Ridouan Taghi's Murderous Rampage, and the Cocaine Kings of Antwerp and Rotterdam - with Mitchell Prothero
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7:40 a.m. September 18, 2018, in the Dutch capital city of Amsterdam. Miles away from the windows and the coffee shops of the city's notorious red light district, in the southern suburb of Buitenveldert, lawyer Dirk Weersom is getting ready for another day defending his clients.

Not least, Nabil B, a former drug dealer turned star state witness in a case against none other than Dutch-Moroccan kingpin Ridouin Taghi.

Nabil, himself accused of several murders for Taghi's gang, which has taken control of cocaine routes from Colombia into Europe via the ports of Holland and Belgium, has for months warned that Taghi will do everything to kill him, including murdering his family members, perhaps even his lawyer. Dutch authorities have scoffed at the claims. This is no Medellin, they say. Such bloodshed would be unprecedented in our democracy.

But in March 2018, Nabil's brother is shot dead in his office. And other relatives flee the Netherlands in fear. Still, nobody truly believes that the violence will spread beyond migrant communities to white Dutchmen like Veersom. 44 years old, a father of two, and an established member of the city's high society. This is what they do, media nods and winks. This doesn't happen to us.

But that morning, everything is going to change. Fearsome hops in his car, but a man appears at the driver's side holding a pistol. He tries firing twice, but the gun jams. Fearsome doesn't take the hint from above. He chases the assailant before arguing with him a few yards away. The shooter composes himself once more, and he takes aim. This time, the gun works. He hits Fearsome ten times in the head, neck, and torso, and kills him on the spot.

Then the murder returns and jumps in a white Opel van and a getaway driver speeds them both to ground. The slaying shocks the Netherlands and Europe. With this brutal murder, a new limit has been crossed, says an Amsterdam police chief. Now even people simply doing their work no longer seem safe. A police union leader goes one further. Organized crime has got totally out of control, he tells media. And the Netherlands?

It's become nothing less, he says, than a narco state. Welcome to the Underworld Podcast.

Hi guys, and welcome to the show with more bad actors than the succession finale. I'm your host, Sean Williams, in Aotearoa, New Zealand. We're back with several big bangs. And while Danny will be back next week, this week we're delving back into a subject we first covered, oof, like a couple of years back. And that is the Macro Mafia, Riddle and Taggy. And like that cop said, how the ports of Northern Europe have just become one of the world's princely-est drug bazaars. It's a crazy, crazy story. And I'm going to be talking about that.

We kind of got into it with Ed Caesar as well a couple of weeks back on the bonuses. And we're doing this now because I think at time of airing, there's going to be three or six shows released from this Project Brazen show called Gateway, Cocaine, Murder and Dirty Money in Europe, which is investigated and hosted by friend of the pod, Mitchell Prothero, who joins me from a new home in Albania, which...

Well, that's interesting. And this show winds through all of the crazy stuff that's been happening this past decade, not least the murder of Dirk Veersom that we just went into. And before we jump in, thanks as always to our Patreon subscribers. I'll have a mini show up this week and I think one other interview too, plus there's all the usual stuff. And the merch is there too. I'm thinking of adding an underworld baby onesie, but maybe that's just for my boy. Let me know if anyone else is interested. I might try and make that happen.

But anyway, I've wanged on for long enough now. Mitch, welcome to the show. And tell us a little bit more about Gateway. Well, basically, Gateway, the name of the project, and what we did was I spent a year looking at how the European cocaine trade has shifted sort of...

The flow into Europe. And over the last five to eight years, it's really shifted heavily through what the low countries, Benelux, Amsterdam, the ports at Rotterdam and Antwerp, some of the smaller ports in the area around it.

They have this industrial scale flood of Europe's cocaine is now coming through an area that's actually really small. And in the past, drugs had come in through these ports, of course, historically. But we're seeing exponentially more than anybody's ever seen. Every year they set records for seizures, and every year they say they're probably getting one out of ten. I mean, Antwerp last year took 110 metric tons of cocaine at the port.

And the head of Belgian Customs told me that they might get one or two out of ten. So that's like half the world's cocaine production, you know, passing through Rotterdam and Antwerp, essentially. So, you know, that was really interesting and how that came about because it's more than just a normal drug story. It's about how, you know, like capitalism and globalism, you know, globalization and financial deregulation and all this stuff contributed to sort of this, you know, just...

giant pile of cocaine in Belgium and Holland being distributed all throughout Europe. It's almost astounding because it really seems to be all passing through that area. I mean, you still see busts in Spain and Italy. Guys will get caught with a few hundred kilos or boat or whatever off the Canary Islands, that type of stuff. Of course, that all still goes on. But nobody's ever seen like last summer in a week,

The Belgians took, I think it was 4.7 metric tons.

off of ships over the course of a few days that were headed into antwerp either at antwerp or you know they start checking them like when they're still out at sea so sometimes an antwerp bus actually took place in the middle of the atlantic they just knew that's where the ship was headed uh so it was 4.7 metric tons and then the next day i was meeting with a source uh in amsterdam and he told me that the wholesale price of a kilo in amsterdam had just dropped 500 euros whoa

And I just, yeah, and for the life of me, I just, that's when it dawned on me because then I asked somebody like, how can they lose 4.7 metric tons and wholesale prices still fall? Yeah.

And the guy was just like, what do you want me to say? They just sent more cocaine. Nobody's low on cocaine. So what was the kind of genesis of this for you? I mean, you've been around Europe reporting on various organized crime and terror issues for years and years. Was it the amount of stuff coming in? Was it the...

the amount of information that we've been able to glean from criminals, you know, ever to encrypted phones? What was kind of the start for you? Well, I'd been a Middle East correspondent forever. And I'd been living in Lebanon, working in Iraq and, you know, even Afghanistan, the whole Middle East region, and then occasionally working up in Europe, particularly during the time of, like, ISIS and Mosul.

there were these attacks across Europe. And it was a natural thing for me to sort of go up to Europe and chase these guys that I'd been dealing with and covering for over a decade in the Middle East. So while I was in the course of doing that, I was talking to a lot of cops, a lot of intelligence people, and we were looking at various communities, for the most part immigrant communities, Moroccan, Algerian stuff across Europe.

And, you know, cops kept flagging to me that, like, yeah, we're talking, like, 50 to 100 assholes here, you know, in terms of, like, the attacks that we're seeing. And we're going to get these guys. And they were right. They did, for the most part. You haven't seen anything remotely like you were seeing in 2015, 16, 17, even 18 years.

Yeah. But they were like, the big problem is the ports, man. You know, they started telling me like one guy joked is like, you're looking for the wrong group of Moroccans, man. Like there's a new, yeah, that's what one cop actually told me. He was like, you should be paying attention to the guys who don't go to Iraq and Syria. Yeah.

And I was like, why is that? He's like, because they're all making huge money in the drug trade. And then I started looking at the numbers just tangentially. And like, Antwerp did send some guys. There was like a famous little outfit called Sharia for Belgium, which was like a predecessor group for all these jihadi groups in Belgium and Netherlands, France. But they didn't send a lot of guys from Antwerp. Whereas Brussels sent like 100 dudes, 100 people from a square kilometer in Molenbeek.

Antwerp sent eight or nine guys or whatever it was, like 12. And the reason for that, people kept telling me, is these guys have jobs and responsibilities and like, you know,

They're running a business. They don't have time to run off to Syria to fight. And so there was this overlap, basically, for coming through the communities and what was affecting them. It got me really interested in it because, like, you know, I could even tell these communities were, and the police were going to weed out the, you know, really hardcore ISIS cells. But then there was this establishment that was there, and it wasn't going anywhere. And, in fact, every year it keeps getting bigger and stronger. Yeah.

That's one of the things we found. So we'll get to kind of, I guess, the big guy in a minute. But where did these drug communities come from? Where have they kind of like, where's the groundswell, I guess, where they've kind of, you know, built themselves into massive drug lords? Well...

It's a traditional thing. And, you know, we got a really good – we got very lucky to interview an academic who specializes in the Moroccan diaspora and herself is like Dutch Moroccan.

And it's not a well-studied kind of group, you know, because they don't have the colonial history and the immigration history that everybody else kind of has and, you know, how Algerians ended up in Paris. Well, you know, we know how they ended up in Paris. But when it came to the Moroccans, you know, much like the Turks in Germany, they came as part of a guest worker program that was sort of over time. And one of the things, you know,

So a bunch of things combined. This was the 60s and 70s, and cannabis was getting legalized or decriminalized in the Netherlands, which had a large Moroccan guest worker community. The Moroccan guest worker community is from the poorest part of Morocco, which turns out to be the Rift Valley, which is the world's largest hashish plantation. So as these guys were assimilating into Dutch society, and all the hippies are trying to buy weed,

These Moroccan guys started their routes, bringing it up. My cousin works on the world's biggest hash farm. We can do something here. So they started smuggling these routes up. And so they'd use cars, speedboats to move hashish. One of the observations I'd have about particularly clan-based structures, like you see with the Moroccans, Albanians, the Italians, certainly in Calabria at least,

is that anybody who's doing cocaine right now, if you show me a guy who's trafficking cocaine, his father probably trafficked hashish and his grandfather probably trafficked cigarettes and things like that. These are the same routes.

It's just over time they get, you know, so these guys were able to connect Morocco to this community. And then, of course, being an immigrant community, they were taking blue collar jobs. They were working industrial jobs, but they were also working in the ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp.

And that's where they really, you know, so this is a community that's established itself there. There's nothing nefarious to it. The cocaine would still be coming in. It just so happens the Moroccans are the immigrant community that lives next to the port and is always specialized in helping get stuff out of the port. You know, the whole community doesn't do it, but like you can find, you know, this is, it's notorious. It's,

Rotterdam and Antwerp are notorious smuggling points. They always have been, you know, long before the Moroccans got there. So, you know, you saw this kind of overlap and nexus. And that's one of the reasons why, like, the legalization of cannabis...

turned Amsterdam into sort of the world, or at least Europe's drug bores in a lot of ways. Because, you know, if you're going to come, like if you're looking to buy five kilos of weed in Germany to distribute or something, you're probably going to Amsterdam. You're probably going to the Netherlands to get it. And if you're going to be there, then you're probably going to meet a guy who can get cocaine. And so this is where a lot of the business basically takes place. It's been described as like,

Rotterdam and Antwerp are the lungs of cocaine in Europe, and Amsterdam's the brain. - Right, okay. - You know, and so, you know, like that's the flow, but the distribution, and it's funny, the Dutch don't want to accept it. They think on some level that it's an immigrant problem, which is utterly preposterous. You know, like he said, whoever was the working class community next to the port would be doing this. Like, it's billions of euros.

And, you know, so there's that port nexus. The Dutch also have this weird thing where they seem to blame everything on the tourists, which kind of cracks me up. Because, like, the tourists aren't doing 110 metric tons of cocaine each year. Like, it's obviously being distributed throughout. And they're pretty much, I mean, they're pretty much welcoming the tourists with that.

and that nightlife anyway, right? I mean, no one's going to Amsterdam. I mean, plenty of people go to Amsterdam. It's a beautiful city. It's got a wonderful culture. But the majority of day trippers, I would imagine, are getting stoned. They're getting hired. They're going out. Yeah, I got to live there for six or seven months, and it's a true local joy to see the stoned American teenagers pile out of the coffee shop, walk into the bike lane, and just get smashed by somebody on a bike. Yeah.

And if you get in the way, the Dutch are like a reasonable people, I would say, for the most part.

But when it comes to the bikes and getting in the way of the bikes, they are not reasonable people. And so it's always very funny. But the thing is, it does, you know, they are blaming like a certain quality of life that's in the city center. And they've always been trying to work on this. I think they're about to ban open weed smoking. They're so tired of it because it's this nexus of drunk tourists, prostitution, drugs, you know, all night drinking, stag parties. And so it's a little bit miserable for,

you know, but when you go outside of that, it becomes a very different kind of city. But it's also one where, you know, this undercurrent is they're running the, you know, Europe's cocaine trade is definitely, it's not being run out of there. It's being brokered out of it. And so there's this strange underbelly. This is the thing we found about the violence. Like, you know, the famous Moroccan mafia war of like 2012, it's still kind of going today over a 10 year period, you know, 30 or 40 people got killed, uh,

maybe 10 others are missing. Then you throw Taghi, the big man, or Edouard Taghi on. He's got a few dozen to him. But they mix them up between countries. So some guys will get killed in Spain. Some guys will get killed in Morocco. A couple guys will disappear in France or Belgium. So the crime stats never really pop that high until you start paying attention to the fact that like,

Yeah, the Dutch only have, you know, 50 murders a year in a country of 10 million people, but like 47 of them are involved in the cocaine trade from like, you know, and all know each other.

And that's what made recording the project so incredibly difficult is because, one, we're talking about a pretty tight-knit insular immigrant community in Europe that, you know, certainly knows how it's portrayed in the media, both as terrorists and as drug dealers. They're sensitive to that. And then on top of it, you've got, you know, all of these other factors flowing through there. And you're trying to get people to talk to you, and you start realizing that everybody knows each other.

Once I started admitting, once we were finished, once I started admitting what I was doing in Ubers and stuff, when guys would ask me what I was doing in Amsterdam, the Moroccan guys would start telling me the story that I was doing and how they knew all these guys. And you're just sitting in the back of the Uber while this guy's explaining your podcast to you because he grew up on the block with three of these guys. And the whole time you're like, oh, you got to let me record you. And the guy's laughing like, no way, man. They all will know my voice. Yeah.

I literally know all these people. This is like a huge part of the show, right? How this one guy, and you mentioned him once, Riddle and Taggy, and we've mentioned him on the show before. I mean, just a gigantic, you know, drug baron. Um,

you do not cross this guy. And if you get in his way and you mention his name, you're fucked, basically. You're going to be in a lot of trouble. If there's a... I mean, at his height, if Ridwan Taghi had any reason to believe you were even talking about him, he'd kill you if you worked for him. Yeah.

So Ridwan's interesting. He actually fits a lot of what we were talking about to open up. He was born in Morocco, moved to the Netherlands when he was really young, moved to a suburban commuter town outside of

He was in a little, like, 80s, 90s, little biker gang. In fact, they were called the Bad Boys. It was the very 80s. And, you know, nicking scooters, stealing hash, stuff like that, normal stuff. But at some point, Ridwan decides to go back to Morocco. And this is where the details are a little bit vague because there haven't been any cases really made about it. So there's, like, it's a mix of legend, and I think there's probably a lot of truth to it. But the details...

But Ridwan goes back to Morocco where basically his family is running one of these hash routes into Spain from Morocco. And,

And that they've been involved in it off and on as a family for a long time. And apparently he goes back to work on that, and he starts beefing up the business. And essentially, I'm sure people have seen these videos, or they're definitely worth going to look for, is do Spanish Gibraltar Zodiac Boat Drug Bus. And there's YouTubes you can watch these of like,

you know, footage of like dudes crashing speedboats into the side of Gibraltar and then guys running out, unloading all the hash, throwing them into SUVs and disappearing in five minutes. And when the cops get there, there's like a wrecked boat that's empty and everybody's gone. Ridwan was one of those guys. And it was really brazen in that regard. He was sort of famous for that. So he started getting a name for himself like that and obviously started branching out into cocaine.

And exactly when that happened, it's a little unclear. He worked tremendously hard to stay behind the scenes. And that's what kicked off a lot, as you pointed out. A lot of our narrative in Gateway is pretty much deciding which incidents of Ridlon Taghi hunting someone down and murdering them we were going to use for the...

Because, like, you could have been, I could have been there all day. There's, like, a spy shop owner who wasn't even informing on him got killed. Tagi ordered his killing. And then, in just the most bizarre detail, then ordered his men to blow up the spy shop the next day just to be safe.

This was the guy that they bought encrypted phones from. I love a spy shop. Yeah, exactly. But he bought encrypted phones from this guy. It turns out the encrypted phones didn't quite work. He had the guy killed. He's a civilian. I mean, the guy probably knew he was dealing with drug dealers, but he wasn't a criminal by any means. He was just a spy shop encrypted phone dealer. They kill him, and then they blow up his shop the next day with C4 just to make sure there's no records. Jesus Christ.

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It's all overkill. I feel sorry. Wrong baker. I'm sorry, man, but we had too many of these incidents. You had to pick. Yeah, with the sheer vindictiveness of this stuff. By 2015 rolls around, Taghi is one of the biggest drug cartel guys in Europe. No one's ever heard of him. He's basically eliminated the winner of the Moroccan Mafia War to take the crown himself.

And then his partner, Noful, who helped him do that, gets locked up. So now it's all talky. And he relocates to Dubai because he's really paranoid.

and kills anybody who talks about him. And we've got these texts that they broke off of his phone in one of the many, many phone hacks that nobody can keep straight in the drug milieu. And he's just ordering killings. He's got an assassin team set up. He even had a biker gang on standby as well. He had multiple.

different assassin groups he could go to. Another guy who didn't make the cut is a Dutch special forces, a special operations soldier, has been convicted now of training his guys with weapons and providing them with extra guns. He'd gotten a guy in the SF, was helping him. They were buying passports. This is what I found so astounding about it, is it's not just the drug story.

It's really, like, the way Tagi went feral, you can tell. He, like, started killing people that were his rivals. He started killing his own guys out of paranoia or trying to kill his own friends and, you know, whatever. But then he goes after the state. Hmm.

And that's what makes him different than almost anybody. In Europe, we had not seen that, in my opinion at least, since like the 70s, 80s, early 90s in Sicily and southern Italy. They had a legitimate war on the state against the Cosa Nostra and various organized crimes. People forget this. A couple thousand people died. There was bombs every week and hostages and assassinations for like 20 years.

this was going on. So by the 90s, they were raging. But other than that, I've never seen anybody, even in the United States, it's almost unheard of. These guys, at various times in this project, the Crown Princess had to go leave university and go into special protection.

The prime minister of the Netherlands had to stop riding his bike to work. The ultimate European no-no. Well, what it is, I was told it's the ultimate Dutch populist schtick, because of course he rides in an armored car. He does ride the bike, but it's a schtick. It's tight framing. They had to stop doing the schtick. They found people, local...

Like local mayors, local administrative people. You'd say Mokhtar in like Arabic, Berger probably or something like that in German. Like the local administrative authorities. A few of them had been corrupted and they were handing out like Dutch passports and different names to Taghi's organization at about a thousand euros a pop. That's just crazy. Prosecutors would find guys following them.

with encrypted phones and black masks. Journalists started getting killed. Okay, the first person to print Taghi's name is this fascinating psychotic blogger named Martin Koch.

And Martin was a criminal. Martin had done like 20 years in prison for two different murders. By all accounts, Martin was rather proud of his murders. But he also was absolutely fearless and liked to blog about crime and got a lot of attention for his blogging. He was the first person to really use Taghi's name and to put it out into public. And Taghi essentially told him, if you print my name, I'm going to kill you.

And he printed his name. And what does he do next? Well, it's not funny because he dies. I mean, Martin gets assassinated. But it was a comedy of errors leading up to it. For like a month, every day, like Keystone Cop style, somebody would try to kill Martin and it wouldn't work. And half the time he'd be drunk and not notice. Like there'd be CCTV footage of him walking down the street drunk with his friend. And a guy runs up.

Behind him with a gun and the gun jams. The guy looks at the gun and runs away and Martin never sees it.

The thing I didn't understand about Martin, I guess he's coming up in the next episode that's coming out on, that people can listen to. Martin deserves his own podcast. Without subscribing to Project Brazen. He's insane. And the thing that confused me was that like, he kept spinning this story. It was like, hey, I'm just like standing up for free speech and I'm just telling a story and I'm kind of like a have a go journalist. I'm like,

It sounds like you're kind of puffing your chest out and slapping your knob on the table because... Oh, he loved it. That's exactly what he was doing. I mean, Riddow and Tag is saying, don't out me or I'll kill you. And he's like, nah, you know. He nicknamed him Fraggle.

Yeah, people have been killed for a lot less. Yeah, he was fat-shaming Noful, who's a husky fella, you know? And he was making fun of his weight. Like, this is a guy that everybody is... These two people are the most terrifying people in a pretty terrifying scene of cocaine trafficking in the low countries. Yeah, this is cancel culture. Yeah, these are the two scariest guys, and he is openly mocking them and just does not care.

Like, clearly he was a sociopath on some levels, you know, like he killed people. He was proud of it. He was by all accounts a really charming, fun guy. Like a friend of mine who knew him said, you know, like, and I think we put this in the podcast. This guy, Paul Vultz from Hep Roll, knew him really well. And Paul basically said, like, I liked him, but it's really hard to be friends with somebody who's proud of having murdered two people.

And he's like, I told, you know, he's like, I used to tell Martin, I like you. I don't think you're a journalist. I think you're a blogger or performer, whatever it is. But, you know, we're not really friends, man. And Martin was kind of understood that, you know, he was proud of having done this. But so he, for instance, by the time it comes out and the hacks start picking up on Taghi's name, it's

That's where we got the name of the first episode was I asked Walter Lamas, who's another reporter from Het Parool, who's one of the first people to write about Taghi. He had an RPG shot into his newsroom at night for that by a bike gang. Nobody was hurt, but, you know. Enough. Yeah. Yeah. Just in the center of Amsterdam. Yeah.

Somebody shot an RPG into a newspaper newsroom. It's still amazing to me. He said that basically he had to go back and find the first time Tagi ever showed up in his notes because he was such an unknown figure. Finally, he found the first reference and it was some source of his going, there's this guy, Ridwan Tagi, and he's terrifying. He makes the underworld shiver. Everybody's scared of him. It's interesting because you say that he escalated a

a sort of almost domestic drug war into an all-out war on the state in the Netherlands. And it's similar to where he was getting the drugs from, right? That's what happened to Colombia in the 90s. That's the kind of breakdown of a lot of the political systems there

has led to the proliferation of cocaine in different hands in Europe. - Yeah, and so what happened, you know, one of the reasons why things exploded like this was, you know, 10 years ago, it was pretty standard. When I first started covering this story, in fact, when I first got into it, I was mostly looking at the Andrangina.

the Calabrian mafia, because they are the most powerful organized crime group probably in the world. And they have enormous financial resources and a huge history of not just trafficking cocaine, but money laundering all over Europe. Some estimates have put their GDP at the same size as Croatia. I don't know how you judge that. I don't know how true that figure could be, because I found with the war on drugs and all this stuff, none of the numbers really quite add up. Yeah.

You know, it's really hard to get on. Like, I keep telling people the only thing I know for sure is, like, how many were seized, what it costs to retail on the street, and more or less how pure it is. That's all you can really know. You know, like, you can see those things change. But other than that, you don't have any idea. And you're pulling these guys. They'll admit to some aside. But so, you know, over time, this...

These guys had been moving, like working for the Andrangada. And if you wanted to get cocaine into Europe, it was kind of a well-trod path, and it was relatively civilized and organized. And it was you worked with the Andrangada who put you in touch with the right-wing paramilitary in Colombia, the AUK. For whatever reason, the right-wing paramilitaries fed Europe more and the FARC fed Mexico and the U.S. more. I don't really know how that worked out.

and that they would set up a deal, and they'd take a healthy cut of it, and then you'd get it out of the, you know, and one of the ways that they would do this is you would pay the Moroccans or the Moroccan mafia or Dutch mafias even, not just Moroccan, working around Rotterdam and Antwerp to get them out of the containers to your destination. It was a step in the food chain. So it's very similar to what Mexico did.

For the longest time, Colombia would basically sell to the United States and pay the Mexicans to transport it across the border to the distribution. And just like what happened in Mexico with the Moroccans, things started changing about five years ago when some genius decided to start paying them in cocaine instead of money, which would have made immediate economic sense, but maybe not so great long-term economic sense because once they started doing that, you exponentially grow overnight.

And what the, basically, at the same time, this 2016 Colombian peace deal breaks up all the paramilitaries. And so now, any asshole can go to Medellin and try to buy, like, try to source wholesale cocaine.

And you can get ripped off, you can get killed, but you can also buy a metric ton of cocaine. Like, you know, it's a little bit more wide open than it ever was before. There aren't kind of the gatekeepers. The Andrangas have sort of moved up a step and become more money launderers and brokers and insurers. And they still traffic amazing amounts of cocaine, but it does seem like they've gone up a step and been replaced, much like the Colombians were replaced by the Mexicans when the Mexicans started getting paid in cocaine.

That's where these dudes came from. This is why you see the various cartels and Chapo and all these guys. And you see Redwantagi and you see a couple of guys in Antwerp that we won't mention their names because they're still out there. There's some of these really big, big-time drug lords. The way they get there is by paying them in cocaine and then they can exponentially grow. And what we found is they started working –

Everybody became agnostic, whereas it used to be like if you had a route in through the port, you could get your 100 kilos for your organization in. You never told anybody about it. It was a secret. Well, the Moroccans and the Dutch have changed that. Now this is why you see 4.7 metric tons getting taken. They're not going to one gang. That's going to everybody. Everybody's in the containers now.

So the Moroccans will just be like, yeah, man, or whoever's controlling that route, well, just why not throw another 100 kilos in?

The more you pack into each, that's why it's got exponentially so huge. Is there just like, screw it, fill it up. I mean, some of these like so-called super mafias as well are these like huge interconnected gangs all over the world now. I mean, and you hear some of the stuff that's coming off of these encrypted chats that are getting hacked and there's people speaking Serbo-Croat and there's people speaking...

Spanish and there's people speaking like Albanian, Fijian. Yeah, exactly. There's people all over the world from the Pacific to the Atlantic just shipping huge quantities of drugs. And no, no wonder this stuff is flooding into Europe in this gigantic way, presumably with, you know, the, the, the green light or the, the, the control of this, this,

It's the macro-mafia there. It's basically the Moroccan mafia. So I guess to bring it back to the story that you're telling, how does this thing... Because you tell some incredible stories about NoFall and Martin, the blogger that you just mentioned as well. But I think people should listen to that because it's just so well told. I mean, how do things start to kind of spiral for Taggy to the point where the Dutch...

public begins to say, "Oh, I think we might have a narco state on our hands." - They, as a society, I think, you know, the Dutch have a really weird relationship with drugs because of the legalization and decriminalization of cannabis. What we're talking about is everybody knows it's one of the major power centers.

It's a city, I mean, let's face it, this is a society that more or less invented modern capitalism in a lot of ways. I mean, they invented the notion of half the things we're dealing with in terms of international trade and finance and stuff like that. So this has been going on forever, and they have a complex relationship with it. It has a tendency to be dismissed, like I said, as an immigrant problem or a tourist problem.

you know, the Dutch are not the first society to not really want to take a hard look at themselves on this issue. I mean, a lot of countries have this problem, but we're talking about Holland, you know, like we're talking about Holland and Belgium. So I'm not going to, I don't, I can go all day about how Canada has this problem too.

But they want to kind of shove it away. And what they couldn't was when Taghi really started coming after the state. Even the stuff like the passports and the command. Like, you can always kind of arrange a dirty cop. You can bribe a local official. Like, I got warned right when I moved there, try not to register with the government because it's only like 500 euros for somebody to look up your address.

You know, to find if they hear that you're working on this. You know, that type of thing. And it's Holland. But, you know, still that stuff's kind of understandable. And part and parcel of having a semi-corrupt kind of economy built around drugs and dodgy finance and trade and public related, like with all the stuff the Dutch are good at. But what happened is the lawyer for a witness against Taghi, Derek Vinstrum,

This is like proper Dutch society guy. He's known by the prime minister. He's a well-known, good-looking young lawyer. You know, everybody likes Derek, and he's well-known in legal circles, political circles, societal circles, whatever. He gets shot for representing a witness against Hagee, and that was the real flag. Prior to that, it could be dismissed as Martin Koch was a

criminal blogger. He's in the same milieu. You know, these guys who got killed. Oh, the brother of a Crown witness got killed? Yeah, but he's a Moroccan guy. I mean, he's probably clean, but you know, that's part and parcel of the, you know, everybody was kind of able to justify the Moroccan Mafia wars, and again, not too many innocent bystanders got hurt. So,

So they did have mistaken identity cases. I'm not dismissing it. It's happened a few times, but mostly everybody was kind of comfortable with the status quo until Derek got killed. And when Derek was murdered, clearly over a case, that was when it was supposed to be seen as the warning shot that this guy's really coming after the state. And it's not for me to say I wasn't covering it back then, but I talked to a lot of people who still say the lesson hadn't sunk in yet.

It was justified as a one-off. Like, this is just one guy. There's this belief that somehow cocaine will go away and there won't be violence if Ridwan Taghi is put in prison for the rest of his life. Okay, it might not be quite as feral and stupid level of violence, but it's still going to be there. And then things started just really rapidly accumulating.

At one point, Taghi orders a hit on a rival in Morocco, and his guys accidentally kill the wrong dude. Guy stood up, changed tables, was wearing the same shirt. The guy they killed was the son of a federal judge. Ouch. A medical student and a friend of the king. So now Taghi's basically got Morocco with a total case of ass to find him.

Whereas the Dutch had wanted, at this stage now, these people are getting killed. Taghi's in Dubai. The Dutch are not having a lot of success extraditing him. But the reason why the Dutch were able to get their hands on him at all was the King of Morocco sent a snatch team to Dubai with the permission of the Emirates. Yeah.

Kidnapped Taghi out of his house, beat the living hell out of him for three days, and then inexplicably put him on a plane to the Netherlands. And nobody's really sure how that went down because it was pretty much assumed that Taghi was not coming back from that trip. Well, I mean, this is a place with, I'm thinking of CIA black sites now. So this, you know, this is probably not a country to be messing around with. Yeah. It's the Moroccan intelligence service.

The Moroccan intelligence services do not mess around. These are notoriously hard-headed people. And they really did. I mean, at one point we saw pictures like Taghi had a literal boot print on his head. That's crazy. In a booking photo. But so I asked around and nobody could quite understand what the Dutch gave. Because honestly, at that stage, Taghi disappears dead into the Moroccan

apparatus and never to be seen again. But inexplicably, the Moroccans and the Dutch worked out a deal to send him for trial. And they extradited him. I do not know what favors were traded. This is kind of like the million dollar mystery. Somebody even suggested to me that there didn't need to be a favor traded once he knew he was going to go to jail, once the king had gotten a hold of him and was like, okay, it's easy for me. Fine, I got my three days beating him. You'll never let him out of prison again.

And now, you know, the Netherlands owes Morocco a favor. So it could have been as simple as that. Or maybe there was a bigger deal. Nobody knows exactly. But Satake ends up in prison where he continues to try to kill everybody that's got him in prison. You know, and at this stage, more and more people are getting smoked. Anybody working on the case is now, like, anonymous. I had a sign of things saying I wouldn't, like, describe Satake.

The judges or prosecutors. Wow. Like, I can't tell you what they look like. Yeah. Honestly, I mean, but no, this is the thing about, okay, I will give Ridwan Taghi this man. I've been around a lot and I've seen a lot of crazy crap. Okay. I've covered like multiple wars on multiple continents and all this stuff.

He just didn't stop. It was like at some point you just could not believe that he, even from prison, he was working every possible angle he could. His cousin is doing five and a half years in prison for using his attorney status to visit him to smuggle messages out, including one that most everybody's pretty sure led to the murder of Holland's most famous journalist, who we haven't even gotten to yet.

was murdered in broad daylight by, we're pretty sure by Taghi's guys. Let's just say there's a lot of evidence that his organization was connected to that. And you know, he's doing that from prison. He's ordering these hits from inside there. He's telling Yusuf, his cousin, where the money he stashed to hire the commandos to break him out of prison is. And the thing about Taghi is that you, as crazy as this stuff sounds, going back to like my history,

You've got to take it seriously. I was going to say, this segues nicely into your report in this story because, I mean, you've got to watch your back a little bit, right? Yeah.

yeah, you know, I mean, look, the people we had on the podcast all have to watch their back. Okay? Like, this is a local story and those guys have their local relationships that I know how hard that is from working in, you know, places where I'm dealing with local crime or terrorist organizations and you've got to build a relationship with them as a beat reporter. And that's what a lot of these guys have. They all have nicknames for each other and stuff. They've all, like, all the, virtually every reporter that I'd met on this assignment had

has lived under police protection at one time or another. The lawyers I interviewed who are now off the case, we don't know why they quit, but the lawyers I interviewed for the Crown Witness, they lived in safe houses for two years. Everybody's been threatened. When I told a Dutch police official what I was working on, he said, oh great, another asshole I have to put under protection. And he goes, at least I think I can get the DEA to pay for you.

And then the guy never talked to me again. You do mention, to give nothing away, you do mention the Italians further down the line in the show and the way that they've dealt with, you know, the Andrangheta and the Cosa Nostra and the Camorra and various groups. And this is fully 90s Italy stuff, right? I mean, this is prosecutors under 24-hour surveillance. This is not just witnesses, but the families of witnesses, the lawyers of witnesses being popped. I mean...

It's pretty crazy, crazy stuff. I mean, it's like typical Northern European, I guess, complacency, where I think you mentioned at some point, they're like, well, this has never happened before. I'm like, well, it's happening now, dickheads. So, like, do something about it. By the time it hits DeVries, even by the time DeVries gets killed in 2020,

at 2021, he gets killed and that shocks Dutch society. But again, Taghi's on trial. So there is this weird panic, but there's also not. It's strange. Again, I don't think they really want to acknowledge the horror of it because it was so out of line.

Nobody wants to think of themselves as a narco state. And the thing is, I will defend Holland. I don't think it's quite a narco state. That's a specific definition. Taki assaulted the power centers of Holland, but he did so far. He's still alive in jail. Let's give him time.

But he, you know, so far he's failed. He managed to corrupt and infiltrate. But no, he didn't get his case dropped. He didn't kidnap the crown princess to trade for himself, which was an ongoing plan, apparently, that everybody had to take seriously, as ridiculous as it sounded.

Yeah.

America doesn't get that so much, but like it's, it's happened more than at least two times in the Moroccan mafia war. Guys tried to break out of prison by having like their brothers hijack helicopters and crash them into the jail. So like you have to take this seriously, you know? And it's all, but again, when you don't have like mass shootings, you don't have street gang wars on the same level. You have like some drill rap stuff between clashing gangs where people do get killed. It's, it's, it's, it's,

brutal as anything you'd find in like the UK or the US in terms of violence in that community but again it's still small you're talking like six or seven murders a year is a lot for a very small community that doesn't see a lot of murders so

So, you know, I will defend the Dutch on this, is that the state did hold up, but just acknowledging it and wanting to see it as something that might be tied to, you know, globalization, completely deregulated finance. Wild, wild. Like if you go to Rotterdam, I keep talking about this. I saw a ship.

Okay, the sister ship of the Evergreen, which got stuck in the Suez Canal, was in Rotterdam when I was there. The exact ship. The sister of it or whatever. Next to it was a ship that was four times bigger and had 28,000 containers on it. 28,000? That were going to get unloaded. 28,000. It had 28,000 containers on it. It dwarfs the ship that...

We got stuck in the Suez. And it'll be unloaded in 24 hours by robots. So if you want to buy anything you want whenever you want at a cheap price, you're going to have a lot of cocaine. It's just that's it. This is why you are not going to, unless you want to radically redo certain aspects of society, like I always joke about this, but the Dutch did not get rich in Rotterdam and Antwerp by making people sushi late

buy mangoes and bananas sitting on the dock, buy anything sitting, they get your stuff out. They're efficient. This is trade. This is what they've been doing for a thousand years, man. And they are good at it. But the point of shipping is to get that stuff out. Off the container ship, onto the backs of the trucks, going out to their destination. Time is money and all this stuff. So, you know, you don't really want to slow down to search everything. Antwerp can scan 2% of the

that go through. They need to know it's coming from intelligence to really have a chance to intercept it. I guess we could ask some 17th century Indonesians, you know, who's good at taking stuff onto ships and getting it across the world. They're going to tell us for sure. Yeah.

Yeah, and so that whole thing is a set up. And then you've got a financial deregulation system that essentially makes it nothing. I mean, guys who live in Dubai who are street kids that five years ago were selling weed and grams of cocaine off scooters to people at bars and stuff, they started getting paid in cocaine. They popped to the top. Five years later, they're in Dubai, and they're setting up holding companies through Panama. Yeah.

Because they've got to move all this money around. And these dudes end up with fairly sophisticated financial vehicles in order to do this. And then the money ends up in often places like either buying stuff in Dubai, a lot of hard assets, people that seems like we couldn't quite nail this down, the exact extent of it. But there's a lot of new development in Morocco in the tourist sector.

in the hotel sector, a lot of infrastructure getting built right around the same time. Billions is pouring through their community in Europe. Italy, man. Yeah. Same, same, same, same things happening in Albania. The same things happening in Albania, which has its own very active organized crime and drug smuggling. As we like to call it, uh, they have their own scene here, uh, and they operate in Antwerp. This is why it's not, we just happened to focus on a Moroccan and the Moroccan mafia is a,

clever phrase, but you could easily just switch this whole thing over to a bunch of Serbs out of like the Hague. Yeah. You know, I mean, this is like everybody is using this route, you know, and that's interesting. That's what we found is it's, it's much less of a top down hierarchical group of organizations than it is a bunch of gig workers who kind of come together for deals. Yeah.

So when people ask me, like, who's the biggest drug dealer in Europe? You know, I can speculate a little bit with a couple of names, but what I'd really say is who's the last one to get stuff through? So the Silicon Valley dream of a democratized, flat organization, the drug industry is living that dream. Yeah.

Yeah, no, this is what I, when I keep going back to the globalization thing, I can think of three guys that if they had dinner, I've said this before, I hope it's not cliche at this point, but if they had dinner with Jeff Bezos, right?

They would just talk about on-time shipping, logistics, sunken costs on infrastructure, payroll. This is what they would talk about. It's a logistics business. It's the purest capitalist product in a lot of ways. And I guess, to kind of widen it out for a second, if we are to talk about Amazon and Jeff Bezos, then

Is there such a thing as a kind of European super mafia? You mentioned the Kinahans and the show. I mean, how densely is this connected or is it just kind of a loosely? Yeah. What is it? They're loose. They're, they're allies. They do business together. We've read, we've read a lot of the messages from that crew. What you're talking about is basically there's an infamous wedding when Daniel Kinahan gets married in the bourgeois Arab and the $9 million a night, like, yeah,

seven-star hotel, they throw this party for a Kinahan wedding. And I guess this was around the time everybody started, a lot of these guys had started moving to Dubai. And this confidential informant for the DEA happens to be there. I guess they thought it was smart to keep an eye on Kinahan or whatever. And the guy's looking around the room and he realizes, well, there's this dude, Ridwan Taghi, who's only recently started...

anybody's ever really heard of. He's at the wedding, and then, you know, next to him is Rafael Imperiali, a top clan leader in the Kimura. And then next to him is like, you know, this dude Tito, a Bosnian

who's still rolling out there too. I'd love to see that wedding, the kind of seating plan on the side of the Burj Al Arab. Tito's there, Rico the Chilean, who's probably we know the least about this guy and is probably one of the most important people to the whole thing. There's a few, Taghi gets a lot of the press just because he was so feral, but he had partners.

And, you know, so these are some of the most powerful, and they're all partying. They're all at this thing. The Kinahans are all there. They're all celebrating together. And the DEA is just astonished that these guys are all there. So that's where the super cartel came from, because they were all living in Dubai. And what we've since learned, in my opinion, it's a lucid alliance. I think they were rivals. I think they worked together. I think, again, you put together deals. Who can put, you know, who's in on this one? We've seen emails from, like, prison that,

Ridwan Taghi sending Raphael Imperiali really polite emails from prison explaining how he still owed $867,000 from a deal. And also, Ridwan's understanding that Raphael's been doing a bunch of deals since Ridwan's been in prison. And...

he could really use money so why don't we start cutting in brother ridwan on some of this stuff even though he's in jail he's got to maintain his organization so it was like that like friendly but also like hey man i hear you're stepping out can i get in on this it wasn't hierarchical i don't think anyone was anybody's boss in this regard yeah you could pick to a handful of things that everybody was good at or maybe they helped each other with like obviously ridwan tagi has a

access to the ports in Rotterdam and Antwerp as the Dutch guy. Tito, it turns out, is one of the first non-Latin Americans I've ever come across that I legitimately believe produces his own cocaine in Peru. He might actually control labs, which I think is unheard of. I can't quite prove it. The Peruvians think he does. And if that's the case, that's like the first time that's ever happened.

And so that's possibly his thing. The Kinnehans are famous for being great at money laundering, finance stuff. The Camorra, why don't you need the Camorra? What can't the Camorra help you with? So you could see kind of where people would have roles and what they'd bring to the table. Rico the Chilean was known for being able to source huge amounts of cocaine out of

South America and stuff like that. So everybody kind of played a role, but it wasn't, I don't think, a hierarchical situation. I wouldn't call it a super mafia. I'd call it like a bunch of bros selling cocaine living in Dubai. You make it sound like some Zemeckis film from the 80s in that case. So, I mean, I was listening to the show and I was like, I really want to hear a follow-up where you just go to Dubai and hang out with a bunch of crazy drug lords, but...

That sounds like it might be slightly dangerous. Yeah. You know, they've got this big rule in Dubai, which is you're not allowed to do anything there. That's what these guys are tolerated. Like, you've got to spend a lot of money...

on apartments and probably payments to security services and fees and golden visas. They're constantly shaking you down. But if you don't kill anybody there and you don't really make the U.S. call looking for you, the U.S. is a different phone call than Belgium. The U.S. doesn't give a crap about a Belgian phone.

drug lord, you know, or whatever. So they're not going to get too involved. You can get away with it for a while. My belief is the minute you stop paying or the heat gets too high, they send you out and take all your stuff and keep it.

Yeah. That's basically, I think, you know, like right now, Ridwan Taghi, like he, he had a beautiful villa in Dubai. They got the door kicked in. I bet there's a senior official from the security services living in that villa right now, or it was sold, you know what I mean? Like, because like, that's what the deal is. So you do get to roll. I, a friend of mine speaking to one of these guys in Dubai, we could not obviously get him to appear on the podcast. He,

He basically indirectly told me through this intermediary that he knew he was going down. He's wanted in Belgium. He's about 34, 35 years old. And he knows in the next few years they're going to extradite him. And he's going to go to jail in Belgium for about 15 years. He figures he can plea out to that. So what he's doing now is making as much money as he possibly can and stashing it all over the world in the hopes that the cops don't get all of it.

And then when he gets out of prison at about 50, he can live a decent life and take care of his family. That's his plan. I mean, that's what we do in the podcast. Same kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. But that's the most logical plan I heard out of any of these guys. He's actually got an exit route that involves... He knows it's going to involve at least a decade in prison. I mean, Dubai is just...

insane right i mean you've got i mean the shows that we've done you've got yakuza guys that have been in dubai you've got dawood ibrahim from india you've got pakistani afghan dealers lebanese everyone's there everybody's there it's like party time for the international criminal community it is and uh they've gotten a little bit more i i thought about a year or so ago it was gonna get better there was a lot of pressure

And I think with the Russia thing, that's now off the table. I think that, like, once you start letting in every oligarch flooding in, you know, like, they've made a decision to go after the money. And so I think right now, probably, there's even less pressure you can apply on Dubai. I guess the good thing from a Russian perspective is that, you know, oligarchs are very easy to push out the window of a...

89-story skyscraper. So that's an easier job than the Aeroflot office in Berlin. Just saying. Yeah, you really don't want to go on the helicopter deck during a oligarch. You're way up there at the top, the little round thing. Yeah, I'm not going up there. Not with a Russian. But yeah, it is a center for this stuff. And again, it's globalized capitalism. The reason why it's all there is because free financial flows of money.

You can move money around. I mean, at one point a guy's telling us in the podcast, it's a full globalized business. You're sitting in Dubai. You're moving money through Panamanian shell companies. You're investing in, let's say, Morocco to launder your cash. You're ordering hit teams to kill dudes in Panama. Mm-hmm.

you've got the, there's an organization there. And that's what we really found from a couple of these hacks. And we're like, the whole, all of European law enforcement and drug, you know, scene is still waiting on the 10-year process of them decrypting all of the Sky ECC hack stuff. I mean, there's guys that are,

There's people basically in there that are going to jail who nobody knows they're going to jail yet. Nobody's just gotten around to those messages. And they're going to be at it for years. So this is one of the things I came across was officially nobody would talk to you.

Like, nobody... Like, I have only a handful of officials were willing to speak on the record. And one of the reasons for this was just absolute paranoia because every, like, six months or so, a cop or an official or somebody pops on Sky ECC and they were, you know, like...

We can't have, like, what if this dude interviews one of our federal police and then, like, a week later we decrypt the messages and that dude's dirty. Oh, my God. And then this guy's got a podcast interview. Like, this is, like, possibly the greatest thing I could imagine happening to me in my life is that the cop I interviewed for the podcast gets indicted for working for a cocaine cartel. I mean, I'm a little turned on. But, like, for them, that would be the absolute biggest disaster in the history of the world.

And so even the chance of that happening, forget it. We're not going to talk to you. And on some level, I appreciate it because the longer this goes on, the more and more weird stuff keeps happening. And just out of the blue, the Dutch will be like, hey, we discovered a torture chamber. And they did. And the cases that the US and the Europeans keep sending to Serbia and Albania,

It's just, this is going to be a nonstop thing. You know, like they've had to go to Montenegro and be like, Hey man, um, you know that guy in charge of the police? Yeah. You got, yeah. He's, um, cartel guy. And they've been dealing with like Montenegro has been actually trying to kick some people out. They've been true. They've got a new government. I'm not an expert on those guys at all, but they've, you know, I'm living next door. Yeah.

Yeah, they're trying to wind up corrupt officials, and a lot of that came from Sky ECC. So if it can happen in Montenegro or Serbia, it can happen in Belgium and Holland. There's still people taking money. They're on the take up there. Antwerp just charged a top federal police detective with providing information to a drug cartel.

Wow. Like, and he was one of the top investigators there. It didn't come from Sky ECC, but the minute I saw that, I was like, and that's why the Belgian cops wouldn't let me talk to anybody. This would have been one of the guys that I would have talked to, or I would have wanted to talk to. Um, he's just been indicted. Um,

Even Taghi's lawyer, I mean, we didn't even get to this, but Inez Weskey, who's a fairly famous or infamous human rights lawyer, she represented Charles Taylor. She has a tendency to take clients absolutely nobody wants, like Ridwan Taghi. She has spent 41 days in jail and is still under investigation as to whether or not she'd been willing to take messages out of prison for Taghi. She's off the case. She's defending herself now.

And, you know, nobody's really sure what the evidence is. We haven't seen it. The Dutch system is pretty opaque, but they just, they kept her in prison for 41 days. That's, yeah. So they just let her out on bail, but the investigator, the judge said there's no reason to keep her in prison while you investigate. You can let her go. But so, you know, there's a possibility that one of the top human rights lawyers,

in the world, fairly infamous, or famous, or whatever. And you can almost see it. Like if Ridwan Taghi tells you, you got to take this message to my family, dude. I mean-- - Yeah, you don't. That's a hard turn down. - Again, he might do it. It's really that over the top. You're not being silly and you're not being paranoid. He really might hire the Spence Knotts. So people can see that, but we don't really know what the truth, and this is again,

Just as we're wrapping up this project, there's more and more attacks on the civil society. There's a guy, not the Dutch, just moving to Belgium next door, the Belgian justice minister. They found three hitters, teenage kids, with encrypted phones and a Kalashnikov following him around. Jesus Christ. Wow. That was last summer.

Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Like, and that's not even Taghi. Yeah. Yeah. That's this other thing that we, you know what I mean? That's another guy. I'm pretty sure I know who that was. And he's trying to intimidate the Belgian state into not trying to extradite him from another country.

So was he going to kill? What were they going to do? Because it's getting pulled all the time. They will pull over a car following the Prime Minister, and there'll be two kids with an encrypted phone and black face masks. Not always guns, but they'll be following people around. It's...

So this organization is, I think it's kind of washed now. I mean, finally, we might be at the end. But like in terms of Butagi's ability to reach outside and get things done, I can't imagine he still can do much. But, you know, this is stuff that was going on.

For a year after I was uncertain whether I even wanted to focus on Tagi because I felt like that story had been told so well and it had already been told. Like originally I didn't come into this wanting to do Ridwan exactly. But then as I'm studying the thing and trying to come up with a narrative, increasingly insane things keep happening every week and the guy's still, he's already in jail and it's still crazy. So that eventually swung me back over and I just said, I can never tell a story better than this. It's continuing while we're reporting it.

And so it's true. Like we don't even know if he's going to have a, I don't even know if they're going to be able to give him a verdict in October, like plan. Well, that, I mean, I guess that was going to be one of my next questions. Um, is this going to end soon? Like what, what, what, what the hell is going on at the moment?

Taghi's going to be in court for the rest of his life. I mean, he's going to be sentenced to prison as well, but meaning there are so many cases to unwind. But the Dutch have a very peculiar system from an American point of view at least, and I think a little bit in the UK too. How do I put this? They're a literal people, the Dutch, and so if they catch you with 100 kilos of cocaine,

They're going to do a DNA test to make sure it's yours. They're going to collect the evidence that ties you to the 100 kilos. They're going to check all the CCTV and stuff like that and put you in the place. They're going to do a really diligent job. And then they're going to charge you with cocaine possession of like 100 kilos. And at no point will anybody ask you where you got the drugs. Okay. Okay.

- Right. But yeah, he has 100 kilos, it's 10 years in prison, he goes to prison, what is the problem here? Well, okay, so like one guy that I was studying, and we didn't use him in the podcast, but I just found this dude freaking amazing.

And I think that this gets to, in no way do I advocate for a harsher war on drugs. But the Netherlands has gone a little silly at times and needs to maybe adjust. Here's a story of one guy. This is just a press release that pops into my inbox last year from the Dutch public prosecutor. Serbian guy living in the country illegally. He does something with his car.

suspicious and cops pull him over and basically they're not like freaking out he doesn't have anything on him the car's not stolen but he's not registered to a house in the Netherlands which is his papers are not in order okay so this is like Germany you gotta be registered to the address you live in or the Dutch get really upset you know it's obviously you know a cultural thing they share with the Germans

And so his papers are not in order. This is all very upsetting. So they go to the house he claims he lives in. It's a stash house. There's like 90 kilos of cocaine, about 20 million euros in cash, and a glock. And he's the guardian of the drugs. It's his job. So they arrest him.

They charge him with possession of 90 kilos of cocaine and all these millions of euros and a gun. So from an American perspective, I'm like, if he doesn't tell them where he got that shit, he's going to jail for 35 years. Millions of dollars, 100 kilos of cocaine, and a gun. Okay, that's 30 years in America. That's maybe life for when you throw in that combination of factors.

Um, nobody asks him anything. And so the court, he goes on trial and pleads guilty. And the court decides that he's obviously a low level employee of an org, bigger organization. And there'd be no real point to like nailing him up hard. And he gives him like five, four or five years. Okay. And then he's going to be deported and then he's going to be deported back to Serbia.

Where he will be hailed because this is what blew my mind is, okay, forget the five years part. They said he's a low-level employee. Really? A low-level employee is left alone with 25 million euros, 90 kilos of cocaine, and a gun? Yeah.

I would say that's a pretty respected member of the organization, to be perfectly honest. In relation to one of the extremely dark crimes that you mentioned, I think it was one of the murders that Martin, the blogger,

carried out. He got five years, if I'm not wrong. He got five for the bar fight guy that he killed. But apparently everybody in the neighborhood, everybody hated that guy. He was doing them a favor. Yeah, that's what Martin says, but actually it does kind of sound like everybody really did hate that guy, from what I can tell. But the really disturbing crime, so Martin wins a bar fight, and that goes bad, and it's basically manslaughter.

but his next killing is like a brutal, he killed the partner of his ex wife. Yeah. And fucking took pictures of the guy dying and like tweeted about it. And his, his, his children saw it. So as much as Martin was amusing, that whole thing was so chilling. That's why I said he's associated. Yeah. And it's also why I didn't mind having a little fun with him. Eventually getting killed was, this was a, you know, like,

this is going back to what Paul says. He was a nice guy, but he was proud of killing people, you know, and the, and the killing of his wife, his ex wife's partner was just beyond the pale. In fact, I don't understand how he only got 12 for that. I think that was the sentence that I was like, Holy shit. That is unbelievably light sentence for, for like, what is a cold blooded, like gruesome murder. Um, yeah, it,

It was really cold-blooded. It was in front of kids, his own children. It's just awful. But going back to the Serbian guy, this is the other thing. So they say he's a low-level employee, which is obviously garbage. He's a highly respected, trusted member of a serious organization. This guy now, he's a Serbian gangster in his 30s. He's going to do, what, two or three years in a Dutch prison before going back to Serbia where he's going to get a promotion for keeping his mouth shut. Yeah, yeah.

So part of what I, because Belgium will put you in jail longer, but part of what I was wondering when I was looking at this stuff is like, they've changed this now, but it was literally changed while I was there, is if an underage kid got caught trying to rip cocaine out of containers in the port of Antwerp, or not in Antwerp, in Rotterdam, it was a 150 euro fine. Okay.

Not even. So they give you basically like you got 100 euros to do it from the drug lord or the guy who hired the kids. And then they throw in 150 euros that would be a bonus if you didn't get caught. But so you could pay the fine if you did get caught without calling them.

And then at worst, you were going to do a couple of months in a Dutch juvie hall over pulling $50 million worth of cocaine out of a container and throwing it to the Albanian mafia over a fence or whatever.

So this stuff is weird, you know? And this is, I felt, I feel really because the things I came away with is you simply can't compete with the scale because it's 27 different law enforcement, you know, Europe, let's say it's roughly 30 or whatever. So roughly 30, everybody's got their own judicial system. They've got their own police system. They've got their own internal politics. They've got their own foreign relations with everybody else. It's all very messy. So you're a polls in charge of wrangling that and trying to get everybody to work together. Um,

They feel like they need more power. I'm not suggesting a war on drugs American style for Europe, but I will say this is if anybody and cops have even told me this, if they really want to track actual money from these guys in Antwerp and Rotterdam and stuff like that, some of the guys that we were looking at, you know, one cop told me, look, you know, we've got 49 detectives basically that work, roughly 50.

federal police detectives in Antwerp that work narcotics and work the port. They're working on the drug gangs and the cartels. They call them clans because they're all family units in Antwerp. He's like, but you got to understand, one of the reasons why I talk to you as a journalist is because you can track finances and money.

And I was like, what do you mean? He's like, we've got college degrees, man, but we're just a bunch of cops. He's like, we don't have the resources to go through like Panamanian shell companies. And like, this is serious crap. We don't have, if we do, we have a handful of people who know how to do that. And they're always busy. They're always swamped. And so this is where you can tell if they want to track the money and they want to get stuff really done, you got to involve the U.S.,

Because the DEA can track it. Yeah.

U.S. Department of Treasury can track it. The scale of the economy looking at the problem is so much bigger. So what you find is, like, I think a lot of those Antwerp metric ton drug busts that I got to watch in progress or whatever, a lot of that, they're not finding it on the dock. They're getting intelligence probably coming from the USDA, probably Belgian intelligence, probably other law enforcement agencies throughout South America, and they're hearing, all right, this container's got a ton in it.

You know, you should stop at off the Canaries or something and take a look. And so that's the crucial role the Americans play, and that's a role that Europe, by design, has an incredibly difficult time getting around. It's the same thing that we saw with them trying to battle those ISIS cells I first started talking about. Once you're inside Schengen, I mean, I'm still using a Dutch SIM card I never had to show an ID for. Yeah, yeah.

And then I could just get on a train and go to Belgium in an hour. Completely different group of cops looking for me. And then if I get tired of that, I can go to Brussels from Antwerp, another hour, for 30 minutes. Now I have a completely different law enforcement system that's looking for me. Am I sick of that? Within two hours, I'm in Paris. Okay, I'm going to buy a new SIM card from Paris and never show any ID. How are the cops supposed to track you like that? There's a certain amount that they can do, and they've gotten better at it, but it's still...

At each stage of the way, you've got to involve another bureaucratic organization.

You've got to get the French to help you. They do their best to help each other, but there's rivalries. There's limited resources. Everybody's competing for the same resources to try to go after gangs that will help them and all this stuff. It's wild. So Europe needs a more unified strategy on it. But I don't know how you do that. That's a political reform that I don't understand. As much as I think your poll was really interesting, they don't have guns and they can't arrest anybody.

Yeah. Yeah. Europe, Europe is drowning in drugs, I guess. And there's 27 different guys with one set of war wings trying to try to save everyone. Um, it's how it feels like. Yeah. That's part of why I did the project because honestly, look, these guys have all the people that are covering the story. Um, the Irish reporters that cover the Kinnehan's, the Dutch reporters that covered Taghi and the whole Moroccan mafia guys, the guys who wrote the Morocco mafia book. Um,

These are all excellent journalists, and they've done a phenomenal job on this story for 10 years. I didn't really bring a lot to the table on that because I can't do a better job of covering Redouane Taghi than Wouter Lambus or Paul Veltz. That's what these guys do all day. They're from Amsterdam. They've been reporters there for 20 years on the same beat. They're all tight. What I could do, though, was do what Europe has a hard time doing, which is take a step back and see how everybody connects to each other.

Because Wouter doesn't, just like the cops, those reporters are reporters, man. They don't have time. They're covering what's happening on the street in Amsterdam. They're covering Taghi's trial. They're covering the latest news on the Kinahans in Dubai if they're in Dublin. Okay, they're doing the Hutch trial. They're doing all this stuff. But they know about the connections. Everybody talks to each other a little bit. I found like most of these journalists, we all kind of know each other now and trade info and tips.

But the fact is they've got their beat and it's the Kinneans, you know, and then they've got their beat and it's the Moroccan Mafia. And then the Spanish guys have this stuff that they're doing and El Pais and stuff. They're really good reporters. So I try to do that when I look at a big project like this, because that's where I can bring some value is being able to see a slightly different view because I know how blinded you can get. You know, I was in Beirut for 12 years. Like I saw Beirut differently than other people do.

But you could step away from what I did and see something different because I was living in it. And so I think that that's all very real stuff. Yeah, this is where I should appeal to German journalists to look into the money laundering from the mob who's going through their country as well, having seen that for many, many years.

I'll give you one, we should wrap up, but I'll give you one story on that. Because originally I got into this money laundering with the Andrangena. Because they are all over Eastern Germany, particularly. But all over Germany, all over Eastern Europe. And I was joking around, like I was in Berlin. It's okay, Alexanderplatz. And I was walking around and I realized that, okay, there was like a chain pizzeria. Like with a random Italian in it.

And I ate at one of them. And then I was walking by and I got confused because it was the same place with a different name two blocks over. And I look in and it's got the exact same menu. And then I start counting them and there's five. Two of them have the exact same menu, are not really well decorated. There's some guys in there, they'll make you a pizza.

but they're not the business ones. But they're right there, like a block away from the really busy ones off of Alexanderplatz. And you realize the same people own all this stuff, and it's clearly money laundering. So I jokingly said this to some cops, an Italian cop, and the Italians, again, they've been at this type of war now for a long time, and they're much better at it than the rest of Europe.

And he just starts laughing. And he was like, you want to hear the story about the Germans? And I was like, yeah. He's like, look, the problem with the Germans is, you know, they're very organized, but if your papers are in order, you can do whatever the hell you want. Preach. You know? And he was just like, as insane as it sounds, he goes, so what we get is like a guy from Calabria turns like 19 and he goes to like random town in Eastern Germany where his cousin happens to own a pizzeria.

And they're moving him out. They're moving him up into the organization, into his drina, as they call it. And so that guy then registers with the Germans, Schengen, paying taxes. The Germans look at his stuff. He's a pizza waiter. He's making 25,000 euros a year. Everything is good. All the papers are nice. Next year, he wants to invest 30 million euros in a shopping mall. Yeah.

And the Italians are like, hey, why don't you ask him where he got the 30 million euros? And the Germans are like, we can't do that. His papers are in order. What are you talking about? And so this is like, you know, one thing that I'd say is I don't love state overreach.

But when it comes to this stuff, I've noticed that one thing that's really useful is at a certain point, you should have to explain to the cops where you got all that money. And I know it's a privacy thing, but it's also just like, come on, man. The Italians, I don't think they're really suffering from privacy, but if you've got an extra million in your account that you can't explain, they just take it. Yeah, yeah. Until you can tell them where you got it, and they will aggressively do it. And that's how you hurt dudes. Yeah.

Belgium has a tough time shutting things down. The mayor of Amsterdam has an easier time. So if there's a shisha lounge, there's an infamous shisha lounge in the podcast, but that place is shut by orders of the mayor and they can just shut things down. Whereas in Belgium, you got to go to court. The Poke Bowl guy, we had a Poke Bowl bombing campaign in Antwerp last summer. Kept blowing in a pancake house. Fair enough, because depending on your feelings on Poke Bowls, but yeah.

Well, again, it's money laundering by the clans. These are all like brothers of people who run organizations, and they were blowing up each other's stuff. The mayors had a tougher time shutting that down. Whereas in Amsterdam, they'll just pull the plug if they decide that you're doing something wrong and it comes to somebody's attention. But they can't seize your money, not as easily. There's cash, but if you've done it even vaguely legally...

you're going to get left alone. Whereas that's not good enough in Italy. You know, the Italians really want to see the receipts and stuff. But he was joking about Germany and he said it's gotten better a little bit since that 2007 massacre. The Germans started taking it a little bit more seriously. But again, they see it

As an immigration immigrant, these Swarthi people from the south, they're not, you know, like they, you know, they don't see it as an institutionalized problem on their end. And I hate to tell you this, but like the Ndrangheta financed the rebuilding of East Germany. Yeah. Oh, yeah. They paid for that. Yeah.

If you see Napoli Pizzeria in rural East Germany, where do you think that came from, man? And the construction companies, the concrete companies, this is why we can never tell really how big they actually are. How do you define what's legal and illegal at some stage with these guys? I would say most all of that money in the 90s and early aughts. This is investments that the Andrangena had gone into cocaine from being basically a kidnapping gang.

They invested their kidnapping gang money into cocaine and started because La Cosa Nostra was mostly heroin. So they saw an opening, started moving huge amounts of it. And right then the wall comes down and they've got all this cash sitting around and like literally boxes of cash in Calabria with no idea what to do with it. And suddenly you get a Eurozone and East Germany and Czech Republic and Poland all in need of massive infrastructure overhauls.

I feel like we're slipping into rise and grind business podcast territory here as well. Just keep upscaling your business, guys, and then you're going to finally get to the top of the pile. Good luck.

So Brazen refused to pay me in cocaine. I wanted to be paid in cocaine. That's the one thing that I've learned is if you can get paid in cocaine, you're on your way. But the flip side to that is a guy that I interviewed about that, I asked him whether or not he was saving up because there's this cliche that's fairly true. Certain guys will save up about $25,000 to buy a kilo of their own from one of these shipments. And then they'll cut it three times, sell it,

buy two more. And then five years later, you can be in Dubai if everything goes right for you. So I asked the guy whether or not he was doing that. And he goes, yeah, bro, I'm saving up 25 grand to replace my Ducati motorcycle that got stolen last year. Are you kidding me? I am not doing that. And I was like, why not? He's like, I have a really good life. He's like, I don't pay taxes. I make about six figures. I took my girlfriend to Aruba.

You know, and I stay off of everybody's radar. If I want to go that big, once you start having kilos, you have to guard kilos. You have to trust people. You have to kill people if they betray you. He's like, it's a mess. You end up dead. He was like, I am perfect where I am. Like...

It was really interesting. He laid out the entire problem with being the drug lord. He was like, "Within a year, you can't trust anybody because now you've got to store and move cocaine. You can't sit on it 24/7. This ain't no NTF, man. It's cocaine. People will steal it. People will steal your cash, and you can't go to the cops."

So to him, that's a step up in danger that's just nowhere near worth it. But he's eking out like a solid upper middle class limit doing what he's doing. And virtually no risk of arrest.

Nobody's looking for him. Let that be a lesson that we can all take home with us from this podcast. Mitch, I should say... Get paid in cocaine. Yes. Get paid in cocaine. I've got to learn the funding rules around YouTube, and apparently you're not allowed to say cocaine, so we're just going to have to bleep that word constantly throughout this show, which is going to sound great. What are we doing? We're doing a show on organized crime. Why on earth would you bring me on?

All I do is talk about cocaine. Okay, this is all I've been talking about for a year. It only dawned on me like about 50 minutes in. I was like, oh my God, yeah, we've got to like, we've got to get the editor on this. But whatever, people know. Well, let's just re-record it and I'll call it Yayo. Get Peyton Yayo, kids. That might be our age range. Yeah, I don't know. It might work better. Oh my God.

anyway people can find Gateway Project Brazen I mean anyone who's finding this show will be able to find that on Spotify iTunes Apple wherever you're going to get your shows anything I'm missing anything you're working on anything we should know

Just, you know, I'm moving on to, you know, starting to look at some of the other organizations. I'm reporting, I mean, I'm basically back at Vice as a senior writer for now. We say for now with all things involving Vice. For now. One of your hands is under the table, so I'm assuming there's a crossfinger somewhere.

Yeah, I don't know. You get a little fatalistic at some point. Keep in mind, I've been laid off from every job I've had in journalism, basically. That's a matter of honor.

Yeah, just straight up. I always joke is I've never been let go without my boss getting fired. That's my point of pride. Like my boss also goes when I go. But so I'm going to be working on stuff like that. I mean, obviously there's a ton to do with Ukraine. I spent a year basically looking at these guys in these cartels and

and there's been a lot going on, obviously, with Ukraine, even across Europe, not just in Ukraine. Wagner stuff. There's so much stuff to look at right now. So I'm going to be looking, doing some reporting. That's why I'm here in Albania. I've spent a lot of time in the Balkans, but I hadn't spent a lot of time in Albania, and it's a unique country.

very unique in some ways. - Yeah, it's amazing. - I kind of can't believe, it's sitting here in the middle of Europe and it's like two million people are all in on a secret and they do not share it. It's really funny. They're lovely, I think they're great, but it does feel like you're in the middle of something.

Who are these people and how are they talking in their proto-Orillian language no one can understand? So I'll be doing that stuff and just grinding away. I mean, the big projects, you want to hit marks, but you don't always know exactly how you're going to do it. I'd like to do something on Serbia. I'd like to do something on the Balkan cartels.

Obviously, there's always spook stuff going on across Europe because of Putin and the war in Ukraine. So, you know, all that stuff. All right. Well, rise and grind. Yeah. As as always. It's been an absolute pleasure, Mitch. We'll have you back on. Thanks. You just brought out a massive, massive story advice. I'll put the link to that also in the blurb to this one as well, because I think people should read that right away. Maybe we'll come back to you on that as well. That must have taken you an eternity.

- It was a long couple of weeks, basically. It was happening at the same time we were finishing Gateway. - Jesus.

And so it was basically the same two-week period. And then I started doing some limited media for Gateway. So that was like a 10-day period. I remember when you and I first were trying to hook up, and then I had to cancel, and my internet was down, and I had to cancel, and then your internet was down. We missed this by about a week. Thank God. If I had been on a video interview even a week ago, I would have been like...

I just, uh, can I have some cookie? You know, like it's really, it was terrible. So thank God we did this now. I'm much more alert and engaged. I have no idea because I've been on my headphones, but maybe my son has been screaming his face off. I have no idea. So, uh,

I'll have to apologize. Let's let you go. We've done an hour. Yes. I'll talk all day, but I'm also an introvert, so I'll have to nap for six hours after this. Well, Albania is a lovely place to do that in as well, I'm sure. Finally, it's not raining. I'm going to the beach next week. I'm actually taking my first vacation in the year. I might even change sim cards. So if I'm hard to reach in the next flight...