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CHAPTER TWO

GANGS, GIRLS, GOD

1976–1997

The path to my meeting with Anwar al-Awlaki in the mountains of Yemen was – to put it mildly – an unlikely one. I was born on the second day of 1976 in a windswept town on the coast of Denmark. Korsør, with its neat red-brick bungalows, could not be more different from the outer reaches of Yemen. At the edge of undulating farmland on Zeeland, it looks westwards across the grey waters of the Great Belt towards the island of Funen.

Korsør belies the conventional image of Scandinavian tolerance and progressiveness. It’s a gritty, working-class town of 25,000 people, including a sprinkling of immigrants from Yugoslavia, Turkey and the Arab world.

My family was lower middle class – but we were not really a family at all. My alcoholic father left home when I was four. In fact he vanished. There were no weekend visits, no fishing trips or days out. My mother, Lisbeth, seemed to have a weakness for flawed men. She remarried, and my stepfather was a brooding, menacing presence, exploding into fits of violence. It might be the way I was holding my fork or just a word. There was no warning, just a fist delivered with force. My mother did not escape the violence, and a few times left home only to return when promised that things would change. They never did, yet she stayed with him for nearly twenty years.

‘I’m not proud of the childhood you got,’ she would say with sadness years later. ‘I actually feel that it is my fault that you became what you did.’

As a child I roamed the shoreline, woods and fields around Korsør. I had plenty of time to myself and wanted to be away from home from dawn till dusk. I would build camps with friends, swing ropes over the frigid waters and drop in, yelling.

The few photographs I have from those days show a face full of uncertainty. There is a wariness about my eyes that brings back a host of unwelcome memories. But I also had a manic energy – energy that seemed to invite trouble.

I celebrated turning thirteen by attempting my first armed robbery with two friends, Benjamin and Junior. It was not a triumph of planning or execution. We chose a small store run by an elderly man renowned for his meanness and his cheap cigars. Clad in balaclavas, we waited in the gloom for the shop to close and then tried to burst in as the shopkeeper began to lock up. Benjamin brandished a .22 revolver that belonged to his father.

The man’s strength belied his age as he tried to force the door shut. Perhaps it was the fear of losing the contents of the till that inspired his resistance. Somehow he managed to lock us out.

Humiliated, we turned to a takeaway restaurant nearby. This time I was sent in with the gun.

My heart sank the moment I pulled out the weapon. I recognized the young woman behind the counter, a family friend. I tried to sound older than I was, lowering my voice in a way that must have come across like a record playing at the wrong speed.

‘This is a robbery.’

It did not sound convincing.

The woman peered over the counter, more puzzled than alarmed.

‘Morten, is that you?’

I turned and fled. We took out our frustrations on an elderly woman in the street by snatching her bag. But she fell and broke her hip, and the police soon beat a path to my home.

It was the start of a spiral. In school I enjoyed history, music and the discussion of religion and cultures but was bored by the demands of classwork. None of my teachers really connected with me – or even seemed to notice me – and I would taunt them. They would respond by throwing chalkboard dusters at me – or by breaking down in tears – as the classroom was reduced to chaos.

I was sent to a ‘special school’ – one for wayward, hyperactive boys – which concentrated on sports and activities, and where students were confined to the classroom for just two hours a day. I was entrusted with a chainsaw in the woodlands and allowed to wear myself out on the football field. There was no shortage of adventure. The school organized trips abroad for the children they were trying to mould into citizens. The intention was well-meaning but the results were less rewarding. A visit to Tunisia triggered my love of travel and adventure, but we reduced the teachers to emotional wrecks, even stealing their clothes and selling them to some locals.

By fourteen I was an unstoppable force. An immigrant from the former Yugoslavia called Jalal and I unravelled water hoses in the school corridors and fired hundreds of gallons into every corner of the building. The school from which it was supposedly impossible to get expelled could take no more.

I had one last chance – at a high school near Korsør, where a maths teacher who saw my sports potential took me under his wing. I was soon playing junior football at a high level. There were mutterings that scouts for professional teams were checking my progress. But my school record, bulging with disciplinary notices, preceded me. One teacher in particular wanted me out of the school. When I was selected to play for a Danish schools’ football team at a tournament in Germany, she took me to one side. Her eyes narrowed and with an expression of grim satisfaction she told me I would not be going because my academic record was not good enough. She knew that going to the tournament was the one thing I craved. I kicked a cup of coffee out of her hand.

It was the last thing I would ever do inside a school. At sixteen, just weeks before my final exams, my formal education was finished. But my street education was just beginning. I joined up with a group branded the ‘Raiders’ by local police because we roamed the town wearing Oakland Raiders baseball hats and baggy trousers.

The Raiders were mainly Palestinians, Turks and Iranian Muslims. We made an unlikely group: the young Dane with red hair and thick biceps (looking like a Norse raider) and his Muslim friends. I gravitated to the Raiders because like many of the immigrant kids I felt like an outsider in Korsør, and I always identified with the underdog. We had few prospects and a lot of time on our hands; most of our energy was devoted to drinking as much cheap beer as we could afford and scoring with as many girls as would let us. My teenage Muslim friends wore their faith lightly. They drank and partied like the rest of us. They would defend Islam in the face of a growing anti-Muslim mood, but did not feel bound by its more demanding restrictions.

Their families had come to settle in Denmark – escaping violence or poverty in their homelands. By 1990, Denmark, like other Scandi­­navian countries, had a sizeable immigrant population. It had granted refugee or guest-worker status to thousands of families from Turkey, Yugoslavia, Iran and Pakistan. In the first dozen years of my life, Denmark’s immigrant population from ‘non-Western’ countries more than doubled. The influx had begun to test Denmark’s reputation as a liberal and progressive society. Skinhead gangs would descend on Korsør with sticks and bats but the Raiders were ready for them. I was never far from the action and found the rush addictive.

It helped that I had a talent for boxing and spent plenty of time in the gym. One of Korsør’s few claims to fame was that it had been the point of departure for Viking raids on England a millennium ago. So it seemed appropriate that one of its more recent sons was Denmark’s best-known boxer, Brian Nielsen, who would fight Evander Holyfield and Mike Tyson.

Nielsen was involved with a thriving amateur boxing club in Korsør, where the youth programme was run by a professional boxer named Mark Hulstrøm. A heavyweight in his late twenties, Hulstrøm was still fighting. Built like an ox, balding with a goatee, he was a man of few emotions. But he was excited by my potential as a young welterweight. I was quick on my feet, with a fast jab, a solid right-hook and a strong jaw. And I loved the physical exertion. Boxing – as well as jujitsu – was a release for the anger I felt, towards my brutal stepfather and against every attempt to make me conform.

I went to the gym – an anonymous grey building on the edge of Korsør – for three years. One day, soon after my sixteenth birthday, Mark took me aside.

‘You have real class,’ he said – his dark-brown eyes gleaming. ‘You could make the Olympic squad, even turn pro.’

Mark visited my mother to explain why I should get more boxing training. Young enough to remember how chaotic a teenager’s life could be, he was also old enough to be a figure of authority. He was as close to a surrogate father as I would get.

My talent took me to tournaments in Czechoslovakia and Holland. Denmark’s national coach came to watch me and I was selected for the national school sports squad. The Korsør club had provided several of Denmark’s Olympic boxers; there seemed every possibility that I could join that elite.

For a while I dreamt of making it as a boxer. But, to Hulstrøm’s disappointment, the discipline demanded was beyond me and I spent as much time using my boxing training in brawls as I did in the ring.

My mother, the essence of lower-middle-class Danish propriety, had long given up on me, and by the age of sixteen I was rarely at home. Rather than face her disapproving looks I bunked down at the homes of my Raider friends. I was never quite sure where I would lay my head the next night. Frequently it was long after midnight, because by now I had discovered the down-at-heel pubs and clubs of Korsør.

Shortly before my seventeenth birthday, there was a big street festival in Korsør. A thug confronted me and accused me of trying to take his girlfriend. With one blow I floored him, knocking him nearly unconscious. It would prove a busy weekend. Another girl’s boyfriend threatened me with a carving knife. With the blade against my throat, my welterweight training kicked in. I stepped back quickly and delivered a right-hook. Two punches; two knockouts. Maybe the Olympics were not such a pipedream after all.

On weekdays I would visit Hulstrøm’s boxing club. At weekends the action would continue, but without gloves. I was rarely hurt, thanks to my speed and a sense of when I was about to be hit. To combine partying, drinking and fighting was far more fun than nine minutes in the ring. And I could look after my friends whenever racist baiting erupted at the clubs. ‘Paki’, ‘black pig’ . . . the insults would fly. And I would step forward and put the assailant on the deck with a couple of punches.

Hulstrøm was a man of many parts. Beside the boxing club, he ran a Korsør disco called Underground. I could be found there several nights a week, even though my musical tastes were more Metallica and death metal than Abba. It was at Underground that I met my first love – a slim, red-haired girl called Vibeke.

Vibeke was a postal worker but her passion was dance and she took ballet lessons in Copenhagen with the sort of dedication that I lacked. She was a calming influence. I found work as an apprentice in a furniture workshop, and with time Vibeke might have tamed my wilder side.

But trouble seemed to follow me. One evening, after plenty of beer, I made out with another girl at a Korsør youth club. Unfortunately her boyfriend heard about our connection. He threatened me with a Danish army assault rifle and was subsequently picked up by the police. Incredibly, they released him without charge after a few hours. Perhaps they reasoned that such a threat was understandable if the target was Morten Storm.

I decided to take matters into my own hands. The boyfriend had supposedly turned up at a party in a grim apartment block on the outskirts of Korsør. When I arrived with three friends the host insisted he had not been there. Convinced he was lying, we beat him with pots and pans we found in the kitchen.

I never found the boyfriend, but the Korsør police found me. I was convicted of aggravated assault and sentenced to four months in a juvenile remand centre.

My prospects were not exactly blossoming. I had been kicked out of five schools and my mother had washed her hands of me. I also had a criminal record. The chances of my choosing the ‘straight and narrow’ were diminishing by the day. And far from leading me away from crime, my apprenticeship inside the remand centre made me harder.

My eighteenth birthday – spent in jail – offered little to celebrate. But at least when I came out I was eligible to drive, and that proved a passport to easy money. Mark Hulstrøm was supplementing his income from the gym with a thriving business smuggling cigarettes from Poland through Germany and into Denmark. We called it the ‘Nicotine Triangle’.

By the mid-1990s cigarette smuggling had become the third-largest illegal business in Germany behind drugs and gambling. The business model was simple. Low taxes and no custom duty meant that a carton of cigarettes in Poland was one third the price of a carton in Germany or Denmark.

Our cover story was that we were buying spare car parts in Germany, where they were cheaper, and bringing them to Denmark. Hulstrøm saw me as a loyal, fearless operator. I spoke some German and was trusted to exchange currencies. We used hired cars – to minimize losses in case the driver was stopped and the vehicle impounded. The cars picked up a few dents – but it was a lucrative circuit.

The distribution centre was a remote farmhouse near the Polish border. At the gates of the farm, an unkempt guard who smelt of sour cabbage would wave me in. I would place a pile of Deutschmarks on the table, and a few minutes later an entire toilet would be moved to one side, revealing a cellar crammed with cartons of cigarettes.

On the drive back, I would look out for foreigners – preferably dark-skinned ones – approaching the Danish border and then follow them. The Danish border police were usually far more interested in questioning them and examining their passports than stopping a young Dane in a van. Occasionally I would cross from Germany into Denmark on tracks or unmarked roads. It was tradecraft that would prove useful when I moved on.

Sometimes I was making the trip two or three times a week and earning the equivalent of $1,000 each time. Not only was the money good: I loved feeling like an apprentice gangster, alert for the police, hiding the contraband, keeping my nerve at border crossings, handling large piles of crisp banknotes.

Just months after emerging from a remand centre penniless and homeless, I had wads of cash, wore smart clothes and was living the high life. Mark Hulstrøm entrusted me with the keys to Underground – now frequented by escorts from Copenhagen who had smelt the money. For the first time in my life I felt important, part of something big. I may have given up making it as a boxer, but I still enjoyed sparring and wanted to stay in shape. I continued to train in Hulstrøm’s gym, and as I bulked up I moved into the light-heavyweight bracket.

My biological father had moved across the Great Belt to Nyborg. I had not seen him in well over a decade but now I was an adult and felt obliged to try to reconnect with him, even if not wildly enthusiastic about what would at best be an awkward encounter. My cousin Lars agreed to come with me and we took the ferry one slate-grey morning from Korsør across to Nyborg.

My apprehension was justified. My father was gruff and unrepentant about abandoning me and my mother. His breath, at midday, reeked of alcohol. We left him after less than an hour; I felt deeply depressed and angry.

Lars and I dropped by a bar in Nyborg to recover. A mistake. A drunk man disrupted our game of pool and then tried to pick a fight. I did my best to ignore him, but when he shaped up to strike me, I responded with a sharp upper cut. The bartender said he was calling the police and closing the place, and Lars and I left. We split up but Lars was arrested almost immediately, and so was I soon after returning to Korsør.

Convicted of assault, I was sentenced to my second spell behind bars – this time six months in Helsingør. The fact that I was provoked made no difference. By now I had what they call ‘form’ – a record of violence. From jail I wrote a confession to Vibeke. This was the person I was, I wrote, suggesting trouble followed me like a dog. But we could still make a life together, I added. Casting us as American gangsters, I imagined Vibeke as my ‘Bonnie’ and signed my letters ‘Your Clyde’.

I could not see much alternative to a life of crime, with jail time an occupational hazard and violence never far away. I rarely derived pleasure from hitting anyone; none of my friends would have ever called me vicious. But I was loyal to a fault and would defend others and myself if threatened. I was not the sort who would walk away from a confrontation.

I did have one score to settle, one that had been a long time waiting.

At a family birthday party soon after my release from jail in April 1995, tensions flared between my mother and stepfather. He had a venomous tongue and knew how to wound her. I saw tears well in her eyes. I warned him to back off but the sniping continued. Without thinking, I stepped forward and struck him hard in the face. He looked stunned, as if suddenly realizing the boy he had so long abused was now a man – and much stronger than him. His glasses shattered and he fell backwards across a table. I watched him go, a tablecloth wrapping itself like a shroud around him.

There was stunned silence. My mother looked at me with a mixture of horror and gratitude; it was perhaps the strangest expression I have ever seen. I walked out of the hall, my knuckles throbbing but my eyes gleaming with pride.

It wasn’t easy to find work after my release from prison. I had two convictions, no qualifications, few skills – but I also had some useful contacts. During my time inside I had met a senior member of the Bandidos biker gang, Michael Rosenvold. I think he liked me because I was the only inmate who wasn’t scared of him.

Denmark had thriving motorbike gangs, and the Bandidos were locked in a violent struggle with the Hell’s Angels. The Bandido motto was: ‘We are the people our parents warned us about.’ I would surely fit in perfectly.

Across Scandinavia, the ‘Great Nordic Biker War’ had been raging for more than a year. At least ten people had been murdered and many more seriously injured. In Sweden an anti-tank rocket was fired at a Hell’s Angels clubhouse. The conflict was fuelled by the trade in drugs coming from southern Europe.

Rosenvold introduced me to other gang members as ‘Denmark’s youngest psychopath’. It was meant in jest but I certainly cut a formidable figure, tall with broad shoulders and thick biceps. I quickly warmed to the camaraderie, the supply of drugs and girls. By then I had got my first tattoo, on my right bicep: ‘STORM’. It did not take me long to become accepted: reliable in a fight, ready to party. The Bandidos were the Raiders on steroids.

Despite my time inside, Vibeke had stuck with me. In a town where thrills were few and far between, she found my links to the underworld exciting and liked how I mimicked the life of a high-roller. Even so she was taken aback by some aspects of the lifestyle. At one party in Korsør she turned up in a black turtleneck with her hair neatly tied back. Most Bandidos women were pneumatic (if not natural) blondes, who wore minimalist outfits of tiger and leopard prints.

When Vibeke found a sports bag full of guns, explosives, hashish and speed that I had hidden under her bed, she erupted in anger. She threw the bag out of the window and yelled at me to get out of her apartment and never come back.

In March 1996, Hell’s Angels gang members opened fire on a group of Bandidos outside Copenhagen airport with machine guns and other weapons, killing one.

Rosenvold called me.

‘I want you to organize a group in Korsør, people we can rely on, who can hold territory,’ he said. ‘And I’m going to need you as one of the guys around me. I’m a target now.’

At twenty I was the youngest chapter leader for the Bandidos in Denmark. It was like I had found a family. Loyalty to the cause was everything.

For the next few months I was Rosenvold’s bodyguard and we ‘held’ Korsør and its surroundings. There were street battles, nightclub brawls. An evening would not be complete without a fight and we knew how to pick them, whether the Angels were down the street or nowhere to be seen.

To begin with, I relished the adrenalin rush and the sense of importance. But as 1996 drew to a close, I worried that the lifestyle was making me an addict – to a cycle of drugs, gratuitous violence and hardcore partying. There was no space left for relationships, for peace of mind.

Two episodes crystallized my unease. On a freezing night shortly before New Year’s Eve, a fight broke out between two big guys and some Bandidos at a Korsør dive. It was normal enough. But this time a bouncer intervened, dragged one of the Bandidos out on to the street and pummelled him. We were not about to let it pass.

The next morning, along with another member of the gang, I paid a visit to the bouncer. The icy grey was giving way to darker gloom when we arrived. I had a baseball bat hidden in my jacket. We donned balaclavas and knocked at his door, pushing him to the floor as he answered. Wielding the bat I swung it at his hips and knees.

In the days after the beating I couldn’t get the sound of his moaning out of my head. I could still hear the crack of his knee fracturing and see his limp broken arm. I began to feel ashamed. Perhaps Rosenvold was right and I was a psychopath.

Occasionally I would look at other young men turning twenty-one, studying for a degree, starting a job, owning a car, going steady. I knew I couldn’t handle routine, but I was beginning to worry that the constant fixes of violence and drugs could kill me. And that made me start questioning the purpose of my life and what might come after it. Deep down I didn’t like the person I was turning into. Was I becoming an even more vicious version of my stepfather?

The second thing to feed my doubts was a meeting in one of Korsør’s clubs with a twenty-year-old woman called Samar. After being evicted by Vibeke I badly needed a lover. I soon imagined a relationship with Samar, and not only because she had the exotic looks of a gypsy with wild, dark eyes, full lips and raven-dark hair, and a presence that I found irresistible.

A Palestinian-Christian, Samar came from a large immigrant family. Her mother soon treated me as a son. I felt wanted, and not just because I could tip the balance in a brawl.

It wasn’t long before I proposed, and her family threw an engagement party. It began as a polite affair at a local hall until some Bandidos turned up. Samar’s grandmother looked on as the guys leapt about to Arabic pop songs in their leather jackets and snorted lines of coke among the couscous and baklava.

Samar’s family remained fond of me. The possibility of having her as a partner made me reconsider the Bandidos. Exhaustion had seeped into my soul. For all the highs my life in the gang had become meaningless.

We spent the night of my twenty-first birthday together, and I was happy: a feeling so rare that it almost shocked me. I was frightened of losing it. In the following weeks, when I wasn’t with Samar, I would lie awake at night. I imagined getting into another fight that would land me behind bars again, or overdosing or getting stabbed. There were plenty of ways to be taken out of circulation. And then Samar would be gone.

On an unusually bright morning a few weeks after my birthday, I found myself in the town’s library. I felt empty and needed sanctuary.

The library, a two-storey building of corrugated steel and concrete, was close to the water’s edge. That morning it provided warmth from the chill breeze that found every corner of Korsør. For a while I stared at the choppy waters and the span of the Great Belt Bridge. I browsed aimlessly among the shelves, vaguely aware of the chatter from the children’s section, but gravitated towards history and religion, subjects that had always fascinated me despite my wasted school days.

I had never felt religious – I had even been expelled from confirmation classes. The priest had told my mother that I was too much of a troublemaker, even for God. But I thought there must be some sort of afterlife. I had had some contact with Islam through my immigrant friends – Palestinians, Iranians and Turks – and had always envied the strength of their families, the way they always had dinner together, the bonds that united them while facing poverty and discrimination.

Perhaps that was why I sat down in an alcove with a book about the life of the Prophet Mohammed. Within minutes I was so absorbed in the story that the world outside evaporated.

The book laid out the tenets of Islam and the life of its founder with seductive simplicity. Mohammed’s father had died before he was born. As his mother, Aminah, gazed at her first son, she heard a voice. ‘The best of mankind has been born, so name him Mohammed.’

She had sent him into the desert to learn self-reliance and to master Arabic as spoken by the Bedouin. But Aminah had died when Mohammed was just seven, and he was passed into the care first of his grandfather and then of his uncle.

What immediately appealed about his life was its dignity and simplicity. As a young man, Mohammed would be called ‘al-Saadiq’ (the Truthful One) and ‘al-Amin’ (the Trustworthy One). He had granted freedom to a slave who had been given to him and declared him his own son.

I learned Mohammed was a successful trader who travelled through Arabia and as far as Syria. But he was also a deeply spiritual man, and in his thirties he would retreat to meditate in a cave on Mount Hira near Mecca. It was there that the Archangel Gabriel visited him and declared he was God’s messenger.

‘Proclaim in the name of your Lord who created! / Created man from a clot of blood.’

As the sun slanted across the Scandinavian sky, I became immersed in the events of the seventh century. I imagined Mohammed taking refuge in a cave as his enemies, the Quraish of Mecca, searched for him. By a divine miracle, it was said, a spider had spun its web over the mouth of the cave and a bird had laid eggs nearby, so the place looked undisturbed and was not searched. The episode was recounted in the Koran. ‘When Disbelievers drove him out, he had no more than one companion; they were two in the cave and he said to his companion, “Have no fear, (for) Allah is with us.” ’

I did not notice the approach of dusk. Mohammed’s story was one of battling the odds, as he sought to propagate Islam in the face of persecution. Here was a man – with his small band of followers – ­prepared to fight for his beliefs. In the words of the Koran:

‘Permission to fight is granted to those against whom war is made, because they have been wronged, and God indeed has the power to help them. They are those who have been driven out of their homes unjustly only because they affirmed: Our Lord is God.’

Fighting for a cause appealed to me; it brought a sense of solidarity and loyalty.

I pictured the migration from Mecca to Medina, the desert battles that Mohammed and his few hundred followers waged and his triumphant return to the holy city, where he showed clemency to the Quraish despite their many attempts to stifle the young religion.

I felt I could relate to Mohammed’s struggles as a man better than to some vague deity with a beard. As Allah’s messenger he seemed a more plausible historical figure than Jesus. It seemed ludicrous to me that God should have a son. I was also struck that Mohammed’s words provided for every aspect of life, from marriage to conflict to obligation. Good intentions were recognized and rewarded. The book cited the Prophet: ‘Certainly, Allah does not look at your shapes [appearance] or wealth. But He only looks at your hearts and deeds.’

Here was a prescription that was both merciful and compassionate and offered absolution for sins. A pathway to a more fulfilling life. Islam could help me rein in my instincts and gain some self-discipline.

I was still reading when a librarian approached me to announce that the library was about to close. I had been sitting in that same alcove for six hours and had read some 300 pages about the life of the Prophet.

The chill wind took my breath away as I stepped out of the library into the cobblestoned streets. Nearby the beacon of a lighthouse rotated. After being steeped in the Arabian desert and consumed by divine revelations, I found it disorientating to be back in the Scandi­navian winter. But my mind and my soul were still far away.