The New Yorker Radio Hour - Astrid Holleeder’s Crime Family

Episode Date: July 5, 2022

All her life, Astrid Holleeder knew that her older brother Willem was involved in crime. But she was stunned when, in 1983, Willem and his best friend, Cornelius van Hout, were revealed to be the masterminds behind the audacious kidnapping of the beer magnate Alfred Heineken. It was the beginning of a successful career for Willem, known as Wim. After a stay in prison, he became a celebrity criminal; he had a newspaper column, appeared on talk shows, and took selfies with admirers in Amsterdam. He got rich off of his investments in the sex trade and other businesses, but kept them well hidden. But when van Hout was assassinated and other associates started turning up dead, Astrid suspected that her brother had committed the murders. She decided to wear a wire and gather the evidence to put him away. If that didn't work, Astrid tells staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe, she would have to kill Willem herself. After Astrid testified against him, Willem was convicted of multiple murders. Living in hiding, and travelling in disguise, she tells Keefe the story of her complicity and its consequences.    Keefe’s New Yorker story about Astrid Holleeder appears in his new collection, “Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels, and Crooks.” This segment originally aired August 3, 2018. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Patrick Raddenkief is a staff writer, and really one of the best writers out there on crime, corruption, and misdeeds of all kinds. In one of our earliest stories on the radio hour, Patrick introduced us to the informants who put the drug kingpin El Chapo in U.S. prison. Patrick has just published a collection called Rokes, True Stories, and. of grifters, killers, rebels, and crooks. And in the book, he tells the story of a woman named Astrid Holader and how she helped bring down a gangster who was her brother. Crime for the Holaders was always close at hand.

Most of the men that I know from my family are dead. I could name not many people that are still alive that I used to know because they were shot. Halater grew up in an Amsterdam neighborhood that's called Yordaun. It's gentrified now with galleries and Airbnbs. But when she grew up, it was big families in narrow apartments and a street life that was pretty unsavory. There was street crime, mobsters, and tax fraud. She grew up all around that stuff.

But when Holader was 17, her family would be at the center of a crime that became international news. In Europe, the kidnappers of beer millionaire, Freddie Heineken, today. made their first demand, silence from the police, Heineken's family, or else. Heineken and his chauffeur were abducted last night as Heineken left his office. Almost four decades later, Astridho later is still living in the aftermath of that crime. Patrick Radinkeef interviewed her for the radio hour in 2018, and he had to be picked up in a car and taken to a secret location. We've altered her voice in our story to protect her safety. Here's Patrick.

The kidnapping of Alfred Heineken, who everyone called Freddy, the magnate who ran the Heineken company, one of the richest men in the Netherlands, was news throughout the world. Heineken walked out of his office one cold day, and as he was about to get in his car, masked gunmen pulled up in a minivan, grabbed Heineken and his chauffeur and drove off. Freddy Heineken, he is the president of the Rate of the Bowery, and his chauffeur, are tonight on footed. No one was more riveted by this crime than the Halater family. Astrid actually remembers talking with her brother Willem,

who was something of a local hoodlum himself. I was sitting with him, eating with him having dinner and telling him, well, who's going to kidnap Heineke? You must be crazy because this man is a friend of the royal family. He has like so much power. They will not get away from this. And I was telling him that. And he was like, oh, do you really think so?

So do you think they can't get away with it? And I mean, yes, yes, sure. Who could be so stupid? The thing is that their father, Willem Sr., worked for Heineken. He was driving the trucks with beers on it, like a beer glass of three feet high or something. So we grew up with Mr. Heineke. We grew up with the company.

He admired him so much. He would do anything for him. Their whole life was Heineken. Like everything in our house was drenched with the company. We ate from plates from the company. We had pencils and pens from the company. We had like balloons from the... We played with the balloons from the company.

So he also enjoyed the beer of Mr. Heinecker very, very much. My father was an alcoholic, but he was very cruel. The violence in the neighborhood was nothing compared to what Astrid and her siblings were experiencing at home. Coming home, drunk, drinking all. day, all night, and yelling at us, beating us up, beating my mother up. We never knew what to expect because there was no logic. It could just be because I put like my hand on the wrong side of the chair. That would be enough to receive a beating. There were four of them. Astrid, who was

fiercely independent. There was Sonia, who her mother described as a doll. She's very put together. There was their little brother, Erard, the baby of the family. And then there was Willem, the eldest, who from his teens, started getting involved in the criminal world around him. He did this with his best friend, Cornelius Van Hout, who everyone knew as Kor. They were really close. Corr actually started dating their sister, Sonia, when she was in her teens. Well, Core was like, he has what I call, and what we all lack in our family, has Joie de Vivre. and things were bad, he would always see the bright side.

Another thing that struck me is that he didn't seem to be afraid of my father. And that was something that I was impressed about. Astrid admired Khor, and she liked him. And she identified with her brother, Willem, the tough guy. She related to him. I think that if I would have been a boy, then I probably would have been the right hand of my brother. Yes, because I have the same anger inside me. I have the same aggression inside me.

And I was very ambitious. And I think my brother is also very ambitious. And because I'm a girl, you could never take part of anything to anything. So you were just a girl. And I had to look for other opportunities. His criminal career started with robberies, and those were like also spectacular robberies with speedboats and, you know, going through the canals of Amsterdam

and then going through the water on the eye, the lake, and there were a huge amount of money that they delayed their hands on, millions. But the kidnapping of Freddie Heineken was on a whole different level. It was so well executed that, weeks, the police had no idea where to look. Desperate, the Heineken family wound up paying a massive ransom, the equivalent of about $35 million today. Eventually, the police got a tip-off, and they found Heineken and his chauffeur. They were also tipped off that Corr and Vim were behind the operation.

But when they went to Kor's house to arrest him, they found Astrid and Sonia there instead. The sisters were dumbfounded. They had had no idea. expected him to have done that. So you had no inkling. You didn't even have any sense at all that your brother, you knew that he was involved in crime, but you didn't think he would do something like this. No, no.

One of Astrid's biggest concerns when the police took her in for questioning was that she was going to miss her German exam. It just didn't compute for her, the idea that her own brother had kidnapped their father's boss. The Heineken kidnapping was kind of an ingenious plot. Corrin Vim had been planning

with several associates for more than a year They built a series of soundproofed cells hidden in a warehouse on the outskirts of Amsterdam. They devised a coded system for communicating with the police and the press. And by the time the police came, they'd already fled the country with millions of dollars in ransom money. A lot of people commit crimes. I know, you know, it's something that happens. It's part of society. But it's never that close.

And with Vim, everybody has a connection to. he turns around and then he commits a crime towards them. And I think that started with Mr. Heinecker. Willem and Cor weren't at large for long. After a couple of months, they were captured in Paris at an apartment they were staying at in a posh area near the Chanselizet. The result of Hout and Holander were from the French's arrest and slay their days in hotels.

When they were arrested, they were arrested, there were so many questions unanswered. Petter de Vries was a crime reporter for the telegraph at the time, and he followed the whole thing very closely. So I was anxious to know what happened, how they prepared everything, how they did it. So I contacted Corfán Hout. I wanted to write a book inside the kitchen of the criminals.

from the point of view of the people who did it, the kidnappers. Them and Kor were giving interviews. They were stuck in a kind of legal limbo in France, and their fame started to grow. There were these young, cocksure, kind of arrogant guys from the streets of Amsterdam who'd had the nerve to kidnap the richest man in the country. They cut a dashing profile.

A lot of people were surprised that a criminal can also be a person with humor, common sense, and stuff like that. Petro de Vries ended up writing this book called Kidnapping Mr. Heineken. It was a huge bestseller. This is the kind of book that people in Amsterdam who don't read books have read this book. Everybody knew the story of Cor and Vim. Cor and Vim were eventually extradited from France to the Netherlands,

and they were tried and convicted and sentenced to 11 years in prison. But they ended up serving only five. And when they got out, they were like celebrity criminals. Not only that, but the authorities had never been able to recover all of the ransom money. So with the help of some of their criminal associates, Vim and Corr had actually invested some of this money while they were in prison. They bought like real estate in the Red Light District in Amsterdam. So they bought all kinds of prostitution there. They bought like the gambling halls.

They bought Casa Rousseau. that's also like a gives sexual life shows the banana bar it's a bar where women shoot bananas with their private parts and that's where a lot of tours come and

watch I mean they bought it yes they had apartments they had beautiful cars not in their names of course it was all in names of other people but they didn't have to work It's not that you could see remorse or poverty or whatever.

No, then the life started. The vacations, the house in Spain, all those kind of things. Astrid remembers this as a relatively happy time. With their father long since out of the picture, Vim had assumed the role of the family patriarch. Cor and Vim were still partners in crime and best friends. Core and Sonia had a second child. Astrid had gone to law school. So there was a kind of tentative harmony of the different elements

in what was really a crime family. Our families were always together. My sister had a house, and we would all eat there. My brother, me, my other brother, my mother, core, you know. So we had one big family. And we thought everything went well. After university, Astrid had tried to get a job corporate law. But the halater name was notorious. When she went out for job interviews,

nobody wanted to hire a halater. Vim suggested she meet with some of the criminal defense attorneys he knew. They were excited to talk with her. Being the sister of Willem Halater had cachetor. So she became a criminal lawyer. And it turned out she was really good at it. I understood my clients. I understood the mothers. I understood the sisters that were arrested to well, they didn't even know why, understood the children. So to me, criminal law was, yeah, it was me. As her career took off, Vim began to confide an Astrid. He would tell her about things he was doing, tell her about his fears.

She wasn't formally his lawyer, but she did act as a kind of legal advisor, an informal sounding board. So you, during this time, you had gone to law school, you had become quite a high power, criminal attorney with connections throughout the city and the country. You're obviously a very formidable, smart personality. And yet you talk about kind of being under the thumb of your brother during this time. Looking back, like, how do you make sense of that? First of all, I was his little sister. and in that sense he was always older than I was

so he was always trying to be and remind me of the fact that he was older and I had to respect him. I was trying to give him the legal advice that would prohibit him from undertake certain actions like when he was planning to shoot a rocket into somebody's house I have to remind him that I think about him only, not about the victim he's planning to make.

So that's why I advise him that he shouldn't do that, because if he would have used a rocket, that it would have been an enemy of the state. So I would advise him, don't do that, you know. But it was difficult. You don't want anybody to get hurt, but you also have to be careful not to get hurt yourself. And it was all too easy to get hurt. One day in 1996, an assassin opened fire at Kor, as he sat in his car, with his family right outside their home.

They were sitting in the car, and then a guy walked up to the car and shot through the window, and he hit KOR. And my sister, she opened the door, rolled out of the car and grabbed my nephew, was sitting in the back, singing a song at that time,

and took him into the house. And Kor was hit, several times, but he survived. Initially, there was just panic and confusion. When Kor got out of the hospital, he and the family fled the country and went into hiding in a farmhouse in the woods in France. Vim promised he'd get to the bottom of things. After some investigation, he came back and he said,

I figured out who wants you dead. It's these two rival gangsters. They want to kill you, and they say that unless you pay them a huge sum of money, they're going to. This seemed believable. What was strange about it to Kor, was that Vim said, I think you should just pay them. Corr himself was no stranger to extortion,

but generally he was the guy doing the extorting. So in this instance, he said, I'm not going to be extorted. I'm not going to pay the money. And this was the beginning of a real wedge between the two friends. And then it all started. Vim was trying to force me to tell him where KOR was.

And that went on for a long period. And that was really awful because it terrorized us. Vim wouldn't let it go. He'd ask Astrid and Sonia for information about where Corp was hiding, and they were reluctant to tell him. Over a period of time, an awful suspicion began to occur to the sisters. What if it hadn't been these gangsters who had ordered the killing? And in the end, there was a second attempt, and Corp did survive again,

and then that was the third time, and that was final. After Kor was killed, the family gathered together, and Vim came, and he comforted his sisters. But by this point, they were pretty certain that he was the man responsible for Kor's death. We were all three of us sitting on the couch, and he was in the middle, and he was grabbing us by the shoulders and pulling us towards him. And I'm like watching, looking at my sister, and my sister's looking at me, knowing that this is all fake. And knowing you have to just undergo this, because if you do otherwise, you would accuse him. And if you would accuse him, then he would probably kill us too. So there was not much of a choice.

Astrin Holader talking about her brother, Willem. We'll continue in a moment with this story from Patrick Radenkeef. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In 2018, Patrick Radenkev told us the story of Astrid Holader, whose brother Willem Holader, known as Vim, was one of Europe's most notorious gangsters. So we're listening to that story now. Astrid knew about her brother Willem's activities.

They were close, and she was a lawyer, so he'd get advice from her. But then their close friend and brother-in-law, Kor, was killed after several attempts on his life. more of Willem's associates started to disappear and Astrid realized that she was very much in danger herself so how could she get out of it here's Patrick Radden Keefe to finish the story just as Astrid was coming to realize what her brother was capable of

the rest of the country was falling for him then started writing a column for a local newspaper he was featured on a hip-hop single called Willem is back how longa? So he has been He even He even Years of my life

And it's just I'm not saying I'm an old wets He even appeared on a national talk show Called College Tour You'd Thank you for the Kriker Thais and Wilhelm Hollader For your own

For your own In this cell Thank you well Thank you very much People would see Willem around Amsterdam riding his scooter And he became this well-known

Kind of iconic figure They started referring to him in the Dutch press as the cuddly criminal. People would come up to him on the street and ask her selfies. Meanwhile, his associates in the underworld started dying one by one. And with Cordad, Astrid and Sonia were terrified for their children. Astrid's daughter, Miljushka, and Sonia's children, Francis and Richie. It's always a question, is you going to do anything to the kids or not? We were two women with children and had to,

Yeah, survive. So that's what we did. You feel hypocrite. From the day on that that happened, it was a feeling as if I betrayed or betrayed myself because I just acted the way you wanted.

Not having the guts to go to the police or anything. So, yeah. There was to start with feeling dirty. No one was arrested in connection with Corps' death. Vim, for his part, was suspected pretty widely of involvement in a great many murders, but he was never charged. He could seem almost above the law, immune, zipping around on his scooter and palling around with local celebrities.

But privately, he was becoming more erratic. Eventually, crime journalist Petter DeVries found himself in Vim's sights. Petter's popular book about the Heineken kidnapping, which was a big bestseller, had been picked up by an American production company. That is the way the game is played. Do you know how big this thing is? He's insane or is smart? But before the movie came out, he later turned on him.

He said, I don't want to have my name mentioned in this picture. And at that time, he came to my house in the evening at 10 o'clock. And then the doorbell rang. And when I looked out of the window, I saw, hey, that's, that's William Hollader. And I said to my wife, I don't think this is, this is okay. He was on his motorbike. He had his helmet on. He had a big leather jacket on, gloves, big shoes.

And he is quite an impressive guy, even without these clothes. and I immediately saw that he was fucked up. And he was, when I opened the door and I said, hey, Willem, he started yelling at me. And at that time, I was thinking, oh, in 30 seconds, I will be lying on the ground, fighting for my life. But Petter DeVries is a bit of a tough guy himself, and he's a seasoned crime reporter. So he managed to keep his wits about him. I said, Willem, calm down. Let's just talk. What's the problem? And he finally calmed down a little bit. And he seemed to leave. But about three times, he also returned to me, standing again very close to me. And do I have to do it right now? You know what is going to happen. You can call the police, but it won't help you. And but finally, after three times he went away and that was it.

Petter did call the police. He filed a police report. But in the meantime, Astrid had started talking to the authorities too. I couldn't live on with the thought that he would kill again. So that's when I turned on him. The only thing we would have left if we wouldn't go to police was take the rights into our own hand and shoot him. And I must say that that would have been the best solution for him and for me.

But my daughter didn't want me to... My daughter didn't want to have a mother, a killer for a mother. She started to tell the police some of what she knew. But the whole process filled her with terror. What if Vim found out? What if she had to testify in court, but there wasn't enough evidence to send him away? She was a criminal defense attorney, remember. She knew what kind of evidence she would need.

So she decided to wear a wire. That in itself was a adventure, because at one point, I thought I had a really good one, and I had it stuck between the front of my bra. At one point, we were talking, and I felt that it was sliding. So I felt it fell down. And I was with him, so if it would fall on,

the ground. I mean, he would have noticed that he would, who would kill me immediately. So there were times that I was really, really afraid, and I kept on being afraid. Astrid eventually compiled hundreds of hours of recordings, and she persuaded Sonia to record conversations with them also. The first time I heard these recordings, they gave me a shiver. You listen to them and you can hear, just in mind. You listen to them and you can hear, just in the tone of his voice the kind of figure this guy was in his family. He was a figure of terror. The villain who are going to declare how man from the street off to

you, you're only a man in my whole life. I have only a linder of you. The family of Kor, everyone, all the other, do you out, but they think that I'm right to sit, Kangaroo. Villam was finally arrested in 2014 and charged with involvement in half a dozen murders, including the murder of Kor Van Hout more than a decade earlier. Her brother is in police custody.

now, but Astrid isn't safe. In 2016, a gang member being held in the same prison told authorities that Willem had tried to hire him to murder Astrid, Sonia, and Petter Vries. What will you do in the admittedly very slim chance that he's not convicted? Oh, then he would go after me, and I would go after him. I'm not going to sit around and wait until he is killing everybody.

Astrid shuttles around the city in armored vehicles. She wears disguises, and she lives in a series of safe houses. When I went to see her, I would be told to wait by a particular canal in Amsterdam, and a driver would show up and then take me to an undisclosed location. I never knew where I was going. It was never to her apartment. I'm living in places that are furnished. It's always being in somebody else's house.

So that's different. I'm like 52, but I don't really have a place of my own. When she testifies in Vim's trial, she sits behind a screen. She doesn't want anybody to see her, but also the prosecutors don't want her to be able to see Vim. So she's behind the screen, yet her voice fills the courtroom. And the two of them bicker and argue. They shout at each other at times. It's incredibly tense.

If Vilem was convicted, he'll probably be held in a maximum security prison until he dies. But even then, Astrid won't feel safe. I asked her why, and she said that if he gets a life sentence, her brother will have nothing to think about for the rest of his life, but revenge. Like Willem, Astrid has become a celebrity in the Netherlands. She wrote a book called Judas about how she turned him in. Think about that title. She doesn't see herself as a hero for stopping this murder spree.

She sees herself as Willem's betrayer. I think it's awful what I do to him because he will be in prison for life. So thinking about that, being the person that sends him away for life, well, that's an agony every day. If I think about the moment he must have heard that I was the one who testified against him, there must have been such a shock and later on he did seeing courts how it felt for him to hear about us

especially me testifying against him yeah watching the trial what struck me the most was that despite the incredibly raw conflict between these two siblings as brother and sister they still share a powerful bond

that having grown up in this abusive environment Astrid feels, despite it all, incredibly connected with her brother. I keep thinking about all the factors of our childhood. I'm like, well, it could have been me, you know. If I would have been a boy, it could have been me. If you could talk to your brother, if it were just the two of you today, now, together, not in the courtroom, what would you say to him?

Whoa. that I still love him in spite of everything that I wish I could take him home, that he could be a brother to me, and that I could take him home. Villam Holader was sentenced to life in prison in connection with five murders. Astrid O'Lader spoke with the staff writer

Patrick Raddenkief in 2018, and her story is told in Patrick's new collection of reporting, a book called Rokes. And one year ago, The reporter Petter DeVries, who was interviewed for our story, was killed. He was shot while leaving a TV studio. And the two suspects are believed to be affiliated with an organized crime group that DeVries was investigating. Their trial began last month.

That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadra. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carillo, Breda Green, Callalia, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, and Gophane in Putabwelle, with help from Alison McAdam, David Gable, Harrison Keithline, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Meng Faye Chen. We had additional help this week from Michael May.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.