The Theatre of the Apocalypse
Part One
By UD Sandberg
Copyright 2013 UD Sandberg
All images copyright © are in the public domain.
[ PROLOGUE ]
It all started with a manuscript
When I was young I read Woodward and Bernstein´s papers on Watergate and I immediately knew that I wanted to be a journalist. In my work as a freelancer in the heart of the newspaper industry at The Economist, The New York Times and The Boston Herald I have witnessed and been a part of a plethora of affairs and events over the years. The most memorable I´ve been a part of up until about a year ago was the election of 2000 when it was decided in the Supreme Court. My coverage eventually developed into a book which was on the New York Times bestseller-list for ten weeks. But the Iacobi-affair, which this book is about, is in a class of itself and unlike my others book I have not written it myself.
Six months ago, more precisely six months and four days, on the 27th of July one of the big four newspapers in the United States published an expose I wrote. The expose was one of many posts which dealt with the Iacobi Affair which at that time was about a month old. In the expose I speculated, just like many other, what had happened, what the catalyst was and more importantly what hid behind those rigorous barricades on the Capitoline Hill in Rome. Just like the others my speculation was what it was, just speculation, none of us had any idea.
A couple of weeks after the publication I got a brown envelope in the mail. Inside was a manuscript. A cover letter was attached and mentioned my expose and praised it for its relevance. The person who wrote it thought that the material in the envelope could be of some interest to me. Why this was sent to me I still wonder.
I have spent several months going through the material in the envelope and I still cannot figure out how everything is connected and why. One of the more peculiar things is that the brown envelope was sent to me in one of the US Postal Services envelopes where a letter was attached from the Postmaster in which she stated that she was sorry for the inconvenience, that the letter had fallen off the machine and was found by a janitor a couple of weeks later. This is what makes it all so interesting. The Postmaster´s letter confirms the somewhat odd date mark on the cover letter. It says it was written by the end of June, in fact, June 23rd.
June 23rd is the same day that the Iacobi Affair culminated. In the envelope was an extremely detailed account of the events in the Iacobi Affair which had to be impossible for an outsider to know about, details which took the police several months to find out about. And that is not the most startling fact. There was also an historical expose in the Manuscript detailing the historical background to the affair and the reason behind it. It´s almost inconceivable that the person who wrote the Manuscript could have known about everything it describes and I will readily admit that I doubted it the first time I read it and also the second and the third time.
But too many details corresponds with my own research and what has been made known from the police investigation and from others which has investigated this mystical affair to reject the Manuscript as something misleading or a hoax. I am now utterly convinced that the Manuscript contains the truth no matter how hard it is to believe it. And I can only speculate how the author got ahold of everything.
I have no idea who the author is, except that I am pretty sure it is a man. Even though I wouldn´t publish his or her name if I knew it because I want to protect my sources. I call him Coetzee after the famous Nobel Prize laureate because he, like my Coetzee, allegedly sends his manuscripts in brown envelopes to his publisher. In either case I am convinced that the author is a man and probably of Swedish or any Scandinavian origin. The Manuscript is written in English but it is quite clear that it is not written by someone with English as their mother tongue. I have had linguists and translators thoroughly examine the Manuscript and they all concluded that the author most likely was Swedish or Scandinavian. The author most probably had a relationship with Ludwig Norén, Ella Stahl, Alexander Wagner and presumably August and Victoria Iacobi. In any case the author is irrelevant; the important thing is that the Manuscript contains the truth.
Before we get to the Manuscript it is in its place that we present the characters in the affair and the overarching events, the little that is known, in case you´re not familiar with the affair.
The person who the affair is named after is the well-known business magnate August Iacobi. Born in Sweden 1946 and heir to the Swedish branch of the old Austrian powerhouse Habsburg. He emigrated early to Austria and founded the Iacobi Investment Group with his inherited wealth which last year, according to Forbes 500, was the seventh largest corporation in the world measured by revenue.
Many believe that Mr Iacobi´s success has come at the price of sacrificing common decency, although some claims are exaggerated. But Mr Iacobi is known for his tough business methods and has more than any other emphasized shareholder value as a business guidance principle, which is a controversial statement because it completely disregards the notion that a company has any societal responsibility, and especially controversial because of the size of the company.
One of Mr Iacobi´s many nicknames is Fat Man, which he got from the nuclear bomb which was dropped on Nagasaki. The nickname came in conjunction with Mr Iacobi´s buyout of rubber manufacturer Snapper Industries, which is regarded as a typical example of his business. Snapper Industries had up until the purchase had its manufacturing and headquarters in Fort Smith, Arkansas since 1923 where the company was founded and has deep roots. When Mr Iacobi bought the company he immediately gutted the company, fired thousands of workers and outsourced the manufacturing to the Guangdong province in China.
The second main character, and judging by the Manuscript he is the true protagonist, is the well-known, at least in Europe, violent criminal Ludwig Norén. He was sentenced to life in January two years ago for the attempted murder of four immigrant men from Iran in central Stockholm. On May 31 last year he escaped from the maximum security facility Hall outside Stockholm, where he had served just over a year of his sentence.
There has been a lot of speculation concerning Ludwig. The commonly held view is that he is or was a lone dangerous man, parallels has been drawn to Lee Harvey Oswald, Timothy McVeigh, Adam Lanza, Charles Whitman and others. This view probably originated from a widely circulated story published by Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet which was translated and sold to a variety of international newspapers including The New York Times. In the article the journalists interview a variety of people with connections to Ludwig, people from his childhood, old teachers and friends. This was also the first time the now widely spread picture of him in high school appeared, where he sits in a classroom and seems to yell at the camera dressed in a black T-shirt with a Swedish flag where it says ”Made of Swedish Steel”.
With Ludwig came the great fear, to some extent very true, that a new terrorism had presented itself or a new kind of threat on a societal level. He was white, non-religious, born and raised in a home in an upper-class suburb of Stockholm where both parents were academics and he had no history of mental illness. Presumably his destructive path began towards the end of high school. No one knows why but suddenly he started to isolate himself and lost a number of his closest friends. According to the article in Aftonbladet he began visiting obscure gatherings on the Internet for example the extremist-community of Flashback and went further off the deep end to a world ruled by delusion and hatred.
The Manuscript completely discards this image of Ludwig. Ludwig is much but not much of his public persona is true to reality.
The odd couple Mr Iacobi and the mysterious Mr Norén met in Austria so
metime in early June last year, soon after Ludwig´s escape. Their relationship, until now, has been unclear because they did not seem to have had any contact what so ever prior to their first meet.
It has also been unclear what motive they had but together with other accomplices or by themselves they were involved in the strange and not fully understood theft at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in the middle of June last year when the Sapphire Box of Edfu was taken.
The Sapphire Box of Edfu is one of the most famous and valuable works of art in the world and it has, to say the least, a mystical history. This event is described in detail in the Manuscript. Because of what happened at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, they fled to Italy hunted by Europol and the Italian and Austrian police. The hunt led to some unexplained events and encounters until everything came to an end at the Capitoline hill in Rome which for some unknown reason, as I said, is still sealed off, although it´s been over six months.
Usually in these kinds of high-profile business, sooner rather than later someone talks or leaks information to the press. There are simply too many people involved and there is always someone or some who feel a strong urge to tell the truth. But all rules have exceptions. No one has ever talked in the Iacobi Affair. I remember when I followed up a bribery scandal in a small town in the U.S. and it didn´t take long until someone got in touch directly with me with information about the scandal. And this applies to virtually every major event I worked on. But this case is unique in several ways.
Before we proceed I want to say something about the vast amount published about this affair. There are some that has come closer to the truth than others, but unfortunately not that close which makes this book paramount. In particular I´m thinking of the series of articles in The Guardian with the headline Murder One, two steals and Corriere della Serra's expose Cinque Pezzi di Zaffiro. The books published have, in my opinion, been far from the truth and also the BBC documentary Head in the Clouds: The Story of the Iacobi Affair despite its great impact.
Common to all books, documentaries, series of articles, etc. is that they have had their focus on the theft of Sapphire Box of Edfu, which is, as you will see, just a small piece in August and Ludwig´s hunt for something much bigger.
The problem with these kinds of complex stories where the main thread is unknown and difficult to map out is that you´re confined to confirm indicia, factors on the periphery and see if the gaps in the history that you fill are credible.
I have had the opportunity to interview people that nobody met before and seen places that belong in this story that no one has seen before in the light of this affair. This opportunity has one explanation and one only and that is the contents of the Manuscript sent to me in the brown envelope. It has pointed to places and people in the periphery that the silent powers do not have any control over.
But the fact remains. No detailed official version is available. No official entity has issued more than a few cursory statements. All we have are some tourist pictures from Piazza Venezia in Rome of Ludwig and August's lifeless bodies behind that iron curtain that still seals the Capitoline Hill to this day. Until now.
I hereby choose to publish the Manuscript in its entirety because I am certain that it contains the true story of what happened.
I have corrected some grammatical errors and Coetzee's tendency to replace b with q in some cases. Two chapters, chapters 9 and 34, are missing and a number of sentences are cut off. The reason for this is unclear.
Where there has been reason I´ve made some clarifications which for the most part can be attributed to linguistic errors because of the author is of Scandinavian origin as mentioned above. The clarifications are restricted only to explain obvious misconceptions. There is a note at each part that needs explaining and all the notes are collected at the end of the book as endnotes. I did not want to correct the author´s Scandinavian English because it would rid the Manuscript of authenticity and distance it from its author but it does make the Manuscript somewhat harder to read but the content, I can assure you, is well worth it.
I have attached the bulk of my notes from the extensive work I put into confirming that the Manuscript's story is true. The notes are edited for readability but are largely unchanged from when they were written. I have removed some names that I want to protect. These notes are marked in the Manuscript with staples in the same way that I did with the title of this prologue: [Prologue], the titles of the notes are thus [The Notes’ date]. By and large, I have honored the wishes of the person who sent this to me. Beside the notes with the staples headlines that I have inserted all that is written below in the Manuscript is by Coetzee.
I enclose my first notes in this prologue.