More often than not he is one step ahead of all other crime reporters and is the first to give coverage to crimes like burglary, murder, road accidents, explosions. He sets the standard in his field of work where it is all too easy to slideover the surface of events in search of sensation. That is the reason why he has won a number of awards. “There are lines that must not be crossed,” says Nikolay Hristov. “There are stories I know of but never make public because they are too painful. But when we are covering a purely criminal offence it is not our job to point a finger at the guilty party, but to lay down the facts without the brutal details - such as they are. Otherwise you would be covering up the truth about one side and that would make you prejudiced. Covering up facts from any given case could turn a story from fact into fiction.”

These are the norms the crime reporter from the Bulgarian National Radio Nikolay Hristov strictly adheres to. But how is it that he is almost always the first to break news?

“That is something that happens over the years. I have been working as a crime reporter for 15 years. When you have that amount of experience you get to meet practically everyone working in the system. By this I do not mean the Interior Ministry top brass because they change every four years and, of late, even more often. You need to know people, to have contacts built on trust within the lower tiers of the ministry where the people are the same.”

He adds that when he was taking his first steps in journalism he never thought that one day he would be reporting on crime. But when he was asked to:

“In time I came to realize that crime reporting is so much more emotional than any of the other more “tame” fields a reporter could be working in; to that we should add the fact that you have to be ready to go out in the street, at any time, day or night,” Nikolay says and explains that in time, one gets accustomed to keeping such odd hours and working “in the fast lane” without this affecting one's family. But how does he cope with the constant stress of his work?

“It is really important when you are working in this sphere not to let it get to you. Otherwise you will end up in a lunatic asylum. I see things so brutal, things other people never get to see. I go inside places only the police and witnesses of serious crimes have access to. If you take these stories personally when you are covering them, it will probably break you and you won't be able to do your job.”

Asked how the profile of crime has changed during the years of his practice, Nikolay Hristov says:

“The crime profile is changing in big cities. We are no longer seeing what we had throughout Bulgaria in the 1990s -thugs with bats, gold chains and in undershirts. But in small towns things have not budged. There, the mobsters of the 90s have not evolved an inch. In cities like Sofia and Varna, where criminals have, one way or another, broken with their past, they now wear expensive suits, don't go to the sordid chalga clubs (chalga being a vulgar kind of pop-folk music, associated with mobsters), they go to piano bars,” Nikolay says. Outside the country, Bulgarians are actively involved in drug trafficking:

“The people that are valued most are those with a seafaring education who can sail a yacht across the Atlantic and smuggle all kinds of special-purpose “plants” (let us call them that). Bulgarians are now part of world corporations running illegal businesses. All of the drugs intercepted at borders - it goes without saying that they are not Bulgarian drug pipelines. No one in Bulgaria has the kind of money needed to run dozens of kilos of cocaine out of the country. Here, the criminal activities are low-level logistics.”

What will it take to bring down the level of crime in the country which has now acquired the proportions of a social phenomenon? Nikolay Hristov:

“A change in the all-pervasive assumption of universal impunity. That is what criminals, victims and the man in the street are now seeing. From the footling crimes in villages, to the murder of elderly people for their 80 Leva pensions, to armed robbery, skimming debit cards, cybercrime-impunity is all around. At this time, phone scams are rife, with 4-5 taking place in Sofia every day. People lose colossal amounts of money. But I have not heard of any large-scale operations taking place to eradicate this type of crime. There are several explanations for this. One is that the criminals involved have some kind of protection and pay “protection money” somewhere down the line. Who to - nobody knows.”

English version: Milena Daynova