At the time when, disgusted with the Romanian society, Caragiale left for the civilized and ordered environment of Berlin, in what was to become a lifelong exile, a destiny saw the light of the day in the outskirts of Bucharest, in the filthy neighborhood of Veselia, a destiny whose progress we are going to follow in this story. The outskirts of Bucharest were then a hybrid reality wriggling between the city proper and the rural areas around, an endemic curiosity, where nature was haphazardly experimenting with the most hideous types of survival. Children would make great efforts to avoid the yearly epidemics of smallpox, malaria, scarlet fever, pellagra, if they had not already been suffering, since birth, from tuberculosis, syphilis, or rickets. The "emotional disaster" of childhood This was the environment in which Ion Shtefanescu was born, an environment that he was later to define as an "emotional disaster". His parents' fights were only too familiar and had become a way of life, and since he had turned five the boy had been constantly "handed over", feeling an unfulfilled love for his mother and a constantly growing hatred for his immoral father. His emotional disorientation continued as his father remarried just after divorcing his mother, and the anger of the then teenager manifested itself so violently that the father could only save his skin by taking refuge in a neighbor's garden. "I don't know what might have happened then," Tata Moshu would often say, with a kind of regret in his voice, a regret that even now (when he is forty, my note) quite clearly fills his soul. His mother will soon abandon him too, for a butcher living in the neighborhood. The then child will remember his stepfather as a "blood-shedding brute". It was the time when the child got the nickname of Tata Moshu (Ol' Dad), being left to the care of his grandparents, and spending his days in the derelict areas of the neighborhood, in the company of the glamorous dudes instructing the kids in the art of petty theft. Though he was very young, he was quiet, introverted, secretive, his behavior often betrayed an early but incomplete maturation. The "seeds of social revolt" will rapidly grow inside him, favored by the wandering life he led in the derelict areas of his neighborhood. The games he played with the other hoodlums of his age "were all a school that helped one become a genuine professional of crime". His favorite pastime was playing at cops and robbers, as when he was a cop he would immediately capture the robbers, while when he was a robber the cops could never catch him. In fact, Tata Moshu, as he puts it himself, spent all his childhood "playing at cops and robbers, a game for which I demonstrated innate abilities, which were later to be improved by a higher education type of instruction!" Though he finished primary school with great difficulty, and was later to study at the famous Gheorghe Lazar high school, he had to drop out for lack of money, caused by the violent fights between his mother and the butcher. This was the context in which in comes… His first mentor: Vlad "Dracula" "We would steal at random, whenever the occasion presented itself, we went to different places and stole, but I was the most gifted of all the gang, the most daring, as I would often manage to get away thanks to my intelligence and swiftness," Tata Moshu would often narrate after that. Because of these qualities, the leader of the neighborhood, nicknamed Vlad "Dracula", asks our hero to join him and they become joint partners in this common "enterprise". Tata Moshu also led a parallel, honest life, working as a painter and hoping that one day, in a future that he was still waiting to be born, he would be able to start a new life and give up his criminal activities. Because Tata Moshu really excelled when it came to the activities of the gang, Vlad "Dracula" was afraid that our hero might take his place, and decided to turn in his would-be rival. Tata Moshu thus goes to prison for the first time in his life. "Calapod" (Shoemaker's Last) the rescuer and the troubled times of the Great War Arrested for ten days when he was only 15 years old, Tata Moshu became convinced that one can consider the experience of prison as that of "a place where one can make new friends or meet old acquaintances." The series of thefts continued, with short interludes of "honest life". In 1915 he was turned in by a member of his gang and sent to the prison of Vacareshti. He was 17 years old. It was there that he met Calapod, together with whom he escaped when the Romanian army retreated to Moldavia. Back on the streets, lost in the utter confusion that had seized the entire Romanian society, Tata Moshu and Calapod organized their first "hit" at the residence of Bishop Sofronie Vulpescu, from where they took the bishop's miter, several crosses, jewels and a sum of money amounting to approximately 15,000 lei, which they shared evenly. Our hero buried part of the money and the miter from which they had taken out the stones. In 1918, their victim was a civil servant from whom they stole 40,000 lei; they changed their clothes in the sleeping car the man was traveling in, but when they tried to sneak through the front line trenches they were arrested by a German patrol that took them to the German headquarters in Focshani. There they claimed they were war refugees, but as they had no identity papers on them, they were fined 50 lei each and imprisoned in the Focshani prison for ten days. When they were freed they took refuge in Jassy and after the war returned to Bucharest. "You cannot just steal like that, at random!" As he changed his clothes in the sleeping car, Tata Moshu left his papers in his own clothes that he had left behind. Tracked down by the Secret Police he was again captured and imprisoned at Vacareshti in 1920. One night, as he was being escorted together with other detainees from the court room to the Vacareshti prison, Tata Moshu managed to break the line and run away. Hundreds of burglaries followed, that he organized skillfully, as a leader of his own gang. One of the members of the gang was a teenager that they sent to get various jobs in the shops they wanted to rob. The girl would immediately provide them with all the information they needed about the valuables in the shop and how they could get in. One night, as Tata Moshu slept at his mother's place, he was turned in by her, and he woke up with the police all around the house. He was tied up, his revolver was confiscated, but a girlfriend managed to slip a penknife into his trousers' back pocket. He cut his ropes with the knife, and after knocking down two of the sergeants he ran away. They shot him in the back, he fell down and pretended he was dead. The two confirmed him dead and left a guard to watch him while they went to the station to report the incident. The guard didn't take much heed of our hero, as he believed him dead. At once, Tata Moshu made a superhuman effort, jumped up and over a fence and hid in an oilfield. He was free again! " I was stealing in order to survive. I was stealing because I was terribly poor." Tata Moshu's existence continued in the same way. Throughout all of his career, he was never captured in a direct clash with the police forces, but only because he had been betrayed by his mistresses, by his relatives or by other criminals who were his rivals. He managed to escape almost every time, "since I was not just another fool that had started stealing," as he would say. Captured again in 1934, Tata Moshu was submitted to a number of minute sociological and psychological tests. While he was being questioned, he tried to justify his way of life thus: "almost everybody steals in today's society, but the real thieves do not even visit a prison: there you can only find those who steal a hen, a loaf of bread or a couple of onions; they are the scapegoats for all who are guilty in this world. Why am I accused of harming the society, of representing a social plague or pest, as it is only because of hunger that I snatch the purse of an actress? And I know only too well that my victim doesn't turn an honest penny, I know that by the luxury she lives in and the jewels she wears. All these idle big shots, who have only an extremely vague notion about the value of money and at whose expense the actress lives, live in their turn at the expense of society; there are many of them, people who don't even have the time to keep an account of the goods society pours on them." We can easily recognize in Tata Moshu's words a description of the realities of our own society of today, where there is no sign of a decrease in criminal activities, no attempt at offering solutions for the social reintegration of these people. Tata Moshu's biography is not an exceptional one. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of people like him who lead an anonymous, loveless life of extreme poverty, while our society is unable to find antidotes or offer any alternative to these deprived people. Our society only generates confusion because of the indifference of its lawmakers and judges, to whom a pickpocket of the suburbia is a "scapegoat" one can easily get rid of. This is a reality Tata Moshu had been aware of since childhood, a dangerous social reality which we are still confronted with even today.
by Adrian Majuru (b. 1968)
