May 27

May 27 marks the apparent end of Piet Hoffmann’s operation inside Aspsås Prison and the beginning of the investigation that exposes its aftermath. The date anchors a lethal shot fired from a church tower, but the prison’s later security footage turns that apparent ending into a question of survival and escape.

The prison operation before May 27

Before entering Aspsås Prison, Hoffmann had mapped its buildings from the church tower and, with Erik Wilson’s help, studied the people and routines of Block G. His first actual entry brought him into a tightly controlled institution: he was escorted through central security, processed, issued prison clothes, and left in a sterile waiting room. The transition from studying the prison at a distance to living inside it made the operation’s constraints immediate.

After ten days, his days were governed by confinement and routine. He spent twenty-three hours at a time in a five-square-meter cell, without visitors or access to newspapers, television, or radio. When the unit’s principal officer showed him its rules and facilities, Hoffmann had to reckon with the prison as his home rather than as a place he had merely prepared to enter.

Establishing a place in Block G

Hoffmann positioned himself in the television corner shortly before the other fifteen prisoners returned. He knew their backgrounds from photographs and chose a seat from which he could watch them arrive while making himself conspicuous. By occupying another prisoner’s favorite chair and beginning a game of solitaire with marked cards, he signaled that he would not wait quietly for acceptance.

The two men he was watching for were Stefan Lygas and Karol Tomasz Penderecki, members of Wojtek serving long sentences at Aspsås Prison. They were meant to help Hoffmann remove rival dealers and take over the prison drug market; if his identity as Paula were exposed, they could also become his executioners. Their position depended in part on information they had already circulated: through Stefan’s lawyer, they obtained copies of Hoffmann’s police, intelligence, prison, and court records to establish his criminal standing.

At supper, two older prisoners demanded to see Hoffmann’s papers. Stefan and Karol Tomasz rose to intervene, but Hoffmann stopped them and allowed the challenge to proceed. The confrontation was a test of standing, framed around the shared hatred that could bind prisoners together. Hoffmann’s response let him demonstrate that he could manage a threat without immediately relying on his allies.

A fragile protection and a turning point

On a Wednesday morning, Hoffmann waited for the unit to open, relying on a pillow beneath the covers, a chair at the threshold, and a sock caught between the door and its frame as makeshift protection. The arrangement bought him only a few seconds if an attacker chose the moment when guards could not see or hear. Prison life therefore required constant attention even in the ordinary interval before breakfast.

By then, Hoffmann had taken an initial step toward control of the market: he had used forty-two grams of thirty-percent manufactured amphetamine to bring down the prison’s three principal dealers. Reports had reached Warsaw and the deputy chief executive, who marked the next stage with a bottle of Żubrówka. The operation’s progress was real, but it depended on secrecy and on the continued usefulness of the people protecting him.

That protection failed when one of the four men around him betrayed him. As exposure threatened, Hoffmann was moved by the prison riot squad from Block G to the voluntary isolation unit in Block C. The move reduced contact with prisoners from other units but also narrowed his world to the people in isolation; voices calling for Paula continued to reach him there. The transfer changed the immediate conditions of his survival without resolving the danger created by his exposed identity.

May 27 and the footage afterward

The decisive record begins at 2:26 p.m. on May 27. After considering the transcripts and video recorder, Ewert Grens drove to Aspsås and requested the prison security-camera footage from that time onward, following the lethal shot fired from the church tower. He returned to the police headquarters, obtained fresh coffee, and watched the recording frame by frame, concentrating on camera fourteen above the glass front of central security.

Grens tracked the people leaving the prison—staff, visitors, prisoners, and suppliers—until he reached a tape recorded four days after the shot. At 8:06 p.m., a cropped-haired man in a Swedish Prison and Probation Service uniform looked up at the camera for an unusually long moment and then continued out. Grens recognized the significance of the image at once. The date that had seemed to confirm Hoffmann’s death thus became the starting point for evidence that someone had left the prison afterward, reopening the apparent ending of the May 27 crisis.