Wicked Wealth Synopsis
Nineteen-year-old party girl Rosanna is murdered in her caravan on a camping area tucked away in a forest in Merkelswerder, eastern Germany. Within hours, Ben, a Nigerian asylum seeker, is arrested. He is the last person to have seen Rosanna in her caravan only minutes before the girl was murdered. Ben insists he is innocent and soon enough every evidence points to a more complicated perpetrator than Ben. Ben has to be released.
The next afternoon Ben is arrested again when forensic pathology discovers that Rosanna was pregnant and Ben the father. After all, Ben’s own wife is also about to have her baby in a refugee camp.
Soon a hacker genius working for the Federal Republic in sensitive ministries and secret services is shot dead in his loft, his battery of computers completely disabled. The same night the hacker is shot, a witness, an old lady who had reported to the police about the shots she’d heard coming from loft, is discovered dead in her flat where she had spoken to the investigators. She and her dog have been battered to death with a golf club.
It is clear that although Ben is connected to the crimes somehow, somebody else is doing the killing. Once again Ben is released. Out of the blue top-notch lawyers in Merkelswerder offer to represent Ben, a penniless asylum seeker. Even Ben himself is flabbergasted. He knows where Rosanna hid her diary and steals it. When his lawyers find out he has the sensitive diary, they take it away from him and forbid him to mention its existence to anybody else. Best he even forgets having ever seen it himself.
Head of the investigative team, KHK Gregor Schindler, finds himself and his team running behind the killer always a beat too late. Rosanna – 27 stabs; hacker Kai – sieved with bullets just when the investigative team was on its way to him; Frau Fritz and her dog battered with a golf club after he had talked to the police and made the bigger mistake of giving some TV channel an interview. There must be a mole at the MCD – Murder Commission Department – informing the enemies of the team’s every planned move, every new vital information.
Acting on his own initiative, Schindler – and by extension his team – finds out that the informer is none other than the chief of MCD himself. It is clear that the person or persons behind these murders must therefore be powerful. The trouble is in establishing if the powerful are politicians or the conglomerate of mafia gangsters who’ve infiltrated Germany in droves ever since the reunification and invested billions of unclean but welcome money in every German sector. But the dirty-mony connection has long since faded because the gangs have the politicians, the economies and even the judiciary in their pockets.
Schindler and his team have to investigate as if they were the criminals. A few days later Ben disappears, apparently kidnapped by two “policemen”. Nobody knows whether he’s still in the country or not, dead or alive. The team however finds out that Rosanna had an unusual caucus of clients: a father, his son and the father’s son-in-law, while her handler is the infamous Zoran the Serb, a multimillionaire “clean” gangster who owns exclusive clubs in the states of Brandenburg and Berlin as well as the caravan camping site in Merkelswerder’s forest. The team is getting close.
Then the city’s state judge is murdered by his own wife in their home in a family squabble that leaves the judge’s daughter and son-in-law shot by the judge’s weapon. And there’s a written and signed confession to the murders of Rosanna, Kai the hacker who also worked for Zoran the Serb, and Frau Fritz and her dog. But was the judge’s confession made under duress?
Then Ben surfaces, alive down in Almería, Spain, and he may well be the most vital witness in throwing the revealing light to all the convoluted abysses of the case…