Organized Crime

Six people were found shot dead in a Chinese restaurant in the town of Sittensen in the early hours of Monday, but a two-year-old girl managed to survive. A seventh victim died on Tuesday in the hospital, dashing the police's hopes of finding out more from him about the crime.

All of the victims were of Asian origin and apparently worked in the Lin Yue restaurant; two may have been the owners. Their bodies were found tied up in different rooms of the restaurant.

Police are questioning diners who were in the restaurant earlier in the evening on Sunday.

The motive for the killings was unclear, police said. There was no evidence that the restaurant had been the target of blackmail and there was no history of Chinese mafia activity in Lower Saxony, the state where the restaurant is situated. Federal investigators are now working on the case.

DW-WORLD.DE spoke with Klaus von Lampe of the department of criminology at the Free University in Berlin about the case.

DW-WORLD.DE: Some analysts are speculating that the murders of the seven people at the Chinese restaurant in Sittensen are part of an organized crime plot perhaps involving the Chinese Triad mafia. What are possible signs of that?

Klaus von Lampe: Organized crime is a very complex term. According to my own broad definition, it is everything that is not committed by a socially-isolated individual or offender. In this case, I assume there were at least two perpetrators, so I think it must have been some form of organized crime. Without knowing more, however, it is difficult to place it in a broader context.

There have been so many murders that have first been ascribed to some big mafia boss who's supposedly handed out an order to have certain people killed. Then it turns out that the reason for a murder was rather banal -- that it involved personal rivalries, or just occurred in the heat of the moment. I'm cautious to say that these killings fit any meaningful notion of organized crime. Nonetheless, rarely are so many dead people found at one crime scene in Germany, so it's quite unusual.

For the sake of argument, what interests might the killings serve to a Chinese criminal organization?

I think it's more likely that several individuals or coalitions of people rather than an organization were holding a grudge against these people because they didn't pay a debt, say, or didn't abide by the rules of racketeering. The whole situation appears very irrational.

What advantage would an organization have from killing seven people? By killing, you make your point that you have power and can use violence efficiently and can then gain compliance from others, for instance, when you are extorting protection payments. But by killing seven people, you end up drawing attention to the activities that you'd rather keep clandestine. That doesn't make sense. This is probably more of a case of a botched debt collection or a robbery, and not a rationally planned act by an established criminal group.

The triads are well-known as Chinese crime networks in the Chinatowns of big cities in England and the United States, for instance, or in Asia itself. Why do we hear so little about triads in Germany?

Germany has no Chinatowns and has a fairly small Chinese population. Whatever criminal activity may be going on within the Chinese community in Germany is probably for the most below the radar screen of German law enforcement. Since such murders don't occur often, the police haven't invested much of their resources in finding out more about Chinese criminal groups here.

How does a professionally organized crime network go about getting what they want without drawing attention to themselves?

For an extortionist, reputation is the key. You want your victims to know that you are capable of using violence efficiently, but without getting caught. Your reputation may only be based on legend or myth. So if you want to be a successful extortionist, you don't want to use any violence at all -- only rarely, if you feel your authority is slipping away, but never if you believe police will devote their energy into solving the crime.

What are some of the characteristics of organized crime in Germany?

It's very low-key. It's not based much on territorial control, with certain groups claiming control over illegal activities in a particular area. You might see that in big cities like Berlin, Hamburg and Frankfurt involving prostitution or parts of the drug market. But that's not characteristic. We have no regional or national power structures regulating illegal activities in Germany.

But there is a lot of illegal activity going on an "entrepreneurial" basis -- such as the trafficking of drugs and stolen cars, cigarette smuggling, property theft and pick-pocketing, credit card fraud, Internet and investment fraud. You can gain ground in a criminal network if you have access to a particular product and start selling it. Once you have enough volume, you become interesting to predatory criminals. They'll say: 'If you're making enough money selling drugs, why not share it with me? I don't want to deal drugs, but since I'm the muscle man, I can certainly take your drugs or money away if you don't share.'

As a criminal entrepreneur, this makes you vulnerable to other crime yourself. In the end, there's no protection for you other than establishing your own military power as an extortionist. It's more a matter of how various extortionists arrange their spheres of influence. It's such a big and nontransparent market that you could never really gain firm control over these territories, so the structures are more flexible than they are rigid. However, the reality of crime and organized crime is much more complex than the standard imagery of mobs or mafias would suggest.

In the end, it's pretty easy to get into an illegal market in Germany; the entrance thresholds are pretty low. It's more a matter of when you becoming interesting to predatory criminals.