The Polish Mafia E-Book

Christopher Othen

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 388

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Welcome to a world of tracksuits, Kalashnikovs and organised crime. After the fall of communism, the most dangerous Mafia you've never heard of ran Poland as its own private playground and wallowed in all the luxury that Eastern Europe had to offer – until someone at the heart of the gang turned traitor and brought everything crashing down in a bloody round of murder and betrayal. Today Poland is a prosperous modern democracy standing proud at the Slavic edge of the European Union. But in the years after the fall of communism it was a gangster state being bled white by criminals while police and politicians looked the other way. You can't understand Poland until you know what it was like to live here when the Cold War had ended and everyone in this poor, icy corner of Eastern Europe was looking to get rich or die trying.

Leseprobe

First published 2024

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Christopher Othen, 2024

The right of Christopher Othen to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 548 9

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall

Contents

1    Death of a Polish Gangster

I    THE WILD, WILD EAST, 1806–1992

2    The 15:10 to Juma

3    Enter the Goon Squad

4    Savage Youth from the PRL

5    Day of the Troglodytes

II    WARSAW GOODFELLAS, 1993–95

6    Seks and Drugs

7    Rocket Man

8    ‘Get in the Van, You Whore!’

9    A Miniature Vietnam

III    EMPIRE OF PRUSZKÓW, 1996–98

10    Making Friends with the Frog

11    The Sausage Butchers

12    We Are the Management Board

13    Unholy Trinity

IV    THE POLISH GODFATHER, 1999–2000

14    Smuggling is Our Cultural Heritage

15    I’m the King Here

16    Planet Masa

17    Who Killed Pershing?

V    POLSKA STRIKES BACK, 2001–03

18    Interpol Red Notice

19    A Moveable Beast

20    Here Come the Mutants

21    The Eagle Versus the Octopus

VI    AFTER THE DELUGE, 2004–PRESENT

22    Ashes and Diamonds

23    Triumph of the Swill

24    Might is Right

Appendix: Gangsters of the Polish Mafia

Notes

Bibliography

1

Death of a Polish Gangster

It was late in the afternoon and starting to get dark when they shot Andrzej Kolikowski in the car park of a Polish ski resort. The 45-year-old was stowing ski equipment in the boot of a silver Mercedes S500 when two men in goggles and winter hats came out of the December gloom with guns. The first man fired a sub-machine-gun burst into the air to frighten off other skiers, then the second gunman shot Kolikowski twice in the chest with a pistol as the big man turned around. Kolikowski fell back on to the snow and the gunman put two more bullets through his skull, before both attackers walked briskly to a green Audi and drove away into the Zakopane twilight.

Normally you have to pay for this kind of symbolism. Poland’s best-known gangster had been chopped down in the dying days of the Kolorowe Lata 90 (the colourful 1990s), a decade he and his friends had done so much to corrupt. Ten years earlier, the Soviet puppets and secret police who’d ruled Poland since the Second World War had been swept aside to be replaced by democracy, free elections and a 16 per cent unemployment rate. Inflation reached equally obscene levels and standards of living dropped through the floor, leaving many Poles to reflect bitterly that the daily grind in a capitalist paradise looked a lot simpler in Hollywood movies.

When every day was a struggle just to put food on the table, it became easy to admire those who’d unlocked the secret door that led to luxurious foreign cars, bundles of US dollar bills and expensive Western clothes. Some of Poland’s new rich were film stars and musicians who made their money doing Slavic imitations of the American culture they saw on television; others were businessmen who negotiated the murky world of post-Communist wheeler-dealing to get rich and build themselves gaudy houses on land that had been farmers’ fields a year before. But the wealthiest and most visible, rolling straight through the new Poland like a bowling ball that knocked over everything in its path, were the gangsters with gold chains and bulging muscles and a Kalashnikov within easy reach.

The men from the wrong side of the law weren’t everyone’s heroes. To those who embraced Western ideas of entrepreneurship, they were just degenerate Cro-Magnons brute-forcing their way into prosperity by preying on anyone smarter and more honest. To the power brokers hoping Poland would one day join NATO and the European Union, they were a noisy embarrassment who didn’t understand the importance of keeping their violence out of the headlines. But to many Poles, the gangsters were textbook examples of how to outsmart the system when you came from the poorest rung of an already poor society and education was something that happened to other people.

Kolikowski claimed to be a car mechanic but that was only a plausible proposition to those who’d never met him in person. His flat-topped, bald head with its horseshoe fringe of dark brown hair sat on a muscular torso that would have given body dysmorphia to the gorillas at the zoo if it hadn’t been zipped into a flashy tracksuit most of the time. A resident of Ożarów, a village just outside Warsaw, Kolikowski was smarter than he looked, and the car mechanic act fooled no one, especially not the skiers he mingled with at the Polana Szymoszkowa resort on his last day alive. Everyone knew he was ‘Pershing’, one of the leaders of the Pruszków Mafia, a gang named after their home town near the capital and the most famous organised crime family in Poland.

If any fellow skiers had somehow failed to hear about the life of sin that bought Kolikowski three homes, two with swimming pools, they’d still have found it hard to understand why a car mechanic had a pretty girlfriend half his age giggling beside him on the slopes. Patrycja was a 21-year-old marketing student from Szczecin – a colourful port city with a griffin’s head on its coat of arms – who’d met her lover at a disco along the north coast. Kolikowski liked to dance but not everyone appreciated his uncoordinated jigging about to music. ‘Baldy, you should take a dance class,’ advised Andrzej Florowski, who served as driver and bodyguard.

Kolikowski didn’t usually appreciate backchat from fellow gangsters but Florowski, known to all as ‘Florek’, was allowed occasional insolence as a reward for his dog-like devotion the rest of the time. That devotion had a price. A month before the visit to Zakopane, someone put a bomb under Florek’s car, and he was lucky not to be shredded like lettuce. Another of Kolikowski’s bodyguards was murdered at his flat in Warsaw’s Wola district two weeks later. Despite the violence, no one could persuade the gang boss against taking his new girlfriend on a weekend away down south.

The Zakopane trip followed close on the heels of Kolikowski’s return from a business trip to America where he’d met up with some important foreign crime figures and watched his boxer friend Andrzej Gołota lose to Michael Grant in Atlantic City. Kolikowski had seemed tense at the prospect of coming back to a Poland where a vicious gang war with rivals from Wołomin, on the other side of Warsaw, had been piling bodies high in the streets until recently. Even some members of his own gang seemed ready to turn on him. A superstitious man, he asked friend and professional clairvoyant Krzysztof Jackowski, who looked more like a punch-drunk streetfighter than a soothsayer, to predict the future.

‘You will leave a hotel in Warsaw and two people will run up to you in the car park,’ said Jackowski. ‘One of them, with a weapon that fires very fast, will kill you’.

Zakopane was at the opposite end of the country from Warsaw and seemed a safe bet for the spiritually inclined. This tourist town of wooden houses near the southern border with Slovakia was famous for its skiing and Poles had loved the place for generations. Everyone had a souvenir photograph somewhere of a family member posing with a street performer in a white bear costume on the Zakopane main drag. The town was a neutral space for gangsters, who rarely settled scores within city limits, and Kolikowski thought he’d be safe there.

He and Patrycja arrived in Zakopane on Friday evening and enjoyed a weekend’s skiing through the hard snow. On Sunday, 5 December, they were on the slopes above the Kasprowy, a red-roofed communist monstrosity of a hotel nestled among the forests only a few minutes’ drive from the centre of town. The base of the ski lifts was conveniently near both the car park and the equipment hire shop, where Patrycja was retrieving their deposit when the gunmen struck.

A doctor who’d been loading up his own car tried to help Kolikowski as the gang boss lay in a darkening pool of arterial blood. Someone else called an ambulance but it was slow coming because an anonymous voice had put in a hoax call shortly before to report a major accident on the other side of town. The ambulance finally arrived and raced Kolikowski to hospital, but he died on the table as they tried to resuscitate him. The news was all over the media by the next morning. ‘The alleged boss of the Pruszków gang, Andrzej K., alias “Pershing”, has died,’ reported the RMF radio station. ‘He was shot yesterday in Zakopane. The police have not ruled out this being a professional hit.’

Professional was right: the phone call to distract the emergency services; the green Audi stolen from Kraków and soon to be discovered burned out near a ski jump; the way the gunman with the sub-machine gun had kept his weapon partly inside a bag to collect the used cartridges. But who ordered the killing?

There was an obvious candidate: for most of the 1990s, the Pruszków Mafia had been fighting rivals from Wołomin for control of every racket imaginable, from multimillion-dollar drug-smuggling networks, slot machine profits and protection rackets to political corruption, control of brothels and car theft on a massive scale.

Scores of gangsters had been shot, stabbed or blown apart in the gang war. Kolikowski had already survived at least three assassination attempts, including a bomb that collapsed a pub ceiling on to a crowd of gangsters playing pool in Warsaw’s fashionable Saska Kępa district five years earlier.

A lot of people assumed the Zakopane hit had been ordered by the Wołomin gang leaders, but the few still alive denied involvement in Kolikowski’s death fervently enough that a lot of well-informed people believed them. Other candidates existed, like the karate enthusiasts who robbed the wrong man and had their kneecaps probed with an electric drill by Pershing and his friends; rogue police officers frustrated at his apparently untouchable status; foreign gangs he’d annoyed over the years, including, it was rumoured, some Colombians; or even his own Pruszków friends, who had been noticeably unhappy about Kolikowski’s expansive plans for the new millennium. Some observers suggested he’d already split from the gang to carve out his own territory.

And why had Patrycja’s first action after the murder been to locate her boyfriend’s mobile phone and snap its SIM card in half?

Live fast, die rich. In the Kolorowe Lata 90, you couldn’t trust anyone.

Today, Pruszków is a small, quiet town full of people living their lives and bringing up families but, thanks to men like Kolikowski, it remains synonymous with organised crime for most Poles. A strange fate for a place first recorded in the eleventh century as a tiny village offering up nothing more spectacular than a few peasants and a fistful of mud. Over the coming centuries, it would remain an insignificant speck on the map while distant gangs of self-declared nobles fought to unify a sprawling chunk of Eastern Europe into what would eventually become the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Once achieved, the unity didn’t last long. A grim period of political turmoil, foreign invasion and some truly incompetent leadership saw the Commonwealth collapse and its territory swallowed up by Russia, Austria and Prussia.

By then, Pruszków was a few hectares of arable land farmed by minor gentry and scarcely bigger than it had been 700 years earlier. No one objected when a Russian merchant dismembered the place and sold it off in pieces to any buyer with ready cash and a burning desire to build a house in the middle of nowhere.

As Poles struggled to retain some sense of national identity under three different empires, Pruszków adapted better than most and unexpectedly began to flourish. Nineteenth-century visitors from Warsaw found a small town with a railway station, an iron works and a home for the mentally ill. The First World War came and went, leaving rubble and death in its wake, but in the aftermath, Poland recovered its independence as the old partitioning empires crumbled to dust.

Marshal Józef Piłsudski took command of the resurrected nation in the interwar years, determined to keep it free of the Nazis and Soviets who were growing ever more threatening on the borders. He died with his homeland unconquered but still painfully underdeveloped. Much of the country remained a rural backwater of forests and farms where horse-drawn carriages were more common than anything with an engine.

Pruszków was a rare, industrialised exception. The 30,000-strong town now boasted a skyline of smoking factory chimneys, even if the men in charge didn’t think the locals deserved luxuries like pavements, streetlights or a functioning sewage system.

The summer of 1939 brought German troops with swastika flags, who spent the next five years killing Jews, Roma and patriots of all kinds. A third of Poland’s population died, with 2.9 million of them being Jewish. The country became a launch pad for an invasion of the Soviet Union that ultimately failed, but not before turning Eastern Europe into a slaughterhouse.

In the spring of 1945, the victorious Soviets invited Polish resistance fighters to a conference in Pruszków for a discussion about the future. Those trusting enough to turn up were arrested and hanged in Moscow three months later. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin wanted it known that Poland was now part of his drab, murderous Communist empire with self-determination no longer on the menu.

The promised collective prosperity of the Soviet system never arrived and the Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa (Polish People’s Republic – PRL) remained a poor country with few private cars, overcrowded trams and the lucky ones riding bicycles. All those grey housing blocks emerging from the rubble were utilitarian and totalitarian, and seemed to have been designed purely to crush the spirit.

A puppet government dedicated its most enthusiastic efforts to political symbolism. Warsaw’s historic Stare Miasto (Old Town) was rebuilt to the smallest detail after the Germans destroyed it in the dying days of the war, while the centre of the city boasted the Pałac Kultury i Nauki (Palace of Culture and Science), a Soviet skyscraper that looked like a brick rocket ship tinted the colour of stale champagne. Officially a gift from Stalin, the palace was finished the year after his death. The Poles hated it. A popular joke of the time:

Q. Where is the best view of Warszawa?

A. From the top of the Palace of Culture.

Q. Why there?

A. Because it’s the only place in Warszawa you can’t see the Palace of Culture.

Pruszków lost its freedom like everywhere else, but benefited from a new communist ruling class who were smart enough to see potential in the town and invest accordingly. Soon it became the manufacturing heart of central Poland. A place that valued manual labour and distrusted too much education fitted perfectly into a dictatorship that felt the same way, although Pruszków was never a model of socialist obedience. In the PRL, everyone had a job or a good excuse, but noisy urban spaces were hard to control and offered plenty of opportunities in burglary and black marketeering for a working man who didn’t like to work too hard.

Only the truly hardcore criminals were in any danger of prison. In a system everyone knew was broken from first principles (‘we pretend to work and they pretend to pay’, as the old Soviet joke went), even the policemen of the Milicja looked the other way for a big enough bribe.

Up in the port city of Gdańsk, the car thief and smuggler Nikodem Skotarczak, alias Nikoś, became a popular hero in the 1980s for his criminal escapades. The Milicja barely pretended to care. For most Poles, breaking the dictatorship’s laws seemed little worse than slacking off at work, cheating in exams or maintaining their Catholic faith with a ferocity that sent the official atheist line from Moscow yelping back into the steppes.

In 1989, the Soviet empire collapsed when the number of true believers dwindled to single figures and Poland had to deal with democracy – a system it knew more in theory than practice. The grey scum line of communism would remain visible across the country for years.

Russia had flooded its satellite with dreams of socialist equality for half a century, but that drained away to leave nothing except dirty tower blocks, cracked concrete and the defeated faces of people trudging between the two. A galaxy of new parties appeared but their mutually incompatible political dreams proved only that Poles couldn’t decide whether they wanted their new country to be a capitalist utopia or a rest home for watered-down leftism. A lot of Poles didn’t care at all, judging by the 43.2 per cent turn-out rate at the first fully free election.

Adverts and the free market livened up the country a little, but not enough. Early Western visitors found a broken, monochrome world where customer service was a purely theoretical concept and the men all seemed to be potato-faced drinkers with unflattering moustaches. Polish women had the bone structure of a Hollywood starlet but the dress sense of a blind housewife with cruel friends. Everyone drank vodka like water and smoked as if lung cancer had never been invented.

With socialist subsidies gone forever, post-communist Pruszków fell harder than most. Jobs and prosperity vanished overnight, turning the already rough housing estates of the Żbików district into some of the most violent in the country. It was here that the Pruszków gang was born, even if the media sometimes forgot that not all of its members were locals. ‘Pruszków Mafia’ was always more a convenient journalistic term than a geographically precise fact. Some of the gang’s most significant individuals came from very different backgrounds.

Jarosław Maringe was a dark-haired, good-looking young man from a run-down part of inner-city Warsaw, who got mixed up with Pruszków in the mid-1990s and just about lived to regret it. The product of an intelligentsia family – the closest communism had ever got to a middle class – Maringe’s soul was a battleground between angel and demon in which the contestant with horns usually came out on top. In another country, in another time, Maringe would have been a respectable young businessman with his face in the newspapers, but this was Poland in the Kolorowe Lata 90, where the life of a gangster seemed the more natural choice. His path from entrepreneurial teen to street soldier to exiled, paranoid crime boss paralleled the rise and fall of Pruszków over the whole violent decade.

The gang he joined in the early 1990s had been formed by men like veteran jailbird and genuine Pruszków resident Janusz Prasol, aka ‘Parasol’ (Umbrella), with his Genghis Khan moustache and years spent in brutal PRL prisons. Parasol’s crew had taken advantage of all the freedoms post-communist Poland had to offer by hijacking trucks, extorting businesses and destroying anyone who got in their way. The gang’s numbers were swelled by younger disciples like Jarosław Sokołowski, aka ‘Masa’ (Mass), a walking wall of muscle with a head like a football, a drink problem and a misleadingly boyish smile. Together, they bribed politicians, corrupted police officers and terrified a population trying to enjoy itself for the first time in decades.

‘We went on the dance floor and started to fuck with anything that moved,’ remembered one gang member:

There were only two of us, but we caused a panic; there was no one strong enough to stop us […] Let me tell you, that was Poland in a nutshell. This was the answer to the question why the Mafia so easily dominated the whole country. No one could stand up to us, everyone was shitting their pants. And they only dreamed that we would leave them alone. And honour? Fuck honour.

The criminal horizon widened with the arrival of gangster legend Pershing from Ożarów, which was about 8km from Pruszków but a very different place. He introduced gambling, debt collection and car theft on an industrial scale. Expensive vehicles were stolen from Germany, cocaine imported from Colombia and gangsters from Russia who challenged the status quo were shot dead in the street. Not even a gang war with Wołomin that littered the streets with bodies could slow them down.

It would all go wrong, as it always does, when egos got bloated and the money too big to share. The further Jarosław Maringe climbed up the gang’s hierarchy, the more clearly he could see the brains of those around him breaking down under a diet of vodka and cocaine. Bad decisions began to seem like good ones and eventually Pruszków would collapse in a bloody round of murder and betrayal that saw Pershing shot dead and his colleagues on trial, in hiding or on a path to become Poland’s unlikeliest celebrities. Other members of the gang cycled in and out of prison, retired or died; one even became head of Ukraine’s International Legion after the 2022 Russian invasion. Bloody gang wars tore the Polish underworld apart as rivals fought for the vacant crown.

But when the going was good, it was very good. Pruszków gangsters went to Marbella and Phucket on holiday, wore athletic wear with designer labels, lived in new-build mansions, counted celebrities as friends and draped gold crosses around their necks. It was not an understated style and to Westerners and many fellow Poles they looked ridiculous, but perhaps that was always the point. They were just the latest in a long line of crooks who were not shy about broadcasting their wealth.

‘Ninety percent of all mob guys come from poverty,’ said ‘Fat’ Vinnie Teresa, a Mafia-made man in the Patriarca crime family of 1960s New England:

They grew up with holes in their pants, no shoes on their feet. They had rats in their rooms and they had to fight for a scrap of bread to eat. Now they made it. They got money, five-hundred-buck suits, hundred-buck shoes, ten-grand cars, and a roll of bills big enough to choke a horse. It doesn’t do any good to just look at it. They want everyone to know they’ve made it.

The gangsters of Pruszków liked to show off just as much as Fat Vinnie’s friends, even if 1990s Poland had a lot less to offer in the way of luxury than post-war America. No one ever mocked their fashion choices out loud.

They were violent, damaged people. Masa spent his childhood listening to his mother having sex with random men in the same room, while Parasol had been viciously tortured in jail by guards who laughed when he coughed up blood. A few rare exceptions, like Maringe, had a background in the intelligentsia, but they had to fight harder than most to be accepted into an underworld where man was wolf to man and the Kalashnikov just another tool.

Maringe’s fellow gangsters called him ‘Chińczyk’ (the Chinese), even though his family had first taken root in Poland when a Frenchman met an Italian girl while a Corsican soldier ruled the continent from west to east. His family tree had some interesting branches.

I

THE WILD, WILD EAST,1806–1992

2

The 15:10 to Juma

The people of Warsaw leaned out of their windows and cheered when the most famous Frenchman in the world came riding into their city in the early days of the nineteenth century. Napoleon Bonaparte had been rampaging across the continent at the head of his Grande Armée for the last two years, crushing enemies, dismembering realms and remaking the map of Europe. A few days before Christmas 1806, he arrived in what had once been the capital of Poland to regroup his forces before plunging east into the Russian Empire.

The Poles saw him as a liberator and seized the opportunity to petition for the resurrection of the old Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. They quickly discovered the emperor had no interest in their nationalist dreams. ‘They have allowed themselves to be partitioned,’ Napoleon told his generals dismissively. ‘Today they are no longer a nation.’

Instead, his troops turned this quiet city of dirt roads and Dresden-style architecture into a swarming multilingual barracks, busy as an ant farm. Food was so sparse and rain so common that the French soldiers complained the only Polish words they needed were ‘Chleba? Nie ma. Woda? Zaraz!’ (‘Bread? Not available. Water? Right away!’) In past centuries, Warsaw had been known as the ‘Paris of the East’, but the new arrivals concluded whoever thought up the title knew little about France and even less about its capital.

After a few months of bustling occupation, Polish nationalists had reason to be hopeful again. A seductive local girl succeeded where diplomacy had failed by persuading Napoleon to grant his hosts an independent state in the modest ‘Duchy of Warsaw’. It looked good on paper but this sawn-off version of the old Commonwealth was never more than a vassal state.

The Duchy’s Polish leaders were feeling more like puppets than partners in the summer of 1812, when Napoleon’s horses finally rattled the wheeled cannons east for war with Russia. Soldiers of the Grande Armée managed to occupy Moscow for thirty-six days before falling back into a chaotic retreat that saw whole army corps killed off by snow, disease and Russian peasants with knives between their teeth.

As Napoleon’s forces fled through the disintegrating Duchy, a Frenchman called Leonard Ludwik Maringe stayed behind in Warsaw to marry the 18-year-old daughter of a transplanted Italian architect. The marriage lasted, even as Napoleonic Europe collapsed around them, and the Maringes settled down to run a hotel in Warsaw, which had reverted to speaking Russian instead of French.

By 1973 the hotel was long gone, along with its legendary befsztyk u Mareza (Mareza Steak), and a bad apple was swinging from the Maringe family tree. A child called Jarosław Jerzy Maringe had come into the world with a French surname no one could pronounce properly and a sense of being destined for better things. He grew up in a city-centre household dominated by strong-willed, intellectual women who had survived a German occupation that killed off their men and were determined never to forget the past.

Maringe felt closest to the memory of his grandfather, executed by the Gestapo as a member of the resistance. ‘One of his tasks was to liquidate informers,’ Maringe remembered. ‘He was basically a professional hit man!’

Maringe was less keen on his very much alive father, an electrical engineer with a drink problem who spent most days mourning the various opportunities for a better life that had slipped through his fingers. Jarosław was still young when his father finally did something right and got permission from the government to take a job in Paris arranged by distant relatives. Maringe’s mother would eventually join him, kissing Jarosław goodbye with vague promises about a quick return. Instead, the Maringes fell out of love and soon separated, neither feeling inclined to return home or send for a son who had been abandoned to the care of his grandmother.

His life was turned further upside down when the government seized the family home under the guise of ‘renovation’ and moved everyone out to a bleak housing estate a few kilometres away in the Gocław district. Maringe found himself in an alien world where his foreign name, good manners (‘being taught etiquette, told to kiss a woman’s hand’) and intelligentsia background were serious disadvantages. He had to toughen up and quick. ‘In order not to be lost in the human jungle I had to become a predator,’ he remembered.

Regular parcels from France made life easier. The arrival of an Amstrad personal computer in the mid-1980s opened a door into the growing subculture of software piracy – something the PRL government didn’t understand enough to outlaw. At first, Maringe copied games for friends but soon realised there was money in his hobby and got a pitch at the Grzybowska computer market – one of the many centres of unlicensed weekend capitalism springing up around the city. He became a regular among the humming monitors and intense conversations on ulicia (ul.) Marchlewskiego Juliana, a huge avenue running through the city which local rumour claimed had been built specifically for Russian tanks to crush any uprisings.

Business was good. After changing his złoty profits into dollars, Maringe was making the huge sum of $100 a week. He didn’t even need the money: his parents regularly sent enough cash from France that the teenager was better off than most adults suffering through a dysfunctional communist economy where petrol and chocolate were still rationed.

The real value of his market earnings was transformational: it changed him from an abandoned, lonely boy in a Gocław apartment block into a confident young entrepreneur. The teachers at school got a taste of the new Maringe when he forced them to get his surname right. ‘It was something my grandmother taught me,’ he said. ‘My family died for Poland under that name. And I insisted it be pronounced correctly.’

As Maringe worked his market stall, the Soviet bloc was slowly disintegrating. In Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalising perestroika policy chipped away at the authoritarian state while, closer to home, economic upheaval had forced the PRL government to work with its critics, the loudest of whom came from the 10 million-strong underground trade union Solidnarność (Solidarity).

Created back in 1980 to protest communism, Solidnarność had been immediately outlawed by Polish leader Wojciech Jaruzelski. The bat-eared and balding general was rarely seen without the sunglasses that made him look like a South American dictator and he went on to oversee a decade of martial law that did little except destroy the economy. By 1988, Jaruzelski had no option except to invite the Solidnarność leaders for secret talks about the future of Poland.

The only issue being debated that meant much to Maringe was foreign travel. Well-connected types had always been able to go abroad, provided they could afford the two weeks’ wages it took to purchase a single-use passport from the sour-faced bureaucrats at the Ministry. The paper trail thinned after that, thanks to a quirk of international diplomacy which granted Poles visa-free travel to a surprisingly wide selection of foreign countries. Even as far back as 1975, Polish travellers made 316,000 trips a year to non-communist nations, with West Germany accounting for 65,000 of those.

‘A stocky worker in Warsaw said proudly that his doctor was visiting Paris,’ noted a New York Times journalist at the time. ‘His friend’s doctor had returned from New York.’

The less well-connected found themselves stuck at home unable to get their hands on all the desirable foreign goods that international travellers routinely smuggled back. Cosmetics and textiles were popular in the sixties, digital watches and calculators in the next decade, but anything hard to source at home, from gold coins to lighter flints, was worth the risk.

As the 1980s economic crisis began to bite, smuggling became vital enough to the Polish economy that the government stopped even trying to police the black market. In 1987, the long-running Centralnej Komisji do Walki ze Spekulacją (Central Commission against Speculation) was shut down and the next year talks with Solidnarność saw foreign travel regulations relaxed, among a host of other concessions. General Jaruzelski and his junta could no longer hold back capitalism.

In 1988, a 15-year-old Maringe took the money he’d earned from software piracy and got himself a passport. He set off for West Berlin on a packed train for the first step of a journey that would lead to a life of crime.

He was good boy, at first. In West Berlin, Maringe took his cash to the nearest Aldi and filled bags with chocolate, beer and canned drinks before dragging the haul back to the train station. After a few trips back and forth across the border, the teenager had enough stock to open two market stalls manned by friends from Gocław. The business expanded from food to selling blank video cassettes (‘it was very important to our fellow countrymen,’ he remembered, ‘that they had this fucking inscription: Made in Japan’) and then to a video rental library of pirated Western films for customers eager to get a window into a better life, preferably one involving Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Somehow Maringe managed to combine his life of guerrilla capitalism with decent school grades and might have built a legitimate career if other young Poles commuting to West Berlin hadn’t showed him an easier way to make money. ‘The biggest mistake of my life,’ he said later.

His new friends were all involved in the Juma, a slangy Polish term for thieving abroad that took its name from the Berlin-bound train leaving the city of Zielona Góra at 15:10 every day, reminding everyone of the famous Western film The 3:10 to Yuma, where an impoverished rancher fights off circling bandits. Light-fingered young Poles justified stealing from Germany as reparations for the war and no one back home challenged them. It was hard to know what right and wrong even meant in the summer of 1989, as communism slipped away and the world flipped upside down.

That June, partially free elections were held in Poland for the first time since the 1930s. The communists had reserved 60 per cent of seats in the Lower House for themselves but Solidarność won the rest, along with almost all seats in the freely elected Upper House. A non-communist prime minister was chosen – the first to be democratically elected in the twentieth century who hadn’t known Piłsudski personally.

The transformation into a genuine democracy was slow and Russian troops would remain on Polish soil for several more years, but the election result rocked the Eastern bloc. Gorbachev doubled down on perestroika by declaring the USSR would not stop countries leaving its orbit, igniting a chain reaction that brought down the Berlin Wall, reunited Germany and destroyed the Soviet Empire. To everyone’s surprise, it all happened peacefully, except for a bloody revolution to remove the Ceaușescu regime in Romania that December. By the end of the year, only the USSR remained upright and even that was punch drunk and swaying, with multiparty elections scheduled for the next spring.

Maringe was too involved in the world of Juma to care much about the political changes around him. He’d formed a gang with other Warsaw boys on the train to shoplift electronic equipment, Gillette razor blades, perfumes, branded clothing, household goods, cigarettes, Absolut vodka and anything else they could smuggle past customs checks. Soon they graduated to stealing car radios abroad for a fence in Saska Kępa called ‘Gruby Jurek’ (Fat Jurek), who bought anything for cash with no questions asked.

Then, in 1990, the criminal life bit back when 17-year-old Maringe was arrested breaking into a car in West Berlin and spent three weeks behind bars in a young offenders institution. ‘I was small, skinny, shit-scared,’ he remembered. The place was run by Kurdish and Turkish gangs, all clearly older than their claimed ages, who took turns intimidating the Polish teenager. He learned to fight back, motivated by seeing a German boy carved up by a Turk in a row over a card game, and soon worked out the basics of prison life: ‘You attack or you are attacked – the rules are simple.’

It was a grim experience, even for three weeks, but Maringe was too addicted to the easy money to think about going straight and stole car radios from the guards’ vehicles in the prison car park on the day of his release. Soon, his Juma exploits expanded into stealing entire vehicles. At the time, foreign cars could be bought on the Polish black market for around $3,000, with some luxury brands going for as high as $25,000. That was a lot of cash for poor Poles, but nothing compared to how much they cost through official channels. By the time communism fell, thousands of ‘unofficial’ cars were estimated to be on Polish roads, most stolen from the West. ‘Come to Poland!’ joked the Germans bitterly. ‘Your car is already here!’

Despite the crime wave, many well-off Westerners still trustingly left their vehicles unlocked with keys and documents in the glove compartment. Maringe and friends took full advantage to joyride choice models back through Europe with boots full of stolen car radios and apparently legitimate paperwork to show at the border. Gruby Jurek took the radios, and the cars got garage resprays and grateful new owners.

When the West finally began cracking down on car thefts, Maringe found himself pursued through foreign forests by police dogs, while helicopters chattered overhead, and searchlights blazed through the frothing treetops. It was nerve-wracking, but the racket remained too profitable to stop.

He made enough cash to buy a bachelor pad flat in Praga Południe, a rough area close to Gocław. His grandmother had given up trying to control Maringe and was glad to see him go – an attitude shared by an older relative called Stanisław who’d just been elected Mayor of Warsaw and could do without any scandal in the family.

Maringe was arrested several more times abroad and did short stints in adult institutions. Still young, he endured the grim realities of life behind bars that included gang fights between Poles and Romanians and fighting off rapists in a Luxembourg cell. He tried to cut his wrists in a Swiss prison, although how serious he was about dying was never clear to the authorities and perhaps even to him.

Back in Poland by 1993, Maringe couldn’t face being locked up abroad again and abandoned his Juma operations. The hunger for easy money remained, along with some new-found resentment picked up in prison, and he targeted the market in Grzybowska, where he’d once had a stall. Maringe knew the place back to front and it was easy to sneak into the premises after hours and walk out with a haul of graphics cards and other peripherals.

Previously, his crimes had been socially acceptable, even vaguely patriotic to some, but robbing his own people was crossing a line. Maringe didn’t even look back. He eventually hooked up with a young gangster working for a crew linked to the underworld in the nearby town of Pruszków.

A fixture at the Warsaw discos, Adrian Kołodziejek’s handsome, well-dressed façade concealed an amoral thrill-seeker who was twisted enough to make a good corkscrew. He and Maringe palled around the capital, competing to see who could pick up the most girls, snort the most overpriced cocaine and do the most daring skok (heist). Once, they robbed a transporter in a car park and pepper-sprayed the guard dog; other times, Maringe conned the moneychangers in Saska Kępa by claiming to have a big wad of foreign currency and leading the victim outside to be robbed at knifepoint.

Maringe thought he and Adrian had become as close ‘as two drops of water’ and it didn’t seem a big step to join Pruszków alongside his friend. Becoming a gangster was the easiest way to get rich in a country where law and order didn’t mean much any more.

Adrian’s Pruszków boss was less enthusiastic about the prospect of a new recruit. Marek Janusz Czarnecki was a hard case from Praga who went by the nickname ‘Rympałek’(Crowbar) and had abandoned the life of an apprentice jeweller for crime. Only ten years older than Maringe, he looked nearly middle-aged with his slippers and beer belly, but the appearance was deceptive. Rympałek had trained as a wrestler and boxer before becoming a player in the underworld and now led a tough crew that included former policemen who’d turned their backs on the law for a bigger payday. It would not be easy to be accepted into their ranks.

Rympałek may have looked like a godfather to a street-level beginner like Maringe, but his bosses in Pruszków were the real powerplayers, and had been ever since an infamous shootout at a hotel near Warsaw, three years earlier. Adrian warned his friend that the gangster lifestyle was more death than glory and that the Hotel George incident was just the tip of a very big, very bloody iceberg. Maringe thought he could handle it. What was the worst that could happen?

3

Enter the Goon Squad

Back at the hotel, a man called Parasol had been shot through both legs, another known as ‘Szarak’ was dead with a bullet in his back and four other gangsters were in handcuffs. Outside, the traffic had pulled over to the verge of a two-lane highway so a wailing police car with a bloody officer laid out on the back seat could race past to the hospital. It was the afternoon of 6 July 1990, and someone had just shot up the Hotel George. The Pruszków Mafia was making its first headlines.

The hotel was a low-slung building of concrete rectangles painted an alarming shade of butter yellow on the road linking Warsaw with Katowice. No one in reception looked twice at the six tough-looking men who’d swaggered inside shortly before the shooting, searching for a Pole named Mirek. Their friend lived in West Germany but had recently come home to see what his country looked like without communism – a decision he’d regretted two days ago when the same men tear-gassed him in the George car park and stole his Mercedes. Now they were here to sell it back to him for $15,000.

Janusz Prasol, aka Parasol, led the gangster crew that day. Big, narrow-eyed and balding, with a drooping moustache ‘like a Mongol warrior’, according to a journalist, he was an amateur boxer from Żbików. Officially employed in a printing firm, his real career lay in imaginative combinations of robbery and violence. If he wanted something, he took it, and smashing someone’s face in the process just added to the fun.

Parasol’s father was a solid citizen who ran a place making electrical transformers, but his son took too much joy in breaking the law to ever go straight, no matter the cost. He’d been in and out of prison through the last decades of the PRL and earned a reputation as one of the Git-Ludzie: a convict elite who refused to bow down to the guards, no matter how many times they got beaten with a shovel handle or held under a scalding shower. Parasol took the punishment and still spat blood in their faces.

Only the toughest could hold on to the status of Git-Ludzie for long. Any disrespect from guards or other inmates, such as a punch, an insult or flicked water from a toilet brush, had to be punished with extreme violence or would result in an immediate slide down the prison hierarchy. Parasol and his friends had managed to stay on top through their many years behind bars and graduated from that Darwinian gladiator school transformed into what even fellow gangsters described as ‘troglodytes’. Now they formed the core of a new criminal gang, taking advantage of the freedoms available in a democratic Poland. Extorting a visitor from Germany was the least of their crimes.

It never occurred to Parasol’s crew that Mirek would alert the police about his missing Mercedes. During the PRL, law enforcement had been in the hands of Milicja paramilitaries who spent more time beating anti-communist protestors than solving actual crimes. If anyone had been handing out prizes for the most hated men in Poland, the gold cup would have gone to the Milicja’s notorious ZOMO riot police – a gang of bloodthirsty head-crackers who dished out the worst of the violence while their bosses shouted encouragement over the radio: ‘Grab whoever you can and into the vans!’ [static] ‘Give ’em a nice, energetic kicking that they won’t forget.’

In April 1990, the government tried to wipe away the stink of the old regime with a brand-new police force but lacked enough professionals for a truly fresh start and so was forced to rely on old Milicja veterans. Most Poles trusted this latest incarnation of law enforcement about as much as they would a chimpanzee with fine china.

Only an outsider like Mirek, familiar with the more orderly world of German law enforcement and desperate to get his car back, would have told the story of the stolen car to a roomful of chain-smoking officers. He got lucky. The men he talked with were that rare breed who were more interested in solving the crime than giving him a ZOMO-style kicking.

On the day of the meeting, armed police hid in the woods around the Hotel George and a helicopter buzzed tight circles in the summer sky. An undercover officer accompanied Mirek inside, posing as his bodyguard. It looked like overkill, but the police were in no mood to take chances, ever since two bodies had appeared beside the Warsaw to Katowice highway a month earlier.

Those deaths sprang from a row over a different Mercedes. On 29 May, a young Pruszków gangster called Wojciech Kiełbiński, known as ‘Kiełbacha’ (Sausage) to friends, had arranged to meet local fixer ‘Bogdan’ after a stolen car failed to meet expectations. The pair set up a rendezvous near Siestrzenia, a small town nestled in a forest where the skinny pine trees shot tightly packed and branchless towards the sky like the bristles of a giant toothbrush.

Bogdan arrived in an Audi 100 with two friends, both ‘Russian’ – which, back then, meant any nationality that used a Cyrillic alphabet, from Ukraine to Belarus – to find a large group from Pruszków blocking the road back to Warsaw with their cars. A man known as ‘Słoń’ (Elephant) and his violent, bearded friend ‘Lulek’, both just out of prison, piled into the back of Bogdan’s car and ordered him to drive into the forest for ‘a talk’.