The Polish Mafia

1

Death of a Polish Gangster

It was late in the afternoon and starting to get dark when they shot Andrzej Kolikowski in the car park of a Polish ski resort. The 45-year-old was stowing ski equipment in the boot of a silver Mercedes S500 when two men in goggles and winter hats came out of the December gloom with guns. The first man fired a sub-machine-gun burst into the air to frighten off other skiers, then the second gunman shot Kolikowski twice in the chest with a pistol as the big man turned around. Kolikowski fell back on to the snow and the gunman put two more bullets through his skull, before both attackers walked briskly to a green Audi and drove away into the Zakopane twilight.

Normally you have to pay for this kind of symbolism. Poland's best-known gangster had been chopped down in the dying days of the Kolorowe Lata 90 (the colourful 1990s), a decade he and his friends had done so much to corrupt. Ten years earlier, the Soviet puppets and secret police who'd ruled Poland since the Second World War had been swept aside to be replaced by democracy, free elections and a 16 per cent unemployment rate. Inflation reached equally obscene levels and standards of living dropped through the floor, leaving many Poles to reflect bitterly that the daily grind in a capitalist paradise looked a lot simpler in Hollywood movies.

When every day was a struggle just to put food on the table, it became easy to admire those who'd unlocked the secret door that led to luxurious foreign cars, bundles of US dollar bills and expensive Western clothes. Some of Poland's new rich were film stars and musicians who made their money doing Slavic imitations of the American culture they saw on television; others were businessmen who negotiated the murky world of post-Communist wheeler-dealing to get rich and build themselves gaudy houses on land that had been farmers' fields a year before. But the wealthiest and most visible, rolling straight through the new Poland like a bowling ball that knocked over everything in its path, were the gangsters with gold chains and bulging muscles and a Kalashnikov within easy reach.

The men from the wrong side of the law weren't everyone's heroes. To those who embraced Western ideas of entrepreneurship, they were just degenerate Cro-Magnons brute-forcing their way into prosperity by preying on anyone smarter and more honest. To the power brokers hoping Poland would one day join NATO and the European Union, they were a noisy embarrassment who didn't understand the importance of keeping their violence out of the headlines. But to many Poles, the gangsters were textbook examples of how to outsmart the system when you came from the poorest rung of an already poor society and education was something that happened to other people.

Kolikowski claimed to be a car mechanic but that was only a plausible proposition to those who'd never met him in person. His flat-topped, bald head with its horseshoe fringe of dark brown hair sat on a muscular torso that would have given body dysmorphia to the gorillas at the zoo if it hadn't been zipped into a flashy tracksuit most of the time. A resident of Ozarów, a village just outside Warsaw, Kolikowski was smarter than he looked, and the car mechanic act fooled no one, especially not the skiers he mingled with at the Polana Szymoszkowa resort on his last day alive. Everyone knew he was 'Pershing', one of the leaders of the Pruszków Mafia, a gang named after their home town near the capital and the most famous organised crime family in Poland.

If any fellow skiers had somehow failed to hear about the life of sin that bought Kolikowski three homes, two with swimming pools, they'd still have found it hard to understand why a car mechanic had a pretty girlfriend half his age giggling beside him on the slopes. Patrycja was a 21-year-old marketing student from Szczecin - a colourful port city with a griffin's head on its coat of arms - who'd met her lover at a disco along the north coast. Kolikowski liked to dance but not everyone appreciated his uncoordinated jigging about to music. 'Baldy, you should take a dance class,' advised Andrzej Florowski, who served as driver and bodyguard.

Kolikowski didn't usually appreciate backchat from fellow gangsters but Florowski, known to all as 'Florek', was allowed occasional insolence as a reward for his dog-like devotion the rest of the time. That devotion had a price. A month before the visit to Zakopane, someone put a bomb under Florek's car, and he was lucky not to be shredded like lettuce. Another of Kolikowski's bodyguards was murdered at his flat in Warsaw's Wola district two weeks later. Despite the violence, no one could persuade the gang boss against taking his new girlfriend on a weekend away down south.

The Zakopane trip followed close on the heels of Kolikowski's return from a business trip to America where he'd met up with some important foreign crime figures and watched his boxer friend Andrzej Golota lose to Michael Grant in Atlantic City. Kolikowski had seemed tense at the prospect of coming back to a Poland where a vicious gang war with rivals from Wolomin, on the other side of Warsaw, had been piling bodies high in the streets until recently. Even some members of his own gang seemed ready to turn on him. A superstitious man, he asked friend and professional clairvoyant Krzysztof Jackowski, who looked more like a punch-drunk streetfighter than a soothsayer, to predict the future.

'You will leave a hotel in Warsaw and two people will run up to you in the car park,' said Jackowski. 'One of them, with a weapon that fires very fast, will kill you'.

Zakopane was at the opposite end of the country from Warsaw and seemed a safe bet for the spiritually inclined. This tourist town of wooden houses near the southern border with Slovakia was famous for its skiing and Poles had loved the place for generations. Everyone had a souvenir photograph somewhere of a family member posing with a street performer in a white bear costume on the Zakopane main drag. The town was a neutral space for gangsters, who rarely settled scores within city limits, and Kolikowski thought he'd be safe there.

He and Patrycja arrived in Zakopane on Friday evening and enjoyed a weekend's skiing through the hard snow. On Sunday, 5 December, they were on the slopes above the Kasprowy, a red-roofed communist monstrosity of a hotel nestled among the forests only a few minutes' drive from the centre of town. The base of the ski lifts was conveniently near both the car park and the equipment hire shop, where Patrycja was retrieving their deposit when the gunmen struck.

A doctor who'd been loading up his own car tried to help Kolikowski as the gang boss lay in a darkening pool of arterial blood. Someone else called an ambulance but it was slow coming because an anonymous voice had put in a hoax call shortly before to report a major accident on the other side of town. The ambulance finally arrived and raced Kolikowski to hospital, but he died on the table as they tried to resuscitate him. The news was all over the media by the next morning. 'The alleged boss of the Pruszków gang, Andrzej K., alias "Pershing", has died,' reported the RMF radio station. 'He was shot yesterday in Zakopane. The police have not ruled out this being a professional hit.'

Professional was right: the phone call to distract the emergency services; the green Audi stolen from Kraków and soon to be discovered burned out near a ski jump; the way the gunman with the sub-machine gun had kept his weapon partly inside a bag to collect the used cartridges. But who ordered the killing?

There was an obvious candidate: for most of the 1990s, the Pruszków Mafia had been fighting rivals from Wolomin for control of every racket imaginable, from multimillion-dollar drug-smuggling networks, slot machine profits and protection rackets to political corruption, control of brothels and car theft on a massive scale.

Scores of gangsters had been shot, stabbed or blown apart in the gang war. Kolikowski had already survived at least three assassination attempts, including a bomb that collapsed a pub ceiling on to a crowd of gangsters playing pool in Warsaw's fashionable Saska Kepa district five years earlier.

A lot of people assumed the Zakopane hit had been ordered by the Wolomin gang leaders, but the few still alive denied involvement in Kolikowski's death fervently enough that a lot of well-informed people believed them. Other candidates existed, like the karate enthusiasts who robbed the wrong man and had their kneecaps probed with an electric drill by Pershing and his friends; rogue police officers frustrated at his apparently untouchable status; foreign gangs he'd annoyed over the years, including, it was rumoured, some Colombians; or even his own Pruszków friends, who had been noticeably unhappy about Kolikowski's expansive plans for the new millennium. Some observers suggested he'd already split from the gang to carve out his own territory.

And why had Patrycja's first action after the murder been to locate her boyfriend's mobile phone and snap its SIM card in half?

Live fast, die rich. In the Kolorowe Lata 90, you couldn't trust anyone.

Today, Pruszków is a small, quiet town full of people living their lives and bringing up families but, thanks to men like Kolikowski, it remains synonymous with organised crime for most Poles. A strange fate for a...