Consider the Mobster (Vol. 1)

Originally published on 29 August 2021

The prodigious, odorous, and Balkan-famous Mobster Expo pitches its tents on the sharp shoulders of the Rhodope Mountains every summer, shortly after The Roma Brides’ Festival to the north and bids goodbye just before Greek shepherds set foot from the south. Which shoulders I refer to is typically undisclosed until 3 days prior the event, but over time its (Mobster Expo’s) locus got tucked in on a ridge somewhere between Batak and Peshtera. At 41°58'49.6"N and 24°14'05.9"E to be precise. If you’re in the blue of what a Brides’ market is or what a Greek shepherd looks like, then this article, whose aim is to cover the 3rd edition of the Mobster Expo - a  juncture of Bulgaria’s three core national enterprises (heartfelt meals meet savouring beverages meet organised crime) - that offers attendees and TV viewers to witness a country democratically garnering its backstage string pullers and mafioso elite, would sound way more real, as it should.

Total paid attendance was over 60 000 for day 1 and primarily consisted of Bulgarians and early-birds from Macedonia and Greece. On day 2, attendance grew at irregular intervals of up to 150 000 ticket-holders who flocked as far West as Slovenia and as far East as Georgia to witness the next big Balkan Don. The ridge has been meticulously terraced and thus so catered to the Expo’s hosting capacity. Each terrace shines with  20 steel-framed stalls installed to house every vendor fortunate enough (both cosmically and financially) to pre-book a spot for his or her small business. Normally, fairs are not a good symptom whereby one can judge a country’s economic health (due to the fact that some attractions, like bumper cars, are 9/10 times state-fair exclusive), unless you’re talking Mobster Expo. Every stall you pass by will be readily available in its original urban environment once the Expo is finished. With one key difference - every item on display you see, smell, or touch is creatively refashioned to blend with the Expo’s mafioso air. Meaning, you can nibble on a Scone by Capone (regular scone), Ponzi Pastries (regular pastries), rinse your throat with 107 Street Gang’s slurpees (regular slurpees),  watch Gamblinos go airborne (regular, punny pancakes named after Thomas Gambino with an inserted ‘blin’, Russian for ‘pancake’, in the middle). You get my marketing drift. The snacks come in styrofoam that seals the nail prints you probably caved in while anxiously waiting on a Disneyland-grade queue the way amber preserves Cambrian mosquitos or smth. There are mobster T-shirts of Scarface and Don Vito Corleone, mobster bobblehead dolls and inflatable Tommy Gun pool toys and tacky felt fedoras. Yours truly saw it all, a lone ranger cutting through thickets of organised crime enthusiasts and the knots of children they brought alongside.

Wikipedically speaking, a mobster is a lesser-known word for ‘gangster’, ranking in the top 10% of words compared to ‘gangster’’s spot in the top 4%.  Unlike their Homo sapiens brethren, mobsters only appear to be omnivorous and that is usually in early stages of adolescent development. Once they cross a certain age threshold, omnivorousness becomes an ostensible facade in front of those who wish to see nothing beyond the sheen of their lacklustre character. However, lust is not something  mobsters lack. Depending on nationality, you can dig up dozens of popular mob-related aliases for the word - yakuza (JPN), liumang (CHN), Bloods (US), Sword Boys (AU) etc., etc. Hadn’t the event been planted in Bulgaria, this article would have had a much more international flavour. Nevertheless, the elected hosts of the show would claim that ‘gangstering’, as everything else in the world, has its roots in our dainty peninsula. Right outside the main tent where the meat and bones of this text will take place booms the voice of one of the Expo’s frontmen. Needless to be aided by a speaker, his voice Homerically resounds the styrofoam-carpeted grass and kitchen-smoked sky as the story of mobbing unfolds right before passersby’s ear drums:

‘Who of those present will deny our pedigree reaching back to the Greek basilei, the agathoi of old, who achieved, rather than usurped, great power and wealth for the benefit of the suffering. These were no mere flesh-and-blood entities, but ‘men who safeguard the laws on behalf of Zeus’ (Il. 1.238–9), to whom it is said that ‘Zeus has entrusted [them] with the sceptre and the laws’ ('Organised Crime in Antiquity', Hopwood).’

Without their swift and adroit minds, Trojan epics would have fizzled into time and the monumental marble imprints of the past we call art would be one with the soil we step on. Perhaps it would’ve been called dart, dirt plus art.'

Despite his overdramatic pathos, there’s truth to be found about mobbing in Southern Europe in particular. News outlets want us to fear the Russian mafia, the Sicilian mafia, the Yakuza, the Chinese, and every gangster faction integrated within Western borders, while entertainment wants us to love them. And if I am remotely correct, the entertainment industry holds a much firmer grasp on the subject. In truth, mobster mentality is most succinctly explained in the opening scenes of The Departed: ‘I don’t want to be a product of my environment, I want my environment to be a product of me’, says Jack Nicholson. If mobsters are about anything, it would be a social form of separatism that looks to break from not just conventional law, but to override a system typically aggravating their otherwise unfavourable circumstances. This, as you felt, stems from further back in time, when the main vortex of mobbing that is Ancient Greece rolled its sleeves and gave us the bedrock of organised crime and introduced the basileis, a nobleman with ignoble intentions: ‘The partisan ways of the ‘godlike princes’ are mirrored by the ways of the gods themselves, who frequently allow personal considerations to override the demands of justice. That personal interests may be upheld by means of violence or intimidation is evident from a simile which speaks of ‘men who, by force, judge crooked law cases in the agora, and drive out justice’’ (‘Organised Crime in Antiquity’) .

The basileis is an oft-contested term in the field of classics, but Hopwood has found enough significant overlaps between present-day dons and ancient lord-like basilei to calculate a plausible comparison between the two. As he says, the basilei are princes who

‘received gifts and privileges, and offered protection in exchange; in practice, they received gifts and privilege, but their subjects largely protected themselves. In the fictional world of the epics, the gap could be bridged, because legendary heroes had super- human strength, supernatural assistance, and a little help from the poet, who disguised the role of the masses. In the real world, however, the gap was unbridgeable. The inability of princes to live up to their claims was a structural problem, and comments about men ‘robbing’ and ‘devouring’ their people reflect this’ (Organised Crime in Antiquity’).

Without a poet at hand to varnish your crimes, gangsters resorted to honing their own eloquence, vindicate their actions, and nest inside an unreachable crevice in the legal system - all of which returns us to that tent recently mentioned. What so central about it. The Expo, while sounding like a pageant, is above every presumption, a competition. A competition of fine rhetoric, problem-solving, and debate. That is why the swarms of people queue for Ponzi Pastries and 14 channel providers stream the event. Bulgarians have thought - if it be a mobster having us, it better be a good one.

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