Explaining the Dutch

[Nentsia]

Few people realize it, not even the Dutch themselves, but the Netherlands is a hotspot of international organized crime. We keep war criminals here (both in jail and as asylum seekers), but Rotterdam is a crucial port for drugs from the America's and it serves as a link with the criminal markets in the UK. On top of that there are motor gangs like the Hells Angels, Satudarah, No Surrender, and the Bandidos that don't shy away from trying to assassinate local politicians from small rural towns where they like to control things, Italian mafia leaders often come to the Netherlands to hide (typically living and working here as an ordinary shopkeeper), the Italian mafia is heavily involved in the Dutch flowers and tulip business (money laundering purposes), Eastern European gangs operate in the countryside of the country, forcing farmers to make their farms available to hide or produce illegal drugs, and of course - because of the number of internet servers in this country - virtually all websites in the world selling illegal stuff (from child pornography to weapons and drugs) is located on a Dutch server.

Amsterdam in particular is an important European center of organized crime. Historically, Dutch crime gangs in Amsterdam were known as the ''Penoze'', a word coming from Amsterdam street language that was born out of a mixture of Dutch, Yiddish and Gypsy words. Many of its words have now become very common in Dutch and transcended their slang status. But the Penoze of the early 20th century was petty theft compared to the sort of crime that globalization in the 1970's and 1980's brought to the city of Amsterdam. The ''revolutionary'' 1960's played a key role in undermining police and political authority in the country, paved the way for a policy of toleration towards soft drugs, and the amount of prostitutes in the Amsterdam Red Light district expanded dramatically. In the name of Dutch tolerance, the young radicals argued, the Netherlands should tolerate everything and everyone. Everyone should be able to do as he pleased. And the authorities, frightened of the riots and knowing it couldve been worse after seeing the violence in Paris and Germany, quickly caved in and used the same argument: the Netherlands has always been a tolerant country, and we shall lead by example.

Dutch youths, ''Provo's'' (from Provocateurs), tried to imitate their English and American peers in every possible way. Jeans, driving motors, organizing music festivals to imitate Woodstock, and opposing the Vietnam War. By 1970 the first Coffee Shops opened up and soft drugs and LSD were exchanged, against the law, at such music festivals. We even got our share of 1970's Leftist terrorism here when the German Baader-Meinhof group in the 1970's, hiding out in the Netherlands, shot a Dutch police officer when he pulled them over. Immigrants from our former Dutch colony, Indonesia, also began to commit terrorist attacks. They were so called Moluccans, an ethnic minority living on a few Indonesian islands that were promised independence by the Dutch government in 1947. Based on that condition, they fought with the Dutch colonial army (KNIL) against the Indonesian nationalists. When Indonesia was finally given independence, the government broke its promise to the Moluccans, who fled along with the Dutch colonials to the Netherlands. Their younger generation, in the 1970's, organized themselves politically and took hostage several trains and schools to demand independence for the Moluccans. The Dutch government, always so tolerant, sent the air-force.



The new gangsters of Amsterdam
Amidst this increasingly individualistic ''I-can-do-whatever-I-want'' and ''f*ck the authorities'' mentality of the 1960's and 1970's, a group of Amsterdam street boys grew up. One of them was Cor van Hout, born in 1957. By the 1970's he earned his money by helping companies to evict squatters from their buildings, usually with a lot more force than the law permitted. Together with a bunch of fellow thugs from Amsterdam, they noticed how easy it was to travel to the mediterranean by boat, and pay a visit to countries like Lebanon, where they bought guns. With guns, they began a series of bank robberies in Amsterdam. By the early 1980's they got the plan to kidnap the richest Dutch businessman: Freddy Heineken, owner of the Heineken beer company. But to make their plan work, they needed one extra member. Cor van Hout brought in a young guy, no criminal experience. It was Willem Holleeder. Holleeder grew up in the heart of Amsterdam, took several beatings from his father in his youth, and was in need for money and sex. He was most of all an adventurist.

In 1983 the gang kidnapped Freddy Heineken and his driver and locked him up in a barn in the harbor of Amsterdam. It was the biggest story of the year in the country, especially because it happened in brought daylight, in front of Heineken's office. Men in balaclava's ran at him with guns, dragged him out of his car into a white van, and knocked down the driver and took him with them as well. This was a kind of crime the Dutch police had only seen in American TV series like Miami Vice - or not, since that started in 1984. But you get the point. One of the kidnappers quite enjoyed the attention for the crime, and would brag in his usual Amsterdam cafe that he was leaving to ''feed Heineken''. The people laughed, thinking it was a joke.

The kidnappers demanded 35 million guldens, roughly 16 million euro, in 200,000 banknotes from 4 different currencies. After a month, the ransom was finally paid, the money carrying the money was emptied near a bridge and the money placed in different cars that smuggled it out of the country to France. Heineken was found several days later by the police. Because the barn was property of one of the kidnappers, the police quickly figured out who was behind all this. By 1984 the French police arrested them. Cor van Hout hired the best and most famous Dutch lawyer there was: Max Moszkowicz, Patriarch of a law family firm that would continue to have close ties to the Amsterdam crime world until the 2000's.

But France couldn't extradite the Dutch criminals to the Netherlands (these were pre-EU days), but didn't want to keep them in France either. So they sent them to a French colony in the Caribbean, where both men spent their days relaxing on a beach while the Dutch police couldnt get to them. When they were finally taken back to France, there was an extradition treaty. Cor van Hout and Willem Holleeder were given sentences of 11 years in 1987, but the time they spent in French jails and waiting for extradition was deduced from it. By 1992 they were out again. But this time they had millions of ransom money at their disposal, which they had hid away before getting arrested. Cor van Hout and Willem Holleeder used their infamy and money to seize control of the Amsterdam underworld.

King of Amsterdam

Cor van Hout invested his money in the many prostitution houses and night clubs in Amsterdam, where girls from Eastern Europe, kidnapped by Eastern European gangs, were being exploited to make money. Van Hout restored his contact with some old bank robbers he knew, Sam Klepper & John Mieremet, who were selling their services as contract killers. They also worked for an Amsterdam drug lord, Klaas Bruinsma who established a global drug trafficking network in the 1970's. Willem Holleeder followed Van Hout after prison and bought the night club Casa Rosso in the Red Light district. Holleeder too hired the services of Klepper and Mieremet, and gradually began to see Van Hout as a rival businessman. In 1996 Van Hout survived an attempt on his life, and in 1997 the Justice department discovered another plot to kill him. They arrested him, put him behind bars for a few years, but in 2000 Van Hout was released again.

He was barely out of prison when the bullets flew around his head again, but once more he escaped death. Finally, in 2003, a man on a motorcycle drove past Van Hout and a friend of his. A man on the back of the motorcycle, probably a Yugoslav contract killer, aimed a weapon and shot both men. The motorcycle appeared stolen, and was later dumped in a lake. It was the beginning of a wave of high profile assassinations of major figures in the Amsterdam crime world. Sam Klepper had been killed in 2000 already, and at his funeral a lot of Hells Angels' attended, a motor gang he intended to join. Holleeder proceeded to blackmail Klepper's wife, threatening that her little son would have the same fate as his father.

Holleeder now also began to collaborate with the Dutch-Surinamese criminal Dino Soerel. Soerel was a typical Amsterdam street thug, who beat people to death with his fists in the late 1980's. By the 1990's he got involved in drugs, together probably working as something of a bodyguard or enforcer for drug lords. When they got arrested, Soerel took over their business. By the 2000's he was one of the most feared men in Amsterdam, known for his volatile temper, his influence, and his willingness to kill people over nothing. Willem Holleeder and Soerel understood that their criminal reputation could be lucrative: they began to extortion rich people in Amsterdam. Nobody would dare to refuse ''protection money'' to those two. Their main victim was Willem Endstra, a man dealing in real estate. They forced him to pay them and to invest their crime money in real estate. The media revealed Endstra as the ''Accountant of the Crime world''. When Holleeder and Soerel discovered Endstra was talking to the police, Willem Endstra was assassinated beside his car in broad daylight.



(Endstra left, sitting on a bench talking to Willem Holleeder)

After Endstra, Holleeder and Soerel went after Mieremet. Mieremet was one of the thugs they had both worked with to kill Cor van Hout and to control the crime world in the 1990's, but Soerel and Mieremet had become enemies. Mieremet had also become a nervous guy after his buddy Klepper had been killed. He might go to the police one day. In 2002 Mieremet was shot but he survived. In 2004 he eventually fled to Thailand. But in 2005 his legal adviser and lawyer was assassinated. Later that year Mieremet was shot in the head in his office in Thailand. That same day, in Amsterdam, a contract killer hired by Soerel and Holleeder, assassinated Kees Houtman - Mieremet's partner in crime. In 2006 Thomas van der Bijl is assassinated, a long-time friend of Cor van Hout and thus also on Holleeder's death-list for quite some time.

Downfall and Anarchy
The hunt for Willem Holleeder intensified due to all the Wild West shootings in Amsterdam. In 2006 he was finally arrested again, accused of 25 murders and extortion. Key evidence in the case are the so-called ''Endstra Tapes'', recorded by the police and Endstra in secret where he tells how he is being extortioned by Holleeder and Soerel, shortly before his death. Holleeder's lawyer? Bram Moszkowicz, son of the previous one, and known to be a flamboyant media figure, who liked to show off his wealth and to associate himself with the wrong figures. But as the accusations grew that Moszkowicz himself was a maffioso, he put down the job. Holleeder was eventually found guilty of extortion and given a sentence of 9 years in 2009. In 2012 he was released after serving 2/3rds of is sentence. Because he had become such a media hype, he initially appeared in a lot of tv and radio shows and even wrote some articles for a newspaper. In the background however, dark clouds formed above Holleeder's head as he feared he was on many hit lists, and there was still a trial running against him for the 25 murders.

Holleeder began to surround himself with new friends like the Hells Angels. In 2014 Holleeder was arrested again because he threatened a crime journalist at his house. He was arrested to serve the rest of his sentence. Meanwhile, the murder trial took a new turn as Holleeder's own sisters turned up as crown witnesses, with recordings of conversations they had with him. They claimed that for decades they lived under his tyranny, that he is a psychopath who uses a mixture of charm, intimidation, and murder to control people. They referred to him as a serial killer who must be stopped, even if it will cost their own lives - since no enemy of Holleeder ever got away alive. Soerel, Holleeder's co-mastermind, was eventually arrested by a SWAT (well Dutch variant) unit in Amsterdam. Three weeks ago, he was convicted to life imprisonment for his role in the 25 murders.

But the downfall of Holleeder and Soerel hasn't made things better. For Amsterdam is now undergoing the so-called ''Mocro War''. Mocro is slang for Moroccan, an immigrant community in the Netherlands. And with the big boys cleared out of the way, its the Moroccan, Turkish and Antillian street gangs from the poorer neighbourhoods of Amsterdam and Rotterdam that have taken over the drug trade. This went well until 2012, when a cargo of 200 kilo's of cocaine was lost in the harbor of Antwerp. A small gang of Amsterdam Moroccan gangsters had arranged for the cocaine with a lot of small investors, so they were indebted to a lot of people. They group that was supposed to collect it couldn't find it, probably because the police had intercepted it - but didn't publish it. The Moroccan group began to fall apart as they suspected each other of having made secret deals behind their backs.

Gwenette Martha, the leader of one clan, was assassinated with more than 80 bullets in 2014. It was a retaliation for Martha's attempt to kill a man named Benaouf, who led the other clan. Benaouf survived. Not much later a Moroccan is shot as he leaves a Moroccan shisha bar in Amsterdam. During a party in a Maritime museum in Amsterdam, another gang member is shot and killed. Allegedly he was Benaouf's right hand.

The assassinations get more and more insane every month. Assassination attempts took place before the windows of a primary school, middle of the day. Bullets were fired in the middle of Amsterdam, penetrating the windows of busses and trains, with passengers inside. Several innocent people, of whom the killers thought they were their targets, got accidentally assassinated. Bullets ended up in baby rooms of surrounding homes as assassinations took place in residential areas. The wife of a criminal was assassinated in front of her child. In 2016, a message was even delivered when the head of a decapitated Moroccan was placed on the sidewalk in Amsterdam before a Moroccan shisha bar, known to function as the headquarters of some major criminals. The poor boy had no criminal role, he happened to be a personal friend of one. The idiotic part is that these ''major criminals'' are mostly 20-year old Moroccan kids with kalashnikovs, and no shooting experience. The bullets end up everywhere, half the time the victims manage to escape, while innocent people die.

I can really recommend you all to visit Amsterdam.