Chronicle of a Death Foretold: Georgi Stoev's Gangster Pulp (Page 4)

Stoev told his most scandalous story in his final book, the third volume of The Bulgarian Godfather. He described how Gen. Luben Gotzev, the former deputy chief of foreign intelligence and former foreign minister (post-1989), was a principal architect of organized crime in Bulgaria, the person who used the extensive political and commercial connections of the old Communist Party to assist emerging crime syndicates in the 1990s. Although Stoev was hardly alone in hurling such allegations at Gotzev, he was the first to claim that the general had been secretly involved in a homosexual relationship with his protégé, the mafia boss Mladen Mihalev. The allegation was a grave insult in Bulgaria's macho society, one far worse than accusing someone of being a crook. The story was endlessly recycled and publicized like none of Stoev's others in various newspapers and on talk-shows, until it nearly became accepted as fact. Although Gotzev threatened to sue Stoev, he never did so, preferring instead to maintain his reticence. "I didn't know Georgi Stoev," Gotzev told me in his mild and fatherly voice during a phone conversation late last year. "I didn't have anything to do with him. Half of what he was writing was an invention." Which half was invented and which factual, however, Gotzev didn't specify.

Luben Gotzev wasn't Stoev's only critic. Doubts about the veracity of Stoev's work arose soon after the publication of his first book, VIS, in 2006. Some critics went so far as to suggest that everything Stoev had written was pure fabrication, that he had never been part of the mafia--that he had invented his past. One of Stoev's most malicious critics, Boyko Belenski, a hack novelist himself, published a book on the subject a few months after Stoev's death. The Revenge: The Whole Truth About the Murder of Georgi Stoev is a lurid potboiler trying to pass itself off as a "true novel"--a book in some ways not unlike Stoev's. It portrays Stoev as a wannabe mobster on drugs, whose "fogged-up brain" and "vain ambition" pressed him to fabricate stories about mafia figures he had never known personally. "Most people lie so they can save their skin; he was lying to make a flag out of it," Belenski wrote. There was little doubt whose flag of revenge Belenski was waving: throughout his book he implied that Stoev deserved his death for daring to tarnish the reputation of the big mob bosses of VIS, VIS-2 and SIC.

If Belenski's book looked like nothing more than cheap ventriloquism, it was less easy to discount serious commentators like Margarita Mihneva, a veteran journalist who interviewed Stoev on her television program, Neudobnite ("The Inconvenient Ones"), in early 2008. "Georgi Stoev imagined he could make a psychological profile of our society. But he invented things. His books were not reliable," she told me. Mihneva herself has reported on the mob, and in 2002 she received an anonymous threat--acid would be thrown in her face--after the airing of a TV broadcast in which she investigated the lavish property holdings of the notorious banker Slavcho Hristov and the current mayor of Sofia, Boyko Borisov. Mihneva found Stoev's tendency to mix fact and fiction disreputable: his books use real names while failing to meet the proper documentary rigor; they purport to present the truth but rely instead on little more than secondhand gossip. "His kind of journalism was not accurate and not helpful at all," Mihneva says. Time and again Stoev affirmed he was telling the truth, but the claim to authenticity is, after all, one of the oldest tricks in the novelist's bag. Could it be that Georgi Stoev was a fake mafioso who died a real mafioso's death?

If this were indeed the case, it would add a nice postmodern flourish to the tale, but it is not entirely plausible. There is simply more evidence pointing in the opposite direction. To separate the grain of personal experience from the chaff of gossip in Stoev's works would be difficult, if not impossible, as the two are so mixed up as to be almost indistinguishable. Nor is there a compelling reason to separate them. In the baffling post-Communist world of Bulgaria, gossip is often more reliable than official information--simply because gossip is often the only information available. Stoev's books captured that climate perfectly. Neither journalist nor novelist, he was a person who related what he had seen firsthand and heard from others. His "fictions" were as salient as his "facts." "Stoev came from a place where gossip is a major form of communication. There information exists on a very primitive level. It's gossip, but it's also genuine gossip. Gossip that is never supposed to leave a small circle of friends," says Palmi Ranchev, a famous boxing coach and one of Bulgaria's most accomplished and talented novelists, whose book Anonymous Snipers won him national recognition. Ranchev's athletic background brought him in peripheral contact with many members of the underworld, including Georgi Stoev. "He was a bandit, all right. I knew him well," Ranchev told me. Quick to dismiss Stoev's novels as hackwork, Ranchev nevertheless does not doubt their core authenticity. In his opinion, Stoev's oeuvre could be classified as "denunciation reports with elements of fiction." But which exactly were those elements?

What seems likely is that on occasion Georgi Stoev adapted stories about mobsters he had heard from friends and associates in an attempt to impart greater weight to his narrative and to magnify the importance of his position as a gang member. Aiming to demythologize the lives of mobsters, he could not avoid mythologizing himself. Some of his claims seem like nothing but farcical swagger. "I was in the middle of the beehive with the queen bee," he boasted in The Bulgarian Godfather. That might have been the case, though he might also be exaggerating his claim to a perch on the upper rungs of the criminal hierarchy. Stoev tried to portray himself as a deft manipulator, a double-dealer who managed to survive by outmaneuvering his bosses and pitting them against each other. "As ludicrous as it all seemed, in that phoney world you always had to play roles," he wrote in the third volume of The Bulgarian Godfather. But then again, even if we allow that Stoev sometimes appropriated lines of characters more central than himself, it seems likely he did so only because he had spent enough time as a mobster to know the entire show by heart.

Perhaps the answer to the question of the veracity of Stoev's books lies beyond their covers. While churning out pulp, Stoev also supplied information to several of Bulgaria's leading newspapers. Slavi Angelov, the top investigative journalist of 24 Hours and the author of 9 Millimeters, an acclaimed volume on the history of the Bulgarian mafia, had a long and productive professional collaboration with Stoev, stretching back as far as 2003, on a series of articles about the deaths of contract killers. "The things he knew firsthand were very accurate, but the things he knew by hearsay were sometimes distorted or plain wrong," he says. Angelov double-checked each piece of information Stoev passed along and concluded it was true that Stoev had served important men in the criminal world and that he possessed many valuable and compromising facts about them. "Without any doubt he was part of those networks and had access to information. He was killed because of the scandals he created with his last books."

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