When Hans Høegh Henrichsen heard about the allegation, he immediately rang the Israeli embassy and asked for an audience for the leader of the Oslo Progress Party Youth, Jøran Kallmyr. The audience was granted. ‘Now we’ll be able to gather the material for a counter-attack!’ Høegh Henrichsen told the young politician. The youth leader had the Israeli point of view explained to him, and adopted it as his own.
That afternoon, Jøran Kallmyr came down hard on the AUF, on the allegation and on Yasser Arafat in a post he called ‘The anti-Semites of the AUF’.
Anders Behring did not let the opportunity of a discussion with Kallmyr pass him by.
‘They’re a pack of idiots! And they certainly haven’t got a clue about the law,’ he wrote of the AUF, adding that the police should fine them for making a false allegation. It was Jøran who mobilised the heavy artillery, Anders just agreed with what he wrote, and joked that the Progress Party Youth should make an allegation against Yasser Arafat.
Two weeks later, the Director of Public Prosecution dismissed the complaint on formal grounds. The International Criminal Court would be the appropriate legal authority for such a case.
The hot summer faded, autumnal weather came sweeping in and the wind whistled. It was the coldest autumn in living memory, and Anders still had not been called in for interview.
The chair of the nomination committee never read anything that Anders posted on the internet, but he had met him.
‘He seems pleasant and reasonable,’ was Høegh Henrichsen’s assessment, ‘but isn’t he a bit vague?’
Anders Behring had failed to make any particular impression on the older man. He had only come to a couple of meetings and had not distinguished himself there. His name had been put into the ring along with a list of other names, but no one from Anders’s local ‘adult’ branch – Majorstuen-Uranienborg – felt he was the right man. It was the local branch that had to interview and approve individuals from their district who were proposed to the nomination committee. For them it was the personal impression that counted, not anyone’s empire-building on the internet.
He was not weighed and found wanting.
He was not even weighed.
He was never called for interview.
His name did not go on the list.
Just before Christmas, the nomination list was finalised. Two youth candidates were nominated. Jøran was on the list. Lene was on the list.
Anders’s posts on the forum grew more negative. ‘The sad thing about the political system in Norway is that it often isn’t the most competent who get political power, but those who are best at networking.’
He told people that Jøran Kallmyr had promised to support his candidature, but had stabbed him in the back instead. That was what stopped him becoming a leader in the party, he explained to his online buddy PeeWee. ‘Kallmyr went behind my back.’
‘How the h… is the PPY supposed to recruit voters under 30 if they haven’t any high-profile young parliamentarians???’ he wrote in the new year, and, ‘The way I see it, the central executive committee has been far too passive when it comes to developing a comprehensive youth strategy! Is there any kind of strategy at all??’
He was a nobody, and it was almost election time.
Jøran was voted onto the council and Lene was elected a substitute member. Soon, Jøran was appointed a secretary to a local government commissioner and later a commissioner, and Lene became a regular council member.
In one of his last posts in the summer of 2003, Anders predicted civil war once the Muslims were in the majority in Norway. The Islamisation of the West was alarming.
On that last point, many in the Progress Party agreed with him.
For his part, he had lost interest in the party. He stopped going along to the offices or to their social events. If they didn’t want him, he didn’t want them either. He moved on, out into the world. Without Jøran; without Lene.
‘High Quality Fake Diplomas!!’
E Tenebris ad Lucem
From Darkness into Light
Sales of false diplomas had taken off. He made his first million.
He made his second million.
He was actually getting rich.
The money was pouring into accounts in tax havens like Antigua and Barbuda, St Vincent and the Bahamas. He had also opened accounts in Latvia and Estonia. That way, he could avoid paying tax in Norway. The banks offered him anonymous credit cards that meant he could make withdrawals from ATM machines in Oslo without his name being registered.
His mother helped him with this money laundering. He had asked her to open three bank accounts. There she deposited the cash her son gave her, before transferring it to him. Within a short space of time she had laundered four hundred thousand kroner.
He got the idea while he was still active in the Progress Party. It had struck him that there could be a market for false diplomas and he set up a website, diplomaservices.com, in the autumn of 2002.
His company, City Group, operated through addresses such as bestfakediploma.com and superfakedegree.com. They advertised ‘Bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate diplomas available in the field of your choice’. Double exclamation marks were sprinkled across the pages. ‘Receive a high quality fake diploma within 10 days!!’ ran the headline in bold italics. The cost was around a hundred dollars per diploma, and the customer was promised a full refund if he could find better print quality anywhere else. For those wanting a complete package of exam certificate plus graduation diploma from a particular university, there was a special-offer price of 295 dollars.
A young man in Indonesia drew up the diplomas to order and then emailed them to Anders in Oslo for approval. There were medical-school diplomas, doctorates and engineering qualifications, diplomas from organisations and societies, even prize certificates. Sometimes Anders did a first draft and then sent it to his employee in Asia, to whom he paid a monthly salary of seven hundred dollars.
The web pages brought in orders for several hundred diplomas a month. The company occupied most of Anders’s time, apart from weekends, when he would be out on the town spending his money, freely at times but never recklessly. Anders had landed himself a nice circle of friends: young men from the West End, some from the School of Commerce, a classmate or two from primary-school days, a few others who had turned up along the way.
He had moved out of the collective in Maries gate and was now renting his own flat in Tidemands gate, not far from where he had lived with his fellow students. His mother came round to clean and tidy for him and took his washing home with her. For this Anders paid her in cash, a few thousand kroner a month.
The orders started piling up. His associate in Indonesia was not that fluent in English and there were quite a lot of corrections to be done. Anders needed somebody who could check the diplomas and add the finishing touches.
In the advertisement he placed through a government employment scheme, he said he was looking for someone to handle the graphics side. The only specification was experience of Photoshop and CorelDRAW, a graphic-design package. The applicant also had to be free to start at once.