Illustration:
Samson / DER SPIEGEL
Narco-State Netherlands
The Slippery Dutch Slope from Drug Tolerance to Drug
Terror
Drug gangs in the Netherlands have long since
graduated from hashish to cocaine - and from dealing on the streets to a spree
of contract killings. Police, lawyers, journalists: All are at risk of falling
victim to the drug violence that has gripped the country.
By Jürgen Dahlkamp, Jörg Diehl und Roman Lehberger
20.10.2021, 12.00 Uhr
A dark
night sky hangs over Amsterdam as Peter Schouten drives home on Nov. 2, 2020.
The lawyer is coming from a TV talk show, where he appeared with his colleague
Onno de Jong and with Peter R. de Vries, a well-known crime reporter. He is
traveling in an armored car, complete with bodyguards, their automatic weapons
in the door compartments. Such has been Schouten’s life since he and the other
two began working with the country’s most important witness – a criminal who
has testified against the Dutch cocaine mafia. The man’s brother has already
been shot and killed for this reason, as was his first lawyer, Schouten’s
predecessor.
Who is next
on the kill list? Schouten? De Jong? De Vries? Schouten looks out through bulletproof glass
and sees De Vries walking alone on the street. The car drives up to him and
Schouten asks: "Peter, what are you doing here alone in the dark?” De
Vries: "I am walking to my car.” Schouten, according to his recollection
of the conversation, replies: "But that’s insane.”
"In the problem areas off southeastern Amsterdam,
young men are queuing up to commit murder on behalf of the gangs."
Cees, a
police investigator in Amsterdam
Eight
months later, on July 6 of this year, De Vries was again walking through
Amsterdam’s city center. It was to be his final walk – and would end in another
250 paces. He had become a living legend. As a journalist, he had not only
reported on criminal cases, but had also solved many of them through his TV
show, "Peter R. de Vries, Kriminalreporter.” A one-man special commission,
de Vries was, for his millions of viewers, proof that a single person could
accomplish more than the entire law enforcement apparatus. He was brave.
Fearless.
And he
never used bodyguards.
On that
July 6 evening, de Vries was again coming from a TV appearance, strolling along
Lange Leidseswarsstraat from the studio to the parking garage where his BMW was
parked. On his right and left were typical Dutch brick facades topped with
hoisting beams from the old gable lifts. Below them, the kitchens of the world:
an Indian restaurant called Bollywood, an Italian named O Sole Mio, a Thai
place. There were tables set up outside for people meeting to eat, talk, laugh.
Indeed, De Vries’ final steps led him through a street that embodied the
country’s self-image: Cosmopolitan, light and lively, safe. A nice façade.
Then the
street grew quieter, more residential. De Vries could see the entrance to the
parking garage ahead, but he didn’t see the young man lurking on the staircase
leading up to the right, to building numbers 176 and 178. The man had been
waiting for De Vries. When the reporter walked past, the man fired five shots.
One of them hit de Vries in the head.
He
collapsed in front of a window plastered with advertising, one of them for a
place called Cooldown Café 'De Kleine’ – a bitterly ironic coincidence in this
horrific story. "De Kleine” was the former nickname of Ridouan Taghi, the
suspected drug kingpin against whom the chief witness had testified.
»Woooooooooooooppppppppwoooooooooppppppppppp hahahaha
insch’allah!«
Decrypted
text message
There is no proof that Taghi sent the killer, even though he is the prime suspect. His lawyer says that her client had nothing to do with the De Vries murder. Formerly the most-wanted man in the Netherlands, Taghi has been in custody since his arrest in 2019. At first, he told his interrogators that the state should save its money and just "give me a life sentence.” He has since clammed up, however, and instructed his lawyer to deny all accusations. Still, the testimony of the chief witness isn’t the only thing incriminating him. There is also evidence provided by encrypted messages that have been decoded. These include an excited "Woooooooooooooppppppppwooooooooooppppppppppp hahahaha insch’ allah!” after another murder. His lawyer claims these messages weren’t from Taghi or from his cell phone.
But the
shots fired on De Vries were about much more than intimidating a witness. They
were a demonstration of power, a show of who has the say in the Netherlands and
who can force others into silence.
And if Taghi, the boss in the high-security wing, isn’t behind the murders – the killings of the witness’ brother, of the chief witnesses’ first lawyer, and of De Vries – then the situation would be even more horrific. Because that would mean that other bosses in the international drug trade have gone to war – a war over cocaine, of which billions of euros worth is moved through the Netherlands into Europe every year. And in which a person’s life is only worth the equivalent of a few hundred grams. An execution costs an estimated 50,000 euros – a package deal that includes surveillance, an escape vehicle, a weapon and the killer himself. "In the problem areas of southeastern Amsterdam, young men are queuing up to commit murder on behalf of the gangs,” says Cees, a Dutch investigator who requested that his real name not be used in this story.
The primary suspect Ridouan Taghi
The De
Vries murder is forcing the Netherlands to finally take stock. How bad has the
situation become in the country, and how could things have devolved to this
degree? The attack has shaken the country’s sense of itself and laid bare how
absurd the cliché was of a supposedly cute, peaceful Netherlands in which a
commitment to tolerance allows for people to calmly coexist – a tolerance that
extends to soft drugs, because a joint doesn’t hurt anyone.
For a long
time, nobody was bothered by the fact that the country’s permissive approach to
hash and marijuana had helped brutal mobsters become powerful, and that the
gangs had also begun carting tons of hard drugs through the country alongside
the soft ones. That every year, 20 people were being killed in that underworld.
But then, the gangsters stopped caring about the public peace.
In 2012, a
gang war broke out, and ever since, the underworld has been extending its
fingers towards the world up above. There was a shooting during which bullets
flew into a children’s bedroom. In 2016, a severed head showed up on the
sidewalk in front of a café. There have been killings of and threats to people
who don’t belong to that milieu and are living a normal life, or to people who
have had the courage to stand up for rule of law and freedom of the press. Or
simply people who had the misfortune of being mistaken by a contract killer for
his target.
The
Netherlands, which wants to be so very permissive, is learning how un-free life
can be in the grips of the mafia. The Taghi gang’s motto is supposedly
"Wie praat, die gaat” – whoever talks, must go. Every journalist who
reports about the Moroccan-dominated Mocro gangs. Every prosecutor who
investigates them. Every lawyer who represents their opponents. Every witness
who testifies against them. They all should be checking under their car for
bombs and looking around to see who might be trailing them. They must be
prepared to submit to police protection and give up their old lives, and for
their family to give theirs up too.
18.9 billion euros
Minimum
annual value of synthetic drug sales in the Netherlands in 2017, according to a
report
"All
boundaries are gone,” says Cees, the investigator. Even Prime Minister Mark
Rutte has supposedly fallen into the sights of the Mocro killers. Earlier this
month, the police arrested a cousin of Taghi’s. The cousin is a lawyer who is
part of the defense team and had constant access to Taghi – and, as indicated
by intercepted communications, allegedly acted as Taghi’s channel over the
course of several months, helping him deliver orders to the outside. Nothing
seems unthinkable, nobody seems safe. DER SPIEGEL has spoken with people who
are living under this constant threat and don’t know when it will stop or if it
ever will. For them, there is no safety – it’s like living in a narco-state.
For many people, living in Holland has become comparable to living in
drug-ridden countries in Central and South America.
The Drug
State
When the
German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) presented its 2019 situation report
on organized crime, one figure stood out above all others: 161. That’s how many
of the BKA’s organized crime investigations had links to the Netherlands.
According to the report, the country was, "by a considerable margin,”
ahead of other countries. "This demonstrates the status of the Netherlands
as an important hub … in the sector of narcotics trafficking.” German investigators
speak of it as the "largest hub” for drugs in Europe.
Who might
have been surprised? As ever this summer, the smell of marijuana hung over the
city – a pre-rolled joint from the coffee shop, "soft easy stoned” for 3
euros, is part of the standard tourist program. The country has managed to make
soft drugs part of its folklore, like cheese and tulips. Just that it hasn’t
stopped with soft drugs.
Synthetic
ones too – Made in The Netherlands – have a first-class reputation: great
quality, great price, and they fly off the shelves. The Dutch are global
leaders, especially when it comes to the drug ecstasy. In a high-profile study,
the criminologist Pieter Tops from the University of Leiden estimated that the
country produced around a billion pills in 2017, and that revenues from
synthetic drugs alone are 18.9 billion euros. At least.
Then
there’s also the domestic cultivation of cannabis (every year, thousands of
plantations are uncovered) and the country’s well-known talent for breeding new
varieties. The product coming out of greenhouses these days makes the hippie
generation’s joints seem like candy cigarettes.
"The
Netherlands is Europe’s drug supermarket,” says Frank Buckenhofer, the head of
the union representing customs officers in Germany. As an investigator at the
Customs Investigation Services in the city of Essen, located not far from the
Dutch border, he knows what he’s talking about: "The professionals for the
import, the cultivation, the manufacturing and the distribution of drugs are
all based in Holland.”
Cocaine seized by customs officials in Hamburg in
August 2019
The most
recent figures available indicate that more cocaine arrived from the fields of
South America in 2019 than ever before: According to the UN authority, it was
1,784 tons, twice as much as in 2014. And the more of the stuff is harvested,
the more it snows in the Netherlands, then in Germany. "We have seen a
massive increase when it comes to cocaine,” Daniela Ludwig, the narcotics
commissioner of the German government, said when presenting the BKA’S situation
report about narcotics crime. "There is a continuous trend in the last few
years,” said BKA head Holger Münch, who was sitting alongside her. The
investigators are coming across ever larger shipments: The most recent
record-breaking discovery in the port of Hamburg weighed 16 tons, with a street
value of up to 3.5 billion euros. The primary suspect was, yet again, from the
Netherlands.
But even if
more drugs are being found, to the police it just means that even more is
getting through. Cocaine is flooding the market, with the UN estimating that
the number of coke-users in Western and Central Europe is 4.4 million. And
growing.
Gangs can
potentially earn billions, which brings to mind a phrase quoted by the State
Criminal Police Office of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia: "The
willingness to carry out violence increases along with the potential income.”
With this in mind, says Thomas Jungbluth, who monitors organized crime for the
Düsseldorf-based office, one must simply look to the Netherlands. "If
these groups are killing an investigative journalist on a public street, that
is a declaration of war. They apparently feel invincible.”
The De
Vries case reminds Jungbluth of Italy in the 1990s, and of the murders of the
mafia-hunters Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. That something "has
developed in a civilized country with solid structures” like the Netherlands,
he says, "is worrying to us all.” Today the Netherlands, tomorrow Germany?
"We don’t want to have to go through that,” says Jungbluth.
The Lawyers
An office
building in The Hague, more cannot be written about it. Silent men are standing
behind the entrance, their eyes hard and empty, their jackets bulging around
their holsters. They are police bodyguards. Outside, in the courtyard, there is
an armored limousine, and more policemen.
Lawyers Onno de Jong and Peter Schouten
The lawyers
of the chief witness are sitting next to another for their conversation with
DER SPIEGEL. Peter Schouten looks not unlike teddy bear that has been squeezed
into a suit: a slightly portly man with a gray beard and smileys on his socks.
He looks like a man who isn’t easily impressed. Onno de Jong, on the other
hand, is ascetic, reserved. He lets Schouten do the talking, partly because
Schouten was first involved in the case, the friend of a dead legend.
The case
began for Schouten on September 18, 2019. That day, at 7:30 am, Derk Wiersum
was walking to his car, parked outside his front door, when a man came up to
him and shot him. Wiersum was the first lawyer of Nabil B., the chief witness,
and the killing set off shockwaves that reached all the way up to the
government, with Prime Minister Rutte called the attack "extremely
disturbing.” Nobody could have imagined something like this happening in the
Netherlands. Nobody? Nabil B. could.
A photo of Derk Wiersum, the lawyer who was
murdered for representing the chief witness
In early
2017, Nabil B. had shadowed a man who was to be murdered. He also procured the
escape vehicle. At that point, he says today, he was still part of the Taghi
gang. But the killer shot the wrong person, something that happens time and
again in the Dutch liquidation business. The perpetrators are young men who
want to move up in the gang and have itchy trigger fingers. They are not
especially smart and use too many bullets, according to a publication by the
Justice Ministry, a volume dedicated to contract killings. One time, they
executed an intern at an Amsterdam neighborhood center with a Kalashnikov
because he looked similar to their target. Another time they hit a DJ, then a
dishwasher. And in early 2017, a man who was coincidentally standing at night
on the veranda of a house where the target person also lived.
The problem
for Nabil B. was that the accidental victim himself belonged to a well-known
family-run gang – one that, it was said, shouldn’t be messed with. And it
didn’t take long for that family to hear a name: Nabil B. Suddenly, he was
stuck in a trap. And after a few days, he was more afraid of being killed by
his own gang, because he knew too much, than by the family of the victim. He
approached the latter, then allowed himself to be arrested by the police under
a pretext and began to talk, talk and talk. Forty-one statements. The man who
supposedly hired him was Ridouan Taghi, whom the police had previously believed
to be the head of a Mocro gang. Nabil B. claimed that Taghi was behind a whole
series of killings in that world.
Two months
later, the police presented its star witness. Nabil B. had warned them not to
out him too soon because at that point the "bodies will fall.” And he was
right. Not even one week later, a man arranged a job interview with Nabil B.’s
brother, who was the head of an advertising agency, had two children, no
criminal record and no contact with the criminal world. The man pretending to
be a job applicant shot him from behind. It was the first message from the
mafia, or at least that’s how it was understood: that if Nabil B. is
unreachable, they’ll just take out someone close to him.
The next
year, Wiersum, the lawyer, was killed, a day that Onno de Jong still remembers
well. It was, after all, the last day he set foot in his own home. At the time,
he was representing the leading witness in a different gang trial. There were,
though, connections to the Taghi gang and widespread concern that De Jong could
also be murdered. He was sitting at his office desk when the State Prosecutors
Office called: Don’t go outside until you are picked up, they told him.
"They brought me home so that I could pack.” Since then, he has lived
under police protection at a secret location.
After
Wiersum’s death, the judiciary asked 20 lawyers if they could take on Nabil
B.’s case. Nobody wanted to. The 21st, though, agreed. To avoid becoming a
target, he remained anonymous, was never on camera during video questioning and
his voice was digitally distorted. But Nabil B. didn’t get along with him.
The casket of the murdered Dutch crime reporter
Peter R. de Vries
So the
witness got in touch with Peter R. de Vries, hoping that the famous reporter
could help him. De Vries told him: First you need a lawyer. And De Vries had
one in mind: Peter Schouten. "If everyone runs away, all of society
suffers,” Schouten told DER SPIEGEL – and he says that it was clear he wouldn’t
retreat.
Peter and
Peter. One Peter is now dead, the other is risking his life. He, too, is under
police protection 24 hours a day, but doesn’t want to live in a safe house like
De Jong. "If you are placed in a barracks, your whole life becomes
unbearable,” Schouten says. Does he regret accepting the job? "Not for a
second.” De Jong, who joined him as co-counsel, says no, "never.”
Schouten
still clearly remembers one particular conversation with De Vries. "I told
him that it would become dangerous for us, for him more so than for me. 'You
have the famous name. If they want attention, terror, chaos, then you are the
primary target.’” But De Vries refused to be intimidated.
In October,
Schouten received a tip from inside the milieu that all three of them were now
on a hitlist. Schouten and De Jong, the lawyers, already enjoyed the highest
degree of protection, but not De Vries. He didn’t want to constantly have a
bodyguard with him, saying that such a situation would make it impossible for
him to work as a journalist. Plus, in the eyes of the judiciary, he was just a
reporter and not a key element in the legal proceedings. Even just over a week
before the murder, when the police received information that De Vries had been
shadowed by an unknown man on his way to the parking garage on Lange
Leidsedwarsstraat, he remained without protection. The unknown man, as would
later become clear, was apparently the driver of the getaway car on the night
of the actual assassination.
The Crime
Boss
Since
March, Taghi has been sitting in the docket in "De Bunker,” the colloquial
name for the highest security court in the country, located in the Amsterdam
neighborhood of Nieuw-West. It is the site of the "Marengo” trial – a
fantasy name produced by the judiciary’s computer system. The primary
accusation against Taghi and 16 others: six contract killings. The murder of
the chief witnesses’ brother is not among them, nor is the killing of Wiersum,
the lawyer. In both those cases, only the alleged killer has been identified.
Wiersum’s killers were each sentenced to 30 years in prison last week, but the
trial was unable to clarify who put them up to it.
The chief
witness -- along with the encrypted chats that the police were able to decode
starting in 2016 -- were able to connect Taghi to other killings. Before the
attack in which the wrong man was shot on the veranda in Utrecht, he wrote:
"I’ll have heads on it” – "heads” being underworld slang for
assassins. After a killer shot an old Taghi associate who had talked too much,
he wrote: "Haha … I’m the best … I’m on the hunt … and I need blood ….
Soon, another scumbag.” Taghi’s lawyer claims that her client didn’t write
those messages either.
Ridouan
Taghi was born in Morocco in 1977 and grew up in Vianen, a town not far from
Utrecht to which his parents had moved as guest workers, as migrants who
arrived as part of a temporary work program were called. Newspapers in the
Netherlands have described his rise to public enemy No. 1 in detail – from
dealing on the streets to solidifying his place as one of the kingpins in the
international drug trade.
By the age
of 17, Taghi had had enough of school and started selling hashish on the
streets. He was part of a youth gang that called itself BAD Boys, with BAD
being an acronym for "black and dangerous” or "black and deadly.”
189 people
were the victims of contract killings in the
Netherlands from 2013 to 2019
Taghi
apparently had plenty of ambition and decent business acumen. He is thought to
have bought hash by the kilo from a large-scale dealer and sold it on the
streets in and around Utrecht. His Moroccan roots apparently also gave him a
boost. The country is a primary source of cannabis, and Taghi is thought to
have set up a supply chain from there, including fast boats to Spain, from
where the goods would be sent further north. Once the chain was set up, he was
perfectly placed to be the prime beneficiary of a 2006 strategy shift by the
South American cocaine cartels: They started sending more of their product into
Europe via West Africa and Morocco. The supply chain allegedly established by
Taghi could handle both hash and cocaine, but the latter was more profitable.
Taghi, who
changed his place of residence to Morocco in 2009, nevertheless remained an
unknown to the Dutch police. And he was still largely unknown in 2012, when the
killing started. That year, investigators managed to seize 225 kilograms of
cocaine in the Port of Antwerp, a laughably small amount by today’s standards,
but back then, it was significant. Two gangs had been waiting for the delivery,
but neither of them knew of the secret police raid and they accused each other
of having stolen the cocaine.
That’s how
it began. In 2012, two people were killed in Amsterdam in a wild shootout in a
residential district. Then came retaliatory murders, and more murders to avenge
those murders. Preventative murders, paranoid murders, statement murders. There
were murders to save face, and murders of people who were at the wrong place at
the wrong time. And the killing just kept on going. Justice Ministry statistics
list 178 contract killings resulting in 189 deaths, though not all of them had
to do with this one gang war. A typical indicator of such "liquidations”
was a burned-out getaway vehicle, torched to destroy evidence.
Who was
fighting against whom? Apparently the killers themselves didn’t always know, a
confusion that can be seen in the text messages. But the killing continued, and
in 2014, the bosses of two rival gangs were murdered, creating a vacuum that
Taghi was happy to step into, along with two other cocaine mobsters. The police
were so unfamiliar with his name that they initially wrote it as Redouan
instead of Ridouan.
They only
found his trail after a special unit took a closer look at some of the
burned-out vehicles. A BMW led them to a group that had apparently become
specialists in contract killings. They trained with Kalashnikovs and were
conducting surveillance on five men. The alleged team of assassins was made up
of former members of the BAD Boys, the gang from Taghi’s youth – and their
prospective targets included a man from Morocco. He was driving when the police
got ahold of him: Don’t drive any further! Get out now! the police told him.
The police had learned that the assassins had attached a tracking device to the
vehicle. After that, a friend of the Moroccan target began talking to the
police, telling them that a certain Taghi had targeted his friend and many
others.
This
informant, known as "the Butcher,” was the first witness to mention
Taghi’s name. Then came Nabil B., the chief witness, and soon after that,
investigators were able to decrypt more and more mobile phone messages. For the
police, all the puzzle pieces came together to reveal a man who was so powerful
and simultaneously so distrustful that he saw potential betrayal lurking
everywhere. A man who preferred just to kill those in whom he had lost trust.
The
Journalists
In a
meeting in early August in Amsterdam, Paul Vugts, a journalist with the daily
Het Parool, is wearing a black T-shirt and blue jeans, a perfect outfit if you
want to avoid attracting attention. How old? "Forty-seven,” he responds.
And will he still be 47 in the fall when the article will appear in DER
SPIEGEL? "Yeah, I hope so.” It’s the kind of black humor which could
potentially double as a sort of morbid premonition.
Vugts
writes about Taghi and other "Mocro” kingpins. In 2017, he received a tip
that a different gang – not Taghi’s – wanted to see him dead and that a couple
of things would happen before he was killed. Each of those predictions wound up
coming true, aside from a bullet in his head. For that reason, he has been
living under the highest level of police protection since October 2017. He says
he is the first journalist to be protected by the same commando responsible for
keeping watch on the royal family.
Het
Parool reporter Paul Vugts Foto: Marcus Simaitis / DER SPIEGEL
Vugts
hadn’t written anything that seemed obviously dangerous. But the gang had come
to believe that he knew more about murders in the milieu than had been printed
and would soon be publishing the details.
He and his
girlfriend moved into a safehouse together. He sold his own home because he
knew that he would never be able to return. He also sold his car, since rental
cars are safer if you swap them out often enough. After a couple of the
criminals ended up in prison, others fled or ended up in a pool of blood, he
hoped that the worst was over. Maybe, with a bit of luck. "Nobody ever
just tells you that it’s over.”
Vugts, in
any case, released himself from personal protection half a year later, after
consulting with the police. He was aiming to regain something of his old life.
The first time he went to a street fair, he says, it felt like he was jumping
into the void. Never before, he says, had he been so touched as when his
girlfriend – after all that they had endured – asked him if he wanted to get married.
Vugts’
parents were social workers and always had foster children in their home,
youths from difficult backgrounds. Today, in the city where he lives, Vugts
sees drug dealers use such kids to either smuggle cocaine or work as spotters
and report to the gang where a target is currently located. Or as killers.
"It is important to write about it,” he says. And even though, as a police
reporter, there isn’t much room for pathos, he says: "If I were to stop,
the others will have won. And this isn’t a game. It’s about our democracy.”
“Kok knew that he was a target, but he didn’t do
anything about it. He said he would probably be killed by bullets before he was
killed by cancer.”
Paul Vugts, crime reporter for the daily Het
Parool
For Vugts,
things started happening when Taghi rose up to become the name and face of the
"Mocro” mafia, when the police slowly beginning to understand who they
were dealing with – and Taghi’s name first became public thanks to a blogger by
the name of Martin Kok. Kok, whom Vugts knew well, had spent a fair amount of
time in prison himself. He drank, took cocaine and tried to launch an escort
service. On his website Vlinderscrime.nl, he would write about the underworld,
posting whatever information he ran across without spending too much time
checking it. Including the name Ridouan Taghi.
Taghi, as
Vugts recalls, filed a legal complaint against Kok, a civilized approach, but
lost. Then, one day, an explosive device appeared under Kok’s car. A passerby
luckily noticed the device, which had the explosive power of 40 hand grenades.
There is a decrypted message from April 2016 that has been ascribed to Taghi:
"This sick, sick Vlinderscrime has to go to sleep Sir!” The term
"sleep,” investigators have come to realize, is code for "die.” And
it appears frequently in the text messages.
On Dec. 8,
2016, Vugts met with Kok and a few others for lunch. "Kok knew that he was
a target, but he didn’t do anything about it,” Vugts recalls. "He said he
would probably be killed by bullets before he was killed by cancer.” That same
afternoon, a contract killer tried to assassinate him, but the man’s weapon may
have jammed and Kok escaped. The same evening, in front of the Boccaccio
Bordello, his luck ran out.
Since then,
the rules of survival for police reporters in the Netherlands have changed. In
June 2018, a delivery van slammed into the headquarters of De Telegraaf. A man
climbed out, lit the van on fire and blew it up. The paper had committed the
sin of comparing the Netherlands to a narco-state. Two crime reporters from the
paper now apparently have round-the-clock protection after credible information
turned up that their lives were in danger.
"It is
clear to everybody: They are killing journalists,” says Vugts. "It would
be a ridiculous lie to claim that you don’t think about it.” Nevertheless, he
is not about to stop. "But everyone has to make that decision for
themselves.” Like a journalist colleague of his, who prefers to remain
anonymous. His first rule: "My life is more important to me than my job.”
His second rule is to only write what the police already know. Which is why he
still hasn’t published a story for which he has completed the reporting.
"If it runs, I’ll be on TV for a few days, and then it will be forgotten.
But these people would never forget me.”
In the
Netherlands, some stories that don’t appear because human lives are at stake.
The
Criminologists
The fact
that the study led by Pieter Tops, the crime expert, created such waves in 2018
wasn’t just because of the numbers – a billion pills per year. It was largely
because Tops held up the mirror to his compatriots. How can it be, he and his
team of researchers asked, that such a small country has been able to maintain
a top spot in the global illicit drug industry over the course of several
decades?
Because,
Tops claims, it is perfectly positioned for the role.
He talks
about the policy of tolerance for soft drugs that has been in place since the
1970s. And about the eternal mentality of the Dutch. He paints the picture of a
country in which drug consumption is trivialized and the drug trade is seen by
many people as a basically normal sector of the economy.
"In the clash between profit and principle,
profit usually wins."
Criminologist
Pieter Tops
He sees it
as a country walking an extremely thin line between being easygoing and being
negligent, between being business-minded and blinded by profit. In Amsterdam
alone, there are more than 160 coffee shops raking in decent profits with
hashish and marijuana. The study describes the widespread attitude as being:
"If people are allowed to use something, why should producing it be such a
problem?”
Jan Meeus,
a crime reporter for NRC Handelsblad, a daily, who focuses primarily on the
economic aspect of the drug trade, says laconically: "First: We in Holland
have been smuggling since we have existed. Second: When it comes to drugs, we
have the expertise, the technology and the trade routes. And third: To change
anything, you’ll have to reprogram an entire nation.”
Tops used
synthetic drugs to illustrate the problem. Although countries like Britain and
the U.S. banned amphetamines in the 1960s and early 1970s, it took the
Netherlands until 1976. The same happened with ecstasy in the 1980s. Even then,
the report makes clear, the bans in Holland usually came as a result of
political pressure from abroad – from countries being flooded with pills from
the Netherlands. But by the time Holland got around to blacklisting the drugs,
domestic gangs had long since managed to leverage their extended legality into
an advantage on the global market. An advantage they have subsequently been
able to defend using their contacts and know-how.
Drug-friendly
policies for marijuana and hashish began in 1976 with the Opium Act,
essentially a capitulation to the hippie movement. The law drew a strict
dividing line between soft and hard drugs, which for the population was
essentially a definition of "good” and "bad” drugs. Purchasing
marijuana, of course, remains illegal according to the letter of the law. But
it isn’t enforced below the level of five grams per person per day.
It was a
solution that seemed to fit the country perfectly. And it opened a new business
sector. Or, as Tops says of his country: "In the clash between profit and
principle, profit usually wins.” It also set a new standard in drug policy,
with Dutch governments since then prioritizing national health. Those who take
soft drugs shouldn’t be ostracized, according to the prevailing approach, to
prevent them from sliding down the slope to hard drugs.
And it is
true that one rarely runs into junkies on the streets of Amsterdam, just happy
stoners. In 2019, the Netherlands was toward the middle of the field in drug
death statistics, comparable to Germany. The strategy, in other words, seems to
have worked – were it not for the fact that it "promoted the rise of a
large, criminal drug industry,” as Tops’ study notes. That, too, has come with
a price. Deaths by murder rather than by overdose.
Dutch
pragmatism – others call it hypocrisy – is perhaps best illustrated by the
so-called "backdoor problem.” Coffee shops are permitted to sell marijuana
at the front of the shop – small amounts per person. It actually adds up to
quite a lot, since many tourists come just for that reason. But the necessary
largescale deliveries to the coffee shops are illegal. They come in
clandestinely through the backdoor.
"That
was, of course, attractive to gangs, and that’s how it began,” says Robin
Hofmann, referring to the narco-war. Hofmann is from Germany but works as a
criminologist at Maastricht University. "The drug war is a consequence of
the tolerant drug policies,” he says. "The tolerance of soft drugs
promoted the trade with hard drugs.” And Dutch gangs sell anything, if it
brings in money: hashish, cocaine, whatever. "Later, the drugs grew
harder, the profits larger and the battle for the market more vicious,” says
Hofmann. "The one thing led to the other.”
It would be
interesting to know what pioneers of the soft-drug wave have to say about
Hofmann’s theory. One of those is Wernard Bruining, who opened the first coffee
shop in Amsterdam, the Mellow Yellow, in 1972 back when it was still illegal.
And Henk de Vries (no relation to Peter R. de Vries), who opened the second
one, Bulldog, in 1975. These days, Bruining delivers lectures on the healing
powers of cannabis. De Vries, meanwhile, leveraged his stoner hangout into a
business empire, including two hotels and a chain of coffee shops.
In
interviews, the two are full of wonderful anecdotes about the wild beginnings –
how Bruining would smuggle cannabis in from America in refrigerators and how De
Vries would receive visits from the police up to five times a day. But when it
comes to questions about the coffee shops fueling the underworld, De Vries
grows quiet. In a statement delivered via his head of marketing, he says that
"he doesn’t want to become involved in some discussion about hard drugs.”
He does, though, say that thanks to the coffee shops, addiction rates to hard
drugs plunged in the 1970s. And Bruining? He also prefers to dodge questions as
to whether the coffee shop movement contributed to the growth of the gangs.
Instead, he makes a plea for the complete legalization of cannabis. Bans, he
says, simply lay the groundwork for higher prices and more crime.
"Of course I look around before walking to my
car."
Cees, chief
organized crime investigator
Cyrille
Fijnaut, a criminologist and former government adviser, believes that the
coffee shops are part of the problem. "The people behind this policy of
tolerance couldn’t imagine that their policy could lead to a problem with
organized crime,” he says. In the 1990s, the situation grew even worse, he
says, with the mass production of synthetic drugs and the establishment of
large-scale cannabis plantations. The government, says Fijnaut, looked the
other way for a long time. For that reason, Fijnaut came forward in 2000 with a
rather provocative premise. The Netherlands, he said, "was on course to
becoming the Colombia of Europe.” By way of explanation, he said: "We,
too, produce huge amounts of illegal drugs.” But the country’s political
leaders only began understanding in 2000 all the risks associated with what was
happening, he says, and only really did so 10 years later: money laundering,
corruption and contract killings.
By then,
from Fijnaut’s perspective, it was already too late. If you allow the drug
industry to grow to such a size, he believes, you can’t act surprised by
"the violence deployed to defend market share and to battle the state.”
The
government has now essentially adopted that view. Approximately 500 million
euros are to be added to the budget for fighting drug-related crime. And
Justice Minister Ferdinand Grapperhaus wrote a rather astonishing letter to the
country’s parliament in which he called the policy of permissiveness into
question. The approach has "often been too naïve,” he wrote, and argued
that it had been wrong to believe that the coffee shops would be supplied by
the gardens of private citizens. Instead, criminal networks had
"discovered an unbelievably profitable business” before expanding it to
include cocaine and ecstasy.
Is Taghi
then a demon that the Netherlands itself called forth with its lax approach to
drugs? Born in the year after the Opium Act, he also got his start by selling
soft drugs on the street, thus laying the cornerstone for one of Europe’s most
powerful cocaine cartels. That, at least, is what the investigators believe.
The Police
Had one
visited Amsterdam police headquarters on Elandsgracht 15 years ago, one would
not have been met by a "Cees” and a "Robert.” The officers would have
used their real names. Holland was an open country, and the police reflected
that openness. They also would have allowed themselves to be photographed from
the front, and not just from behind. Robert, 48, is head of the special
commission looking into the De Vries murder. Cees, 52, is chief investigator
for organized crime, which has spent recent years doing all it can to prevent
the worst before it comes to pass. The gunfire. The deaths. And the avalanche
of cocaine.
These days,
the two don’t even appear in court files under their real names – both have
merely been assigned numbers. If lawyers and journalists are no longer safe, it
is but a small step before judges, prosecutors and police investigators must
fear for their lives. "Of course, I look around before I walk to my car.
I’m not afraid, but the danger is coming closer,” says Cees.
A state
prosecutor with whom he often works has been under police protection for some
time. "She has a husband, children. That puts everyone under enormous
pressure.” Even tried and tested drug investigators in Germany are shocked by
how dangerous the situation has become for their counterparts in the
Netherlands.
A police
spokesman, who also requests his name not be used, says that because of the
danger, they are careful to avoid having the same officer comment to the press
too often regarding the Taghi and de Vries cases. They cycle people through so
that nobody ends up becoming the face of the police, and thus a target for the
next demonstration of power.
One must
understand, Cees says, that cocaine changed everything. They used to all
celebrate when they confiscated 100 kilograms of cocaine. Now, he hardly even
notices. These days, the amounts at stake are measured in the tons, in the
hundreds of millions of euros. And that, he says, has changed the criminals as
well. At some point, they started seeing themselves as masters of the universe.
He explains that this has made everything more unpredictable. "Most
criminals don’t want to attract attention,” says Cees. But that is no longer a
concern of Taghi’s.
The young
gang members have changed as well. They used to just rob stores, one after the
other, before moving on to cars and apartments. It took some time before they
turned to gun violence. Now, though, they sit out their prison term for
burglary, get out, and wham, shoot somebody with a Kalashnikov, Cees says, even
if there is a seven-year-old child in the victim’s car. Then, they are caught
because their getaway car doesn’t start – because in their panic they forget
that automatic cars must be in "park” to start. They are, he says, too
young and inexperienced, but prepared to do anything.
Such is the
current situation, and the police, Robert believes, is partly to blame.
"Between 2005 and 2012, we didn’t initiate a single drug-related
investigation.” And what about the narcotics unit? "We didn’t have one,”
he responds. Politicians, he says, apparently thought it would be better to
invest money and personnel in the fight against violent crime and money
laundering.
The
Amsterdam Police Department was restructured, establishing an organized crime
unit. "Drugs were not the focus of the unit,” the police spokesman
confirms. Cees says: "When the war then broke out in 2012, we knew hardly
anything about those guys.” Investigators were just lucky that the chief witness
came forward. And that law enforcement in other countries was able to deliver
several data sets, which is how they received the decrypted text messages sent
by the dealers. Otherwise, the Amsterdam police would still be trying to catch
up.
The police
also had to overcome the fact that a reform had been implemented that reduced
the number of police stations, but enlarged the few remaining ones, thus
limiting their knowledge of what was going on in the streets. It was a
cost-saving measure, but it meant fewer contacts on the ground. Saving money is
always a top priority in Holland. Even Taghi derided the approach in his first
hearing, according to Het Parool. The fact that the reward for his capture was
only 100,000 euros was typically "Calvinistic,” he said, and
"stingy.”
Cees says
that the public prosecutors’ offices also suffered from the focus on saving
money. "The courts are full. We could bring them a number of cases, but
what’s the point if they won’t be prosecuted?” Plus, police and prosecutors
don’t have a legal mandate to investigate every crime. There is no legal
requirement to investigate, as there is in Germany and most other countries. It
is known as the "principle of opportunity,” and means that Dutch law
enforcement officials focus their attentions on violations that have political
priority. Drug offenses have not traditionally fallen into that category.
This is
exacerbated by the fact that some courts also continue to approach drug-related
crime as though it’s not a big deal. There is a recommendation to public
prosecutors that they only ask for sentences of six to eight months for the
import of 500 to 1,000 grams of hard drugs. For a time, Holland’s prisons were
so empty that cells would be rented out to Belgium and Norway. Last year, Cees’
colleagues busted a cocaine smuggling ring that had brought in six tons of
cocaine. Several suspects are still waiting for their trials but are not behind
bars. The court decided against putting them in pre-trial detention. For six
tons of coke.
And Germany?
When
contacted with questions about the impact to Germany of drugs from the
Netherlands, the General Directorate of Customs, which is responsible for
narcotics smuggling, responded: "We have no reliable data.”
Perhaps the
situation in Germany is comparable to that in the Netherlands 10 years ago.
Cees, the Dutch investigator, says they haven’t yet found information about
drugs that Taghi may have smuggled into Germany. "But there must be
something,” he says, given the amount of cocaine that doesn’t remain in
Holland.
“We can still get ahead of the wave."
Daniela
Ludwig, the German government’s federal drug commissioner
And gangs
from the Netherlands have long since established a foothold in Germany. In July
2020, a group shipped a container carrying 800 kilograms of cocaine from
Antwerp down the Rhine River to Karlsruhe, Germany. Even though police watched
the smugglers unload the container, they managed to elude the grasp of law
enforcement in Stuttgart. Apparently, there was a large network in place to
take on the cocaine and sell it onward. When the German police apprehended the
Dutch team that emptied the container, they didn’t have a single gram of
cocaine in their possession.
Some
narcotics investigators in Germany say that their Dutch counterparts "have
completely lost control” and claim that the situation isn’t nearly as bad in
Germany. On the other hand, though, they say, Germany has for years paid too
little attention to narcotics and, more broadly, to organized crime. The fight
against terror and extremists took priority.
"I
don’t want a situation in Germany similar to the one in the Netherlands,” says
Daniela Ludwig, the German government’s federal drug commissioner. "We can
still get ahead of the wave,” she says, assuming that the fight against
organized drug smuggling is made "an absolute top priority for law
enforcement.”
Cees has
been at it too long to be particularly optimistic. "Perhaps Germany is
lucky at the moment and doesn’t have somebody like Taghi. But I’m guessing
you’ll ultimately have it just as bad.”
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário