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Stockholm’s drug trade entangles a student posing as wealthy, an immigrant dealer and a mob enforcer; criminal defence lawyer Jens Lapidus traces its hierarchies.
Money from drugs, prostitution and protection rackets is cleaned by running it through ordinary-looking businesses like video stores and restaurants, and through chains of offshore companies that send it back home. Because of this, the clean economy and the dirty one come to share the same businesses and the same people. The line between them keeps getting thinner.
The pull of quick money can matter more than old loyalties of ethnicity or traditional gang membership. People from very different backgrounds, a would-be upper-class student, an immigrant dealer and a mob enforcer, end up working together or against each other because the money draws them all to the same trade.
Someone who wants to belong to a richer crowd can study its manners, slang and timing until he passes as one of them. Keeping up the act takes real money he does not have, so he lives two lives: a few nights of high living and the rest spent scraping by. The gap between the two lives is what makes quick, illegal money so tempting.
Modern criminal groups increasingly borrow the language and methods of corporations: expansion, recruiting skilled staff, financial engineering. Criminal work becomes a career inside a system with ranks and rules, not just a string of individual choices.
The enforcer who does a boss's dirty work carries the most risk but sees little of the profit. Over time this unfairness wears down his loyalty, and he starts looking for a better deal for himself.
A man can break people's fingers with one hand and stroke his child's cheek with the other. He keeps the two worlds apart and fears what his child would think if she found out. His dream of a normal family life sits uneasily next to the work that pays for it.
When accomplices save themselves by informing on a partner, the betrayed person may make revenge the organising goal of his life. Planning it gives him a purpose, but it also drains him.
Seen from inside the underworld, the police are faint background figures and nobody stands for justice. The only differences are degrees of badness, so any code of honour exists only inside the group, such as sparing one's own countrymen.
Behind the glamour of a wealthy city's nightlife runs an organised trade in drugs, extortion and laundered money, strained by ethnic tension and social unrest. The rich party scene and the criminal economy feed each other.
In a world built on easy money, loyalties are hard to win and revenge is fought hard. Once people are in, they get set against one another, and finding a way out is harder still.