According to his children, Veikko Saukko was an abused child, both physically and psychologically. His father was stern, critical, and impossible to please. Saukko himself is profane, cruel and violence-prone, known for striking employees without provocation, and his enjoyment of drunken bar brawls has resulted in him being locked up in drunk tanks in various cities around the world. He smokes three packs of cigarettes a day, has been an alcoholic since an early age, and even today, at age sixty-nine, habitually drinks four gin and tonics per hour. Several years ago, he spent three months in jail for drunk driving. His known associates include influential racists and a number of mafiosi from various countries. Saukko inherited his father’s racist views, and has no qualms about expressing them, either privately or publicly.
Saukko has a complex personality. Despite the above, adjectives used by friends and acquaintances to describe him include: charming, sensitive, droll, profound, open, timid, dreadfully shy, and a sophisticated and entertaining conversationalist. He’s also one of Finland’s most skilled open-sea yachtsmen. A picture emerges of a manic-depressive, even schizophrenic man.
His first wife, Anna-Leena, bore him five children, three girls and two boys. He divorced her suddenly and without apparent provocation after thirty-six years of marriage. Three weeks later, he married Tuula Jaatinen, age twenty-six. Tuula was made director of the Saukko art foundation and began embezzling right away. Over the course of two years, she absconded with, at best estimation, 10.2 million euros. She was tried and convicted for embezzlement, but disappeared rather than serve her three-year prison sentence.
Currently, Tuula lives in Switzerland. Finnish authorities requested that the Swiss return her to Finland, but the Swiss prevented the extradition. She’s wanted by Interpol, as requested by Finnish officials. Her location in Switzerland is known to Finnish police and press. Interestingly, she’s still married to Veikko Saukko, even though, aside from the embezzlement described above, she’s rumored to have been the lover of Veikko’s son, Antti—also married with children—throughout the course of her marriage to Veikko.
Veikko’s first wife, Anna-Leena, is in deep legal difficulties herself. As former director of the foundation, she was accused, via multiple lawsuits, of misappropriation of funds. In 2007, she declared bankruptcy, after being court-ordered to return 17.5 million euros to the foundation.
The five Saukko children all live at home, with the exceptions of Kaarina, deceased, and Antti, missing for nearly a year, in the mansion that stands two hundred meters behind the museum. Veikko insists that he stays surrounded by his children, whether single or married, and that they reside in the mansion. He enforces this through financial blackmail. His children are:
SON JANNE—member of corporation’s board of directors. Age thirty-seven.
SON ANTTI—member of corporation’s board of directors, but a less-than-serious person. He prefers yachting, snowboarding and surfing to working. Married. Father of four. Age thirty-nine.
DAUGHTER KAARINA—party girl. A Finnish Paris Hilton. She would have been age thirty-two.
DAUGHTER JOHANNA—married and mother of two. Lutheran priest. Age forty-two.
DAUGHTER PAULIINA—the troubled child. Engaged in prostitution as a minor, presumably to antagonize her father and defy him to publish her antics in Be Happy. Finally he did, after which she gave up prostitution. She did, however, become a heroin addict. She’s now a recluse, seldom if ever leaves the mansion, and is addicted to methadone. Age forty-four.
His children despise their father and have made no effort, not even in the media, to pretend otherwise. Some of them believe he has a narcissistic personality disorder, and a total inability to feel empathy. They complain that he subjects them to late-night drunken monologues, and pits them against one another by constantly changing the provisions of their inheritances.