Mob-style killings shock Netherlands into
fighting descent into ‘narco state’
Murders, corruption and ‘Mocro Maffia’ prompt Dutch to
set up war chest to tackle wave of organised crime sweeping nation
Senay
Boztas in Amsterdam
Sun 3 Jul
2022 08.00 BST
Journalists
and lawyers under protection or murdered on the streets, court hearings guarded
by the army, witness statements anonymised, and billions in dirty drug money
that leaches through society, corrupting as it goes.
This is the
Netherlands, where these facts have now inspired a crackdown pitting some €500m
a year against a level of organised crime that politicians fear is increasingly
“undermining” public order.
The mayors
of Amsterdam and Rotterdam are warning of a “culture of crime and violence that
is gradually acquiring Italian traits”, with record amounts of intercepted
drugs at the port of Rotterdam, extreme violence that often kills the wrong
target, and €15bn to €30bn a year laundered into property, cannabis “coffee
shops”, tourism and bars. Allegations that the country, better known for its
tolerance and fiscal frugality, has the characteristics of a “narco state 2.0”
are now being taken extremely seriously.
“We will
never have as much money as the criminals opposite us, but there has never
before been as much structural money to tackle them, from prevention to
disrupting earning models, punishing people and protecting those on the
frontline,” justice minister Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius said in parliament.
“Those
amounts of cash can only be made if the underworld is infiltrating the
legitimate world and nesting there: in streets of shops, business parks, our
estate agents and lawyers,” she said.
The Dutch
government announced a new international collaboration last Monday against
criminals who ship cocaine from South America via the ports of Rotterdam and
nearby Antwerp in Belgium. Politicians also want to scrutinise “facilitator”
businesses, expand crown witness schemes, delve into opaque financial
structures and offer vulnerable young people in 16 neighbourhoods better
options than crime.
Paul Vugts,
a crime reporter for Amsterdam paper Het Parool, who spent six months living
under police protection after getting death threats, said it was high time for
action. “It took the killing of a crime blogger, the innocent brother of a
crown witness against [alleged drug gang chief] Ridouan Taghi and others, then
the witness’s lawyer Derk Wiersum, and last summer my colleague Peter R de
Vries, the crown witness’s official confidant. We don’t have mafia like Italy,
but this kind of violence is mafia-like. It is terror.”
Hans Nelen,
professor of criminology at Maastricht University, agrees. “Let’s face it, when
we had the killing of Peter R de Vries, the famous journalist, it resulted in a
shockwave,” he said. “Politically speaking, it has woken up. We do not have
empirical evidence that corruption has endemically polluted the system [but] we
see serious faults.”
A serious
crime unit, the Multidisciplinary Intervention Team, is being overhauled and
recent investigations have revealed holiday parks where criminals may be
laundering money, suspect private art galleries, dodgy transport firms and
corruption at Schiphol airport. Banks have already been sanctioned for abetting
money laundering, and accountants and law firms are next. Cracking encrypted
phone services has generated scores of leads and arrests – most recently of
suspected drug criminal Mink K in Lebanon. Public prosecutors and courts were
demanding life sentences last week in the massive Marengo murder trial.
Meanwhile, Rotterdam’s mayor is lobbying for all fruit containers at the port
to be scanned – and for more than the €10m promised to businesses to help deal
with corruption.
In
Rotterdam, businesses are training 2,800 employees to combat corruption and
intimidation – and Bas Janssen, managing director of the port association
Deltalinqs, points out that customs, police and security firms are also
sometimes implicated in collections of cocaine from containers. “The mayor of
Rotterdam is knocking on the door and saying it is an urgent issue, but we have
to do it together,” he adds. “Companies within ports are working in a highly
competitive environment, it costs a lot of money, so we need a north/west
European approach.”
Another
initiative is neighbourhood youth intervention. Sharon Dijksma, mayor of
Utrecht, believes every teenager saved is a win, even if her share of an €82m
budget may not be enough.
“Disadvantaged
young people from families with multiple problems, who often have personal
challenges, are incredibly vulnerable to the claws of the criminals. So you
need credible messengers, people who have seen it all before, who speak their
language – and who can motivate and even discipline them back to the right side
of the street,” Dijksma said.
Keeping
at-risk children in the home would help, according to forensic psychologist
Thimo van der Pol, who is piloting a New Zealand-inspired family intervention
model in Amsterdam.
“It’s very
difficult to get in touch with families that are high risk because they are
afraid that their child will be put out of the house,” he said. “It is a
societal problem. Parents are addicted, there’s poverty, extreme inequality,
racism, debt, but the child also has to have a predisposition to develop these
problems.”
While Dutch
criminal gangs have been dubbed the “Mocro [Moroccan] Maffia” and ethnic
minorities are overrepresented as crime suspects, Statistics Netherlands
researchers say racial background is less important than age, education and
socioeconomics. Some believe that to tackle criminal recruitment the Dutch need
to address racial discrimination in the benefits system and jobs market, plus a
grammar school system in which there is an unequal representation of children
from lower socioeconomic groups and those with a non-western background.
Ruşen Koç,
a coordinator at Labyrinth, a social research firm, set up the OOK foundation
to advise parents on helping their child achieve in school. “Cultural
background is very relevant in the Netherlands,” he believes. “It starts with
school advice at the age of 11, manifests on the internship market where
students with migratory backgrounds are more likely to be declined, and finally
finds its way to the job market. To stop young people from going into crime we
must be able to give them a better alternative.”
Others want
to tackle drug use, which is at pre-pandemic levels in Europe, while cocaine
use has increased in the Netherlands.
Conversely,
the DenkWerk political thinktank advocates fully legalising cannabis and
ecstasy, while cracking down on cocaine. Lawyer Peter Schouten thinks the
country should go further: “The only solution is that the United Nations thinks
about throwing out the drug treaty of 1961 and says: let’s see how we can
legalise soft drugs and regulate hard drugs,” he said.
Karin van
Wingerde, professor of corporate crime and governance at Erasmus School of Law,
warns the crackdown cash must not be wasted on over-organisation or naive
ideas. “If we try to focus on lawyers as crown witnesses, there is no incentive
whatsoever as long as there is a risk that lawyers are assassinated in broad
daylight,” she said.
Whether or
not the long-term budget survives competing demands of climate and economic
issues and a housing crisis is another question, says Vugts at Het Parool.
But justice
minister Yeşilgöz-Zegerius is sending a message. “I don’t have the illusion
that we are going to wipe out criminality,” she told MPs.
“But I want
the Netherlands to be so unattractive that they think: ‘I don’t want to go
there.’”
The mafia's grisly advances in the Netherlands
and Belgium
In the first of a two-part investigation, 'Le Monde'
looks at the rise of organized crime in these two countries, where powerful
organizations control drug trafficking against a backdrop of increasingly
extreme violence. 'Judges, prosecutors, families, journalists... Everyone is
afraid,' said a lawyer.
By Thomas
Saintourens and Simon Piel
Published
on May 21, 2022 at 20h00, updated at 20h00 on May 21, 2022
It is a
single-story, ocher-brick building in the western suburbs of Amsterdam. Located
at the end of Zuidermolenweg, on the edge of the Osdorp district's commercial
area, it is far less noticeable than the American Hummer dealer right across
the street. There is nothing out of the ordinary, apart from its closed
shutters and security gates. But everyone around here knows that this former
office building caters to a very special crowd. "Who's coming today?"
ask two female passers-by, apparently accustomed to the surrounding commotion.
On this
Wednesday, November 17, behind the secure walls of the "bunker," as
it has been nicknamed, a man is on trial: 31-year-old Jeffrey Slaap. A reputed
killer, according to the police. Recently extradited from Spain, where he was
in hiding, he has come to face justice, wearing a leather jacket and tight
ponytail. This is an important case: it has exposed the top dogs of a criminal
team, to which this Dutchman is allegedly linked, in a conflict between cocaine
traffickers. The events date back to December 31, 2015. That evening, in a
quiet town in the south of the country, two brothers who were members of a
rival gang were shot at with automatic weapons while in their car. Shot in the
head, Chahid Yakhlaf added his name to the list of victims of the "coke
war" that has killed more than 80 people in less than ten years in the
Netherlands.
Faced with
the risk of attacks and escapes, several years ago the government decided to
hold the most sensitive court appearances in this discrete suburban building.
Before Mr. Slaap's appearance, this single courtroom, equipped with bulletproof
glass to separate the press, public and courtroom, had seen some of the nation's
most powerful organized crime figures, traffickers whose power and violence had
grown steadily as the cocaine market exploded in Europe. This line-up makes the
"bunker" a special place, overprotected and highly symbolic. In its
own way, it is the judicial epicenter of the criminal phenomenon that strikes
deep into the Netherlands and Belgium, two countries that, in the matter of a
few years, have become the most important cocaine gateways into Europe.
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