One of Stefan Thunberg’s clearest childhood memories is watching his father and older brother at the kitchen table making Molotov cocktails to throw into a house where his mother was hiding. “My father could be a good man,” Thunberg says. “When there wasn’t explosiveness and violence and drinking. Unfortunately, there often was – sometimes all three.”
Stefan was one of four brothers raised by a violent father, Boris. “Violence was the language in our family,” he says. Three of them grew up to become bank robbers, members of an outfit known in Sweden as the Military Gang, who were responsible for 10 audacious heists in the early 1990s.
In the most outrageous, they put a bomb in a locker at Stockholm’s main train station to distract police while they pulled off a bank heist in another part of the city. “They often used the threat of violence as a tool to get what they wanted,” says Thunberg. “They learned that from my father.”
Stefan was the exception. While his brothers spent their late teens and early 20s sticking up banks and armoured vans, he was at art school. Why didn’t he wind up as a bank robber? “I was the second son, my older brother was in the firing line. He really had to take the first punch. I was always observing, always seeing my father try to make his eldest son an expression of himself. I could avoid that and do my own thing. I survived because after my parents divorced, I went my own way. My older brother was less lucky.
“In all families where you have violence as a language, the older son is moulded by the father and then he turns against the father,” says Thunberg. “My father wanted to mould my brother. But not me.”
That doesn’t help explain why his younger brothers turned to crime. Surely they could have escaped his father’s influence, too? “I’ve thought about that a lot. I don’t think they would have become bank robbers if my eldest brother had never been born. They followed my brother’s lead and were loyal to him. They didn’t have the criminal minds, and they didn’t use violence as a tool because Dad did and as he taught my older brother to.”
Even though he wasn’t part of the Military Gang, Stefan was privy to their crimes. He recalls going round to his brother’s house after they pulled off their first robbery, holding up a security van. “When I got there the TV news was on showing a report about the robbery they had just done. My brothers were sitting around talking about how they were disappointed. They had stolen 1m SEK (£75,000), but there had been another 10m behind a door they couldn’t open in time.”
Moments later, his older brother invited Stefan to look into a hole under two linoleum tiles in the guest room. The brothers had fitted a door into the floor that opened into a secret chamber. It was there that they stored more than 200 automatic weapons stolen in a daring raid on an army compound, which they planned to use in future heists. “My big brother said, ‘You can never tell anyone about this.’ Because in my family, among us brothers, this was taken completely for granted. This was how we had been raised, taught by my father – you never, ever, give up a member of the family.”
For a long while, Stefan didn’t tell his estranged mother what his brothers did for a living. “She had no idea they were bank robbers. She thought they ran a construction firm, which they did as a cover, and was very proud of them. When she found out the truth, she thought she had failed as a mother.”
As the Military Gang became famous in Sweden, inevitably, several TV production companies tried to make dramas out of their exploits. “But they didn’t know the family background to the story, so they all failed.”
Thunberg, now one of Sweden’s leading screenwriters (his credits include Wallander), was in a perfect position to tell the story. He has done just that with a novel called The Father, which he co-wrote with crime novelist Anders Roslund. It is a bestseller in Sweden and has been optioned to be made into a movie by Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks.
Thunberg, 47, says that writing the novel was more helpful to him than the two years of therapy he had to deal with his childhood. Why did he write a novel, not a memoir? “By fictionalising what happened we’ve got closer to the feeling and truth than I would otherwise. But everything that happens in the book happened in life. Names have been changed, that’s all.”
He claims, for instance, that the scene in the novel in which the father shows his son how to make Molotov cocktails happened precisely that way in real life. “I was a witness to that.” In the novel, the father, Ivan, pours the correct amount of petrol into a wine bottle, then stuffs its neck with torn-up shreds of his estranged wife’s monogrammed pillowcase. Then he tries to justify his plan to use the bomb against his wife, whose ostensible betrayal was to leave her violent husband.
In the book, father and son drive to his ex-wife’s parents’ house with the Molotov cocktails. Ivan stands outside and yells to his ex-wife: “Britt-Marie! Come home to your family! Your kids! Me! Come out now! Otherwise, I’ll burn you! I’ll burn down the whole fucking thing!” Moments later, he and his son drive away from the burning house.
Did it really happen like that, I ask Thunberg? “It did. It was an attack against her and her family. She really tried to break loose. My father couldn’t allow that. The bonds of family were everything to him.”
Those family bonds, Thunberg thinks, is one reason why, when his brothers grew up, the Military Gang was so effective. Three of its members were family and from a close-knit family at that, plus two other friends. “They were used to standing together as a clan against a hostile world.” says Thunberg.
One brother alone broke that united family front. Isn’t this novel about his family history a betrayal? “You can say that,” laughs Thunberg. “My father brought me up not to be a rat. Now I’m ratting out the whole family, but as a storyteller, you have to write what you know.”
The Military Gang committed a string of outrageous robberies and evaded the police for two years – until December 1993 when the gang, who included Thunberg’s father Boris, was captured and jailed. Now, 22 years later, his brothers are out of jail and trying to go straight in the construction business.
Thunberg’s father is also out of jail and, Thunberg says, is a sad figure. “He’s an alcoholic and hasn’t dealt with his demons.” But does he love him? “I do love him, but I don’t respect him.”
The novel reopened old family wounds. “My younger brother called me after reading the book and said: ‘Stefan, I hate you, but I love this fucking book.’ Then he hung up the phone and for nine months we didn’t speak. Another brother read the novel five times and then told me that the book wasn’t about him today, but about a 17-year-old version of him he doesn’t remember.”
Those wounds are likely to be reopened: Thunberg and Roslund are writing a sequel about what happened to the family 20 years later.
Has his older brother read the book? “He read it and sent me and Anders a really great email about how he now understood the madness he was exposed to – and exposed others to – during those years.”
As for Stefan’s mother, who has remarried and not spoken to her first husband for a quarter of a century, she could not read the novel, although she supported her son’s decision to write it.
That’s understandable: the novel starts with a shocking scene in which her husband breaks into her house after four years apart and beats her up, for some perceived offence.
Has his father read the book that is named after him? “No. That’s his problem. It’s very difficult to talk to him now, especially when he’s been drinking. He lives in the past.”
The Father by Anton Svensson (a pseudonym for Stefan Thunberg and Anders Roslund) is published by Sphere Books, £14.99. To order a copy for £11.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846
