Buying ice cream and strawberries from criminal gangs

Maybe you have too?

This summer I did it again. It has, frankly, been a tradition for many years.

I bought strawberries from a company started by the Abdo family, where the gang leader Ismail Abdo, “Strawberry”, was employed.

I am also aware that I traded absurd amounts. But they were for personal use. A lot of people don’t think that my son and I can consume all the fruit we bring home. But the strawberries were just for us. They were extremely good, of the Malwina variety – the one with an extra strong and perfumed scent. And they were Swedish, according to the cocky and likeable teenage girls selling them.

The Abdo family’s activities have long been the subject of police operations. In recent years, they have been noticed in the media in connection with the bloody conflicts surrounding the Foxtrot network.

I acted like I used to, without knowing the full background of my particular local strawberry merchant.

In hindsight it feels that a bit naive. Stupid, even. It would have been possible to put the puzzle pieces together.

At the same time, it wasn’t cocaine I bought.

It was “the best strawberries in Sweden”, according to the girls who always seem to be open in their small stand by a heavily trafficked road between the fields outside Uppsala.

I grew up on this plain, and I always cheer when the signs with a large painted strawberry appear at the entrance to my village.

A few hundred meters from here, the murder took place, which started one of the worst spirals of violence in Swedish criminal history. Here Ismail Abdo’s mother was shot in her own home, according to the police on behalf of Rawa Majid, the “Kurdish Fox”.

An earlier tradition me and my son had to buy soft ice cream at a special kiosk in Uppsala.

The ice cream was good and the women who ran the kiosk were incredibly nice. We rarely minded the long queues. Sometimes we were there several times a day. A few years later I found the kiosk in a preliminary investigation. Here, Rawa Majid laundered the Foxtrot network’s money, with the help of friends and family. Today, both parents are convicted of money laundering.

Perhaps you have also bought strawberries from “Strawberry”, ice cream from Kurdiska Raven, or just a very good falafel or pizza at an unexpectedly good price?

Then you, like me, have probably participated in the gigantic criminal economy. Or at least found yourself in its gray areas.

In the business structures around the Abdo family, billions are turned over over thirty registered businesses, and fruit and vegetables are sold all over Sweden.

An experienced business manager speaks up Dagens Industris Lasse Wierup that they took advantage of a hole in the market: by combining imports of fruit and vegetables with goods from the Middle East, they meet the needs of a target group estimated to be two million people – those who have roots in food cultures other than the Swedish one.

However, Wierup’s review shows an activity that “had strikingly short distances between organized crime and apparently serious business activity.”

Before midsummer, the police carried out actions against a long line of strawberry sellers. A large part of the checks were directed at the Abdo family’s business.

Shop owners that the police checked described themselves as “3-400 people who work hard and have nothing to do with crime” when Dagens Industri asked.

There is certainly something in it – nor would the police claim that everyone who works in such large corporate structures is a criminal.

But in the gang wars of recent years, everyone risks becoming targets. One of the company’s distribution centers was destroyed in an arson attack in the fall of 2023, and a number of members of the Abdo family have been the victims of attacks.

It is often spoken about how gang crime “eats its way into society.”

But how does it actually affect you and me? How does the non-criminal come into contact with it?

Of course, it’s more often about ice cream cones, strawberries or barbecue than about shootings, violent crimes or robberies.

Many police officers and researchers have long warned of the increasingly close links between business and serious crime.

But there will never be the same kind of interest in such events.

Our depictions of gang crime are often focused on the violence. The drama of it fills many newspaper articles, Netflix series and rap songs.

There aren’t many rap songs about gang members bilking poor pensioners – even though this is an important part of the business for some networks. There are also not that many successful TV series focusing on fraud directed at the Social Insurance Agency.

Another reason we don’t discuss economic crime with the same intensity as street violence, I think, is that the violence itself can feel so alien that it’s easier to mentally place far, far away from oneself. As if it happens in a movie.

That’s not the case with ice cream and strawberries. For me, the token didn’t fall completely until this summer.

The violent crimes that are so often reported on are actually a kind of side business. The terrifying tip of an iceberg.

The large and everyday part of the criminal world – we all live in it.