Chronicle of a Death Foretold: Georgi Stoev's Gangster Pulp (Page 3)

"My books are not fiction. They are the absolute truth; they are my life." During the last year of his life, Stoev repeated this claim on talk shows, in newspaper interviews, almost anyplace where someone would lend him a microphone or an ear. By 2007 he had written ten popular books on the Bulgarian mafia and become a minor celebrity. Their serialized titles were plain enough: VIS, SIC, The Bulgarian Godfather. Stoev was a straight-shooting gunslinger who didn't wear the bulletproof vest of allegory. His books contain no relative points of view, no epistemological conundrums, no disclaimers. Things happened the way they did, and that was that. Many others--journalists and novelists and sociologists--had written expertly about organized crime in Bulgaria, but they were simply observers and commentators. Georgi Stoev was something else: an inside man, "the chronicler of the mafia." It may be that after his past, Stoev's most precious asset was his lack of imagination. "The things I write about are things I've personally seen or things I've heard from people who are reliable and wouldn't lead me astray," he said in an interview for TV2, a small private network, in February 2008. Articulate and soft-spoken, Stoev was a beefy, bull-necked man the size of a bulky wardrobe with a square head thrown on top like a discarded hatbox.

The writer's psyche in the body of a "wrestler" looked slightly ridiculous on television, but the whole nation was mesmerized. In a country where even successful novels sell a few thousand copies at most, the print runs of Stoev's books reached the tens of thousands. No central bookstore or provincial newsstand could afford not to sell them. Here was someone who had spent years in the underworld, where he had known and worked for its most ferocious mobsters, and had survived to tell the tale. As Nadya Cholakova, the author of several volumes on the history of post-Communist organized crime, explained after Stoev's murder in an interview published in Standart, a Sofia daily, "Georgi Stoev was different [from investigative journalists]--he was his own kind of kamikaze. He literally declared to people from his world, 'I am one of you and I'll reveal your secrets.'... He was always ready to provide [journalists] with information and most of the times it proved accurate." Stoev returned empty-handed from his journey in the underworld, willing to sing to the regular folk about what he had seen. That backward glance would eventually cost him his life.

"Georgi Stoev had an elephant's memory and absolutely gossipy curiosity. He knew how to work with information, which was his true capital," Ognyan Mladenov, Stoev's first publisher, told me. Vlado Daverov, the editor of Stoev's first books, adds, "He was a very intelligent boy, very well informed. But he hated the gangster world because that world had rejected him." Since Stoev had had no literary experience whatsoever when he started writing in 2006, Daverov assisted him with the technical elements of the craft. "Georgi was responsible for the content, and I did the writing," he says. The two men developed something akin to a friendship, discussing movies, one of Stoev's passions, in their spare time. The former gangster's ambition, however, constantly kept emotions on edge. "He really wanted to be famous, and made it in the end. He was ready to die in the name of fame. I've never seen such ambition," Daverov says. For one reason or another their relationship gradually soured, and Stoev embarked on an independent career with a new publisher, New Media Group, in 2007. Having learned Daverov's lessons well, Stoev went on to write his most personal work, the three-volume Bulgarian Godfather series.

Stoev's prose is clunky and littered with clichés, his plots sometimes implausible and ludicrous, but there is little doubt that he was an intriguing storyteller in possession of much sensitive information. A mélange of dime-store fiction, memoir and soap opera, his books purport to follow the vicissitudes of his three former employers--VIS, VIS-2 and SIC. Rather than present the big picture, the way a journalist or sociologist would have done, the ex-gangster depicts events on an intimate level from a first-person point of view. His books feature minutely reconstructed conversations between mobsters (bosses and foot soldiers), ruminations on the psychology behind organized crime, quotidian details concerning the routines of drug-traffickers and hit men and gossip about the private lives of prominent mafia members, including their eating habits and sexual predilections.

Indeed, one of Stoev's most significant contributions to Bulgaria's underworld of letters was his demythologization of gangsters, depicting them as ordinary people living almost ordinary lives. In many cases they are portrayed as little more than regular Georgis "behind whose slick appearance there was the village bumpkin from the countryside," as he wrote in the second volume of SIC. Another signature trait was his use of real names in his books. "I think we should start calling the spade a spade. Enough with rumors and veiled conjectures. Somebody needs to come out and say these things out loud," Stoev told Veneta Raykova of the celebrity TV show Goreshto ("Hot") in January 2008. At the beginning of the show, he placed his hand on a Bible, saying that he swore to tell nothing but the truth and that he was prepared to defend his claims in court if necessary. "I am ready to assume full responsibility for the things I say. I'm ready to stand trial, so I can prove my position.... Or let somebody at least come out and say that I'm lying," he added. No suits for slander or libel were ever filed against Stoev, so he kept on naming names.

A number of Stoev's books--especially the Bulgarian Godfather series--bravely tackled the burgeoning culture of contract killings: the killers, the weapons, the killed, the entire chain of command. No aspect of the subject was taboo. Stoev revealed details with professional panache. To kill somebody, he explained, was neither that difficult nor that expensive. Apart from a small number of skilled assassins, who were hired for the most sensitive cases, most killers were just average thugs, "hungry and pitiless," in need of fast cash. And here Stoev went on to challenge another popular myth: that the majority of contract killings were motivated solely by business interests and territorial disputes. In fact, he claimed, mafia murders in Bulgaria were more often triggered by personal rivalries, trivial disagreements or fear of a competitor. "One moment people embraced, and the next they were killed by friendly fire. You couldn't follow the logic, and things were not always just a matter of money. Paranoia had taken hold of everyone," he wrote in the second volume of The Bulgarian Godfather. That pervasive paranoia often pushed things over the edge, sparking internecine gang wars. "The dirty intrigues we created ourselves forced us to destroy each other."

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