Three days ago was a typical Friday night in Berlin’s Neukölln district. A row of police cars with flashing blue lights blocked the cobbled street along the canal. Inside a cafe, police officers in bullet-proof vests questioned a 28-year-old employee about two red boxes of 9mm Luger bullets that turned up during a surprise search of the premises.
In dry, bureaucratic German, the police noted later in a statement: “The bullets could not be attributed to anyone.”
The Neukölln visit was one of nine simultaneous raids across the city that night. Over the course of eight hours, police officers visited bars, cafes and shops, seized unlicensed gambling machines and illegal drugs. Accompanying tax officials demanded to see till rolls and account books.
While Dublin has its gangland structures, Berlin – alongside the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) – is clan-land.
“Clans are playing in the same league as the mafia and we’re not talking misdemeanours: we’re talking about robbery, blackmail, right up to homicide,” said Herbert Reul, state interior minister in NRW, last week.
Germany has always been home to ambitious organised crime networks, in particular Russian and, increasingly, Vietnamese. But the past decades have seen a surge in criminal clans with Arab, Lebanese and Turkish roots.
An estimated 200,000 people live in so-called clan structures in Germany, with up to 1,000 members in each clan.
Not all such clans are criminal and not all members of criminal clans are themselves involved in crime. But many are.
Berlin has about 20 families which can trace their arrival back to fleeing the Lebanon war in the mid-1970s. Some families have Lebanese roots, others were stateless families living there in refugee camps. Many arrived in Germany via East Berlin and applied for asylum in West Berlin or registered as students, and never left.
By the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, some 20,000 such refugees were arriving in the united capital annually. Many, stateless and unable to work legally, turned to crime.
Many of the stateless arrivals appeared in no statistics and police looked away, says criminologist Dorothee Dienstbühl, “because it involved ethnic minorities”.
“The police were very insecure how to address the problem,” she told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper, “and feared accusations of being racist.”
Inventive
Now in their second and third generation, Berlin’s clan leaders are endlessly inventive. In March 2017 a giant gold coin worth €3.3 million vanished without trace from the city’s Bode Museum. Last February, three members of a leading criminal clan were handed jail sentences for the theft of the 100kg coin, which remains missing.
Weeks later, the clans moved on: siphoning off untold millions from Germany’s Covid-19 quick assistance fund with aid applications for phantom firms. When investigators in Berlin cross-referenced applications with known clan member addresses, they turned up 250 hits.
Furious at the criminal clans’ growing audacity, German authorities have launched what they call a “1,000 jabs” strategy – regular raids to harass criminal clans and disrupt their businesses.
Last year alone Berlin police carried out 382 raids, including on 190 shisha bars, 60 betting shops, 25 hairdressers and 11 jewellers.
Some 123 luxury cars were confiscated in that time while the Berlin clan linked to the Bode Museum theft has had 77 properties worth an estimated €9 million seized, until they prove the money used to buy them was not laundered.
For Berlin’s state interior minister, Andreas Geisel, permanent raids and seizures from clans are all about “standing on their feet where it hurts – with their finances”.
That means a lot of work for the city police given the clans operate in brothels, car repairs, office rentals, drinks kiosks and even so-called cocaine taxis.
Sports clinic
Maria (not her real name) was delighted to secure a job a number of years ago in a leading Berlin sports clinic, but on her first day she realised the owner was one of the city’s most notorious clan families.
The upmarket clinic, she soon realised, was running a health insurance scam involving healthy football players and fraudulent sick payments.
“We had the best-stocked medicine cabinet in the city, with all sorts of stuff we shouldn’t have had,” she said. “The brothers used to show up regularly and pay everyone from a big roll of cash. When they told us not to come to work the next day, we knew they’d been tipped off about a raid.”
Battling informants inside the police force is one major challenge in tackling the clans; another is finding informers of their own inside the clans, given their nature as closed, endogamous networks of inter-married cousins.
For Islam researcher Ralph Ghadban, Germany’s patriarchal criminal clan structures are an “enormous danger, eating into our society”.
In a nod to their simultaneous love of expensive cars and social welfare, he writes that “the clans view everything here as a society to be looted”.
Given decades of neglect and denial, Mr Ghadban is largely complimentary of the new push back against criminal clans by Berlin’s city-state government and the ruling Social Democratic Party (SPD).
Claims among the SPD’s junior coalition partners – the Left and Green parties – that the campaign is racist is, he says, “ideologically stupid”.
“If a particular group is disproportionately criminal,” writes Mr Ghadban in his book Arab Clans, “one has to call it by its name.”
On Monday morning, Berlin’s battle against its clans takes its most dramatic twist yet. In chamber 300 of Berlin district court, three members of the Abou-Chaker clan will hear damaging insider testimony against them by a former confidant.
Anis Ferchichi, a rapper better known by his artistic name Bushido, took on the Abou-Chaker brothers as his managers for nine years.
When he broke with them in 2017, Bushido says they demanded pay-offs, threatened him physically and planned to kidnap his young child.
Going public has put his life in danger and Bushido now has round-the-clock police protection. Five bodyguards will flank him when he arrives in court on Monday. If he decides he has nothing to lose, and tells all in court, it may prove a crucial tipping point in Germany’s clan war.
