The Murdered Crime Reporter & the Mocro Mafia, Holland's Underworld Kings
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This July 6th, famed crime reporter Peter de Vries is heading home from a TV record in central Amsterdam. It's broad daylight as he strides along one of the city's narrow streets near its lightest plain square. A gunman steps out and shoots him five times, once in the head. De Vries falls, bleeding. Folks rush to help him. The gunman runs. Nearby, cops hunt him down.

He's a 35-year-old Polish national with a 21-year-old Dutch rapper accomplice named Delano G. De Vries dies in hospital a week later. There's an outpouring of grief and admiration in the Netherlands and way beyond. "He's a national hero to us all," says Amsterdam's mayor, adding, "a rare courageous journalist who tirelessly sought justice." De Vries' broadcaster issues a stirring statement. The reporter, quote, "lived by his conviction. On bended knee is no way to be free."

The death is a chilling reminder of Dutch drug crime that's been crescendoing for a generation, leaving bodies all over the country and way further. Most of Europe's cocaine comes through the ports of Rotterdam or baggage at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport. But the freeze-slaying hasn't happened in a vacuum.

For months before his death, he's been advising a key witness in the Netherlands' biggest ever Mafia trial. One held in a bunker, surrounded by armed cops, whose main defendant, its guest, once trafficked a third of Europe's entire coke. This trial drags in Colombian cartels, Irish families, even Napoli's Camorra Mafia. It's huge. Witnesses and lawyers have already been assassinated. The Freeze, the superstar sleuth, is only its latest victim.

as well wishes lay reeves in dam square amsterdam's pulsing heart one sign stands out attack on the freedom of press it reads no an attack on his involvement with the marengo trial welcome to the underworld podcast so hey guys welcome to the show uh my name's sean williams and i'm here with danny gold yes and we are two journalists who in this podcast

take you through the world of transnational organized crime and everything that goes with it. And I'm excited about today's episode. Yeah, it's a cool one. And how's it going at the moment, Danny? You've been upstate on the beaches or something? You've been kind of away from home? Yeah, yeah, trying to be, man. It's hot out here, you know, dog days of summer.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've been kind of glued to the computer the last few days. My Ethiopia story came online. You can read it, blah, blah, blah. But they could even like donate something to the situation out there, which if you've read the story is pretty, pretty damn awful. Yeah. Yeah. It was a good article. It's in GQ, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, it came out over the weekend. And maybe if you've done that, then consider dropping us a few bucks on the Patreon, guys. I mean, we've had a ton of stuff going up there lately. Danny, you spoke to this expert on a Swedish mob. I had a porn star on. I think that one's up today as we're recording it. It's all go, guys. Yeah, I don't know. You were kind of like...

You know, I was like, what does a porn star have to do with organized crime? I didn't really buy your rationalization, but, like, I'm not going to question it. But also, I like how you kind of went with, hey, there's this, like, awful civil war going on. You should donate to some of the, you know, some of the groups that are helping. But also donate to us. Well, I mean, you know, if we don't have any money, we can't do this, right? So...

But yeah, back to the Netherlands. I mean, pretty much every organized crime story I've ever written has a link to this country. Like that Icelandic Bitcoin heist episode we did last month. The guy who masterminded it was running coke through Rotterdam. And the guy who skipped jail wound up with his dealer mates in Amsterdam. The black acts in Nigeria. Guys are just working as baggage handlers at ship hole, pushing suitcases full of drugs off KLM flights from Africa. And the guy who's been in jail for a long time,

Curtis Warren, that guy was one point, like one of Europe's biggest gangsters. In 1995, he actually relocated to a villa in a town near Harlem. That's the old Harlem. Even D Company Mumbai has got connects with the Dutch. Yeah, I mean, for such a pleasant place of like tall blonde people with funny accents, riding bicycles everywhere and windmills, like it really does seem that Holland is

is this just kinetic point in global organized crime. Like I'm, I've always wondered why, like, is it just because of Amsterdam? Obviously the ports are a big thing too. And I'm, I'm excited to learn about why that is. Yeah. I mean, why do you think all those people on the bikes look so chipper? It's kind of, it's kind of a mix of all these things. Yeah. But in this book called the drug war, the secret history by Peter Walsh, which is this incredible anthology of the history of the UK's drug war. I recommend folks go out and get it because it's,

Brilliant. But he goes into the fact that Britain's first modern drug baron, Gurdjieff Singh Sangha, aka The Doctor, he actually set up shop smuggling from the Netherlands as long ago as 1972. Yeah, I've never actually heard that name before. I don't know who that guy is, but add him to the list. Like, I want to know about this The Doctor guy. Yeah, he's pretty interesting. We do a lot of stories that are pretty live. I mean, your one on Captagon last week, that's still like big news in the Middle East.

And Peter De Vries' death is as fresh as it comes for this show. He only died a month ago. So this whole episode is kind of about the slow and brutal collision course between this deadly mafia on one side and a fearless journalist on the other, and how the Netherlands has just kind of become Europe's narco state. And I mean, it really was fascinating to research all this stuff. And if you're keen to learn more, I've put

I've put a ton of interesting stuff on the reading list that comes out for our Patreon. So yeah, guys do that. I mean, it's what a price of a third of a coffee in London or Manhattan or something. Just go out and get it. Yeah. And also we have merch up. If you go to underworldpod.com, that's our website. There's merch up there and the t-shirts and all that. Don't Instagram your crimes, all that good stuff. We don't want to harp on this stuff, you know, but we kind of, uh, we need to. Yeah, we do. So this show, it's about something called the Macro Mafia, which is,

In essence, just a shortening of the word Moroccan, like a nickname for young kids involved in gang crime in Holland. But as we're going to learn, it's not really just confined to Moroccan gangsters, even if it does have a lot of its history there. And this macro mafia, it's like it's hardly a secret, right? The Dutch have even had a TV show out about some of its real life events since like 2018, I think, called...

Surprisingly, Macro Mafia. I haven't watched it. Can anybody who has tell us what it's like in the comments or social media? Engagement, engagement. Come on, engage with us. But anyway, IMDB tells me that it's the story of, quote, three best friends, Romano, Pencil, and the Pope, which basically sounds like an Animaniacs show. I'm sure it's good. I kind of want to watch the Animaniacs now.

So, Walter Lallemans, I'm sorry if I'm getting your name wrong, Walter, he literally wrote the book on the Macro Mafia, and he has this to say about it. Quote, it's about young boys growing up in areas of Amsterdam where tourists never go. It's not canals, the Rijksmuseum, Van Gogh, it's the housing estates. They don't have the same opportunities. They're aspirational. They're looking for a career in the underworld. That's like a nice little clap moment for our pod.

Just on the consumption side, Amsterdam has been this place for Europeans to get wildly messed up on all kinds of narcotics for centuries. Little digression, but I remember the first time I went there with a bunch of student mates and we went to some legal high store and bought a box of mushrooms each, ate them with some tea. Lovely. Really, really chilled out. And then we turned these boxes over, we flipped them over and it said for free people, you

So we basically spent the next half a day going absolutely insane. I thought roadworks were a fairground and I thought I'd gone deaf or something. And then this pal of mine had a fit in Burger King on Dam Square and had to be carried out yelling. The only problem with that is that it was Victory Day in Europe or something and the king was speaking to thousands of folks in the square. So in the middle of this big important moment, there's us carrying our mad friend out of Burger King like pallbearers at a funeral.

weaving for all these kind of Dutch guys and yelling in some magic mushroom frenzy.

Not the proudest moment I've ever had. You know, before COVID, I spent a week each year just working and seeing friends in Amsterdam. It's an amazing city and a bit like Berlin, despite what Danny says. It's just a really beautiful place to chill out and have a coffee and a quiet beer. You ever checked out the red light district in Amsterdam, Danny? Yeah, I mean, I don't want to diverge too much because I feel like we've been doing that in the beginning of the episode. Yeah, I actually, I did mushrooms for the first time there in Amsterdam a long time ago.

It didn't go well. You know, don't do hallucinogens in a place that the drag society come to buy sex and crack. Do it in nature. You know, that makes for better, good brain feelings. Can we get that on a t-shirt? Yeah. The Van Gogh Museum on mushrooms kind of rules, though. I definitely had a moment there where people were moving the paintings. I think it's actually where I decided to become a writer, but...

Let's go back to the mafia. Yeah, anyway, yeah. How did this mafia get so big that it could gun down the country's best-known crime reporter in broad daylight? Well, first, a couple of things. Just like the Russian mob, which you, Danny, you've dived into a bunch on your shows on The Underworld.

It's not really a single gang. It's more like a collective of gangs that have slowly come together, consolidated and become more deadly. Yeah. When we talk mafia here sometimes, you know, we don't actually mean it in the... It's just a colloquialism now for organized crime. You know, it's not the sort of Italian hierarchy, Southern Italy hierarchy thing, but just...

I think we've covered that before. And this is a report by ARA, which is a Catalonian newspaper of all things. Quote, these gangs, mainly made up of people of Moroccan origin, have their epicenter in the port of Rotterdam and operate above all in the Netherlands and Belgium. But their tentacles reach Latin America and also the Costa del Sol, one of the traditional entry points for drugs in Europe.

So yeah, the Mock Crow Mafia is a really big deal. It's been operating since the 1990s, but it really came to the fore in 2012 with a massive, massive bust.

But before we get into all of that, and the gang gang killings, and the cold cases, and the heavyweight crime journo, we're going to take it all the way back to when this Moroccan-Dutch connection really began. And that's in the rubble of the Second World War, when the Netherlands was a shelled out mess. The country's crying out for so-called guest workers to help rebuild its cities. We already kind of touched on this with our episode on the Berlin Clans, which...

kind of sprung up when Gastarbeiter, that's like guest workers in German and in Dutch, by the way, from Turkey in the Middle East are sidelined and their kids are denied access to the German workforce pretty much. So in the Netherlands, these Gastarbeiter come mostly from Morocco, specifically the super poor area of the Rift Mountains, which is this range that goes from Tangier to the Mediterranean coast.

And just like in Germany, these young Moroccans coming over to Europe for some cash and a decent life, they're met with a quote, useless integration policy, according to the website Dutch News, which adds, quote, the people who were recruited for work in the Netherlands were not seen as human beings, but as working hours. Get undressed, bend over and be searched like cattle. Fahri Isik, one of the workers, described the vetting procedure that he and others were subjected to at the time.

It continues, integration was not a goal. Men were put up in boarding houses without language lessons. Once they are reunited with their families, it was looked upon favorably when newcomers clustered together in an area. It did not matter because they would be going back anyway. Benefits were also given without asking too many questions. So yeah, like half-assed integration, guys. That's where it gets you. So you've got a system where Moroccans are brought in as the help.

with no thought to how they'd actually integrate or get any purchase in Dutch society, really. Whoops. That's another tale of immigration policy and organized crime, folks. So these are young men with strong family connections and bad living conditions in Holland. And guess what grows up in the Rift Mountains? Yep, it's hash. Actually, it's already a big spot on the 60s hippie trail, with millions of backpackers hopping over from Spain to smoke, quote, kiff,

which is just tobacco chopped up with hash, which I guess is basically just a fat joint.

Actually, the German verb for smoking weed is kiffin, so they must be related somehow. Yeah, our homie Jake Hanrahan of Popular Front, he did a really cool story on a modern-day hash operation in the same mountains, I think. You know, it involved the dark web, so there was that sort of modern take on it. I talked to him about it, actually, I think on one of our recent Patreon episodes. Boom. As you might expect, these disenfranchised Moroccan guys living pretty much in workhouses and treated like cattle are

Yeah, well, screw that, a bunch of them say, and they get to work shipping homegrown from mum and pop in the mountains straight over to Amsterdam. And, of course, the locals love this stuff. And despite all those coffee shops you see in Amsterdam today, weed isn't decriminalised in the Netherlands till 1976. So, a new underworld booms. And there's a great story about the rise of the Macro Mafia at, sorry, Danny, Vice News by Niko Vorobjov.

He's actually a friend of the show and we should get him on a bonus episode soon. Anyway, in his story, Nico speaks to a female imam in the Netherlands whose dad was one of those early hash smugglers into the country. And she tells him, quote, it wasn't just the money because he was lousy at that. It's more the camaraderie, dreams of making it big, excitement, the whores, the rebel pirate lifestyle. Who doesn't want the rebel pirate lifestyle? Yeah.

Yeah, probably the daughter of the guy who has the rebel pirate lifestyle. Yeah, that's a good point. Fair enough. And Nico, by the way, who's a convicted drug dealer turned writer, I'll put his book Dope Land up on the reading list for this show, by the way. He's got another great article with The Independent in the UK about the Macro Mafia, which I've used a bunch for this episode. You guys should check it out. It's up there. So you've got this budding Moroccan mob, pun 100% intended. You've got a city that already has a buzzing organized crime scene.

Some listeners might have heard the word Penoza. Well, that's just really another word for the underworld in Amsterdam and other major Dutch cities. And it's been going on forever, pretty much run by local guys. With the undertone of the two phrases, Mokro, Mafia and Penoza, being that one is brown-skinned folks and the other is whites. And that distinction gets more important later on in this episode. So the Penoza, who run the game till the Mokro come along, they include a pretty scary villain named Willem Hollida.

He makes his name kidnapping the beer tycoon, Freddie Heineken in 1983. Yes. Heineken is just the family name. It's a, it's a crime that shocks Europe.

Holliday was shopped in by his sister in an incredible trial. And friend of the pod, Patrick Radden Keefe, actually wrote about it in a brilliant New Yorker piece from 2018. Put that on the list too, guys. You should read it. Yeah, that's a pretty wild article. I remember that. That's great, yeah. Holliday would eventually be sentenced for five murders. But this kidnapping best back in 1983, that actually puts DeVries, Peter DeVries, the journalist, on a collision course with the underworld.

And he writes a bestselling book called Kidnapping Mr. Heineken that I only just found out actually ends up being a 2015 movie starring Anthony Hopkins. Did you hear about this movie? I've never even heard of it before this. Nah, neither have I. Nah, must've been good. So Heineken's Kidnapping Me is a big moment for Dutch organized crime. And De Vries, who even tracks down one of the kidnapping crew at a hideaway in Paraguay, by the mid-90s, he's the Netherlands' best known journalist.

And in '95, he gets his own TV show, which is this weekly thing called Peter R. De Vries: Misdaadsviela Kukker. Shit, I can't even do it, man. Which is the Dutch word for crime reporter. How did that sound? Yeah, I mean, great people, weird language. Yeah. And Peter De Vries, he like breaks some pretty serious stuff, right? His most famous case is probably the disappearance of Alabama student Natalie Holloway in Aruba in 2005.

after which he got footage of the prime suspect bragging while high that he'd sold her into sex slavery. So this guy, Holloway, the Heineken kidnapping, organized crime stuff, I mean, he is just like a one-man wrecking crew of journalism. Oh, yeah, he's like hero of the pod for sure. This guy gets results, right? And he's combative and people love him. He's a national icon and, like, he just looks so Dutch. He's got this cropped curly hair and a moustache and this football commentator's ivory suit. It's great.

But things are changing in the Dutch underworld. The old boy Pinoza are actually drifting away from the drug market's big bucks, and the macro mafia is solidly on the rise. Well, actually, like I said before, it's basically anyone with a migration background. And one of its most important dons is not Moroccan at all. It's a guy called Gwyneth Martha, a guy from Curacao, which is this Dutch colony in the Caribbean. For Americans, there are loads of MLB players from there.

Martha's actually big into football, soccer, and he comes through the youth ranks at Ajax, which is one of the biggest clubs in the world. Loads of the Netherlands' best players are from Curacao. It's actually mad how many top-level athletes are from this tiny island of 150,000 people that's kind of just off the coast of Venezuela. This will probably mean nothing to you, Danny, but Patrick Kluivert, Patrick van Aanholt, Leroy Fair...

There must be something in the Weetabix over there. Anyway, Martha's already into petty crime when, in 1992, his big brother Giovanni is shot dead outside a popular club on Amsterdam's Rembrandt Square.

It changes his life. From a small-time crook, Martha becomes one of the country's biggest drug smugglers. He commands a big chunk of the coat market, and he handles more and more ecstasy that's fueling Amsterdam's booming rave scene. Yeah, there was a huge ecstasy scene there in the 90s, I think, right? And not just being used there, but also manufactured for exporting, I think...

Various Israeli organized crime figures even had their own factory set up there. Massive, massive amounts of ecstasy came out of Amsterdam in the 90s. Yeah, and people should check out your episode on Israeli organized crime as well. But Martha makes his name hooking up with Moroccan Benayouf Adoui.

And they level up pushing Coke through the docks in Antwerp, that's in Belgium, mostly by piggybacking on produce, which means custom officials are up against the clock on searches or the fruit and veg will go bad. Yeah, that makes so much sense. For some reason, I never thought about that in terms of reasons why a lot of contraband is shipped hidden in agricultural products. But the idea that you've got to get through it quickly, otherwise they'll go bad. Just great.

Great logic. Yeah, I know. And that makes me wonder why when we did that maxi trial episode, they hid so many ecstasy pills in like canned tomatoes. Like, do you guys realize why tomatoes are canned? You should learn from the Dutch. Good point. Antwerp, which is like, I mean, this whole region is really small, right? So it's just a short drive away from Amsterdam.

It's just riddled with crime. It's an inner city port, which means that things are madder, more frantic. It's tech is hacked and folks are paid off. Here's a criminologist called Robbie Rocks, great name, talking to Nico for the independent piece I mentioned. Quote,

We see poor employees being paid for their access passes, information about the whereabouts of containers, or even for more active involvement like taking cocaine out of the containers. Law enforcement also talks about rising the intimidation of poor employees who are being followed to their homes while wearing company clothing. An Antwerp journalist says, quote, it's real strange how many drug-related murders are carried out here. Someone's killed somewhere every week and there are regular disappearances of people involved in drugs.

You never see them again, so you know what's happened. It's pretty dark, right? Yeah. Yeah, you wouldn't expect that from Antwerp. It's a really sort of pretty little quaint European city. In 2003, Martha finally gets his revenge and kills Giovanni's murderer. Before long, people are calling him the King of Amsterdam. Over the next 10 years, Martha retreats into this kind of scar-faced paranoia, ordering hits and rarely venturing out to do any dirty work himself.

Allies are frequently gunned down and he's running out of pals. Martha and Adui use a local group of hoods called the Turtles, terrible name, to get the goods from Antwerp to the Netherlands and out across Europe. But now we're up to 2012 and that moment I mentioned at the top of the show and it's going to blow this whole world wide open. So that year, there's a 200 kilo shipment of cocaine coming into Antwerp for the Macro Mafia.

Except, before it gets to them, the Turtles, working with a Colombian cartel operating out of the Netherlands, intercepts the load. This turns everything batshit, basically. Adui blames his old buddy Martha for the theft, and the two get into this bitter battle for control of the Macro Mafia.

On May 22nd 2014, Martha's at a kebab shop in the Amsterdam suburb of Anstelveen when gunmen corner him and shoot him 80 times. I hope he had the kebab first. Terrible. And when a slaying like that goes down in the underworld, you can bet there's going to be more to come. In 2016, goons leave a severed head outside a shisha bar near the Fondle Park in central Amsterdam. Hard to recommend by the way folks. Not the decapitation but the park. Always run around there when I'm in town.

This war really spills from the underworld onto Main Street. By 2018, over 30 murders have been attributed to the war over those 200 kilos, basically. And all the while, the macro-mafia spread is getting wider and wider. In 2016, an associate is found in a safe house belonging to Ireland's Kinahan Syndicate, which I think we covered in one of our first episodes with Jake Hammerhan.

And the connections don't even end there. According to reports, the Macro Mafia has allies in the Balkan mob and the Camorra, the Italian mafia from Napoli, that's like bringing in vast amounts of drugs through Rotterdam and Antwerp.

Basically, the Montreux Mafia have become kind of the gatekeepers for the European drug trade. And through some death negotiation, they get incredibly rich off it. Yeah, Rotterdam, I think, is the most trafficked report in Europe, right? And I guess Spain has got to be up there. Yeah, Spain's got to be up there too. And I imagine the Moroccans have lots of contacts or

or run essentially a lot of the ports in Southern Spain. I guess so, right? Because Spain's got these like weird little territories in Morocco and used to run Western Sahara, but like... Well, yeah, I mean, it's right there. Yeah, and I think Rotterdam, I'm pretty sure it's one of the biggest ports in the world. I mean, when you look at the list, I think there's like seven or eight Chinese ones, but I think Rotterdam's either the next biggest or one of them. But it's huge, yeah. And it's where pretty much all the drugs are coming in.

And after Martha gets shot, this all gets a bit bonkers. There's a guy, for example, named Noafel Fasi, who shoots a guy dead in Marbella.

Then he kills a guy in Amsterdam, which cops think was actually organized by the Iranian Secret Service as revenge for a 1981 bomb attack in Tehran that killed a bunch of Islamic Revolution officials. Yeah, stay with me here, guys. And Fazi's bills were actually paid by a Dutch Chilean guy called El Rico, who was a big Kinahan narco.

And apparently in one episode, Fassi shoots a guy in the leg. He goes to prison. He gets out and shoots the exact same guy in the leg. I mean, could you tell that this is a drug market that's spiraling out of control? Yeah, damn. I mean, I was going to make you repeat that all back to me, but. Yeah, it's all right. I've got, I've gone a bit off topic, but like, I'm going to get back to something a little bit easier to understand now. And this is the rise of Ridder and Taggy and the collision course with DeFreeze and the Marengo trial. This is going to go into overdrive.

So Taghi's born in Morocco in 1977. But as a toddler, he's moved to Utrecht, which is a Dutch city, just a short drive from Amsterdam. Like, honestly, everything's a short drive from Amsterdam in Holland. But Taghi gets into crime from a very young age. And he runs a local gang called the Bad Boys, which, all right, Taghi, is a bit rumblefish, but OK. And by the time he's a young man, he's all kinds of involved in the Macro Mafia.

Taghi, he goes straight to the top. He moves to Dubai in 2016, like Dubai again, sort it out guys. And he gets fully in bed with the Kinahans, shipping cocaine from South America into West Africa, and from speedboats into Spain, or ships into the Netherlands. It's a gigantic operation, and anyone who defies him, they wind up dead. At one point it's suspected that Taghi controls a third of Europe's cocaine market.

Considering that's a $9 billion industry and probably in truth a ton more, he's earning a lot of money. Yeah, $9 billion seems way short to me. It does to me too. It was quoted a few times a couple of years ago, but yeah, I'm sure. I mean, the amount that's not taken. Yeah, I mean, I've gone out in London, you know, like $9 billion short. It's even in the Houses of Parliament, guys. That's how much coke is in London.

Dutch police described this guy's cartel as a quote, oiled killing machine and say they've overheard wiretaps where Taghi orders murders like quote, cups of coffee, which is really Dutch.

And bear in mind that the entire time this is going on, Peter De Vries is running shows about the macro mafia, covering cold cases, unmasking gangsters, just being a bit of an all-round G exposing this dirty underbelly from Amsterdam that's become pretty much Europe's biggest mafia. Remember Willem Holleder, the Penoza guy who kidnapped Franny Heineken? Well, De Vries is onto him.

In 2018, De Vries cracks the 20-year-old case of Nicky Verstappen, a murdered schoolboy. De Vries claims he has over a thousand phone calls with the boy's parents over the years. Maintaining his claim, the police did a shit job tracking his killer. Then he finds the guy in Spain and his superstardom as a crime reporter is sealed. De Vries is pretty cool, like dogged, really principled, doesn't mind making enemies. Yeah, seriously, I mean, this guy is iconic. But there's big news on the way.

In 2018, Dutch cops arrest a macro mafia henchman who sings about Ridouin Taghi ordering all kinds of murders across Europe from his Dubai villa. And then you remember Nabil, the guy who's the super grass in this trial that I mentioned early on? Yeah. His brother is murdered. Authorities then open the Marengo trial, which kind of sounds cool, but it's just a random name.

refers to a kind of fabric, apparently, to prosecute 14 murders carried out between 2015 and 2017. And this thing is held in a bunker courthouse reminiscent of the one Palermo built for Italy's Maxi trial, which we've also covered on this show. Wait, so who is going to trial in this Marengo trial? Yeah, that's kind of coming up, but it's essentially Taghi, and he's become a kind of stand-in for the entire Mokro mob, essentially, these days.

The state star witness at the Marengo trial is this former gangster, Nabil B, who I've mentioned before. His lawyer is a guy named Dirk Weersum. And in 2019, he's shot dead in Amsterdam. There's a massive scandal over the killing, and it makes global news. The head of the biggest Dutch cop union says, quote, Sure, we're not Mexico. We don't have 14,400 murders. Ouch.

If you look at the infrastructure, the big money earned by organized crime, the parallel economy, yes, we have a narco state. Are we overusing the phrase narco state or is just like everyone doing it? Because, you know, we did North Korea just a while ago, Syria with Captagon. Next week, I'm talking about the Dominican Republic or are things just like crazy and kind of wild right now?

I think it's one of those things where they call it like the Reichsstaat, the kind of country of law. It's pretty strong, right? So you can't just go down and gun anyone in the street, although murders happen relatively frequently. But there is a huge amount of money going through the Netherlands. And I think that's what this guy is referring to.

But yeah, maybe the term narco state is overused. But I'm not using it, Danny. This is the head of the Dutch police union. That's true. Take it out with him. Another report in 2019 describes the nation as a, quote, Valhalla for drug criminals, which...

I guess I like the kind of one-upmanship in all these Dutch guys trying to get their quotes onto the papers. And I really like this one. In 2019, there's also a poll in which 59% of Dutch say that their country is a narco state. So there you go, guys. It's official. So as you can imagine, there's this massive pressure on the authorities to bring Taghi to face justice over all this death. And shortly after Interpol issues a worldwide warrant, in 2019,

Dubai cops arrest Taghi, who's living with his wife and six kids in a villa.

And despite there being no extradition treaty between the UAE and Holland, they send Taghi back to Amsterdam with his right-hand man, this guy who's been evading feds all the way over in Colombia for protection from the Gulf cartel, which gives you some idea how huge this thing is. By the way, guys, the Dubai police don't half sing their own praises. Says its chief, quote, we analysed a huge amount of data and information besides surveillance cameras into the city to identify Taghi's location.

He has a smart mind as he didn't make any purchases or transactions under his name since he arrived in Dubai. He left no trace, which was a big challenge for us, but we arrested him in the end. I mean, mate, if you've got this giant narco living in a house in a city of 3 million people and your contacts don't know where he is, you're pretty awful. So now in this story, we're up to this year.

Taghi's in a supermax prison, reportedly trying to bribe everyone to escape, and the Marengo trial gets underway this March. Two helicopters fly overhead, armoured vehicles bring everyone in and from the bunker courthouse, and dozens of heavily armed police circle in its perimeter. And despite being hunted down for years, Nabil B is still alive, and he's ready to put his old boss away for life. And who's advising Nabil? Yes, it's Peter De Vries.

The worn-in-the-tooth old hack, who sometimes pops up as a spokesman for The Witness. As early as 2019, De Vries sells media he's seen his name on a blacklist issued by Taghi. I am not afraid, he says, but Nabil's brother and his former lawyer were killed, so it's better not to get hysterical thinking that something could happen.

It's part of the job. What is the deal with Nabil? Like, who was he in the organization? Do we have any idea how he flipped or why he flipped or anything like that? We have absolutely no idea who this guy is. Like, as far as I can tell, there is no information apart from that moniker, which is really typical of Western Europe. But yeah, I guess we're going to find out in a couple of years when this case goes down.

And then we're up to de Vries' murder. And then we have another outpouring of grief and hate all over the Netherlands. It says a mourner to Deutsche Welle, quote, no one who knew him ever forgot him. And he never forgot anyone either. I don't know anyone who was as important to Holland.

He always stood up against injustice and gave a voice to those who had none, says another. I don't want his death to be in vain. I mean, if I die and someone says that about me, I would have done almost as good a job as I'm doing now. I guess what remains to be seen is whether his death actually will be in vain. Nabil's still alive, of course, and Taghi's facing his comeuppance, which I guess is some kind of result.

But the drugs aren't going anywhere. Last year, German cops intercepted 23 tonnes of cocaine that had come through Rotterdam with a value of billions of euros, making it Europe's biggest ever drug bust. The coat was put in boxes of wall filler. 23 tonnes? This is about two and a half times the weight of a jet stream plane, so...

Yeah, quite a lot of cocaine there. In terms of the trial and what Taghi could face, like, is there, you know, I don't know how European criminal justice works that well. Is there like a life sentence he could be facing? Like, how does it work there? I'm not sure about the Netherlands, but pretty much across Europe and the countries that I know reasonably well, he'll be facing life, which in Europe means usually somewhere around 25 to 30 years with parole, I guess around two thirds of the way through that.

And he's like got a lot of cases against him, but I don't think that he can face any more than that, which makes De Vries' death almost a bit more tragic, if anything. And what makes it even more tragic is that De Vries' death has also given these right-wing shysters, there are plenty of them in the Netherlands, yet another thing to pin on migration, which is pretty much the political fashion in Europe these days.

So there you have it. There's the gangsters, the mega trial, the drugs, the crime journalists. What a mess. And I want to get someone on to talk to us about the Marengo trial on the Patreon soon as well, guys. So watch this space. But for now, yeah, that's the background to Peter DeVries' tragic death. Yeah, that's really, you know, I'm glad you went into this because I had a

I had read the articles when he got killed and it was a crazy story trying to follow what was happening. Yeah, I honestly didn't know the background to Tagi at all. I saw his name a lot. I know that people requested this sort of episode. Do we know anything else about those two guys that the Dutch, the rapper and the Polish guy that shot him? Like, is there anything connecting them to Tagi right now? Like,

Are we positive? Or are most people positive that he ordered the killing? Not yet, no. We've just got these kind of monikers that they give, you know, first name and a letter. And we know that one of the guys is a young Dutch rapper. And I checked out his Instagram and it's just kind of...

boring stuff. So he wasn't actually Instagramming his crimes. Yeah, we don't know a lot more. And because of Europeans, contempt laws are so, so strong. I don't think we're going to learn a lot more about this for a few months yet. So watch this space, guys. But it's, yeah, it might be a while before we learn anything more about this. Damn. Well, thanks, everyone, for tuning in. And remember, if you didn't like this episode, it's the middle of August and we're still making free content for you. You know, appreciate it. Later. I'm

I'm Lola Blanc. And I'm Megan Elizabeth. And we're the hosts of Trust Me, the podcast about cults, extreme belief, and the abuse of power. Now on Podcast One. We want to debunk the myth that people who join cults are uneducated because anyone can be manipulated by a narcissist. And we should know we both have been. Join us every week as we explore the world of extreme belief. Talk to survivors and experts. And share our own experiences with cults and the abuse of power. Get new episodes of Trust Me every Wednesday on Podcast One and anywhere you get your podcasts.

Thanks.