Turkey's Mafia Boss Youtube Sensation Trying to Bring Down the State
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November 3rd, 1996, 7:30pm. A black Mercedes sedan is speeding away from a secret hotel meeting when it slams into a truck in Susurluk, a small town in northwestern Turkey. The car is doing over 100 miles an hour. Three of its passengers die on the spot. According to one anonymous witness, the car's brakes have been remotely disabled. Then, after the crash, a three-man team arrived on the scene and snapped the victim's necks.

That bombshell won't drop for years later though. In '96, the crash rips open the dark belly of Turkish politics and its cozy tiles with the mob. The three dead are a fascist paramilitary and contract killer, a senior cop and a beauty queen. The guy who escaped is a member of parliament and they'd all just had a meeting with Turkey's interior minister. This is a real-life tale of the deep state, of shady characters pulling the strings of power in one of the world's biggest nations.

It's about freedom fighters, jihadists, drug lords and presidents. And 25 years later, one mobster in Dubai is blowing the whole thing wide open once more. Welcome to the Underworld Podcast.

So yeah, this is bonkers. I think a lot of our listeners will know about Sadat Peker. He's basically the best YouTube influencer in the world. Better than all that shit with Logan Paul Mayweather. Like this mafia boss running his mouth out over the course of nine videos now about all kinds of crazy connections between the Turkish state and the mob. Like I said, jihadist wars, assassinations, conspiracies. And I mean, like full...

proper conspiracies, not QAnon. This is real. Yeah, I'm really excited about this episode. You know, this story's been out there, I think, for a few weeks now. And if you follow us on any social media, I've been talking about it a lot just because it's

I mean, it's crazy. It's also a little hilarious. I mean, this guy's out of his mind and the way he presents things. But it really dives into this murky area of Turkish mafiosos and shadiness and violence and this underbelly of Turkish society in the deep state, which is all – I mean, it's very confusing. We're going to try to explain it, but it's hard to do in just one podcast episode because this goes back decades. And there's all sorts of groups and it morphs and all that.

I think actually, Sean, you're going to talk to an expert on this for the Patreon, which, you know, speaking of Logan Paul Mayweather, I lost a bunch of money on the fight last night. So definitely, definitely hit up that Patreon and let me let me slowly begin to put the pieces back together of my life because Mayweather just I don't want to get into it. But you don't even deserve to have money if you're putting it on that.

It was disappointing to say the least. But anyway, moving on. Yeah. So Sadat, right? I mean, like you just said, he is insane. He's an enigma wrapped in a riddle, dressed in an outfit that makes him look exactly like someone's creepy uncle at a wedding. Yes. And so that's Revelations. And I'm going to call him by his first name in this pod for obvious reasons.

They started a few weeks back when he made a bunch of YouTube videos of him sitting in a nicely decked out hotel room, pointing a finger at absolutely everyone in the Turkish state. All of them are still online doing like crazy numbers with titles like Tough Struggle and Braveheart. One of them has done 17 million views. It's like half one of ours. So fair play there.

Yeah, I mean he's really taking the retired mafia guy to YouTube pipeline to a whole new level. Like we have guys like that. I mean even in the US, right? You have like Franzisi and John A. Light and all those guys who go on Vlad TV. But mostly they just do like motivational speaking stuff or reviewing mafia movies every Monday or something like that where this guy is just airing out the dirty laundry of literally everyone at the high level of Turkish society and threatening to bring down Erdogan and just –

shaking the foundations of the state. So I feel like that's a better YouTube look than motivational speaker. It's a little more intriguing and...

Oh, yeah. I mean, he does dribble into some pretty bad inspo stuff at times as well, but we're going to get into that. Don't we all? Yeah. Like you said then, this stuff is really rocking Turkey's politics hard. I mean, Sadat is coming after his biggest players and he's not missing. That man don't miss. Nope.

So that says he's in. Yep. You guessed it. Dubai. I think actually that might have to be one of our golden rules, right? So you don't Instagram your crimes by property and move to Dubai, except I guess that that has blown rule number one, clean out the water. Just taking a huge dump on officials. He says he's, he'd been hand in glove with like years and years. Um, but there's no extradition. So that's exactly why he went. And that's exactly why everyone should go. Um, yeah.

It's the only reason to go. I mean, so that packs a knockout, but his delivery, it's not great. I mean, half of it is like him moaning about people not trusting him or disrespecting his honor. One's in a conference room and he's posted this like weird ASMR video of a dot matrix printer doing the eye of the tiger tune. Like he's a, he's a poster, like true, true poster. But yeah, he's like a complete fruit loop. His room's lined with books by Trotsky, Mario Puzo,

And he laughs like a complete maniac. And one of the best things about him is that he doesn't mind saying the quiet bits out loud. Like he just comes out and straight up admits the violence and meant to quote, take revenge against the government and politicians. He said he stood by and help when they were nothing. It's all gone. Real Godfather over in Turkey right now.

So his taste for revenge, that comes when cops launch raids across Istanbul and four other cities to capture members of Sadat's mafia, and they grab 49 people. Sadat supposedly skips town across the Balkans to North Macedonia, which is formerly Macedonia, by the way. His wife and children are present when all this kicks off, which he thinks is dishonorable, and you're going to hear about on a lot in this episode. Present where? Like they're there when the raids are happening or when he's in Dubai or what? In Turkey. In Turkey.

So, yeah, Dubai is a new home for this guy. So that's biggest gripe with all this, though, is that Turkey's interior minister, Solomon Soylu, offered him protection and tipped him off to leave for North Macedonia in the first place.

This gentleman's agreement then goes south when cops go after Sadat's gang. And a couple of weeks ago, cops arrest Sadat's brother, Attila, who's also a crime boss, from his home on the southwestern coast of Turkey in Mula. Crime boss how? Like, what do these guys, what do they actually do? We keep hearing them described as mafia, but like, does it kind of, I mean, I haven't seen a lot on that, like on their actual businesses and what they were doing.

No, and that's kind of the weird thing, right? He sort of comes out of nowhere, certainly for foreign audiences, like he's come out of nowhere to do all these videos. And in Turkey, you can't find a huge amount about his background. I mean, he definitely has a mafia. It seems like he's into drug running, extortion, like all that good stuff. But I couldn't really find much. There's a bunch of snippets of information, but it seems a bit Chinese whispers. Like I think it's just been passed around.

between all of the different media outlets. So I don't know. I mean, we're going to get into his bio in a minute as well. So there is some stuff we know. But all of this stuff that he says, it's so damaging because...

One of the things the AKP, which is the Justice and Development Party, led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, one of the things this party has been able to tell Turks is how it cleaned up after this chaotic period in the 90s, where there was tons of political violence, full-blown insurgency from the PKK, which we'll get into later, massive corruption, gangsterism, the lot. Like, Turkey seems to have been a basket case back then, and so that was one of the kingpins kind of bringing the pain.

Erdogan has tightened his grip on Turkey since. He's strangled media, political opposition, and he's built these crowd-pleasing buildings like mega mosques, bridges. He's also a bit of an Islamist, and he's delivered terrorists into Syria. He was also a semi-pro footballer, by the way, proving that little man syndrome we all know of, the guy who had trials at Charlton School. I mean, did you understand any of that? The Turkish stuff, yes. The weird English references, no.

Right. Cool. Got it. And I was just trying to get Charlton into it. And Edelwein, right, he's this great populist. Yeah. So he's in the mold of Donald Trump or Duterte or Bolsonaro. But Sadat might have blown all of that clean image right up. To be fair, though, like...

Clean to who, right? Because I think obviously he has a lot of support in Turkey and all that among nationalists and whatnot. But for people who don't fall into that, whether it's leftists or Kurds, Armenians, and for a lot of people in the world, he's not seen as this clean guy, right? He's seen as pretty much something close to a dictator that's done some ethnic cleansing and is corrupt and whatnot. But I think what you're saying is true for supporters of the AKP. He is seen as...

as uh this sort of staunch advocate for the country that's that's done um a decent amount of good yeah i mean it's it's like this kind of law and order uh reputation right he's kind of like sweeping up the streets all the bad guys inverted commas but if if sadat is telling the truth in all his videos it means not a lot changed under the ak party after all and some want the interior minister soylou to step down and keep the party's image a little bit cleaner i guess

Yeah, I think the funny thing too is that Erdogan kind of started out – for years, people thought he was going to be this kind of – almost like a reformer. And he actually – he initiated a ceasefire. I was there covering it in 2013 with the PKK. That was like a really hopeful moment where things were going to calm down and violence was going to calm down in Turkey. And this 30-year sort of insurrection slash war that had been playing out was going to come to its end. But –

Yeah, that didn't last too long. I guess we'll talk about that a little later. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of turmoil in the last few years there. So this is from a Washington Post story by Karim Fahim. Quote, Sadat's stories about the nexus of organized crime and politics in Turkey are earthquakes rumbling dangerously close these days to the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. I always miss, like, is it Recep Tayyip? I don't know.

Anyway, this is like bang on the news right now, right? So this episode comes to you just a couple of days since Sadat dropped his latest content, which points the finger directly at Turkish President Erdogan himself. He became Turkey's PM in 2003, president in 2014, kind of a bit of a Putin deal switching between those two rules. And the stuff Sadat is coming out with, this stuff is like poisonous. And we're going to get into all the juicy details of this throughout this show.

And by the way, like always, we've got this long list of stuff to read, watch, etc. on the Patreon. That's patreon.com slash the underworld podcast, along with this script. And after this, like record, I'm going to interview Ryan Gingeras, who's literally written the book on Turkish all those crime to heroin, politics, everything. So he's going to tell our Patreon members what all this stuff you're about to hear, like really means, I guess, from an expert's point of view.

And, like, what's going to come out and whether this one mobster who kind of looks like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever and from Paris with Love at the same time, whether he can topple one of the world's, like, strongest kind of strongman leaders. And I should say before we properly kick off with all this that not all of what Sadat's coming out with has been corroborated. But the history behind all this stuff is, I mean, you can make your own minds up listening to it. Oh, and also, Danny, I'm calling this episode Lost in Peckwood. Cool.

No, I'm going to pass on that one. But yeah, I mean, Turkish history, especially in the last couple of decades and the intricacies of the country and all this stuff that's going in and out is super, super complicated. And there's all sorts of shadiness and like,

groups and intrigue and all that so we're going to try to to sort of narrow this down but um you know especially i've done a lot of work on the uh on the pkk and the ypg and all that and if you're interested in in that aspect of it i would definitely recommend the book uh blood and belief by eliza marcus or eliza marcus i think it's uh it's it's really really thorough on on this time period in turkey in the 80s and 90s when when all this chaos was going on cool yeah i mean

It's crazy trying to unpick the recent history of Turkey, but I'm trying to give it a go. But first things first, before we kick off into all that, who is Sadat Peker? So this guy was born in 1971 in Adapazuru. I'm going to scrub all of the Turkish names in this, by the way. This is like not a million miles from Istanbul near the Black Sea coast. According to his website, and this guy has a website, he's the only kingpin we've featured with his own so far.

He lists reading books, charity, martial arts and Turkish rock, which I don't know a lot about as his hobbies.

I mean, he is kind of hilarious. Also, I didn't know he was so young. He looks a lot older. He does. He's had a tough life, this guy. What's even better is that he lists only one thing in his list of hates, and that's people who lie. Sounds like a dating profile. I know. And in the list, what I hate even more, he's got unfaithful people and people who pretend to eradicate poverty. Also, I'm getting a Google Translate on this, so sorry, Sadat, if you've written some totally different random stuff.

He's obviously a huge fan of modesty because his biography page then reels off a bunch of his own inspo mottos.

Yeah. I mean, everything about him is just so perfect for the content media age. And I DM'd him on like four different social media platforms, tried to get him to come on. But unfortunately, all I got was extremely angry Turkish nationalists and trolls yelling at me, which reminded me of the good old days of reporting on the PKK and the YPG. Awesome. Yeah. I want to tell a couple of these little inspo quotes because they're amazing. And yeah,

Yeah, I admit. Google Translate might have made them a little bit more fruity, but here goes. Quote, for as long as I live, I have not been one of those people who have thought about the fear of torture, prison, or death, and I will never be. For them, I just feel sorry. I mean, I don't spend a huge amount of my time worrying about torture, but...

I guess if you're a mafia boss. And here's a bit of a riddle. Quote, people serve as much as they believe in the values they believe in. They pay the price as much as they serve. What do you reckon on that one? Like Vedana font, sunset background, yoga studio wall?

I don't even know. I mean, maybe it's more poetic in Turkish, but yeah, it's definitely got like, it's definitely got rise and grind vibes and, you know, posts about loyalty on Facebook and things like that. Oh man, honor. This guy is just, I mean, it's just like loads of letters that he's posted to this website that he's like sent to high up folks in the government bleeding on about honor and Turkish nationalism and politics. I'm going to save you guys the time. Don't bother with any of it.

So anyway, as a young guy, Sadat spends a load of time in Germany. I think we got into this before. Yeah, there's a lot of Turkish Germans in the country. And then he gets in trouble with the law and flees to Romania where cops are hunting him down for racketeering, coercion and incitement to murder.

Yeah, we did talk about, I think, Turkish organized crime a bit in Germany in one of our really early episodes that Sean did about, you know, the gangs in Berlin. And, you know, I don't think many people are aware of how much Turkish ultranationalism, too. Oh, yeah. You know, intersects with that sort of crime. But also, you know, it's super connected with the criminal world and it plays out in the streets of Europe. I mean, for decades. Yeah.

Whether it's Turkish intelligence or Turkish mafia figures that may not have been connected to the state have committed crimes against dissidents, against Kurdish activists, against Kurdish PKK affiliates and members and things like that. Even in 2013, there was a big story when Turkish intelligence allegedly murdered – executed really three Kurdish female activists slash PKK members in Paris. Right?

Right there. And I think, I mean, I don't know how that played out exactly. There hasn't been a trial and there were some allegations that it was internal PKK conflict, but I think most of the signs pointed to it being Turkish intelligence that was involved. And they just kind of, like, they get away with it for the most part, you know? Like, political assassinations happening in European streets and they get away with it. I mean, there was even that thing in D.C., right? Was that a couple of years ago where they're

The like Turkish bodyguards. Yeah, that was just like brawling outside Erdogan's bodyguards brawling, who I think were affiliated with the gray oles, which we'll talk about in a minute. Yeah, who were like brawling with protesters and getting away with it as well. I mean, that obviously wasn't murder, but it was kind of, it really sets the tone for how these things go. Yeah, for sure. So Sadat, right, he comes back to Turkey in 1998.

And there he's convicted of founding a criminal network. So during the case, Sadat claims a Syrian politician has warned him not to act so arrogantly. But I guess it works out because Sadat is sentenced to just under nine months and he's out by May 1999, which is generous.

Yeah, it's also – I keep referencing the Balkans episodes a lot, but it kind of gets to this whole point of interconnectivity of the government and mafia figures that they use for their own ends to kind of do their dirty work. I don't think it's as pronounced or as out in the open as it was in a place like, say, Serbia or Albania, but it's definitely there and interesting.

the lines start blurring between who is who and who does what when it comes to stuff like this. Oh, for sure. And we're just about to dive into all this crazy stuff as well. Unsurprisingly, after he gets this lucky break with the judge, his criminal career just continues pretty well. And he's back on the outside running things until he gets arrested again in 2005. The Mafia associations, robbery, forgery, and a bunch of other stuff.

But we still don't have it cleared up. I guess it's not out there, like what he was actually doing. Maybe he was good at the whole mafia stuff and, you know, wasn't doing his YouTube show and keeping his business, you know, not on the streets. I reckon so, which is weird considering he's like basically like a YouTube personality. But he so so so that he marries his lawyer while he's inside on a 14 year stretch. And soon afterwards, he's swept up as part of this thing called the Ergenekon Ergenekon.

which is basically a national conspiracy, right? Again, it can is alleged to be this secularist, ultra nationalist kind of Freemasons group with ties to politicians, military officials, journalists, and apparently mafia bosses. It's named after this mythical place in the Altai mountains.

You know, we keep saying deep state, and I want to kind of talk about that because I feel like Trump's kind of bastardized the word. But I feel like in Turkey, there really is a deep state, right? It started off decades ago. It was ultra-nationalist and tied in with the military, and they sort of orchestrated things to make sure the country stayed mostly secular. And it's kind of morphed, and there are different variations of it, right? You had Gulen, who we'll talk about too, who had what some people refer to as like some shadow control in government because he had so many members of his movement, right?

You know, he's a cleric that was very powerful, that had a gigantic movement. And, you know, then you have this sort of weird morphing where it becomes ultra-nationalist, but also sort of Islamist, which is with Erdogan and the stuff that we're going to get into as well. But it is, I mean, here, like it's kind of mostly made up and exaggerated. In Turkey, it's definitely real. Yeah, it leaves a kind of weird taste in your mouth when you get into it because you feel that it's just like a hole of mirrors. The more stuff you learn, like the more...

Just so much of this stuff. But yeah, like you say, it starts off as the deep state stuff as a secularist movement and then it kind of morphs with Erdogan's rule. Now, these trials get really weird.

The BBC calls it the court case that changed Turkey, and they're right. Basically, they're Erdogan's way to sweep out the bits of the military that de facto pulled the strings of power in Turkey since the 60s and had masterminded a series of coups, kind of like a Turkish League of Shadows, like we just got into. The trial itself takes five years, and it concludes in 2013 with 17 life sentences dished out. There's just one tiny little hitch. Agenikon may have never existed in the first place.

Writes in Istanbul court in 2019, quote, it was understood the existence of the Ergenekon armed terrorist organization could not be proved by conclusive and convincing evidence. And therefore, leadership, membership and committing of crimes on behalf of the organization could not be proved. So I guess they've gone for a RICO for some mafia that doesn't even exist. Or maybe this is where it all gets very smoke and mirrors.

Anyway, during these trials, Sadat gets 10 years and he blames the court for punishing his reputation and not the crimes.

But the conviction's quashed, it seems, and by 2015, he's even pictured chatting with Erdogan, which, as you'd expect, it creates a bit of a stink. And then he holds a rally against terror with the AK party that year, saying, quote, blood will flow greatly if Turkey lets up in its fight against the PKK. That's the leftist Kurdistan Workers' Party founded in the 70s, kind of similar to the Farkin Columbia or the New People's Army in the Philippines.

You've covered the PKK a bunch, right? Yeah. I mean, I don't know if I would compare them to the FARC or I don't really know much about the New People's Army, but they're essentially this insurrectionist group that rose up among Turkish Kurds. Kurds have always been treated like second-class citizens, lacked rights, been attacked. I mean, they weren't even allowed to have their national identity, their identity at all, really, due to the Turkish ultranationalism and whatnot.

Kurds – I mean I'm not going to get super far into it. Kurds are an ethnic minority in Iraq, in Syria, in Iran, in Turkey, and they've been pretty much treated like garbage in all of those countries. Ethnic cleansing, some pretty horrific genocidal acts committed against them. And this group, the PKK, rose up really – I mean I think it was formed in 1979 but really rose up in the 80s.

As this Kurdish – sort of Kurdish identity, but also it was I think Maoist in the beginning. Now it's tempered itself a lot, but it got really bad in the 80s and 90s in terms of these sort of like guerrilla street fighting that was going on and military attacks and whatnot, and you had Turkish groups fighting.

that were ultra-nationalists in the Turkish military, bombing their villages and killing civilians and all this sort of stuff. And the PKK was doing terrorist acts as well. It was really, really, really bad, lots of deaths. And Sean had mentioned too that the Turkish government kind of treats them now like a bogeyman. They're always the people that you can blame for something bad happening. And they use it to whip up nationalist frenzy and all that.

And there was – I was there when this ceasefire was declared in 2013 in southeast Turkey, which is where the Kurdish population is concentrated. And there really was this hopeful moment there that everything was going to be sort of more peaceful and there was going to be a representation for Turkish Kurds that they were proud of and things like that.

But it didn't really stay that way. Within a year, things had really gotten pretty bad because the Kurdish group operating in Syria, the YPG, is effectively the PKK as well. They're an affiliate, but they're kind of the same thing.

And Erdogan really wanted to crack down on them. They were getting a lot of international support, a lot of Twitter support too from like – they became like a darling of the left internationally in like 2014, 2015. And that just led to increased tensions. There were bombings. There were pretty brutal attacks. They leveled the city. I mean the Turkish military leveled the city full of Kurds and things just kind of went haywire.

And, yeah, I'll just leave it at that for right now. Yeah, I mean, there's so many different angles we could go to the PKK from. But, yeah, so like Danny just said, like they're pretty much the national bogeyman. And...

So we get up to the point of 2016 in this story, right? And that July, there's an alleged coup against Erdogan. And he responds by A, crushing it, and B, purging thousands and thousands of people with even the slightest allegiance to a guy called Fethullah Gulen. This guy is a businessman and religious figure who lives in Pennsylvania. And it's said has long wanted to become Turkish leader.

He was a preacher until the 80s, and he moved to the US in 1999, when he was on trial back home for undermining the Turkish government. In the early 2000s, when Erdogan was coming up, he and Gülen teamed up to shift Turkey's balance of power from secularism to Islamism, just like we said.

Gulen had this giant empire of media, businesses, aid foundations, and he backed Erdogan until 2013, when this massive corruption scandal brought protesters to the streets. You might have seen it on the news. It was like the Gezi Park riots, protests. Then Erdogan's police kills 22 of these protesters, and he blames Gulen of trying to overthrow his government, calling Gulen's empire, quote, a parallel state.

Yeah, I think my days of knowing a lot about Gulen and what he stood for are kind of long past. But they're Islamists, but it's a lot lighter, I would say. It's light with a small light. Yeah, that AKP has been involved in involving jihadis and things like that. And Gulen has a ton of followers, and they were involved in the government. I think military, police, all sorts of stuff like that, he had a lot of followers. And again, this is like another accusation of them being the deep state leaders.

which some people will testify that it's kind of real that Gulen had that set of power. Others say it's exaggerated, but it's not like the trial we talked about because this is a real thing. And there are all these sort of like shady, powerful groups in Turkey.

Yeah, that's when it starts going all Inception, right? Because there's just like deep states within deep states within deep states. Yeah, the lines are switching and all that. It's tough. I hope you guys are following this so far because we're going to get down to Sadat in a minute. So, I mean, we'll no doubt get into Ghulam more in other episodes and we should definitely do a show on the Grey Walls, this right-wing paramilitary group. I mean, we could always do one on the Erdogan, to be fair, too.

Yeah. I mean the gray wolves too, you kind of have to like, they're an ultra nationalist group that really came up with the seventies. Um,

First, I think they were relatively secular and they would – they just went on like killing sprees. They were essentially death squads against leftists, Kurds, Greeks, Armenians, labor parties, things like that. And you can see them sometimes acting like really aggressive football hooligans in the streets of Istanbul. They'll show stuff like that. But yeah, they were murdering people. And I think too, like they became more neo-fascist and more aligned with the AKP and Islamist

Islamists then as opposed to secular now and then, but yeah, it's all this stuff sort of shifts, but they've also been accused too of being involved with like mafia tactics and, and drug trafficking. So all this stuff is all entwined and it's all very confusing, but, uh, yeah. Yeah. It's, it's crazy. Um, but anyway, given all this background between Erdogan and Gulen, um,

This 2016 coup attempt, at least, kicks off, right? Erdogan stops it. 300 people die. The AK party locks up 40,000 people across the country. Judges, teachers, the lot. Eventually, Erdogan's government will have 160,000 Turks fired from their jobs for association with Gulen. So it's like a full-blown national purge.

So this is kind of the world in which our boy Sadat is kind of running around, right? This is the circles he's moving in.

except where the nationalism is concerned, he is way, way off the deep end. He's basically a Turco fascist believing something called Turinism, which is this 19th century pan-Turkism to unite the Turkic-speaking people even from Hungary to East Asia together to counter other ethnic movements at that time, like pan-Slavism. Anyway, that doesn't leave much room for the Kurds.

So in 2016, when a group of scholars, including Chomsky, I mean, is there anything that guy doesn't sign, calls for peace in southeast Turkey, Sadat writes one of his online open letters telling these guys, quote, we will let your blood in streams and we will take a shower in your blood. Yeah, the reason, you know, the peace process, the ceasefire fell apart is

was mostly because of the city called Kobani, which is on the border. It's in Syria. It's on the border of Turkey. It's a Kurdish city. I actually was there. It got besieged by ISIS on all sides. And the other side was the Turkish border. And the Turks essentially shut it down. You know, they weren't letting anything come in. There are lots of fighters from the PKK trying to come in to help out, things like that. Eventually, they negotiate to let a few things in. But I actually snuck across that border. This is in December of 2014 to go into Kobani,

and do a story there with the various elements that were fighting against ISIS. And yeah, I mean, the Turkish, the Kurdish people looked at it and saw they accused Turkey of siding with ISIS, you know, and other jihadis and things like that. And protests started, which led to fighting, which led to, you know,

like all out kind of guerrilla warfare. And that's when the Turkish government went in and leveled the, the, the Kurdish Turkish city of, of Jizre and stuff like that. And that sort of kicked off this, this, you know, new, not new, but like a sort of rehashing of the conflict. Again, that thing has got really bloody. And that's what he was, I guess. Yeah. The Turkish nationalists were not about like, they were not about trying to make peace with the Kurds at all. And I think Sadat was probably, you know,

You know, blood and streams. Yeah, blood and streams. Makes it pretty clear. Yeah, I mean, he goes on, actually. You can really hear his writing style in this bit. Quote, if the terrorists...

You who are their supporters and foreign countries, intelligence service in some, all of you accomplish your goals and turn this state into a non-functioning situation. You should well know that you will never be shown mercy by the children of this homeland. I mean, how many, how come so many mobsters are far right? Anyway, it's like it runs for a lot of groups. Anyway, this actually earns Sadat a pretty good comeback from an opposition politician in Turkey who says, quote,

Some third class godfathers are casting a duty for themselves and jumping on this. Another guy offers a stronger but nowhere near as good reply, saying that, quote, the impunity of this murderer will prove that the mafia has become an organic component of the new state.

Yeah, I like Third Class Godfather better. That's a solid burn. Yeah, that is good. So now to the videos. And I'm not going to do every single one in order, like just the key bits because they are long, these things. Like in one video, for example, one of these things that he puts out, Sadat alleges that an MP named Tolga Agar, son of Mehmet Agar, who was the interior minister I mentioned at the top of the show in the Susuluk scandal,

raped a female journalist two years ago who was found dead from suicide soon after. Agar's denied all this, of course, and called it slander. But I mean, this is the kind of revelation that Sadat is just throwing into the public sphere. He's also threatened to reveal the name of an official who died of a heart attack at the home of a mysterious woman named Daphne, which tabloids have taken to mean a TV presenter and former Miss Turkey, who's repeatedly had to come out and deny a relationship with Erdogan.

And it gets stranger still, right? In his eighth YouTube confessional, Sadat said that Turkey had supplied weapons to the al-Nusra Front in Syria, which is this al-Qaeda-affiliated terror group, through a secret paramilitary group called Sadat. That's Sadat, not Sedat. He says he sent a load of trucks and vehicles to the Free Syrian Army, quote, under my name. There were no procedures, no registries. They were crossed directly into Syria.

But then the vehicles were sent to al-Nusra instead. Then Sadat just drops the bomb, quote, let's open Pandora's box. Do you know what you should do to trade in Syria? There is Mr. Metin Karatli, the chair of the presidency administrative affairs in the presidential complex. You go to him. I'm not talking about the dealings of one or two trucks, illegal raw oil, tea, sugar, aluminium, copper, secondhand cars,

billions of dollars, big money. Yeah. I feel like there's, there's long been accusations in the last decade against Erdogan and other sort of corruption involving just money stuff, you know, like real estate. I think his son was involved in things like that. Like there's a lot like this isn't anything new, right? He's not coming out of left field with this, with a lot of it. So it's not like, you know, Erdogan was a squeaky clean guy who never had allegations of corruption against him before now. No. And I mean, you know, Turkey supplying, um,

Islamist fighters to like regional conflicts is nothing new either. But I guess it's just like kind of telling everyone this is solid info. Yeah. But like, yeah, Sadat's videos are like that sixth season of 24 where a nuclear bomb goes off at the end. Like, where do you step it up from there, mate? Well, actually, the most recent video he did was about Big Brother Tayyip, the Sadat-Khawarza one, calling him out directly saying,

He says, quote, if I'm a spy who's involved in an international conspiracy, I'll sit down and talk in front of you as a brother in the next video. Big brother type. Boom. Mic drop. Yeah. What does that mean? He's basically calling him out and saying, come on my show. Like, come on my YouTube channel and chat. Oh, I see. Yeah. He's really gone full YouTuber content creator, you know?

Yeah. That's like the tactic, right? You stir up some controversy, then invite the guy to come on your show, bring in his fans and whatnot. It's like it's marketplace of ideas, right? It's very, it's very Dave Rubin. So yeah, I mean, on this Sunday, which is yesterday when we're recording this, which is Monday, which is yesterday when you're listening to it. Does that make sense? Like totally. So that released his ninth video, which to be fair was a little bit more than his usual rumor mill. Like it had some evidence backing up.

It does go straight for Erdogan, just like Sadat promised. Sadat releases almost 13 minutes of a video chat between him and oil baron Serdar Eksi, who's a relative of the president, where they confirm knowledge of the sending of weapons to jihadis in Syria. So I'm going to use some of the quotes as translated at news site Aval, by the way. My Turkish is a bit rusty.

They quote Seda asking and nodding Eski, quote, we were at the hotel. You were there too. Were you not there every time we were sending the materials? Then later, quote, we were not selling these weapons. You were on it too. And so was I. Oh, and guess what he calls Turkish media won't publish his accusations. Yeah. Dishonorable, of course.

And of course, like in this video, Sadat can't also resist a tiny little dig at Soylu. I mean, it's not a tiny little dig. Saying Soylu was trying to go for the presidency, but he couldn't do it because he'd sold Sadat out.

Oh, and because he's got a quote brain, the size of a hazelnut. I mean, it's bigger than a peanut, I guess, but yeah. Part nine of the Sadat tales did not disappoint. And last time I checked it, it's got over 9 million views on YouTube. Like it's pretty, it's going off. People are watching this so much. It's making, making money, man. Monetizing for real. Oh yeah. Yeah. I wonder what his, I wonder what his money is. Shit. Um,

But the most damaging stuff comes all the way back to the Susuluk scandal in the 90s that we told about in the start of this show. According to that, in 96, he was approached by an intelligence official to assassinate a Cypriot journalist named Kutlu Adalu with an Uzi. This guy had been writing about a massive armed robbery in Famagusta. That's like, I think that's the biggest town on the Turkish side of Cyprus. And how vehicles used in the raid belong to the local government. Cyprus, by the way, guys, it's like,

an island just off the Levant. It's home to about 80% Greeks, 20% Turks, and it's divided along its capital, Nicosia. Anyway, Adela was shot outside his home on July 6th, 1996. Attila Pekka, who we mentioned, Sadat's brother, he issued a pretty mad statement. Quote, Eken, the intelligence guy, gave me an Uzi gun in the adjacent room. He taught me how to use this gun and how to install the silencer and take it out.

And then Attila describes case in Adela's home. Quote, there are again a lot of voices coming from the house. Seeing this, Commander Corkert said to me, even if there are three people, they are all from the Kurdistan's Workers' Party, the PKK. Whoever is a friend of the PKK is a member of the PKK. It is okay if you kill them all.

Wow, that's kind of, you know, the three people thing is kind of ironic considering the assassinations in Paris, right, that I mentioned. Yeah. But yeah, they, like, brutal, just brutal assassinations all over. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, Adela's killers were never found. Shock. So that says it was ordered by Mehmet Agar, who we mentioned before, the interior minister.

He's also accused Agar of a 1993 car bomb that killed another journalist. So all this is piling on top of the mad deep state stuff Turks already found out about from the car crashes fallout all the way back then. This mad confluence of politics, organized crime, nationalist attacks on Armenian and Kurds, shitloads of money changing hands. Mehmet Agar, by the way, he steps down after that scandal.

He returns to parliament in 2011, then a judge gives him five years for his role in Susserluck. So he's out now, he's a free man. And this is from the WAPO again, this time it's from Sinem Adar, a Berlin-based analyst. Quote, In the 1990s, the state still had some upper hand over these underground networks, which served its purposes. In the last decade, it feels like the mafia has penetrated more into the state, and it's not clear who has the upper hand.

Perhaps most striking is that Sadat has dug up one of Turkey's most enduring deep state scandals. This is something called the Pelican Group. Now, the Pelican Group first gets a mention in 2013 when judges arrest journalists in the wake of the Gezi Bark protests, which we spoke about earlier. Back then, people say that this shady group has the judiciary in its pockets.

Then in 2016, the group is thought to be behind the release of documents that lead to the resignation of Turkey's PM.

And this is not some made up conspiracy theory like Ergonekon may have been, right? This is real. It's got a headquarters in this luxurious Ottoman mansion on the Bosphorus. And it's led for the most part by Erdogan's son-in-law, who's the finance minister. This group is named after the Pelican Brief, this 1992 John Grisham book that got turned into a film with Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington, like legal drama, pretty cool film.

Then in 2016, the Pelican group is thought to be behind the release of information that drives a wedge between Erdogan and his PM, Ahmet Davutoglu, who steps down. And basically in the wake of that and other sort of situations in Turkey,

People that work for Pelican, this is like a deep state of journalists and judges and whatnot. They've been working to kind of suppress information that's harmful to Erdogan. Yeah, I mean, similar to the stuff that we mentioned before, but this stuff is pretty solid. So Sadat is pointing a finger for all of this stuff, the stuff that he's mentioned ultimately at this Pelican group.

and folks he says are members. And so far, the politicians have remained defiant. Erdogan has stood by Soylu, whose public addresses have been pretty weak, according to a lot of tabloid stories I saw. Yeah, I feel though, from what I'm reading, it sounds like Erdogan has been riding this out okay. Like he's always maintained a decent level of popularity and he's kind of a master manipulator, but it doesn't seem like he's... Obviously, I think I saw a statistic that said like,

literally half of the Turkish people have seen at least a clip of the video or something like of one of the videos or something like that. But it does seem like he's, you know, he's going to be able to hold out for sure. Yeah, I reckon so. I mean, we're going to find out from this interview that I'm going to do with Ryan Ginger as well, how, how kind of how shaken the state is. Um,

But I mean, so that is not backing down, right? He's taken his war with soil in a deep state to Twitter. I mean, this guy's a king of posting, like honestly say stuff like quote, a dog that doesn't know how to bark. We'll call a wolf home. I mean, it kind of makes half sense, but it's sure. Like it's definitely a million, million times better than the guff on his website. He also says with a dose of typical modesty that he has quote, donned the garb of martyrdom. The rest is in God's hand.

He's really living that Dubai lifestyle, but I do wonder if Erdogan is putting heavy pressure on the UAE to do something about it. They tried with the US and Gulen. I think, wasn't Flynn involved in the beginning stages? When he was going fully into being a wacko, doing something with some shady deals? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's always been kind of crazy. Gulen is this guy who's immensely powerful in Turkey, and he lives in a rural compound in

in Pennsylvania. Just like in the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania. I've tried to get interviews with him for years and years, especially when the coup kicked off. He actually did, I think, end up giving an interview or at least releasing a statement, which we hadn't done. He didn't really talk at all before that. But it's just kind of fascinating where he is. I'd love to see his guys when they go to the local convenience store in rural Pennsylvania, how those interactions go. That reminds me of those Gambian guys that try to take over the presidency there, right? When they just like

like security guards and someone worked in a pharmacist or something. I don't know. This was in the US as well. But yeah, so Sadat is on a roll, right? And the craziest parts of this story might yet come out. He's got three more videos in the bag and each one just lays down more of this wild interconnected madness at the heart of Turkish power.

Yeah. I mean, does he only have three more coming out? Cause once you get into content game, you got to keep, you got to keep producing. Like, I don't think he's going to just make three videos and then retire. Like he's got more ASMR. I mean, right. He's got a, he's got a channel now. Like he's got a, he's got to make it work. Like the algorithm, the algorithm forgets real quickly. So you got to get that stuff up. Yeah. And that ego, I mean, I can't imagine you just linking into the background. You got to keep making content, man. Don't we know.

This is a great line, by the way. This time it's from a former head of counter-terror in Turkey. Quote, in the 90s, there was not this much shady activity. It was not at this level. The end of this is going to be political murders.

So yeah, there's your boy Sadat Peker. I mean, what an insane tale, and it's still coming out now. An expert I listened to basically summed it up as, even though the AKP claims it's flushed out all these mafia bad guys from government, it's actually now kind of switched around, right? And Sadat Peker now sounds more credible, while his enemy Soylu just sounds like a gangster. Like, things may genuinely be worse now than they were in 96 with the Susuluk scandal.

Yeah, it's pretty – it's a lot of really bad people doing really bad things. I don't want to entirely make light of it, but it is – I mean when you look at a photo of this guy or just watch his videos, like I don't understand Turkish, but it is funny. Like he looks like a funny – it's just completely ridiculous that this is happening.

um and you know we can't really do it justice unless you actually just watch his videos with his like open spread collar shirt and his like doofy haircut and him just like sitting there like a bad talk show host just like airing out the dirty laundry of an insanely powerful government that's been in power for a long period of time and has gotten away with a lot i mean i've just got this idea of a tiktok house of like

all of these gangsters that we've, we've got in Dubai. It'd be amazing. Oh my God. This is like pure MTV nineties era documentaries. Like this would be an amazing version of the real world. Make it guys make it. Um, yeah. So that's that. What a crazy sour. Yeah. I hope, I hope it was understandable that we didn't go in too many directions, but it is, um, you know, we wanted to jump on this. Sean put the episode together really quickly. We want, we wanted to just jump on this because it is in the news. Um,

It is pretty wild. I can't remember another circumstance where something like this was happening and we wanted to get it out there because people had asked us what's going on with that and what's happening. Yeah, I hope that made perfect sense for you guys. Yeah.

All right, cool. Thanks a lot. Again, patreon.com slash the underworld podcast interviews every week or so or two with people who can break this stuff down in a, I'd say, you know, more interesting, not more interesting, but a different way. Anyway, it's a good job. I don't listen to the end of podcast. It was like a nice thing.