Towards the end of 2016, four years before one of the Netherlands’ best-known journalists was fatally shot in the middle of Amsterdam, a 30-year-old man named Nabil B was about to upend his life for ever.
Nabil was one of five children born to Moroccan parents who emigrated to the Netherlands in the 1970s and settled in Utrecht, a medieval city in the centre of the country. While his siblings all went on to become entrepreneurs and successful businesspeople, Nabil struggled academically. After finishing a metalworking degree, he started selling weed and dabbling in smalltime crime. He was a young man who wanted “a lot”, his best friend from that time later told police. “He had big stories, he loved money.”
One night in 2006, Nabil says, he met a man named Ridouan Taghi at a local shisha lounge. Taghi was 29, about 10 years older than Nabil, but the two shared a fondness for chess and family connections to Chefchaouen, a 15th-century Moroccan city whose blue buildings are said to provide divine protection. At the time, Taghi was living between Dubai and Morocco and making a fortune smuggling hash across the strait of Gibraltar and into the coffee shops of Amsterdam and Utrecht. Over the next few years, Taghi, whose nickname was Kleine, or Tiny, would become a rising star in the global cocaine trade. Around 2008, when many South American cartels decided to shift their trafficking operations from the US to Europe, using north-western Africa as a jumping-off point, Taghi was ready to accommodate them. He shipped a fleet of high-powered speedboats to Morocco to scale up deliveries, hired fishermen to receive shipments of cocaine and built out his empire. Taghi is now thought to share control in up to a third of all cocaine trafficking in Europe, and to be personally worth more than €1bn.
Soon after they met, Nabil says, Taghi started giving him small jobs in the Netherlands. For the next 10 years, Nabil worked as a lookout for Taghi’s organisation, arranging getaway cars and gathering information about rival gang members, which would then be passed on to the “heads” – that is, professional assassins. While Nabil was at the bottom of the organisation, which the press nicknamed the “Mocro Maffia” because of the Moroccan heritage of some of its members, he had some insight into what was happening at the top through his friendship with Taghi’s right-hand man, Saïd Razzouki. While Taghi denies ever having met him, Nabil later told prosecutors that during his time working for Taghi he witnessed at least 13 murders, several of which he helped arrange.
In December 2016, Nabil was assigned to shadow an associate suspected of leaking information to a rival cartel. Taghi, who liked to describe his enemies in flamboyant terms, instructed a colleague that “the dirty whore child … must be taken out”. On 12 January 2017, just before 2am, two men in a black Audi drove to a split-level home in Utrecht’s leafy Overvecht neighbourhood, tasked with doing just that. They fired multiple shots at a man on the porch, killing him instantly. They threw their weapons in a nearby canal and abandoned the Audi about a kilometre from the scene, setting it on fire before they fled. Nabil had provided them with the car.
It was only once Nabil woke up the next morning to 10 missed calls that he realised things had gone wrong. Rather than the intended target, the killers had hit Hakim Changachi, the 31-year-old scion of a family alleged to have gangland connections, who happened to live in the same building. It wasn’t only a disastrous case of mistaken identity. For Nabil, it was personal. Changachi had been a childhood friend of his.
The Changachis soon learned of Nabil’s involvement in their son’s murder, and reached out to arrange a meeting. Nabil claims Taghi instructed him to blame the killing on a rival gang. Nabil did so, but as he would later tell police, his conscience was weighing on him. “I couldn’t live with that family going through hell while I perpetuated a lie,” he said. He had grown up with Changachi and had attended his wedding. He knew the situation wouldn’t simply go away. He suspected the family knew the truth, and he didn’t trust Taghi to protect him should they decide to retaliate. One way or another, Nabil realised, somebody was going to have him killed.
With no good options, on 14 January 2017, Nabil told one of Changachi’s relatives that the murder had been ordered by Taghi. Hours later, he called a police station in central Amsterdam and offered himself up as a witness. It was a decision that would set in motion a series of shocking events: at least 20 arrests, including the capture of one of Europe’s biggest drug kingpins; three killings, including the assassination of one of the nation’s most famous public figures; five years and counting of often chaotic trial proceedings, conducted under previously unseen levels of security. The effect on Dutch society has been profound. Having witnessed all this mayhem, a country that has long prided itself on its tolerance of drugs is now starting to question that approach.
* * *
Until early 2012, when a crew called the Turtles stole 200kg of cocaine belonging to a rival group from Amsterdam, and inter-gang violence spilled out into the streets of Dutch and Belgian cities, Dutch people had little sense of how deep the country’s organised crime problem went. Over the previous few years, cocaine had become more readily available, but murder rates stayed low – less than 130 a year. Natural disasters such as flooding were considered more immediate threats to public safety than crime.
To recoup the losses from the stolen cocaine, rival gang members, disguised as police, kidnapped one of the Turtles and took a photo of the man suspended over a meat grinder. They sent the image to his brothers, who promptly paid the debt – and then declared war. Before long, Amsterdam became the setting for terrifying gangland violence: AK-47s fired at cops, grenades detonated in residential neighbourhoods. By 2018, attacks were no longer limited to people associated with organised crime. When mainstream journalists reported on this, they too were targeted. In just over a single week, a rocket was launched into the office of the tabloid magazine Panorama, and a delivery van was driven into the lobby of the national newspaper De Telegraaf, whereupon the driver set fire to the vehicle and ran off.
A low point came on 9 March 2016, when a severed head belonging to a 23-year-old drug runner was left outside a shisha lounge in downtown Amsterdam. The evening that gruesome discovery was made, Peter R De Vries appeared as a guest on a popular TV news panel programme. Then in his mid-50s, De Vries was a familiar and trusted face in the Netherlands. Athletic and squarely handsome with a streak of masculine bravado, he was “the Keith Richards of crime reporters”, as one interviewer put it, the rare journalist with “rock-star status”. Over the years, as his reputation grew, De Vries leaned into the role, giving up his 80s moustache and maths-teacher blazers for leather jackets and black dress shirts. On TV that night, he compared the beheading to the scene in The Godfather where a mafioso leaves a horse’s head in its owner’s bed. Not long before, he noted, the Openbaar Ministerie, or OM – the equivalent of the prosecutor’s office in the US justice department – had issued a triumphant statement announcing that the country had “won” its war on drugs by increasing sentencing for offenders. This, declared De Vries, was crazy, reflecting “a level of naivety [he] had rarely seen before”.
De Vries had been around long enough to know. He became a household name in the Netherlands in the 80s, when he covered the kidnapping of beer mogul Freddy Heineken as a cub journalist for De Telegraaf. This was the biggest crime story in Dutch history – Heineken was eventually rescued after three weeks in captivity and an £8m ransom was paid – and De Vries parlayed his reporting into a bestselling book and a lifelong friendship with one of the kidnappers. In 1995, he launched his weekly TV show, Peter R de Vries: Crime Reporter, establishing himself as a dogged investigator with a tabloid sensibility and a seemingly inexhaustible work ethic.
To generations of viewers raised on the show, De Vries was best known for his investigations of sensational cold cases. In 2006, an American college student, Natalee Holloway, was murdered on the Dutch Caribbean island of Aruba. Years after most people had accepted that the suspected killer, a young Dutchman, would never be convicted, De Vries shocked more than 7 million viewers by staging an elaborate hidden-camera sting to extract a confession. While the man later claimed he had been lying, the stunt won De Vries an Emmy, and the suspect is currently serving a 28-year sentence for a different murder.
Another celebrated De Vries intervention concerned the case of Nicky Verstappen, an 11-year-old boy who was found dead after disappearing from a summer camp in 1998. After the family contacted him, De Vries launched his own investigation, raised money to reward tipsters, publicly berated the police for not doing enough, and elevated Verstappen’s disappearance into one of the highest-profile unsolved crimes in the Netherlands. Two decades later, he encouraged nearly 15,000 men in the area where Verstappen had disappeared to submit to genetic testing, building what would become the largest DNA dragnet in Dutch history. As a result, a man was arrested in Spain, convicted of murdering Verstappen and eventually sentenced to 16 years in prison.
The Holloway and Verstappen murders were typical of the kinds of cases De Vries gravitated towards – ones in which the targets were children or young women, sympathetic victims of seemingly random acts of violence. Victims’ families recalled how he would send flowers on the anniversary of a relative’s death and keep their stories in the media long after everybody else had moved on. “Where a lot of journalists are basically doing one-night stands, he was into long relationships,” said Wouter Laumans, a journalist for the newspaper Het Parool and one of the authors of the book Mocro Maffia. He was “no bullshit”, said Jasper van Dijk, a socialist MP who collaborated with De Vries to secure citizenship for more than 10,000 refugees who had been stranded in the Dutch legal system. “He’s a very nice guy if he’s your partner,” Van Dijk added. “But if he’s your enemy, you have a problem.”
De Vries gave up his TV show in 2012, but he never missed an opportunity to step in front of a camera and promote his cases, or just share whatever was on his mind. His willingness to comment on basically anything – provincial elections, football, internet bullying, the scourge of racism in the Netherlands – earned him a reputation as mediageil (“media horny”) and landed him into the occasional controversy. He got into public spats with politicians and celebrities, and once had to apologise for appearing on TV dressed as the Hindu god Ganesh. His desire for the spotlight became something of a running joke. One satirical TV show ended every episode by promising De Vries as an expert guest the following week.
The week after De Vries appeared on TV to discuss the case of the severed head, he was in the news again, this time as part of the story. One of the Heineken kidnappers, Willem Holleeder, had threatened to kill De Vries over a dispute concerning the film adaptation of his Heineken book. Holleeder was sentenced to four months in prison and three years’ probation for making the threat, and prosecutors had decided to appeal, saying it was too lenient. This was headline news because in the Netherlands, everything Holleeder did was headline news. After serving time for the Heineken kidnapping, he had used brutal violence to rise to the top of the Dutch underworld while managing to cultivate a reputation for being a criminal with a code – “you only kill other criminals, and you stay away from innocent people and lawyers” is how Jermaine Ellenkamp, a producer at the tabloid news show RTL Boulevard, summarised it. De Vries didn’t buy into this view of the old-timers – “those nostalgic stories about honour codes: bullshit,” he once declared – but he did acknowledge some differences between Holleeder’s generation and the new wave of gangsters.
The scene at the Fayrouz shisha lounge seemed to be an indication that drug violence was getting more brazen. The Dutch press started publishing articles about whether the Netherlands was “the new Mexico” and state prosecutors began taking research trips to Italy and picking up copies of Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah to meet the evolving demands of their job. A handful of experts had for years warned about the new generation of Dutch criminals – groups that criminologist Cyrille Fijnaut has described as, “more extensive, more digital, more organised, more violent, more corrupt, more embedded, more profitable and more transnational” than any that came before them. But top law enforcement officials were more keen to focus on Holleeder than Taghi, who had only appeared on their radar in 2015. Besides, the thinking went, the Netherlands was a wealthy northern European country; it would never face the same kinds of organised crime problems as its southern neighbours.
When I asked Paul van Liempt, a journalist who recently published a book on the OM, about the kind of spectacular violence that the Netherlands has witnessed in recent years, he replied: “We couldn’t have imagined this happening: it’s like you couldn’t imagine Covid starting.” Tahmina Akefi, a TV journalist and De Vries’s fiancee, put it another way. In the past, when Dutch people thought about crime, they thought about the Heineken case. Now, she said, “everyone is looking back at Heineken like it was a fairytale”.
* * *
As soon as Nabil turned himself in to police that January morning in 2017, he entered negotiations to become a crown witness. This meant that, in exchange for sharing everything he knew about Taghi’s organisation in court, he could secure a reduced sentence and the resources to start a new life in witness protection. Although no formal agreement was signed until almost 12 months later, when Nabil stepped into the station he began talking, and after that, he never stopped.
Nabil gave more than 40 statements about his former boss, the organisation, and his own involvement in what the Dutch call “liquidations”, producing more than 1,500 pages of transcripts. All the material he generated – which his former lawyer Oscar Hammerstein likened to “a book without a beginning or an end” – was one reason why it would be nearly three years before anybody involved in the case stepped into a courtroom. Another reason was that relations between Nabil and his government handlers would soon take a nosedive.
On 23 March 2018, despite objections from Nabil and his family, the OM revealed his role as a crown witness by submitting some of his statements as evidence in another case. Three days later, the OM announced that Ridoaun Taghi and Saïd Razzouki were being investigated for ordering a series of murders. The investigation had begun years earlier, but this was the first time most of the Dutch public had heard Taghi’s name. The investigation provided the basis for what would become known as the “Marengo” trial – Dutch trials are given randomly generated names – in which a total 17 defendants would be charged with six murders, four attempted murders and devising plans to kill four people and blow up a store that sold surveillance equipment. Several were to be tried in absentia, including Taghi and Razzouki. However, at this point, the start of the trial was still years away.
When the OM made public Nabil’s role as a crown witness, most of his family was still living in the same Utrecht neighbourhood they always had, surrounded by people with ties to Taghi. A security plan for them had not yet been implemented. Less than a week after the OM’s announcement, Nabil’s brother Reduan, a young father with no connections to organised crime, was fatally shot in his office by a man posing as a job applicant. Nabil had been warning for months that something like this might happen. Later, it emerged that police had been aware of a text message from Taghi stating that he wanted Nabil’s family put “to sleep” if he so much as mentioned Taghi’s name to authorities. (Because the case is ongoing, the OM refused requests for an interview.)
Alongside Nabil’s testimony, the prosecution had access to one other major trove of evidence against Taghi and his associates: a huge database of messages from the suspected boss and members of his cartel. These had been extracted from overseas servers belonging to two Dutch companies, which, until they were raided and shut down in 2016 and 2017, sold “pretty good privacy” phones: Blackberry and Android handsets that came preloaded with end-to-end encryption software. At the time, PGP phones were the gold standard for criminal communication. They were supposedly unhackable, which meant that users tended to be “very open about what they were ordering, either murder or drugs or whatever”, said Joost Nan, a criminal law professor at the Erasmus School of Law. The PGP databases were found to contain about 900,000 missives about Taghi’s group, with the boss alone sending “200-300 messages on average a day”, according to Hammerstein. While names were anonymised, Taghi’s aliases stuck out: they included Angel of Darkness, Public Enemy #1 and Ticket to Hell for All Motherfuckers. As users were identified and messages decrypted, more and more defendants were named in the case.
De Vries covered these developments on the news show RTL Boulevard, where he regularly appeared as an on-air analyst. Then, on 14 May 2019, he found himself at the centre of the story. “Justice and the police have informed me that I am on the death list of the fugitive Ridouan Taghi and that he has ordered my liquidation,” he tweeted. According to Akefi, De Vries had been informed about the threat two months earlier, but the justice department had not given him any further details about what they knew, or why he might have been on the list. De Vries seemed to think making the information public was the best way to get to answers.
A day after De Vries posted his message, Taghi contacted him through an intermediary to assure him that he wasn’t in danger. “I have no reason whatsoever to do anything to you,” he wrote in a message that was broadcast on RTL Boulevard on 16 May. “You can go wherever and whenever you want without fearing any danger from me,” it said. “As a boy, I always watched your television programme with great fascination. I respect you and see you as a professional journalist. I have 100,000 percent nothing against you.”
* * *
By the spring of 2019, Nabil had been in police custody for more than a year, occasionally leaving prison to travel to the courthouse where he would deliver his statements from a secure witness booth, as part of the lengthy pre-trial process common to Dutch criminal cases. He was losing faith in the government’s ability to protect him. In April, the OM had mistakenly included a photo of him in a folder shared with all the defendants’ lawyers. The OM expressed its regret for the error, but by then it was too late. “A goddamned stupidity,” De Vries wrote on Twitter. (The mistake would be repeated three more times in the following months.)
Members of Nabil’s family were worried about their own safety. One of them had already been killed, and in a joint statement that was made public in May 2019, the family wrote that they had “repeatedly pointed out to the police and judiciary that we were in serious danger”. They filed a civil motion against the OM for failing to adequately protect them. Finally, on 11 September 2019, Nabil cancelled part of his protection agreement with the OM. This risked further delays and a possible retrial. His gamble was that, to keep him as a state witness, the government would sweeten the terms of the deal and improve the protection offered to him and his family.
As this was being negotiated, on 18 September, in a shocking turn of events, Nabil’s lawyer, Derk Wiersum, was fatally shot outside his home in Amsterdam. As De Vries put it in a TV interview, “the message is terror” – a clear warning to Nabil and anyone willing to help him. It was also “the moment when everybody in the government realised that this was serious”, said investigative journalist Yelle Tieleman. While the murder of Nabil’s brother had been regarded as a horrible tragedy, it hadn’t prompted any changes in security policies around state witnesses. It wasn’t until Wiersum’s death, Tieleman said, that authorities realised that “Taghi was retaliating not only in the criminal world, but also in civil society”. Those in elite circles seemed particularly shocked, Tieleman noted, because “Wiersum was a white lawyer”. He was seen as “one of them”.
The killing shook the Netherlands. “Organised crime has crossed a line,” declared the justice minister at the time. The head of the Dutch constitutional monarchy, King Willem-Alexander, described the killing as an attack on the rule of law. A trade magazine for lawyers recommended readers invest in stab- and bulletproof vests. Law offices hung Wiersum’s photo in their windows, and an emergency hotline was set up for any lawyer or judge who felt threatened. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Justice snapped into action. More than 100 investigators were assigned to look into Wiersum’s murder, a new taskforce was created to protect people under threat, and the OM set up a 400-person intelligence team to focus on the money flows that support organised crime.
As police and government officials were scrambling to deal with the aftermath of Wiersum’s murder, the OM was busy tightening the noose around Taghi and his associates. On 16 December 2019, Taghi was arrested in Dubai and extradited to Amsterdam soon after. “Just tell the judge: give me life [in prison], that will save you a lot of money,” he told police during his first interrogation on 26 January 2020. A month later, Razzouki was arrested in Colombia.
After an international manhunt that had lasted nearly two years, two of the most wanted men in the Netherlands were finally in custody.
* * *
The email came out of the blue, at the beginning of March 2020. While De Vries had been keeping an eye on Nabil’s story – the Marengo trial was, after all, the biggest Dutch crime story of recent years, and no journalist could avoid it – back then, his focus was elsewhere. As Covid was starting to sweep through Europe, he was busy being a new grandfather and directing the media law firm he had started three years earlier with his son, Royce. (In a departure from De Vries’s usual clientele, the firm had carved out a niche in defending minor celebrities from unflattering coverage.)
But then De Vries received a message from one of Nabil’s brothers, inviting him to join the defence team as a confidant – an informal role somewhere between a media adviser and a priest. De Vries was intrigued, and phone calls and meetings with Nabil’s family soon followed. According to Peter Schouten, a lawyer and longtime friend of De Vries who would eventually join Nabil’s legal team: “Nabil never missed an episode of [De Vries’s] show. He was sitting in front of the television every Sunday it aired.” The idea was that De Vries would help the family manage the press, use his national platform to advocate for better treatment, and give Nabil somebody to confide in.
Those around De Vries were not surprised he had been asked, but were surprised to learn he was considering saying yes. “He’d always been the one fighting for justice for people who had no one to fight for them, and all of a sudden, he was the guy helping a crown witness with blood on his hands,” said Saskia Belleman, a court reporter for De Telegraaf. In deciding whether or not to work with Nabil, Akefi recalled, De Vries talked about it “with everyone who was important to him. And everyone said: ‘Don’t do this.’ Everyone. Without any exceptions.” Against all objections, De Vries accepted the offer. The men first met on 12 March.
Some speculated it was all down to ego – a desire to be part of a trial that would replace Heineken as the most important in Dutch history. Others saw it as an extension of his desire to help crime victims. De Vries himself had a simpler explanation: “The star witness called me personally and asked,” he said, adding that he wanted “to send a clear signal to the killers of Reduan B and Derk Wiersum”. Ellenkamp, De Vries’s longtime producer on RTL Boulevard, recalled a conversation in which De Vries remarked: “I can’t look at myself in the mirror if I’m not helping this man.” When I met Akefi at the riverside headquarters of a public broadcaster in Rotterdam, she told me that she believed De Vries was less interested in helping Nabil than he was in making sure Nabil’s family was receiving proper protection.
When it came to his own safety, De Vries was less careful. Several weeks after De Vries came on as a confidant, he met with Dutch anti-terror police to arrange a security plan. According to several people close to De Vries, he was presented with a take-it-or-leave-it deal. He could either have a full-time, 10-person security detail, which would effectively prevent him from reporting in the field and living a normal life, or forego protection entirely. Once again ignoring the objections of everyone close to him, he chose to go without.
* * *
Peter Schouten’s law office is in a picturesque neighbourhood in Breda, a small, old-moneyed city with neatly manicured parks about 60 miles from Amsterdam. When I walked into the townhouse on a chilly morning in early April, I passed by a black Audi containing two men, who kept watch. For more than a year, Schouten and his colleague, Onno De Jong, have lived with full-time security details, the specifics of which they cannot discuss.
I was greeted at the door by De Jong, who is bald with a trim white goatee and a commanding presence. In addition to Nabil, he was also representing the crown witness in another trial, which began in 2021 and focused on 19 people suspected of belonging to a motorcycle gang that allegedly acted as Taghi’s “killing squad”.
As we sat in a wood-panelled conference room, Schouten cast his mind back to April 2020, when De Vries first asked him to represent Nabil. Things hadn’t gone smoothly at first. Despite having initially approved of De Vries working with the crown witness, the OM quickly backtracked, stating that the journalist was ineligible to join Nabil’s legal team because he wasn’t a lawyer. De Jong thought this was just an excuse. “Peter was the most important investigative journalist in the Netherlands,” he said. “They were afraid that if they did something wrong, Peter would discover it and bring it into the open.”
For months, the case stalled. But after Nabil declared he would only testify if he could work with “the Peters”, the OM relented, and permitted De Vries to join the legal team. In July 2020, Schouten was officially recognised as Nabil’s lawyer, and De Jong joined him.
A boisterous man in his 50s, Schouten obtained his law degree after spending more than a decade producing TV game shows in Asia, and before that, working as a publisher. Schouten and De Vries had been close for decades, and their friendship eased the pressure of working under such extreme circumstances. While De Jong and Schouten had 24/7 security, De Vries’s refusal to accept similar measures meant he was left exposed. Schouten recalled an evening when the three men had just finished a TV appearance and were leaving the studio. It was late, and Schouten and De Jong were in their armoured cars when De Vries walked past them in the parking lot. “Where are you going, Pete? What are you doing?” Schouten texted him. “He said: ‘Well, my car’s parked 700 metres away.’ It was dark, around midnight. And I said: ‘No, no, no, come in my car, I’ll bring you there.’”
Although De Vries was stubborn about giving up his freedom, Akefi believes the authorities also downplayed the threat he was facing. “They were like: ‘Maybe you should think about your security.’ It was not like: ‘This is dangerous. You can’t do this without accepting security, we won’t allow you to.’” She recalled a time when De Vries had an appointment at the national anti-terrorism office, “but he was not allowed to park his car in their building,” she said. “He had to park 500 metres away. They said: ‘Well, it’s not our problem. Find a place outside and walk to our building.’ I mean, you invite someone who is in danger but you don’t allow him to park his car inside your building? How crazy are you?”
* * *
The Marengo trial was scheduled to start in early 2021, but in the months before, the process seemed to be spiralling out of control. When the 13th pre-trial session was held, in late October 2020, Razzouki was still in Colombia awaiting extradition, 43 witnesses had yet to give statements, a judge had just resigned, and numerous lawyers involved in the trial were publicly attacking each other and the OM over how things were going.
As the press focused on the chaotic legal process, an even more dramatic story was unfolding in secret. In December 2020, the FBI had quietly notified Dutch authorities about a new stash of decrypted text messages it had acquired. At the time, Taghi was being held an hour outside Amsterdam in the highest-security prison in the Netherlands. Its residents included Holleeder and the man who assassinated film-maker Theo van Gogh. (Van Gogh’s killer sometimes cooked for Taghi, a Dutch news agency reported.) The newly intercepted messages revealed that Taghi was communicating with the outside world through one or more compromised prison guards. After receiving the tip, Dutch authorities opened a new investigation and continued to let Taghi use his phone in order to surveil him. None of this would become public for another year.
The same month, December 2020, prison officials fielded a request from Taghi’s cousin, a small-time lawyer named Youssef, who wanted access to Taghi, saying he was a member of his legal team. Over vigorous opposition from the OM, in March 2021 the Dutch bar association granted the request, on the grounds that Youssef was an accredited lawyer and could visit his cousin as often as he liked – which he did, sometimes multiple times in one day. Alongside legal shop talk, secret recordings later suggested that the men had begun devising outlandish escape schemes. One was to hire a group of Balkan mercenaries to free Taghi via a “navy seal”-style mission involving 1,500 litres of oil dumped on the streets around the prison. Another was to kidnap four prison employees and hold them hostage until Taghi was freed. It was later reported that Youssef had also acted as a liaison between Taghi and his associates, facilitating the day-to-day business of cocaine trafficking, money-laundering and targeting Taghi’s enemies. (Youssef denies these allegations, and claims that he was, in fact, trying to prevent Taghi’s prison escape.)
At the end of 2020, police informed De Jong, Schouten and De Vries that they were among Taghi’s targets. “I made a conscious choice to defend Nabil B,” Schouten told De Telegraaf when the news was leaked. “This extremely annoying message does not change that.” At that time, when news of the threats became public, Taghi didn’t issue any denials.
* * *
On 21 March 2021, after three years of preliminary hearings, procedural blunders and Covid-related delays, the Marengo trial finally began. Proceedings were held in a shabby, heavily fortified building known as “the bunker”, in an industrial area of Amsterdam near a used car dealership. When I visited, on a rainy late-winter morning, police barricades were stacked outside the entrance of the courthouse, which resembled an underfunded primary school. White steel shutters covered all the windows. On trial days, defendants were shuttled to court in a heavily armed convoy. According to Tieleman, the investigative journalist, between 600 and 700 security officers were needed on days when all suspects, lawyers and judges were present in court.
From the start, “everything about the trial was abnormal”, recalled Laumans, the journalist. On day one, a small group of pro-Taghi demonstrators assembled outside a different courthouse, having got the address wrong, and shouted about how he was being denied due process. In the real courtroom, Taghi described Nabil as a “pathological liar” and a “fabulist”. The scene was made even more surreal by the security measures. In addition to Covid precautions – social distancing, plexiglass dividers, regular breaks for disinfection – drones and helicopters with snipers circled above.
The collective charges did not mention drugs. Instead, the crimes under examination were six murders and four attempted murders, and each day the trial focused on a different crime and set of suspects. For the first three months, Nabil – who was a defendant as well as a crown witness – invoked his right to remain silent. By the end of May, he refused to appear altogether, citing safety concerns. In June, he suspended his protection agreement, again asking for better protection for his family and girlfriend. Then, the trial adjourned for three months. “It’s really, really frustrating,” Belleman, the courtroom reporter, said of the many delays that have dogged the case.
As the trial continued, De Vries managed to lead a relatively normal life. Covid restrictions were beginning to ease, and in addition to speaking regularly with Nabil, he posted selfies on cycling trips and began planning his future with Akefi. At the end of June 2021, he launched a crowdfunding organisation that promised to pay €1m to anybody who could provide key information in the case of a student who disappeared in 1993. In an interview during this period, De Vries responded with characteristic brashness when asked if he feared for his safety: “That’s part of the job,” he said. “A crime reporter who at really tense moments says: ‘Now it’s getting a bit too intense for me,’ would be better off working at Libelle [a women’s magazine].”
* * *
Just before 7.30pm on 6 July 2021, De Vries was walking to his car down a narrow street in central Amsterdam, after appearing as a guest on RTL Boulevard. In security camera footage released later, people are seen sitting outside a nearby cafe in the waning summer light when a tall man in a sand-coloured suit walks briskly past, tailed by two men in matching grey sweaters and white sneakers. Seconds later, five gunshots ring out off-screen. In the aftermath of the attack, gruesome videos of De Vries’s injuries were posted to YouTube and circulated on WhatsApp. He was rushed to hospital, where he died of his injuries nine days later.
The suspected killers were arrested within an hour of the shooting, pulled over on a motorway about half an hour outside Amsterdam. They were a 35-year-old Pole named Kamil E and a 21-year-old part-time rapper named Delano G. A police search of their Renault Kadjar turned up a machine gun, a converted starter pistol believed to be the murder weapon, and a tank of fuel, which officials suspect was intended to set the car ablaze. On Delano’s mobile phone, police later found a message sent minutes after the shooting: “Bro, that bullet went right through his head. Twice. Everything shot. Nice.”
De Vries was always a beloved celebrity, but death turned him into a martyr. In the months after his death, the street where he was shot transformed into a makeshift memorial, covered in bouquets of flowers. Thousands paid their respects at a public service, and condolences poured in from politicians, TV stars, the Dutch king and EU commissioner Ursula von der Leyen. His books returned to the Dutch bestseller list, and his motto, “on bended knee is no way to be free”, lifted from an Eddie Vedder lyric, was posted on signs across the country. Peter Schouten had the words tattooed on his leg. By the end of 2021, “Peter R De Vries” was the most-searched term in the Netherlands, and on the day of his funeral, nearly every radio station in the country played his favourite record, Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale, at the same time.
De Vries’s former colleagues are still adapting to the new reality in which they find themselves. Less than a week after the attack on De Vries, police told the staff of RTL Boulevard that there were credible threats that their office would be attacked, and gave them 40 minutes to evacuate. They never returned to the Leidseplein studio. The show is now filmed in an undisclosed location, guarded by armed police. Ellenkamp, one of the show’s producers, told me that after years of working with a “publish, publish, publish” mentality, the editorial team now carefully considers if a story might endanger them in deciding whether to run it. “It’s changed the way we think about crime and the way we work,” Ellenkamp told me. “We didn’t think this was going to get this big, like Italian-style. It’s completely different. It’s another world.”
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After De Vries’s murder, a judge granted permission to tap the phone of Taghi’s cousin, Youssef, who was still meeting with the kingpin in prison. On 8 October 2021, Youssef was arrested for allegedly smuggling information to his cousin, and is now in prison awaiting his own trial. Two weeks later, authorities in Morocco arrested Taghi’s nephew, Jaouad, on suspicion of involvement in the assassination of Derk Wiersum. By the end of 2021, five members of the Taghi family and more than 80 people in total had been arrested for their alleged involvement in, or connection to, what the OM has described as a “well-oiled killing machine”.
The trial of De Vries’s alleged killers began on 12 June 2022. It was the first criminal trial in the Netherlands in which every single person involved – from law enforcement officials to forensic lab workers – remained anonymous. In light of the evidence, the case was relatively straightforward. In court, the OM asked for the alleged hit men to be sentenced to life in prison. A verdict was scheduled to be handed down on 14 July.
While there was compelling evidence to suggest who had pulled the trigger, it wasn’t clear why De Vries had been killed, or exactly who ordered the assassination. Then, on 4 July, prosecutors arrested another Polish man, Krystian M, on suspicion of orchestrating the murder. Krystian was already in prison for a shooting related to the Taghi organisation. At 5pm on the day of the attack, he had texted Delano screenshots of De Vries. An hour and a half later, Krystian sent Delano an image of the RTL Boulevard studio, and wrote: “Tell the Pole he’s there, that’s what it looks like. You have to follow him.” After the killing, he told Kamil to destroy his phone and “eat the sim card”.
On 5 July, the verdict was delayed after an anonymous witness told police Krystian was acting on the orders of “the boss of the Mocro Maffia”. According to the witness, “the journalist” was killed because “he helped the key witness in the case against that Moroccan man”. Two months later, reports leaked that one of the men who had filmed De Vries’s murder was captured on a police wiretap naming Taghi as the man behind the attack. If true, this meant Taghi had managed to order De Vries’s murder from his prison cell. While charges relating to De Vries’s death have not been filed against Taghi – and he strenuously denies involvement in this killing, as well as any others that have been linked to him – “it seems that Peter R de Vries had to pay for his role as confidential adviser to the crown witness in the Marengo trial”, the OM stated in July.
At the time of writing, Marengo proceedings have lasted 43 months, with no end in sight. Meanwhile, the trial of De Vries’s alleged killers remains ensnared in legal complications and setbacks. Whatever their outcome, the cases have profoundly altered how Dutch society views the dangers posed by organised crime, and by extension, the drug trade that fuels it. Despite popular belief, soft drugs have never been legal in the Netherlands – they are only decriminalised – and authorities are now facing pressure to move away from a policy of “tolerance” towards one that’s more clearly defined, whether that’s criminalisation or legalisation. (De Vries was in favour of the latter, calling the current approach “a disastrous, expensive failure costing billions and bringing us nothing but misery.”)
In the interim, the public seems more willing to accept a more interventionist approach to fighting organised crime. Joost Nan, the Erasmus law professor, noted that initiatives are in the works that would make it easier for authorities to decrypt encoded messages, confiscate money earned through criminal activity and restrict certain inmates’ ability to communicate with other inmates and make outside phone calls. “I do think that because a family member, a lawyer, [and a] crime reporter were killed, it made the public more aware than ever of the extreme consequences that drug violence can have in society,” said Jan Meeus, a crime reporter with the newspaper NRC Handelsblad. “The climate in this country is changing.”
In the meantime, history continues to repeat itself. This month, eight men accused of attempting to kill seven rivals during the early days of the cocaine war in 2012 will stand trial. The evidence against them, as in so many recent megatrials, is their own text messages. In January, Peter de Vries’s son Royce announced that he had been secretly providing legal assistance to Nabil’s sisters, who remain under state protection. De Vries had kept this hidden from everybody, even his colleagues, but the OM let it leak to the press. Shortly after, he was informed that his life was in danger.
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