Hoffmann begins taking over the prison drug market at Aspsås

Piet Hoffmann begins taking over the prison drug market at Aspsås Prison by making a calculated entrance, using his connections and knowledge of prison routines to undermine the existing suppliers. The takeover is both a practical operation and a struggle over status: Hoffmann first makes himself visible as someone who will not be easily intimidated, then uses a concealed supply of amphetamine to displace the men who control distribution. The same network that helps him establish power also becomes a source of danger when someone betrays him.

Arrival and Establishing a Position

Hoffmann had studied Aspsås Prison before entering it. From the church tower he had mapped its buildings and observed the security bars; while on remand, with Erik Wilson’s help, he had learned about the prisoners and staff in Block G. But the prison bus carrying him through the gates marked his first actual entry into the high-security facility. After intake, he was given prison clothes and left in a sterile waiting room. Ten days later, he was still spending twenty-three hours a day in a five-square-meter cell, with no visitors, newspapers, television, or radio. The severe limits on time, contact, and movement made the prison’s routines part of the challenge he had to master, not merely the setting for his plan.

When he was shown the unit, Hoffmann learned its practical rules from the principal officer: where to go, when lock-in began, and how daily life was organized. He then chose a place in the television corner before the other prisoners returned. He knew the faces and backgrounds of all fifteen men in the unit and positioned himself so that each would see him arrive. Rather than wait quietly in his cell, he occupied a familiar chair, took marked cards, and began playing solitaire at another prisoner’s table. These small, visible breaches of expectation were deliberate signals: the newcomer would not hide, seek permission to exist, or wait for the unit to decide what he was worth.

Allies, Records, and Prison Status

Hoffmann’s first tests came at supper, when two older inmates demanded to see his papers. Stefan Lygas and Karol Tomasz Penderecki, both members of Wojtek serving long sentences at Aspsås, were ready to intervene. Hoffmann waved them back and allowed the confrontation to proceed. He understood that his standing depended on answering the challenge himself and on the kind of respect recognized in the prison’s informal order.

The challenge had been prepared for. In the days before Hoffmann arrived, Lygas and Penderecki had told other prisoners whom they were expecting, what he had been arrested for, whom he had worked with, and his supposed standing with an Eastern European mafia. Through Lygas’s lawyer, they had also obtained copies of his police and prison records, criminal-intelligence information, and recent judgment. Hoffmann thus entered a world where reputation was assembled from documents as well as rumor. His allies had helped circulate the information that would make him legible to the other inmates, but he still had to establish that he could hold his ground in person.

By lunch on his second day, no one was sitting too close or staring him down while he ate. That early shift in the unit’s behavior was a beginning, not yet complete control. Prison status followed an informal hierarchy: murderers commanded high regard, major drug dealers and bank robbers also ranked above many others, while men convicted of sexual offences occupied the bottom. Yet the hierarchy had a practical limit. The person who controlled drugs and syringes could command even the respect of killers. Hoffmann’s objective was to reach that decisive point by controlling supply.

The Concealed Supply and the Attack on Competition

Hoffmann signalled his next move to Lygas and Penderecki with the Polish word for evening, indicating that the main dealers would be dealt with that night. He volunteered to clear and wash up after a meal, then secretly took two spoons and a knife from the kitchen. In his cell, the knife opened the binding of Lord Byron’s Don Juan. Inside a long, narrow cavity lined with Rizla papers, he found the concealed amphetamine he had left there before entering prison. The hiding place had been prepared earlier; its discovery in the book connected the current prison operation to planning done outside the prison walls.

The supply was small by the standards of a free market, but Hoffmann judged it differently. In prison, demand was greater, supply more difficult to obtain, and the consequences of discovery more severe. Four books contained a total of forty-two grams of thirty-percent manufactured amphetamine. He had once consumed most of what he smuggled in himself, selling or trading some only when circumstances forced him to. This time he reserved the supply for a different purpose: breaking the competition and taking control himself. The contrast marks a change in how he uses contraband. It is no longer primarily a personal resource or a way to meet debts; it is leverage over the prison’s market and its hierarchy.

Hoffmann divided the forty-two grams into three bags of fourteen grams. One was intended for the Greek prisoner in Cell 2; the other two were meant for the two other major suppliers in Block H, one upstairs and one downstairs. Before placing a bag in the Greek prisoner’s cell, he checked the curtain rail, secured the package against the wall, and restored the rail. The concealment depended on ordinary furnishings and on an empty corridor: he entered the cell while other prisoners were in class and the workshop, when staff were elsewhere. He also noticed photographs of a young girl and a woman on the wall. That detail did not alter the mechanics of the plan, but it made the cost of the hidden drugs concrete: the prisoner whose cell he used would face an extended sentence and removal to another prison if the supply were found.

Control, Exposure, and the Limits of the Takeover

The operation succeeded at its immediate objective. Hoffmann had felled the three principal dealers with the forty-two grams, while reports had already reached Warsaw and Wojtek’s deputy chief executive, who marked the next stage of the plan. The scale of his ambition becomes explicit in the speed of the change: in two days he was expected to control all supply and sales, a position that would place him above even prisoners whose authority came from murder. His rise therefore rested not only on having a product to distribute but on converting a carefully timed removal of competitors into command of the supply network.

The takeover did not make him secure. When the danger of exposure became apparent, Hoffmann could not escape far within the prison and demanded isolation instead. A ten-person riot squad moved through Block G; six officers remained to discourage further violence while four escorted him to the voluntary isolation unit in Block C. This transfer changed his immediate surroundings but preserved the prison’s central constraint: his movement and contact were still governed by the institution. In isolation, he recognized that one of the four men who had served as his protection and route of escape had betrayed him. The reversal exposes the vulnerability built into his method. Hoffmann could use allies, records, routines, and a hidden supply to acquire power, but he could not guarantee the loyalty of the people on whom that power depended.

Narrative Significance

The takeover shows how Aspsås operates as a closed social order with its own measures of authority. Official confinement restricts space, time, and contact, while informal inmate status is negotiated through reputation, nerve, and access to contraband. Hoffmann adapts to both systems: he learns the unit’s daily rules, makes himself conspicuous to its residents, and treats the drug supply as the means to reorder their hierarchy. His progression from newcomer to prospective market controller is rapid, but the later move into isolation and the discovery of betrayal prevent that rise from reading as a settled victory. The operation establishes his capacity to seize control and, at the same time, the fragility of control in a prison where information and allegiance can turn against him.