Hoffmann's staged arrest and prison placement convert an undercover operation into an apparent criminal prosecution: official records are altered to make him seem more dangerous, an arrest is arranged to look real, and he enters Aspsås under a sentence he has helped make credible. The plan gives him access to the prison drug market, but it does so by making the false identity that protects the operation also the identity that governs his confinement.

Constructing the criminal record

Before the arrest, Erik Wilson has a court employee alter Hoffmann’s record at the National Court Administration. A sentence originally recorded as one year and six months becomes five years. Wilson also asks for additional offenses: attempted murder and aggravated assault on a police officer. The employee does not ask why. The changes are not incidental embellishments; they are intended to shape how authorities and prisoners will read Hoffmann before he has a chance to establish himself in person.

The work takes place late in a large room with only one computer and one desk lamp in use. The employee prints the amended page and gives it to Wilson, accepting the risk of prosecution for serious document forgery. The staged identity is therefore assembled through an institutional document and the cooperation of someone prepared to falsify it. Hoffmann’s later prison persona will not rest only on what he says about himself: a record made to look official will precede him.

An arrest arranged to look real

Wilson warns Hoffmann that he has been made more dangerous in the records and that the patrol sent to arrest him will arrive with expectations and adrenaline. Hoffmann must not be armed, because an armed confrontation could escalate. A warrant has been issued only hours before Wilson tells him about it. An anonymous, untraceable call then directs police to Biljardpalatset, where a supposedly serious wanted criminal is expected to appear.

Hoffmann does not flee. He checks that he has left behind the knife he normally carries, waits where the officers can see him, and turns from the pool table when the police enter. He keeps his hands visible, but the arrest still becomes forceful; he is struck, restrained, and left with limited memory of the encounter. The contrast is central to the staging: his conduct is controlled, while the officers act on the dangerous profile they have been given. The arrest must persuade its witnesses, and the public story, that he is the person described in the records.

Wilson watches from the police garage at Kronoberg as vehicles arrive and wait. It takes thirty-five minutes for eight specially trained officers to locate and arrest one of the country’s most documented and dangerous people. During the escort toward the remand prison, Hoffmann makes a threat against an officer and refers to a past shooting in Söderhamn. The threat is part of the criminal performance: the false record is supported by behavior that gives it a voice. The governing principle is that only a criminal can convincingly play a criminal.

From remand to Aspsås

After the arrest and a fast-track trial, Hoffmann prepares to enter Aspsås prison. He admits to possessing three kilograms of amphetamine in the trunk of a rented car, secures the prosecutor’s confirmation that he acted alone and bears sole responsibility, and accepts the judgment without waiting for it to become final through the usual delay. The conviction gives the operation a concrete legal form and keeps the case focused on him rather than on the network he is meant to penetrate.

Hoffmann has studied the prison from the outside and, with Wilson’s help, learned about prisoners and staff in Block G while on remand. Yet planning cannot make the first entry familiar. At Aspsås, guards escort him through security and registration, search him, issue prison clothes, and place him in a waiting room. He has never been inside the prison before. After ten days in severe isolation on remand, he is assigned to a cell in G2 Left and escorted through internal passages, security doors, and stairs to Block G. The route marks the transition from a prepared operation to life under the institution’s actual routines.

A guided tour teaches him the unit’s practical rules, including where to go and when lock-in occurs. He then positions himself in the television corner before the other prisoners return. He knows the faces and backgrounds of the fifteen men in the unit, and chooses a place where each will see him arrive. Rather than remain hidden or wait for permission to approach, he takes a familiar chair, uses marked cards, and begins a game of solitaire. These small breaches of etiquette announce that he expects to be noticed and intends to establish his standing from the outset.

Credibility, danger, and exposure

At supper, two older prisoners challenge Hoffmann and demand to see his papers. Stefan Lygas and Karol Tomasz Penderecki, members of Wojtek Security International and Hoffmann’s intended allies in taking over the prison drug market, are ready to intervene. He signals them to hold back and allows the challenge to proceed. Respect in the unit has to be negotiated among prisoners, not simply conferred by an official file, and the confrontation offers him a chance to show that he can manage a test without immediately relying on his associates.

Those associates have already prepared the ground. They have told other prisoners that Hoffmann is coming and circulated copies of records from police and prison systems, along with his judgment, obtained through Stefan’s lawyer. The materials help make his arrival legible as a criminal’s arrival. At the same time, Hoffmann’s survival depends on information moving through the very channels that can expose him. His preparation is therefore both protection and vulnerability: documents establish his status, but they also make the concealed operation traceable to people who know what to look for.

The prison’s enclosure intensifies that risk. Hoffmann spends much of the day locked in his cell and uses a pillow, chair, and sock at the door as precautions against an attack during a period when guards cannot see or hear. When he fears exposure, he relies on voluntary isolation as a possible means of survival. The prison riot squad later escorts a vulnerable prisoner from Block G to the voluntary isolation unit in Block C, a separate space where residents can move around without encountering prisoners from other units. Isolation changes who can reach him, but does not undo the underlying danger: one of the people meant to protect or help him has burned him, and the undercover identity has become precarious inside the prison.

The operation as institutional practice

The staged arrest is one instance of a larger system of covert policing that the novel makes explicit near its conclusion. A search of secret intelligence records uncovers 302 reports from the preceding year describing informant work that revealed one crime while other crimes were marginalized. The secret reports and the incomplete information available to ordinary investigations produce different accounts of the same cases; prosecutions and investigations can proceed without information held elsewhere in the police organization.

The novel’s closing distinction between fact and fiction places Hoffmann’s invented identity within that institutional pattern. It states that criminals have been used as covert human intelligence sources under arrangements that are denied and concealed, and that criminal records and reports have been manipulated to create credible backgrounds. His placement in Aspsås is consequently more than a single deceptive arrest: it shows how an operation intended to investigate serious crime can depend on falsified records, concealed knowledge, and a legal process built around a carefully selected version of events. That machinery gets Hoffmann through the prison gates, but it cannot guarantee that the identity it constructed will remain under his control.