Original subtitles

The look and the presence he had was world class.

He was big, he was tall, he was muscular, he was a real life badass.

But the reason why we're doing this television program now is not because he

a great wrestler that was a standout for years, but because he was in wrestling

and then did some other batshit stuff.

He made people around him uncomfortable, but not in a good way.

You don't know that story?

He got deported from this country for weapons.

Driven by a desire for fame, Tony took his strongman persona to the extreme.

He wanted to be the person that people would, could you believe he said that?

Could you believe he did that?

And into the corridors of political power.

That guy's going to be an elected official?

He wanted to be famous, so that's how he was going to do that in Finland.

Until his relentless pursuit of the spotlight led to infamy and ended in

tragedy.

What more did he have to live for? The

dream was over.

The image he had created for himself became impossible to maintain.

He looked like a villain, he sounded like a villain, but unfortunately in

life, he was a villain.

In the summer of 1993,

Wrestling fans witnessed the debut of Ludwig Borga, an arrogant new villain

Finland.

This guy's a tough dude.

The foreign heel in professional wrestling has been a standby since the

the 20th century. They were exotic. They were mysterious. They were not like us.

You ain't from around here, are you, boy?

I'm Jim Cornette, and I was working for the WWF when Tony Holm, a .k .a. Ludwig

Borga, made his brief but spectacular run.

The fans could take their animosity out by booing the anti -American.

Maybe you sang that Russian national anthem just one time too many. Vince

McMahon loved the foreign heel concept so much that if we didn't have a problem

with a country, he would figure one out.

From Helsinki, Ludwig Borga.

So suddenly, you get this guy named Ludwig Borga from Finland, and because

he had an accent, that was close enough for Vince McMahon.

I can do something with this guy.

USA stand for it, my continent.

You stink a lot.

He was going to get a great push because it was easy to position him as a

villain.

I'm Jim Ross, and I was an on -air talent in 1993 for the WWE.

One way you get a villain notice is you have them break a streak, and Tatanka

had a winning streak.

Tatanka wins the 40th! Being the Native American, representing America, the fans

just connected right to me.

I'm Tatanka, an official legend of WWE.

I was running on an undefeated streak for two years.

When the office came to me, they said, we're really looking to do something big

with Ludwig Borga.

In our business, it's called rubbing.

You get out there and you rub shoulders with Hulk Hogan, that stardom rubs off

on you.

Ludwig had a tremendous opportunity.

The best thing for you to do is sell it. And he wanted me to sell it.

So Ludwig threw me in the ring and then pinned me with one finger.

By beating me, it instantly puts

Ludwig right at the top of the ladder.

Uh,

now looking at it, no.

The power of that WWF TV is tremendous.

Having a fan base that buys your action figures and sells them out.

But remember, we're on there 300 days a year.

So you're in the locker room a lot. You know, they want guys who are going to be

in there friendly with everybody. Because now you can do business

But Ludwig was never that guy.

Not that the guys had anything against him. He just never allowed the guys to

get close to him. Let's put it that way.

Morgan had a great look, but he was a miserable human being.

People didn't want to work with him. He made people around him uncomfortable.

And then when we finally realized he had the SS tattoo on his calf, things

started going downhill from there.

For the kids out there who weren't around, the SS was Hitler's private army

committed many of the atrocities at Hitler's behest in Nazi Germany.

You can't show something like that on television in 1990 -something in

So they said, cover that shit up.

One of the boys, if they would have seen that, I guarantee you someone would

have said something.

So, obviously, it was kept undercover.

We made a mistake in hiring him.

He slipped by us.

Tremendous strength and agility.

It wasn't done on purpose.

We just didn't do a good job of vetting him.

You can imagine how some of the Jewish talents in the locker room reacted to

him. It's not right to impose upon them such negativity.

We needed to get rid of him.

The fact that he had it to begin with indicated that probably something was

going on up there that maybe we didn't want to delve into much deep.

Drop it! Come on, Ralph!

Tony Hallne's childhood was defined by bitterness, brawls and resentment.

One thing to know about Tony is that he came from a broken home.

His parents divorced when Tony was just two years old. His father had a problem

with alcohol and it seems like his mother did too.

I'm Mikko Marttinen, a journalist and a writer of Tony Halme's biography.

The other important thing to know about Tony is that he kind of struggled

between two language communities.

His mother was originally a Swedish speaker and decided to put the boys into

Swedish -speaking school.

This made Tony feel like an outsider from very early on in his life.

. . . .

. . . .

He yearned for respect.

He felt that he was looked down upon because of his poverty.

Years before he ever stepped into a wrestling ring, Tony constructed a new

-masculine persona for himself, which he referred to as the Viking.

As soon as Tony stepped out to the street, he became the Viking.

He had the word Viking with a helmet tattooed on his arm.

He started to talk to Robert B. Paul.

And getting into street fights.

In the newspaper archives I found a very old item.

It says that two karate guys were just beating up everybody in a bar.

Turns out those karate guys were Tony and his best friend Krister.

Tony was fascinated with movies.

The one movie that really made an influence on him was Taxi Driver.

Maybe Tony saw him as the same kind of outsider as Robert De Niro.

And when he saw that movie, he decided that he will move to the United States

someday.

In 1986, Tony heads to Los Angeles searching for fame, fortune, and a

new direction.

They wanted people to like him. People like you because you're famous.

And I think that was a shield for a lot of insecurities that he had.

My name is Dee Dee, and I was once married to Tony Hollomay.

Size -wise and personality -wise, Tony was larger than life.

Fell in love with him pretty quickly.

When we got married, he wanted the music to be God Bless America.

He wanted to be famous in America.

He wanted to be a movie star in America, and he heard about Gold's Gym in Venice

Beach.

He attempted to be a bodybuilder, but he just didn't have the shape of a

bodybuilder. He had a big belly. He was a big guy everywhere.

It became almost like an obsession for him to be as big as possible, and

steroids helped.

He had a shoebox, and it had steroids from Russia.

It was clearly nefarious.

I'll never forget one of the packages was for horses.

His ambitions were to be a star, whatever way that came to him.

He got some small roles for Little Caesars. Tip. He was in a national ad,

some beer commercials.

Get back to work!

And eventually some small roles on TV as well.

No one argues with Curly.

Hanging in the Gold's Gym, a lot of people told him that you should go into

wrestling. You could really earn some money with this, and they got Tony

interested.

He did some wrestling shows with Herb Abrams, UWF.

He had a costume made, and it was Tony as the Viking.

I told you I'm going to hurt every pencil neck, every pipsqueak who steps

way. And there's only one way they're going to leave the ring. It's on the

stretcher. Hurt. I think UWF should start to sell life insurance too.

It was silly. Very silly.

Japan was probably his first big wrestling shows that he did.

Tony told everybody that he was a successful boxer in Finland.

None of this was true. He had never had a boxing fight in Finland.

But New Japan made his gimmick about that.

Tony Holm had become a star in wrestling in Japan, where they

liked big guys, giant monsters battling it out. King Kong and Godzilla.

The Japanese wrestling circuit is really tough.

It was very punishing for the wrestler's body, and Tony was very candid about

starting to use strong painkillers during his time in Japan.

It really became a habit for him.

Somewhere along the line, Tony's opportunities in Japan started to

little bit. His attitude was not great.

When I met Tony, the way that he spoke to you made you understand that he

held himself to be somebody.

But you have to know who else is in the room.

My name is Michael Maggiolotti, alias The Rebel Starbuck.

I'm the pioneer of Finnish professional wrestling.

Tony and I wrestle tags alongside guys like Scott Norton against the Japanese

contingents. From what I've heard, Tony Hall may rub some people the wrong way

ethnically. He had sympathies towards the White Brotherhood.

He had a lot of friends who were skinheads and whatever else.

And the wrong thing came out of his mouth. And a fight broke up between

Norton and Tony Hallmeyer at the bar.

I think that enough was enough.

And now it was judgment day.

Tony had a very famous incident with Scott Norton, an American wrestler.

Some people say that Tony kind of sacrificed Scott Norton.

Then again, Scott Norton says that he cleaned Tony Halme's clock.

This was a problem for New Japan.

Two of their foreign guards were not getting along.

And that

was the end of Tony in Japan.

With Tony back in California, his wife rethinks their three -year marriage.

There were a lot of things going on at the time that I overlooked.

But it wasn't until he cheated on me that I knew

what kind of person I was married to.

As much as I didn't want to be with him anymore, you know, I still loved him.

And at the point that...

I decided I needed to divorce him.

He got very emotional and, oh my God, I'm so sorry I did this to you. And I'm

going to take my truck and drive off the pier.

And I just said, I can't do this anymore.

I woke up to a lot of things that he lied about.

But I never imagined that he would turn into the person he turned into.

As soon as we split up, That's when he became Ludwig Borga.

We're back, ladies and gentlemen.

In 1993, Tony joins the World Wrestling Federation as a main event villain, but

his run with the company lasts less than a year.

After they gave him that push of defeating me, they were building him up

Luger.

But the fans never got behind it.

They were giving him all the vignettes and all those interviews and bringing

into TV, but his interviews were just like, blah.

This time it's going to be hard and tough, and I'm going to finish this

so -called hero once and for all.

Sometimes he's speaking Finnish to the camera. He says things like, which is

Finnish for like, I'll rip your ass off or something like that.

Whatever you say.

Most people in the U .S. don't even know where Finland resides on the world map.

So why should anybody feel threatened by who you are?

Americans think Lex Luger thinks.

So Americans choke on this.

He lacked the ability to connect with the audience, the nuances of being a pro

wrestler he did not possess.

And then we saw the SS tattoos on his calf and understood his philosophies.

They were not very healthy.

How do you justify it? How do you justify an SS tattoo based on what that

for and still to this day?

I think the reason he got the tattoo on his leg was because he got attention for

being fascinated by the Nazi thing.

I remember he spent some time in Russia and he came back with all kinds

of military memorabilia that was used by, I guess, Nazis or I

don't know. But one of the things was this creamer pitcher and on the bottom

had a swastika on it. And it was dated like 1941.

And I had used it as a flower pot in our house.

I didn't know that they were Nazi material.

I was just a young, naive person.

I didn't know shit from Shinole at that age.

But why would somebody get an exit -only tattoo on their rear end?

Why?

What the fuck would propel a man to tattoo exit -only above his asshole?

Especially when you're the size he is and look like that, do you really need

have written instructions for people not to fuck you in the ass?

Does there have to be a written warning?

What the fuck's going on with that?

And who are you making that statement to when you're walking down the street?

You're so anti -homosexual that you have exit only tattooed above your asshole.

Who's going to know?

Ah, nope. Him in the ass.

While wrestling at Madison Square Garden, Tony injures his ankle in a

With Tony being injured, he was unceremoniously dropped, and I don't

any of the audience really missed him either.

Whatever the reason became was good to get rid of him.

I'm glad he didn't get hurt on my watch.

And he pretty much self -destructed once he left WWE.

So if WWE is no longer an option, where do you go from here?

So Tony is looking for work, and he gets signed to fight in UFC.

And Tony doesn't take the training very seriously.

His opponent ends up being Randy Couture, who

will become a legend of the sport.

Prior to the fight, he had said, I will never tap out.

I would rather get out of there dead.

But, you know, as soon as the choke is on, he ends

up losing in one minute.

That's the end of his MMA career.

Tony went back to L .A.

He was getting married again, this time with a Finnish woman.

The police came and raided their house.

The SWAT team and guns and bulletproof vests and shield.

Tony was charged with trafficking controlled substances, which were

and possession of a legal firearm, an Uzi.

When we were together, Tony liked to shoot gun because they gave him power.

I never imagined that he would become a guy that got in trouble with gun.

Not defense industry.

The laws were very clear. If you had been convicted of a firearm felony in

United States, you should be deported. And that's what they did.

And he could never go back to the United States again.

He went back to Finland to chase the big and famous dream.

Tony's quest for fame in America is cut short.

forcing him back to Finland to pursue his dream once more.

I think it was a really hard blow for Tony to be forced to leave the United

States. He wants to be famous, he's a showman, so he's ready to try

He was the Finnish heavyweight professional boxing champion, and all of

loved his character.

In the Finnish version of TV show Gladiators...

Hän oli elementissään. Tonin

tästä viikinkimyötistä oli täysin sataprosenttia se Toni, mikä hän halusi

And then Toni gets his segment in a Finnish talk show where he records a

Where he, in a very comical way, brags about how manly he is.

It sells very well, and eventually he will record a whole record.

At this point, Tony Hallme is one of the most famous people in Finland, in fact.

Everything Tony touches is gold. To the Finnish people, he really

was superhuman.

He achieved something. He was in Hollywood.

He went to do Die Hard 3.

Wait, wait, Jesus, don't open it. It's a bomb.

Even though it was a side role, he was a goon. That broke the news barrier as

far as making Tony Hallme a household name.

He had learned in wrestling how to sell his character, and he decides to write

another biographical book.

Almost like a political manifest.

It's Tony's life story with a lot of violence, a lot of sex, but a lot of it

made up and embellished.

A lot of those stories are offensive to many people.

He uses the N -word a lot.

He's very traditional when it comes to roles of men and women.

There's a lot of people who hate him, but there's certainly a big segment of

Finnish population that really looks up to him.

Tony's polarizing infamy attracts Finnish power brokers eager to cash in

natural charisma and headline -grabbing antics.

My name is Veikko Vallin and I got to know Toni in the early 2000s.

The first time I met Toni personally was when my company started developing

protein drinks for big men.

We had to find a suitable person to promote it.

The idea that Toni would leave politics was initially a joke.

They contact Timo Soini, who is the leader of the very small true Finns

which is really struggling at that time.

He joined the political party in Finland that were the troublemaker.

And he was a troublemaker.

But let's say the SS tattoo.

How it didn't play into his political career is, I think it's a question of

timing.

During that time, Finland changed in a number of ways.

The Cold War ended, we joined the European Union, the immigration began

And this coincided with an economic recession.

As you can guess, a lot of these immigrants became scapegoats for

people had.

I think that a lot of Finns were very proud of being Finnish.

So when you do away with national identity, a lot of people saw it as a

So that's why I believe that he was forgiven.

Let's take care of our own before we take care of anybody else.

We weren't as liberal then as a nation as we are now.

And he had charisma, especially for the Finnish people, for the Finnish

audience. They understood him.

The closest equivalent to Tony Halme as a politician is Donald Trump.

The feelings they evoke in their audience are much more important than

And if you look at it, so many parallels in pro -wrestling and politics.

It's all about how to manipulate people's emotions.

Toni said what he thought, and he didn't have any regard for political

correctness.

He also didn't care if the things that he said were true or not.

Didn't he say that Tarja Halonen, our president at the time, didn't he say

she was a lesbian?

He talks about immigration in a way that is actually extremely offensive

and racist.

to his audience.

And he thought, well, let's do it.

But he had ping -pong and apu -papu again.

Something like that.

What is halventava?

I don't remember the name of the pavilion that challenged me, but that's

But still, I believe in democracy.

I'm not a sultan, because people called Toni Wiginkin a whore.

The officials discussed whether Toni should write anything at all. Should it

changed entirely?

Is it a dangerous person for Finnish society?

Can she be on television at all?

Are these opinions too radical?

Sitten se vaalipäivänä näkyy, että kehen ihmiset luottaa.

Kaikki meni hyvin, kunnes sitten Toni valitti eduskuntaan.

Sitten alkoi alamäki.

Following a campaign fueled by nationalist pride, Tony Hallmay stunned

political establishment with a landslide victory.

Incredibly good numbers. It was gangbusters. People just voted for this

masse.

If you had said in the locker room at the time, see that guy over there? He's

going to be elected to political office.

Somebody needs to treat this guy.

If you'd have said he's going to be a nationalist right -wing lunatic, I'd

said, okay, I'll buy that. But politician, I wouldn't have got that

Now in office, Tony escalates his divisive rhetoric.

I've never seen a man who beats a woman without a hand.

And we, of course, around us, we were like, Toni, can you calm down a little

bit? This is a bit like Nolo.

But it's okay, Toni.

He couldn't hold it in.

Toni was the kind of man who said the things that many men do.

I can tell you that the people who live in the neighbors of foreigners sleep

very badly, if at all.

A lot of people hold Tony Halme to be, I guess, a white supremacist would be the

correct term.

It's a bit different when I want to do something.

I'm absolutely sure that never in the 90s the Jews would have had their asses

kicked.

I noticed when I was in the same room with him in the municipality, that the

stories changed every week.

I said, well, I don't always remember what has been said.

It was always the fact and fiction that went with him.

Her husband and wife were doing things economically well.

There shouldn't have been anything that would have led her to the destruction.

I see that the biggest reason is the trauma that she had.

Then the cycle of destruction is very powerful.

At this point he had already developed a serious alcoholism problem on top of

his drug addiction.

Tony's increasing substance abuse becomes impossible to ignore.

Tony had promised to have an exhibition match against his old friend and

sparring partner.

The fight became quite brutal, especially for Tony, who really got a

that fight.

After the fight, Tony starts drinking.

He goes to Tampere, where he has some friends, and keeps on drinking.

After about two weeks of these spins, he finally returns home to his wife.

They develop an argument.

The wife says, we are true. I've had enough of your drinking.

Tony grabs a handful of medicine, swallows them.

The wife, of course, wants to call the 911.

At some point, Tony gets hold of a gun.

The wife tries to grab the gun away from Tony.

And during the struggle, the gun goes off.

To this day, we're not sure whose finger was on the trigger.

But the wife flees the apartment, calls 911.

She goes back inside the apartment and she finds that Toni is unconscious.

He has swallowed some of his own puke and doesn't really show any signs of

life, really.

Poliisin mukaan kukaan ei loukkaantunut välikohtauksessa.

Silminnäkijät kuitenkin kertovat, että Halme vietiin tapahtuman jälkeen pois

paikalta ambulanssilla.

Poliisi on ollut tänään yhteydessä Halmetta hoitaviin lääkäreihin, joiden

Halme on yhä heikossa kuin.

He really struggles for his life for the first couple of weeks.

Eventually, they manage to revive him.

But by this point, it's clear that he has suffered some serious brain damage.

He can only talk like one word at a time, and he starts the slow process of

recuperating.

But he's never back to his old, colorful, quick -thinking self.

People could see that he was not the old Tony at all.

His marriage ended. That made things only worse.

He was depressed.

The citizen Tony Halme is accused of several crimes related to the shooting

the summer. So it's exactly the same, what action will come, if the court will

judge you, then you will be fired.

Yes.

Then he started to make objections to the judge.

He practiced roles.

He is a prison guard at SSL in Porvoo.

He had to be the lawyer.

Tony resigns from parliament and receives a four -month suspended

Now on disability, his health struggles push him deeper into isolation.

Things were getting

bleaker all the time.

He was seriously addicted to painkillers, used a lot of alcohol.

He continued to do steroids as well, but obviously they don't help you if you

cannot do the training.

He kept doing these appearances in little

bars around Finland, and that was the only really thing that got him out of

house at that point.

It appears that he got in debt also because of the drugs that he had to buy

the black market.

You've been to the mountaintop and you have to come down because there's

else to go.

For a lot of people, I think it's too much.

You'd rather end it than become nobody again.

Call now. The phone is ringing inside.

Call the police.

It was dark all night.

I thought Toni was sleeping, but she wasn't.

On January 10, 2010, Tony Halme is found dead by suicide,

bringing a sudden end to his turbulent life.

Why did he arrive to that decision?

Obviously, we can only speculate, but... It must have been very hard for him to

see himself in the condition that he was, which was so far removed from the

ideal that he always held of a big, strong man.

Not surprised.

Didn't shed a tear.

What does a person do to another person where you don't even get emotional about

that?

Because he was a piece of shit and he burned the bridges.

You know, he treated people horribly.

Ja sitten kun lähdetään menemään sinne juurisyyhyn, mitä Toni ite sanoi, että

hän on ollut katkera elämälle, mitä hänelle on tapahtunut, että äiti ei

välittänyt.

Siinä isossa äijässäni mä näin sen pikkupojan, joka kaipas sitä huomiota ja

rakkautta.

Ehkä vähän sitä halveksuntaa ja sitten sitä vihaa.

When the man hates like this man, you're not going to beat this man.

So, what is his legacy?

He was best known as Ludwig Borga.

A nondescript heel from Finland who never really connected with

the audience.

I was ringside. Can't remember a Ludwig Borga match.

Because he just didn't stand out in that environment.

He was an asshole.

And that's where I leave it.

Tony brought everything that he had learned in the American show business

wrestling to Finland at the right time and really revolutionized Finnish

politics in a lot of the same ways that Donald Trump changed politics in the

United States.

And this really paved the way for a lot of politicians that ran on anti

-immigration themes everywhere in Europe during the next couple of decades.

This was just the result. At the end of the book you say that success is the

best cost.

Those who I had to endure in my life, and I think it's the same for others,

failure is perhaps good.

I want people to know that there was a good side to this person, you know, and

wouldn't have fallen in love with somebody that was a complete monster the

that we know of him now.

But I think he destroyed himself

in every way that a person could do that.