A horse, a TV, a husband you’ll never see again
On fictive marriages in Romani communities
Pepi’s niece Dancha and her partner Trayan, more widely known by his nickname Rambo, came over one time when we were struggling to throw out our old couch. Pepi gave them a call and asked if they’re free to help us out. Within one hour, they were here. Pepi and Rambo carried the huge couch the 6 floors down and then we sat down to have a few drinks while our daughter was playing with their children.
In-between the jokes and laughter, as the sun began to set, Pepi mentioned they’re welcome to stay the night.
“Thank you, but we can’t,” Dancha said, “We need to be up early. We’ll be doing the legal marriage thing tomorrow morning.”
“Oh, really?” Pepi said, “How much?”
You’d be forgiven to assume that Dancha and Rambo would be getting married to each other. After several years living together, having two children, being very much in love, a natural step would be to “sign the papers” as we say.
But if they were going to legally marry each other, they were going to do it the Romani way. A big celebration, an orchestra with drums, everything announced weeks if not months in advance.
In fact, they did already have such a wedding in 2019. A Romani wedding: no vows, no signatures, no officiant. Not recognized by institutions, so very much “unofficial.”
So, this is why Pepi’s immediate reaction was not “What?” or “And you didn’t invite me?” or “Congrats!” He immediately knew what Dancha was saying. So he asked “How much?” How much was she going to get paid.
“It’s a great deal.”
The scam is simple. Men from eastern countries who want to gain legitimate access to the EU get legally married to EU citizens for cash. The newlyweds meet only when they sign the marriage documents, cash changes hands, and then they disappear from each other’s lives.
In this case, it was two men from China. One of them married Dancha, with her partner Rambo acting as the best man / witness to the signature. The other one married Fidana, the long-term partner of Dancha’s brother, mother of his seven children.
They each received 5,000 BGN (2,500 EUR).
“Uncle, I have big plans for this money,” Dancha was telling Pepi. “I will take a driving course and get my driver’s license.”
2,500 EUR is a peculiar number. It can be so little and so much, depending on who looks at it. For some people, it’s pennies. For others, it’s about a month’s salary. And for people living in extreme, generational poverty? It looks life-changing. A clean slate, a new start.
To put things in context, Dancha is unemployed because she looks after the children. Only Rambo supports the family financially, by working in street cleaning and earning minimum wage. At the time when this “wedding” took place, minimum wage was 550 EUR per month. Now it has been raised to the whopping 620 EUR.
Dancha’s plans were very sensible. With a driver’s license, a whole new world opens up. She was looking at this pile of money and thinking of emancipating herself. It was a chance to gain agency in a life full of dead ends.
But what happens to plans when you’re marked by poverty?
If you’ve ever been on a harsh diet, you’ve felt the ravishing appetite the overpowers you when you’re “allowed” to eat again. If you know this feeling, then you have an inkling of how Dancha and Rambo felt when the 2,500 EUR was in their hands.
Dancha and Rambo’s home was demolished in 2017 by the municipality and ever since, they’ve been sharing a social housing room with Dancha’s mother, living in horrible conditions. No running water, power cuts, steep moldy stairs that have caused many injuries, no working toilet, nowhere to shower, walls covered in mold.
When you’re so steeped in grimness, you jump at any opportunity for joy. In Dancha and Rambo’s case, that took the shape of a big plasma TV and a big celebration, buying anyone and everyone as much as they could eat and drink. The plasma TV spent less than a week on their wall before it went to the pawnshop.
The 2,500 EUR melted away. Like ice in the sun.
Some of it was spent on the celebration. A lot on the plasma TV. Some of it was spent gambling by Dancha’s mother. Then, real expenses came knocking, so Dancha and Rambo pawned the TV and that was it.
If you find yourself judging them, hold your horses. It is very easy to see how the money could have been spent more wisely. They see it too. But if you’re starved, physically, psychologically, and you find yourself with a big pile of cash in your hands, all your plans and your rational thinking get hijacked by everything inside you that has been craving and craving forever. It takes enormous willpower to resist this hunger and do the rational thing.
And even then, there are no guarantees.
Dancha’s brother, whose partner Fidana also got married for 2,500 EUR, didn’t blow the money on immediate gratification. He used it to buy a car and a horse. This was a very sound investment. With a horse, his family could make a decent living, way above minimum wage. With a car, he and his adult sons could easily travel to construction gigs and do repair jobs. He opened two paths for his family to hustle, to make a living.
If this sounds almost too good to be true, it’s because it is. For 2,500 EUR, what are the odds that you’d score both a decent car and a healthy horse? The car broke down within a week. Meanwhile expenses piled up too quick so he had to sell the horse before ever making any money with it.
On the outside, in retrospect, from the calm of our comfort, it can seem to us that Dancha’s brother had the right instincts but rushed and rushed, without proofing, without double-checking, without planning.
But you can’t be sure you wouldn’t do the same thing in his shoes. You get this one shot, you know how quickly money melts away, you have to move, you have to turn it around and do something meaningful. So you do it as fast as you can. And then you watch it fall apart.
Fictive marriages are not the only way that Roma living in poverty are being used. They are paid cash to accept companies to be signed over in their names. Property, too. For anyone trying to disguise criminal activity, the easiest —and ironically, cheapest —thing they can do is offer cash to a Roma living in poverty. The cash never sticks. But the signatures do.
“Petya was in the hospital. I was out of a job,” he explained. This was during the time his daughter Petya fell into a pot of boiling water and spent weeks in the hospital with her life in danger, undergoing multiple surgeries. And some acquaintance mentioned how he could get quick cash just in exchange for his signature. Tzvetan showed interest tentatively and the very next day, a guy rolled up in a 300,000 BGN Mercedes as he was unharnessing the horse from the cart.
“Jump in,” the man said.
“No,” Tzvetan said, “Look at me, I’m too dirty.”
“Come on, come on,” the man insisted, his hands glued to the wheel, the motor of the car still running. “Come make a quick 1,000.”
Tzvetan climbed in. The process was easy. Before he knew it, he had signed some papers and now a bunch of cars were registered to his name. So simple. 1,000 BGN for a signature.
“Don’t worry,” the man assured him. “You’ll have no problems with these cars. If you have any trouble, just call me.”
“200 here, 300 there,” Tzvetan continued his story. “Bills, debts, food, supplies for Petya, and the money was gone.”
But the cars weren’t gone. Soon, Tzvetan learned they were used for smuggling refugees.
from our piece “Come make a quick 1,000“: The Romani signatures underpinning organized crime
What happens to the ghost marriage?
So now that Dancha and Fidana are married to two men from China who are currently living in Germany, what happens?
On the surface, nothing. Both women are living with their families as they had before then. On paper, they are married to other people, but it doesn’t affect their daily life, so nobody cares.
The consequences show up later, maybe years later.
