18th November, 2024 in True Crime

A knockout punch from the Polish Mafia

By Christopher Othen

In November 1999 the Polish boxer Andrzej Gołota fought Michael Grant in Atlantic City before an audience of fight fans, celebrities, and expat Poles.

In the audience was Donald Trump, then a real estate mogul with an odd haircut and political ambitions, but a few rows behind and to the right was a big man in an expensive black suit who leapt to his feet cheering every time Gołota landed a punch. Andrzej Kolikowski aka ‘Pershing’ was the best known gangster in Poland and had come to Atlantic City to escape the violence tearing the underworld apart back home. He would be dead in two weeks.

Kolikowski made his name as part of the Pruszków Mafia, the biggest organised crime family in post-communist Poland. The gang began in 1990 when some thuggish career criminals who’d been in and out of prison under communism teamed up with a younger generation eager to make money in the brave new world of democracy. Within a few years they controlled Warsaw. By the end of the decade they controlled Poland. Pershing fronted the gang, young intelligensia Jarosław Maringe dealt the drugs, a huge thug called ‘Masa’ kept everyone in line, and the ruthless Janusz Prasol aka ‘Parasol’ spent the money on vodka and girls.

Millions of dollars flowed through their hands: enough to buy pardons from President Lech Wałęsa, holidays in Thailand, and fleets of luxury cars. Every day the newspapers reported another murder, another gang war, another case dropped when the victim refused to press charges. They seemed untouchable.

Some Poles hated the gangsters for brute-forcing their way into prosperity with protection rackets and drug deals and robberies; others respected them as men who took what they wanted with a Kalashnikov in one hand and a vodka shot in the other. Not even a gang war with rivals across the river that turned Warsaw into a ‘miniature-Vietnam’, in the words of one crook, could knock them from the top spot. That only happened when the gang turned on each other as the new millennium approached and unleashed a wave of back-stabbing and murder.

Pershing would be the most prominent victim. After four years in prison he had come out determined to ditch Pruszków and go his own way as head of a rival gang. After a slow start, the money began pouring in when fellow Pruszków defector Masa suggested getting into the slot-machine racket. Poles had discovered gambling after the long, grey years of communism and the sector was growing every day. It wasn’t difficult for a hardman like Pershing to intimidate the slot-machine firms into paying $500 protection money per machine every week. And there were thousands of machines across Poland.

The money was glorious until Pershing’s old comrades in the Pruszków Mafia decided to muscle in on the racket. A shaky truce held through most of 1999 but then tempers flared, bullets flew, and bodies started hitting the floor as open warfare broke out in the Polish underworld. After a psychic told Pershing that death would find him in Warsaw, the superstitious gang boss jetted off to Atlantic City to watch Andrzej Gołota take on heavyweight challenger Michael Grant and wait for things to cool down back home.
Gołota did well in the early rounds until a ferocious comeback by Grant put him on the defensive. In round 10 a stunned Gołota told the referee he couldn’t continue and it was all over, with Pershing losing the $70,000 he’d bet on a Polish victory.

Perhaps the bad luck followed him home. On Sunday 5 December 1999 the 45-year-old gangster was standing by a silver Mercedes S500 in the car park of a Polish ski resort, far away from Warsaw, when two men walked out of the afternoon gloom with guns. They shot him down in the snow. The Pruszków Mafia had won the final round.