The first thing that strikes you as you approach 60 Panagi Tsaldari Ave. in the Athens suburb of Keratsini — before the in memoriam graffiti, before the modest shrine of candles and flowers — is that you wouldn’t murder anybody here unless you were convinced you could get away with it.

The street is an oasis of commercial activity in a neighborhood brought low by Greece’s economic crisis. Piraeus, of which Keratsini is one of five municipalities, used to be a separate city, and it remains economically and culturally distinct: a tough, blue-collar region, reliant on heavy industry and the shipyards known as The Zone until the crash came and pushed unemployment over 90%. Panagi Tsaldari feels different. The broad, well-lit avenue is lined with bars, cafés, boutiques, and chain stores. Crowds of young people drink at sidewalk tables while cars cruise past blasting hip-hop and Europop.

No. 60 is a narrow doorway between a children’s clothes store and an upscale patisserie. This is the unlikely spot where, just after midnight last Sept. 18, Greek rapper Pavlos Fyssas, aka Killah P, was stabbed to death. “It was a big shock because we never have something like this here,” the patisserie owner tells me a few weeks after the murder. “It happened when people were walking around. It’s very weird, the whole thing.”

One of Fyssas’ signature songs, "Piraeus on My Back," was a boisterous celebration of the place where he spent every one of his 34 years. It was here where he left high school and began working in The Zone. It was here where he formed his first group, Kaka Mandata, or Bad News, with fellow metalworker Petros Pountidis and became an unusually well-liked figure in Greece’s restive hip-hop scene. It was here where he also became a union man, community activist, and outspoken opponent of the neo-Nazi party Chryssi Avgi, or Golden Dawn. And it was here where he died.

Despite the visibility of the crime scene, exactly what transpired is unclear: Media reports and witness accounts are incomplete and even contradictory. But the fundamentals, at least, are consistent. On Sept. 17, 2013, Fyssas was enjoying a night out with his girlfriend Chryssa and seven other friends and spent some time in a side-street bar during a soccer match between local heroes Olympiacos Piraeus and Paris Saint-Germain. Petros Pountidis, who has spoken to some of Fyssas’ companions since that night, claims that the rapper only ventured into the bar with two of his friends so that one of them, who was ill, could use the bathroom and get some water. Either way, a handful of the bar’s customers were members of Golden Dawn, and one of Fyssas’ group was overheard saying something disparaging.

The match finished just after 11:30 p.m., around which time Fyssas and his two friends left the bar to rejoin the rest. They saw a group of Golden Dawn members, including the men from the café, observing them ominously while calling and texting for reinforcements. Dozens of men began arriving quickly, some on motorcycles, shadowed by eight members of the Greek police’s DIAS motorcycle force, who had been alerted to the gathering crowd by a member of the public. The new arrivals were dressed in the familiar Golden Dawn outfit of black T-shirts and camouflage pants, and they were armed. “Baseball bats with nails and screws at the end — like Viking weapons, the stuff you see on Game of Thrones,” says Pountidis.

The mob began taunting and threatening Fyssas’ group, which ran toward Panagi Tsaldari. According to the account Pountidis heard, once his friends were at a safe distance, Fyssas, who had a muscular laborer’s build and a strong nerve, stood his ground and confronted the mob. Some of the Golden Dawn members set upon him while Chryssa pleaded, in vain, for the DIAS officers to intervene. According to one witness, the assailants “were acting as if there was no police around. They just did not care at all.”

At this point, a gray Nissan crossed lanes at high speed and pulled up a few feet away. The driver, a pudgy middle-aged man, got out. At least one witness claims that Fyssas’ attackers pointed him out to the driver and shouted, “It’s him! It’s him!” The driver walked straight up to Fyssas with a calm expression, moved in close as if to embrace him, stabbed him twice in the chest, and returned to his car. Fyssas remained on his feet just long enough to lift his shirt to show the police his wounds, and indicate his assailant. At last, a young policewoman sprang into action and handcuffed the driver, but it was too late. Fyssas was taken by ambulance to the local hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

One doctor who treated him said the wounds had the hallmarks of a “professional hit,” but everything else about the murder was bafflingly inept. The killer, a 45-year-old unemployed truck driver named Giorgos Roupakias, acted in front of dozens of witnesses, threw the knife bearing his fingerprints on the ground, and made no attempt to escape. He told police that he had been driving home after watching the second half of the soccer match with a friend when his car was ambushed by a mob and he struck out in self-defense. He also denied any connection to Golden Dawn. Within hours, it was established that none of this was true.

Roupakias was proven to be a Golden Dawn member who worked part-time at the cafeteria in the party’s office in neighboring Nikaia. His own wife told police that he had been at home watching the soccer match on television for most of the evening before he received a phone call and got into his car. Inspection of cell phone records found that Roupakias had spoken several times that night to Giorgios Patelis, leader of the Nikaia branch. Shortly after the murder, Patelis called Ioannis Lagos, parliamentary deputy for Piraeus, who then contacted Golden Dawn's leader, a squat, bulldog-like 56-year-old former commando named Nikos Michaloliakos. It remains unclear who decided to eliminate Fyssas, and exactly when they decided, but it backfired spectacularly.

At the time of the killing, Golden Dawn had 18 deputies in Greece’s 300-member parliament and a poll rating of almost 15%. Conservative pundit Babis Papadimitriou had even suggested that the ruling center-right party New Democracy welcome “a more serious Golden Dawn” into its coalition government.

So the whole country was astonished when, just two days after the murder — the first of a native Greek following many similar attacks against immigrants — the minister of public order requested that the Supreme Court declare Golden Dawn a criminal organization under anti-terrorism legislation, and produced files outlining 32 separate criminal cases against party members. Police arrested key figures in the Golden Dawn leadership, including Patelis, Lagos, and Michaloliakos. Raids on deputies' homes uncovered caches of weapons and Nazi paraphernalia. With breathtaking speed, the government moved to transform the party that might have been its ally into a pariah.

Twelve days after the murder, Prime Minister Antonis Samaras told an American Jewish Committee reception in New York: “We are dedicated in completely eradicating such a shame. We must do it within the context of our democratic constitution. But we have to go all the way and do whatever it takes.”

There is little doubt about what happened outside 60 Panagi Tsaldari Ave. The puzzle is why it happened and how Golden Dawn made such a catastrophic miscalculation.