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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 theKolorowe 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