[dramatic music]
[Narrator] Amsterdam, July of 2021.
On the banks of a canal in the city centre,
a crowd of people gather to pay their respects.
Some of them shed tears.
They came from all over the Netherlands to pay
their last respects to one of the country's
most famous figures, Peter de Vries.
[audience applauding]
The star journalist of Dutch television,
shot dead in the street a few days earlier.
[dramatic music]
Peter de Vries was 64 years old,
an investigative journalist specializing in criminal cases.
For more than 30 years,
he kept Dutch viewers on the edge of their seats
with his hard-hitting investigations.
[announcer speaking in foreign language]
You’re watching the programme that will reveal what the police and the mob,
have always wanted to keep secret, but you want to know.
For several months, he'd been working on a story following
an ultra violent mafia
that was operating in the Netherlands.
There was a price on his head,
but he refused police protection.
His murder took place in the heart of Amsterdam.
It's 7:00 PM.
Peter de Vries in a light coloured suit
leaves the studio where he recorded his program.
He goes home.
He doesn't know that the killers have been following him.
[guns blasting]
Peter is shot five times at close range.
He was such an important person for the Netherlands and really appreciated.
He became a victim of what he was fighting so hard against
so I felt compelled to come.
It's really shocking, horrible that something can happen.
Then you're back from work and then you're shot.
What do you think this means for Dutch society?
A collapse.
I've been to the crime scene once or twice,
I've talked to people and it's unbelievable...
The sadness, the emotion, the silence.
Atrocious!
What do you mean by "collapse"?
That our society is somehow becoming less and less safe.
What is happening to this country?
It’s a peaceful country.
[Narrator] This murder is not a unique case.
This is the latest in a series of assassinations coordinated
by drug traffickers,
a phenomenon that is now threatening the whole of Europe.
It seems hard to believe,
but the Netherlands with its tulip fields and windmills,
is now the new playground of drug cartels.
In less than ten years,
the Netherlands and Belgium have become the main gateway
for cocaine into Europe.
[dramatic music]
This is because the two largest ports on the continent are located here.
Rotterdam and Antwerp.
Thousands of ships from all over the world
pass through every week.
It's now estimated that between 50% and 80% of the cocaine
consumed in Europe is hidden in these containers.
For customs offices, it's a real headache.
It's impossible to check all the loads.
Paul Meyer was one of the players in this traffic in the 2000s.
He agreed to reveal some of his tricks to us.
This is a boat from South America,
and then you know that this boat is coming back here.
So you need people here, or you don't need somebody.
Somebody put containers out and simple.
It's not difficult.
[Narrator] In the ports fear has set in.
The dockers are constantly harassed by traffickers
who want to recruit them.
They try to get your name
and when you don't cooperate with them, they threaten you.
And they attack you or your family.
It's a dangerous business.
[explosion booms]
This traffic gave birth to a new mafia,
led by Dutch people, all of Moroccan origin,
the Mocro mafia.
Powerfully armed,
these gangs are ultra violent and do not hesitate
to use torture.
One of their members testifies.
[dramatic music]
If someone has to die, he will die.
It doesn't matter if he is with a woman or a child.
He has to die.
These drug traffickers feel invincible,
attacks on journalists,
a murder of a lawyer.
Even the Dutch Prime Minister is not safe
from their threats.
A terrifying prospect to end up on their blacklist.
I'm protected by the Dutch military police,
a special unit of them, a very professional unit.
But I'm not allowed to say anything
about how this protection is organized.
[Narrator] This cocaine trafficking generates
tens of billions of euros each year.
The authorities are concerned.
Are Belgium and the Netherlands
becoming the first narco states
in the heart of Europe?
A suburb of Amsterdam, March, 2022.
The beginning of an extraordinary trial.
A large police force was deployed around this building,
which at first sight seems to be ordinary,
but is in fact highly secure.
A bunker,
it has been specially designed for trials
related to organized crime with surveillance cameras,
armoured windows, and permanently closed shutters.
It's here that one of the most powerful bosses
of the Mocro mafia would be judged.
He arrives in an armoured vehicle.
Ridouan Taghi, 44 years old.
According to the police,
he controls 30% of the cocaine traffic in Europe
and has an estimated fortune
of almost a hundred million euros.
Alongside him, 16 of his accomplices.
They're being prosecuted for six murders and approximately
20 attempted murders.
An intense trial.
It's forbidden to film or even draw the faces of magistrates.
Journalists follow the debates in a small room far away.
According to Woulter Laumans, an expert on criminal cases,
this trial is a first in the Netherlands.
The prosecutors are now anonymous.
They ask us not to write down their name,
also of the judges.
And it says something about the fear
that's around the whole Marengo trial.
[Narrator] In the courtroom,
protected by bulletproof glass,
the key witness of the trial.
He's the former right-hand man of Ridouane Taghi.
But since he agreed to collaborate with the police,
there's been one death after another in his entourage.
When they announced that they had a crown witness.
Within weeks, his brother was killed.
Later on, his lawyer was murdered,
and then Mr Peter de Vries became his trust person,
his representative in the media.
And he got murdered last summer.
[Narrator] From the depths of his prison,
Ridouane Taghi reigns terror.
The witness's first lawyer had been murdered at his home
in front of his wife.
Today, a new lawyer replaces him.
He lives under close protection, 24 hours a day,
seven days a week.
He agreed to meet with us.
[dramatic music]
[gulls crying]
Peter Schouten arranged to meet us at the long beaches
along the North Sea, two hours drive from Amsterdam.
He's 65-years-old and his life has changed with this trial.
I'm now in the protection for a year, more than a year.
[Journalist] How does it feel living like this?
Well, it's a little bit to be like a package,
but actually I'm proud I can do this job,
and I would never let anybody intimidate me.
It's important that a suspect has a lawyer.
Somebody has to do it.
And for me, it feels important that in a democracy,
we follow the rule of law.
[Narrator] Military personnel in plain clothes
are never far.
The lawyer was a close friend of journalist Peter de Vries.
Both had been informed by the secret services
that they were on Ridouane Taghi's blacklist.
We were discussing the dangers, the risks,
and it was clear that we discussed the fact
that one of us could be shot.
But we of course, didn't know who would be the first one.
I told Peter that he was the biggest prize,
because he's very famous,
and therefore it would create far more chaos
than it would to kill me.
[Narrator] While working on this trial,
the two friends discovered how powerful
Ridouane Taghi's organization was
and how much of a threat it posed to the Netherlands.
My client has made statements up to 1,500 pages
about how they work and how they do the killings,
how they spot the victims.
It really shows a very organized way
of doing their business.
This is actually also something that makes it very difficult
for the Netherlands to fight with.
The authorities are quite unorganized,
and crime is quite organized.
[Narrator] These mafia gangs were built around
the cocaine trade that has exploded in the Netherlands in recent years.
But the government has long underestimated this phenomenon.
Yet in Amsterdam,
one man warned of the rise of this new crime.
This Walter Loumans,
the journalist we met during the trial of Ridouane Taghi.
He's written two books on the subject.
This the first one, "Mocro Maffia."
This was published in 2014.
I sold about, 140,000 copies we sold.
[Narrator] The book became a social phenomenon,
and even inspired a fictional series on Dutch television.
The Dutch witnessed the merciless war between gangs
to take control of the cocaine trade.
"Mocro mafia" is a slang term chosen by Woulter
to refer to the Moroccan mafia.
As we all know,
a lot of hashish gets smuggled from Morocco to Europe.
So what is the epicentre of European software culture?
It's Amsterdam with the coffee shops.
So the whole infrastructure was already there.
Then in Colombia,
the cocaine cartels started targeting Europe as a market.
They started shipping the drugs to West Africa,
and the cocaine went over the old hashish lines into Europe.
That's how it started.
So the guys who were running these lines became very rich,
and that's the explanation
why these guys are... a lot of them are of Moroccan descent.
[Narrator] The Port of Rotterdam was the main
moneymaking base for the Mocro mafia.
As the largest port in Europe,
30,000 ships pass through each year.
In 2021, customs managed to seize 70 tons of cocaine.
But this is only a small part of the drugs
that enter the country.
I've seen guys who went from young guys,
with a North Face jacket on the scooter,
in the banlieue area to multimillionaire,
who owns millions of real estate in Dubai.
In a time span of three years,
this can happen.
So it's not the gold dream, it's the white dream.
That's why Ridouane Taghi stands model
for this new generation of Dutch criminals.
He started dealing marijuana and then at a certain point,
he replaced the hashish for bricks of cocaine,
and he became very wealthy.
[Narrator] Fifty kilometres from Amsterdam,
Laserdref High Security Prison,
where the country's most dangerous criminals are locked up.
Vito Shukrula regularly visits his clients there.
At 32 years old,
he's one of the Mocro mafia's favourite lawyers.
He's familiar with the profile of young people
who are recruited by traffickers.
When you talk to these guys,
you find out that they don't have much in life.
Sometimes they have a very, very bad childhood with a lot of violence,
or they don't have anything,
bad schooling, bad education, low intelligence.
And they are very vulnerable and they are easy targets
for guys in the underworld.
[Narrator] He's surprised by the speed
with which these young recruits
go from petty crime to extreme violence.
Before there was people,
they were professional hit men.
But nowadays you see young people 18, 19 years,
and they maybe start with stealing a bike.
And then within two, three months
they get handed a Kalashnikov from someone, and they shoot somebody.
[Narrator] Vito set up his practice
in the suburbs of Amsterdam
in an area inhabited mainly by the Moroccan community.
Don't need it anymore?
[Journalist] No.
- Here you better stop. - [Journalist] Sorry?
[Vito] To film here.
[Journalist] Why shouldn't I be filming here?
They're gonna kick you.
They're gonna beat you.
[Journalist] Why?
[Vito] Why? Because they're criminals.
They don't want the neighbourhood to be filmed.
Okay.
The guys that live here, one of them has a brother, got life imprisonment,
for shooting at police, so they don't care.
If the police here, they always come to arrest someone
with three, four, or five cars.
'Cause they're gonna get into a fight.
It's not safe.
[Narrator] Today the Mocro mafia accounts
for half of his clientele.
He built his reputation by getting
one of their leaders acquitted.
Ironically, his parents were fans of the film, "The Godfather".
So they named him Vito in memory of Vito Corleone.
[dramatic music]
The lawyer has noticed that the cases he's dealt with
are getting increasingly violent,
often with weapons of war.
[explosion booms]
Like this raid on a house in the suburbs of Amsterdam,
where the police discovered an arsenal.
[dramatic music]
So this is a case about
a large stack of weapons
that was found in a garage
with machine rifles,
AK-47,
grenades,
revolvers.
Everything that you need to kill people
can be found in this kind of garage.
If you're talking about license plates, stolen cars,
heavy artillery, suits, hoodies,
everything can be found in there and it shows
the level of professionalism that people use to kill people.
[Narrator] The war between the different Mocro mafia gangs
is said to have left more than a hundred people dead.
The amount of violence and the way that they use it
is getting more and more extreme as to show who's tougher,
that they want to show each other,
"I'm the boss, I can come with more extreme violence than you,"
to just try to scare each other off.
But the thing is that it keeps going on and on and on,
and with beheadings and shooting people in broad daylight,
even if they're with a baby or with a wife.
So there's no rules in this game.
[Narrator] Here are some examples of text messages
sent by Ridouane Taghi to his men in the field.
I need a bloodbath and nothing else...
The 'Yougo' is no longer alive,
the dog has been shot 5 or 6 times in the head...
Better shoot that butcher. Everyone can know it's from me.
He spoke with the police...
[Narrator] But it was during a raid that the Dutch police discovered
that the Mocro mafia had reached a new level of horror.
June 2020, they storm a farm.
[explosion booms] [dramatic music]
Law enforcement agencies discovered that it served
as a rear base for a drug gang,
a competitor of Ridouane Taghi.
They inspect the rooms one by one,
they find no drugs or money.
But in a garage,
seven containers transformed into a cell,
with soundproof walls and handcuffs fixed to the floor.
[soldiers yelling]
In one of them, a stock of police uniforms.
This container fitted out as a torture room,
a dentist's chair with straps and handcuffs,
and in the corner pliers, pincers and even a blow torch.
[dramatic music]
We managed to get in touch with a member of the Mocro mafia.
You mean near the fast food restaurant?
Is it accessible by car?
Vito, the lawyer acted as our intermediary.
[dramatic music]
A meeting behind closed doors under a bridge
in the suburbs of Amsterdam.
The man is 34-years-old.
He belonged to a rival clan of Ridouan Taghi.
He was the boss' right-hand man.
Twenty years of Mocro mafia under his belt.
The problem in the criminal world is
that when you are young, you want to earn money quickly,
you want nice clothes, nice cars...
And so you start with the little things:
you steal a little, you sell a little bit of drugs
and without realising it, you fall into another world.
And after that, there is no turning back.
[Narrator] Very quickly, the young recruits become soldiers,
capable of killing on command to prove their allegiance.
How much money is someone to get paid to kill somebody?
The cheapest is four thousand euros.
The most expensive, depending on the importance of the person...
It can reach millions.
Here in the Netherlands there is no honour and respect for people.
If someone has to die, he will die.
It doesn't matter if he is with a woman or a child.
He has to die.
What do you think about Ridouan Taghi?
I have no answer to the question.
[Journalist] What's his reputation?
[Interviewee] Bad.
Angry.
I would say that it's like a monster. A monster, like a devil.
[Journalist] People are still afraid of him,
even though he isn't there.
Yes, that's normal.
He still has his contacts outside.
He is a very powerful person with a lot of money.
So you have to be very careful what you say and what you do,
because he will kill you if he has to.
It wouldn't keep him awake at night.
[Narrator] A few months after this interview,
the Mocro mafia attacked the highest level of the state.
"Dutch Prime Minister threatened by the cocaine industry.”
"In the Netherlands, the threatening shadow of the Mocro mafia.”
Prime Minister, Mark Rutte,
had just announced that he was going to give
an exceptional budget of 430 million euros
to help the police fight against drug traffickers.
It was after this announcement that the police discovered
that Mocro mafia spotters had started to follow him.
The politician who used to be close to his fellow citizens,
and travelled by bicycle,
was immediately placed under heavy protection.
[dramatic music]
To organize the counter attack,
the Netherlands turned to Italy,
a country that has become an expert in the fight
against the mafia.
The Dutch Minister of Justice, herself went to Rome.
[voices chattering]
For two days,
she met with magistrates and police officers specializing
in the fight against organized crime.
She improvised a press conference on the spot
with the Dutch media.
One wonders if we, the Dutch citizens, are aware
If we are aware
that organised crime has taken over our streets.
But it is there!
In the Netherlands, it would be good to be less naive
and to see that what
is happening in Italy.
is also happening in our streets.
[Narrator] She was appointed Minister of Justice & Security
only a few months ago.
At 45, she has become the new face of the fight
against the cocaine mafia.
[Journalist] In Europe now,
everybody discovers the strongness of the narco mafia.
Do you think that the Netherlands is the frontline
now in Europe?
I think we are because our open economy,
and our excellent infrastructure we have,
which is great and beneficial for the typical Dutchman,
is also being abused by criminals.
So we see that we are an entrance towards Europe,
and the rest of the world of drugs coming in and going out.
So that means that if we want it or not,
we are in front of this battle,
which is also with our neighbours,
with Belgium, with France, with Spain,
also with Germany and Italy.
[Journalist] You're going to fight against them.
Are you afraid?
- Personally? - [Journalist] Yeah.
No. Then I should've chosen another job.
[Journalist] Some people say,
and some ministers say that the Netherlands could become
a narco state.
What do you think of that?
No, that would mean that politicians are being paid
by drug criminals which is not the case.
[Journalist] Not the case?
Definitely not. Definitely not.
Thank you so much.
[Narrator] But while the Netherlands is taking steps
to counter attack,
the Mocro mafia has already found a new target,
Belgium.
The motorway between Antwerp and Rotterdam
is nicknamed the "Drugs Motorway."
This is one of the routes used by traffickers
to flood the European market with cocaine.
[police radio chatters]
In an unmarked vehicle, Thierry is on the lookout.
He belongs to the mobile gendarmerie brigade.
It's mission: to intercept suspicious cars.
We're going to be looking more specifically at BMWs, Audis
and other fast cars.
[indistinct chatter]
Suddenly he has a catch.
A car is suspicious.
[indistinct chatter]
What is it that jumps out at you?
Driver behaviour.
A little wary, a little nervous.
Just a feeling: the way he looks at me when he passes.
In a few seconds, he catches up with the car.
The Skoda here. We follow a black VW Polo...
Thierry was right.
The vehicle is already known for transporting drugs.
The car is escorted into a motorway service area.
On that day,
the federal police and Belgian customs joined forces
for a major operation.
They're increasing the number of checks and they search
all the cars one after the other.
This morning, most of the seizures involved cannabis.
What did you find?
A bag of marijuana.
But also more unusual products,
like these bottles of laughing gas.
And in the late afternoon, the police hit the jackpot.
Thanks to this special van.
[siren beeps]
Inside a mobile scanner allows the cars to be examined
in real time and to find what could be hidden
under the bodywork.
This is the light around the car and above...
Below the light box, a suspicious bag,
locked in a secret cache invisible to the naked eye,
We need to find the bag... How does it open...
Bart Vertessen heads the federal police's anti-drug unit.
And in ten years of service,
he has learned to outwit the ingenuity of traffickers.
You have to turn on the engine,
you have to put the defrost on,
you have to turn on the ignition
with a little screw that is here.
And then the second boot opens.
With the cover fitted.
Inside in a simple plastic bag, two kilos of pure cocaine.
A small fortune.
What is the market value of this?
€50 per gram, you can do the maths yourself,
the guy won't sleep well tonight.
This trafficker, a Dutchman of Moroccan origin,
has just lost a hundred thousand euros.
He was coming from Rotterdam and was to deliver
the cocaine to Brussels.
In 2021, Belgium became a new cocaine hub.
That year,
the Belgian federal police succeeded in decrypting
thousands of messages exchanged by traffickers.
In a fortnight, they conducted more than 200 searches,
seized 17 tons of cocaine and 1 million euros in cash.
It was the Belgian federal prosecutor himself who announced
the extent of the phenomenon on the news.
The vast majority of the messages we intercepted
were related to drug trafficking.
And we discovered a shocking world
with huge amounts of money.
Just the 17 tons of cocaine we seized
lost them 2 billion in three weeks.
At the Brussels courthouse, federal prosecutor,
Frederick Van Leeuw, agreed to meet us.
He still can't believe the amount of money generated
by the cocaine trade.
There are sums of money at stake that sometimes
approach the budgets of certain states,
And with these billions of euros,
a whole circuit of corruption is set up,
and then the lives no longer cost anything.
The Belgian police have discovered
a new type of crime that they're not used to,
gangs fighting for control over the cocaine trade,
murders,
settling of scores, Kalashnikov shootings,
and even grenade throwing as in this footage
captured by a surveillance camera in the city centre.
We have gone from organised crime that tends to hide,
to live happily let's live hidden,
let's make money without being seen,
to organised crime
that wants to scare and wants
to take over through violence.
These are situations that are
completely corrupting Latin America
and certain countries that are becoming states
that are almost run by drug traffickers or, in any case,
the drug traffickers have enormous influence.
Honestly, this is a situation that we must absolutely avoid here.
And today it's the city of Antwerp that particularly
worries the authorities.
Located in the north of the country,
15 kilometres from the Dutch border,
Antwerp, the second largest port in Europe.
A gigantic industrial zone that has become
the Mocro mafia's new playground.
A headache for the Belgian customs offices.
They are housed in this large, dark building,
in the heart of the port.
The fight against cocaine trafficking
has become their main task.
A tough challenge,
checking the 12 million containers that pass through
the port each year.
Kristian Vanderwaeren is the federal director of customs.
We now go to where the truck enters the verification site.
In this war, he has a secret weapon.
Every day, customs officers select containers,
and they direct them into this long concrete box,
in reality, a giant scanner.
Within a few minutes, the load is x-rayed.
How many trucks are scanned each day?
It can go up to 70 to 80 containers a day here.
Customs officers select containers
according to their origin,
the goods declared or sometimes information,
provided by the police.
The scans are then analysed in the offices.
[dramatic music]
You see the scan is done from the side, these are olives that were in there.
And here you see the image
there is the possibility to go into more detail and check here:
is there anything abnormal in there.
Nothing to report in this container,
but the director is keen to show us the ingenuity
of the traffickers on a previous seizure.
It's in a refrigerated container.
Here it is not normal that there is a wafer like this.
In this case, the cocaine was incorporated
into the structure of the container.
The scan can also indicate how deep the cocaine is hidden.
You see here that the colour, the density is different.
And based on that, the analysts give instructions to the auditors
that they have to go that many metres inside to find the drug.
In this refrigerated lorry,
customs officers only found about a hundred kilos of cocaine.
But in 2020, they made a record seizure,
thanks to information gathered by the police.
Eleven tons of pure cocaine discovered in a single container,
a total value of 450 million euros.
[dramatic music]
Never before in the world has so much cocaine
been found in a single container.
Here, cocaine seizures have increased 30 fold in ten years.
Three tons in 2013,
90 tons last year.
And customs officials estimate that this would represent
barely 10% of the drugs that actually enter the country.
In Antwerp, one man knows all the secrets of the port.
He met us at a cafe in the city centre.
It's hard to imagine this man was at the heart
of drug trafficking in the 2000s.
When they asked me, "What is the best job for me?"
Then I say "Smuggler."
'Cause everything is inside in that time,
especially because the parties, the money,
but also how you say, the pressure,
it's exciting.
[Narrator] Paul Meyer was the head of a smuggling ring.
He was paid by traffickers to bring their cargo of drugs
safely into the Port of Antwerp.
Twenty years of criminal life.
I know that people don't hear this,
they don't want to hear this,
and they want to see somebody who is saying now,
that I'm sad and I don't do it again, but I'm honest.
It was a beautiful time. It was a really beautiful time.
Okay, the product is not nice.
I agree. I don't discuss also about that.
So yes, I don't like it, but I miss the trafficking,
all the things around smuggling.
Yes, I miss.
[Journalist] How much money did you make?
A lot of money.
A lot of money. Every five weeks.
The turnover was 21 million,
between 21 and 25 million euro every five weeks.
And we make a lot of money. Yes, we make a lot of money.
[Narrator] According to the courts,
he and his associates earned more than 700 million euros
before the Belgian police caught up with them.
In 2007, he was arrested in Bangkok, Thailand,
and then extradited to Belgium where he was sentenced
to ten years in prison.
Today he's a free man.
He claims he has gone into construction.
But has forgotten nothing of the tricks
he used to foil the customs officers.
According to him, the Port of Antwerp is a sieve.
[Paul] Yeah. Here you can see here.
All this is... You see the water here is the port.
It's incredibly big till Holland.
[Narrator] Next to the historic centre of Antwerp, the port.
It is huge, covering 135 square kilometres.
[dramatic music]
Okay...
Now here you can see...
You just can go inside.
Normally you cannot drive here.
Now you can see yourself
how easily that you can come with your car...
till the boat.
And I mean,
this is a big difference with Rotterdam or the closed ports.
This is a open port.
[Narrator] Unlike the Port of Rotterdam
which is completely fenced off and closed to the public,
you can walk the length and breadth of the Port of Antwerp
and easily access the container storage areas
that are normally off limits.
Now, I told you, look you can see it yourself.
It's easy to drive here and nobody is saying something.
And when they want to organize this to close this gate...
Look here...
the wood.
Now, 80% from the wood is coming from there.
I think from countries like Brazil or Peru,
Brazil or whatever.
[Narrator] The wood comes mainly from Latin America,
as does the cocaine.
This type of cargo is therefore the ideal hideout
for traffickers.
We were able to access the containers
without any control for over half an hour.
We walk around sensitive and normally off-limit areas
without anyone stopping us.
This is a boat from South America.
So when you are clever,
you book your containers inside there.
It's easy when you have this information now,
and then you know that this boat is coming back here.
So you need people here, or you don't need somebody,
somebody put containers out and simple.
It's not difficult.
[Narrator] And to get this information,
it's sometimes enough to simply talk to the dockers
and seafarers who are on the key.
Hi, do you work here?
No, I've got my boat tied up over there. Do you need anything?
No, we are trying to understand why the port of Antwerp is so open
and why you can drive to the ship.
Normally, you have to announce yourself to the guard...
Yes, but I went all the way around to the Panama boat
and nobody asked me any questions. Nobody!
Is the Panama boat yours?
No, I'm moored just behind. A big tanker.
- Okay. - Tanker.
[person speaking in foreign language]
Seemingly a harmless conversation.
But for a smuggler, a valuable source of information.
Okay, it's in my language,
but you can see how easy you can talk with people.
He explained me everything.
He give me also other places here in Antwerp, in the port,
where you can go also with your car.
So I mean, information is easy to get here.
I only opened my window and I ask something.
And I didn't pay him for that information, so...
[Narrator] Corruption in the port is said to be rampant.
In 2021, the discovery by the Belgian police,
of thousands of encrypted conversations between traffickers
revealed the extent of the scourge.
Customs, police, shipping companies, transport companies,
security agencies.
The cocaine mafia has infiltrated
the entire port infrastructure.
Their main target, dockers.
We went to the bars in the port where they are said to meet,
with a hidden camera as the subject is sensitive here.
[Journalist] I hear a lot about corruption.
How does it work?
I mean, is there people coming to you,
and ask you for some money?
They try to get your name.
And when you don't cooperate with them, they threaten you.
And they attack you or your family. It is a dangerous business.
You better stay out of it. You better stay out of this business.
When you're in it,
it's very difficult to get out.
Do you know people?
And do you think it's possible I can get in touch with some?
No?
I think you'd better not do that.
Watch out what you’re doing.
[Narrator] The dockers know the risks
of revealing too much.
I know someone who has faced this problem.
The police caught him.
They put him and two of his colleagues behind bars.
And normally you are in detention for months.
Do you think he spoke?
Six months later, he was...
These threats are so frequent
that the main dock workers union made a prevention clip
to alert their members to the risks they take
when working for the mafia.
Hi Ben, do you want to make money? You want to buy a nice car?
What should I do?
Nothing special. Just move a container.
The clip features a smuggler who bribes a docker.
Is it dangerous?
No, if you don't want to do it, we'll find someone else.
But you'll miss out on €25,000.
Here's small advance, okay?
Yes, okay.
All right.
The clip alerts the dockers,
once they get involved, it's almost impossible to get out.
I thought we could count on you!
You're kidding! You have a nice family.
Maybe we could visit them...
For the traffickers,
the dockers are an essential cog in the wheel.
They are the ones who have control over the containers.
Niels worked for 10 years on the docks. Today he's retired.
[Niels] My job was to lift containers from the ship.
I operated mobile cranes, container cranes and stackers.
That means the big machines that take the containers
from A to B.
[Narrator] Usually on a ship like this,
the drugs are concentrated in one container,
and the traffickers have to isolate it
from the rest of the cargo in order to gain access.
Niels was approached several times, but always refused.
[Niels] A guy said to me,
"You have to put this container on the site."
That was a time that he said,
"It has to be fixed, it's broken."
And so I lift the containers and underneath it was intact.
So I said "Something wrong here."
And if you apply to them, they own you,
and then they offer you some money.
[Journalist] And how much money can you make
if you collaborate?
[Niels] I heard amounts from 20,000,
10,000, 20,000 euros, eh?
Yeah, but once you get the 20K,
the next time you get 10K maybe or 5K,
and you still have to do it.
If you don't do it, you're f**ked.
[Narrator] More surprisingly,
the traffickers have found another way to bribe
the dock workers.
They pay them in cocaine.
[Niels] Most of the young dockers who are applied now,
they use coke themselves because they're not able to get
the physical work that the docker has to do.
So they use coke to be more f**ked up,
to have more power to work.
And the traffickers, they know that.
So they pay the guys also in coke.
They say, "Okay, if you do this,
you get five grams," or this and that.
Or they make them addicted to coke and then they give 'em
a small amount that they can sell themselves or whatever.
[Journalist] Do you think that we still can fight
against these traffickers?
[Niels] It's a war nobody can win.
Nobody can win it.
[Narrator] In Antwerp,
some neighbourhoods are now completely plagued
by drug trafficking.
Cocaine arrives in such quantities
that it's sold on the streets.
A gram is the cheapest in Europe, 40 euros,
half the price than in Paris.
Now we're going to go to the red-light district,
but we're going to stay for 20 minutes,
no longer because otherwise it's going to get busy.
Filip De Winter has been a city counsellor
and a member of parliament for more than 20 years.
He leads a Flemish nationalist party, Vlaams Belang,
which is classified as far right.
- Hi, Filip! - Hi.
Is everything OK?
He is a major figure in Belgian politics,
but he's only accompanied by two bodyguards
as the neighbourhood is in the hands of the Mocro mafia.
A drug dealer lives above me, he has just been arrested.
And his wife continues to traffic in his place!
It is a family business.
We don't know what to do in these cases.
Today he's one of the few politicians willing to speak out
publicly about the violence in Antwerp.
He wants to show us a scene filmed by a surveillance camera
a few weeks earlier.
[dramatic music]
A man shoots his gun at the front of a house,
eight shots in the street.
The shooter is not hiding, takes his time,
and surprisingly is filmed by his accomplice
with a mobile phone.
There are incidents like this every day.
Shooting at houses.
Attacks with grenades, with Molotov cocktails.
There were 37 this summer. For 3 months.
Almost every 2-3 days, there is an attack.
These areas have become mafia areas.
It is really the mafia that rules.
Tonight, Filip de Winter is due to attend the city council.
Drug trafficking is on the agenda.
This is a sensitive subject on which the mayor
absolutely refuses to speak publicly.
I tried several times to question the mayor.
Yes, he doesn't want to.
Why do other public authorities, other political actors...
They do not want interviews with journalists
to show the truth in their neighbourhoods.
Because they think it is bad publicity
for the city of Antwerp.
It's the Omerta.
It reigns in Antwerp with everything that happens with the drug mafia.
Are some politicians afraid to confront the issue?
Of course.
They are afraid because it is supposedly bad publicity for our city,
but they may also be afraid
because there are threats, intimidation...
The mayor was intimidated. Perhaps also from others.
We don't know.
I have also received threats,
but we have to fight them while we still can.
[gentle music]
The city council takes place in the historic centre of Antwerp
in the majestic 16th century City Hall.
A solemn, formal setting.
But this does not stop Filip de Winter
from pounding his fist on the table.
He has just learned that some of the majority counsellors
have suggested that since the war on drugs
seems to be lost already,
cocaine use should simply be decriminalized,
and that makes him angry.
Drug use should be criminalised!
For all those who use drugs and sniff cocaine,
or whatever, as a recreational activity.
You have to dare to put a stop to it.
Why don't we call on all the personalities in Antwerp to say, and you first:
"It has to stop." You have blood on your hands if you use cocaine.
Don't buy that cocaine anymore.
You are helping and supporting the drug mafia.
You are directly responsible for the violence if you use cocaine."
The mayor does not want to enter into the controversy
of decriminalization.
According to him,
the city simply cannot win this war on drugs alone.
We have made specific efforts.
We have created special anti-drug units
within the police and they have been successful.
And you can see it in the crime figures.
But organised crime is international, and often run from the Netherlands.
And we can't fight it with just our municipal police.
In Antwerp, cocaine trafficking is estimated to be worth
50 billion euros.
This is the equivalent of five times the city's budget.
The drug traffickers are now extremely rich.
And as in Holland,
they do not hesitate to attack the state directly.
[dramatic music]
On the 24th of September,
police in Brussels foiled an attempt to kidnap
the Minister of Justice.
This member of the government who had issued arrest warrants
against Mocro mafia leaders based in Dubai,
now lives under heavy protection in an undisclosed location.
Let us be clear, if we give in to the criminal as a society
we will end up in South American conditions,
i.e. in a narco state where the drug mafia
is above the law and dictates everything.
Fortunately this is not the case here. And I'm sure it will never happen.
Belgium and the Netherlands may not be on the verge
of becoming narco states yet,
but one thing is certain,
the cocaine mafia has moved into Europe,
and is more powerful than ever.
[dramatic music]