The traders
 

In the first years after the Revolution I can?t say that I achieved much. I didn?t have much money, apart from what my parents gave me and that wasn?t much. Around ?92, thanks to my friends, my curiosity and my defying character, I started doing drugs. First I did it for fun, but I soon became addicted to heroin. I had already become familiar with a lot of young people who sold drugs but money to get them was the real issue. Heroin was very expensive and I needed ever more. I couldn?t give up drugs, so I had to find a way to make money. I began by taking things from the house and pawn them for drugs. Later I was planning on getting them back.

That?s how I lost most of the valuable things in our flat. My mother was so upset that she got seriously ill. I couldn?t think of anything else but money: how to get them and how to spend them on drugs. That?s how I started stealing. I stole cars and from cars, things like stereos, mirrors and generally anything that I found inside. Then I sold everything and get drugs. I also stole from stores, any kind of stores. In ?96 I robbed a woman who was just getting out of a bank and had a lot of money on her. I wasn?t thinking straight: I could have killed her because I actually stabbed her with a screwdriver. The woman pressed charges and I was arrested. I was sentenced to prison and spent two years there.

There was a good part to this story: in prison I managed to give up drugs at a time when nobody believed that such a thing would be possible anymore. When I got out, in ?98, my mom?s health was even worse and soon she passed away. My only surviving relative was my brother who had a family and couldn?t do much to help me. So I didn?t really know what I could do to earn a living, especially that there was nothing in particular that I was good at. I had no income. Then I asked some friends for help. I knew they had made some money working abroad and I asked them to help me. Their ?work? was actually to steal from credit cards. After I had started making money myself in this way, I had to pay for any piece of information they gave me because that was the rule, even if the people who gave you the info were your friends. Everybody knows that you can make a lot of money stealing from credit cards. I went with them to Spain and I learnt how to do things. I got a lot of money out it. At the beginning I was in the front line, meaning that I was in the greatest danger to get caught by the police. Later on I became the least in danger to get busted. I bought myself everything I needed to make sure of that: a video camera, which we called the pussycat, and I started renting the cars I needed to go to different places, generally to the ATMs I surveyed with my pussycat. We almost got caught by the Spanish police once or twice but we managed to escape.

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Martor nr 1/1996
Martor nr 2/1997
Martor nr 3/1998
Martor nr 4/1999
Martor nr 5/2000
Martor nr 6/2001
Martor nr 7/2002
Martor nr 8-9/2003-2004
Martor nr 10/2005
Martor nr 11/2006
Martor nr 12/2007
 

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