Each of those heists, police alleged, had been the work of individuals with apparent connections to crime families, particularly a rising network of clans of Lebanese origin that have turned Berlin into one of the gangland capitals of Europe. Many of these families had fled Lebanon in the 1980s, during the country’s civil war, turning up in what was then Communist East Germany before crossing into the West on tourist visas and applying for political asylum. They settled in Neukölln, a hardscrabble West Berlin neighborhood beneath the flight path of jets landing at Tempelhof Airport. “They were allowed to stay, but they were not integrated into society,” says Benjamin Jendro, a spokesperson for the Berlin Police Union who has studied the families for years. “They had no access to the labor market, no official residency status. And some of them turned to crime.”
Initially, experts say, the newcomers focused on muscling in on Germany’s drug trafficking, prostitution, and protection rackets, at the time dominated by the Russian Mafia. More recently a second generation, born in Germany, has nudged the clans toward more sensational criminal exploits, like robbery and murder.
The clans have been difficult for law enforcement to penetrate; they are insular and shun contact with outsiders. But the swaggering violence of those in their ranks routinely makes headlines. In one of the most spectacular recent killings, Nidal Rabih, a 36-year-old reported enforcer from one of the clans, was shot eight times in a Berlin park on a late-summer day in 2018 while standing beside an ice cream truck with his wife and three young children. His funeral drew 2,000 mourners, many with suspected clan affiliation, from across Germany, as well as 150 police officers, shutting down streets and snarling traffic. Martin Hikel, the district mayor of Neukölln, described the scene as “reminiscent of dark Mafia films” to the German publication Die Welt. The popular TV series 4 Blocks portrays the clans as a sort of Arab-German Sopranos—driving Mercedes and Audis instead of Cadillacs and Hummers, plotting hits and other crimes over water pipes in outdoor shisha bars on gritty Neukölln streets that could have come straight out of Damascus or Baghdad.
Perhaps the most brazen and visible of the Lebanese clans are the Remmos. The patriarch, Issa Remmo, who reportedly grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, arrived in West Berlin in the 1980s. Today, authorities say, he sits atop an extensive network made up of some dozen children and 15 siblings along with untold numbers of relatives and associates—some of whom have been connected to high-profile crimes. The clan has earned a reputation for crude violence and a brute criminal style. For example, instead of torching their way into stolen safes with welding equipment, in at least one instance that experts discussed, a safe was hauled up to the roof of a tall building and thrown to the ground in order to bust it open.
Experts say that the clans impose a culture of omertà and stoicism in the face of arrest. A prison term is considered a badge of honor. “The family says that ‘jail makes men,’ ” says Falko Liecke, a Neukölln politician who works to dissuade young people from pursuing criminal careers. “When the kids get out of prison, they throw them a big party and give them their first Rolex watch.”
Almost instantly police wondered if the Green Vault robbery had been a Remmo job. After all, it bore all the hallmarks of other cases involving the family. The thieves had left a trail of violence and vandalism: Before breaking into the museum, they’d set fire to an electrical distribution box beside the Elbe River, plunging the neighborhood into darkness and obscuring their images from the security cameras outside the palace. They smashed through reinforced-glass cases with a dozen blows of an ax, and they attempted to cover their tracks by spraying the Chamber of Jewels with powder from a fire extinguisher. In a nearby parking garage, police discovered the charred carcass of one of the two cars they had driven to the scene, torched by the thieves in an apparent effort to destroy traces of their DNA. Though in this, they weren’t as successful as they had hoped.
