five-o’clock shadow, and greying temples. He was often referred to as “The Arab,”
although he did not have a drop of Arab blood.
He looked a little like the stereotypical local boss in an American gangster movie,
but in fact he was a talented financial director who had begun his career as a junior
accountant at Milton Security in the early seventies. Three decades later he had
advanced to CEO and COO of the company.
He had become fascinated with the security business. It was like war games—to
identify threats, develop counter-strategies, and all the time stay one step ahead of
the industrial spies, blackmailers and thieves. It began for him when he discovered
how the swindling of a client had been accomplished through creative
bookkeeping. He was able to prove who, from a group of a dozen people, was
behind it. He had been promoted and played a key role in the firm’s development
and was an expert in financial fraud. Fifteen years later he became CEO. He had
transformed Milton Security into one of Sweden’s most competent and trusted
security firms.
The company had 380 full-time employees and another 300 freelancers. It was
small compared to Falck or Swedish Guard Service. When Armansky first joined, the
company was called Johan Fredrik Milton’s General Security AB, and it had a client
list consisting of shopping centres that needed floorwalkers and muscular guards.
Under his leadership the firm was now the internationally recognised Milton
Security and had invested in cutting-edge technology. Night watchmen well past
their prime, uniform fetishists, and moonlighting university students had been
replaced by people with real professional skills. Armansky hired mature ex-
policemen as operations chiefs, political scientists specialising in international
terrorism, and experts in personal protection and industrial espionage. Most
importantly, he hired the best telecommunications technicians and IT experts. The
company moved from Solna to state-of-the-art offices near Slussen, in the heart of
Stockholm.
By the start of the nineties, Milton Security was equipped to offer a new level of
security to an exclusive group of clients, primarily medium-sized corporations and
well-to-do private individuals—nouveau-riche rock stars, stock-market speculators,
and dot-com high flyers. A part of the company’s activity was providing bodyguard
protection and security solutions to Swedish firms abroad, especially in the Middle
East. This area of their business now accounted for 70 percent of the company’s
turnover. Under Armansky, sales had increased from about forty million SEK
annually to almost two billion. Providing security was a lucrative business.