by Matteo Tacconi
In 1996 a car crash disclosed the Pandora’s box, revealing a macabre relation between organised crime and State powers. A heavy truth whose 
shadows still darken today’s Turkey.
Turkey gained the unenviable reputation as a Mafia nation in the mid 1990s. At that time, the forbidden link between State sectors and organised crime emerged dramatically, shocking everyone. Indeed, who would have imagined such a blurry line between Politics and Mafia? Who could have predicted such a marked connection between the lawful country and criminal country, so greatly compromising the nation’s health? No one.
The Mafia-nation profile was discovered by chance due to a car accident on November 3, 1996 at the gates of Susurluk, a western Anatolian village (Turkey’s inner region, that is to say, the whole country except Istanbul). A darting Mercedes, speeding up to 125 MPH on the road, smashed against a truck. In the fatal crash, three of the four people on board died: Huseyn Kocadağ, Abdullah Catli and his partner, the beauty queen Gonca Us. The fourth passenger, Sedat Bucak, survived the impact.
Ordinary road fatalities? Not really, considering the passengers’ biographies. Catli was a notorious Mafia boss involved in heroin trafficking and a leading member of the (in)famous Grey Wolves, a right-wing, ultra-nationalist group with clear military suggestions. Kocadağ was the head of Istanbul’s police academy and one of the main organizers of the special units deployed for the repression of the Kurdish separatist insurrections that broke out in 1984.
As for Bucak, the survivor, he was an MP elected in the district of Urfa in south-eastern Turkey, the region with the highest percentage of Kurdish population. He was involved in the Kurdish front line, too, having at his command 20K men armed to the teeth and involved in the hunt for PKK militants and activists (the Kurdistan Workers’ Party), the political-military organization that represented the main ethnic minority in the country.
Before long, the simultaneous presence of the three in the Mercedes smelled damned fishy. The inquiry that followed shortly thereafter brought to light an uncomfortable truth. Namely: pieces of the state and institutions had hired the worst thugs in the organised crime scene as killers, many enrolled in the Grey Wolves, in order to hunt, track down, and defeat the Kurdish rebels at the height of the war between the separatist rebels and the State. In exchange for the services provided, including the mass murder of civilians, the Mafia was rewarded with good money and a blind eye, if not two, turned to their businesses, led by drug-trafficking.
Historically, this was the main and most lucrative activity of Turkish godfathers, and after a decade of outward calm, as a consequence of the agony of the domestic opium industry it attracted their yearning again. Just in the 1990s, in fact, the Golden Crescent, the region between Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, finally emerged as a large new field of opium and its major derivative, heroin. Turkish godfathers leaped on the opportunity and became the largest wholesalers in the European market. An undefeated record, even now that Afghanistan has ousted its other two fellow-countries in the narcotic trio.
Drug trafficking, and far beyond
The Istanbul and Anatolian gangs easily infiltrated all areas within their reach: gambling, prostitution, high finance, real estate, racketeering, arms smuggling. Usually, these operations were carried out in cahoots with the police, the intelligence apparatus, and the military hierarchy. These people were proficient in taking a share of credits of anti-Kurd actions, as well as the spoils.
Mafia mobsters, cops, politicians, and military officers: one big happy family. All together, they formed the backbone of the “Deep State” (Derin devlet in Turkish), a catacomb-like structure driven by the military Establishment and extended to politicians, senior bureaucrats and police, dedicated to intervening with ‘creative’ methods in public affairs and deemed as the generator of every conspiracy story and violent period in the history of the Turkish Republic. The Susurluk case unearthed its existence and made it clear that the Deep State also had enlisted mobsters, giving them an important part as co-stars.
After the scandal emerged on November 3, 1996, a Watergate in Turkish sauce, as someone described it, a wave of popular outrage and a short-lived reaction from the healthy side of the institutions resulted in a little cleanup, by removing the most compromised policemen and jailing some mafia members who had taken part in the maneuvers of the Deep State.
Drug trafficking, and far beyond
The Istanbul and Anatolian gangs easily infiltrated all areas within their reach: gambling, prostitution, high finance, real estate, racketeering, arms smuggling. Usually, these operations were carried out in cahoots with the police, the intelligence apparatus, and the military hierarchy. These people were proficient in taking a share of credits of anti-Kurd actions, as well as the spoils.
Mafia mobsters, cops, politicians, and military officers: one big happy family. All together, they formed the backbone of the “Deep State” (Derin devlet in Turkish), a catacomb-like structure driven by the military Establishment and extended to politicians, senior bureaucrats and police, dedicated to intervening with ‘creative’ methods in public affairs and deemed as the generator of every conspiracy story and violent period in the history of the Turkish Republic. The Susurluk case unearthed its existence and made it clear that the Deep State also had enlisted mobsters, giving them an important part as co-stars.
After the scandal emerged on November 3, 1996, a Watergate in Turkish sauce, as someone described it, a wave of popular outrage and a short-lived reaction from the healthy side of the institutions resulted in a little cleanup, by removing the most compromised policemen and jailing some mafia members who had taken part in the maneuvers of the Deep State.
2010: A Silent Odyssey
After that, pitch darkness. Since then, not another word was uttered about Mafia, drug trafficking and Deep State. Little by little, a curtain of silence was drawn over it. These matters gradually disappeared from the agenda. The Mafia, as it is currently stated in Turkey, was virtually defeated. The heroin trafficking, as is commonly pointed out, is less intense than before. The State, as emphasized, has been cleaned up. This is what they most often told us again and again in Istanbul and Ankara. This, followed by two considerations.
The first: the country enjoys good health. Second: the International community, Brussels and the rest of the Western countries that brought pressure and made several petitions for a clean sweep in the ‘90s, no longer have anything to worry about.
Those swearing that Turkey is rid of the old evil are backed by the figures. Regarding drug trafficking, Ankara can show the highest number of heroin seizures in the world: twelve tons in 2009. As for the Mafia hierarchy, after Susurluk, and then in more recent times after the massive raids conducted between 2004 and 2006, many babas, Turkish godfathers, were sent to jail. Others are still under investigation.
Can all this be enough to proclaim Turkey’s watershed after the ‘90s? There is still reason for doubt. Let’s start with drug trafficking. Considering the Afghan situation, where permanent war has pushed the production of heroin forward at the highest levels ever, there is no guarantee that the remarkable police seizures achieved directly proportional to the dismantling of the successful drug trafficking trade. Moreover, someone noted that the large amount of heroin seized means that the flow of “brown sugar” from Kabul towards Europe is substantially increasing, and that the Turkish roads, although with some diversification in the routes in recent years, remain by far the most used on the drug journey. This phenomenon was also confirmed by a drug trafficking study conducted by Interpol and UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime).
Regarding the Mafia, or the “denial” of the Mafia, some reservations are still justified. After all, arresting a number of babas is quite different from affirming that criminal groups no longer exist. One wonders what happened to the godfathers’ assets, their immense wealth, their tens, hundreds, thousands of businesses? Can it be all over? Can we believe the clean-up that followed Susurluk and the recent wave of detentions, actually brought organised crime off its high horse?
And the questions continue, primarily the possible return of the Derin devlet, the Deep State. Indeed, in 2008, another Watergate exposed a secret ultra-nationalist organization, mainly composed of representatives from the military establishment and proven senior Mafia bosses. Their plot, according to investigators, was to oust the legitimately constituted government with its Islamic overtones led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, head of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which came to power in 2002.
Some of the members of this cell, called Ergenekon, had already been implicated in the Susurluk affair. Among them were general Veli Küçük and Sedat Peker, considered by many as the current Turkish Mafia’s Boss of the Bosses. Based on this pairing, many see Ergenekon as a new Susurluk, adapted to changing circumstances and roles. If the Kurds were once the public enemies, now, the sights are set on the Islamic party in power. If the Mafias once acted as gangsters, now, as many analysts point out, they are actively enrolled in the Deep State in their brand new position of well-bred, full-dressed, successful businessmen, the outcome of the transition that led to the final establishment, along the past fifteen years, of a real industrial Mafia.
The judges are still investigating, and the trials and hearings are still in progress. The Ergenekon case is far from being closed. It could result in a Susurluk 2.0 version, or maybe not. It could be demonstrated that the Deep State still exists and its puppet masters caught, or the whole prosecution could collapse. Who knows? The courts are entitled to sort things out.
Meanwhile, one could reasonably wonder whether the great cure everybody is talking about has really resulted in a miraculous outcome, or whether, on the contrary, the syndromes of drug trafficking, Mafia, and the Deep State remained unaffected by the remedies employed during the last fifteen years. Let’s try to put two and two together.