The Underworld Podcast - Ridouan Taghi's Murderous Rampage, and the Cocaine Kings of Antwerp and Rotterdam - with Mitchell Prothero

Episode Date: June 20, 2023

Mitchell Prothero has been on the tail of Ridouan Taghi, the Mocro Mafia and the Marengo Trial for years—and he joins Sean to discuss "Gateway: Cocaine, Murder & Dirty Money in Europe", a podcast about every aspect of the so-called "super cartel" that has taken control of the world's most lucrative cocaine market. From Spanish boat crashes to doorstep hits, notorious bloggers and torture cells, this is a case that has blown away European conceits about its complicity in global organized crime. And Mitchell tells us how he came face-to-face with Taghi himself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Whatever needs to be done for your thing, Canva can make it an even better and bigger thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at USAA.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply. 7.40 a.m. September 18, 2018, in the Dutch capital city of Amsterdam.

Miles away from the windows and the coffee shops of the city's notorious red light district, in the southern suburb of Boethenfeldit, lawyer Dirk Viersum is getting ready for another day defending his clients. Not least, Nabil B, a former drug dealer turned star state witness, in a case against none other than Dutch Moroccan kingpin Ridouin Taghi. Nabil himself accused of several murders for Taghi's gang, which has taken control of cocaine routes from Colombia into Europe via the ports of Holland and Belgium has for months warned that Taghi will do everything to kill him, including murdering his family members, perhaps even his lawyer. Dutch authorities have scoffed at the claims. This is no

Medellin, they say. Such bloodshed would be unprecedented in our democracy. But in March 2018, Nabil's brother is shot dead in his office. And other relatives flee the Netherlands in fear. Still, nobody truly believes that the violence will spread beyond migrant communities to white Dutchmen like Viersum, 44 years old, a father of two and an established member of the city's high society. This is what they do, media nods and winks. This doesn't happen to us. But that morning, everything is going to change.

Viersum hops in his car, but a man appears at the driver's side holding a pistol. He tries firing twice, but the gun jams. Thiersson doesn't take the hint from above. He chases the assailant before arguing with him a few yards away. The shooter composes himself once more, and he takes aim. This time, the gun works. He hits Fearsome 10 times in the head, neck and torso and kills him on the spot. Then the murder returns and jumps in a white opal van,

and a getaway driver speeds them both to ground. The slaying shocks the Netherlands and Europe. With this brutal murder, a new limit has been crossed, says an Amsterdam police chief. Now even people simply doing their work no longer seem safe. A police union leader goes one further. Organised crime has got totally out of control, he tells media. And the Netherlands? It's become nothing less, he says, than a narco state.

Welcome to the Underworld podcast. Hi guys, and welcome to the show with more bad actors than the succession finale. I'm your host Sean Williams in Otero in New Zealand. We're back with several big bangs. And while Danny will be back next week, this week we're delving back into a subject. We first covered, like a couple of years back. And that is the mockro mafia, Riddle and Taggy. And like that cop said, how the ports of Northern Europe have just become one of the world's princelyest.

drug bazaars. It's a crazy, crazy story. We kind of got into it with Ed Caesar as well a couple weeks back on the bonuses. And we're doing this now because I think at time of airing, there's going to be three or six shows released from this project brazen show called Gateway, cocaine, murder and dirty money in Europe, which is investigated and hosted by a friend of the pod Mitchell Prothero, who joins me from a new home in Albania, which, well, that's interesting. and this show winds through all of the crazy stuff that's been happening in this past decade, not least the murder of Dirk Viersen that we just went into. Before we jump in, thanks as always to our Patreon subscribers.

I'll have a mini show up this week and I think one other interview too, plus there's all the usual stuff. And the merch is there too. I'm thinking of adding an underworld baby onesie, but maybe that's just for my boy. Let me know if anyone else is interested. I might try and make that happen. But anyway, I've wanged on for long enough now.

Welcome to the show. And tell us a little bit more about Gateway. Well, basically Gateway, the name of the project. And what we did was I spent a year looking at how the European cocaine trade has shifted sort of the flow into Europe. And over the last five to eight years, it's really shifted heavily through what the low countries, Banalux. Amsterdam, the ports at Rotterdam and Antwerp, some of the smaller ports in the area around it. They're just, they have this industrial scale flood of Europe's cocaine is now coming through an area that's actually really small. And in the past, drugs had come in through these ports, of course, historically.

But we're seeing like exponentially more than anybody's ever seen, you know, every year they set records for seizures. And every year they say they're probably getting one out of ten. I mean, Antwerp last year took 110 metric tons of cocaine at the port. And the head of Belgian customs told me that they might get one or two out of ten. So that's like half the world's cocaine production. You know, passing through Rotterdam and Antwerp, essentially. So, you know, that was really interesting and how that came about, because it's more than just a normal drug story.

It's about how, you know, like capitalism and globalism, you know, globalization. and financial deregulation and all this stuff contributed to sort of this, you know, just giant pile of cocaine, Belgium and Holland being distributed all throughout Europe. It's really, you know, it's almost astounding because it really seems to be all passing through that area. I mean, you still see busts in Spain and Italy,

you know, guys will get caught with a few hundred kilos or boat or whatever off the Canary Islands, that type of stuff. Of course, that all still goes on. But nobody's ever seen. like last summer. In a week, the Belgians took, I think it was 4.7 metric tons off of ships over the course of a few days that were headed into Antwerp, either at Antwerp, or, you know, they start checking them like when they're still out at sea. So sometimes an Antwerp bus actually took place in the middle of the Atlantic. They just knew that's where the ship was

headed. So it was 4.7 metric tons. And then the next day I was meeting with a source in Amsterdam and he told me that the wholesale price of a kilo in Amsterdam had just dropped 500 euros. And I just for the, yeah, and for the life of me, I just, that's when it dawned on me. Because then I asked somebody like, how can they lose 4.7 metric tons and wholesale prices still fall. And the guy was just like, what do you want me to say? There's, they just send more cocaine. Nobody's low on cocaine. So what was the kind of genesis of this for you?

I mean, you've been around Europe reporting on various organized crime and terror issues for years and years. Was it the amount of stuff coming in? Was it the amount of information that we've been able to glean from criminals, you know, hitherto encrypted phones? What was kind of the start for you? Well, I'd been a Middle East correspondent forever, and I've been living in Lebanon. working in Iraq and, you know, even Afghanistan, the whole Middle East region, and then occasionally working up in Europe,

particularly during the time of like ISIS and Mosul, you know, there were these attacks across Europe. And it was a natural thing for me to sort of go up to Europe and chase these guys that I'd been, you know, dealing with and covering for over a decade in the Middle East. So while I was in the course of doing that, you know, I was talking to a lot of cops, a lot of intelligence people.

And, you know, we're looking at various communities, you know, for most part, you know, immigrant communities, Morocco and Algerian stuff across Europe. And, you know, cops kept flagging to me that like, yeah, we're talking like 50 to 100 assholes here, you know, in terms of like the attacks that we're seeing. And we're going to get these guys. Like, and they were right.

They did for the most part. You haven't seen anything remotely like you were seeing in 2015, 16, 17, even 18. Yeah. But they were like, the big problem is the ports, man. You know, and they started telling me, one guy joked is like, you're looking for the wrong group of Moroccans, man. Like, there's a new,

yeah, that's what one cop actually told me. He was like, you should be paying attention to the guys who don't go to Iraq in Syria. Yeah. And I was like, why is that? He's like, because they're all making huge money in the drug trade. And then I started looking at the numbers just tangentially. And like Antwerp did send some guys.

There was like a famous little outfit called Sharia for Belgium, which was like a predecessor group for all these jihadi groups. groups in Belgium and Netherlands, France. But they didn't send a lot of guys from Antwerp, whereas Brussels sent like 100 dudes from 100 people from a square kilometer in Molenbeek. Antrop sent like, yeah, Antwerp like sent eight or nine guys or whatever it was, like 12. And the reason for that, you know, people kept telling me is these guys have jobs and responsibilities and like, you know, they're running a business.

They don't have time to run off to Syria at a fight. And so there was this overlap, basically, for coming through the communities and what was affecting them. It got me really interested in it because, like, you know, I could even tell these communities were, and the police were going to weed out the, you know, really hardcore ISIS cells. But then there was this establishment that was there and it wasn't going anywhere. And in fact, every year it keeps getting bigger and stronger. That's one of the things we found. So we'll get to kind of, I guess the big guy in a minute, but where do these drug communities come from? Where are they kind of like, where's the grounds swell, I guess, where they've kind of, you know,

build themselves into massive drug lords? Well, it's a traditional thing. And, you know, we've got a really good, we got very lucky to interview an academic who specializes in the Moroccan diaspora and herself is like Dutch Moroccan. and it's not a well-studied kind of group, you know, because they don't have the colonial history and the immigration history that everybody else kind of has and, you know, how Algerians ended up in Paris. Well, you know, we know how they ended up in Paris. But when it came to the Moroccans, you know, much like the Turks in Germany, they came as part of a guest worker program that was sort of over time. And one of the things, you know, so a bunch of things combined. This was the 60s and 70s and Canada. cannabis was getting legalized or decriminalized in the Netherlands, which had a large Moroccan guest worker community.

The Moroccan guest worker community is from the poorest part of Morocco, which turns out to be the Rift Valley, which is the world's largest hashish plantation. So as these guys were, you know, simulating into Dutch society and all the hippies are like trying to buy weed, you know, these Moroccan guys started their routes, you know, bringing it up. My cousin works on the world's biggest hash farm. We can do something here.

So, like, they started smuggling these routes up, you know, and so they'd use cars, speedboats, you know, to move hashish. And one of the observations I'd have about particularly clan-based structures, like you see with the Moroccans, Albanians, the Italians, certainly in Calabria, at least, is that anybody who's like doing cocaine right now, if you show me a guy who's trafficking cocaine, his father probably trafficked hashish and his grandfather probably trafficked cigarettes. and things like that. These are the same routes. It's just over time they get, you know, so these guys were able to connect Morocco to this community. And then, of course, being an immigrant community,

they were taking blue-collar jobs. They were working industrial jobs, but they were also working in the ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp. And that's where they really, you know, so this is a community that's established itself there. There's nothing nefarious to it. The cocaine would still be coming in.

It's just so happy. The Moroccans are the immigrant community that lives next to the port and is always specialized in helping get stuff out of the port. You know, the whole community doesn't do it. But like you can find, you know, this is, it's notorious. It's Rotterdam and Antwerp for notorious smuggling points. They always have been, you know, long before the Moroccans got there. So, you know, you saw this kind of overlap in nexus. And that's one of the reasons why, like, the legalization of cannabis turned Amsterdam into sort of the world,

or at least Europe's drug boars in a lot of ways. Because you know, if you're going to come, like if you're looking to buy five kilos of weed and Germany to distribute or something, you're probably going to Amsterdam. You're probably going to the Netherlands to get it. And if you're going to get there, then you're probably going to meet a guy who can get cocaine.

And so this is where a lot of the business basically takes place. It's been described as like Rotterdam and Antwerp are the lungs of cocaine in Europe and Amsterdam's the brain. Right. Okay. You know? And so, you know, Like, that's the flow, but the distribution.

And it's funny, the Dutch don't want to accept it. They think on some level that it's an immigrant problem, which is utterly preposterous. You know, like he said, it's whoever was the working class community next to the port would be doing this. Like, it's billions of euros. And, you know, so there's that port nexus. The Dutch also have this weird thing where they seem to blame everything on the tourists, which kind of cracks me up. because like the tourists aren't doing 110 metric tons of cocaine each year. Like,

it's obviously being distributed. And they're pretty much, I mean, they're pretty much welcoming the tourists with that lifestyle and that nightlife anyway, right? I mean, no one's going to Amsterdam. I mean, plenty of people go to Amsterdam.

It's a beautiful city. It's got a wonderful culture. But the majority of, you know, day trippers, I would imagine, are getting stone. They're getting hired.

They're going out. Yeah, I got to live there for, you know, six or seven months. And it's a true, like, local joy to see the stoned American teenagers pile out of the coffee shop, walk into the bike lane, and just get smashed by somebody on a bike. And if you get in the way, the Dutch are like of reasonable people, I would say, for the most part. But when it comes to the bikes and getting in the way of the bikes, they are not reasonable people.

And so it's always very funny. But the thing is, it does, you know, they are blaming like a certain quality of life that's in the city center. And they've always been trying to work on this. I think they're about to ban open weed smoking. They're so tired of it because it's this nexus of drunk tourists, prostitution, drugs, you know, all night drinking, stag parties. And so it's a little bit miserable, you know. But when you go outside of that, it becomes a very different kind of city.

But it's also one where, you know, this undercurrent is they're running, you know, Europe's cocaine trade is definitely, it's not being run out of there, it's being brokered out of it. And so there's this strange underbelly. This is the thing we found about the violence. Like, you know, the famous Moroccan mafia war of like 2012, it's still kind of going today over a 10-year period. You know, 30 or 40 people got killed. You know, maybe 10 others are missing.

Then you throw Taghi, the big man, Redwan Taggi on. He's got a few dozen to him. But it's, you know, they mix them up between countries. So like some guys will get killed in Spain. Some guys will get killed in Morocco. A couple guys. disappear in France or Belgium. So the crime stats never really

pop that high until you start paying attention to the fact that like yeah, the Dutch only have 50 murders a year in a country of 10 million people but like 47 of them are involved in the cocaine trade from like, you know, and all know each other.

And that's what made recording the project so incredibly difficult is because one, we're talking about a pretty tight-knit insular immigrant community in Europe that certainly knows. how it's portrayed in the media, both as terrorists and as drug dealers. They're sensitive to that.

And then on top of it, you've got, you know, all of these other factors flowing through there. And you're trying to get people to talk to you, and you start realizing that everybody knows each other. Once I started admitting, once we were finished, once I started admitting what I was doing, like in Uber's and stuff, when guys would ask me what I was doing in Amsterdam.

You know, the Moroccan guys would start telling me the story that I was doing and how they knew all these guys. and you're just sitting in the back of the Uber while this guy's explaining your podcast to you because he grew up on the block with like three of these guys. And the whole time you're like, oh, you got to let me record you.

And the guy's laughing. Like, no way, man. They all will know my voice. I literally know all these people. This is like a huge part of the show, right? How this one guy, and you mentioned him once, Rido and Taggy,

and we've mentioned him on the show before. I mean, just a gigantic, you know, drug baron, you do not cross this guy. And if you get in his way and you mention his name, you're fucked. Basically, you're going to be in a lot of trouble. If there's a, I mean, at his height, if Ridwan Tagi had any reason to believe you were even talking about him, he'd kill you if you worked for him. So Ridwan's interesting.

He actually fits a lot of what we were talking about to open up. He, you know, was born in Morocco, moved to the Netherlands when he was really young, moved to a suburban commuter town outside of Amsterdam. He was in a little like 80s, 90s, a little biker gang. In fact, they were called the Bad Boys. It was a very 80s. And, you know, Knicking scooters, stealing hash, stuff like that, normal stuff. But at some point, Ridwan decides to go back to Morocco.

And this is where the details are a little bit vague, because there haven't been any cases really made about it. So there's like, it's a mix of legend, and I think there's probably a lot of truth to it. But the details. But Rydwan goes back to Morocco where basically his family is running one of these hash routes into Spain from Morocco, and that they've been involved in it, you know, off and on as a family for like a long time.

And apparently he goes back to work on that, and he starts beefing up the business. And essentially, I'm sure people have seen these videos, or they're definitely worth going to look for as like do like Spanish Gibralta Zodiac boat

drug bus and like there's YouTube so you can watch these of like you know footage of like dudes crashing speedboats into the side of Gibralta and then guys running out unloading all the hash throwing them into SUVs and disappearing at five minutes and when the cops get there

there's like a wrecked boat that's empty and everybody's gone Ridwan was one of those guys and it was really brazen in that regard. He was sort of famous for that. So he started getting a name for himself like that and obviously started branching out into cocaine. And exactly when that happened,

it's a little unclear. He worked tremendously hard to stay behind the scenes. And that's what kicked off a lot, as you pointed out. A lot of our narrative and gateway is pretty much deciding which incidents of Ridlauntagie hunting someone down and murdering them we were going to use

for the show. Because I could have been, I could have be there all day. There's like a spy shop owner who wasn't even informing on him got killed. And Taghi ordered his killing. And then in just the most bizarre detail, then ordered his men to blow up the spy shop the next day just to be safe. This was the guy that they bought encrypted phones from. I love a spy shop. Yeah, exactly. But he bought encrypted phones from this guy. It turns out the encrypted phones didn't quite work. He had the guy killed. He's a civilian. I mean, the guy probably knew he was dealing with drug dealers,

but he wasn't a criminal by any means. He was just a spy shop, cryptophone dealer. They kill him, and then they blow up his shop the next day with C4 just to make sure there's no records. Jesus Christ. Friends, I want to tell you about Delete Me, a service that I've recently started using. Look, we all know privacy is pretty much a thing in the past,

and if you use the internet, there's big companies and big sites, storing all of your information, information that you'd rather not have out there for anyone to see. For me, I know what the kind of reporting I do, you know, controversial stuff, dangerous topics. I want as little of my information out there as possible. You got weirdos trying to docks you, people trying to scam, all that stuff that I'd rather and not worry about. And that's where Delete Me comes in.

They are pros at getting your info removed and taken off these sites. You know, I signed up. I told them some of my info, what to look for, and boom, they do all the rest. They get sites to remove your data. And if they can't, they help you figure out how to deal with it, how to mitigate it, all that. If you want help, go to join delete me.com slash underworld. That's j-o-I-n-d-L-E-T-E-M-E.com, all one word, slash underworld. That's our coupon. With that, you will get 20% off. Joindelet me.com slash underworld, make it happen. Like, it's all over chill. And that guy didn't even, I mean, I feel sorry.

Wrong Baker. I'm sorry, man, but like we had too many of these incidents where it was You know, you had to pick, yeah, you know, like with the sheer vindictiveness of this stuff, you know, by the time he, by 2015 rolls around, Taghi is one of the biggest drug cartel guys in Europe. No one's ever heard of him. He's basically eliminated the winner of the Moroccan Mafia War to take the crown himself. And then his partner, Noful, who helped him do that, gets locked up. So now it's all Taghi. And he relocates to Dubai, because he's really paranoid. And, he's, you know, kills anybody who talks about him. And, you know, we've got these texts that they broke off of his phone in one of the many, many phone hacks that nobody can keep straight in the drug malo. And, you know, he's just ordering

killings. He's got assassin team set up. He even had a biker gang on standby as well. He had multiple different assassin groups he could go to. Another guy who didn't make the cut is a Dutch special forces, a special operation soldier, has been convicted now of training his guys with weapons. and providing them with extra guns. He'd gotten a guy in the, you know, SF was helping him.

They were buying passports. This is what I found so astounding about it, is it's not just the drug story. It's really, like, the way Toggi went feral, you can tell he, like, started killing people that were his rivals. He started killing his own guys out of paranoia or trying to kill his own friends and, you know, whatever. But then he goes after the state.

and that's what makes him different than almost any but in europe we had not seen that in my opinion at least since like the 70s 80s early 90s in sicily and southern italy they had a legitimate war on the state against lecosinosa and various organized crimes like people forget this like a couple thousand people died yeah like there was bombs every week and hostages and assassinations for like 20 years this was going on so by the 90s they were raging but other than that I've never seen anybody even in the United States, it's almost unheard of. These guys, at various times in this project,

the Crown Princess had to go leave university and go into special protection. The Prime Minister of the Netherlands had to stop riding his bike to work. The ultimate European, no, no. Well, what it is, I was told it's the ultimate Dutch populace schick is, of course

he rides in an armored car. He does ride the bike, but, you know, it's a schick. But, like, so they had Tight framing. They had to stop doing the schick. They found, like, people, like, local, like, local, um, like, local mayor's, local administrative people, he'd say, Mokhtar and, like, Arabic burger, probably,

or something like that in German, like, the local administrative authorities. A few of them had been corrupted, and they were handing out, like, Dutch passports and different names to Taghi's organization at about a thousand euros a pop. That's just crazy. prosecutors would find guys following them with encrypted phones and black masks. Journalists started getting killed. Okay, the first person to print Taghi's name is this fascinating psychotic blogger named Martin Koch. And Martin was a criminal.

Martin had done like 20 years in prison for two different murders. By all accounts, Martin was rather proud of his murders. But he also was absolutely fearless and liked to blog about crime and got a lot of attention for his blogging. he was the first person to really use Taghi's name and to put it out into public. And Taggi essentially told him, if you print my name, I'm going to kill him. And he printed his name. And what is he did next? Well, it was a, I mean, it's not funny because he dies.

I mean, Martin gets assassinated, but it was a comedy of errors leading up to it. Is that, like, for like a month, every day, like Keystone cop style, somebody would try to kill Martin and it wouldn't work. And half the time he'd be drunk and not notice. Like, there'd be CCTV footage of him walking. down the street drunk with his friend, and a guy runs up behind him with a gun, and the gun jams.

The guy looks up the gun and runs away, and Martin never sees it. The thing I didn't understand about Martin, I guess he's coming up in the next episode that's coming out on, that people can listen to... Martin deserves his own podcast, man. Without subscribing to Proger Brazen.

He's insane. And the thing that confused me was that, like, he kept spinning this story. It was like, hey, I'm just, like, standing up for free speech, and I'm just telling a story, I'm kind of like a have-a-go journalist. It sounds like you're kind of puffing your chest out

and slapping your knob on the table because... Oh, he loved. That's exactly what he was doing. I mean, Riddle and Tag is saying, don't out me or I'll kill you. And he's like, nah, you know. He nicknamed him Fraggle. Yeah.

He was... Yeah, people have been killed for a lot less. Yeah. He was fat-shaming noful, who's a husky fella. You know? And, like, he was making fun of his weight. Like, this is a guy that, everybody is, these two people are the most terrifying people in a pretty terrifying scene of cocaine

trafficking and the low countries. Yeah, this is the two. Yeah, these are the two scariest guys. And he is openly mocking them and just does not care. Like, clearly he was a sociopath on some levels. You know, like he killed people. He was proud of it. He was by all kinds of a really charming, fun guy. Like, a friend of mine who knew him said, you know, like, and I think we put this in the podcast, this guy, Paul Vutz from at Perl, knew him really well, and Paul, Paul basically said, like, I liked him, but it's really hard to be friends with somebody who's proud of having murdered two people. Yes.

And he's like, I told, you know, he's like, I used to tell Martin, I like you, I don't think you're a journalist, I think you're blogger or perform, whatever it is. But, you know, we're not really friends, man. And Martin was kind of understood that, you know. He was proud of having done this. But so he, for instance, by the time it comes out and the hacks start picking up on Tagi's name, it's where we got the first, the name of the first episode was I asked Walter Llamas, who's another reporter from Het Parole, who's one of the first people to write about Taghi.

He had an RPG shot into his newsroom at night for that by a bike gang. Nobody was heard, but, you know. Enough. Yeah. Yeah, just in the center of Amsterdam. somebody shot an RPG into a newspaper, newsroom, it's still amazing to me. And he said that basically

he had to go back and find the first time Taghi ever showed up in his notes because he was such an unknown figure. And finally he found the first reference and it was some source of his going, there's this guy Ridwan Taghi, and he's terrifying. And he makes the underworld shiver. Everybody's scared of him.

It's interesting because you say that he kind of escalated a sort of almost domestic drug war into an all-out war on the state in the Netherlands. And it's similar to where he was getting the drugs from, right? That's what happened to Colombia in the 90s. That's the kind of breakdown of a lot of the political systems there has led to the proliferation of

cocaine in different hands in Europe. Yeah. And so what happened, you know, one of the reasons why things exploded like this was, you know, 10 years ago, it was pretty standard. When I first started covering the story. In fact, when I first got into it, I was mostly looking at the Andrangida, the Kalabrian Mafia, because they are the most powerful organized crime group, probably in the world. And they have enormous financial resources and a huge history of traffic, not just trafficking and cocaine, but money laundering all over Europe. Some estimates have put their GDP at the same size as

Croatia. I don't know how you judge that. I don't know how true that figure could be, because I found with the war on drugs and all this stuff, none of the numbers really quite add up. It's really hard to get, like I keep telling people, the only thing I know for sure is like how many were seized, what it costs retail on the street,

and more or less how pure it is. That's all you can really know. You know, like you can see those things change, but other than that, you don't have any idea. And you're appalling these guys, they'll admit to some aside. But so, you know, over time,

these guys had been moving like working for the Andrangida And if you wanted to get cocaine into Europe It was kind of a well-trod path And it was relatively civilized And organized and it was you worked with the Andrangina Who put you in touch with the right-wing paramilitary In Colombia, the Auk

For whatever reason the right-wing Right-wing paramilitaries fed Europe more And the FARC fed Mexico and the US more I don't really know how that worked out And that they would set up a deal, and they take a healthy cut of it, and then you'd get it out of the, you know, and one of the ways that they would do this is you would pay the Moroccans, or the Moroccan mafia, or Dutch mafia's even, not just Moroccan, working around Rotterdam and Antwerp to get them

out of the containers to your destination. It was a step in the food chain. So it's very similar to what Mexico did. For the longest time, Colombia would basically sell to the United States and pay the Mexicans to transport it across the border to the distribution. And just like what happened in Mexico with the Moroccans, things started changing about five years ago when some genius decided to start paying them in cocaine instead of money, which would have made immediate economic sense, but maybe not so great long-term economic sense,

because once they started doing that, you exponentially grow overnight. And what the, basically, at the same time is 2017, 16 Colombian peace deal breaks up all the paramilitaries. And so now any asshole can go to Medellin and try to buy, like try to source wholesale cocaine. And you can get ripped off, you can get killed, but you can also buy a metric ton of cocaine. Like, you know, it's a little bit more wide open than it ever was before. There aren't kind of the gatekeepers.

The And Drainigan have sort of moved up a step and become more money launderers and brokers and insurers. And they still traffic amazing amounts of cocaine. but it does seem like they've gone up a step and been replaced, much like the Colombians were replaced by the Mexicans when the Mexicans started getting paid in cocaine. That's where these dudes came from.

This is why you see, you know, the various cartels and Chapo and all these guys, and you see Redwantagie, and you see a couple of guys in Antwer that we wanting to mention their names because they're still out there. You know, there's some of these really big, big-time drug lords. The way they get there is by paying them in cocaine

and then they can exponentially grow. and what we found is they started working, everybody became agnostic, whereas it used to be like, if you had a route in through the port, you could get your 100 kilos for your organization in, you never told anybody about it. It was a secret.

Well, the Moroccans and the Dutch have changed that. Now this is why you see 4.7 metric tons getting taken. They're not going to one gang. That's going to everybody. Everybody's in the containers now. because the Moroccans will just be like, yeah, man, or whoever's controlling that route, well, just why not throw another 100 kilos in?

The more you pack into each... That's why it's got exponentially so huge. Is there just like, screw it? Fill it up. I mean, some of these like, so-called supermafias as well are these, like, huge interconnected gangs all over the world now. I mean, you hear some of the stuff that's coming off of these encrypted chats that are getting hacked,

and there's people speaking, Serbo-Croat and there's people speaking Spanish and there's people speaking Albanian. I don't know, Fijian. Yeah, exactly. There's people all over the world from the Pacific to the Atlantic just shipping huge quantities of drugs and no one of the

stuff is flooding into Europe in this gigantic way presumably with you know, the green light or the control of this what it's the mockro mafia there is basically the Moroccan mafia. I guess to bring it back to the story that you're telling,

how does this thing, because you tell some incredible stories about Nofall and Martin, the blogger that you just mentioned as well, but I think people should listen to that because it's just so well told. I mean, how do things start to kind of spiral for Taggy to the point where the Dutch public begins to say, oh, I think we might have a narco state on our hands.

They, as a society, I think, you know, the Dutch have a really weird relationship with drugs. Because of the legalization and decriminalization of cannabis, what we're talking about it is everybody knows it's one of the major power centers. It's a city, I mean, let's face it, this is a society that more or less invented modern capitalism in a lot of ways. I mean, they invented the notion of half the things we're dealing with in terms of international trade and finance and stuff like that. So this has been going on forever, and they have a complex relationship with it. It has a tendency to be dismissed, like I said, as an immigrant problem or tourist problem. You know, the Dutch are not the first society. They're not really want to take a hard look at themselves on this issue.

I mean, a lot of countries have this problem, but we're talking about Holland. You know, like we're talking about Holland and Belgium, so I can go all day about how Canada has this problem, too. But they want to kind of shove it away. And what they couldn't was when Taghi really started coming after the state. Even the stuff like the passports and the command, like you can always kind of arrange a dirty cop. You can bribe a local official. Like I got warned right when I moved there. Try not to register with the government because it's only like 500 euros for somebody to look up your address.

You know, to find if they hear that you're working on this. You know, that type of thing. And it's Holland. But, you know, still that stuff's kind of understandable. And part and parcel of having a semi-corrupt kind of. economy built around drugs and dodging finance and trade and public related, like with all the stuff the Dutch are good at. And, but what happened is the lawyer for a witness against Taghi, Derek Vinsstrom,

this is like a proper Dutch society guy. He's known by the prime minister. He's a well-known, good-looking young lawyer. You know, everybody likes Derek. And he's well-known in legal circles, political circles, societal circles, whatever, he gets shot for representing a witness against Hockey. And that was the real flag. Prior to that, it could be dismissed as Martin Koch was a criminal blogger. He's in the same Maloo. You know, these guys who got killed,

oh, the brother of a crown witness got killed. Yeah, but he's a Moroccan guy. I mean, he's probably clean, but, you know, that's part and parcel of the, you know, everybody was kind of able to justify the Moroccan Mafia War. and again, not too many innocent bystanders got hurt. So they did have mistaken identity cases. I'm not dismiss it.

It's happened a few times, but mostly everybody was kind of comfortable with the status quo until Derek got killed. And when Derek was murdered, clearly over a case, that was when it was supposed to be seen as the warning shot that this guy's really coming after the state.

And it's not for me to say, I wasn't covering it back then, but I talked to a lot of people who still say, the lesson hadn't sunk in yet. It was justified as a one-off. This is just one guy. There's this belief that somehow cocaine will go away

and there won't be violence if Ridwan Taghi's put in prison for the rest of his life. Yeah. Okay, it might not be quite as feral and stupid level of violence, but it's still going to be there. But so then, and then things started just really rapidly accumulating. At one point, Taghi orders a hit on a rival. in Morocco and his guys accidentally killed the wrong dude.

Guy stood up, changed tables, was wearing the same shirt. The guy they killed was the son of a federal judge. Ouch. A medical student and a friend of the king. So now Taghi's basically got Morocco with a total case of ass to find him. And whereas the Dutch had wanted, you know, at this stage now Derek's,

you know, these people are getting killed. Taggi's in Dubai. You know, the Dutch are not having a lot of success extraditing him. But the reason why the Dutch were able to get their hands on him at all was the King of Morocco sent a snatch team to Dubai with the permission of the Emirates, kidnapped Taghi out of his house, beat the living hell out of him for three days, and then inexplicably put him on a plane to the Netherlands.

And nobody's really sure how that went down because it was pretty much assumed that Taghi was not coming back from that trip. Well, I mean, this is a place with, I'm thinking of CIA black sites now. So, you know, this is probably not a country to be messing around with. Yeah. It's the Moroccan intelligence service. The Moroccan intelligence services do not mess around. These are notoriously hardheaded people.

And they really did. I mean, at one point we saw pictures like, Tagi had a literal boot print on his head. That's crazy. In a booking photo. Yeah, but so I asked around and nobody could quite understand what the Dutch gave, because honestly, at that stage, like, Taghi disappears dead into the Moroccan intelligence apparatus and never to be seen again. But inexplicably, the Moroccans and the Dutch worked out a deal to send him for trial,

and they extrad him. I do not know what favors were traded. This is kind of like the million dollar mystery. Somebody even suggested to me that there didn't need to be a favor traded once he knew he was going to go to jail, once the king had gotten a hold of him, and was like, okay, it's easy for me. Fine. I got my three days beating him. You'll never let him out of prison. And now, you know, the Netherlands owes Morocco a favor. So it could have been as simple as that. Or maybe there was a bigger deal. Nobody knows exactly. But Satagi ends up in

prison where he continues to try to kill everybody that's got him in prison. You know, and at this stage, more and more people are getting smoked. Anybody working on the case is now like anonymous. I had the signing thing saying I wouldn't like describe the judges or prosecutors really wow like I can't tell you what they look like yeah I wouldn't

because honestly I mean but no this is the thing about okay I will give Ridwan Taghi this man I've been around a lot and I've seen a lot of crazy crap okay I've covered like multiple wars on multiple continents and all this stuff

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Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. He just didn't stop. It was like at some point, just could not believe that he, even from prison, he was working every possible angle he could. His cousin is doing five and a half years in prison

for using his attorney's status to visit him to smuggle messages out, including one that most everybody's pretty sure led to the murder of the Holland's most famous journalist. He hadn't even gotten to yet. Was murdered in broad daylight by, we're pretty sure by Taghi's guys. Let's just say,

there's a lot of evidence that his organization was connected to that. And, you know, he's doing that from prison. He's ordering these hits from inside there. He's telling Yusuf's cousin where the money he stashed to hire the commandos to break him out of prison

is. And the thing about Taghi is that you, as crazy as the stuff sounds, going back to like my history, you've got to take it seriously. Yeah, for sure, I was going to say, this is, this segue into your reporting this story because, I mean, you know, you've got to watch you back a little

bit, right? Yeah, you know, I mean, look, the people we had on the podcast all have to watch their back, okay? Like, this is a local story, and those guys have their local relationships that I know how hard that is from working in, you know, places where I'm dealing with local crime or terrorist organizations, and you've got to build a relationship with them as a beat reporter. And that's what a lot of these guys have. They all have nicknames for each other and stuff. They've all, like, all the, virtually every reporter that I met on this assignment has lived under police protection at one time or another. The lawyers I interviewed who are now off the case,

we don't know why they quit, but the lawyers I interviewed for the Crown Witness, they lived in safe houses for two years. Everybody's been threatened. When I told the Dutch police official, what I was working on, he said, oh great, another asshole I have to put under protection. And he goes,

at least I think I can get the DEA to pay for you. And then the guy never talked to me again. You do mention, to give nothing away, you do mention the Italians further down the line in the show and the way that they've dealt with you know, the Andrangetta and the Kosovo and various groups and this is fully 90s

Italy stuff right? I mean this is this is prosecutors under 24 hour surveillance this is not just witnesses but the families are witnesses, the lawyers of witnesses being popped I mean it's pretty crazy crazy stuff I mean it's like typical northern European I guess, complacency, where I think you mentioned at some point, they're like, well, this has never happened before.

And like, well, it's happening now, dickheads. So, like, do something about it. By the time it hits DeVries, even by the time DeVries gets killed in 2020, or 2021, he gets killed. And that shocks Dutch society. But again, Tagi's on trial. So there is this weird panic, but there's also not. It's strange. Again, I don't think they really want to acknowledge the horror of it because it was so out of line.

You know, nobody wants to think of themselves as a narco state. And the thing is, like, I will defend Holland. I don't think it's quite a narcos state. That's a specific definition. Taki assaulted the power centers of Holland, but he did so far. He's still alive in jail. Let's give him time. But he, you know, so far, he's failed. He managed to corrupt and infiltrate. But no, he didn't get his case strong. He didn't kidnap the crown princess to trade for himself, which was an ongoing plan, apparently, that everybody had to take seriously, as ridiculous as it sounded. She can't go to university,

and I don't blame her parents for not letting her. There's guys on the roof of the high-security prison with Stinger missiles. Why? Because Taghi really might hire Expets and odds guys to crash a helicopter into the prison. Which has happened in Belgium and France before. The helicopter escaped from prisons, a well-trod genre in Europe.

America doesn't get that so much but like it's happened more than at least two times in the Moroccan Mafia war guys tried to break out of prison by having like their brothers hijack helicopters and crash them into the jail so like you have to take this seriously you know and it's all but again when you don't

have like mass shootings you don't have street gang wars on the same level you have like some drill rap stuff between clashing gangs where people do get killed it's as brutal as anything you'd find in like the UK or the US in terms of violence in that community.

But again, it's still small. You're talking like six or seven murders a year is a lot for a very small community that doesn't see a lot of murders. So, you know, I will defend the Dutch on this, is that the state did hold up, but just acknowledging it and wanting to see it as something that might be tied to, you know, globalization, completely deregulated finance. Wild, wild.

Like, if you go to Rotterdam, I keep talking about this. I saw a ship Okay, the sister ship of the Evergreen which got stuck in the Suez Canal was in Rotterdam when I was there, the exact ship, the sister of it or whatever. Next to it was a ship that was four times bigger and had 28,000 containers on it.

28,000. That were going to get on. 28,000. Had 28,000 containers on it. It dwarfs the ship. that got stuck in the Suez. And it'll be unloaded in 24 hours by robots. So if you want to buy anything you want whenever you want at a cheap price,

you're going to have a lot of cocaine. It's just that's it. This is why you are not going to, unless you want to radically redo certain aspects of society, like I always joke about this, but like the Dutch did not get rich in Rotterdam and Antwerp by making people sushi late, by mangoes and bananas sitting on the dock, by anything sitting, they get your stuff out.

They're fishing. This is trade. This is what they've been doing for a thousand years, man. And they are good at it. But the point of shipping is to get that stuff out. On to the container, you know, off the container ship, onto the backs of the trucks,

going out to their destination. Time is money and all this stuff. So, you know, you don't really want to slow down to search. Everything. Antwerp can scan 2%. of the containers that go through. They need to know it's coming from intelligence

to really have a chance to intercept it. I guess we could ask some 17th century Indonesians, you know, who's good at taking stuff onto ships and getting it across the world? They're going to tell us, for sure. Yeah, and so that whole thing is a set, the whole thing's a setup, and then you've got like a financial deregulation system

that essentially makes it nothing. I mean, like, guys who live, in Dubai who are street kids that five years ago were like selling like weed and grams of like cocaine off scooters to people at bars and stuff. You know, they started getting paid in cocaine. They popped to the

top five years later. They're in Dubai. And they're setting up shipping or holding companies through Panama because they've got to move all this money around. And these dudes end up with like fairly sophisticated financial vehicles in order to do this. And then the money ends up in you know, often places like either buying stuff

in Dubai, a lot of hard assets people, it seems like we couldn't quite nail this down, the exact extent of it, but there's a lot of new development in Morocco in the tourist sector, in the hotel sector, a lot of infrastructure getting built right around the same time. Billions is pouring through their community in Europe. Edly, man. The same as Italy. Yeah, it's the same thing's happening in Albania.

The same things happening in Albania, which has its own very active organized crime and drug smuggling, Malu, as we like to call it. They have their own scene here. and they operate in Antwerp. This is why it's not, we just happen to focus on a Moroccan, and the Moroccan mafia is a clever phrase, but you could easily just switch this whole thing

over to a bunch of Serbs out of like the hay. You know, I mean, this is like, everybody is using this route, you know, and that's interesting, that's what we found is it's much less of a top-down hierarchical group of organizations than it is a bunch of gig workers who kind of come together for deals.

So when people ask me, like who's the biggest drug dealer in Europe. You know, I can speculate a little bit with a couple of names, but what I'd really say is who's the last one to get stuff through? So the Silicon Valley dream of a democratized flat

organization, the drug industry is living that dream. Yeah, no, this is what I, when I keep going back to the globalization thing, I can think of three guys that, if they had dinner, I've said this before, I hope it's not

cliche at this point, but if they had dinner with Jeff Bezos, they would just talk about like on-time shipping, like logistics, like sunken costs on infrastructure, you know, like payroll.

You know, this is what they would talk about. It's a logistics business. It's the purest capitalist product in a lot of ways. And I guess to kind of widen it out for a second, if we are to talk about Amazon and Bezos, then is there such a thing as a kind of European super mafia? You mentioned the

Kinans and the show. I mean, how densely is this connected or is it just kind of a loosely, yeah, what is it? They're loose, they're allies. They do business together. We've read, we've read a lot of the messages from that crew. What you're talking about is basically there's an infamous wedding when Daniel Kinnahen gets married in the Borjol Arrope and the $9 million a night like seven star hotel. They throw this party for a Kenahan wedding. And I guess this was around the time everybody started, a lot of these guys that started moving to Dubai.

And this confidential informant for the DEA happens to be there. I guess they thought it was smart to keep an eye on Kinnahan or whatever. And the guy's looking around the room and he realizes, well, there's the student Ridwan Taghi, who's only recently started anybody's ever really heard of. He's at the wedding. And then, you know, next to him is Raphael Imperiali, a top

clan leader in the Camorra. And the next to him is like, you know, this dude, Tito, a Bosnian drug lord, who's still rolling out there too. I'd love to see that wedding, the kind of seating plan on the side of the Birch-Alab. Tito's there. Rico, the Chilean, who's probably

the, we know the least about this guy, and is probably one of the most important people to the whole thing. There's a few, you know, Taghi gets a lot of the press just because he was so Farrell, but he had partners. And, you know, so these are some of the most powerful, and they're all partying. They're all at this thing. The Kenahan's are all there. They're all celebrating

together. And the DEA is just astonished that these guys are all there. So that's where the super cartel came from, because they were all living in Dubai. And what we've since learned, in my opinion, it's a loosened alliance. I think they were rivals. I think they worked together. I think, again, you put together deals.

Yeah. Who can put, you know, who's in on this one? We've seen emails from, like, prison. Ridwan Taghi sending Rafael Imperiali really polite emails from prison explaining how he still owed $867,000 from a deal and also Ridwan's understanding that Raphael's been doing a bunch of deals since Ridwan's been in prison and he could really use money so why do we start cutting in brother Ridwan

on some of this stuff even though he's in jail he's got to maintain his organization so it was like that like friendly but also like hey man I hear you're stepping out can I get in on this? It wasn't hierarchical. I don't think anyone was anybody's boss in this regard. You could pick to a handful of things that everybody was good at or maybe they helped each other with. Obviously, Ridwanthaghi has amazing access to the ports

in Rotterdam and Antwerp as the Dutch guy. Tito, it turns out, is one of the first non-Latin Americans I've ever come across that I legitimately believe produces his own cocaine in Peru. that he might actually control labs, which I think is unheard of. I can't quite prove it. The Peruvians think he does, and if that's the case,

that's like the first time that's ever happened. You know, and so that's possibly his thing. The Kimmhans are famous for being great money laundering, finance stuff. The Camorra, why don't you need the Camorra?

You know, what can't the Camorra help you with? So, you know, you could see kind of where people would have roles and what they'd bring to the table. You know, Rico de Chilean was, known for being able to source huge amounts of cocaine out of South America and stuff like that. So everybody kind of played a role, but it wasn't, I don't think, a hierarchical situation. I wouldn't call it a super mafia. I'd call it like a bunch of bros selling cocaine living in Dubai. You make it sound like some Zemeckas film from the A's in that case.

So, I mean, I was listening to the show and I was like, I really want to hear a follow-up where you just go to Dubai and hang out with a bunch of crazy drugs. drug lords, but that sounds like it might be slightly dangerous. Yeah. You know, they've got this big rule in Dubai, which is you're not allowed to do anything there. That's what these guys are tolerated. Like, you've got to spend a lot of money on apartments and probably payments to security services and fees and golden visas. They're constantly shaking you down.

But if you don't kill anybody there and you don't really make the U.S. call look for you. The U.S. is a different phone call than Belgium. Yeah. You know, and like the U.S. doesn't give a crap about a Belgian drug war, you know, or whatever. So they're not going to get too involved. You can get away with it for a while. My belief is the minute you stop paying or the heat gets too high, they send you out and take all your stuff and keep it. Yeah. That's basically, I think, you know, like right now, Ridwan Taghi, like he had a beautiful villa in Dubai. They got the door kicked in. I bet there's a senior official from the security services.

living in that villa right now. Or it was sold, you know what I mean? Because that's what the deal is. So you do get to roll. A friend of mine speaking to one of these guys in Dubai, we could not obviously get him to appear on the podcast. He basically indirectly told me through this intermediary that he knew he was going down.

He's wanted in Belgium. He's about 34, 35 years old. And he knows in the next few years they're going to extrad it. And he's going to go to jail in Belgium. for about 15 years. He figures he can play out to that. So what he's doing now is making as much money as he possibly can and stashing it all over the world

in the hopes that the cops don't get all of it. And then when he gets out of prison at about 50, he can live a decent life and take care of his family. That's his plan. I mean, that's what we're doing with the podcast. Same kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, but like that's the most logical plan I heard

out of any of these guys. You know, like he's actually got an exit route. that involves, you know, he knows it's going to involve at least a decade in prison. I mean, I mean, Dubai is just insane, right? I mean, you've got, I mean, the shows that we've done, you've got Yakuza guys that have been in Dubai.

You've got Dawid Ibrahim from India. You've got Pakistani Afghan dealers. Lebanese, everyone's there. Everybody's there. It's like party time for the international criminal community. It is. And they've gotten a little bit more. I thought, about a year or so ago, it was going to get better.

There was a lot of pressure. And I think with the Russia thing, that's now off the table. I think that, like, once you start letting in every oligarch flooding in, you know, like they've made a decision to go after the money. And so I think right now probably there's even less pressure you can apply on Dubai. I guess, you know, in a new way. I guess the good thing from a Russian perspective is that, you know, oligards are very easy to push out the window of an 89-story skyscraper.

So that's an easier job than, you know, the air of flat office in Berlin. So just saying. Yeah, you know, like you really don't want to go on the helicopter death during the oligarch. You know, like you're way up there at the top, the little round thing. Yeah, I'm not going up there. Not with a Russia. But, you know, yeah, it is a center for this stuff. And again, it's globalized capitalism.

The reason why it's all there is because free financial flows of money. You can move money around. I mean, at one point a guy is telling us in the podcast, it's a full globalized business. You're sitting in Dubai. You're moving money through Panamanian shell companies. You're investing in, let's say, Morocco to launder your cash. You're ordering hit teams to kill dudes in Panama.

There's an organization there. And that's what we really found from a couple of these hacks. and we're still like the whole all of European law enforcement and drug scene is still waiting on the 10 year process of them decrypting all of the Sky ECC hack stuff

I mean there's guys that are you know like there's people basically in there that are going to jail who nobody knows they're going to jail yet nobody's just gotten around to those messages and they're going to be at it for years like so this is one of the things I came across was

officially nobody would talk to you. Like, nobody, like, I have only a handful of officials were willing to speak on the record. And one of the reasons for this was just absolute paranoia because every, like, six months or so, a cop or an official or somebody pops on SkyECC and they were, you know, like,

we can't have, like, what if this dude interviews one of our federal police and then, like, a week later, we decrypt the messages and that dude's dirt. Oh, my God. And this guy's got a podcast interview. Like, this is like possibly the greatest thing I could imagine happening to me in my life is that the cop I interviewed for the podcast gets indicted for working for a cocaine cartel. I mean, I'm a little turned on.

But like, for them, that would be the absolute biggest disaster of the history of the world. And so even the chance of that happening, forget it. Yeah. We're not going to talk to you. You know, like, and, you know, on some level I appreciate it. Because the longer this goes on, the more and more weird stuff keeps happening. and just out of the blue, the Dutch will be like,

hey, we discovered a torture chamber, you know, and they did. And, you know, the cases that the U.S. and the Europeans

keep sending to Serbia and Albania, it's just, this is going to be a nonstop thing. You know, like they've had to go to Montenegro and be like, hey, man, you know,

that guy in charge of the police? Yeah, you got, yeah, he's a cartel guy. And they've been dealing, like Montenegro's been actually trying to kick some people.

people out. They've been true, they've got a new government. I'm not an expert on those guys at all, but they've, you know, I'm living next door. You're being saying. Yeah, they're trying to wind up, they're trying to wind up corrupt officials. And a lot of that came from Sky ECC. So if it can happen in Montenegro or Serbia, it can happen in Belgium and Holland. There's still people taking money. They're on the take up there. Antwerp just charged a top federal police detective with providing information to a drug cartel. Wow. Like, and he was one of the top investigators there. It didn't come from Sky ECC. But the minute I saw that, I was like, and that's why the Belgian cops wouldn't let me talk to anybody.

This would have been one of the guys that I would have talked to or I would have wanted to talk to him. He's just been indicted. Even Tagi's lawyer, I mean, we didn't even get to this, but Inez-Westky, who's a fairly famous or infamous human rights lawyer, she represented Charles Taylor. She has a tendency to take clients absolutely nobody wants, like Ridwanthagi. She has spent 41 days in jail and is still under investigation as to whether or not she'd been willing to take. messages out of prison for Taki. She's off the case. She's defending herself now.

And, you know, nobody's really sure what the evidence is. We haven't seen it. The Dutch system is pretty opaque, but they just, they kept her in prison for 41 days. That's, yeah. So, they just let her out on bail, but the investigate, the judge said there's no reason to keep her

in prison while you investigate. You can let her go. But so, you know, there's a possibility that one of the top human rights lawyers in the world, fairly infamous, you know, and you can almost see it. Like if Ridwan Taghi tells you,

you've got to take this message to my family, dude. I mean... Yeah, you don't. So that's a hard turn down. Again, he might do it. Like, it's really that over the top. You're not being silly and you're not being paranoid.

You know, he really might hire the Spence Knott's, you know? And so, you know, people can see that, but we don't really know the truth. And this is, again,

like, just as we're wrapping up this project, there's more and more attacks on the civil society. There's a guy, you know, the Dutch, not the Dutch, just moving to Belgium next door, the Belgian justice minister, they found like three hitters, teenage kids, with encrypted phones and a Kalashnikov following him around.

Jesus Christ. Wow. That was last summer. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? And that's not even Taghi. Yeah, yeah. That's this other thing that we, you know what I mean?

That's another guy. I'm pretty sure I know who that was. And he's trying to intimate the Belgian state and did not try to extradite him from another country. So was he going to kill? What were they going to do? Because it's getting pulled all the time. Like they will pull over a car following the prime minister.

And there'll be like two kids with an encrypted phone and black face masks. Not always guns, but they'll be following people or out. So this organization is, I think it's, kind of washed now. I mean, finally we might be at the end. But like in terms of Tagi's ability to reach outside and get things done, I can't imagine he still can do much. But, you know, this is stuff that was going on for a year after I was uncertain whether I even wanted to focus on Tagi because I felt like that story had been told so well and it'd already been told. Like originally, I didn't come into this one and to do rid one exactly. But then as I'm studying the thing,

and trying to come up with a narrative, increasingly insane things keep happening. happening every week and the guy's still, he's already in jail and it's still crazy. So that eventually swung me back over and I just said, I can never tell the story better than this. It's continuing while we're reporting. And so, it's true. Like, we don't even know if he's going to have a, I don't even know if they're going to be able to give him a verdict in October like plan. Well, I mean, I guess that was going to be one of my next questions. Um, is this going to end soon? Like, what, what, what the hell is going on at the moment? Tagi's going to be in court for the rest of life. I mean, he's going to be sentenced to prison as well, but meaning there are so many cases

to unwind. But the Dutch have a very peculiar system to the, from an American point of view at least. And I think a little bit in the UK too. How do I put this? There are literal people, the Dutch. And so if they catch you with 100 kilos of cocaine, they're going to do a DNA test to make sure it's yours, you know, like they're going to collect the evidence that ties you to the 100 kilos. They're going to check all the CCTV and stuff like that and put you in the place. They're going to do a really diligent job. And then they're going to charge you with cocaine possession of like 100 kilos.

And at no point will anybody ask you where you got the drugs. Okay. Okay. Right. But yeah, he has 100 kilos. It's 10 years in prison. He goes to prison. What is the problem here?

Well, okay. So like one guy that I was studying, and we didn't use him in the podcast, but I just found dude freaking amazing. And I think that this gets to, in no way do I advocate for a harsher war on drugs. But the Netherlands has gone a little silly at times and needs to maybe adjust. Here's a story of one guy. This is just a press release that pops into my inbox last year from the Dutch public prosecutor. Serbian guy living in the country illegally.

He does something with his car suspicious and cops pull him over and basically they're not freaking out. He doesn't have anything on him. The car's not stolen, but he's not registered to a house in the Netherlands, which is his papers are not in order. Okay, so this is like Germany, you've got to be registered to the address you live in. Oh, yeah.

The Dutch get really upset. You know, it's obviously, you know, a cultural thing they share with the Germans. And so they, his papers are not in order. This is all very upsetting. So they go to the house he claims he lives in. It's a stash house. There's like 90,

kilos of cocaine, about 20 million euros in cash and a glob. And he's the guardian of the drugs. This is, it's his job. So they arrest him. They charge him with possession of 90 kilos of cocaine, you know, all these millions of euros and a gun. So, you know, from an American perspective, I'm like, if he doesn't tell them where he's, where he got that shit, he's going to jail for 35 years. Like millions of dollars, a hundred kilos of cocaine, and a gun. Okay, that's 30 years in America. If that, you know, that's maybe life, you know, for when you throw in that combination of factors. Nobody asks him anything. And so the court, he goes on trial and pleads guilty. And the court decides that he's obviously a low-level employee of an bigger organization. And there'd be no real

point to, like, nailing him up hard. And he gives him like five, four or five years. Okay. And then he's going to be deported, and then he's going to be deported back to Serbia. Where he will be hailed, because this is what blew my mind is, okay, forget the five years part. They said he's a low-level employee.

Really? A low-level employee is left alone with 25 million euros, 90 kilos of cocaine, and a gun? I would say that's a pretty respected member of the organization, to be perfectly honest.

In relation, And so one of the extremely dark crimes that you mentioned, I think it was one of the murders that Martin, the blogger, carried out. He got five years, if I'm not wrong. He got five for the bar fight guy that he killed. But apparently everybody in the neighborhood, everybody hated that guy. He was doing them a favor, right? Yeah, that's what Martin says.

But actually, it does kind of sound like everybody really did hate that guy, from what I can tell. But the really disturbing crime, so Martin wins a bar. fight and that goes bad. And it's basically manslock. But his next killing is like a brutal... This is awful. He killed the partner of his ex-wife. Yeah, and fucking took pictures of the guy dying.

And, like, tweeted about it. And his children saw it. So, as much as Martin was amusing, that whole thing was so chilling. That's why I said he's a sociopath. And it's also why I didn't mind having a little fun with him eventually getting killed. This was, you know, like, this is going back

to what Paul says. He was a nice guy, but he was proud of killing people. And the killing of his wife, his ex-wife's partner was just beyond the pale. In fact, I don't understand how he only got 12 for that. I think that was the sentence that I was like, holy shit, that is an unbelievably light sentence for like what is a cold-blooded, like gruesome murder. Yeah, it was really cold-blooded. It was in front of kids, his own children.

It's just awful. But so going back to the Serbian guy, this is the other thing, you know, so they say it's a little level employee, which is obviously garbage. He's a highly respected, trusted member of a serious organization. This guy now, he's a Serbian gangster in his 30s. He's going to do what, two or three years in a Dutch prison before going back to Serbia where he's going to get a promotion for keeping his mouth shut. Yeah, yeah. So part of what I, because Belgium will put you in jail longer. But like part of what I was wondering when I was looking at this stuff is like, they've changed this now,

but it was literally changed while I was there, is if an underage kid got caught trying to rip cocaine out of containers in the port of Antwerp, or not in Antwerp, in Rotterdam, it was a $150,000 fine. Okay. Not even...

So they give you basically, like, you got $100 to do it from the drug lord, or the guy who hired the kids, and then they throw in $150 euros. That would be a bonus if you didn't get caught, but so you could pay the fine if you did get caught without calling them.

Oh, man. You know, and then like at worst you were going to do like a couple of months in a Dutch Juvie Hall over pulling, you know, $50 million worth of cocaine out of a container and throwing it to the Albanian mafia over a fence or whatever. So this stuff is weird, you know, and this is I feel really because the things I came away with is you simply can't compete with the scale

because it's 27 different law enforcement, you know, in Europe, let's say it's roughly 30 or whatever. So roughly 30, everybody's got their own judicial system, they've got their own police system, they've got their own internal politics, they've got their own foreign relations with everybody else, it's all very messy. So Europe's in charge

of wrangling that and trying to get everybody to work together. They feel like they need more power. I'm not suggesting a war on drugs American style for Europe, but I will say this is if anybody and cops have even told me this, if they really want to track actual money,

from these guys in Antwerp and Rotterdam and stuff like that. Some of the guys that we were looking at. You know, one cop told me, look, you know, we've got 49 detectives basically that worked roughly 50. Federal police detectives in Antwerp that work narcotics and worked the port. You know, they're working on the drug gangs and the cartels. They call them clans because they're all family units in Antwerp. And so he was like, but you know, you got to understand, like one of the reasons why I talk to you as a journalist. because you can track finances and money.

And I was like, what do you mean? He's like, we've got college degrees, man, but we're just a bunch of cops. He's like, we don't have the resources to go through like Panamanian shell companies. And like, this is serious crap. We don't have animals. If we do, we have a handful of people

who know how to do that. And they're always busy. They're always swamped. And so this is where you can tell if they want to track the money and they want to get stuff really done, involve the U.S. Because the DEA can track it.

The U.S. Department of Treasury can track it. The scale of the economy looking at the problem is so much bigger. So what you find is, like, I think a lot of those Antwerp metric ton drug busts that I got to watch in progress or whatever, a lot of that, they're not finding it on the dock. They're getting intelligence probably coming from the USDA, probably Belgian intelligence, probably other law enforcement agencies throughout South America. and they're hearing, all right, this container's got a ton in it. You should stop it off the canaries or something and take a look.

So that's the crucial role the Americans play, and that's a role that Europe, by design, has an incredibly difficult time getting around. It's the same thing that we saw with them trying to battle those ISIS cells I first started talking about. Once you're inside Schengen, I mean, I'm still using a Dutch SIM card. I never had to show an ID for. Yeah, yeah.

And then I could just get on a train and go to Belgium, in and out. Thanks, yours too. What does Ravs stand for anyway? To me, it's the remarkably advanced vehicle. Really? To me, it's the runway approved vehicle for its amazing style. What about remarkably adaptable vehicle because of its versatile cargo space? Or really admired vehicle?

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Now I have a completely different law enforcement system that's looking for me. Am I sick of that? Within two hours, I'm in Paris. Okay, I'm going to buy a new SIM card from Paris and never show any idea. How are the cops supposed to track you like that? There's a certain amount that they can do, and they've gotten better at it, but it's still, at each stage of the way, you've got to involve another bureaucratic organization. You've got to get the French to help you.

They do their best to help each other, but there's rivalries, there's limited resources. Everybody's competing for the same resources to try to go after gangs that'll help them. You know, and all this stuff, it's just, it's wild. So Europe needs a more unified strategy on it. But I don't know how you do that. That's a political reform that I don't understand.

You know, as much as I think Europe poll was really interesting, they don't have guns and they can't arrest anybody. Yeah, Europe is drowning in drugs, I guess, and there's 27 different guys with one set of water wings trying to try to save everyone. It's how it feels like. That's part of why I did the project because honestly, look, these guys involved,

the people that are covering the story, the Irish reporters that cover the Kenahan's, the Dutch reporters that covered Taghi and the whole Moroccan mafia guys, the guys who wrote the Morocco mafia book. These are all excellent journalists, and they've done a phenomenal job on this story for 10 years. I didn't really bring a lot to the table

on that. Because I can't do a better job of covering Redwantaghi than Vauter Lombus or Paul Vultz. Like that's what these guys do all day. They're from Amsterdam. They've been reporters there for 20 years, you know, on the same beat. They're all tight. What I could do, though, was do what Europe has a hard time doing, which is take a step back and see how everybody connects to each other. Because Vowler doesn't, just like the cops, those reporters are reporters, man. They don't have time. they're covering what's happening on the street in Amsterdam. They're covering Taghi's trial. They're covering the latest news on the Kinnahans in Dubai if they're in Dublin.

Okay, they're doing the Hutch trial. They're doing all this stuff. But they know about the connections. Everybody talks to each other a little bit. I found, like most of these journalists, we all kind of know each other now and trade info and tips. But the fact is they've got their beat and it's the Kinnahans. You know, and then they've got their beat and it's the Moroccan mafia.

And then the Spanish guys have these stuff that they're doing at, El Pais and stuff. They're really good reporters. So I try to do that when I look at a big project like this, because that's where I can bring some value, is being able to see a slightly different view, because I know how blinded you can get. I was in Beirut for 12 years. I saw Beirut differently than other people do.

But you could step away from what I did and see something different because I was living in it. And so I think that that's all very real stuff. Yeah, this is where I should appeal to German journalists to look into the money laundering from the mob who's going through their country as well, having seen that for many, many years. I'll give you one,

we should wrap up, but I'll give you one story on that, because originally I got into this on money laundering with the Andrangina. Because they are all over Eastern Germany, particularly, but all over Germany, all over Eastern Europe. And I was joking around, like, I was in Berlin, it's okay, Alexander Plotz,

and I was walking around, and I realized that, okay, there was like a chain pizzeria with a random Italian man. And I ate at one of them. And then I was walking by and I got confused because it was the same place with a different name, two blocks over. And I look in and it's got the exact same menu.

And then I start counting them and there's five. Two of them have the exact same menu are not really well decorated. There's some guys in there. They'll make you a pizza, but they're not the business ones. but they're right there, like a block away from the really busy ones off of Alexander plots.

And you realize the same people own all this stuff, and it's clearly money laundering. So I jokingly said this to some cops, and an Italian cop. And the Italians, again, they've been in this type of war now for a long time, and they're much better at it than the rest of Europe. And he just starts laughing, and he was like, you want to hear the story about the Germans.

And I was like, yeah, it's like, look, the problem with the Germans is, you know, they're very organized, but if your papers are in order you can do whatever the hell you walk. Preach. You know? And he was just like

as insane as it sounds. He goes, so what we get is like a guy from Calabria turns like 19 and he goes to like random town in eastern Germany where his cousin happens to own a pizzeria. They're moving him out.

They're moving him up into the organization into his drina, as they call it. And so he's like, that guy then registers with the Germans, Schengen's, Panet. The Germans look at his stuff. He's a pizza waiter.

He's making 25,000 euros a year. Everything is good. All the papers are nice. Next year, he wants to invest 30 million euros in a shopping mall. And the Italians are like, hey, why don't you ask him where he got the 30 million euros? And the Germans are like, we can't do that.

Yeah, that's... His papers are in order. You know, like, what are you talking about? And so this is like, you know, one thing that I'd say is I don't love state overreach. But when it comes to this stuff, I've noticed that one thing that's really useful is at a certain point, you should have to explain to the cops where you got all that money.

And I know it's a privacy thing, but it's also just like, come on, man. The Italians, I don't think they're really suffering from privacy, but if you've got an extra million in your account that you can't explain, they just take it. Yeah, yeah. Until you can tell them where you got.

And they will aggressively do it. And that's how you hurt dudes. Belgium has a tough time shutting things down. The mayor of Amsterdam has an easier time. So if there's a Shisha Lounge, there's an infamous Shisha Lounge

in the podcast, but like that place is shut by orders of the mayor and they can just shut things down. Whereas in Belgium you got to go to court, you know, and like the Pokey Bowl guy, we had a Pokey Bowl bombing campaign

in Antwerp last summer. Fair enough. Because Pankakehouse also got blown up. But yeah. Well, again, it's money laundering by the clans. These are all like brothers of people who run organizations, and they were blowing up each other's stuff. The mayors had a tougher time shutting that down.

Whereas in Amsterdam, they'll just pull the plug if they decide that you're doing something wrong and it comes to somebody's attention. But they can't seize your money, not as easily. There's cash. But if you've done it even vaguely legally, you're going to get left alone. Whereas that's not good enough in Italy.

You know, the Italians really want to see the receipts and stuff. But he was joking about Germany, and he said it's gotten better a little bit since that 2007 massacre. The Germans started taking it a little bit more seriously. But again, they see it as an immigration, immigrant, these swarthy people from the south. They're not, you know, they don't see it as an institutionalized problem on their end. And I hate to tell you this, but like the Andrangida financed the rebuilding of East Germany. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

They paid for that. Yeah. You know, like, if you see, I mean, if you see Napoli Pizzeria in rural, like, East Germany, where do you think that came from, man? You know, like, and the construction companies, the concrete companies, this is why we can never tell really how big they actually are. Because, like, how do you define what's legal and illegal at some stage with these guys? I would say most all of that money in the 90s and early odds.

This was investments that the Andrangina had gone into cocaine from being basically a kidnapping gang. they invested their kidnapping gang money into cocaine and started because La Colosinoza was mostly heroin. So they saw an opening, started moving huge amounts of it. And right then the wall comes down. And they've got all this cash sitting around and like literally boxes of cash in Colabria

with no idea what to do with it. And suddenly you get a Eurozone and East Germany and Czech Republic and Poland all in need of massive infrastructure overhauls. I feel like we're, we're, um, slipping into like rise and grind business podcast territory as well just just keep up scaling your business guys and then you're going to you're going to finally get to the top of the file brazen refused to pay me in cocaine that was my i wanted to be paid in cocaine that's the one

thing that i've learned is if you can get paid in cocaine you're on your way okay but the flip side to that is a buddy a guy that i interviewed about that i asked him whether or not he was saving up because there's this cliche that's fairly true certain guys will save up about 25 grand to buy a kilo of their own from one of these shipments. And then they'll cut it three times, sell it, buy two more. And then five years later, you can be in Dubai if everything goes right for you. So I asked a guy whether or not he was doing that.

And he goes, yeah, bro, I'm saving up 25 grand. It's to replace my Dukadi motorcycle that got stolen last year. Are you kidding me? I am not doing that. And I was like, why not? He's like, I have a really good life. He's like, I don't pay taxes. I make about six figures.

I took my girlfriend to a ruba. you know and I stay off of everybody's radar if I want to go that big if once you start having kilos you have to guard kilos you have to trust people you have to kill people if they betray you he's like it's a mess you end up dead he was like I am perfect where I am like it was really interesting he laid out the entire like problem with being the drug lord he was like within a year you can't trust anybody because now you've got a store and move cocaine you know and like it's got you can't sit on it 24-7. It's a phone. This ain't no NTF, man. Like, you know, it's cocaine. People will steal it. People will steal your cash and you can't go to the cops. So to him, that's a step

up in danger that's just nowhere near worth it. But he's seeking out like a solid upper middle class living doing what he's doing. And virtually no risk of arrest. Well, nobody's looking for him. Let that be a lesson that we can all take home with us from this podcast. Mitch, I should say Get paid in cocaine. Yes. I've got to learn the funding rules around YouTube and apparently you're not allowed to say cocaine.

So we're just going to have to bleep that word constantly throughout this show, which is going to say great. What are we doing a show on? Why on earth would you bring me on? All I do is talk about cocaine. Okay, this is all I've been talking about for a year. It only dawned on me like about 50 minutes in. I was like, oh my God, yeah, we've got to like,

we've got to get the editor on this, but whatever, people know. Well, let's just re-record it and I'll call it Yeo. Get Peyton Yeo, kids. That might be our, that might be our age range. Yeah, I don't know. It might work better, but.

Oh, my God. Anyway, people can find Gateway Project Brazen. I mean, anyone who's finding this show will be able to find that on Spotify. buy iTunes, Apple, wherever you're going to get your shows. Anything I'm missing, anything you're working on, anything we should know? Just, you know, I'm moving on to, you know, starting to look at some of the other organizations.

I'm reporting, I mean, I'm basically back at Vice as a senior writer for now. We say for now, with all things involving Vice. Yeah. For now. One of your hands is under the table, so I'm assuming there's a cross fingers somewhere. Yeah, I don't know. You know, you get a little fatalistic at some point. Like, keep in mind, I've been laid off from every job I've had in journalism, basically.

That's like after about two and a half years. Yeah, just straight up, I always joke is I've never been let go without my boss getting fired. That's my point of pride. Like, my boss also goes when I go. But so I'm going to be working on stuff like that. I mean, obviously, there's a ton to do with Ukraine. I spent a year basically looking at these guys in these cartels, and there's been a lot going on, obviously, with Ukraine, even across Europe, not just in Ukraine,

but Wagner's stuff. There's so much stuff to look at right now. So I'm going to be looking at, you know, doing some reporting. That's why I'm here in Albania. I've spent a lot of time in the Balkans, but I hadn't spent a lot of time in Albania. And it's an, like, it's a unique country, very unique in some ways. I kind of can't believe it. It's sitting here in the middle of Europe, and it's like two million people are all in on a secret,

and they do not share it. It's really funny. They're lovely. I think they're great, but it does feel like you're in the middle of something. You know, like, who are these people? And how are they talking in their proto-Oryllian language no one can understand? You know, like, but I'll be doing that stuff. And just grinding away.

I mean, the big projects, you know, you want to hit marks, but you don't always know exactly how you're going to do it. Like, I'd like to do something on Serbia. I'd like to do something on the Balkan cartels. Obviously, there's always spook stuff going on across Europe because of Putin and the war in Ukraine. So, you know, all that stuff. All right, well.

Rise and grind. Yeah, as always. It's been an absolute pleasure, Mitch. We'll have you back on because you just brought out a massive, massive story advice. I'll put a link to that also in the blurb to this one as well, because I think people should read that right away. Maybe we'll come back to you on that as well. That must have taken you eternity.

It was a long couple of weeks, basically. It was happening at the same time we were finishing Gateway. Jesus. And so it was basically the same two-week period. And then I was doing media, you know, I started doing some limited media for gateway. So that was like a 10-day period. I remember when you and I first were trying to hook up

and then like I had to cancel and my internet was down and I had to cancel and then your internet was down. Like we missed this by about a week. Thank God. If I had been on a video interview like even a week ago, I would have been like, I don't know. I just, can I have some cooking?

You know, like, it's really, it was terrible. So thank God we did this now. I'm much more alert and engaged. Well, I have no idea because I have been on my headphones, but maybe my son has been screaming his face off. I have no idea. So I'll have to apologize. Let's let you go.

We've done an hour. Yes. I'll talk all day, but I'm also an introvert. So I'll have to nap for six hours after this. Well, Albania is a lovely place to do that in as well, I'm sure. Finally, it's not raining. I'm going to the beach next week. I'm actually taking my first vacation over here.

I'm getting, yeah, I'm turning. I might even change sim parts. So if I'm hard to reach in the next slide. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th,

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