At ten thirty a.m. on that dreary May Day Eve, with the tellers’ cash drawers freshly filled, two men entered the branch of Sampo Bank in It?keskus, in East Helsinki. They wore black military-style clothing, ski masks, and carried AK-47-type rifles. Each had two banana clips fastened end to end with black electrical tape, so that when one clip was shot empty, the two-clip rig would only have to be flipped to re-load, eliminating the need to reach for another clip.
They fired off bursts into the air to make their presences known and began screaming in thick, grammatically poor English. One shot an unarmed bank guard dead. They didn’t have to order people to lay prone on the floor. The few early customers flung themselves down in the hope of staying out of harm’s way. No alarm was triggered. The robbers ordered the tellers to fill black plastic grocery bags with money. One teller, an older woman, too terrified to move, was also executed.
The robbery was over in less than three minutes. Before they left, one robber bellowed, “We strike against the enemies of God.” The other laughed and shouted, “Lock your daughters up, you motherfuckers, we comin’ to get you.”
I was called within minutes of the robbery and told to come to the crime scene because, as with the young soldier whose throat had been cut, it was felt that the robbery was related to the murder of Lisbet S?derlund.
Milo living so close to me was a convenience. I called him, picked him up, and we were at the bank within half an hour. It wouldn’t be my case, it would go to Saska Lindgren. Apparently, a race war was in progress, he would be given the cases related to it, and I would consult because of the presidential mandate concerning Lisbet S?derlund. We questioned all present. We looked at the videotapes. Although we couldn’t be certain because the only exposed skin we had to go by was the area around their eyes, all agreed that the perps were black.
Milo rolled a tape back and forth a few times. “The rifles they used,” he said, “are Rk 95 Tps, the type stolen from the training camp. An unlikely coincidence.”
According to the rules of battle as set forth by the white combatants in this race war, the original decree was “For every crime committed by black men, we will kill a nigger in retribution.”
That hadn’t proven accurate. A number of crimes had been committed by blacks since then without retribution. My gut told me, though, that they had realized the difficulties behind killing a black person for every crime committed, but as was the case with the young soldier, murder would be answered with murder, and if we couldn’t unravel this fast, more people would soon die.
Later that evening, Milo called me. He’d picked up something interesting on a cell phone tap. Helsinki was heroin dry, and Russians were going to try to re-lubricate. The Russians believed they were safe, as only two men knew about the deal, the seller and the buyer. One would bring five kilos to Helsinki tomorrow. It was worth a million euros plus on the street. The deal was for half a million, wholesale price.
The normal price of a gram of heroin was a hundred twenty euros. With the city bone dry, the buyer planned to sell it for more than twice that price. He would distribute by the ounce, and then one more rung down the ladder, smaller dealers would sell by the eight ball—three and a half grams—but end users would pay two hundred fifty a gram. Plus, this was eighty-eight percent pure Afghan heroin. Street heroin was usually fifty percent. He could step on it hard with lactose and sell it off as close to eight kilos. In Afghanistan, a kilo costs five thousand bucks. Five thousand becomes a million. The stuff entrepreneurial dreams are made of.
Tomorrow was Vappu. They would seal the deal and celebrate spring by having some drinks on the patio outside at Kaivohuone—The Well Room—at five p.m., and then make the exchange in the parking lot. Milo asked if I wanted to take it on.