When Sleiman stabbed Samir, he crossed a line that swept Hundige up in a tornado of evil that continues to wreak havoc to this very day. In Politiken’s library, nearly four hundred newspaper articles have been published about the conflict between Bloodz and Black Cobra in the span of a decade, not to mention the thousands of articles posted online about the same gang war.
“It’s possible that there’ll always be a whiff of crime surrounding me. After all, I’m from the ditch. I’m from Askerød; I’m from The Scrub House, The Ditch House, The Dam House, The Pond House; I’m from the undergrowth. I grew up in a place named after shrubbery and ditches, and I’ll never be able to wash that out of my veins, my blood, or my sweat. It’s where I was shaped, where I was molded. Askerød was where I was destroyed, but it was also where I became a person and a man. That’s why I have chosen not to leave it. And I’m proud that I’m still there. I’m proud that I put up a fight instead of running away.”
Sleiman talks to people who belong to criminal groups, and if anybody thinks that prisoners in Denmark are cut off from contact with the outside world, they can think again. Sleiman is in constant communication with friends on the inside. They call him, and he calls them. If they’re in trouble, he tries to help. In order to get by in the joint, you need friends on the outside.
Right now, two of his closest friends, Hedgehog and Pepe, are behind bars, and they each still have plenty of years left to their sentences. Hedgehog is still haunted by the same group who tried to squeeze money out of Sleiman for the business with the car. The blackmailers say that if they can’t get the money from Sleiman, they’ll have to get it from him.
Sleiman once said that if they go after Hedgehog, they’ll have to go through him first. It sounds more like the guy who wishes to pay at the counter but refuses to take his wallet out of his pocket as opposed to a man turning over a new leaf.
“I can’t turn my back on a friend who’s in jail for seven years and another who’s in for twelve and now a third who’s in for ten. I have my family and a small number of people whom I love, and I will do anything to protect them.”
It has been six years since Sleiman was last convicted for a felony. He doesn’t wish to comment on it further, but after having talked to several other sources, it’s clear that he has still found himself on the wrong side of the law on several occasions during those years. As mentioned earlier, the police encouraged him in as late as 2012 to wear a bulletproof vest everywhere he went. Meanwhile, there’s nothing to suggest that he has been criminally active the last three years.
He says, “I’m no longer active, but there’s a risk I might end up in a situation where I’ll be forced to defend myself. And I will. There are people out there who think you’re weak when you’re not a member of a group, and they’re trying to take advantage of that.”
Is it possible to speak with two tongues and still tell the truth? Sleiman is a man who tries. He tries to hang on to his old world and leave it at the same time. Once in a while, he speaks so fondly of the bond he shared with his brothers that one begins to suspect he might return to the fold if invited.
“The streets took me in. When nobody else wanted me and all my flaws, the streets embraced me. They embraced me as a whole human being, an ugly one, an imperfect one, but a human being, nonetheless. While other people said, ‘Monster,’ and ‘Beyond repair,’ the streets said, ‘Welcome, brother.’
“I have spent my entire life searching for love, and I never found it in the environment I was living in. I found it through Anna, through Kira, through Birger, through my family, through Jesper, in my relationships with the people who have somehow met me with honest intentions. Through them, I found love, but from all the people I expected to receive love, all I got was hatred, and a lot of the people who expected love from me got hatred as well. I was not an evil child, and I was not an evil person when I came to the streets. But I turned into one. My friends weren’t evil kids or evil people when they came, but instead, we became evil.”
The burden of responsibility lies with Sleiman and his friends. In Sleiman’s eyes, the fathers in the ghettos bear some of the responsibility. Many fathers and some families were simply too weak to stop the young men, while others participated in and incited the war. Far too many merely looked on with glee and did nothing, and their sons became gang members and criminals.
Sleiman says, “They did nothing to stop us when we chose the path of blood. There’s an old Arab saying that goes, ‘When you see someone else’s misfortune, your own troubles seem much lighter because now you have someone to point fingers at.’ And evil thrives when good men do nothing.”
Sleiman doesn’t claim that it is all society’s fault. He’s also well aware that it would be public suicide for a man with his track record to say so. Yet he insists on his right to criticize. Society was to blame for some of the things that happened. He insists that the Hansen family would’ve received more help than the Sleiman family did when the family arrived in Askerød and his father had tried to murder his mother and sister. He insists that his mother was a woman but was treated as a foreign woman while he and his sisters were treated as foreign children, and this resulted in poorer treatment. He also insists that what happened to him and his friends also happened in the other large ghettos in Århus, Odense, and Copenhagen.
“I turned to violence because I grew up in a society, in a ghetto, where violence was the only thing people understood. If I had grown up in a local community where the influential people were academics, doctors, and lawyers, I would have become an academic. But I grew up among criminals, among thieves, among hustlers, among people who blackmail other people. I’m not saying it’s society’s fault, but I’m a product of that. I’m not a product of Palestine. I don’t know Palestine. I’m not a product of my mother and father’s escape from Lebanon. I’m a product of Denmark.”
“I’ve just tried to describe how a normal boy can become a serious criminal and how a father’s violence and a father’s hardships in a new country, a new society, while having to learn a new language, can end in tragedy for that society and for his family. I hope the young people of Askerød and other ghettos will read this book and ask themselves if they’re on their way to wasting their lives like I wasted mine.
“I hope they understand that they shouldn’t follow the Sleimans or the Bekirs of their world because that road only leads to defeat for everybody. None of the guys I grew up with are happy today. The same goes for me. Some of us are still locked up. Some have killed people, and some of us have to constantly look over our shoulders because we’re scared that someone will sneak up and shoot us in the back. None of us will ever really be free.”
So, does Sleiman regret the life he has led? Yes and no.
“I regret a lot of my actions, but they’re also the things that made me the man I am today. And I can’t regret who I am. I can’t regret my own life. I’m still the same person. I’m just trying to be a better version of myself.” Now Sleiman will tell the rest in his own words.