ten years of cocaine war in the Amsterdam streets
“This was the wild west,” says mayor Eberhard van der Laan on December 30, 2012 in the television program Buitenhof. The evening before, two Amsterdam-Moroccan people in their twenties were mowed down on the street in the Staatsliedenbuurt – a nicer term past here – by death squads combined with automatic weapons. Their friend, whom the perpetrators had targeted first, had been very lucky to escape his attackers by jumping into the water between houseboats.
Rapid advance
“There was terrible shooting,” says Van der Laan. A bullet flew through a nursery. Two motorcycle police officers were fired upon from close range with a Kalashnikov from a getaway car. But, probably the mayor, things are going well with safety in Amsterdam. The number of murders and manslaughter is historically low.
He cannot imagine that the double liquidation in the Staatsliedenbuurt is not an incident. A new generation of criminals has just issued their ID. The perpetrators and their entourage are young and violent. The major one has a smaller base or a smaller migration background. They grew up in working-class neighborhoods and are quickly making their way through the criminal environment. Where their previous generations have their favorite devices in hashish and ecstasy, the new generation is concerned with the underlying cocaine trade.
Around the turn of the millennium, Colombian drug cartels shifted their smuggling routes to West Africa, among other places. From there, the “blocks” of pressed cocaine go to Morocco, to cross the old hash lines and then negotiate Europe.
The fact that the fight against drugs was not a priority in Western Europe in those years, in the Netherlands, helps these groups to stay under the radar.
‘A new king in town’
Samir Bouyakhrichan from Amsterdam-Slotervaart is one of the key players who faced the beacons in those years. Once he stole scooters, later he was engaged in burglaries. After being examined with a glass above his right eye during a brawl, he acquired his nickname: Scarface. The twenties get into the cocaine trade with older criminals. In no time he is regarded as the goldcrest of the Amsterdam underworld. “There’s a new king in town,’ he shouts with swagger when he bumps into acquaintances from the environment in the PC Hooftstraat in those years.
Ridouan Taghi is making a double career in Utrecht. Once started as one of the hash dealers at the deer camp in Vianen, he also grows into an influential cocaine smuggler – though he will remain invisible to the resources and the extroverted Scarface for even longer.
Largely out of sight of the investigative services, the young men make their fortune in the white powder. And they are not the only ones. In 2012, the global cocaine market was given a new boost by the end of Colombia’s civil war, though men had, naively, pressed for the tissue to be removed. The military stopped destroying the Farc’s coca plantations in rural Colombia. With the resulting surplus of cocaine, the cartels like to storm the European market.
The smartphone is emerging parallel to the geopolitical development. Blackberries can be attached to the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) program, which allows digitally encrypted emails to be sent. Not only does it enable criminals to arrange intercontinental cocaine transport relatively easily and without being spied on, the drug lords can even direct the aborted violence unnoticed from a distant foreign country.
Drug lords do reach young people
Where the austerity government has more or less withdrawn from the working-class neighborhoods, the drug bosses know how to reach underprivileged young people easily. It is comparable to ‘recruitment’, often little more than the question: ‘Do you want to earn something’?
In the evening of May 22, 2014, assassins liquidate the Amsterdam drug criminal Gwenette Martha with many bullets in it, in Amstelveen. The Amsterdam detective Marjolein Smit has exactly that day on the front page van The parole partly for the new generation of criminals. The government seems powerless. “Crime pays, is the creed, not wanting to help,” explains Smit. “Our system is not very traditionally designed to retaliate, deter, resocialise and re-educate. That’s still true: you throw yourself in jail, but the other parts don’t work for the most difficult categories of young criminals.”
They are prophetic words. In 2022, prosecutors, lawyers, new and journalists are constantly stating that no form of the usual prevention of young hardened criminals will come up against.
Violence is only increasing. At home and abroad, young criminals are liquidated or barely survive, many end up in jail as perpetrators for a long time. The regions of Amsterdam and Utrecht play leading roles in this, but violence is also spreading in other large and sometimes medium-sized cities.
Professionalism, blunders
The fact that violence is seen as a major pillar within the professional cocaine clans is something that the rest of society notices not only from extreme outbursts of violence in the streets, regularly in broad daylight. In July 2015, the investigative services make a special weapon find in Nieuwegein. Storage boxes are full of machine guns, pistols and associated weaponry, including PGP phones. In a major investigation, stolen cars appear to have been prepared in garage boxes. Inconspicuous cars were used to observe or to observe in more than steps after a liquidation.
Here is an underworld army in the weather ready to turn out at any moment. Or, as one of the suspects puts it in an intercepted conversation: ‘Hitman at your service’.
In February 2016, the Amsterdam Chief Public Prosecutor Theo Hofstee was nevertheless relieved that things remained relatively quiet in Amsterdam in 2015. According to him, the six liquidations had nothing to do with the underworld feud that started in 2012. “That conflict seems to have died out,” he concludes at a press conference in Amsterdam’s city hall. The parole commented on it. The term ‘pink glasses’ falls, the same criminal camps are still merciless outside the city limits.
Head chopped off
A month later, a severed head lies in front of a water pipe café in Amsterdam South. The victim is a 23-year-old Amsterdammer, who is certainly also a liquidation has access. Once again the social commotion is great and once again the indignation has subsided. It’s a pattern that keeps repeating after every exorbitant incident of violence.
Is the government naive? Is the focus wrong? In Amsterdam, crime fighters and administrators have long been proud of the Top 600, in which young offenders of high impact crimes (robbery, street robbery) punishment and care will be lifted, with a possible decrease in ‘recidivism’ – driving wrong again – as a result.
But many important players in the underworld feuds – such as the twenty-something whose sawed-off head lay in the street – are invisible to the investigative authorities. That is, for example, because they have emerged quickly and other crimes are involved in the specific crime that the Top 600 focuses on. Until 2019 the drug trafficking and keeping track of excessive violence not out there.
In April 2016, the investigative services finally got the wind in their sails. In Canada, Ennetcom’s computer servers are seized and copied, and abused under a popular PGP provider. Millions of messages are decrypted. What the criminals appear to have written to each other while they thought they were unspyed has been debunked. In slang, but crystal clear, they discuss who should die, how they spot (observe) and hit (kill) the target. Later, international servers from PGP providers such as Encrochat and Sky ECC are also taken down, with an equally mind-boggling harvest.
Another blow: the star witness
Meanwhile, another breakthrough follows in the drug circuit dominated by Moroccan Dutch. In January 2017, Nabil B., a self-proclaimed regulator within Taghi’s group, was arrested because he was trapped after a failed liquidation. Not the intended, but a friend was shot dead, from a powerful family on the street too. He goes to justice.
After a long and arduous process, the Public Prosecution Service proudly presents the key witness in a criminal case that will later develop into the enormous Marengo trial against Ridouan Taghi and sixteen co-defendants. Six days later, Reduan B., the brother of the key witness, was shot dead in North Amsterdam.
Once again, outrage ripples through the country. It goes down again.
Derk Wiersum will follow in September 2019. Nabil B.’s lawyer is shot dead when he wants to leave for work in his electric car. This time the shock wave is huge. Minister Ferd Grapperhaus speaks of an ‘attack on the rule of law’. Prime Minister Mark Rutte wrote a day after the murder: “The fight against the enemy, organized crime, is extremely complex. But we will win it.”
similar rhetoric can also be heard after the assassination of Peter R. de Vries in July 2021. “Strike back hard,” politicians cried. Ministers, administrators and members of parliament travel to Italy and America to see how crime is fought there with a heavy hand.
In the courts throughout the Netherlands, an unprecedented number of serious criminals are on trial, who have been caught on the basis of that intercepted PGP message traffic. Meanwhile, the number of shelling at homes is increasing and everyone who is professionally involved in crime fighting has the feeling that the fight is over. Because despite everything, the price of a kilo of cocaine on the street is currently lower than ever.
Key moments in the Dutch ‘war on drugs’
December 29, 2012. The Wild West shooting in Amsterdam’s Staatsliedenbuurt kills two people in their twenties. It predicted and two motorcycle cops survive automatic fire.
May 22, 2014. In Amstelveen, hitmen sift through crime kingpin Gwenette Martha from De Pijp.
August 28, 2014. Samir ‘Scarface’ Bouyakhrichan is shot dead near Marbella, during an appointment with prominent Amsterdam criminals.
December 8, 2014. Luana Lux Xavier is liquidated in front of their home in Amstelveen in the presence of her mother and children.
March 8 and 9, 2016. On March 8, the decapitated body of Amsterdammer Nabil Amzieb lies in a burnt-out van in Zuidoost, the next morning his severed head is found in front of water pipe café Fayrouz in Zuid.
January 26, 2018. Trainee Mohamed Bouchikhi is shot dead in a community center on Wittenburg, according to justice by two hardened Amsterdam criminals, who had wanted to liquidate a rival there in the midst of children.