Piet Hoffmann’s infiltration of Aspsås prison is both an undercover operation and a forced adjustment to a closed institution: he enters with a plan for taking control of the prison drug market, but must first learn how to live under its rules and establish standing among its prisoners. His apparent authority depends on Wojtek contacts who can help him; the same network can expose him as Paula and turn that protection into danger.

Preparation and entry

Before entering the prison, Hoffmann had mapped its buildings from the church tower, studied the bars on its windows, and, while on remand, learned about the prisoners and staff in Block G with Erik Wilson’s help. The knowledge gave him a working picture of the place, but not the experience of being inside it. When the gates opened and the transport bus moved toward central security, he crossed into one of the country’s highest-security prisons for the first time.

The controlled entry made clear that preparation could not remove the institution’s power over his body and movement. Guards escorted him through a separate entrance into registration, removed his restraints, and subjected him to a security search. Afterward he received prison clothes and waited in a sterile room without speaking. The operation had brought him inside the walls; it could not make him an ordinary visitor or spare him the prison’s procedures.

Ten days passed before he moved into the unit. For twenty-three hours each day, he was confined behind a metal door in a five-square-metre cell, without visitors, newspapers, television, or radio. The imposed routine reduced his world to the cell and the brief interval outside it. His longing for company sharpened during the isolation, a reminder that the operation demanded not only tactical control but endurance of the prison’s enforced separation.

Establishing a place in the unit

When the unit was empty, the principal officer gave Hoffmann a practical orientation: where to use the toilet and why lock-in occurred at seven thirty rather than five minutes later. The tour covered the ordinary details that would structure his days. Afterward he had time to sit in his cell and accept that, for the foreseeable future, this was where he lived.

Before the other prisoners returned, Hoffmann chose a visible place in the television corner. He knew the faces and backgrounds of all fifteen men in the unit and wanted to see them arrive, but his own visibility mattered just as much. Rather than hide in Cell 4 or wait for an opening to present his papers, he took a familiar seat, used marked playing cards, and began a game of solitaire at someone else’s table. These small breaches of convention presented him as someone prepared to claim space, not as a newcomer asking permission.

At supper, two older prisoners questioned him about his papers. Stefan Lygas and Karol Tomasz Penderecki initially moved to intervene, but Hoffmann signalled them to hold back and let the exchange proceed. He recognized that respect in the unit had to be negotiated through its informal rules as well as through official documents. The challenge became an early test of whether he could manage scrutiny without appearing dependent on his protectors.

Wojtek’s network and the drug-market operation

Stefan and Karol Tomasz were two of four Wojtek members serving long sentences at Aspsås. Hoffmann regarded them as helpers in eliminating competitors and taking over the prison drug market; if his identity as Paula were exposed, they could also become his executioners. Their role therefore carried the operation’s central contradiction: they made his position stronger while giving the organization a route to him.

The two men had prepared the unit for his arrival. For several days they had discussed who was coming, what he had been taken in for, whom he had worked with, and his standing with Eastern European mafias. Through Stefan’s lawyer they obtained copies of his criminal-record, criminal-intelligence, prison, and recent court files. Hoffmann’s apparent criminal identity was thus supported by a dossier presented through the channels of the prison world. He was not relying on improvisation alone; his arrival had been preceded by a coordinated effort to make his claimed status legible to other prisoners.

The operation soon produced a concrete advance. Hoffmann brought down the three principal dealers in Aspsås with forty-two grams of manufactured amphetamine at 30 percent strength. Reports needed for the next stage had reached Warsaw and the deputy CEO, who marked the development by opening a bottle of Żubrówka. The transaction connected a specific act inside the prison to the wider organization’s plans: the takeover was being monitored and treated as a progression, not as a local dispute detached from Wojtek’s operations.

Exposure, isolation, and the cost of survival

The prison’s separate units offered a way to manage immediate danger without leaving its walls. When Hoffmann believed he was about to be exposed, he demanded isolation. A ten-person riot squad entered Block G; six officers remained to deter renewed violence while four escorted him to the voluntary isolation unit in Block C. Though the unit resembled other prison accommodation—with a wardens’ room, television corner, showers, kitchen, and Ping-Pong table—it separated its residents from prisoners in the other units. The transfer changed who could reach him, but did not restore an ordinary life or end the threat.

The protection offered by Hoffmann’s allies then reversed. He understood that one of the four people who had served as his protection and possible route of escape had exposed him. The betrayal made the danger internal to the network on which he had relied: the people positioned to help maintain his cover were also close enough to destroy it. In isolation, the name Paula was called from farther away, while wardens tried to quiet the voice without understanding what the call meant to him.

Hoffmann’s response to the prison’s threat was to suppress the feelings that might make survival harder. He felt none of the fear or stress he believed he should feel, and shut away thoughts of Zofia, Hugo, and Rasmus—the reminders of the life outside that he needed to keep out of mind. He had entered this state as he passed through the prison gate, and abandoned it for only two seconds when a shot was about to be fired. The infiltration’s decisive cost is therefore not just confinement or exposure: the means of staying alive require him to suspend his connection to the people for whom he is trying to survive.