Two blackmailers who asked a resident of Oradea for 15,000 euros, for a “failed transport of migrants”, pursued

Levente Vasile Praja, 41 years old, called “Supa”, was sentenced to 5 years and 6 months in prison with execution, while Samuil Ionuț Gal (35 years old) received a sentence of 3 years and 2 months of detention. Immediately after the Oradea Court of Appeal pronounced the final sentence, on April 25, the police did not find the two to take them to the penitentiary.

“Either he gives them the money, or he liquidates it”

Praja and Gal are part of a group of seven men investigated because almost three years ago they threatened a 28-year-old from Oradea that they would kill him and set fire to his house if he did not pay them 15,000 euros, plus 1000 euros for each day of delay, for an alleged debt.

The blackmailers met the victim on June 17, 2021, in the parking lot of a shopping center in Oradea, on Calea Aradului. According to the threatened man, they acted in mafia style: they blocked his car with three cars, threatened him and even hit him. All because he would have considered the 28-year-old “turner” to the Police, a fact that would have led to the arrest of a driver transporting migrants to Romania. As a result, they asked him to pay for the damage suffered as a result of the failed shipment.

Later, the young man explained to his girlfriend that “he was “assured” by those people that he would either give them the money or liquidate it”, the prosecutors mentioned in the indictment.

In the following three months, the victim was searched several times by one of the aggressors, who asked her to pay the requested money. The investigators showed that Levente Praja, who also hit the young man during the meeting in the parking lot, would have been to the place managed by the blackmailed man’s girlfriend to remind him that he had a debt to pay.

The judges learned that the intimidation and threats affected the 28-year-old man, who “interrupted certain daily activities: he stopped going to the gym, he stopped going out with his children, to the theater, to the movies, and he started avoiding the areas of the city where he had found out that the defendants were going out”.

Caught in the act, upon receipt of the first installment

After, on September 15, 2021, they drove several cars to the premises of the beloved victim, the men accused of blackmail returned towards the end of the same month to collect part of the money. Afraid of being caught by the authorities, one of the defendants first checked the meeting place, but did not notice anything suspicious.

But the police officers of the Office for Combating Crimes Against the Person and the prosecutors from the Oradea Prosecutor’s Office were on the spot and caught three of the blackmailers when they were receiving 5,000 lei from the victim.

In the trial that followed, Levente Praja and Ionuț Gal were sent behind bars, the court showing that both are recidivists. Five defendants received suspended sentences: Sergiu Bogdan Turcuț (39 years old, called “Palmă Mare”), Raul George Lup (36 years old), Norbert Alexandru Losonczi (35 years old), all from Oradea, Constantin Ioan Letan (31 years old), from Suplacu de Barcău, and Florin Răzvan Moza (32 years old), from Câmpani.

If Praja and Losonczi were accused of also hitting the blackmailed young man, the court found “complicity through inaction” in the case of the other five, in the sense that they did not prevent the assault of the victim.