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The Danish left-wing group Blekingegadebanden (The Blekinge Street Gang) could have developed into a true Danish terrorist cell. In his best-selling and award-winning book, Blekingegadebanden, Den hårde kerne ('The Blekinge Street Gang: The Hard Core'), journalist and author Peter Øvig Knudsen relates the second part of the group’s story. It is a piece of Danish contemporary history with roots in Norway, Sweden, France and - particularly - the Middle East. A story which defies the powers of imagination.
By Bo Maltesen. Translated by Thomas E. Kennedy.
It took a brutal robbery and the murder of a young police officer in 1989 for the Danish police to arrest a group of extreme left-wingers who had good educations, families and good jobs – and, as it turned out, a double life for more than twenty years, during which the young fantasists on the on the extreme left developed into the most intelligent and cynical criminal gang Denmark has seen to date, planning and executing such shrewd robberies and other criminal acts that many detective novelists must envy them.
The Danish National Security Service (Politiets Efterretningstjeneste - PET) had known of the group’s existence since the 1970s and uncovered their connections to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), for example. Still the group was allowed to keep working, and it was not until a violent robbery in Copenhagen during which a young police officer was shot dead that PET and the police began working together to assemble enough evidence to arrest the group.
But the biggest surprise for the police was still to come: Only due to an unusually lucky set of coincidences did they discover the evidence to convict the group, when a man with a loose connection to the gang was involved in a single-person accident in a rental car. In the wreckage of the car the police found a telephone bill, which led them to the secret cover address that had been the group’s hideout. The apartment at the address proved to be full of weapons and outfits for disguises, as well as the plans for some of their many crimes – including what would be their last robbery the one that cost the police officer his life.
And how do we know all this? Because journalist and author Peter Øvig Knudsen spent four years of his life digging into the case. He was granted access to police archives, he spoke to one or more of the gang’s members and he interviewed a whole series of policemen.
Then he wrote a book in two volumes about the Blekinge Street Gang, as the group came to be called, since the cover address was an apartment on Blekinge Street in Copenhagen.
The first volume, Blekingegadebanden, Den danske celle ('The Blekinge Street Gang: The Danish Cell'), was published in the spring of 2007. It was highly commended for telling the story of the gang’s first years with a wealth of detail and matchless documentation. Moreover, the book was written in a dramatic and well-composed style that was up-close and personal. It was a story we could still remember? By then the gang members had all done their time and were out in society again with new identities, families and jobs.
The story of the Blekinge Street Gang is a confirmation that reality can surpass the imagination. And if you had any doubts after the first volume, none will be left after reading the second one, which was published in the fall of 2007. Together more than 200,000 copies of the two volumes have already been sold in Denmark. Editions are planned in several other countries, including Norway and France. For most of this fall, Peter Øvig Knudsen has gone from one award ceremony to another, culminating with the so-called Cavling Prize, which is the most distinguished journalistic award in Denmark.
In 'The Hard Core', we witness the gang’s growing cynicism. Its first years - which were characterized by much political activity and a few, less violent robberies - gave way to less emphasis on politics and more on serious crimes. The commitment to the Palestinian Liberation Front grew stronger and stronger and the gang ended up becoming deeply involved in the liberation movement. Over the years they provided quite a bit of money and a number of weapons to the PFLP. But when their plan for getting the PFLP a huge sum by kidnapping the son of a Swedish billionaire collapsed, they felt they owed a debt to the Front. This was why they pulled the heist in Copenhagen, a robbery that turned out to be their last crime.
In 'The Hard Core', Peter Øvig Knudsen is a master at taking the reader along through a series of the most violent crimes in Danish criminal history as if we were there ourselves, but without glorifying the gang’s ruthless methods. He tells it the way it was, but doesn’t forget to mention the victims: the guard who was killed, the mother of the murdered police officer etc.
Both volumes draw a tremendous yield of information from “the Voice”, one of the convicted gang members with whom Peter Øvig Knudsen conducted hours of interviews and whose reflections on the gang’s deeds Øvig Knudsen presents unvarnished, so we can judge for ourselves.
Together, Peter Øvig Knudsen’s two books on the Blekinge Street Gang constitute almost 1000 pages of a devilishly well-told, well-documented yarn about how a group of intelligent young people, through a casual flirtation with radical forces, became a criminal organization with few or no scruples when it came to getting money and weapons to their “friends” in the PFLP. In other countries – Germany, for example - this sort of group would likely have developed into a real terrorist cell. After you have read 'The Blekinge Street Gang', you can’t help but think that, if the gang had not been caught in the spring of 1989, the next step might have been a Danish Rote Armee Fraktion.
Peter Øvig Knudsen has previously written documentary books – about life during and after the German occupation of Denmark, for example. With 'The Blekinge Street Gang', he has set a new standard for journalistically researched and dramatically told stories from Danish contemporary history.
Bo Maltesen is a journalist for one of Denmark’s leading morning newspapers.
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