Prisoner No. 503/77: A Story of Survival

Christer Lybäck

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By Veera Luoma-aho
     
      The first sensation is one of abject horror.
      Christer Lybäck’s mobile rings at precisely 10 a.m. on January 26th, 2011.
      Today is somewhat unusual for a Wednesday, as Lybäck is not scheduled to perform any operations this morning.
      He is sitting in the car with his partner Paula.
      The sun is shining, Paula is chatting on her phone to a girlfriend.
     
Lybäck picks up, and the caller introduces himself as an officer from the Satakunta Open Prison, the former Köyliö Reserve Prison, located between Turku and Pori in the west of the country.
      Lybäck’s moment of stark panic at the introductory words is understandable: for a split second he forgets that he is Dr. Christer Lybäck, successful and highly respected orthopaedic surgeon, a partner in a flourishing private hospital, and a model citizen, father, and husband.
      For that split second he fears that he has been caught for something and that retribution is about to come crashing down on his head.
      However, the prison officer’s message does not concern Lybäck directly.
      He is calling because an inmate of the Satakunta Prison named Kari Virtanen has died of a coronary earlier this same morning.
      In the prison’s files, Virtanen has listed Christer Lybäck as his next of kin, should anything happen to him.
     
Lybäck is a heavily-built man with broad shoulders and a bald pate.
      He is wearing a patterned black half-length coat, of a type more commonly seen on snowboarders in their twenties. He has a gold chain around his neck.
      His gaze is straight and penetrating.
      If one had to hazard a guess at his profession, eminent physician might not be the immediate choice - perhaps a doorman at some bar or restaurant.
     
Lybäck has decided to tell his life story, even though the thought of it becoming public knowledge frightens him not a little.
      How did he come to know Kari Virtanen?
      What is his story, and why the fright?
     
     
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Let us go back in time to 1976 and the Kultainen Orava [Golden Squirrel] restaurant, close to Hakanemi Square in Helsinki.
      The dance-restaurant opened here eight years previously.
      Two men are sitting at a dim table right next to the dance-floor.
      One is Christer Lybäck, the other Kari Virtanen.
      Christer has a black attaché case with him.
      There is a sheath-knife in the case.
     
Christer is 23 and full of anger. Two things he hates above all others: one is people who grass to the police, and the other is that someone leaves a debt unpaid.
      On this occasion it is the latter in question.
      A buyer of stolen goods arrives at the men’s table and sits down.
      He announces to his creditors that he does not have the money outstanding to them, and that he does not intend to pay.
     
Christer opens the case, takes out the knife, and knocks the man to the ground.
      He leans over him, pinning him down and holding the knife to his throat.
      The lights suddenly blaze on the restaurant, and the other patrons scatter from around the two men sprawled on the floor.
      Christer hears a woman screaming.
      At this point, Kari grabs Christer by the shoulders and tugs him away from the other man.
      The two flee the restaurant to some dark corner of nearby Kallio, and the police do not catch up with them.
      Thanks to Kari’s timely intervention, nothing irreversible happens.
     
Christer first meets up with Kari years earlier when they are both doing a stretch in what was then known as Helsinki Central Prison, in Sörnäinen.
      Christer takes immediately to Kari, who is a year or two older than him and a hard-bitten con with several sentences under his belt.
      Kari also has a softer side; he teaches Christer the rudiments of playing the guitar, and they often sing together.
      Christer’s favourite number from those days is Rauli “Badding” Somerjoki’s Paratiisi (Paradise).
     
In many respects the two men are alike: both are intelligent, charismatic, and have a way with words.
      What they like and respect in each other are frankness and a sense of fair play.
      Honesty among thieves, perhaps.
      But as a pair they are dangerous - they also support one another in carrying out some very bad acts.
      When they are not doing time, they pull off a good many jobs together.
     
On one occasion they break into a car accessories store in Hyvinkää with two other men.
      Christer hot-wires a Datsun Bluebird to use for the caper.
      It is a model of car he was particularly specialised in, back in the day.
      Later in life he calculates that he must have stolen hundreds of them in the course of his life of crime.
      The four men force their way into the office and remove the bulky safe, weighing a couple of hundred kilos.
      They drag it out to a loading platform and drop it into the trunk of the Datsun.
      It is so heavy that the front wheels of the car bounce up off the ground, almost like in a cartoon.
     
The safe has to be tied down with cords and the four men have to squeeze themselves into the front seat of the hopelessly unbalanced little car in order to make it even semi-drivable.
      They head for a nearby dump and break into a tool-shed there.
      After hours of grunting and sweating, they finally get the safe open.
      Inside is a princely 100 markka [roughly EUR 16.00 in today’s money], all in coins.
     
Their crimes are pretty often this sort of bungling: a great deal of effort and perspiration for precious little reward.
      But when Christer and Kari are back inside, and in the same prison, their plans begin to grow more ambitious and serious.
      They decide they will take on bigger heists together - armed bank robberies, to be precise.
      In their cell they go over the meticulous details of their plans.
      The bank robberies never materialise.
      Thanks to Kari, the man from the Kultainen Orava is also allowed to keep his neck.
      A great deal of grief fortunately goes unexperienced, but there is still quite enough for one life.
     
     
********************************
     
     
Christer’s early childhood is a happy one. His father Sven is the doorman at a restaurant in Helsinki’s New Student House, and his mother Aino works in a clothing store on Kaisaniemenkatu.
      The home in Helsinki’s Hakaniemi district houses a very ordinary and largely happy working-class family.
      To be fair, one generation back Sven’s family background is more middle-class: his father Edvard Lybäck was a businessman who owned a silk mill in neighbouring Kruununhaka.
      As a boy in the 1930s, Sven was taken to school by car, which was certainly uncommon in the Helsinki of that time. But that was all before the silk business went belly-up, and before Edvard walked to the Hietaniemi Cemetery and put a bullet through his skull.
     
Sven still has a few traces of the bourgeois Finland-Swede about him.
      The children are expected to mind their manners, and Sven has a lifelong hatred of communists.
      Christer’s happy childhood comes to an abrupt end in a telephone call.
      He has just turned nine and is spending his holidays at the summer place of a friend’s family.
      His mother is at work, and his father in hospital.
      There is nothing very unusual about the situation: Sven has been having heart problems for years; he has had several mild heart attacks and on occasions has had to spent quite long periods as a hospital in-patient.
     
As a consequence, Christer cannot muster up the energy to go and see his father on what is apparently another routine stay on the wards.
      Any bad conscience he may feel is numbed by the lure of the summer in the country.
      One night, Christer has trouble sleeping.
      When the phone rings downstairs early the next morning and “Aunt Taimi” answers it, he guesses what has happened even before the woman starts to cry.
     
After his father’s funeral, Christer walks alone on the waterfront in Hakaniemi.
      Suddenly, from beneath the grief he is feeling, a new and strange emotion comes to the surface: anger.
      His father’s death seems to the little boy to be a grossly unfair thing, altogether wrong.
      If there were only someone on whom one could avenge the injustice of it all.
      Anyone but the boy himself.
     
His widowed mother soon finds a shoulder to cry on, a university-educated engineer who was half-crippled during the war.
      The man leaves his family to be with Aino, but he is not up to becoming a surrogate father to his new wife’s children.
      All the same, the family’s finances are now secured.
      It does not take long before the new family eats its last dinner together, at the restaurant in the Hamburger Börs Hotel in Turku.
      Aino, her new man, and Christer accompany Jörski to the harbour in Turku.
      Jörski, six years older than his brother, has no wish to hang around and watch his mother’s new relationship blossoming, and he leaves for a life as a merchant seaman.
     
Christer has the feeling that everyone else around him has a means of fleeing from the pain of Sven’s death.
      His brother goes to sea, and his mother escapes into the arms of a new man.
      On the quay in Turku Harbour stands a little boy who has nowhere to go.
      Although that is not to say there are no means of escape.
      One of them is paint thinner - toluene, mineral turpentine, “turps” and the like.
      Getting wasted using industrial solvents as an inhalant immediately seems to Christer like a most excellent thing to do.
     
With his mates, he starts buying thinners from the hardware store - and later trichloroethylene or TCE from the pharmacy.
      Though used widely as an industrial solvent - and formerly as an anaesthetic - TCE as a non-medical recreational drug is seriously bad news, causing damage to the brain, the kidneys, and the liver.
      The distance from a dose that will get you high to one that will get you dead is worryingly short.
      With the benefit of hindsight, it is probably a stroke of luck that Christer soon begins to commit petty crimes.
      As a result, he is able to get off cheap thinners and switch to alcohol as his drug of choice.
     
Everything changes very quickly; there is no long spiral downwards.
      Bang, and he’s away.
      By the age of just 12, Christer is already into week-long binges where he barely comes up for air.
      While the other pre-teens are still spending their time in children’s games, Christer is hanging out in Helsinki alleyways with a bottle of thinner or some cheap spirit under his coat.
      The good little family boy becomes a street rat.
     
His mother Aino tries to set things right as best she can.
      In keeping with the mores of the time, Christer often gets a good hiding - from his mother at home and from the teachers at school.
      In turn, Christer uses his fists on others in the schoolyard and in the streets.
      Growing up in Helsinki's Hakaniemi in the 1960s, learning how to look after oneself in a scrap is essential.
      And Christer scraps a lot, because there are other boys in the school who fancy being hard cases, too.
      But he is no coward or bully: those he picks fights with are always the same sort of little troublemakers as himself.
     
The family moves from Hakaniemi to the western suburb of Lauttasaari.
      On his first day at his new school, Christer makes it his business to determine who thinks he is the toughest nut in the class.
      He immediately challenges the boy to a fight and beats him into submission in the school lavatories.
      Fighting is the only means at the boy’s disposal to win respect.
      He has nothing else to offer.
     
As the petty crimes become less petty, the manners learned from his father stand Christer in good stead.
      Suspicions do not usually fall on a well-behaved and polite boy.
      Christer and his friends start to pull off entire crime waves on their own modest plane: at the age of 14 or so, they go systematically through the various offices of the city administration.
      With the cash lifted from stolen wallets on coatstands, they fly around Finland, just for the hell of it.
     
From time to time, the police catch the boy at it, and sometimes they also give him a roughing-up in the cells.
      Sometimes they take a more kindly attitude, and they simply shake their heads and tell him from grim experience that his future looks bleak - very bleak indeed.
     
      Continued... see link below
     
     
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print in the April 2011 issue of Helsingin Sanomat's monthly supplement Kuukausiliite
     

More on this subject:
 Prisoner No. 503/77 (Part Two)
 Prisoner No. 503/77 (Part Three)
 Prisoner No. 503/77 (Part Four)

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VEERA LUOMA-AHO / Helsingin Sanomat
veera.luoma-aho@hs.fi