ANDREW TATE USED TO CRUISE ALONG THESE SCRUFFY SUBURBAN STREETS about 16km from the centre of Bucharest in Romania. Past a rubbish dump and a sprawling cemetery and a line of small houses that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the British TV soap Brookside. Rolling by in his Lamborghini or Bugatti or any other of his fleet of supercars. Puffing a cigar and adjusting his Michael Corleone sunglasses. Beating his tattooed chest at the red light.
Tate, who likes to call himself Top G (in street slang G stands for gangster), says he’s done nothing wrong. He might look and behave like a gangster. He might have boasted of gangsterish pursuits and claim to have made billions. But now, as a guest of the Romanian penal system, he says he’s not an actual gangster at all. He says he’s a good guy.
His arrest on 29 December by armed members of Romania’s anticorruption unit – the ones who arrest gangsters – was over allegations of people trafficking and rape. Officers wearing balaclavas stormed Tate’s compound by cover of night, and say they found guns, knives and large sums of cash. Top G and his younger brother, 34-year-old Tristan, were led away in handcuffs. Two Romanian women, Georgiana Naghel, and a former police officer called Alexandra Luana Radu, were also detained. The four are suspected of being part of a human trafficking group, although they say they are innocent.
I’m on my way to Andrew Tate’s home. I’d never heard of Tate until last summer. I usually cover wars, international crises, oldschool corruption. Tate sounded like another self-obsessed attention screecher on social media. “He’s not,” said a colleague. “He’s one of the most Googled people on the internet. He gets more views on social media than Rihanna. Oh, and he told a Twitch Stream that he’s the world’s first trillionaire.”
But how could that be true? How does a former kickboxer from Luton convert notoriety on social media into his claimed Musk-scale wealth? And more pressingly, for Tate at least, what will the Romanian investigators discover about his money-making activities? If he is found guilty, he could be detained in a Romanian jail for the best part of 20 years.
Tate is a social media phenomenon. His content on TikTok has been viewed more than 12.7bn times. No one else on the platform comes close. He claims to have mastered the social media algorithms that sends posts ripping through cyberspace like a plague. He is a master of
