Wojtek's plan to take over Sweden's prison drug market

Wojtek's plan to take over Sweden's prison drug market is a calculated campaign to capture a high-value, enclosed trade by replacing existing dealers with a single organized supply network. The plan makes Piet Hoffmann its inside leader: he is to clear away competition, distribute Wojtek’s drugs, and establish control in a Swedish maximum-security prison. Its promise of commercial expansion rests on the same conditions that make Hoffmann’s assignment dangerous: a dependent customer base, a closed social order, and an informant’s fabricated criminal identity that can be turned against him.

The market and its projected value

The proposal begins with expansion. Wojtek already controls the Norwegian, Danish, and Finnish markets, and Sweden is presented as the next territory to enter. The argument is numerical: Sweden has about five thousand prisoners, and nearly eighty percent are described as major consumers of amphetamines, heroin, and alcohol. At the meeting, the estimate is narrowed to four thousand drug-dependent prisoners and their daily consumption, yielding a projected eight to nine million kronor in business per day. The figures turn prison into a market that can be assessed and targeted rather than merely a place where the existing trade happens to persist.

The price comparison makes the opportunity more concrete. A gram of amphetamine costs 150 kronor on the street and three times as much in prison; heroin, priced at 1,000 kronor on the street, also sells for three times that amount inside. Wojtek’s representatives describe an unprecedented operation requiring substantial investment before returns begin. Their confidence depends not only on the expected margins but on their ability to finance a sustained effort: the organization can invest and wait until the closed market belongs to it.

Command, strategy, and supply

The arrangement divides authority between the outside and the inside. Wojtek’s deputy chief executive will direct the operation externally, while Hoffmann will lead it from within one of three maximum-security prisons: Kumla, Hall, or Aspsås. The plan follows precedents in Norway and Finland, where the takeover had proceeded from an initial prison before extending elsewhere. Sweden is therefore framed as a new national campaign using a method already applied in neighboring markets.

The proposed takeover has two stages. First, Hoffmann is to eliminate the competition already operating in the prison. Then Wojtek will supply drugs through its own channels. The initial stock is seventy-eight kilos, approved for use in a price-dumping strategy: amphetamine is to be sold at fifty kronor per gram instead of three hundred. The low price is intended to teach prisoners who controls the supply and displace rivals. Once the market is captured, prices could rise as high as five or six hundred kronor per gram. The sequence is not simply cheaper product followed by greater profit; it is a deliberate effort to make temporary affordability serve long-term control.

Hoffmann specifies the opening timetable. He wants three days without contact to deal with the competition and take in enough drugs. Beginning on the fourth day, he requests one kilo of amphetamine each week through Wojtek’s channels. He is responsible for ensuring that the supply is used, and he does not want drugs hidden or stored in a way that could sustain a competing operation. His instructions show how the broad corporate plan becomes a prison-level system of timing, distribution, and surveillance of rival stock.

Hoffmann inside the closed market

The assignment is built around Hoffmann’s access to prison life and his ability to function under a manufactured criminal identity. He has spent a year in Österåker prison and recalls a world where drugs confer authority and even improvised alcohol made from food waste can shape who holds power. That experience gives the commercial strategy a human setting: the takeover is to operate within an existing hierarchy where access to intoxicants is closely tied to status and influence.

Aspsås is not familiar territory when Hoffmann first enters it. Before his arrival he has mapped its buildings from the church tower and, while on remand, used Erik Wilson’s help to learn about prisoners and staff in Block G. Yet preparation does not erase the difference between studying a prison and living inside one. After ten days, he has spent twenty-three hours a day in a small cell, without visitors or ordinary media. On his release into the unit, he learns its routines and rules, then deliberately sits in the television corner where the returning prisoners will see him. He chooses a visible place, another prisoner’s favored chair, and a marked deck of cards: a calculated performance of someone neither frightened nor waiting for permission to belong.

The takeover and its reversal

Two Wojtek members serving long sentences at Aspsås, Stefan Lygas and Karol Tomasz Penderecki, are meant to help Hoffmann suppress competition. They have prepared the ground by talking about his arrival and circulating copies of his police and prison records, his criminal-intelligence file, and his latest judgment, obtained through Stefan’s lawyer. At supper, two older prisoners challenge Hoffmann to produce his papers. Stefan and Karol Tomasz move to intervene, but Hoffmann allows the questioning to continue, using the encounter to establish himself through the prison’s informal tests of status and belonging.

The first operation succeeds: Hoffmann takes down the prison’s three main dealers with forty-two grams of manufactured amphetamine. Reports reach Warsaw and the deputy chief executive, who regard the result as the opening of the next stage. But success does not make Hoffmann secure. When exposure threatens, he uses the prison’s voluntary-isolation system to move away from the unit. In isolation, he realizes that one of the four people who had been his protection and route to escape has betrayed him. The plan’s reliance on a network inside the prison has become its central vulnerability: the same associates who make the takeover possible can reveal the concealed identity on which it depends.

The wider cost of covert operations

The prison campaign belongs to a wider system in which police use criminals as covert human-intelligence sources while concealing that cooperation. The novel’s closing account says that crimes have been marginalized and investigations and trials conducted without correct information so that other crimes could be solved. A set of 302 secret intelligence reports records cases in which an informant’s work to uncover one crime gave rise to another; some investigations collapsed despite relevant knowledge already being held internally. The operation’s concealed arrangements therefore have consequences beyond the prison market: secrecy can distort the official record and leave courts and investigators without the information needed to understand a case.

The final contrast is between the public account of law enforcement and the hidden mechanisms used to construct Hoffmann’s role. Police records and reports can help create a credible criminal background for a recruited informant, while extensive alteration of information becomes routine within a society founded on the rule of law. Wojtek’s plan depends on prison being a closed market that can be captured; the surrounding covert system is itself closed to ordinary scrutiny. Hoffmann’s early success demonstrates the commercial logic of the takeover, while his later isolation and betrayal expose the human and institutional risks concealed behind its clean calculations.