Wojtek's planned takeover of Sweden's prison drug market

Wojtek's planned takeover of Sweden's prison drug market turns the prison system into both a lucrative distribution network and a means of extending criminal influence beyond prison walls. The plan depends on a striking economic difference between drugs sold inside and outside, and on Piet Hoffmann's ability to enter prison under a constructed criminal identity. Its aims are laid out as an intended operation, while Hoffmann's placement and initial moves at Aspsås Prison show how that design begins to take shape.

The Market and Its Financial Logic

At the meeting that secured Hoffmann's approval, the deputy CEO described Sweden as the next closed market for expansion. Wojtek had already invested in and gained market share in neighboring Nordic countries; now it intended to repeat that process in Sweden. The deputy CEO anticipated financial backing for the effort, and a meeting with the Roof in Warsaw provided the guarantee for the work involved in taking over the Swedish market. The project was not presented as a small extension of existing trade, but as an unprecedented operation requiring substantial investment before returns could begin.

The calculation rested on the premium paid for drugs inside prison. The figures presented to Hoffmann put amphetamine at 150 kronor per gram on the street and three times that amount inside; heroin was said to cost 1,000 kronor on the street and three times as much in prison. The plan estimated that four thousand incarcerated users, consuming at the rates described in the meeting, could represent eight to nine million kronor in daily business. That figure was conditional: it assumed everyone paid. Even so, the estimate made the prison population legible to Wojtek as a concentrated market whose restrictions did not prevent high-value trade.

The intended reach extended beyond the immediate customers. The deputy CEO was to lead the operation outside prison, while Hoffmann would organize it from within one of Sweden's maximum-security institutions: Kumla, Hall, or Aspsås. The larger ambition was to control both supply inside and the people and channels connected to it outside. The projection named fifty-six existing Swedish prisons, with more being built, and envisioned Wojtek eventually controlling every one. This was a forecast and objective, not evidence that the takeover was completed.

The Two-Stage Takeover Plan

The proposed method had two stages. First, Hoffmann would remove existing competition. Then Wojtek would supply drugs through its own channels, beginning with the remaining seventy-eight kilos of amphetamine approved for the operation. The intended opening price was fifty kronor per gram, compared with a stated prevailing prison price of three hundred. This below-market offer was designed to establish Wojtek as the supplier across the prison population; only after control had been secured would prices rise, potentially to five or six hundred kronor per gram.

The low opening price was therefore a means of capturing the market, not a promise of lasting access at a discount. The plan joined product supply to the consolidation of power: eliminate rival dealers, make the new channel dominant, and then set the terms. Hoffmann estimated that he needed three days to remove the competition and requested no contact during that period, making the initial seizure of control a discrete phase before the broader distribution system began.

The operation also treated prison debt as a recruitment mechanism. According to the plan Hoffmann explained to Erik Wilson, some prisoners could pay for drugs from their cells, while others could not. Wojtek would continue selling to those unable to pay, leaving them indebted when their sentences ended. On release, they would face a choice between working to repay the debt or facing threatened violence. The projected outside network was thus not separate from the prison market: it would be generated through transactions inside and carried beyond the sentence. The prison was conceived as a point of entry into a wider supply and criminal-control system.

Hoffmann's Placement and Early Moves

Hoffmann's route into the market depended on a staged arrest. He planned to be caught with three kilos of amphetamine, admit possession, claim he was acting alone, and accept a substantial sentence so he could be moved promptly to the intended institution. The plan relied on charges being brought immediately and on his acceptance of the sentence avoiding delay; if events went smoothly, he expected to be inside the right prison within two weeks. This approach drew on his earlier experience in Österåker Prison, which he remembered as a place where drugs and the control of basic goods shaped prison power. That experience informed his assessment of what would matter once he entered Aspsås.

Before his first arrival at Aspsås Prison, Hoffmann had mapped its buildings from the church tower and studied the bars on its windows. While on remand, he had also learned, with Erik Wilson's help, about prisoners and staff in Block G. Yet reconnaissance did not remove the distinction between knowing the institution at a distance and entering it. On arrival, leg irons restricted his movement; prison staff processed and searched him, issued him loose-fitting clothes, and placed him in a sterile waiting room. These formal routines marked his admission into a controlled environment whose rules he would have to navigate in person.

Ten days passed before the next stage. For twenty-three hours each day, Hoffmann was confined in a five-square-metre cell with no visitors, newspapers, television, or radio. When he was taken to the unit, a principal officer showed him its practical routines, including where to urinate and the precise time of lock-up. Hoffmann then had to make the cell his home while learning the rhythms of the institution. The takeover plan depended not only on contraband and alliances but on surviving this imposed schedule and the isolation that preceded ordinary contact with other prisoners.

Establishing Position and Taking Control

Before the other prisoners returned to the unit, Hoffmann chose a seat in the television corner where he could see each arrival and be seen in turn. He already knew the backgrounds of the fifteen other prisoners from photographs. Rather than wait unobtrusively for acceptance, he occupied a favored chair, used marked cards, and began playing solitaire at another prisoner's table. The gestures made his arrival visible and challenged the expectation that a newcomer should hide until others approved him. In the prison's informal order, his first task was to establish that he was not entering as someone easily intimidated.

Two Wojtek members at Aspsås, Stefan Lygas and Karol Tomasz Penderecki, had prepared the ground. They had spoken about Hoffmann's arrival and arranged criminal-record, intelligence, prison, and court documents through Stefan's lawyer. At supper, other prisoners pressed Hoffmann to show his papers. Stefan and Karol Tomasz initially moved to intervene, but Hoffmann waved them back and answered the challenge himself. The episode shows the plan's dependence on both organizational support and Hoffmann's own performance: the documents supplied a credible background, while his conduct had to establish his standing among prisoners.

Hoffmann's first reported seizure of the local market followed quickly. He felled the three main dealers at Aspsås with forty-two grams of manufactured amphetamine at thirty percent purity. Reports reached Warsaw and the deputy CEO, who then raised a glass to the next stage. The operation had moved beyond planning into a concrete removal of competitors, but that early success did not resolve the danger of exposure or establish that Wojtek achieved control across Sweden's prison system.

Exposure and Institutional Consequences

The new position carried a risk built into the undercover method: if Hoffmann was exposed, the same organization and prison allies that enabled his entry could become a threat. When he feared that his cover had been compromised, he sought transfer to voluntary isolation, where prisoners from other units could not reach him. The move offered separation, not escape from prison. Later, hearing a voice call for Paula, he understood that someone within his circle had burned him; the evidence does not identify which of the four possible sources was responsible. His isolation therefore marks a reversal in the takeover's conditions: protection through access and contacts gave way to survival through distance.

The operation also belongs to a broader institutional pattern disclosed by Ewert Grens's investigation. He found 302 secret intelligence reports describing cases in which an informant's work to uncover one crime had been accompanied by the marginalization of another. An official inquiry and a parallel body of concealed reports could therefore record different accounts of events, leaving investigators and prosecutors without information that might have changed their work. The book's closing account states that the Swedish Police Service had long used criminals as covert human intelligence sources, while denying and concealing the cooperation; it also describes doctored records as a working practice used to construct credible criminal backgrounds.

That institutional context complicates the meaning of Wojtek's planned expansion. Hoffmann's manufactured identity and prison access serve the undercover effort to penetrate a criminal organization, but the same methods require deception, altered records, and tolerance of crimes committed or enabled in pursuit of intelligence. The market plan is therefore more than a scheme to sell drugs behind prison walls: it sets in motion a contest over who controls the prison economy, while exposing how covert policing can obscure the crimes it is meant to investigate. The evidence establishes the scale and early execution of the intended takeover, its vulnerability to exposure, and the secret system surrounding the informant; it does not establish that Wojtek ultimately controlled all Swedish prisons.