The Dangerous Crime Clans of Berlin
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Welcome to the Underworld Podcast, where we dive into the secret world of organized crime and other criminal phenomena. With me, Danny Gold. And me, Sean Williams. And today we're going to be talking about the Berlin Clans, which are sort of Lebanese and Kurdish clans that operate in Berlin and control the drug trade and do all sorts of other mischievous things. And Sean, living in Berlin, has some...

Some experience with, I think, you know, some elements of that, maybe just on the customer side. I don't want to incriminate him or anything like that. Sean? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm currently sitting in a studio in Kreuzberg, so there's probably some shady shit going on outside the window right now, none of which, unfortunately, I'm involved in, which would be useful in the pandemic. But yeah, we're going to get into these guys. They're pretty fucking nuts, actually. As you're going to find out, there's a lot of Sopranos-heavy stuff going on.

And I think, unfortunately, it's not popular in America, but it should be. There's a TV show that's like Germany's The Sopranos called Four Blocks, which really dives into the underworld of these clans, which is phenomenal. And I think it gets the underworld podcast endorsement. Definitely. Yeah, I love that show. And it's like the guys really put their effort in and they spent years and years researching these guys. So actually, if you want to know some more about these guys, then I would look up that show. Yeah.

And if you work at Amazon and want us to talk about that show every episode, hit us up. You know, make us an offer. Anyway, let's get going. It's 3 a.m. on a cold night in March 2017. Three young men are scooting across elevated rail tracks in central Berlin, sporting dark hoodies. Nothing strange there. Folks will do a lot to score drugs before hitting Berghain. Only this lot are looking for a very different kind of hire, and it will be making headlines for years to come.

The tracks head across the river Spree, bypassing Berlin's famous Museum Island. A stretch of them backs onto the historic Borden Museum, home to a mishmash of ancient arts and odysseys. Our three guys aren't interested in any of it though. They stop at a jutting out wall and hoist up a ladder. Climbing up and through a window into the museum's changing rooms, a guard on the inside has left open, and unconnected to the museum's alarm system.

What these guys are looking for is about 100 yards along one of the museum's corridors in a large display case. It's a massive gold coin, minted in Canada, called the Big Maple Leaf, one of only six in the world. It's 99% gold, the size of a serving plate, worth about $4 billion, and almost unprotected. The three guys smash the case with an axe and heed the £220 coin onto a skateboard before rushing it back along the corridor and tipping it out the window onto a wheelbarrow, dropping it a bunch of times.

Wait, they used a skateboard to transport it? Yeah, these are high-tech guys. They know what they're doing. And as we're going to find out, this is not out of the ordinary for these particular group of guys. So yeah, they put this thing on a skateboard. It weighs a ton. They hop it down onto the tracks, probably dropping it a bunch of times and scuffing it up.

and then they will the maple leaf into a park and disappear into the night. Not long afterwards, these DIY masterminds are in court, accused of a robbery that's got Germany hooked. One of them, a guy called Dennis, used to work at the Boden Museum. He's the inside guy. The other two, teenage cousins named Ahmed and Wissam, are no strangers to cops. They've been caught for all kinds of low-level violent crimes and pickpocketing. They're screwed, obviously. Police find gold fragments and glass splinters in their car and apartments, and receipts for the axe, the ladder, and the skateboard.

The big maple leaf will never be seen again, likely cut up and sold for parts. It was the coup of their lives, a judge later tells jurors, tongue-in-cheek. So young and already millionaires. So yeah, I mean, on the one hand it seems really professional, the way they were able to get in, but on the other hand, they just left evidence all over the place. They basically hung up signs like, we did it, catch us. Yeah, they don't really give a shit either. Like, these guys...

As I'm going to go into, these guys get pretty much reared into these clans. And the fact that they're young is no coincidence. And the fact that they don't really give a fuck who sees what, that's no mistake either. Yeah.

It's kind of part of their MO, is how they act. So, yeah, they're pretty slapstick, these guys. But the thing is, when they're going into court, their surname raises plenty of eyebrows across the city. It's Remog. For years, the Lebanese-German Remog family, called a clan in Berlin speak, have terrorized the city, robbing, running drugs, extorting, and generally being a pain in the polizei's ass. The polizei are like the...

Germans police? Yeah, Polizei, police. Yeah. Okay. I mean, you know, people, you got to explain these things. I'm just saying. I'm going to, I don't know how much to like Germanize the words in this, you know? Can I go like for Berliner and call him like Reimor clan? I think I'm going to, I think I'm going to stop halfway with that. All right. That works. That works.

Yeah. So, a year later, cops charge 16 Remo clan members with money laundering. They see 77 Berlin properties they say were bought with black money. Among them is the home of Issa Remo, the clan's raw bone leader. 52 years old, with cropped hair and a love for one-liners, Remo's a skinny Tony Soprano with a TJ Maxx style to boot. His HQ is this bloated yellow brick villa in a leafy kind of shit part of town. Doesn't look like something a mafia boss would live in beside the guys keeping watch outside.

But it definitely is. Rema's the head of Berlin's most notorious clan, one of 12 so-called problematic families the city police have identified that run an underworld that's grown steadily since the 1980s. Wait, so they call them problematic families? That's like the way that they identify these? Is that for real?

Yeah, and that's like the least problematic way that the police describe these guys as well. It's very politically correct, the problematic families. It's quite a euphemism. Yeah, politically correct isn't really something that Germany is good on either. So yeah, despite what you may think about modern Germany, it's still pretty light years behind in that kind of stuff.

But these guys, yeah, they've been all over the place for years. They've robbed banks. They've been responsible for some really outlandish crimes like bank blasts in the middle of the day, killings, tons of other stuff. And it's not even the biggest clan in Germany. There are loads of these groups and they've become a massive headache for the authorities. Soon after the raids, a local reporter catches up with Issa Remo. He doesn't seem like he's in the mood for a friendly chat. He just had a simple headline for the hack. You're messing with the devil. That is... I mean, that's...

Saying that out in the open to a journalist, that's pretty solid right there. That's like movie character worthy. I mean, I don't know if he's playing a part or whatever it is, but that's, I mean, especially to a journalist. He loves to limelight this guy. Yeah, that's a solid headline right there. Like if someone said that to me. I know, right? You go to the guy's house. Yeah, he goes to the guy's house and he's saying that within two minutes. I'd be straight on the bus home. If someone said that to me when I was reporting on a story, I would just be like, I'm done. Like, this is all I need. I'm good to go. Yeah, this guy's a bit of a media whore. He loves his limelight.

Yeah, like Four Blocks, that show that we were discussing earlier, that's been a real big hit over here. And there's even this barbershop not far from where I am right now called Tony Hamady, and it's named after the show's main character. They've got pics of the cast getting their hair cut there like some Italian mafia barbershop. Yeah, it sounds like the show is kind of doing for Berlin what the Sopranos did for suburban North Jersey. I guess Berlin was already cool. Like suburban North Jersey, not that great. Great diners, but just not that cool. Yeah, I mean...

Not, you know, Berlin's cool, but Jersey's not exactly like black t-shirts and pilly raves kind of cool, right? No, no. It's got a different kind of vibe. It's not there yet. I don't know. Maybe. It's actually a great window into the underworld in Neukölln, this show, which is actually this ultra hip but really downtrodden part of Berlin that's home to this wild collection of folks from all over the world.

Zonen Alley, which is Sun Alley in English, is like the show's epicenter, and it's full of Arab and Turkish bars, restaurants, hookah bars, and other stuff. Loads more people moved into the street in 2015 when Angela Merkel opened the borders, and it pretty much looks like a Middle Eastern street. I mean, I met this guy from Damascus who came over in that big wave of immigration. He actually just calls it Little Damascus with his mates. So that should give you an idea of how kind of standout this place is.

So the writers of that show, they spent three years researching the clans, speaking to locals about them and so on. They even have real gangsters in the cast. Vessel Gilline, who plays Abbas, Tony's brother, spent three years in jail for 2009 for beating up a guy who later died. But so these clans, I mean, they're essentially all Lebanese for the most part. Yeah, I mean, Lebanese sometimes in name only, like a lot of these guys are stateless, a lot of them are Kurds that have kind of roamed around the Middle East, either being exiled or...

kind of, you know, moving around for economic reasons. So, yeah, I mean, it's even more specific than that. There are certain clans within Kurdish tribes in the Middle East that are where these guys in Berlin are coming from. So it's pretty specific stuff.

So Neukölln, this area, this crazy kind of mix of people from all over the world, that's where I was living until the end of last year. I was there for like six years. It's a fun place, but it has this really widespread kind of low-level racketeering all over the place. There are tons of front businesses like brothels, which are legal in Germany, by the way, bars and these weird betting shops called Spielcasinos, which are pretty much every other place along that street. Obviously, the drugs market in Berlin is massive. Even now, all the clubs

Clubs are shut, which is probably making it even bigger in a way. And most of those are coming through the clans or their affiliate groups in the city.

Yeah. How much business alone do people go into like Berghain or these big clubs bring in? Cause I gotta, it's gotta be able to support like four or five clans. I mean, last time I went to Berlin was, was a decade ago, but like people, people really, you know, they load up, they, they take their, their nightlife culture seriously. I have friends that go there even now and like still make pilgrimages and they go, I mean like, what do you do for 45 hours in a club? And,

And then like, yeah, you, uh, you know, sweat and you consider your life choices and then, uh, you do it all over again, I think. Yeah. I think the answer is a ton of ketamine and speed and, and you support the clans and, and all that. Are there, are there even, I mean, to combat these things, are there, are there like PSAs there where it's like, don't buy this? You're supporting these criminal groups. Cause we do have that with cocaine in the U in the U S.

Yeah, I mean, that's like the biggest fallacy, right? About Berlin, this super liberal place. Everyone's kind of like super woke and want to stay on the right side. And yet every weekend they kind of buy half a ton of drugs coming straight from sort of the mafia and get fucked up off their tits. And then they're

They kind of go back in and get awoke again. Look, we don't judge here when it comes to recreational activities. I'm judging. This is not a judgmental podcast. Even the shisha bars are in on the game. There were a bunch of raids in Berlin bars last year where they found tons of untaxed illegal tobacco in warehouses all over town. A police chief said at the time these were so-called bread-and-butter businesses of the clans. And if you think this is kind of chump change, Bugsy Malone stuff, it's worth remembering that police grab thousands of kilos of this stuff each raid.

Production cost is under 5 euros or 6 bucks, or maybe like 20 bucks by the time this goes out. Anyway, this tobacco sells for like 60 bucks off the shelf, so that's millions of euros just in tobacco alone. These aren't mom-and-pop operations, although as we go on you're gonna find out they pretty much are as well. It's probably best to start with what a clan actually is, because you wouldn't exactly call the Gambinos or the Yamaguchi Gumi clans, although they probably could be called that, right?

I mean, one thing about German culture is that it's not really that PC, and they lump all these folks into one definition because they're just guys who came over from the Middle East, and that's all the Germans can see in some way. Germany's Federal Criminal Office describes clans as the committing of crime by members of ethnically isolated subcultures. The cops here also call clans criminal parallel societies, which is kind of a nod to the fact many of these families are pretty insular and keep to themselves. I mean, it's actually...

Pretty similar for all ethnic groups that move into it. I mean, it happens in New York too, right? It started back in the day, Irish, Italian, Jews, later on Vietnamese, Chinese, Russians. It's sort of what everyone does when they're an ethnic group that moves to a city where they don't fit in with the dominant culture in a way and just –

you know mingle among themselves and especially if they're poor and whatever else they form these games I guess there's always been different names for them you know I don't find clan that that offensive but it's just like that's that's what every ethnic group has done I don't want to isolate these groups as being like they're the only ones in a way yeah yeah totally I mean like a lot of these guys came over in the 70s and 80s when the during the Lebanese civil war um

And then they followed a wave of people from Turkey who came over in the 50s and 60s as the so-called guest workers who were trying to kind of rebuild Germany after the war. And as you can imagine, like in Western Europe during that time, guys in the Middle East weren't exactly that welcome when they arrived. And, you know, like that's how...

pretty much all of these guys got their start they were sidelined they didn't really have much of a foothold in the culture people didn't really want to know them so they just turned to crime it makes perfect sense um the most of the guys they moved to west germany so these are cities the big industrial cities like bremen kaiserslautern uh the rural valley these places where you know they they make the cars and the pills and all that other stuff that makes germany tick um

The biggest clan in the country is the Miri clan, led by a guy called Ibrahim Miri who fled the Lebanese civil war in 86 and he was just 13. Cops reckon around 10,000 people could be members of his group these days. Anyway, Miri and tons of other clan families are Mahalami Kurds, sorry for the pronunciation, an ethnic group present mainly in southeastern Turkey and Lebanon. So yeah, these Kurds I think were...

concentrated in the city of Mardin, which is a city in southeast Turkey. I've actually been to it. It's beautiful. It's up on like a hill. But from my understanding is they were all originally from that area and then sort of filtered out due to various conflicts within Turkey and the Middle East in general. Does that sound accurate? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, rule number one in the Middle East is that the Kurds get fucked over wherever they go. So

uh i think the turks had exiled them in the early part of the 20th century and then they found themselves in lebanon a lot of these guys and then they were kind of stateless and and didn't really have uh any gain in the society there so that's why a lot of them came over to europe as well yeah a big thing too in turkey um if you go there's the stereotype of kurds sometimes is that they're uh

Drug dealers or traffickers, a lot of it sometimes having to do with the fact that the PKK was accused of trafficking the Kurdish militant group and that Kurds live in some of the shittier neighborhoods in places like Istanbul. And some of them have to rely on that to survive. It's every oppressed group gets accused of these things. Yeah.

elements of truth to some of it, but it's definitely a stereotype that persists in Turkey. I think that it also goes further in Germany because there's so many Turks that a lot of them are quite

right wing and like they're pretty anti-Kurd as well so if you walk along the Zonen Alley or other streets in Neukölln you'll find loads of people that say the Kurds are a problem other Arabs are a problem so you get this kind of like secondary racism coming from minority Turks in the area as well so this Miri guy he comes to Germany and he settles in Bremen so that's a city of half a million people in northern Germany not too far from Hamburg

He's part of a huge family, seven siblings when he arrives, another five born soon after. He commits his first crimes aged 16, then goes on a spree of acts including robbery, extortion, abduction. He also sets up a Bremen chapter at the notorious Mongrels Biker Club, which dealt drugs for years. Biker gang crime is really common in Germany, by the way. There are tons of headlines about clubs getting busted up and down the country all the time. And more people from the Miris join, making that biker gang into a handy little mafia.

Yeah, it seems like there's big Sons of Anarchy vibes with these biker gangs in Europe. I remember being in Amsterdam, not in the right mindset, and just huge biker dudes everywhere in these cafes. It's really taken off in the culture there. Did it come from America? I mean, do you have any idea? I've no idea. I mean, I'd assume so. But I mean, Germany loves America. There's this weird kind of subculture in Germany that everyone listens to country music. They have these weird fucking...

like schlager music which is this like really cheesy pop folk kind of music that people listen to but it's not just germany though right you see like hell's angels in scandinavia and uh and and and holland and you know maybe maybe we'll dive into this in a later episode i love when we come up ideas like this just organically just flowing from us yeah we're on fire man yeah yeah um yeah like

So this Miri guy, right, he's pretty deep into organised crime by the time he's in his middle age. And in 2014, authorities decide they've had enough of him and they try to deport him back to Lebanon. So the problem is, Miri doesn't have a passport, he's stateless. So they only get to send him to Lebanon in 2018, where Miri is telling reporters his life is in danger. Shock. Somehow he manages to get back into Germany last year. Then late last year, they sent him back again. So this is getting pretty ridiculous at this point.

And this is one of the biggest problems of organized crime in Germany, right? So loads of the guys who come over during these civil conflicts, they've never given full statehood. So you've got tons of folks in the Middle East settling in Germany, educating their kids in the German system, but they can't find work because they're undocumented. No wonder so many of them have turned to crime to make ends meet. Yeah, it's pretty common, I think, for communities like that coming into areas where...

If you don't give them an opportunity to earn a living in a legal sense, what do you expect to happen? I'm not making excuses for it, but it's just you have to give people a way to take care of themselves to feed their family. Otherwise, of course, they're going to look for the shadow economy and find ways any way they can. Yeah, and I mean, you've got these kids coming through the education system. They're German, basically. And then when they get out of school and they want to get a job, they've got nowhere to go. So no wonder so many of them

turn towards their own community again and so much of that is involved in organised crime.

Cops have taken absolutely ages to get a grip on these groups too. According to a government report from 2018, these clans made around 800 million bucks and that must be nothing compared to the true amount given how much the police have bungled their attempts to follow them. This is one thing I picked up and I'm not sure if it's true or not because it's mostly from TV shows and tabloid headlines but it really seems like the police in Europe are kind of inept when it comes to crime like this. Is that fair to say? Yeah, I think so. I think it's like a combination of a load of different stuff like...

There's simultaneously a bit of a racist attitude to these communities, but also a lot of cops and they're kind of hamstrung by PC messaging coming from the top. So they don't really go in and they don't really represent themselves in these communities at all. So they've just been kind of flying under the radar for decades. And then these communities are like pretty much forgotten in the mainstream. You know, they don't see any representations of themselves. The kids are...

oftentimes stateless. There's really nothing for them to grab onto in Germany. So I can see, you know, you can see how these kind of groups get pretty much no attention from the authorities. What about the legal system there? I mean, is it easy to get away with stuff? Is it easy to get off?

Yeah, I mean, getting off, maybe not. But yeah, I'm going to get into some of that stuff in there. There's definitely some pretty lax little loopholes and tricks of the trade that the clans are picking up on, yeah. So when the Berlin Wall was up, many of these families stayed active in West Germany, which welcomed them more than the East. But a lot came to West Berlin during the Cold War too. And anyway, Berlin's the country's biggest city, as much as it might be broke as shit and a complete basket case. Even today, actually. I can say that on personal.

So the authorities claim there are up to 30 major families like this in the capital, 12 to 13 of which are closely involved in organised crime. Some estimates put the total number of Klan members who are criminals at 8 to 10,000, but there's a lot of guessing going on there.

The reason there's a lot of crime going on in Berlin itself could be due to a bunch of things. Drugs are a huge issue. Obviously, we've just been over that. Everyone's going out and getting wasted all the time. Last year, there was this huge bust where a bunch of drug taxis, they called them, were hollowed out by the cops. They were just going around, brazing to people's doors, selling drugs on SMS. Just like perfect sort of turnkey solution as a Silicon Valley one.

In New York, they do that with taxis, like with Uber or Lyft and stuff like that. And they just kind of, you don't order an Uber or Lyft, but when they show up to deliver drugs, so I've been told, they have the Uber sign and the Lyft sign there. And it just makes it, it's a pretty easy way to get away with things, I think. Yeah, I mean, if you can get pizza delivered to your door, you should be able to get cocaine, right? Yeah, of course.

So in Berlin, sex work is another huge area that crime's kind of proliferated as well. Berlin's home to hundreds of brothels, from these little red light, happy and massage parlours to giant mega brothels. There's even a pretty disgusting place called King George in David Bowie's old neighbourhood of Schöneberg. Although, I should add, I don't know if David Bowie went to this place. That doesn't all you can fuck option. I think it was used as a safe house in Homeland, actually, which is pretty ironic.

First of all, David Bowie didn't need to go to a place like that to have an all-you-can-fuck option. I'm pretty sure that's just how he lived. And also, I'm sorry, from the top, like one more time,

Homeland safehouse? What is happening here? There was a series of Homeland that was absolutely dreadful that was set in Berlin. It was like some terrorist plot and they used this shitty, disgusting, all-you-can-fuck brothel as their HQ for all the hackers and the good guys in it. Was that addressed in it or is it just you saw the location and you're like, oh, they're using that place that doubles as an all-you-can-fuck brothel as their safehouse?

Yeah, I mean, I've driven past it very quickly many times, so I know how the front of it looks. Moving on, anyway. So, yeah, I mean, obviously sex and the mob are never too far apart anywhere in the world. And in 2016, 900 people raided Artemis, this four-story mega brothel complex in West Berlin, where they found dozens of women who'd been trafficked into the city. That was also run by the Hell's Angels, by the way.

The third is kind of boring in a way, and it's like really German. It's a stable, well-functioning country, for the most part. And it's rich. And Berlin, whose mayor once marketed as poor but sexy, is the ground zero for this massive property boom that's hiking rents and making property developers a shit ton of money. A politician from the left party – that's the party born out of the ashes of the East German Communist government, by the way –

recently said that Germany was, quote, a gangster's paradise. Even Palermo's public prosecutor said he'd invest in the country if he were a criminal. Calabria's Andrangheta, Europe's biggest drug trafficking outfit, is reckoned to launder 80% of its illegal proceeds in Germany. That's wild. I mean, Panama, Dubai, even Manhattan real estate...

People will launder money through $10 million, a single condo, but I've never heard about Germany. I mean, that's...

Yeah. Yeah. The authorities are just starting to get a handle of this black money, they call it. It's gone way under the radar for so long now. And this is kind of the reason that the clans have become so big, right? Because they become experts at cleaning money. No wonder the Remo clan had like 77 properties stolen by the police after the big maple leaf went missing. And they were worth over 10 million bucks. I mean...

I know these are hardly New York prices, by the way. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. In New York, you can wander that much money through one condo. It just seems like a lot of effort to do it in Berlin through 57 properties. Yeah, I mean, on the flip side, though, it does kind of put your one-bed, bed-stuy condo into perspective, right? When you can get a house in Berlin for about a tenth of the price. God, I don't want to talk about it. No.

So there's four major clans in Berlin. Remo, Abou-Chaker, Fakro and Al-Zayn. Ralph Gadban, who's this Lebanese-German author who's been writing about the clans for decades, recently described to Deutsche Welle, which is like the BBC of Germany, how difficult it is to track these guys. And I quote...

They have different statuses and they spell their surnames differently, so it's very difficult to estimate any figures. Sometimes they're stateless, some of them have Turkish passports. Many of the others you can assume have Lebanese citizenship, but they won't go and pick up their passports. Why should they? So they get deported? So this Gabban guy, he says the police are blind to the problem, which isn't really true.

And he's had a tendency for years to break into these pretty crude stereotypes and he describes clans as religious fanatics. He's been under police protection since he went on Lebanese telly last year and kicked off on the clans there. So yeah,

Is there stuff flowing in from Lebanon? I know it's a major center for drug trafficking, stuff coming in from West Africa, coming in from Latin America, guns, all that. Is there contact there? Do you know if there's communication between organized criminal groups in Lebanon and in Berlin? I don't know a huge amount about the Lebanese side of it, but I do know that a lot of the money washing that goes on between the two countries. So there'll be a lot of bank accounts in Switzerland or Lebanon and the money will be going back and forth.

And they'll be cleaning it over there and bringing it back over here as clean money and then buying loads of properties and other stuff with that. Gabban recently said that one problem was integration, telling a journalist, again, I quote, People were deeply convinced of the superiority of our open, individualized, liberal, democratic legal system and believed that migrants would automatically integrate. That was a fatal mistake. So he's pretty strident in his views, this guy.

But his work is interesting. He's reported on a world that's super hierarchical and patriarchal. And one of the opening lines of his book, Arab Clans, The Underestimated Danger, he quotes a kid in Noikone he calls Tarek, who's a coke dealer, that tells him, the German state doesn't interest me. We have our own rules. Otherwise, we wouldn't be doing this shit.

It's like... Yeah, I mean, that's just criminal societies, right? They play by their own rules. I guess there's an added element when they're seen as the other or foreigners, but it's basically just how... Yeah, I mean, I think Mr. Gabban's got a chip on his shoulder anyway because some of his other stuff's pretty out there, but he's definitely in this world. He's definitely spoke to a lot of guys in there, so...

It's like there's a big, big chunk of truth in what he's saying. Berlin prides itself on being this multicultural mix of people from all over the world, right? They call it multi-culti.

And it kind of is, but it's really, really separated. You've got your Eastern Europeans and Russians in the giant tower blocks in the old communist East. Turkish guest workers brought over in the 50s after the war. They live in the Northwest and Southeast. There's Arabs in Kreuzberg and Neukölln, the two hippest parts of town these days, which means there's yuppies from, you know, Australia, the UK, America and Germany.

And there's Vietnamese who came over as communist pals in the Cold War, bartenders from Brooklyn. It's all different worlds. I mean, I bet Four Blocks is almost unrecognisable to a ton of Berliners, because it kind of all flies under the radar a lot. And then there is these times where it really, really doesn't, like the Big Maple Leaf. And that's why I want to focus on the Remo clan. Firstly, it's the Remo. He's a Mahalami too, just like Ibrahim Miri.

His family's originally from Mardin, on the Turkish border with Syria, like you said, and they're exiled to Lebanon where they're stateless and they can't get properly educated. Like the Miris, the Remos flee war in Lebanon in the 80s and they set up shop in Germany.

Is is a big guy, he's pretty overweight and he loves holding court in public with his guys. But sometimes he goes unnoticed more or less until 1992, just months after the wars come down, and Berlin by all accounts is a giant, broken free-for-all, still shelled out from the Second World War and riddled with crime. I'm going to use a lot of reporting from the Tagesspiegel now, which is Daily Mirror in English, which is one of Berlin's top papers and has done a ton of solid reporting on the clans.

In 1992, two Remo brothers shoot a Balkan restaurateur in Schöneberg, the same district as that all-you-can-fuck brothel hell place. Another guy is seriously injured, and when cops grab the pair they find heroin and a load of blank Lebanese birth certificates. Issa himself doesn't pop up until 2003, when a police officer points out a broken taillight in his car, and he responds by telling the guy to quote, "...drive on you idiots," adding, and I think this bit is key, "...I'll fuck you in the arse, and your president too."

I'm sorry, is this the same guy that said you're tangling with the devil? Or is this a different dude? I thought you were going to ask who the president was at the time. Yeah, this is the devil guy. Yeah, he's quite a character. So he's, I mean...

So they're just...

Almost untouchable, it sounds like. Just running wild. And generalists, too. They don't specialize in anything except for fucking shit up and trying to get money. Yeah, anything goes with these guys. And there's so many of them at this point. It's pretty hard to keep tabs on them as an organized group. I'd assume that it was mostly just drug dealing. It's that, too. It's kind of like everything. It's what makes these clans so kind of fascinating in a way, right? It's just all crime goes. And they'll do any old shit to make a buck.

I mean, this goes all the way to his immediate family, right? So one of his sons is in jail accused of beating a man to death with a baton. So he's a nice guy. Another is convicted of coordinating a series of van heists across town. Two Rema brothers, Ibrahim and Bilal, both with long rap sheets, smashed their car into a tree and died. The funeral was massive, drawing in folks from clans all over the city. Police must have been thinking something was really up by then.

And leading them all is Issa. He never stops being loud, but at some point he gets a gastric ban and slims down. So he's thinking about his health. Yeah, got to. He's kind of scruffy. Yeah, yeah. I mean, he's kind of scruffy. He's really out in fancy clothes and he claims he's a German patriot. This is super interesting. So he flies a German flag from his villa gate and has Ich bin ein Berliner tattooed across his chest.

He likes barbecues. He drives a Mercedes. He's got no time for basic niceties. He's a model German. See, now I'm confused because I assume these guys...

We're like, I'm not German. I'm Lebanese. I live by my own rules. But this guy just seems like he's out there eating sausages, drinking giant beers, talking to women that are wearing those costumes with the hair and the buns and stuff like that. You know what I'm saying? Germans. Yeah. I mean, he's doing everything. He's everything to every man. This guy is a complete nutcase. Renaissance man. Yeah. I mean, like his members...

Not so much the Patriots. And then you get these massive, almost slapstick-like episodes, right? So in 2014, the Remo clan blew up a bank in southern Berlin and they made off with almost 12 million bucks. Only one guy was arrested and cops believe the rest was washed through Lebanon and back into German real estate. So there's that kind of playoff between the two countries, right? And you remember that jewel heist in Dresden last year? Did you see that in the news? It's like this huge...

Hi, it's these guys broke into the so-called Green Vault in this old building in the middle of the city. And they made off with over a billion dollars worth of treasure. It was all over the news in Europe. There were videos of the guy just like brazenly smashing into the place, breaking open the display case and just like hauling loads of shit into their bags. Um,

Cops think that might have been carried out by a Berlin clan. And some have even fingered the Remos for doing that recently. It sounds very Pink Panther-ish, which I think we'll do an episode on too. Those guys who just do the smash and grabs. Oh, the Balkan guys? Yeah, they're good fun. I just don't understand how they get away with... Berlin's a modern city, aren't they? They're not security cameras? How do they keep getting away with this? Yeah, this is an interesting thing, right? Because...

Security and privacy are huge issues in Germany. So going all the way back to the war, you've got the Gestapo. And then after the war finishes, you've got the Stasi in East Germany. And these guys are just constantly monitored the whole time. And Germans really associate the idea of privacy with freedom. So much so that it was a big issue when they're trying to do all this COVID tracking app stuff. A lot of Germans were kicking off over that. And it's because they...

Yeah, I mean, they're not on Twitter that much. They're not on Facebook. They don't like to give their real names or the streets are blanked out in Google Maps. Privacy is a huge issue in Germany and that's why, to bring it back to this heist, it's like there's barely any CCTV and there's not a lot of

Yeah, there's not a lot of stuff to catch these guys in the act, really. So if this podcast doesn't work out, I think I might move to Berlin and just start doing crimes because it sounds pretty, you know, good place to do it. It's pretty, yeah, it's a pretty solid place to get your career started, I think.

Clans fought each other in massive street battles twice last year in Nykone. This February, one guy was killed in a gun battle just minutes down the road from the Reichstag. I mean, it's not even in the top 50 gun battles the Reichstag has seen, but you get the message. Like, this is pretty serious stuff. And like, with the big maple leaf, the Remo clan keeps the guys committing these frontline crimes young.

So they can be tried as minors and get off with light sentencing. As the 90s philosopher, as the offspring once said, if you're under 18, you won't be doing any time. You got to keep them separated. I think Issa Remo is probably into the offspring as well. I can imagine him bopping along. So one family clan member told a reporter recently that, quote, prison makes men. And she's got 15 kids, right? So that's a lot of men. Clan members mostly marry among themselves. So their family bonds are really strong. That's obviously really good to prevent snitches.

Neither do these guys fight among themselves that much, although you do get the odd flare-up. They're not really like the mob families of 80s New York. There's no war, just a few fights here and there. What about with the Turkish motorcycle gangs? Are there clashes? Or even German gangs? Are there German gangs there that get involved? I mean, I guess there are, but you don't read about them that much. And I was struggling to find information about the clans alone, even in German. And I mean...

There's nothing about them fighting other German gangs at all. So I think it's pretty peaceful on that front. Yeah, like, weirdly the highest profile thing that's happened recently in Berlin is that this big German rapper called Bushido switched his management from the leader of the Apu Chaka clan to Ashraf Remo, Issa's brother.

Recently, Ashraf is said to have pulled a samurai sword out of his car after being threatened and waved it at the guy like a madman. This has been on TV screaming about being pals with his fellow Arab brothers, but obviously it's total bullshit. So there's a Netflix series that I thought was a ripoff of Four Blocks about German-Lebanese Kurdish rap singers.

Like Dynasty and their tie-ins with organized crime. It's pretty terrible. It's medium terrible. I think it was called Sky or something like that. But I thought it was a ripoff of Four Blocks, but it sounds like it's based on this. And it's worth watching this sort of.

There's some truth. I mean, like, did you hear about the guy who used to be a rapper in Kreuzberg in Berlin that turned out to be one of ISIS's biggest propaganda tools? This guy called Dennis Cuspert, who ended up being called Dezo Dog and going out and kind of taking part in a lot of the atrocities. Oh, yeah, the ISIS guy.

Yeah, yeah. He started off as a rapper in West Berlin, in Kreuzberg, and he was part of a gang. So there's stuff going on, but the clans are really running the show. I mean, the only German rapper I respect is that guy Jesus, who has those terrible videos where he's just sniffing a bunch of blow and holding machine guns. You know who I'm talking about? Yeah, yeah. I'm going to send you some stuff later, but it's pretty much all shit. I probably won't respect it, but please send along.

So, like, it's clear the clans don't give much of a shit about the cops. A bit like most of the guys in Four Blocks, right? So now the police are going another way. I know Rudy Giuliani is to like this total joke these days. Broken windows has been debunked by tons of crime experts. But Berlin cops have turned to what they call pinprick policing. So they ticket guys to the number of gaming machines they've got in cafes or shaky bookkeeping or carbon monoxide levels, stuff like that.

Last year they did this in Berlin almost 400 times. So you can imagine that Issa's pretty pissed off by now. Well, I think the thing with broken windows was that it was more about targeting anyone and everyone who was committing these sort of low-level crimes. Where in this, if it's specifically targeting the clans and associated members with these low-level things, I think it makes a lot more sense. You know, you get them on anything you can. They did Capone for tax fraud, man.

Yeah, exactly. This April, loads of guys were arrested at Issa's mum's funeral, which looked like something out of The Godfather, right? Loads, hundreds of people. Some of them were attacking photographers and video journalists who were there. It was a pretty wild time. Issa's 53 now, so he's like peak mafia boss age. He's got so much money and property, it's hard to see what the authorities are going to pin him with, really. And just like Ibrahim Miri, he's not a Lebanese citizen. So there's seemingly no chance the German state will ever deport him. He certainly acts like he's untouchable anyway.

Pride before the fall? Maybe. But the guy's been through a hell of a lot, and he doesn't look like he's going to slow down anytime soon. And the clans? The cops have barely figured them out. I think they'll be around for plenty more series of four blocks. Well, that's good. I think there's been two or three so far, and I'd like to...

Like to watch more and kind of see what's happening there. But I mean, you know, at one part of me, it sounds like the police have sort of caught on and they're taking this seriously. I know I've read some stuff where it seems like they're really trying to break things down. But it seems like you're saying that they're still just not able to do anything. I mean, is that German law? Is that these guys are so good at what they do? They seem pretty reckless. They're pretty reckless. Yeah. I mean.

Like I was saying earlier about the age of some of the guys committing their kind of like frontline big crimes, they're always teenagers. They're pretty much just, you know, straight off the street, done a couple of pickpocket and jobs, and they do these big sort of slapsticky heists. And that keeps the low levels of the group in jail and not snitching on the higher ups. And yeah, like the cops have cottoned on to these guys a fair bit.

But there's so many of them and the money's been washed for so many years now that it's pretty hard to kind of nail down where the money's going and where they can kind of pick them up and sort of really hurt them. Yeah, I mean, it's crazy. Anything else you want to add? Watch Four Blocks. Solid show.

uh one of the rare instances of good german tv so i'd recommend that and it's like it's shot in this really kind of um i mean you know but it's shot in this like really visceral kind of handheld way so if you've ever been around any of these neighborhoods or you know berlin at all you'll you'll recognize all of the streets and it's kind of a really good window into this stuff yeah it's it's excellent so thank you all again thank you sean for this thanks for tuning in to the underworld podcast please

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