nternational Europe The Netherlands Narco-State Netherlands: The Slippery Dutch Slope from Drug Tolerance to Dr

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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.

ANZEIGE

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.

ANZEIGE

So arbeiten Sie zu Hause

produktiver
Laptop, externer Monitor, Headset und Co. –
mit zeitgemäßen Lösungen sind Sie im
Homeoffice mindestens genauso produktiv
wie im Büro. Hier erfahren Sie, was Sie
brauchen – und wo Sie es zu besten
Konditionen finden.

And he never used bodyguards.

DER SPIEGEL 42/2021

The article you are reading

originally appeared in German in
issue 42/2021 (October 16th,
2021) of DER SPIEGEL.

SPIEGEL International
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.
ANZEIGE

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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.

ANZEIGE
 Keine Privatsphäre im Internet?
Mit diesem genialen Tool haben Datenspione
keine Chance

»Woooooooooooooppppppppwoooooooooppppppppp
pp 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.

ANZEIGE
 $289 $84.95 $719

A sea of flowers at the site where journalist Peter R. de Vries was murdered in
Amsterdam
Foto: ddp

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

Foto: Dutch Police

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.”

The import of drugs into the Netherlands, of course, is also

related to its location on the coast. After Antwerp in Belgium,
the port of Rotterdam is the second-largest point of entry for
goods in Europe. But according to a current report from
Europol and UNODC, the UN’s anti-narcotics authority, even
the drugs that arrive in Antwerp mostly go to the Netherlands,
and only later to the other countries on the continent. The
most common substance these days is cocaine. The coke
business is booming, and so too are the coke kings. "Cocaine is
the problem,” says Cees, the Dutch investigator. "Cocaine has
changed everything.”
Cocaine seized by customs officials in Hamburg in August 2019
Foto:
Hauptzollamt Hamburg / dpa

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

Foto: Marcus Simaitis / DER SPIEGEL
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
Foto: Jeroen Jumelet / picture alliance / ANP

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

Foto: Bruno
Press / abaca pess / ddp

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.
Criminal investigators at the site of the de Vries murder
Foto: DPG / action press

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.

Coffee shop The Bulldog in Amsterdam

Foto: Berlinda van Dam / Hollandse
Hoogte / IMAGO

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.”

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