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The trial of a narcotics squad chief reveals the shadowy world of Finnish police
- The United States is not alone in facing problems with its police -
By Jarkko Sipila
I walked out of the massive Helsinki District Courthouse into the dark and rainy December weather— these late afternoons are dark as nights —and I had to laugh out loud. The day in court had been bizarre.
I’ve worked 25 years as a crime reporter and written more than 20 crime novels –those translated into English are the Helsinki Homicide series. But this Aarnio case is something special. There is no way I could use this plot in my novels. Why not? Because my novels are realistic police procedurals.
If you live in Finland, you know this case, which has occupied top headlines for the past two years. It has also shaken the foundations of the Finnish police force. One of Finland’s most prominent police officers faces a maximum sentence of 13 years on drug smuggling charges.
I’ve spent about 90 days this year reporting the case from the District Court for Finnish Channel 3 News and its website.
Outside of Finland, there’s a good chance you have never heard of this case, although the New York Times wrote a story on it last August.
The story of Jari Aarnio’s trial shows what can happen if proper oversight of police activities are neglected and “the end justifies the means”-mentality prevails. The case also provides an excellent example of poor police leadership. Several problems have arisen over how the police have handled the investigation of one of their own, more on those later.
And this is not the only controversial police trial in Finland this year. This month three officers were charged with abuse of public office. According to the charges there was wide misuse of confidential police records that resulted in many people without any criminal connections ending up in a police database; the list even included Russian president Vladimir Putin. This case also demonstrates the results of lack of police control and oversight.
It has not been a good year to be a cop in Finland, but let me get back to the Aarnio case and first give you some background on Mr. Aarnio and the Finnish system.
Narcotics Officer of the Year
Jari Aarnio was the head of the Helsinki Police Department Narcotics squad. A slightly chubby man, nicknamed “The Emperor,” he has superb social skills. He can get along as well with the president of the Republic of Finland as with the president of Hells Angels.
“A strong willed man brings out strong emotions,” one witness said last week in court.
Mr. Aarnio, now 58, had worked in the Helsinki PD Narcotics Unit since the 1980s and became the head of the 80-officer unit in 1999. He was awarded the prestigious “Finnish Police Officer of the year” title in 1987.
He was frequently in the media—well, he still is for different reasons, but earlier he was the narcotics officer in Finland. The case is roughly akin to NYPD whistleblower Frank Serpico being put on trial for corruption.
In 2000, there were well over a hundred local police departments in Finland, but due to budget cuts and consolidation, the current number is 12. This has, of course, led to bad blood and envy as police chiefs have been forced to compete against each other for the top jobs.
Then there is the Finnish FBI, here called the NBI, for National Bureau of Investigation. Its main task has been to investigate organized crime and complex financial crimes, as well as narcotics crimes. The Finnish Customs is the third major player in antidrug enforcement. Historically, the Helsinki PD narcotics squad has handled the biggest cases and largest confiscations. It was the top dog in the country.
Cooperation among the various police departments traditionally has been bad; for example, in the ’90s, there was almost a shootout as Helsinki Police, NBI and Customs staked out the same gas station and believed each other to be gangsters.
The main setting: Helsinki PD vs NBI.
Helsinki PD is by far the largest police department in Finland and employs about 18 percent of the country’s police officers. The NBI has worried about its own future as police departments have grown larger and gained more and more expertise in difficult cases. As a result, the NBI has been forced to shut down some of its offices around Finland.
Some of the other police departments have sided with NBI, some with Helsinki PD. Others try to stay neutral mainly out of fear. Espoo PD, in a neighboring city to Helsinki, for example, sided with the NBI as they busted a Helsinki PD informant in the ’90s and ran into problems with Mr. Aarnio. This made cooperation in the Greater Helsinki region even more difficult.
So, bad blood and envy have reigned in the Finnish police. Neither the national police commissioner nor the National Police Board under him has been able to correct the situation. Matters were not taken seriously, and it’s possible that police bosses believed that competition among the narcotics units produces better results.
“The Barrel” Case
Around Christmas of 2011, the NBI got information from Holland that a barrel containing about 140 kilos of cannabis had been detained in Arnhem, Holland. It was bound to Finland.
The barrel was emptied of drugs and sent to the Finnish address as a decoy. This led the NBI to the people who received the barrel, and ultimately five men were sentenced to a total of 50-some years in prison. Helsinki Police was included in this operation, called “Duo,” as Helsinki PD was at that time investigating a large cannabis case in Eastern Helsinki.
The cooperation between the units resulted only in more bickering than anything else, with very little information shared. Their meetings have been described as pre-school kids brawling.
The NBI never arrested the leader of the barrel smugglers, whom they nicknamed the “Pasila man,” since the 10 or so prepaid-phones used by him were located mostly in the district of western Pasila, where the Helsinki PD is headquartered.
At the end of 2012 the Helsinki PD narcotics squad admitted to NBI that the phones were prepaid numbers used by Helsinki PD to contact informants. The NBI dropped any further investigation of the “Pasila man” for the time being.
Prosecutors now argue that Mr. Aarnio himself was the “Pasila man.” The renewed investigation began with one prostitute.
The Prostitute
Early in 2013 officials at the Ministry of the Interior, which oversees police activity, were contacted by a prostitute who in public has gone by the name of “Saara.” She told officials about Mr. Aarnio’s lavish cash spending and how he had pushed her into prostitution and supported her. Saara also said that she had had sex with the narcotics squad chief.
Saara’s background is colorful. In the early ’90s she was dating a man who was found dead in a car near the Helsinki dockyards. He had been shot along with another man. The case is still unsolved. In 2003 a former informant to the Swedish police was killed in the apartment registered to Saara. Four men were sentenced to life in the case, but the body has never been found.
In the summer of 2013, after meeting with Saara, the ministry initiated an investigation of Mr. Aarnio for abuse of public office.
The Investigation
In Finland there is no special unit to investigate crimes committed by police officers. The law states that the head of the investigation must be a prosecutor, but the investigation itself can be executed by other police officers as long as they belong to a different unit.
The Office of Prosecutor General chose Mr. Jukka Haavisto to lead the investigation of Mr. Aarnio and the NBI to execute the actual investigative duties.
Mr. Aarnio’s defense team has repeatedly stated that the investigation has not been impartial.
In 2009 Mr. Haavisto had previously prosecuted Mr. Aarnio in a court case which originally began from suspicion that Mr. Aarnio and the Helsinki PD had leaked information to their informant to protect him from the NBI. Mr. Aarnio was acquitted in this case. His defense stated that the NBI investigators in the case were Mr. Aarnio’s public enemies.
The Prosecutors’ Case
Mr. Aarnio was arrested in November 2013 on bribery charges, and a month later, in December, the investigation was widened to include narcotics offenses. Mr. Aarnio was suspected of being the “Pasila man”—the point man in the barrel smuggling case.
The discovery of one of the “Pasila man’s” phones in Jari Aarnio’s garage and the linking of phone location data to Aarnio’s whereabouts broke as major news in a country where people don’t trust politicians, but do place trust in the police. In hindsight way too much trust.
The NBI left no stone unturned. Mr. Aarnio’s son and wife became suspects. Search warrants were executed at his parents’ house. Another police department in Eastern Finland was suspected of a cover-up, aiding Mr. Aarnio.
In the winter of 2014, 80 NBI officers were investigating the case, and the costs rose to millions of euros. NBI took the case very seriously.
Extensive searches were carried out in the offices of the Helsinki PD. Several Helsinki narcotics squad officers were placed under suspicion and arrested. Mr. Aarnio was the only one charged with drug crimes. Three others were accused in the ongoing trial of abuse of public office.
Later the suspicions also led to the “cleansing” of the Helsinki PD narcotics squad, where a third of the officers have been transferred either voluntarily or involuntarily.
Also, for example, hotel records were dug up trying to link Mr. Aarnio’s whereabouts to the “Pasila man’s” phone location data; this information revealed that Mr. Aarnio had been with a female acquaintance. He claims that the NBI included this information in the investigation just to destroy his marriage.
The Trial
The trial began in January 2015, and is still proceeding. Mr. Aarnio faces 13 years in prison on about 30 charges, including aggravated narcotics offenses, bribery, witness intimidation and obstruction of justice.
The trial was separated into two parts. In the first part, Mr. Aarnio had already been convicted and sentenced to one year and eight months for bribery and abuse of public office. He secretly owned a part of a small technology company called Trevoc, which supplied Helsinki PD with tracking devices.
To complicate this case a bit was the fact that the main owner of Trevoc is Pasi Patama who was fired from the NBI in 2007 after he lost the trust of his supervisors. But this fact evidently didn’t prevent NBI from investigating the case.
The narcotics case began in June 2015. Mr. Aarnio and all of his 10 co-defendants pleaded not guilty.
There is no smoking-gun evidence in the case. The state prosecutor Jarmo Hirvonen has talked about the evidence as “mosaic,” meaning that many small pieces joined together can reveal the whole picture.
Voices have been raised and tempers have flared in the courtroom. Security has been heavy; a remotely-controlled drone operated by the police crashed in the courthouse yard. The only resulting injury was police pride, which has also been questioned inside the courthouse.
Prosecutors link Mr. Aarnio to the cannabis barrels mainly via telephone location data, his unexplained wealth of at least 400,000 euros, and interrogations of two of his co-defendants. But in court both have denied those statements.
One of the strongest pieces of evidence is the 70,000 euros found hidden in the backyard of Mr. Aarnio’s country home. The place was originally searched in November 2013, at which time money-sniffing dogs didn’t find anything. The stash was found a half year later in a new search. Mr. Aarnio’s defense claims that the money had been planted in order to frame him.
The prosecutors and the defense might agree on the finding, but differ in their explanations. “We would need a time machine to find out what really happened,” prosecutor Mikko Männikkö said in disgust at one point.
I agree with Mr. Männikkö. A time machine could really help, but would it solve the case? Maybe to judges and the press, but the prosecutors and the defense would still be locked into their own explanations and opinions.
The Dying Millionaire
Surprisingly, in early November, Mr. Aarnio admitted to having amassed hundreds of thousands of euros in extra cash, as prosecutors have charged. In the previous two years, he had made no comments at all concerning his finances.
In his explanation, he said that he had met a Finnish businessman in the 1980s and provided him with security during his business deals. Mr. Aarnio had, for example, helped him to secure deals with Arabs who had needed Finnish prostitutes brought into their countries. Libya was one of these countries.
Mr. Aarnio testified that he had never received money from the businessman, but that in 2002 in a theatre parking lot he had been given 447,000 euros from a courier of the dying business millionaire, thanking Mr. Aarnio for his services. He kept the money without reporting it on his taxes.
Oddly enough there’s at least some truth to this story. The widow of the millionaire was suspected of stealing the money, as she had withdrawn over a million euros from her husband’s bank account, apparently with his permission, a few days prior to the terminally-ill millionaire’s death. The wife then brought the money to the hospital but nobody knows what happened to it afterwards. Ultimately the wife was acquitted of any crime in an almost 10-year-old court case.
When prosecutors commented that Mr. Aarnio had built his explanation of this money on a few publicly-known facts, Mr. Aarnio’s defense replied that this was no different than the manner in which the prosecutors had built their entire case.
The Midpoint
The 100-day-long drug trial is now about at midpoint. The case has revealed a shadowy police world where informant contacts are not registered, where documentation is scarce and where some of it at the Helsinki PD has gone missing. Rules have been ignored and oversight nonexistent. A confiscated phone has disappeared, and suspicions have arisen that the Helsinki PD tricked the District Court into issuing phone-tap permits.
The case has also revealed the possibility that phone location data have not been 100-percent reliable, which may have far-reaching consequences, since that data have been widely used in Finnish courts as quite foolproof evidence of a person’s location.
Mr. Aarnio has explained that the “Pasila man” phones actually were prepaid phones Helsinki PD used to contact police informants. No records have been kept of the phones. One of the contacts was a man thought to be a leader in the Finnish underworld.
During the case several police informants have been named, although some parts of the trial have had to be conducted behind closed doors.
In the end of November 2015 the court surprisingly released Mr. Aarnio from pretrial detention where he had been kept for two years. The Court stated that further detention would be unfair as it believed he could no longer disrupt the investigation.
First witnesses
The hearing of witnesses began in early December 2015 and will proceed until at least March 2016. Witnesses include police officers, criminals and even journalists. A journalist will be asked if Mr. Aarnio was the source for his controversial story. If he refuses to answer, he can—according to law—be sent to jail for 90 days.
The first witnesses were officers from the Helsinki PD and the Kuopio PD narcotics squads. They highlighted the differences between local police departments and the NBI. This acrimony had almost led to fights during the annual cruise of narcotics officers last spring. One Kuopio officer on the ship even had brought with him tapes of secretly-recorded conversations of the NBI superintendent badmouthing Mr. Aarnio.
Several officers in the courtroom were described as being enemies. Two of the Helsinki PD narcotics officers told the court that Lasse Aapio, chief of Helsinki PD, had told them they would have to choose sides when in court. They understood this to mean that they were directed to make statements against Mr. Aarnio.
Mr. Aapio was Mr. Aarnio’s superior for a few years and was supposed to directly supervise him, but this didn’t prevent Mr. Aapio’s nomination as chief of the Helsinki PD in 2014. At that same time, the Helsinki PD Narcotics Unit received its new director from Espoo PD’s Narcotics Unit, a man who had sided with the NBI.
In relation to Mr. Aarnio, some suspicious events from the NBI investigation have already come to light.
The NBI Officer
Friday, the fourth of December, 2015, was the most bizarre day to date of “the trial of the century.”
Only one witness was called, an NBI officer who had interrogated one of the main persons-of-interest in the case, a 43-year-old woman who was close to one of the biggest Finnish drug lords of the ’80s and ’90s, Miika Kortekallio.
Mr. Aarnio busted Kortekallio in the ’80s, and he received a long sentence. After being released from prison Kortekallio returned to his old business, and in 2002 ended up dying somewhat mysteriously while in prison again. Kortekallio had close ties to Aarnio, but was he an informant? Yes, he was, claimed one of the Espoo PD officers last week in court.
Prosecutors say that with her Dutch contacts the woman helped Aarnio organize the smuggling ring. Since prosecutors are demanding an eight-year sentence for her, she is listed as one of the co-defendants.
In the 2014 NBI interrogations, she talked about smuggling and about how Mr. Aarnio had ordered her to do specific things, but in court this September she denied those statements. According to the law, judges can make their own decisions on which statements they believe.
This was the reason why the NBI officer was called to testify in court now. Some strange facts came to light: The officer admitted that he had given the woman three thousand euros during the year. He had also bought her a moped, phone, plane ticket, food, and many lunches. One of the main interrogations was done after the policeman had paid for the woman’s alcoholic drink.
The NBI officer said that he had paid all of it from his own personal funds and that his superiors knew nothing about it. Mr. Aarnio’s defense lawyer of course doesn’t believe this. Two shopping trips and phone bills were reimbursed to him by the NBI.
It is clear that the NBI officer endangered the investigation of the most important police corruption case in Finnish history by his actions. He is in now under investigation of abuse of public office.
But this wasn’t all. The 43-year-old woman was held in custody for a month in the spring of 2014. Every day the NBI officer visited her in jail.
Their relationship included “sweetheart-style” text messages which were sent back and forth. The officer denied any sexual involvement; he said he gave her money because he felt sorry that she was facing serious charges. The officer also said that they used to listen to Ed Sheeran’s ballad “I See Fire” before the interrogations. Sometimes even her attorney was present in the room.
The judge ended the Friday hearings by telling the reporters: “Well, welcome back next Tuesday to see what happens then.”
Well, that Tuesday was much duller. Mr. Aarnio’s wife declined to testify, one Helsinki PD officer claimed that 60 kilos of amphetamines got into the county because of the disputes between Helsinki PD and the NBI, and one informant was named in court. He’s dead now, so no harm was done.
The main question in the trial remains: Is Mr. Aarnio the “Pasila man?”
Well, what else can I say…? The “trial of the century” is living up to its claim. It has been partly Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., partly Love Boat, partly soap opera, and it provides the confusion of almost any sitcom.
Crime reporters are not supposed to have any feelings - it doesn’t matter to me if Mr. Aarnio is guilty or not - the case still makes me sad and mad. Finnish people deserve better from their police.
But had I written this story as part of my Helsinki Homicide series, my publisher would have laughed me out of his office. “Not a chance; this stuff is too far out, not believable,” he would have told me. “Come back with something that can actually happen.”
Jarkko Sipilä is a Finnish journalist and author of the Helsinki Homicide series.
twitter: @sipilamtv3
Cell: +358-40-5086169
www.jarkkosipila.com
I walked out of the massive Helsinki District Courthouse into the dark and rainy December weather— these late afternoons are dark as nights —and I had to laugh out loud. The day in court had been bizarre.
I’ve worked 25 years as a crime reporter and written more than 20 crime novels –those translated into English are the Helsinki Homicide series. But this Aarnio case is something special. There is no way I could use this plot in my novels. Why not? Because my novels are realistic police procedurals.
If you live in Finland, you know this case, which has occupied top headlines for the past two years. It has also shaken the foundations of the Finnish police force. One of Finland’s most prominent police officers faces a maximum sentence of 13 years on drug smuggling charges.
I’ve spent about 90 days this year reporting the case from the District Court for Finnish Channel 3 News and its website.
Outside of Finland, there’s a good chance you have never heard of this case, although the New York Times wrote a story on it last August.
The story of Jari Aarnio’s trial shows what can happen if proper oversight of police activities are neglected and “the end justifies the means”-mentality prevails. The case also provides an excellent example of poor police leadership. Several problems have arisen over how the police have handled the investigation of one of their own, more on those later.
And this is not the only controversial police trial in Finland this year. This month three officers were charged with abuse of public office. According to the charges there was wide misuse of confidential police records that resulted in many people without any criminal connections ending up in a police database; the list even included Russian president Vladimir Putin. This case also demonstrates the results of lack of police control and oversight.
It has not been a good year to be a cop in Finland, but let me get back to the Aarnio case and first give you some background on Mr. Aarnio and the Finnish system.
Narcotics Officer of the Year
Jari Aarnio was the head of the Helsinki Police Department Narcotics squad. A slightly chubby man, nicknamed “The Emperor,” he has superb social skills. He can get along as well with the president of the Republic of Finland as with the president of Hells Angels.
“A strong willed man brings out strong emotions,” one witness said last week in court.
Mr. Aarnio, now 58, had worked in the Helsinki PD Narcotics Unit since the 1980s and became the head of the 80-officer unit in 1999. He was awarded the prestigious “Finnish Police Officer of the year” title in 1987.
He was frequently in the media—well, he still is for different reasons, but earlier he was the narcotics officer in Finland. The case is roughly akin to NYPD whistleblower Frank Serpico being put on trial for corruption.
In 2000, there were well over a hundred local police departments in Finland, but due to budget cuts and consolidation, the current number is 12. This has, of course, led to bad blood and envy as police chiefs have been forced to compete against each other for the top jobs.
Then there is the Finnish FBI, here called the NBI, for National Bureau of Investigation. Its main task has been to investigate organized crime and complex financial crimes, as well as narcotics crimes. The Finnish Customs is the third major player in antidrug enforcement. Historically, the Helsinki PD narcotics squad has handled the biggest cases and largest confiscations. It was the top dog in the country.
Cooperation among the various police departments traditionally has been bad; for example, in the ’90s, there was almost a shootout as Helsinki Police, NBI and Customs staked out the same gas station and believed each other to be gangsters.
The main setting: Helsinki PD vs NBI.
Helsinki PD is by far the largest police department in Finland and employs about 18 percent of the country’s police officers. The NBI has worried about its own future as police departments have grown larger and gained more and more expertise in difficult cases. As a result, the NBI has been forced to shut down some of its offices around Finland.
Some of the other police departments have sided with NBI, some with Helsinki PD. Others try to stay neutral mainly out of fear. Espoo PD, in a neighboring city to Helsinki, for example, sided with the NBI as they busted a Helsinki PD informant in the ’90s and ran into problems with Mr. Aarnio. This made cooperation in the Greater Helsinki region even more difficult.
So, bad blood and envy have reigned in the Finnish police. Neither the national police commissioner nor the National Police Board under him has been able to correct the situation. Matters were not taken seriously, and it’s possible that police bosses believed that competition among the narcotics units produces better results.
“The Barrel” Case
Around Christmas of 2011, the NBI got information from Holland that a barrel containing about 140 kilos of cannabis had been detained in Arnhem, Holland. It was bound to Finland.
The barrel was emptied of drugs and sent to the Finnish address as a decoy. This led the NBI to the people who received the barrel, and ultimately five men were sentenced to a total of 50-some years in prison. Helsinki Police was included in this operation, called “Duo,” as Helsinki PD was at that time investigating a large cannabis case in Eastern Helsinki.
The cooperation between the units resulted only in more bickering than anything else, with very little information shared. Their meetings have been described as pre-school kids brawling.
The NBI never arrested the leader of the barrel smugglers, whom they nicknamed the “Pasila man,” since the 10 or so prepaid-phones used by him were located mostly in the district of western Pasila, where the Helsinki PD is headquartered.
At the end of 2012 the Helsinki PD narcotics squad admitted to NBI that the phones were prepaid numbers used by Helsinki PD to contact informants. The NBI dropped any further investigation of the “Pasila man” for the time being.
Prosecutors now argue that Mr. Aarnio himself was the “Pasila man.” The renewed investigation began with one prostitute.
The Prostitute
Early in 2013 officials at the Ministry of the Interior, which oversees police activity, were contacted by a prostitute who in public has gone by the name of “Saara.” She told officials about Mr. Aarnio’s lavish cash spending and how he had pushed her into prostitution and supported her. Saara also said that she had had sex with the narcotics squad chief.
Saara’s background is colorful. In the early ’90s she was dating a man who was found dead in a car near the Helsinki dockyards. He had been shot along with another man. The case is still unsolved. In 2003 a former informant to the Swedish police was killed in the apartment registered to Saara. Four men were sentenced to life in the case, but the body has never been found.
In the summer of 2013, after meeting with Saara, the ministry initiated an investigation of Mr. Aarnio for abuse of public office.
The Investigation
In Finland there is no special unit to investigate crimes committed by police officers. The law states that the head of the investigation must be a prosecutor, but the investigation itself can be executed by other police officers as long as they belong to a different unit.
The Office of Prosecutor General chose Mr. Jukka Haavisto to lead the investigation of Mr. Aarnio and the NBI to execute the actual investigative duties.
Mr. Aarnio’s defense team has repeatedly stated that the investigation has not been impartial.
In 2009 Mr. Haavisto had previously prosecuted Mr. Aarnio in a court case which originally began from suspicion that Mr. Aarnio and the Helsinki PD had leaked information to their informant to protect him from the NBI. Mr. Aarnio was acquitted in this case. His defense stated that the NBI investigators in the case were Mr. Aarnio’s public enemies.
The Prosecutors’ Case
Mr. Aarnio was arrested in November 2013 on bribery charges, and a month later, in December, the investigation was widened to include narcotics offenses. Mr. Aarnio was suspected of being the “Pasila man”—the point man in the barrel smuggling case.
The discovery of one of the “Pasila man’s” phones in Jari Aarnio’s garage and the linking of phone location data to Aarnio’s whereabouts broke as major news in a country where people don’t trust politicians, but do place trust in the police. In hindsight way too much trust.
The NBI left no stone unturned. Mr. Aarnio’s son and wife became suspects. Search warrants were executed at his parents’ house. Another police department in Eastern Finland was suspected of a cover-up, aiding Mr. Aarnio.
In the winter of 2014, 80 NBI officers were investigating the case, and the costs rose to millions of euros. NBI took the case very seriously.
Extensive searches were carried out in the offices of the Helsinki PD. Several Helsinki narcotics squad officers were placed under suspicion and arrested. Mr. Aarnio was the only one charged with drug crimes. Three others were accused in the ongoing trial of abuse of public office.
Later the suspicions also led to the “cleansing” of the Helsinki PD narcotics squad, where a third of the officers have been transferred either voluntarily or involuntarily.
Also, for example, hotel records were dug up trying to link Mr. Aarnio’s whereabouts to the “Pasila man’s” phone location data; this information revealed that Mr. Aarnio had been with a female acquaintance. He claims that the NBI included this information in the investigation just to destroy his marriage.
The Trial
The trial began in January 2015, and is still proceeding. Mr. Aarnio faces 13 years in prison on about 30 charges, including aggravated narcotics offenses, bribery, witness intimidation and obstruction of justice.
The trial was separated into two parts. In the first part, Mr. Aarnio had already been convicted and sentenced to one year and eight months for bribery and abuse of public office. He secretly owned a part of a small technology company called Trevoc, which supplied Helsinki PD with tracking devices.
To complicate this case a bit was the fact that the main owner of Trevoc is Pasi Patama who was fired from the NBI in 2007 after he lost the trust of his supervisors. But this fact evidently didn’t prevent NBI from investigating the case.
The narcotics case began in June 2015. Mr. Aarnio and all of his 10 co-defendants pleaded not guilty.
There is no smoking-gun evidence in the case. The state prosecutor Jarmo Hirvonen has talked about the evidence as “mosaic,” meaning that many small pieces joined together can reveal the whole picture.
Voices have been raised and tempers have flared in the courtroom. Security has been heavy; a remotely-controlled drone operated by the police crashed in the courthouse yard. The only resulting injury was police pride, which has also been questioned inside the courthouse.
Prosecutors link Mr. Aarnio to the cannabis barrels mainly via telephone location data, his unexplained wealth of at least 400,000 euros, and interrogations of two of his co-defendants. But in court both have denied those statements.
One of the strongest pieces of evidence is the 70,000 euros found hidden in the backyard of Mr. Aarnio’s country home. The place was originally searched in November 2013, at which time money-sniffing dogs didn’t find anything. The stash was found a half year later in a new search. Mr. Aarnio’s defense claims that the money had been planted in order to frame him.
The prosecutors and the defense might agree on the finding, but differ in their explanations. “We would need a time machine to find out what really happened,” prosecutor Mikko Männikkö said in disgust at one point.
I agree with Mr. Männikkö. A time machine could really help, but would it solve the case? Maybe to judges and the press, but the prosecutors and the defense would still be locked into their own explanations and opinions.
The Dying Millionaire
Surprisingly, in early November, Mr. Aarnio admitted to having amassed hundreds of thousands of euros in extra cash, as prosecutors have charged. In the previous two years, he had made no comments at all concerning his finances.
In his explanation, he said that he had met a Finnish businessman in the 1980s and provided him with security during his business deals. Mr. Aarnio had, for example, helped him to secure deals with Arabs who had needed Finnish prostitutes brought into their countries. Libya was one of these countries.
Mr. Aarnio testified that he had never received money from the businessman, but that in 2002 in a theatre parking lot he had been given 447,000 euros from a courier of the dying business millionaire, thanking Mr. Aarnio for his services. He kept the money without reporting it on his taxes.
Oddly enough there’s at least some truth to this story. The widow of the millionaire was suspected of stealing the money, as she had withdrawn over a million euros from her husband’s bank account, apparently with his permission, a few days prior to the terminally-ill millionaire’s death. The wife then brought the money to the hospital but nobody knows what happened to it afterwards. Ultimately the wife was acquitted of any crime in an almost 10-year-old court case.
When prosecutors commented that Mr. Aarnio had built his explanation of this money on a few publicly-known facts, Mr. Aarnio’s defense replied that this was no different than the manner in which the prosecutors had built their entire case.
The Midpoint
The 100-day-long drug trial is now about at midpoint. The case has revealed a shadowy police world where informant contacts are not registered, where documentation is scarce and where some of it at the Helsinki PD has gone missing. Rules have been ignored and oversight nonexistent. A confiscated phone has disappeared, and suspicions have arisen that the Helsinki PD tricked the District Court into issuing phone-tap permits.
The case has also revealed the possibility that phone location data have not been 100-percent reliable, which may have far-reaching consequences, since that data have been widely used in Finnish courts as quite foolproof evidence of a person’s location.
Mr. Aarnio has explained that the “Pasila man” phones actually were prepaid phones Helsinki PD used to contact police informants. No records have been kept of the phones. One of the contacts was a man thought to be a leader in the Finnish underworld.
During the case several police informants have been named, although some parts of the trial have had to be conducted behind closed doors.
In the end of November 2015 the court surprisingly released Mr. Aarnio from pretrial detention where he had been kept for two years. The Court stated that further detention would be unfair as it believed he could no longer disrupt the investigation.
First witnesses
The hearing of witnesses began in early December 2015 and will proceed until at least March 2016. Witnesses include police officers, criminals and even journalists. A journalist will be asked if Mr. Aarnio was the source for his controversial story. If he refuses to answer, he can—according to law—be sent to jail for 90 days.
The first witnesses were officers from the Helsinki PD and the Kuopio PD narcotics squads. They highlighted the differences between local police departments and the NBI. This acrimony had almost led to fights during the annual cruise of narcotics officers last spring. One Kuopio officer on the ship even had brought with him tapes of secretly-recorded conversations of the NBI superintendent badmouthing Mr. Aarnio.
Several officers in the courtroom were described as being enemies. Two of the Helsinki PD narcotics officers told the court that Lasse Aapio, chief of Helsinki PD, had told them they would have to choose sides when in court. They understood this to mean that they were directed to make statements against Mr. Aarnio.
Mr. Aapio was Mr. Aarnio’s superior for a few years and was supposed to directly supervise him, but this didn’t prevent Mr. Aapio’s nomination as chief of the Helsinki PD in 2014. At that same time, the Helsinki PD Narcotics Unit received its new director from Espoo PD’s Narcotics Unit, a man who had sided with the NBI.
In relation to Mr. Aarnio, some suspicious events from the NBI investigation have already come to light.
The NBI Officer
Friday, the fourth of December, 2015, was the most bizarre day to date of “the trial of the century.”
Only one witness was called, an NBI officer who had interrogated one of the main persons-of-interest in the case, a 43-year-old woman who was close to one of the biggest Finnish drug lords of the ’80s and ’90s, Miika Kortekallio.
Mr. Aarnio busted Kortekallio in the ’80s, and he received a long sentence. After being released from prison Kortekallio returned to his old business, and in 2002 ended up dying somewhat mysteriously while in prison again. Kortekallio had close ties to Aarnio, but was he an informant? Yes, he was, claimed one of the Espoo PD officers last week in court.
Prosecutors say that with her Dutch contacts the woman helped Aarnio organize the smuggling ring. Since prosecutors are demanding an eight-year sentence for her, she is listed as one of the co-defendants.
In the 2014 NBI interrogations, she talked about smuggling and about how Mr. Aarnio had ordered her to do specific things, but in court this September she denied those statements. According to the law, judges can make their own decisions on which statements they believe.
This was the reason why the NBI officer was called to testify in court now. Some strange facts came to light: The officer admitted that he had given the woman three thousand euros during the year. He had also bought her a moped, phone, plane ticket, food, and many lunches. One of the main interrogations was done after the policeman had paid for the woman’s alcoholic drink.
The NBI officer said that he had paid all of it from his own personal funds and that his superiors knew nothing about it. Mr. Aarnio’s defense lawyer of course doesn’t believe this. Two shopping trips and phone bills were reimbursed to him by the NBI.
It is clear that the NBI officer endangered the investigation of the most important police corruption case in Finnish history by his actions. He is in now under investigation of abuse of public office.
But this wasn’t all. The 43-year-old woman was held in custody for a month in the spring of 2014. Every day the NBI officer visited her in jail.
Their relationship included “sweetheart-style” text messages which were sent back and forth. The officer denied any sexual involvement; he said he gave her money because he felt sorry that she was facing serious charges. The officer also said that they used to listen to Ed Sheeran’s ballad “I See Fire” before the interrogations. Sometimes even her attorney was present in the room.
The judge ended the Friday hearings by telling the reporters: “Well, welcome back next Tuesday to see what happens then.”
Well, that Tuesday was much duller. Mr. Aarnio’s wife declined to testify, one Helsinki PD officer claimed that 60 kilos of amphetamines got into the county because of the disputes between Helsinki PD and the NBI, and one informant was named in court. He’s dead now, so no harm was done.
The main question in the trial remains: Is Mr. Aarnio the “Pasila man?”
Well, what else can I say…? The “trial of the century” is living up to its claim. It has been partly Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., partly Love Boat, partly soap opera, and it provides the confusion of almost any sitcom.
Crime reporters are not supposed to have any feelings - it doesn’t matter to me if Mr. Aarnio is guilty or not - the case still makes me sad and mad. Finnish people deserve better from their police.
But had I written this story as part of my Helsinki Homicide series, my publisher would have laughed me out of his office. “Not a chance; this stuff is too far out, not believable,” he would have told me. “Come back with something that can actually happen.”
Jarkko Sipilä is a Finnish journalist and author of the Helsinki Homicide series.
twitter: @sipilamtv3
Cell: +358-40-5086169
www.jarkkosipila.com
