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Sedat Peker must have had plenty of late nights, but he’s a diehard baby face.
ISTANBUL BLOG:
Meet “The Botox”, the mafia boss who’s singing like
a canary about the Erdogan regime on YouTube
stretches back across the past decade, has reached an extreme point. Conflicts among the gangs that work off the regime are starting to surface.
Not too long from now, the new depths of Turkey’s collapse will make big headlines and assessing contemporary goings-on via the lens of The Botox case may help to understand the country's plight.
What we have here is also the sexiest side of the murkiness that has proliferated under the Erdogan regime. There is abundant cocaine, money, guns, polemics, marinas, yachts, hotels, villas, homicides... you name it.
It is not the first time that Turkey has reached this point and, under normal circumstances, an early election would clean up all the mess. Erdogan’s current “crutch”, Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) head and junior coalition partner Devlet Bahceli, would raise the flag for
a snap poll. But what we have right now, with a president fixated on hanging on, are not normal circumstances.
Roots of the modern mafia
Let’s go back quite some way to help work out where we are. It is thought that the roots of the modern mafia, a rotten fruit of all modern nation states, in Turkey date back to the “Occupation of Constan- tinople”, which lasted from November 13, 1918 to October 4, 1923. During this period, the Special Organization (Teskilat- i Mahsusa), the intelligence unit of
the Committee of the Union and Prog- ress (Ittihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti/CUP),
Akin Nazli
Sedat Peker, a mafia boss known in Turkey as “The Botox Chief” or “The Botox”, has of late become a must-watch Youtuber. All Turks except the Erdogan media have been talking about his video series throughout May.
Peker has in fact had a YouTube channel for seven years. But recently, his
viewer stats crossed the 3mn per video threshold. He has released four videos so far and he says he will release more.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has also made use of The Botox (“Erdogan gets his Peker out in war of words with Turkish academics”, bne IntelliNews Pro, January 14, 2016), and The Botox is currently talking about the shadowy ‘state within a state’ Pelicans group, police chief-turned-politician-turned- convicted criminal Mehmet Agar and Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu.
Peker has not said anything new yet.
All the crimes he has referred to are well-
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known to the public. However, as The Botox was a participant in the crimes in question, they are open confessions and are adding to the current weakness of the Erdogan regime.
Perhaps, we need to stop here to take stock of a few observations on the development of the modern Turkish mafia since we will
“Peker has not said anything new yet. All the crimes he has referred to are well-known to the public. However, as The Botox was a participant in the crimes in question"
encounter many names in the coming days and it could get a little vexing for those who have never heard of them before.
Conflicts among gangs start to surface
The reason for wasting time on this matter is that Turkey’s collapse, which
organised old-style gangsters, known as Kulhanbeyi, along with all other criminals against the occupying forces (British, French, Italian and Greek).
The CUP was a coalition of Turkists and Islamists. It grabbed the government