LETTER FROM ISTANBUL
More entertaining than a TV series, less predictable than a social media chat, weekly appearances on YouTube of mafia boss Sedat Peker, unleash passions in Turkey, where three weeks of tight confinement – from April 29 to May 17 – have somewhat numbed the spirits.
Thanks to his soap opera, the fifty-year-old gangster, once imprisoned several times for scams, murders and organized gang crimes, broke the monotony by unwrapping the dirty laundry of his relationship with the highest representatives of the Turkish state, which he described as affiliated with the world of crime. “It’s not over, we’ll talk about it again”, he promises with each episode, followed by more than 500,000 Internet users.
With each of his interventions on YouTube, a new book is exhibited, the title of which expresses the concerns of the literate godfather. In the most recent, Thursday, May 13, the book of the day was the novel by the American Mario Puzo, It’s stupid to die. At the previous meeting, Leon Trotsky’s memoirs were prominently displayed on the desk. As if Sedat Peker saw himself as the future leader of the opposition in exile, persecuted by a Turkish Stalin whose name he does not specify.
The president’s son-in-law
Three senior officials are targeted by his revelations: Süleyman Soylu, the current Minister of the Interior, Berat Albayrak, the son-in-law of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was Minister of Finance from 2018 to 2020, and finally the former Minister of the Interior. interior, Mehmet Agar, in office in 1996.
In the course of his story, the Mafioso returns, not without nostalgia, to the respect with which Mr. Soylu once surrounded him, who provided him with police officers as bodyguards and pushed the amenity to warn him that a judicial inquiry had just been opened about him, advising him to go green. Sedat Peker did not ask for his rest. In 2019, he moved to Montenegro, officially to follow a university course. But he is talkative, repeating to anyone who wants to hear him to have fled his country because of the personal enmity that the president’s son-in-law has shown him.
In January 2021, the boss was arrested in North Macedonia and then deported to neighboring Kosovo. His tracks are then lost between the Balkans and Dubai, apparently his last base. It is therefore far from Turkey that this unsavory character, but endowed with a good address book, is now settling accounts with his former protectors.
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