Chronicle of a Death Foretold: Georgi Stoev's Gangster Pulp (Page 5)

The murder of Georgi Stoev shocked even the most skeptical observers. His death was the missing piece of evidence that seemed to prove, in the most ghastly manner, that there was a degree of truthfulness to his books after all. Even people who had never liked Stoev conceded the point. "His death," complained the journalist Martin Karbovski in Standart, "legitimized his stupid books written with a vocabulary of four-hundred words." As Tihomir Bezlov, the chief crime expert from the Center for the Study of Democracy, told Darik Radio, "It's obvious that there are many exaggerated claims in Stoev's books that sound bogus, but he was also a very well informed man and obviously there was a motive behind his murder."

The three shots that rang out on April 7, 2008, revived the painful memory of another hit job--the murder of the dissident Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov in London in 1978. According to leaked files, a Bulgarian State Security agent fatally poisoned Markov with a pellet fired from a modified pen. Like Stoev, Markov had been a longtime confidant to his future assassins--the Communist Party in his case--before brazenly turning against them. He defected in 1969 and later worked as a journalist for the BBC and Radio Free Europe, while also writing a series of scathing sketches and articles on totalitarian Bulgaria eventually collected in his book In Absentia Reports. Markov was a more accomplished novelist, one of Bulgaria's best, but Stoev's courage in standing up to unveil the mafia did not pale in comparison.

The investigation of Stoev's murder eventually foundered. Despite the fact that he was executed at noon in front of myriad witnesses (unlike the mystifying 007 operation against Markov), the unmasked hit men slipped away without a trace. The police interrogated Stoev's "book characters" without much success. "I haven't read his books," Mladen Mihalev was reported to have told detectives. Tabloids rehashed various tales, from the fairly credible (a Bulgarian mafia boss had paid 50,000 euros to Ukrainian thugs to kill Stoev) to the bizarre (Stoev had contracted his own murder). No official government account of the murder exists. Unsurprisingly, finding the assassins--the hit men as well as the masterminds--gradually began to look like a doomed enterprise. Since the mid-1990s, gang-style shootings had been occurring on an almost daily basis in Bulgaria, with the fatality list including not only mobsters but also football-club managers, athletes, bankers, insurance agents, customs officials and even a former prime minister of the country, Andrey Lukanov. They were all people who at one time had been linked to organized crime either as quiet participants or unruly detractors. Even when Bulgaria finally introduced numerous reforms in law enforcement and the judiciary in the early years of the new century in preparation for accession into the European Union, the assassinations continued. According to a report issued by the Center for the Study of Democracy in 2007, contract killings remained "the most efficient and inexpensive instrument to solve serious economic problems." Between 2000 and 2005 there were at least 156 such killings (about 13 percent of all homicides) with only seventeen of them solved. Bulgaria unfortunately became known as the "Sicily of the Balkans."

When Bulgaria joined the European Union in 2007, the expectation of officials in Brussels and citizens in Sofia was that the EU's modern rules and regulations would curb the power of the country's criminal organizations. Yet organized crime had already modernized itself. Whereas during the 1990s the Bulgarian mafia had restricted itself to traditional activities like drug trafficking, racketeering, car theft and gambling, in the early years of the new century it branched out into tax evasion, money laundering, real estate speculation, the siphoning of EU accession funds and manipulation of bids on public procurement projects. New players arrived as well. With most of the criminal syndicates a shambles because of bad management or infighting, their leaders either assassinated or gone into hiding, the more intelligent and insidious oligarchs took over. Many of them were people who had been tangentially involved in the Bulgarian underworld in the 1990s and had subsequently used their capital to monopolize major industries like water supply, garbage collection, telecommunications and electricity. With the government's covert blessing, they partitioned Bulgaria into economic spheres of influence, out of which they continued to extract, in a semi-legal fashion, enormous dividends. Once a Soviet satellite, Bulgaria was slowly turning into a miniature of Putin's new Russia. What little difference had once existed between the government and the criminal underworld vanished, leading to what the German investigative journalist Jürgen Roth has called, in his controversial book The New Bulgarian Demons, "the complete overlap between state functionaries and people from criminal organizations." Roth was not alone in his dire assessment. As Yane Yanev, an opposition MP and one of the few active whistleblowers in Bulgaria, recently told me, "There has been no government system in Bulgaria in the last twenty years. It's a quasi state. There's danger now that the mafia will completely take over the country."

In that sense, the type of "wrestler" mafia Stoev wanted to expose was long defunct, quietly disguised in a suit and tie. By the time he began writing, his books were already passé. But whether out of the desire for revenge or a longing to atone for the many sins of his past, Stoev harbored ambitions beyond writing. Far from feeling content with the popularity and high sales of his books, Stoev still aspired to effect some kind of social change, even if belated; he had hoped the proper authorities would take his texts seriously and would use them as a basis for investigating and then prosecuting those underworld bosses he knew who were still alive. "When the first book about Mladen Mihalev came out, we went into hiding in the countryside. We were waiting for a call from the main office of the prosecutor," Dobrin Dodev recalls. (Dodev was standing next to Stoev when he was murdered.) No such call came. The louder the discussion of Stoev's books grew, the quieter the government agencies became about their allegations. Stoev was never even offered basic police protection. (Despite my numerous requests, the Bulgarian police refused to comment for this article.)

Luckily, or lethally, for him, in the last several months of his life Stoev managed to secure interviews with some of Bulgaria's biggest media outlets, finally attaining the national exposure he had so desperately sought. "The surest way to remove a person is by ignoring him," Stoev told Veneta Raykova on Goreshto in early 2008. With a firm but anxious voice, he addressed his compatriots from the screen: "I insist that the police and the prosecution do their job and give me their attention. I insist that they stop behaving as if they don't know me and nothing of what I say is true. Because I think it's getting dangerous for me.... I insist, here, before the whole of Bulgaria, that those people give me their attention." At the end of the show, Raykova lightheartedly asked Stoev to predict the next contract killing in Bulgaria. Stoev, already visibly tired, answered, "I can only predict my own murder."

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