The trap was laid in a rented office: two rooms in downtown Copenhagen, furnished without a whisper of Scandi style. If it wasn’t for a Frida Kahlo print on one wall, the premises might have felt as impersonal and stark as a confessional. That, in any event, was what it became. For six months, beginning in mid-2022, a parade of people – members of motorcycle gangs, entrepreneurs, lawyers, real-estate barons, politicians – trooped through to recount their sins to Amira Smajic. They didn’t come for expiation. They knew Smajic to be one of them – an outlaw, and in her particular case, a business lawyer so skilled at laundering money that she’d enabled a couple of billion kroner in financial crime over the previous decade. They called her the Ice Queen, because she showed not a flicker of regret for what she did.

In her office, Smajic’s visitors bragged about dodging tax, bribing officials or exploiting the bankruptcy code. She offered them coffee and coaxed forth their confidences. Six cameras and three microphones, secreted in power sockets, captured it all – footage that was turned into a documentary called The Black Swan. In its surreptitious method and breathtaking drama, The Black Swan bore all the fingerprints of its director, Mads Brügger, a provocateur who has spent his career searching for bombshells to drop but who had never quite managed it as well as he did here. Denmark’s national bird is the Cygnus olor, a swan as white as virtue. The Black Swan, in showing such easy, unbridled formulations of crime, blew up Denmark’s idea of itself.

Since airing last May as a five-part series on TV2, Denmark’s biggest television network, The Black Swan has sent the country into convulsions. One out of every two Danes has seen the documentary. After its release, a biker-gang member and his accountant were charged with financial crimes and taken into custody; others, including a municipal official, are under investigation. The Danish Bar and Law Society formally apologised to the minister of justice for the conduct of two lawyers caught on camera; they have been either fired or disbarred. A new money-laundering law was introduced to give banks more oversight over “client accounts” – the kind of accounts in which lawyers pool the funds of several clients and transact on their behalf, and that featured in many of the machinations in Smajic’s office. In her New Year’s speech, Denmark’s prime minister suggested biker-gang criminals ought to be stripped of their pension rights – a detail so specific it was surely inspired by The Black Swan.

Other Scandinavian nations also reeled upon watching The Black Swan. After the series premiered in Sweden, a criminologist at Lund University warned: “There’s a lot of evidence that it’s probably even worse here.” Norwegian civil servants invited Brügger to Oslo in January to talk to them about money-laundering. All of Scandinavia, he believes, has persuaded itself that crime exists only in violent, poor abscesses on the edges of their societies. “The Danes totally subscribe to this idea that Denmark has no corruption, and to the idea of Denmark as the end of the road,” Brügger said, referring to the political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s notion that “getting to Denmark” is the goal of every modern democracy. “The Black Swan punctured that hallucination,” Brügger said. “It was Denmark’s red-pill moment.”

Sitting in the Copenhagen offices of Frihedsbrevet, or Freedom Letter, an investigative journalism site Brügger co-founded in 2021, I asked him what ordinarily passes for corruption in Denmark. He thought about it for a comically long time. During his boyhood, he recalled, one major scandal involved a small-town mayor being bribed with a bathroom renovation for his home. In 2011, Danish newspapers carried as front-page news the revelation that the prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, was leasing her car from Germany, saving €20 a month and depriving the exchequer of €70 a month in tax. Brügger had told a Greek friend about this brouhaha; the friend stared at him and said: “Back home, we’re talking about a politician who was given an entire island as a bribe.” Brügger also related a Frihedsbrevet scoop: Copenhagen’s leading newspaper editors had been attending a Proust book club run by a government official, a degree of socialising that Brügger characterised as unhealthy. This was, he was suggesting, the scale of grift Danes were used to – chump-change tax avoidance and highbrow hobnobbing – until The Black Swan came along.

But he was embroidering for effect. There have been graver controversies: a stock price manipulation scheme in 2008; a money-laundering case involving Danske Bank; a $1bn tax fraud case that ended in a 12-year prison sentence for its mastermind last December. Michael Bang Petersen, a political scientist at Aarhus University who studies trust in Danish society, told me that citizens’ trust in politicians has fallen by 20 percentage points since 2007. But their trust in fellow citizens has stayed stable. When asked if they can trust most people, an astonishing 80% of Danes reply in the affirmative. Lawyers, roasted as rogues practically everywhere, enjoy a glowing reputation in Denmark, and the welfare state is revered, as inviolable as a cathedral.

“We’re taught from a young age that cheating the system is not something you do, because you end up pissing on everybody,” Ane Cortzen, a television presenter and Brügger’s sister, told me. “Cheating on taxes is one of the most serious crimes you can commit.” Kalle Johannes Rose, an associate professor at Copenhagen Business School, observed: “Most Danish scandals have to do with the state – public healthcare, public banks, public something or the other. People want to know their high taxes are being spent correctly. If they don’t trust the system, they don’t pay their taxes, and then the house of cards falls down.” The Black Swan thus invited viewers to dwell on their worst nightmare: a shattering of the trust that underpins not just the smooth functioning of their beloved welfare state but the essence of what makes Danes proud to be Danes.

Amira Smajic wears her dark hair pulled back so tightly that her skin tightens around her high cheekbones. It lends her the severe, credible look of a schoolteacher, doubtless an asset during her years of crime. In her first job after university, at an accounting firm, Smajic quickly sensed they were skating close to the edge of the law. Her employer was subsequently convicted of fraud and forgery – but by then, Smajic had struck out on her own, working with Denmark’s biker gangs, which are notorious for criminality and violence. “I specialised in making accounts look as needed – getting white money to turn black and vice versa,” she says in the film. For these services, she earned several hundred thousand kroner a month. “I shopped in Louis Vuitton every week. I bought shoes like other people buy milk.”

In 2020, wearying of the paranoia and guilt of this delinquent life, Smajic thought of going public – through a book, perhaps, or a film. Having met several publishers and journalists, she eventually found her way to Brügger, and she commanded every shred of his attention. Over sushi, she told him so much about her connections with the criminal underworld that “she was clearly the real deal”, Brügger told me. He was instantly smitten, in that half-ardent, half-extractive way that journalists are with their subjects.

Brügger and TV2 first considered investigating the old contracts, emails and texts in Smajic’s files. But Michael Nørgaard, TV2’s editor-in-chief, said he was aware that Smajic had spent years engaging in fraud and forgery. “Could we believe that the materials she came to us with were intact – that she didn’t take out documents to put her in a better light?” he wondered. The idea to open a new office and clandestinely film its operations, Brügger and Nørgaard told me, came from Smajic. In a 2021 email, which Brügger showed me, Smajic excitedly laid out five pages of plans to monetise her past: articles, newsletters, podcasts, an eight-part true-crime show, the documentary, four books, the full panoply of a repentance empire. The arc, Smajic wrote, referring to herself in the third person, would be of “her social and moral redress”.

Brügger says he believed her. Smajic had come to Denmark as a child refugee from Bosnia, along with her family, and on one occasion she told Brügger that her father, who’d died of cancer, would have been disappointed that she’d turned to crime after Denmark had taken her in. “I will never get out of this life if I do nothing,” Smajic says in the first episode, with the air of a woman plotting to burn a bridge even as she flees over it. Before filming began, a security expert talked Smajic through the consequences of making the documentary, Brügger told me. “He didn’t spare her. He said she may have to relocate to another country, change her name, or not see her friends any more. She was crying, and I thought: ‘OK, that’s it. She’s out.’ But she insisted on continuing.”

Brügger and Nørgaard knew one more thing about Smajic. She was at the time, and had been for years, a police informant. On her request, they withheld that from the documentary – but they also didn’t let the police know in advance about the trap they were setting. In a brief contract, drafted at the outset of production and barely two pages long, Brügger’s producer, Peter Engel, stipulated that Smajic would be paid 30,000 kroner (roughly £3,350) a month. Engel said she also agreed to refrain from any actual criminal activity during production. In the opening minutes of The Black Swan, sitting across a desk from Smajic in a room resembling an interrogation chamber, Brügger asks her what the worst outcome of her undertaking could be. She replies: “That someone finds out and I will be liquidated before any of this is shown.”

The suspense of whether Smajic will be unmasked keeps The Black Swan as taut as a bowstring. The documentary’s more immediate shocks come from watching people methodically plan to break the law. The crimes range from the paltry to the serious. A man named Wassem, to whom Smajic introduces herself in the first episode, runs a shawarma shop and wants to skip out on tax. Fasar Abrar Raja, a grey-bearded member of a motorcycle gang called Bandidos, helps demolition crews dispose of asbestos and other toxic material without the costly safety measures the law requires. For a fee, he will bribe environmental analysts and local officials to look the other way while he dumps the material in the Danish countryside. Fasar also brings along Martin Malm, a smooth-faced businessman who launders millions of kroner a month through his “invoice factories”: companies that issue fake invoices for services never rendered. (Malm might invoice a nightclub owner for providing bouncers, say; the owner would pay Malm, who’d keep a fee and return the rest to the owner in cash or some other fashion, allowing him to avoid paying tax on it. The bouncers, needless to say, don’t exist.)

One of the film’s revelations, Brügger says in a voiceover, is the connection “between the nice-l