When, in early July, detectives discovered a secret torture chamber halfway between the giant ports of Antwerp and Rotterdam, it was dark that the room was built in an old shipping container.
The excessive gang violence that has dissipated over the past decade in Belgium and the Netherlands is inextricably connected to the sea surface, infiltrating the two ports and on the streets of the region’s major cities.
In 2019, the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) decided to travel to Antwerp, throughout Colombia, to affirm his determination to combat drug gangs worldwide. A series of shootings and explosions in the Belgian city, europe’s largest port house at the moment, has led to the creation of a special task force to meet the growing challenge of violence by drug gangs around the world.
Rotterdam and Amsterdam have been affected by similar increases in open gang warfare. In Rotterdam, at least three men were shot dead in Mafia-style murders this spring, while a construction gunned down and then bombed. Police suspect the violence related to the interception of 4,200 kilograms of cocaine through the government at the port of Antwerp last month.
In Amsterdam, there has been a steady accumulation of violence in the underworld over the more than 8 years. In 2014, crime lord Gwenette Martha ran over in a rain of more than 80 bullets outdoors a kebab shop; a severed head left outdoors in a café in 2016; an anti-tank rocket fired at the offices of a primary newspaper in 2018; and in December 2019, Derk Wiersum, the lawyer for a state witness in a primary public trial, shot his wife dead outdoors from his home.
Connoisseurs claim that the torture chambers discovered that EncroChat’s arrests belong to an alliance of local criminals who oppose the once-wanted man in the Netherlands, Ridouan Taghi, an alleged Dutch-Moroccan mafia chief arrested in 2019 for murder and drug trafficking. .
So how did a component of the global so fashionable and in a different non-violent way, basically known for its waffles, flowers and blank streets, become home to a steady stream of gang murders?
It’s cocaine.
THE TORTURE CHAMBER DISCOVERED IN THE NETHERLANDS. SCREENSHOT THROUGH POLICE PHOTOGRAPHY
Much of The European cocaine passes through Rotterdam and Antwerp. In July 2020, Dutch customs revealed that they had twice seized the amount of drugs in the first six months of 2020 compared to the same time last year, basically in the port of Rotterdam, while Antwerp is the main access point to Europe for cocaine smuggled from the south. America. In 2019, a total of 61.8 tons of cocaine was intercepted in the sprawling 120 km2 port, an increase of 660% over five years.
“It’s a very immediate movement of millions of boxes in Antwerp,” says Bob Van den Berghe of the UN Container Control Program. “Ships are deposited in the port and ships leave temporarily, which is an advantage for criminal organizations.”
A 2015 investigation that at one point, smugglers hacked into Antwerp’s safety net, allowing them to better plan shipments of cocaine smuggling through tracking containers. There have also been cases of corruption in the port, with port workers bribed or followed in their homes and coerced through criminals.
While cocaine smuggling profits have increased, violence has also increased. When a 200-kilogram shipment was seized from Antwerp Customs in 2012, the raid triggered a wave of gunfire and retaliation in Belgium and the Netherlands, among an organization of mobsters suspected had been torn apart.
In 2018, the murders of 30 other people were related to the dispute, and Gwenette Martha’s. Two members of a Belgian team known as Tortugas were kidnapped and filmed and tortured with a welder. The war was re-performed in the 2018 Belgian black comedy Gangsta.
The scenario got so bad that in 2018, the Antwerp government made the decision to strengthen security and combat corruption in the port. However, they admitted that they still found, at most, only 10 percent of the cocaine trafficked through the port. From Antwerp, the drug is transported to the Netherlands for cutting and distribution in Europe.
In March, it was in Antwerp and Rotterdam that drug traffickers first flooded cocaine from Colombia and Brazil in anticipation of a long COVID-19 blockade. “The coronavirus has not stopped the tsunami of cocaine, and this year the maritime smuggling of cocaine remains at a very high level, in line with our record year of 2019,” Belgian Customs Manager General Kristian Vanderwaeren told VICE News.
Global criminal unions, from Belgian and Dutch drug trafficking corporations to Italian mafias, British corporations and crowds in Africa and Eastern Europe, have established permanent bases in Belgium and the Netherlands to ensure certain businesses run smoothly. And this invasion of the Mafia, and the violence that followed, has generated very genuine fears that the region will become a kind of drug dealer.
The Netherlands has a long history of cocaine. In the early 1900s, the Dutch East India Company, after exploiting and enslaving millions of people, began growing coca in its Indonesian colonies. There was even a cocaine factory in Amsterdam, which provided walking powder to all sides of World War I. When foreign treaties nevertheless put an end to the rampant coke industry in the Netherlands, Rotterdam became a key place for the importation of illicit drugs. South American industry. And when the port government began to take strong action against traffic to Rotterdam, criminal gangs began smuggling cocaine to Antwerp.
The circle of Italian criminals of relatives “Ndrangheta” is founded in Antwerp and Rotterdam. According to mafia expert Dr. Anna Sergi, “Ndrangheta has been established within Calabrian immigrant communities in southern Italy, restaurants and pizzerias to launder their money and maintain their presence without drawing too much attention.
“Normally the ‘Ndrangheta are very free, ” said Sergi. “So there are some key members who are investing in the [smuggled] operation, and then they call the other people who want and use their friends on local mafia teams to make their filthy paintings, and that’s the case in Antwerp.
The Ndrangheta clans have also joined Brazil’s toughest crime syndicate, the First Capital Command (CPC), to send cocaine through their coastal ports. By sharing borders with Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, as well as a long Atlantic coast, Brazil is a suitable starting point for the snowstorm bound for Europe.
But many coca players come from these ports, such as the Surinamese and Caribbean gangs from the former Dutch colonies of South America and the Caribbean; the Italian Camorra Mafia in Naples; Irish band Kinahan; Kurdish and Turkish-Assyrian clans; Albanian mobsters; Dutch and Belgian local operations.
Some of the most infamous components are what the local media have called “mocromafia” or Moroccan mafia. The Antwerp Coke War team was a Moroccan circle of cannabis relatives known as Turtles, which was part of a wave of immigrants who arrived in the Netherlands and Belgium in the 1960s and 1970s as a spendbeiders (guest workers), with a giant contingent of the impoverished Rif Mountains in northern Morocco.
Many were treated “like cattle” and, without any attempt to integrate them, were transferred to pensions or ghettos. From this ordeal was born an elegance of marketers specialized in the import of cannabis from their country of origin.
“Mochromafias are now necessarily the young men or grandchildren of those I worked with,” said Steve Brown, a retired hashish staliff who, along with his Rif partners, brought tons of grass to Amsterdam in the 1980s. “In my day it was us who sent cocaine to Morocco. I would go 20 times a year and take it to the dealers because they liked it. But 10 or 15 years ago, the [Colombian] cartels began in Africa and Morocco as intermediaries to Europe. Several teams were already smuggling hashish to Spain and the Netherlands, so it was only herbal that these teams, who had the technical knowledge, logistics and corrupt port officials, began transporting coke.
According to Salima el Musalima, a magnet in the eastern Netherlands, the boom of the mochromafia was not just due to money. “My father was one of the first pioneers of cannabis smuggling drugs in Morocco,” he told VICE News. “It wasn’t just the money, because it sucked. It’s more the camaraderie, the dreams of doing big things, the excitement, the whores, the way of life of the rebel pirates.
He said that the alienation felt by some young Dutch and Belgo-Moroccans is, in turn, what leads them to crime. “Many young people concerned about drugs in my city have harmed their families. I see a lot of frustration: if you’re a young Moroccan, the media opposes you,” he said. “That’s why the world of drugs and jihadists is very well followed. It provides other young people with a platform on which they are not the victim, but the aggressor. At some point, they say “f-you” and introduce the infraglobal, which has its own rules The other option is jihad.
Once dependent on Dutch networks for the cocaine pie component, Antwerp’s importance as a cocaine port has led Belgians to take more charge of distribution. Their profits are reinvested in local businesses, especially in the deficient immigrant neighborhoods of Antwerp’s Borgerhout district. This triggered a far-right backlash in Belgium, as well as the anger of Flemish nationalist mayor Bart de Wever, who established a special task force to take on the gangs.
“Old-school regulations and codes of conduct no longer seem to apply,” says Dutch criminologist Robby Roks, who has studied the evolution of the underworld in recent decades. “Gangs used to focus their attacks on those directly related to organized crime themselves, not on lawyers or members of their family circle. Some of the shootings occurred in broad daylight, near schools, and sometimes the other people were also killed, which turns out to be similar to the fact that the real hitmen are younger and much less experienced.
Although this component of Europe does know the type of blood-blood-bathing drug in countries like Mexico in the short term, recent occasions recommend that violence related to cocaine trafficking will only worsen.
Thanks to Dutch Teun Voeten. Niko Vorobyov is a government-certified (convicted) drug dealer turned editor and E-book Dopeworld on foreign drug trade. You can stay with him on Twitter Lemmiwinks_III