Chronicle of a Death Foretold: Georgi Stoev's Gangster Pulp (Page 2)

On November 10, 1989, Georgi Stoev was just 16. Born and raised in Sofia, he was the son of working-class parents who could afford only the bare essentials. Stoev was a diligent student and a fine athlete with dreams of making it big one day. After finishing high school and his military service, he planned to pursue a career in athletics. For years he had been involved in sambo, a popular sport in the former Soviet bloc that combines traditional wrestling techniques and Eastern martial arts. Sambo and other power sports like wrestling, weight lifting and boxing had always been the darlings of Soviet athletics. Having few other means of flexing their muscles at the West, Communist governments lavished money and resources on stocky men in spandex. Bulgaria was no exception. Because it lacked opportunities to overthrow its enemies on the diplomatic stage, it competed for authority on the mat and in the ring. Athletes who prevailed in international competitions were feted as heroes and rewarded with special privileges--cars, large apartments, pensions, military rank, even political connections.

Though not the best in his class, Stoev did not lack talent. "He had a few medals from municipal competitions," his mother told me. "He was a good boy." A serious knee injury, however, cut short his sambo career soon after the Zhivkov regime collapsed. It was just as well. With the economic crisis deepening, the hefty state budget for sports was slashed, and many of the leading professional training schools for athletes had to close. "My life changed back then. I stopped receiving scholarships. I would go out more and more often in search of money," Stoev said in an interview published posthumously in the Sofia daily 24 Hours. Athletes were not spared the general fate of the country. Penniless and adrift, many of them began roaming the streets looking for lucrative ways to test their stamina and strength.

Some of the best athletes went on to become the most feared mafia bosses of the 1990s: Ivo Karamanski, the Iliev brothers (Vasil and Georgi), Iliya Pavlov, Dmitriy Minev, Mladen Mihalev, Krasimir Marinov. They were all classmates, all thrived in the underworld and are all, but for the latter two, now dead, casualties of gangland justice. Georgi Stoev did not belong to this elite group, but he was one of the countless other poor men and women who, impatient to see the wheel of fortune make its next revolution, joined the emerging crime syndicates. The mob guaranteed at least some kind of job security. And to the lucky few, crime promised the luxuries the party had once offered to prizewinning wrestlers--fast cars, large apartments, income, special privileges, respect.

Although the word "wrestler" eventually became slang for "criminal" in Bulgaria, all sorts of people drifted into the underworld: con men; prominent doctors, lawyers and public servants; day laborers from the countryside scrounging for a buck. But the most important element of the underworld--the organization--was supplied by the government: during the institutional depoliticization that occurred between 1990 and 1992, nearly 17,000 State Security operatives were dismissed, as well as thousands more militiamen and army personnel. Drawing on their extensive political influence and intimate knowledge of the old smuggling networks of the Communist regime, they laid the groundwork for organized crime and also got involved in the action. "There was no way to become a mafia boss without support from the police or some party functionary," Stoev told the TV hostess Veneta Raykova early last year.

When Stoev descended into the criminal underworld, he had already freelanced for a spell as a petty thief--a few stolen tires and car batteries, some carjackings, several random muggings. His breakthrough, by his own account, came when he began working for the notorious "violence entrepreneur" Vasil Iliev in the early 1990s. With law enforcement in Bulgaria almost entirely dysfunctional, Iliev decided to start a security firm called VIS (Veracity, Investments, Security), a thinly veiled extortion racket. A spinoff, VIS-2, peddled car insurance no one could afford to go without, unless he wished to pay "ransom" for his missing vehicle. Thieves who meddled with property insured by VIS-2 were quickly found and "chastised" for their disrespect. Stoev was a foot soldier in the chastisement brigades.

It was a labor-intensive job. One fearless car thief, who did not want to confess his crime, was bound to a bed in a basement and beaten with metal rods. Describing the incident years later in the book series SIC, Stoev wrote, "We beat him black and blue, but we were careful not to break his bones. A beating has its own internal logic and psychology like any other human activity. It goes through the following stages: First, the victim feels intense pain and screams. Then he goes limp, his organism gives up, and he is ready to confess anything. He takes the punches without protest and, if he's still conscious, wonders whether he'll die now or later.... A beating is hard labor.... It's a whole art in itself." Stoev was not completely insensitive to other people's suffering, though he tried everything possible not to think about it. "In the basement I behaved like a beast," he admitted ruefully, "but out in the daylight I managed to forget about everything. It was my survival strategy. I existed in two parallel worlds." It was an existence that was taking its toll on both victims and victimizers.

When Vasil Iliev was ambushed and murdered in the middle of Sofia in April 1995, nothing much changed for Stoev. He was already working for Iliev's friend and nemesis, Poli Pantev, an executive director of SIC. Inspired by the success of VIS-2, SIC had been formed in 1994 by several leading crime figures. It had commandeered a large chunk of the growing insurance market and diversified into other highly lucrative sectors: gambling, banking, speculation in food commodities, smuggling embargoed petrol to war-torn Yugoslavia (an operation comparable in its clout and profitability to bootlegging in the United States during Prohibition). Stoev still participated in violent punitive campaigns against competitors and enemies of the company, but less often. The exact arc of Stoev's criminal career remains vague, but at the end of the 1990s he was apparently promoted to more respectable positions. Pantev, whose "cruelty combined with sharp intelligence" Stoev greatly admired, appointed him a casino staffer and then the manager of a striptease club in Sofia. "It was a fancy club, with crocodile skins and snakes hanging from the walls. Very classy. And Georgi was always surrounded by bodyguards," recalls Dobrin Dodev, Stoev's best friend and attorney. Pantev even gave his employee a gold ring with the inscription "From Poli"--a gesture that placed Stoev in his boss's inner circle.

Pantev certainly had reason to trust him. Unlike ordinary gangster rabble, Stoev didn't drink or use drugs except for occasional mild sedatives to take the edge off his job. He was disciplined and resourceful. Whether that trust eventually accrued into direct offers for contract killings is not clear, but according to Stoev's accounts, Poli Pantev, as well as another powerful boss from SIC, Mladen Mihalev, asked him to be a middleman in the recruitment of assassins. Bulgaria's underworld was daily becoming more and more crowded with various criminal organizations battling for turf, and the cheapest and fastest way to reaffirm one's claims was by eliminating other claimants. But it seemed that Stoev hadn't done his job very well when the competition finally got to his boss: after surviving one failed assassination attempt that involved a rocket-propelled grenade, Pantev was killed with four shots to the head at a hotel in Aruba in March 2001. He was succeeded by Georgi Pehlivanov, another shadowy character from SIC. And Stoev, like movable property, was reassigned to the new boss.

Bigger changes were stirring. Stoev was ecstatic when his wife, Svetla, a former biathlete, gave birth to a daughter, Jacqueline, in 2001. "He was a very caring father and husband," Svetla recalls. "He would do anything for his family." Stoev's years as a family man were his happiest and also the most economically challenging. It is not exactly clear when or why Stoev cut his ties to the underworld, but the break seemed irrevocable. He might have sought revenge for some injury, or perhaps wished to protect his loved ones, or wanted to become a better man--Stoev never provided a clear explanation and left people guessing. Most often he would say that he wanted to quit the contract-killing business and leave behind the ignoble past, start a new life. Journalists were baffled with his simple answers, but he refused to provide more details. Whatever his motives, his choice to abandon criminal life left him destitute, at least for a short time. According to Dodev, Stoev lost his savings in the ill-reputed First East International Bank, an institution partly owned by Mladen Mihalev. He ran a pharmacy that failed. He was eventually forced to sell luxury items he had acquired as a mobster, including two Mercedes sedans. In time, with money running low, Stoev's most marketable option was to provide for his own and his family's future by cashing in his one remaining asset: his past.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.