General Discussion

Being mostly (though not exclusively) in Europe, that usually means the bad guys are organized crime, usually Serbs, Albanians, Romanians, i.e. Balkan in origin. If the situation warrants, which on rare occasions it still does, we work usually with two teams—one a mobile special brigade of Berlin police, and the other a team of ex Israeli military mixed with members of a Dutch anti-terror squad as well as a few ex-Balkan security guys who lend native language fluency (for surveillance as well as interrogation).

Obviously, it’s a team we only put together on very rare occasions, although other entities know them, respect them, and avail themselves of their services. I was once in on a bust of some bad guys because I could ID them. The head bad guy claimed “nix verstehen,” but when we searched him, he had an obviously phony German passport as an ID. So, “Herr Becker,” born in Essen, speaks no German, eh? When the Croatian-speaking interrogator got to him, he suddenly remembered he understood German before he was carted off.

We once nailed a Serb in the act of trying to rob a colleague from Bremen. Not wanting to let go of the stolen property, he tried twisting and turning, hoping the security guy would give up. He didn’t and the thief ended up breaking a finger, which is very painful. He started yelling about “brutality,” even though the injury was all his doing. The local cops were minimally sympathetic.

Recently, since the first wave of Covid, there have been less public occasions for organized robberies of people I work with, and the larceny “biz” seems to have fallen on hard times. No fatalities, but the Balkan guys (we caught some, so we know where they are from) are being more brazen about using firearms—a risky prospect in Germany. German law is extremely lenient where robbery is concerned UNLESS a firearm is involved. THAT carries an automatic minimum five year sentence. I wish the same were true for ICE kidnappers. If they commit an illegal kidnapping while armed, every one of them should get an automatic five year prison sentence. See how eager they are to fill their quotas under THOSE conditions!