The Story of Sweden's Gang Crime Chaos: From Yugoslav Kingpins to Bombings, Rifles and Roadblocks
01:00:15 Share

ButcherBox, you guys have heard me talk about it before. It is a service that I used even before they were an advertiser because I like getting high-quality meat and seafood that I can trust.

right to my door, 100% grass-fed beef, free-range organic chicken, pork-raised crate-free, and wild-caught seafood. We are only like a month and a half away from chili season. You're going to want to stock your freezer with a lot of meat that's not going to cost you that much at all. It's an incredible value. There's free shipping. You can curate it to customize your box plans, and it gets delivered right to your doorstep.

No more annoying trips to the grocery store or the butcher. It's going to save you time and save you money. Sign up for ButcherBox today by going to butcherbox.com slash underworlds and use code underworld at checkout to get $30 off your first box. Again, that's butcherbox.com slash underworlds and use code underworlds.

July this year in Gothenburg, Sweden's second city. A bunch of guys are chilling at a barber shop in the city's industrial south. It's a relaxing broad daylight, 2pm. Then, as if from nowhere, two men stride into the shop dressed in black, their faces shielded by balaclavas and brandishing guns. One pushes the barber aside. He's coming straight for his customer, a 25-year-old sitting still in his chair beside the window. "Stand back!" the pair yells.

and they open fire, emptying 10 bullets into the man, most of which hit his head. He dies almost instantly, blood spattered everywhere, still sitting in the chair. It's a scene straight out of Manhattan. Albert Anastasia, Murder Inc, Hollywood Law. This is the latest in a slew of gangland violence that's gripped Gothenburg since May, when around 100 men held a massive street fight in a northern suburb, stunning locals and the police.

A few days after that, an assassin shoots a man in the back of the head at point blank range at a grocery store. Then, at the end of June, a 17 year old kid walks up to a 30 year old policeman and shoots him dead in the rough neighbourhood of Bishopsgarden, one of the downtowns of the city's chaotic gang scene. It's the first time an active cop has been shot dead in Sweden in 14 years. It's public outrage.

Swedish PM calls the murder a quote "attack on our open society" who will never back down in the struggle against organized crime. But it's not over and just days after the officers slaying two men walk into the barbershop in Frölunda yet another deprived area ravaged by gangs proliferating in the years following the demise of Balkan mobsters that dominated Swedish crime for decades. Their numbers are huge. They're bombing and grenade attacking citizens

And they're getting so young, the Swedish state didn't know what to do. Drugs, joblessness, a hostile environment, turf wars and guns from the full Yugoslavia. It's a miracle more bodies aren't dropping. Then this is Sweden, land of social welfare, Spotify, Abba, Ikea. It's a peaceful place, right? One of the world's good stories. A safe space. Not quite.

In fact, Sweden's the only place in Europe where gun crime has gone up since the early 2000s, with bomb blasts, roadblocks and murders an all-too-common feature of daily life in its three major cities, Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmö. And the barbershop bloodshed won't be its last. Welcome to the Underworld Podcast. ♪

So, hey guys, and welcome to another edition of the show that teaches you all about how to settle turf wars in public without involving those pesky cops. I'm your host, Sean Williams, and as always, I'm joined by my podcast wife, Dani Gold, who's based in a place called New York City. I am in the fair town of Berlin. This is a multicultural, multi-continental podcast.

It's just two white journalists in our 30s, straight up heterosexual males talking about gangs. Getting kind of weird. And when you put it like that, it's kind of depressing. But yeah. Totally cool. Totally cool. I mean, how's it going over there? I mean, right now we've got an election going on. I mean, as we're speaking, we've got an election going on. So it's the end of Angela Merkel. Is anything exciting going on in the States?

Yeah, I mean, take it easy, Dan Rathers. No one's here for that. I'm excited about this episode. I think a lot of people have reached out to us and said they wanted us to talk about the gang situation in Sweden. But I think I like what you did here. You're kind of going back into the history too. So I think it's a pretty good episode for sure.

Yeah. And if you listen to the Patreon episode we did recently with Hugo Kamann, who described like an insane amount of gun violence, homicides, gang trouble in Sweden, which is like a world away of the image most people have of it, which is all happy, clappy, sing song, rich people living in a little stable paradise.

Yeah, I also, I interviewed Bjorn Wegner a little while back who kind of broke down the entire history of organized crime in Sweden. And, you know, he's super knowledgeable about all this stuff. So the Patreon again, patreon.com slash general world podcast where we put up bonus episodes, you know, for $5, you can get show notes, scripts, source lists, everything like that for a little bit more. But please support us if you can, because that's where we're doing a lot of interesting stuff if you want to get more.

Yeah, and I mean, all this stuff about Sweden being this, you know, nice little happy country is pretty much true. I mean, Sweden is a really safe place to live. It's got just 1.08 homicides per 100,000 people, which puts it 184th worldwide. The UK is 175th, by the way. America is 94th, so get in Britain.

I'm actually, I'm surprised America is only 94th and not like top 50, to be honest with you. I want to double check. I want to double check those facts. But yeah, I mean, the Sweden thing is interesting too, right? Because, you know, it has become this political football for culture war stuff, you know, where it's either like the most dangerous place on earth or completely fine, depending on which side of the culture war you fall on, which neither one of those things is true. And also weed is like, we don't,

do that. We're not going to get involved with that. We'll tell some good stories about it. Yeah. I mean, didn't Trump say that like Sweden was on fire or something? That was like a big touch. I don't know, man. Like the right wing in the U S really seized on Sweden for a while. Um, and it just became like a stupid talking point football that we're going to ignore. Yeah. We're going to ignore that guys. But those stats, like the 1.08 homicides, that's

really only for certain kinds of Swedes. And to explain why, we're going to take it all the way back to the 1970s, as we love to do here, when Sweden and the whole of Scandinavia is really going through this industrial purple patch, and they just don't have enough people for the jobs. So what they do is they reach out across Europe, particularly in the socialist Yugoslav Republic, which is then run by a dictator called Josip Broz Tito.

And so under Tito's Yugoslavian brand of socialism, Yugoslavians, that's modern day Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Slovenia and Serbia, including, of course, Kosovo. Their citizens live pretty well compared to their neighbors in, say, like Albania or Bulgaria, Romania. And they actually have pretty decent freedom of movement so they can head across Europe easily.

And even the world, I mean, there's loads of people in South Africa from the former Yugoslavia, and they're looking for money to send home for family and country. And that includes Sweden. And there's a great report, by the way, last year, Global Initiative by Waterkemp. I've used a bunch of this research, so shout out to Water. But all of this Balkan migration comes with a pretty massive catch.

Yugoslavia is a hotbed of crime at the time. And as Mischa Glennie says in MacMafia, like one of the best books ever, these so-called guest worker communities, the gastarbeiter we spoke about in our Dutch and German episodes, they quote, provided the milieu in which less salubrious Yugoslav characters could take refuge and disappear from police if necessary.

Yeah, and not only that, though, as we kind of discussed in the Pink Panther episode, and I think in Archon's episode as well, which was our first one, Tito had a habit of sending some of his most fearsome killers and criminals across Europe to murder dissidents, do bank robberies, and just have a great, chaotic, lawless time. So that was...

like something that they actively did the Yugoslav. I don't know if it was, you call it a secret service, they're intelligent operatives and whatever it was like, that was something that day engaged in. Well, it's funny. You mentioned one of those guys. I mean, we're going to get to 1972 now and violence is just kicking off everywhere in the world. The black liberation army shoot dead two cops in New York city. The British army massacres, 14 people in dairy on bloody Sunday, black September kills Israeli athletes in Munich. I mean, it's,

Those are just insane times. And in the Balkans, it's the starting point in the career of a certain Mr. Zerko Raznatovic. Yep, that's right, folks. We're kicking this show off with our star of episode one, like 15 years ago or whenever we started this thing. That's the original Tiger King, Arkhan.

And like you said in that show, Danny, Arkan makes his name going on a robbing spree, like all over Europe with a bunch of his buddies, turning over banks and more, shipping drugs and other stuff, just making dollar. And then there are Albanians at the same time. They're shifting hooky cigarettes and alcohol, Turks forging heroin and weapons routes across the continent. In fact, in 1974, Arkan actually moves to Stockholm, where he carries out five bank robberies and 12 raids in total.

which the authorities actually do pin on him. But just like in Belgium, Germany and elsewhere, he gets away.

And then, like we get into in your first episode, the War of the Balkans in the 1990s, it turns these thieves and pill pushers into paramilitaries, used by the government, just like you said, to knock off rival ethnic groups. And they commit all kinds of horrific abuses before turning that money and power into an even more potent mob, which Swedes call, and I'm sorry, Sweden, I'm going to ruin your language here, the Yugomafian or Yugomafia.

Now, I'm assuming like this is using the word mafia as a catch-all for organized crime groups, right? Like is this a situation where, like with the Russian mafia, where it's not exactly some hierarchical structure? It's just a bunch of criminals who sometimes align with each other or is it like more significantly organized? It seems a bit of a mishmash at first, but a couple of guys are going to sort of rise to the top.

And then you kind of add to this situation, this like really unique situation in the Balkans. You get these thumped, broken nations in the former Yugoslavia. And you're pretty much just making ready-baked gangs with lawlessness and easy trafficking routes at home and a network of established, tooled-up hoods ready to go all over rich European nations.

And from that point, you could branch off into the Albanian Ponzi scheme, which we mentioned in previous shows, but we really should do one on that alone. And the Italian Mafia or the Pink Panthers, which is another one of your shows, would

But let's head back up to the Scandies because it's just about to get nuts there. Yeah, I think the Archon episode really dives into this a lot more if people want more depth in that. But like also, you know, I think it's one of our first ones. So let's just say it's a little rough if you go back and listen. It's not as smooth and polished as we are now. Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you're going to go back, listen to Danny's ones because mine are...

Hellfire. But Sweden already has its homegrown gang problem at this time. And they're mostly homegrown guys, outlaw biker groups that pop up in the 70s and 80s. It actually takes the Hells Angels until 1990 to found a chapter in Skåne, which is the region enveloping Malmö, Sweden's third largest city, which is separated from the Danish capital, Copenhagen, from a bridge made famous by a Scandinoir detective show. Bridge, yeah.

Yeah. For some reason, you know, I know these guys are like vicious and sociopathic and they would definitely kill me very easily, but it's just kind of like the weird appropriated American culture happening there of these biker gangs. It just kind of strikes me as adorable. You know, it's like when European rappers use American slang, although again, you know, very, they're all very dangerous people want no problems with them. It's just kind of weird. Yeah. Again, like ABBA and all kinds of nice stuff. I mean, I think I'm going to disabuse you of that pretty soon because

These local bikers, I mean, these guys are no match for the war-toughened Slavs. And by the mid-1990s, the Yuga Mafia is pretty powerful, and it controls many of the black market trade routes into Sweden. And the so-called gangster king of all of this, according to the Swedish cops, this is a guy named Dragan Joksovic, a.k.a. Jokso. He's born in Tetergrad in 1956, which is modern-day Podgorica, Montenegro.

And this guy is a beast. He's six foot seven, two, six, five pounds. It's got a face like a grizzled vampire, gold chains and arms like bouncy castles. Christ. I mean, he probably had to buy his tracksuits custom made, you know? I've got a great photo that I put up on our Twitter this week and he looks, he just looks comical. He's so huge. Anyway, this guy, yeah, he's scary, right? I don't want to be getting on his wrong side ever. Yeah.

P.S. Patreon for Slashable Underworld podcast guys help me out with the Moldovans. I mean, we're making it worth your while with a load of bonus shows and I can only do so much whey powder before I shit myself to death. So anyway, Yoxo is known as this terrifying street fighter back home and he even gives infamous tough guy Lazo Delavich a run for his money.

Wait, who is Lazo Delovich? Like you can't just be like, oh yeah, infamous tough guy, Lazo Delovich and think anyone has any idea what you're talking about. Can I not just say like infamous tough guy in Yugoslavia, Lazo Delovich and people don't know that he's absolutely nails. No.

Okay. You got to clarify. All right. This guy is a bad, big, bad criminal. And he's known in the underworld back then as like the baddest guy ever. And apparently according to the law, according to law, he actually beats Yoxo in a fight, but like gives him such a run for his money that this guy's like, all right, yeah, cool. You got me. And he kind of like gets the word out. This guy is pretty nails. But one time Yoxo, as he was known,

He actually goes a bit too far and he beats up a Yugoslav army soldier back home. And before he's arrested, he flees to Sweden and quickly falls in with the local mobster crowd, including Arkhan. Folks there call him the quote, great Yoxo. Cause yeah, I mean, he's massive and he's like a right-hand man for Arkhan when he's tearing about the country, robbing banks and all sorts.

And now we like to look at the bigger picture for these shows, like show that these things are systemic, tons of politics behind the ethnic crime groups. But Arkana and Yoxo, they're just the absolute worst migrants you could ever have. Just a pair of total shitheads. That's my sizzling hot take on that.

And while Arkan goes on the lam across the continent, Jokso manages to build an empire in Sweden. He evades the cops and he makes tons of money. He actually even appears in the music video for Sweden's Eurovision entry. And no, sadly, it wasn't ABBA, which really annoyed me in the research. But of course, it was Lasse Holm and Monika Törnell with their classic, Edith Herr du Kalle Kjellik.

which I think means, are you too late for love? I don't know. And I want our Swedish listeners reviewing my accent there. And by that, I mean, don't review it. And I mean, it didn't do as well as 1985's Bra Vibrationer. Or of course, 1984's Diggy Lou, Diggy Lay. But you know, it's a tune. And if you want to know, because I'm genuinely, like I actually am a massive ABBA fan. They won it with Waterloo back in 74. So there's your obligatory ABBA reference, guys.

um do you even get eurovision in the states it's like the high mark of european culture i just i have no idea what you've said for the past four and a half minutes i do know yeah yeah ding dong but uh i i like the idea of this guy being in this video wearing like a shiny shirt and dancing to like awful european pop music so i hope that's what happens yeah i mean i'll be honest i put in the hard miles for you guys and i looked through this music video and i

Couldn't really see if there was a six foot seven gym bunny like dancing about in the background, but I guess it's there. I mean, there's also even a documentary called Yoxo, but it's some 90s TV show and it's all in Swedish. I've put it up there on the reading list in case anyone can understand it. Anyway, so there's an Interpol agent who chased Yoxo around for 12 years. He's called Kenneth Villeman. Quote, it was almost impossible to gather evidence against him. All the witnesses' tongues were tied in a knot at the very mention of Yoxo's name.

Everyone was afraid of the cruel methods he used. Everyone was afraid of him like the devil himself. I mean, was this guy really just shifting fags and booze? I mean, I know the alcohol situation in Sweden is pretty mad. You have to buy it from state supermarkets and it costs a fortune. Actually, I think my mate, shout out to Eric, he said they all get on booze ferries to Finland or something. That sounds super fun.

Anyway, Yoxo, he only gets one stint in prison ever, and that's two months of carrying a wrap of coke. Props to the policeman for having the stones to nick him, by the way. And he owned restaurants and a few racehorses, like good old-fashioned mafia money laundering holes. So wait, did they clash with the biker gangs? Was there some sort of battle over these territories, or they just kind of moved in and took over? As far as I can understand, it's similar to the situation with the Italian mafia in Australia. So...

the bikies were kind of running town and then these Yugoslav guys came along just completely beat their asses down and then they ended up doing errands essentially and like running drugs and other stuff for the Yugoslavians. Yeah. And it's not all underworld stuff that Yoxo's into and like this is a good story. In 1993,

Swedish princess Ulrika Biddergaard, who's a former horse riding world competitor. She's abducted from her parents' villa outside Brussels. Shout out to the team at Equal Lifestyle for this, our absolute belter of a lead. Quote, gagged, blindfolded and slightly sedated. This is how the Swedish rider Ulrika Biddergaard, then just under 30 years of age, was held for five days in our country.

I like that. Anyway, so Ulrika's just minding her own gold-plated business when Lars Nilsson, this handyman at the villa, he grabs her at gunpoint, rolls her up in a carpet, and gags and binds her up in a soundproof box around the size of a fridge. He also tries sedating her with paint thinner, which, as every good builder will tell you, just gives you an insane headache like poppers. So good work on the DOA, Lars, not so much on the farmer. And as you can imagine, all of this is just sending huge shockwaves through Sweden.

And who do the authorities turn to to help them get closer to the princess?

That's right, it's everyone's favourite nightmarish gym bunny, Jockso. Says Serbian newspaper Korea, quote, Jockso also worked as a security guard for celebrities. When the Swedish princess was abducted, the security services turned to Jockso to help them through their connections in the underground. And the happy ending of this affair, the release of the uninjured princess, brought in great popularity in the tabloids.

which called him Great Yoxo and Yoxo Div. I mean, I'm sure that means something in Serbian or whatever, because calling someone a div in England isn't an R, but whatever. And by the way, Ulrika ends up marrying the Belgian gendarme who frees her. So you get the idea. Yoxo isn't just a gangster. He's a full-blown celebrity.

I mean, this is like a really, it's like a bad Netflix movie. You know, like, like it should be its own episode. It's Swedish police can't solve the kidnapping of the princess. So they turned to the one guy who can, it's like six foot eight gigantic Serbian gangs. Like what is going on? Yeah. I mean, it's like actually the plot of a Mario computer game, but it'd be like, it's like one of those Hallmark Christmas movies, except kind of dark, you know?

I mean, I'd be up for making that again. Any producers out there like we can do that show. But York's days are numbered too, right? And in 1998, he's waiting in line to place a bet in Stockholm when he shot twice in the body and twice in the back of the head by a 20 year old Finn called Jan Raninen, who's later sentenced to life in prison. Jock's dead age, just 42. Merked by basically a teenage Finn, man. What a way to go. Yeah. Not known for their gangsters, are they?

The murder crashes through the Yugamathian underworld and it's alleged that Arkhan cried at Yoxo's funeral, which is the only time he's thought to have cried. I mean, yeah, all right. It's

Says the Serbian paper courier again, quote, after the murder of his friend in Stockholm, Raznatovic threatened the Swedish authorities that if he did not punish the perpetrators quickly, he would take revenge by killing Swedish soldiers in SFOR, that's the peacekeeping mission, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Arkhan, man, he just operated differently, huh? I still struggle to level the pictures of Arkhan with the man of Arkhan. He looks like such a little baby-faced nice guy.

He really was not. No. So this shooting at this betting store by basically a child Finn kicks off a gang war. And just two months later, two dark clad men walk into the Brother Tuck bar in Stockholm and they shoot dead a 36 year old Yugoslavian, Dragan Kovac, who supposedly hired Rananen with automatic weapons.

arkans thought to be behind that killing too wait so was this an internal gang war between various like us law factions yeah yeah pretty much it seems like someone just wanted to top the king they did and arkan is just like uh no way and so he starts causing mayhem as only he can really do and really there's just so much information on the yugo mafia and i mean most of it in the swedish press and i've

Basically disappeared down a Balkan gangster hole doing research on this one. There's a pretty grim episode back in 1983, for example, when a member of the mafia working on behalf of the government, that's the government in Yugoslavia, cornered Croat dissident businessman Stepan Djurakovic in a town just outside Munich. And he shot him with six bullets in the back and arms and then a blow from an axe. That's pretty gross.

And that was a guy called Ratko Dokic, who owned a Stockholm boxing gym. I mean, this stuff is all so tied up with the Yugoslavian Secret Service, the wars, total mess. Anyway, back to Yoxo's death. And it leaves a massive hole in the hierarchy of the Yugoslavian. And who winds up filling it?

It's this little known guy by the name of Milan Sevo. Remember that name guys, because our boy Milan is going to get involved in one of the maddest parts of this episode before long. This all kind of reminds me of just the pusher trilogy, you know, but I think that's Denmark, right? Is it? I didn't even know that. Oh, it's great. You should watch those movies, man. They're incredible. Cool. No one on the list. And then they're all about, uh, it's about Balkan Balkan mobsters in, uh, in Scandinavia, but I'm pretty sure it's Denmark.

Yeah, I mean, there's a huge crossover with Copenhagen and Malmo, but we're going to get into a bit later on as well. Throughout the early 2000s, armed robbery has become a big deal in Sweden. In 2002, a gang led by a famous rapper named Leo Carmona, also known as Chinese for his Asian looks,

carry out a record-breaking multi-million dollar heist of a plane from London, which lands at Stockholm's Ålanda Airport carrying 15 sacks of cash. Which stuns authorities, granted, but the crime takes an even darker turn the following year when one of the men involved is murdered in the Finnish capital Helsinki.

Three guys are convicted of the slaying and Carmona gets a life sentence for ordering it. How are you going to let a plane heist happen after Goodfellas comes out? I just, I don't get it. Honestly, this airport is just a clown show all the way around. And like, this is far from the final connection between rap and gangland killings that we're going to get from this episode.

But back to those robberies. In 2006, robbers armed with automatic weapons and explosives, they raid a security van in Orlando near the airport again. And the same year, Gothenburg's airport is shuttered after masked men ram a gate and hold up luggage handlers unloading Forex, and they get around a million dollars.

And then in 2008, a group of men carries out an even more daring robbery in Gothenburg, dropping spikes on the street to stop police cars, burning cars to make the city into a flaming maze and just leaving suspect bombs in the city center. Man, they are just all over the place, man. Craziness. Loving it. I mean, what is going on with these security guys?

But before we get to the biggest heist of them all in 2009, I actually want to take you first to the city of Uppsala near Stockholm for a completely batshit story that, while a bit off our main storyline, it's really, really worth telling. So, Danny, have you ever heard of the Gizmondo? I have not. Okay, you're about to. This thing was a 2005 handheld gaming device that

that was apparently going to take on the PSP, be a new Game Boy, only with a PDA, GPS and camera attached. So yeah, super cool. And this thing was made by a British company named Tiger Telemetrics. And to be honest, if you're hearing the phrase British Game Boy, you should already be on the lookout for trouble. A bunch of stars even promote the Gizmondo, and it looks like it might actually go somewhere. But then in 2006, shock horror, critics panned the thing

Tiger files for bankruptcy over 300 million bucks of debt. Oops. And also one of its execs, this smooth looking 44 year old Swede called Stefan Eriksson, he seems to have some less than ballroom tires. In fact, it's a little bit more than that. So back in 1981, Eriksson then an auto repair man in the Swedish city of Uppsala, he gets sent down for robbery. And then in the 90s, he heads up a gang, locals called the Uppsala Mafia,

I just thought of oops upside your head then. That was dumb. Committing extortion, drugs, offences, and then he goes in and out of jail, but he's far from done. By 2006, Ericsson is looking for another payday, and then he invests in Tiger. Says website The Local, quote, One of the first homegrown criminal networks to use mafia techniques, such as threats and violence as a business concept, was the Uppsala Mafia.

Having started out by selling steroids at the gym, the gang eventually achieved worldwide notoriety after luring international companies into investing in Gizmondo, a company that built on the back of a handheld gaming console that barely reached the market. What is going on in Sweden, man? It's just one Netflix series after another over there. Yeah, I was telling you earlier, like, this is so many stories within stories. It's insane.

Just weeks after the company files for bankruptcy, Ericsson wraps his $2 million Ferrari Enzo around a Malibu power pole at almost 200 miles per hour, and he splits the car clean in half. But amazingly, he gets left with nothing but a split lip.

And there's a brilliant wire piece from back then by Randall Sullivan. But basically, Erickson's been drinking. And when someone asks him how he is, he says he's an anti-terror cop and some minders whisk him away. Quote,

I would rank it as probably the most incredible exotic car crash in history, says Greg Carlson. I know, what a great quote. Who runs wreckedexotics.com. And I mean, I know I've banged on about how boring the internet is now, but wreckedexotics.com, it's still there and it's good. Oh man, what an amazing name for a website and just a topic in general. I love everything about it, I love. Like if you want...

The absolute definition of schadenfreude. That website is there for you.

Anyway, guys, read the Wired story for a full account of all this insanity, which goes through black market cars, fake companies, the lot. Ericsson is found out. He's imported millions of dollars worth of cars illegally, and he's done a load of other weird financial shit. But he basically manages to get released from prison in 2008. But like all good crooks, he's not done. He goes down for another 18 months when he gets deported to Sweden. And then he later gets hooked on a bunch of drug offenses, and

I mean, those Swedes getting into the country and causing crimes, Trump should have banned them. It's also like he did all these wild and insane crimes and then he served 16 months. Just Northern Europe, man, you know? Yeah, I mean, that is exactly what we're about to get into towards the tail end of this show as well. Anyway, that is the Uppsala Mafia. Now back to the robberies. And I hope that didn't jolt you out of the story, but I just thought that was such a cool story. It was worth telling.

So you'd think the cops or at the very least Swedish airport security, they would be getting wise to all this stuff, the robberies, it being such an epidemic. And it's carried out mostly by these foreign-born gangsters, many of whom are coming straight out of the Yugomafian scene. Well, yeah and no. So we get into September 2nd, 2009.

And now I'm going to borrow heavily from a brilliant feature that friend of the show, Evan Ratliff, wrote about this. Massive recommend. Love reading Evan's stuff. And we've interviewed him for a bonus show too on the Patreon, guys. So he begins his tale on this September day. It starts in a Stockholm suburb and three men are meeting up to discuss something. Only they're not alone. The Swedish police have plainclothes officers snooping behind them. One they know is a guy called the quote tall one.

There's actually another of the three that pricks the cops ears up the most. And that's a first generation Montenegrin Swede called Goran Bojavic. Anyway, forget my accent. Bojavic runs a cafe and furniture store on the edge of town. Nothing more than a few parking tickets on his record. But Serb cops have been chatting to their Swedish counterparts about a friend of Goran's who's not all that innocent. Milan Sevo. Remember him? He's the leader of the Yugomafian who took over after Joxo's murder.

Well, by this time, Sebo's just been captured on the Greek-Macedonian border after nine months on the run. And folks at the Serbian embassy have tipped off their Swedish counterparts as Sebo and Bojovic have been chatting about, well, something. Fool me once, think the Swedes. Shame on you.

For me, I don't know, like dozens of times. Yeah, that's definitely on them. And this time they're not messing about. They bugged the car and phone of Bozovic and they're off to the races. Or so they think.

it seems that Bojovic has clocked them, and he hops town for Belgrade, then Montenegro, then Thailand, where else? A quick fact about Sevo, by the way, he co-writes an autobiography called Swedish Godfather, in which he says a friend of Sweden's King Carl Gustav reached out to obtain photos Sevo had of the king at a lesbian sex show in a Stockholm strip club in the 90s. Also, Sevo kind of looks a bit like Kid Rock, which...

I'm not sure if that's good or bad. It just is. Anyway, the authorities are probably of a good idea what this strange team is going to plan. After all, Sweden, home to just 9 million of Europe's 700 million people at this point, accounts for 10% of the continent's robbery losses, suffering 224 assaults on cash distribution systems.

And from all the surveillance they've gotten the guys, the police piece things together to a G4S cash depot at Orlando Airport. Orlando Airport again. And they reckon the gang are going to strike on September 17, 2006. But they don't. It's actually going to kick off a week after that when a team of guys grab a helicopter and they fly it to the security depot a little after 5 a.m.,

searching for 150 million bucks of cash that's just lying there. They land by a skylight, smash it, and drop ladders into the place. And the cops? They're not going anywhere. Ordinarily, they scramble a chopper of their own, but an accomplice of the gang has placed fake bombs at the police hangar and set fire to the area, grounding them. The gang circular saw their way into the safes, stuffed bags full of the cash. They fly off into the night.

The helicopter touches down well out of town and the Crim's make their escape. Cops have been absolutely murked, embarrassed and the media tears them a new arsehole. And Evan's story has tons of stuff on the phone records, media, cops, the lot. But actually most incredible is the helicopter pilot was a TV producer who they stopped trying to board a plane to the Canary Islands.

But it takes the police years to track down the perps. An Iraqi Swede, a Syrian Swede, Bojovic. I mean, you could say it was a bit of a bodge job, in fact. Terrible. Absolutely awful. Yeah. The 2009 heist also marks a kind of breaking point for the Uyghur Mafia in Sweden, in a way. There's still definitely Balkan-organized crime in the country, but the robbery kind of splits them up, snaps off the leadership, and they're on the run, disparate and disjointed.

And of course, even now we've got Albanians running the drug scene in Western capitals like London and Paris. Plenty of crime coming out of the region these days. But since 2009, Swedish organized crime has shot off in a very different direction. And that is what we're going to dive into right now. Leading up to the gun crime epidemic the country finds itself in today. Yeah, I think when people hear Sweden crime now, they mostly think of like, you know, grenades and guns and guns and with like young kids in Malmo.

Yeah, it's pretty chaotic and pretty grim. And while gun crime has actually decreased across Europe, it's gone up in Sweden going all the way back to 2005, according to Sweden's National Council for Crime Prevention, which is shortened in Swedish to BRA, which is funny if you're 14 like me.

And for a long time, the epic everyday epicenters of this epidemic is Malmo, right at the bottom tip of Sweden, not that far from here in Berlin, actually. And like I said before, it's been the initial focal point for biker gangs crossing the bridge back and forth into Denmark, but it's about to get way darker. Yeah, I'd always wondered like what strategically if there was any advantage to controlling the city, but it sounds like it's just like a major transportation point coming from out of Sweden inside of it.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And there's Copenhagen as well, yeah. So for this, over to Zlatan Ibrahimovic. He is one of the world's best footballers, a household name. His 2013 autobiography, I Am Zlatan, is a story about a boy's rise to superstardom. But it's also a tale of immigration in Malmo, and it's directly linked to the crime wave ripping through Sweden today. Zlatan grows up in a suburb of Malmo called Rosengård, a new-build place that goes up in the 1960s and 70s.

His father is Bosnian, his mother Croatian, and they're fleeing the chaos in the Balkans at that time, and he grows up, he says, completely separate from the Swedish kids in the city proper. Quote, Swedish TV didn't exist for us. Adding, we lived in a very different world from the Swedes. I was 20 when I saw my first Swedish film, and I had no idea what the Swedish heroes and sports stars were.

Says one of his school teachers in the book, quote, I've been at this school 33 years and Zlatan is easily in the top five of the most unruly pupils we've ever had. He was the number one bad boy, a one man show, a prototype of a child that ends up in serious trouble. What was his style of play like? I mean, did he show any of that number one bad boy behavior? Yeah, absolutely. Like he's really...

He's just like really unique, scores amazing goals, really petulant, gets sent off a lot. I love him. I think he's great. Anyway, Zlatan joins his boyhood club Malmo FF, which I think is Sweden's most successful club in Europe. And then he smashes it, heads off to Holland, Ajax, Milan, Barcelona, even LA. He's still banging in an ungodly amount of goals for AC Milan today. And he's nearly 40.

The reason I'm saying this is Zlatan's upbringing actually mirrors that of so many young boys and girls in Rosengård, which basically becomes a low-income ghetto completely separated from the city, packed with people from the Balkans, Middle East, from the Iraq Wars, conflicts in Syria. I think Afghanistan too, yeah? Somalia? Yeah. Yeah, Somalia. Big, big Somali-Swedish community. Yeah.

So in 2008, by which time Zlatan's long gone and playing for Inter, an Islamic centre in Rosengård becomes the epicentre for what cops call, quote, the most violent riots we ever had encountered. When the local council doesn't extend the place's lease and local youths go apeshit in response. When cops arrive to evict them a few weeks later, they're met by 30 people who beat them back, setting fires to cars, trash cans, setting off fireworks, etc.

It's just getting mad, basically. And this sets off a chain of events that's going to rile up Europe's far right. Spur talk of so-called no-go zones in Malmo, pushed by reactive shit like Breitbart and so on. But this depressed, barely integrated and deeply segregated neighborhood is roiling. And what comes out of it is a bunch of gangs.

It's no coincidence that Malmo is a port city. I mean, what do we say here? Ports and borders. Always trouble. Says a former MP, quote, We have the same problem here as in the north of Mexico, though on a smaller scale. So it's logical for the gangs to gather here and fight each other.

i mean that's flat pack gangsterism and that is the only ikea reference you're getting in this episode but that's interesting right is this riot is it seen as like a starting point like everything comes out of it or it's more like this was the first clue that things were changing in a way that was not going to be good i think that people knew for a while when the job started disappearing that it was in a lot of trouble but this 2008 riot is really the the kind of spark point that that kicks off a new era in crime

And yeah, in Malmo's case, the shipbuilding and textiles that brought the guest workers in the 70s, the guys we spoke about at the top of the show, they disappear sharply when people start getting stuff from China, India, elsewhere. Sweden stops importing folks for those reasons, but then you have regular immigration for other reasons. And jobs stay stagnant, but apartments that have been built for laborers years back, they stay, obviously.

And by the time tensions rise over the mosque, up to 80% of people in Rosengård are unemployed. What? That is a tinderbox. Is that true? Like that fact, 80% of young people or 80% of people are unemployed? 80% of people. That's all people. It's insane. I want to fact check you eventually. Yeah. And shout out to listeners. You can always fact check.

God, I hate that.

But the area does not look like a traditional Sweden either. Satellite dishes hang from every balcony. The bakery sells Middle Eastern confections. Al Jazeera plays on the televisions. And young men huddle on street corners, casually bragging about doing battle with the police. I mean, there's some casual racism by the New York Times. And it continues, quote, A few years ago, the fire and ambulance brigades would not even enter Rosengård without a police escort.

Youth there threw rocks and set cars on fire. Police officials say things are much better now. Fires were down 40% last year compared with 2009. But last month, two police vehicles parked at the station were set on fire with small homemade explosives. You know, in some ways, it kind of reminds me of gang control neighborhoods I've seen in like El Salvador. And I've talked about this where, you know, there's like complaints about the government not providing resources, which are which are accurate.

But at the same time, any time you have fire and ambulance trucks going in there and they're getting threatened and attacked, you can't complain about places not providing resources. But then any time an NGO or some sort of government entity wants to come in and actually help or give resources, they're attacked or not allowed to. You can't have it both ways. You got to choose one or the other. We're going to get into a couple of quotes later on as well where you can pretty much see that being fleshed out.

But this is a classic story, right? I mean, you get a country welcoming migrants so long as they build stuff for cheap. Then when they stay, there's no integration, no language training beyond the most basic stuff. Then when the cops go, you've got a giant migrant population and they don't feel local. In some cases, they don't even speak the language. They feel locked out of the labor market. They're hooked on welfare, attracted to the black market.

Berlin, London, New York. I mean, literally everywhere. See, I disagree with that fundamentally. I mean, I can't speak for Berlin or London, but that's not really the story of New York, right? I mean, this is European countries are much worse at integration when it comes to immigrants than a place like New York is. And I don't mean like there's New York is by no means perfect, right?

but it's way better than these cities. Like communities are nowhere near as isolated. They have a ton more opportunities in the labor market. And it's not easy, right? But people aren't really made to feel that unwelcome. You know, I'm sure people coming from the Middle East in the past five or 10 years could definitely say otherwise right now. But like I walked down my block, there's people from five or six different countries that own small businesses that are operating there, right?

The kids are going to college. My Yemeni bodega, his son is in Columbia, right? It's an Ivy League school. The Korean dry cleaners kid is a Marine. You know, I'm not just saying using this anecdotal evidence. It's like people are integrated far better here. So I really disagree with that characterization being the same as in New York. Obviously, you have immigrant communities that come here and there's a lot of poverty and it's a struggle and crime does come out of that, right? But it's not like a similar situation to what's happening in Sweden right now at all.

Yeah, I tend to agree with you, actually. I guess the difference in Europe is that there's so many different countries with different languages and like pretty tight borders. So I don't know, like it's really hard to integrate people to that extent. You guys are bad at it. Europe's bad at it. Sure. Europe's bad at it and we're good at it. That's the bottom line. We're better, better at it. You're just better human beings. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a big part of it, too.

Let that be the take home from this episode, guys. And at this time, Leo Carmona, remember that guy, Chinese, the guy who's in prison for life over the 2002 Olanda raid and the 2003 killing in Helsinki, he actually forms a record label behind bars called Cartel and Cartel. And they make tons of really dark, violent gangster rap tunes that speak to this feeling of alienation for so many kids in the ghettos of Rose and Gordon elsewhere.

And even many, many years later, cartel and outfits are still getting banned from festivals from promoting violence. And I mean, they are. ABBA have got tunes like Money, Money, Money, Does Your Mother Know, The Winner Takes It All, and The Day Before You Came. And I mean, they could easily be tracks of a 50 Cent album. It's terrible. Anyway, throughout this time, you've got a bubbling gang scene, a depressed, desperate neighborhood, and

A port, a growing white wing, happy to blame everything on brown people. Sweden's actually getting pretty hairy. And I remember this actually, personally being in the news all the time. And it's always cited by people like Nigel Farage when folks are talking about Londonistan, all that crap. From 2009 to 2010, a skinhead called Peter Mangs, he actually goes on a shooting spree in Malmo. He kills two people and seriously wounds over a dozen more. He gets life inside.

But a wave of execution-style killings is on the rise too. In 2011, a gang leader is shot dead. By 2013, Reuters is calling Mahmoud, quote,

Sweden, Chicago. So sorry, Chicago or Malmo. I'm not really sure. Since that first gang leader has dropped another eight go in a year, eight in a year. And again, Sweden's got a really, really low homicide rate, guys. Over 80% of those, they're gang related.

And there are other reasons for this. Sweden's cops are notoriously understaffed and its justice system is incredibly lenient, especially on youngsters, which it often dishes out community service for actual shootings, which is insane. Or maybe not, depending on your opinion. Nah, it's insane. Yeah, it's insane, right? Either way, combined with all the other factors, it's made Swedish gang crime completely chaotic, contested by dozens of gangs, and increasingly young.

Friend of the Pog Jake Hanrahan made a great vice doco from Malmö in 2017. A contact told him that these days young people, they control the gangs. Quote, everybody wants to be in charge in Malmö and this is how it ends. Simple as that. Sweden goes through the successive waves of unrest during these years. In 2013, cops shoot a 69-year-old man dead in the Stockholm suburb of Husby in

So rioters set a Stockholm police station on fire and folks in Malmö, they burn up two squad cars. Cops are starting to warn about a gun problem even back then too. Says the deputy commissioner, quote, we believe it's linked to the prevalence of weapons. It's big. Here's a guy from Rosengård speaking to Vice in 2016, eight years after the riots. Quote, when I was five and six years old, Rosengård felt safer.

Now when I'm 16, it doesn't feel as safe. More drugs, more people die here, all kinds of criminality. Where I live, for example, a lot of people are fighting. There's a lot of uniformed and undercover cops around. I see them at night when I'm with my friends. It's a lot worse to live here now. I wish we would move to somewhere else.

Oh, and guess where all those guns come from? Yep, it's the Balkans. Yugomafia guys have been smuggling in weapons from their homelands for ages, and now Malmo in particular and the hoods of the local gangs are packing heat in a country where barely anybody has a gun.

This January, the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, they released a report that claims that most of them come from Serbian gangs that traffic through family outfits and bikers. Most of them come across the bridge from Copenhagen. Hand grenades sell for just 12 bucks, and a third of all the illegal handguns on Swedish streets are Serbian Zastravas. That, like, that grenade price can't be real. Like, there's no way.

Yeah, I looked that up. I was cross-referencing it with like three or four different sources. 12 bucks. Jesus. That is mad. When are there so many attacks? Yeah, yeah. Says Swedish investigator Gunnar Appelgren to Global Initiative, quote, "...what we've seen in the last few years are organized crime groups, mostly based in Serbia, that set up proxies in Sweden to receive shipments of drugs and weapons." So they're still behind the scenes.

And continues an OCCRP story, quote, "...groups receiving arms from these traffickers include Swedish biker gangs and family-based drug syndicates. Others include youth gangs among Sweden's Somali diaspora, as well as a notorious group of loan sharks that has exploited its own community of Orthodox Christian immigrants from the Middle East for decades."

And I mean that sounds shady AF. And it leads to another grim phenomenon, which is the use of explosive devices in gangland attacks. In 2017 and 18, these are most limited to powerful firecrackers and Yugoslavian M-75 hand grenades. And they're concentrated in low-income hoods like Rosengård. But civilians are also getting caught in the crossfire.

In January 2018, for example, a 63-year-old man dies when he picks up a grenade in Stockholm thinking it's a toy. A Dutch exchange student is also hit by a stray bullet during an execution-style killing at a pizza place in Uppsala. But in 2019, gangs start using homemade IEDs to terrorize neighborhoods.

That year the NGO Intelligent Fusion tracks 160 explosive incidents, the vast majority in its three major cities, with the blasts getting bigger and more deadly. So bad did the bombings get that Denmark actually reinstate border checks, which is big in Europe these days, sorry Britain. According to an academic report I read, today's Swedish gangs are split into four main types.

First, there are clearly defined groups with insignias and rules and established crimes, like the Yuga Mafia to a lesser extent and the biker groups to a greater one. Then there are relational gangs, so gangs from the same family or clan or neighborhood, even religion. There are thought to be 40 of these across the country. 40! With as many as 12,000 members. I mean, no wonder it's going crazy.

And then there are bands of undefined gangs that are defined only from the outside. So these could be chancers, just groups of powers who commit crimes, anything. And then there's the project-based group, thrown together to pull off a robbery, smuggling or an execution. This is your Grand Theft Auto 5 crew or the G4S crew in 2009. And these days it's getting worse and worse. And it's more closely intertwined with the rap scene.

In 2019, a years-long feud between two Stockholm gangs, the Schotters and Duttspatrouillen, I think that's Death Patrol, Death Squad, exploded into violence when two men were found dead in their car in Copenhagen. One of those most affiliated with the Schotters is a really famous rapper, it's called Yassin. He actually blew up in the charts while he was behind bars on gun crime charges, and he was jailed this year for a plot to kidnap a rival artist, which is nuts.

In August 2020, rival gangs actually set up roadblocks in Gothenburg to catch rival mob members. And the maddest part isn't that. The cops didn't even arrest anyone. The four gangs involved in the feud met up at a hotel and they reached the truth on their own. Malmo's shooting rate has actually gone down a bit.

Across Sweden, they're still rising. From 3-3-4 in 2019 to 3-3-6 last year. And 107 explosive detonations. I think, you know, one of the things Bjorn was actually talking about in the interview was how Malmo has calmed down a bit, a decent amount over the last two to three years. So it's not nearly as bad as it was when it kind of earned its reputation. Yeah, but it just seems to be going elsewhere. I mean, also in August 2020,

A 12-year-old girl is killed during a drive-by shooting at a gas station outside Stockholm, and that just disgusts the country. If we don't stop the new recruitment of young people into the criminal circles, harsh measures will not mean anything, Home Affairs Minister Mikael Damberg tells broadcaster SVT.

But even crazier, the AK-47 used in that killing, police discover it's the same one used in a music video for a tune called Blue Cheese by 10AM. I didn't name the song, guys. The band take it down, but it's back up on YouTube now so you can see it. It's so dark. And then you get to this summer and the barbershop shooting that we got to at the start of the show.

And then the final blow, this year Leo Komona, that's the Chinese, he's getting out of prison after 16 years. And by all accounts, he's walking into a gang scene that seems ready made for his return. The authorities just don't know what to do with all this stuff and it's just going to keep on going. So maybe we should get Dale to play us out with some ABBA just for something cheerful at the end of what's really a brutal, pretty scary tale.

I mean, we might get copyright infringement, who knows? But, yeah, I mean, I guess, look, it is brutal and scary and none of it's good. But if you actually compare the murder rates of some of the worst cities in Sweden, I don't even think it would make top 20 in the U.S.,

So, I mean, it's... Not even top 50. It's one of those things where, like, there's some nuance, right? You definitely have to have... You have to be aware of the fact that, like, things are bad there. Like, they're getting bad. But, comparatively speaking to, like, you know, the US, it's not...

it wouldn't be considered atrocious here, unfortunately. So it's kind of like, you know, again, like we said, finding that middle ground between being like, there isn't a problem there where it's like, yeah, there is a problem, but it's not completely insane. It's just not very good.

It's not very good. That's the TLDR. Yeah, I think we've definitely had people reach out to with a lot of Swedish stories like this. So I think there's room to somewhere down the line for us to get back into all the different rivalries that have turned Mamo in the past into a war zone. Yeah.

But yeah, let me just give some thank yous to the folks that are supporting us, especially our dude, P. Thomas, who really came through. Will Wintercross, Trey Nance, Matthew Cutler, Chris Cusimano, Ross Clark, Jeremy Rich, Doug Prindiville, Jared Levy. Hit us up. Anything you guys want to talk about, theunderworldpodcast.gmail.com and patreon.com slash underworldpodcast for bonus episodes. We've been trying to get one out a week, and it's always interviews. We might start doing some short stories soon.

if you guys want to support. And besides that, thank you again for tuning in and supporting us. Cheers, guys.

Can you hear the drums, Fernando? Do you still recall the fateful night we crossed the Rio Grande? I can see it in your eyes, how proud we were to fight for freedom in this land.