Dutch Crime Lord's Life Sentence Upheld
Euronews reports that last Friday, Dutch judges upheld Willem Holleeder’s life sentence for ordering the murders of five people. Holleeder was first sentenced in 2019, as a result of a trial in which his sister, Astrid Holleeder, testified against him.
Holleeder was a Dutch ganglord, notorious first for being involved in the kidnapping of Freddy Heineken, and then for ordering the execution of Cor van Hout, who was his friend and accomplice in the Heineken abduction. Van Hout was also Holleeder’s brother-in-law, having married Sonja Holleeder with whom he’d had children.
Willem Holleeder, also known as Wim or “The Nose”, was known for a short time as the “huggable criminal”, as he would pose for selfies with self-proclaimed “fans”.
The kidnapping of Freddy Heineken was extremely high-profile, and the plot seemed to have been pulled straight from a Hollywood movie. He was abducted along with his driver, Ab Doderer, on November 9, 1983, and the pair were held for over 21 days.
Forbes reports that the kidnappers made contact with the police by dropping Heineken’s watch, Doderer’s papers, and a ransom note all bundled together in an envelope at a small police station. The note included instructions for the police to run an ad in the personal section of a Dutch newspaper reading: “The meadow is green for the Hare” to signal that the ransom was ready. Heineken and Doderer were forced to record a message that was used to be played over a phone call to direct investigators to the first of a series of buried messages leading police on a trail across the country. Sounds complicated so far?
The next step involved a car with a walkie-talkie used to radio instructions for the detectives to stop on a highway bridge in order to drop the ransom, which was roughly the equivalent of $30 million and weighed over 200 pounds, into a storm drain marked by a traffic cone. The five mailbags containing the ransom slid through the drain and landed on the flatbed of a waiting pickup truck, which allowed the crew collecting the ransom money to escape unnoticed.
The ransom was driven to a wooded area southeast of Amsterdam where it was buried in barrels before the crew rode away on bicycles. Reportedly, about $8 million of the ransom was not buried, and accomplices of van Hout and Holleeder were instructed to invest it into the drug trade.
Van Hout and Holleeder fled to France together. The two were on the run or in legal limbo in Paris and the French Caribbean for four years. They were finally extradited and convicted of the kidnapping in 1987. Detectives were able to find the pair by tracing calls that Van Hout made to Sonja Holleeder, and the two men survived France’s notorious Sante prison together.
In the Netherlands, the men were sentenced to 11 years in prison, but were released after only 5.
Sometime after the kidnapping, van Hout and Willem Holleeder had a falling out. Holleeder allegedly planned several failed attempts on van Hout’s life, before finally ordering a successful hit in 2003.
Holleeder was convicted in 2019 of ordering the murders of van Hout and four other people: the so-called "banker for the mob" Willem Endstra in Amsterdam in 2004, gangster John Mieremet in Thailand in 2005, building contractor Kees Houtman, also in 2005, and associate Thomas van der Bijl in 2006. His own sister, Astrid Holleeder testified against him. She submitted several secretly recorded clips of Willem confessing to various crimes. Whenever she had to publicly testify in court, she was seated behind an opaque screen. This way, her brother was theoretically prevented from intimidating her, and her appearance was kept a secret from the reporters crowding the courthouse. She had decided well before the trial to try and extradite herself, her husband, and her child from the family of crime she had grown up in. In 2016, she published “Judas”, a memoir about growing up in the Holleeder household and detailing her decision to turn against him.
CBS News writes that last Friday, 6/24/2022, Dutch judges upheld Holleeder’s sentence of life in prison, which was handed down in the aforementioned trial. This was the maximum punishment he could receive.
For further reading
Iain Martin’s “Kidnapping Freddy Heineken: The Story of Europe’s Largest Ransom”
Patrick Keefe’s article published on The New Yorker
Picture from CBS News, Dutch criminal Willem Holleeder at a courthouse in Haarlem on February 2, 2014 during his trail for allegedly threatening Dutch crime reporter and investigative journalist Peter R. de Vries. by ROBIN VAN LONKHUIJSEN/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
