After more than 20 years, Peter Nusser, known in the neighborhood as “Wiener Peter”, was arrested in Frankfurt on Sunday. He was considered one of the most notorious figures in Hamburg’s red-light district.
The federal police arrested a former Hamburg pimp as he entered Frankfurt Airport on Sunday. Peter Nusser, known in the milieu as the “Viennese Peter”, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1990 for several contract killings. In 2000, the judiciary suspended further execution of the detention – Nusser was deported to his home country of Austria. With the restriction that he has to serve the rest of the sentence when he returns to Germany. This is exactly what should happen now, as the authorities announced.
Who was the man who ended the “golden age” in St. Pauli with cold-blooded contract killings?
“Wiener Peter”: When the killers came to the neighborhood
Jump in time: Business is good in St. Pauli in the 1970s. The neighborhood is divided into two groups of pimps. The GMBH, consisting of Gerd Glissmann, Michael Luchting, Walter “Beatle” Vogeler and Harry Voerthmann, controls half of St. Pauli. The Nutella gang, consisting of up to eight younger pimps, the other half.
Both are in rivalry with each other, but they do not fight each other. The sex business peaked in the mid-1970s. Former public prosecutor Rüdiger Bagger explained in a documentary by the NDR: “They say that around 150,000 Deutschmarks were on the table for distribution at the weekend.”
A big cake, of which Peter Nusser would also like a piece. The ex-waiter from Carinthia in Austria comes to Hamburg and quickly rises to become one of the richest and most powerful figures in the milieu. Together with his own organization, the “Chikago Gang”, he is much more radical and brutal than his opponents.
With his partner Fritz Schroer, called “Chinese-Fritz”, he was able to get a floor in the large brothel “Palais d’amour”, where several women worked for him.
“The white queen left a real floor damage”
At the beginning of the 1980s, however, red light shops collapsed. People are afraid of AIDS – the brothels remain empty, the street prostitutes also have hardly anything to do. The pimp gangs make up for their lost earnings by selling cocaine. At that time, the white powder was the fashion drug par excellence.
But not only their customers, but also some pimps become dependent. The business partner of “Wiener Peter”, Fritz Schroer, also succumbed to the “white lady”, as she was called in the milieu.
“The cocaine destroyed almost everything here,” explained Thomas Born, later called “Karate-Tommy” to the NDR. The white lady left real damage to St. Pauli – for everyone, according to the former member of the “Nutella gang”.
Schroer becomes unreliable, paranoid. After all, he wants to get out of the red-light business, pull his wives and his money out of the “Palais d’amour”. The “Viennese Peter” cannot accept that.
“You don’t part with the Viennese. You get separated from the Viennese.”
On September 28, 1981, he summoned Schroer to the trendy pub “Zur Ritze” under the pretext that they had something to discuss. When Schroer enters the store, the “Viennese Peter” clears a bar stool for him. Seconds later, an assassin approaches Schroer. Three shots are fired. Schroer is dead on the spot. His shares are “inherited” by “Viennese Peter” Nusser. To date, the crime has not been fully elucidated.
It is the first murder in the red light milieu. With “Chinese Fritz” the old St Pauli codex is also buried. Gone are the days when the big boys settled problems among themselves – without weapons. In the neighborhood there is a whisper: “You don’t part with the Viennese. You get separated from the Viennese.”
It’s an experience that more pimps will have. In October 1982, two prostitutes quarreled in the “Eros Center” brothel. One of them gets a black eye. Her pimp Angie Becker from the Nutella gang, together with two cronies, demands 2,000 Deutschmarks for loss of earnings. They drive into the salon on the other side.
At the end of the evening, Becker and his partner Klaus Breitenreicher, known as “SS Klaus” because he was a combat swimmer in the Bundeswehr, were shot dead. Just three days later, the milieu buried the “M” of “GMBH”. The “beautiful Mischa” Michael Luchting hanged himself in his house near Hamburg-Harburg. Rumor has it that someone was standing under him with a shotgun as he jumped. This case was not solved either.
The thing with “Mucki”
In 1984 the “Viennese Peter” met the man who would later make headlines as the “St. Pauli killer”: Werner “Mucki” Pinzner. Pinzner is serving a 10-year sentence at the time for his part in a supermarket robbery in which a clerk was shot. He is serving his final months of sentence in an open prison.
Even during his time in prison, he made contact with red light giants. Now he wants to make a name for himself in the neighborhood as a contract killer.
Commissioned by Nusser, Pinzner traveled to Kiel on July 7, 1984 and shot dead a former brothel owner who had tried to blackmail other pimps. Three days later, Pinzner was released from prison as having been resocialized. He collects 30,000 D-Mark killer wages.
A short time later, Nusser has the next order for Pinzner. Similar to Fritz Schroer, the pimp Peter Pfeilmeier, known as “Bayern-Peter”, had become unreliable due to drug intoxication. He had repeatedly beaten up clients in his own brothel and now wanted to take his shares out of the establishment.
Pinzner offers the drug addict Pfeilmeier an alleged cocaine deal, drives him under this pretext to a remote parking lot in north-east Hamburg and shoots him.
But that’s not all. Nusser now wants to become completely independent of his business partners and sends Pinzner to Munich. There he kills another companion of “Wiener Peter”: Dietmar Traub, known as “Lacquer shoe Dieter”, dies on a forest path. The fortune of “Lackschuh-Dieter” falls to Nusser. He is now definitely one of the biggest figures in Hamburg’s Kiez.
The end of the “Wiener Peter”
Its expansion arouses desires. In the spring of 1985, Nusser was visited by three pimps in the “Palais d’amour” who demanded shares in the large brothel. Nusser refuses and is beaten up in front of his prostitutes. A humiliation that the “Viennese Peter” cannot accept. He instructs Pinzner to murder the three – for a flat rate of 60,000 Deutschmarks.
On Easter 1985, a meeting between them is to take place at the home of Waldemar Dammer, one of the pimps who beat up Nusser. The other two are missing, but Pinzner still kills Dammer and another employee.
It should be the last contract killings that Pinzner commits. A short time later he is betrayed. Through dozens of raids and identity checks, the police finally found a witness who linked Pinzner to the murders. He is arrested. During interrogation, Pinzner later admits that “the Viennese was my boss”. During an interrogation he finally shoots the public prosecutor Wolfgang Bistry, his wife and himself.
Shortly thereafter, the “Viennese Peter” was also arrested. In a court case he remains silent. In February 1989, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for aggravated robbery, conspiracy to commit murder, and incitement and aiding and abetting in murder.
Until the year 2000, he served his sentence in the infamous Fuhlsbüttel prison in Hamburg, known as “Santa Fu”, and according to “Spiegel” he worked in the prison library and as a bread truck driver. He is then deported to Austria. There is no continuation of the prison sentence. As is later known, Nusser moves to Ibiza and, according to his own statements, develops apps for mobile phones.
But now Nusser has to go back to prison. He is said to have landed in Frankfurt on April 3 on a trip from the Dominican Republic to Vienna. This was noticed during a personal check. So the “Viennese Peter” will stay “on vacation” for a longer time.
Sources: Documentation NDR, Reeperbahn.de, The mirror
annotation: An earlier version of the text stated that Nusser came from Kufstein. This is not correct. We have adjusted the text accordingly.