their support groups among the immigrant gangs.
During the summer, it was as if peace had settled in Hundige for a while. Perhaps it was because Bloodz had been weakened and were now without a leader. Sleiman had been ostracized, Pepe and Lefty had walked out, and apparently, Bekir had lost his status. Sleiman’s old gang is currently like a snake without a head. The gang is no longer as visible, and in Køge, where the war between Bloodz and Black Cobra claimed several lives, the two parties are apparently talking to each other.
Last summer, there was even talk of an evening meeting, with the objective of making a peace agreement between everyone in Gersager Park and Askerød. Young and old, friends and enemies, Bloodz and Black Cobras were supposed to have dinner together. Sleiman has talked vividly about how amazing such a night would be. But sadly, the meeting never came to fruition. The past has left its brutal traces in Hundige, and while a peace agreement sealed with the breaking of bread under the open summer sky is a beautiful notion, too much blood has been spilled for it to be settled with a barbecue.
Besides, there are many indications that Bandidos is slowly swallowing up Bloodz. Whether that will result in the end of the conflict or, if the homeless, leaderless Bloodz members will continue the war against Black Cobra from within Bandidos, is a question in need of answering. Small conflicts keep arising, and on August 31, things were smoldering once again. A large number of Bandidos gathered in Gersager Park, where Black Cobra still have their headquarters.
There have been several incidents since then, and the sense of peace that ruled last summer was ruined by ten to twelve gunshots on October 5. At around 10:30 p.m., the shots were fired at the clubhouse that Sleiman once helped establish and Lars Løkke Rasmussen visited back in December 2010. On October 5, shots were fired from a bridge on Anders Plougs Boulevard and from a dark BMW driving down Godsvej.
No one was injured, the police turned up with dogs to search the area, and the residents of Askerød were uncomfortable. The police couldn’t say for sure if the attack was gang-related, but according to Jensen, it appeared to be a well-staged operation.
Three days after the shooting, the clubhouse was closed. Jørgen Fahlgren, former head of the Askerød housing department and a strong advocate of the clubhouse, is sad to see it go. But there was no other way.
Things were not looking good in Askerød. The atmosphere was tense, and people fear that the young people will run wild in protest against the closing. The clubhouse didn’t close because of the shooting. It closed because unfortunately the young people in the community were so self-destructive.
In 2010, Askerød was removed from the official list of Danish ghettos, but now the area has been readded to the list. According to the new specifications, more than 50 percent of the area’s fifteen hundred residents are from non-Western countries, and the number of criminals in the neighborhood is on the rise.
On October 11—the police searched three apartments in the area looking for a group of men suspected of having stabbed a member of Black Cobra.
The Black Cobra member is thirty-four years old and from another suburb west of Copenhagen. He was filling up his tank when a dark Mercedes rolled up beside him. Several people jumped out of the car, and one of them stabbed him multiple times. Per usual, no one saw anything and no one came forward with any information regarding the crime.