(WHIMSICAL MUSIC)
(SPEAKS DUTCH)
(MAN SPEAKS DUTCH)
Amsterdam is the heart for the drug trade
for thousands of people who are in this game.
And by the mid '90s the police were using really strange methods
to arrest smugglers.
But the best-laid police plans can always go to shit.
(CAMERA SHUTTERS CLICKING)
(WOMAN SPEAKS DUTCH)
(MAN SPEAKS DUTCH)
It was absolutely mad.
If you're law enforcement,
you're supposed to do things by the book.
You know, don't play the game if you don't understand the rules.
# ISOBEL CAMPBELL & MARK LANEGAN: Come Undone #
# I'd do it all again
# But I can't get
# Close to you
# I come undone
# I come undone... #
(SHIP'S HORN BLARES)
REPORTER: Rotterdam is the world's largest port.
Hardly surprising that it's also Europe's biggest importing centre
for illegal trafficking.
By the '90s, if you were involved in the smuggling industry,
Amsterdam was definitely the place to be.
The Dutch did speak Dutch,
and the British spoke British...
..but we had the international language of smuggling.
I was looking desperately for something that could generate money,
and Amsterdam was the Wall Street of drug dealing.
It was somewhere where prices were set...
..products were introduced.
They're tested, they're sampled,
they're, basically, brought to the marketplace
before they're internationally distributed.
And there was one new frontier just about to happen.
A certain drug has a certain golden era, so to speak,
and the early mid '90s was really a powerful introduction to cocaine.
# THE PRODIGY: Breathe #
(SPEAKS ENGLISH)
When I'm riding my bike, the noise of the motor gets my soul,
gets my heart.
# Breathe the pressure
# Come play my game, I'll test ya
# Psychosomatic, addict, insane... #
(SPEAKS ENGLISH)
And there's only one place to find your fortune in Holland.
(MOTORCYCLE ENGINE REVS)
# ROOTS MANUVA: Witness #
In the beginning of the '90s, Amsterdam was like an animal place.
The red-light district, the Coffee shops.
You can go to everything, and you can smell everything,
you can taste everything, just like Sodom and Gomorrah.
Really, I felt it like, you know, I wanna be there, I wanna experience.
When I was 18 years old,
one of my friends are asking me, "Do you want to work as a bouncer?"
And when my friend was coming, he said to me,
"Just go with me to the toilet."
And he had a small envelope.
I see just like a white powder.
And he told me, you know, "This is good for you,
"because you can work the whole night."
And I was sniffing that coke for the first moment.
It give me so much energy.
Like 30 Red Bulls.
I was thinking that a lot of people was looking at me...
..everything in my body feels numb, I feel sexy.
Also it give me just a little bit of power,
that I can do more than ever before.
I think, "Wow, man.
"I want more of this."
# ROOTS MANUVA: Witness #
Cocaine at that time was, like, really, really booming.
And also the profit margin is larger than ecstasy.
So there was a lot of money to be made on cocaine,
so we started to sell it.
We were the gang known as the Delta Group by the Justice Department.
25 men who had a reputation
for being one of the more intimidating groups
because of the high number of people
who arem basically, known to have killed people.
Erm, where should I start?
Erm...
Yeah, so it's late '80s,
and I've been working as a software developer
for a number of years now..
..and I was just getting more and more fed up.
Life in an office just wasn't for me.
And at the same time, maybe I was also feeling the temptation
because my childhood friend was already involved in drug dealing.
And it just looked like a much more interesting life.
It wasn't even about the money, it was really about the excitement,
and the thrills and the challenges.
It's just a great life. (LAUGHS) Sorry, but it is.
I quit my job and asked my childhood friend if I could work for him.
(BANGS ON CAR DOOR)
And then one day we were actually just transferring gear
from one car to another...
..and we had observed police observing us.
Definitely, you see telephoto lenses, and stuff like that.
(CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS)
The police were really worried about cocaine
supercharging organised crime.
In the '90s, they needed something professional.
Being an investigative journalist was like being a detective.
That is a fact.
In the '90s, I needed a story which would make a difference.
I interviewed a criminal.
He told me he was being interviewed by a special police force.
And they were called the IRT.
So, what's the IRT?
He explained it to me.
The IRT was a specialised team, comprised of the best
of the best police officers from the Netherlands.
The super team.
It was experimental. Nobody knew about it.
Their plan was to use any means to contain organised crime.
The IRT was set up to take down Klaas Bruinsma,
the real kingpin of drugs in the '70s and '80s.
After he was killed,
they wanted to see who would take over
as the top criminals of the Netherlands.
There was one particular group -
the Delta Organisation.
They started to become the biggest criminal gang in the Netherlands.
It had three leaders.
Three people, they were supposedly the crime bosses of the Netherlands.
The IRT, their aim was to get to the top,
to the kingpins, the crime bosses.
(TENSE MUSIC)
(DOOR OPENS)
You're looking at quite a stretch here, my friend.
This was no small amount.
I mean...
(EXHALES)
..I imagine your girlfriend may visit,
the first few years...
sure.
But after a while...
she'll get bored.
You know?
Look for something else.
I'm not a rat.
OK.
Wait!
What do you want me to do?
(MOODY JAZZ MUSIC)
The IRT had some kind of informant...
..and he told me their plan.
They wanted the informant to offer the Delta group
a new line of drugs being imported into the Netherlands.
The IRT would then organise these drugs to be waived
through the Customs.
(TRUCK'S HORN BLARES)
The informant would then help the IRT follow
the drugs to the leaders of the Delta group.
And then they would arrest them and take the whole group down.
Or so they thought.
(TOILET FLUSHES)
I've got something for you. Whew.
I've got something for you. (LAUGHS)
Yeah, I've got a... I got a special deal.
A special deal for you.
I can get all the gear into the country, yes.
Why don't you just shut up? Shut up!
I got a... I got a special...
I got a special... I got a deal for you.
(EXHALES)
(SOBS)
(TENSE MUSIC)
Thanks for meeting with me.
There was this guy who approached the group with an offer.
And my boss, just after hearing him out, thought
that there was something fishy about it and it was too good to be true.
(GUN COCKS)
Why should we trust you?
It sounds like fucking bullshit!
No, no, no, no. Wait! Wait
He was trying to set us up.
That could've been a death sentence. That's just how those things work.
OK, look, if you don't kill me,
I can help you make so much money, I swear.
OK, OK, it's the police.
They have this crazy plan.
They gave me a free pass to get anything you guys want
through Customs,
so they can follow the gear and get to your boss.
What if we work together?
We can play them.
Yeah, he was, basically, made into a double agent.
Police assumed that we believed he was part of us now.
Everything that he knew he would tell us.
But, more importantly, he would convey everything
that we wanted them to know.
# SALT 'N' PEPPER: Push It #
The informant tells them we were transferring gear.
So, they'll be there with their cameras and stuff,
and they'll film us taking it.
And they say, "OK, we've got them now,
"and, hopefully, we can follow the trio of leaders"
But then we'll come up with a story like, it isn't what we wanted,
or we had to stash it somewhere else.
So you can just sell them bullshit all the time,
and because they don't know
that we're onto them, they will believe it.
The informant told the IRT, "You're getting there.
"Keep on going, you're getting close.
"Keep on this track
"because we're getting really close, keep on going."
Every time they got closer, so called closer, to this triangle...
..the informant said, "We have to do one more time.
"We have to do more transport."
(TRUCK'S HORN BLARES)
They had no idea we're stringing them along constantly,
so we, basically, had the government helping us
import and sell drugs.
So, yeah.
This method, the IRT method,
helping to import the tonnes of drugs,
they thought they had it all contained, but they didn't.
There was so much cocaine overflowing the Dutch market...
..that the criminals started exporting to the UK.
(DOUBLE BASS JAZZ MUSIC)
Quickly, get a picture of that!
Big, fat Rolex.
That's that.
There are people who use brute force and ignorance,
and there are people who use their minds,
and I've always used my mind.
I'm what you call a clue finder.
If something is a business opportunity,
I'll be searching for it.
The thing about the drug industry is it's about supply and demand.
In Britain, famous people were making cocaine
a lot more acceptable to do.
REPORTER: It's now the country's most high-profile drug.
Powder cocaine became known as pub grub,
so English, white, working-class guys,
who wouldn't have looked at cocaine before, suddenly was doing it.
So, the demand for cocaine has grown and grown and grown.
So, as long as I could find a good, strong supply line,
I had customers ready and waiting to buy.
And there was a lot of cocaine coming into Holland.
It was like almost a Santa's Grotto for a drug dealer.
Just amazing, really.
And if you were involved in the smuggling industry,
Amsterdam was perfect
because it is so central to Europe.
It allows you various routes, globally,
to get drugs through its airports, through its docks.
And there wasn't a place left on the plane,
or container ship that we wouldn't stash drugs.
We had an engineer that worked on one of the planes.
He could get anything off a plane the size of a small fridge.
We had one particular route where we used
to put them on the back of computer screens.
We'd have someone take two bags onto the flight,
pull the drugs out of it,
throw it into lost luggage and take the drugs out at the airport.
If someone's cleaning the toilets on an aeroplane,
put those five keys of cocaine in a compartment underneath the toilet.
We had gear in the nose of the plane,
we had it in the cargo,
we had it in dustbins,
we had it in every single moving mechanical part
that existed on that plane or ship.
So, we had a system
where things were running incredibly smoothly.
Everything is just smoother, and easier, and cheaper and faster.
So, everything is just on steroids now, that's the effect you have.
The criminals, they were given so much leverage by the IRT.
They became multi-, multi-millionaires
maybe even billionaires.
Yeah, we got a lot bigger and richer because of them, absolutely.
From the money exchanges that we were doing,
yeah, you can see that it must be millions every week.
(PISTOL COCKS)
We were kind of gun nuts,
so if we could get our hands on stuff, then we would buy it.
Handguns, a few machine guns.
50 kilos of Semtex,
which is a plastic explosive.
And then there were some rifles and some hand grenades.
So, we were just expanding in every direction,
we were getting better at what we were doing.
By all metrics, I think we were very successful.
Instead of battling the organised crime,
the IRT made it bigger
and more powerful and richer
than any organised crime group ever before.
The cocaine was ending up at the street.
They made a lot of money.
It was just free cash.
There are hundreds of thousands of users,
and you can say it's a free choice to use drugs,
but at a certain point it isn't.
I didn't have the coke under control.
The coke had me.
I was in a tunnel.
I don't see anything anymore,
but I only want to have that feeling,
that adrenaline feeling every moment and every day in my life.
First of all, it was a half gram.
And then I used one gram.
And after a couple of weeks and months I just want to use more.
After a year, every day I use three grams.
One gram was one hundred euro.
And a half gram of heroin every day.
I need 250 euro.
Every day, when I woke up,
I was thinking about how can I buy drugs for this day?
..first I sell drugs.
And after I was selling drugs,
as a bouncer I can take drugs from other people in the club.
Only to use it for myself.
Sometimes with my friends, you know,
we'd go to make a deal with some dealers,
and we'd go to there, but we don't bring the money, we bring a gun.
A lot of robberies we do with each other at the gas stations.
And it was a really, erm...
The IRT was active for several years already,
but cocaine was still flooding the market.
(DOUBLE BASS JAZZ MUSIC)
There is still a lot of crime.
There were no arrests, there were no seizures.
The IRT costs a lot of money, a lot of manpower,
but shows no result.
# CURTIS MAYFIELD: Superfly #
There was a decision made that the leads of this IRT thing,
that was in the hands of the Utrecht Police,
had to come over to the Amsterdam Police.
I already was in charge
of the crime squads in the Amsterdam Police Force,
and I had a reputation to bring results,
so the Chief of Police asked me to be the new leader of the IRT.
# Oh, superfly
# You're gonna make your fortune, by and by...
They worked in the special building in a secret spot in Amsterdam
and didn't share information.
# Trying to get over
# Trying to get over... #
The first morning in the IRT was not a morning of a warm welcome.
They weren't very excited for me to take over the lead of the team.
There was an atmosphere of suspicion.
The smell of the place was not good.
My feeling was they are hiding information.
They're trying to avoid to share their secrets with me.
So, I did some digging, and I got the picture
that there was never a criminal arrested
and never done a seizure of all these drugs.
It was completely insane.
So I confronted the colleagues with that.
I draw the whole line on the whiteboard.
I said, in my opinion, this is what happens.
Together with criminals,
we are ordering drugs from South America.
We are shipping drugs to the Netherlands.
We ask Customs...
"Don't check these container."
(TRUCK'S HORN BLARES)
And we put these containers, split them in several portions
and drive these portions of drugs to stashes for the criminal groups.
And we don't arrest the criminal,
we don't do seizures,
we just import a lot of drugs to the Netherlands and Europe.
And I asked them,
"When do you think where the point is you will catch the crooks?"
They didn't know.
I was really shocked.
It's completely illegal what we do.
It's completely criminal and I want to stop it.
..because I really had good parents.
She was in the kitchen, cooking for us.
I took something out of that. I think it was her necklace.
I was feeling like it was not good...
But I was really needing the drugs,
and, you know when I was selling it...
I was really thinking about her, about also my dad.
That the kind of things they have been through
to come here to Holland.
REPORTER: Most of the expatriates have now been integrated
into the community, but about a thousand are still living
in former German concentration camps like this.
My parents and other Indonesian immigrants
were treated really badly by the Dutch.
And, erm, when I was selling her necklace,
you know, I can buy three grams from it.
Yeah.
DIRECTOR: If your habit at that time was at least three grams a day,
all it got you was one day's worth of drugs.
Not only one day, a couple of hours.
It's not only about the last time
because it was a lot of times I was robbing her gold,
but also her bank account.
Even the money that she had in her pocket.
Seeing her emotion, seeing her pain,
she really was not trusting me anymore,
but because her mother heart for me was so much love
that she denied everything, to me.
And it was, really, for me, like, er...
It's emotional for me now, talking about it,
because she was really the best mum in my life.
DIRECTOR: Did you ever think about the people
that took the drugs that you were getting into the country,
or producing, and the negative effects that they could have had?
I don't think I have any responsibility,
or blame in that at all.
No one forced you.
It's a voluntary transaction between two adults,
two consenting adults.
Don't do drugs kids, yeah, whatever,
but if you do do drugs, it's on you.
All the Delta group cared about was just making money.
I think they were never worried about
the damage they would bring to people's lives.
At the time the IRT had been helping import
more than a hundred shipments of drugs.
On some occasions the police was actually driving the drugs
to where they were stashed for the criminals.
Then I realised I need to have proof.
I asked my police colleague from Criminal Intelligence,
"I would like to have a word with you when all the others are gone."
And then I said,
"You have all the secret and confidential information
"about all the transports, about all the informants in your computer,
"and you're going to give it to me right this evening.
"If not so, then this will be the last evening
"that you work with the police force. I will see to that."
And he handed me over two little dossiers,
and then he left the building.
It was a very exciting moment.
I think the smoking gun is in these documents.
And I felt very, very tense.
It's hard to believe that none of these involved detectives
ended up with cash in their own pockets.
If so, they won't let me in possession
of these papers for a very long time.
I decided to make a copy
of all the secret information about the transport.
I drove home like a mad man, fast, too fast.
And this copy, I put in a plastic case...
..and buried the documents in the ground.
Sort of crazy situation.
And I think this is my securance.
This is my lifeline.
And with this information I will stop the IRT and the Delta group.
(INSECTS CHIRRUPING)
(SINISTER MUSIC)
(SHIP'S HORN BLARES)
At that time there were a lot of drugs coming in from the Netherlands,
and our job was to stop it from hitting the streets of the UK.
Cocaine smugglers were organised criminals doing damage to the UK,
doing damage to people, children and families,
and that gave us our determination to arrest them.
At the peak, I would say of cocaine smuggling
I was comfortably in the top one percent of smugglers.
REPORTER: Despite the increase in drug seizures,
there's still no shortage of cocaine supply.
During that period,
I was responsible for importing
over a metric tonne of cocaine monthly.
REPORTER: Methods of smuggling are getting more and more devious.
Investigators fear that huge stockpiles of cocaine
destined for the UK are being built up in Holland.
At the peak of my success I had a huge shipment coming in.
Half a metric tonne of cocaine in a consignment of coconuts.
Destined for the fruit and veg market in London.
We literally put it in sacks, threw it on a container
and threw a bunch of coconut sacks in with that container.
(SHIPS' HORNS BLARE)
Sometimes we would have names
or intelligence provided by a human source
that pointed to a particular shipment.
(TENSE MUSIC)
(CHATTER ON POLICE RADIO)
It was all going smoothly.
Once the container arrived at the docks, they'd been cleared.
(SHIP'S HORN BLARES)
So if we established that we had a shipment of coconuts
coming into a market in London...
..we might still ship the coconuts to the recipient...
..in order to arrest some more senior people in the organisation.
I turned up at the fruit market, ready to oversee the handover.
Where I parked, keeping an eye on it...
(POLICE SIREN BLARES)
..two cars raced up to me,
and the guy jumped out with this iron bar
and started smashing the windows, shouting.
(GLASS SHATTERING)
Next thing I knew, they reached in and grabbed me.
I thought, "I'm finished."
when they said, "You're nicked," I couldn't believe it.
The point at which you make that seizure,
and you make those arrests, it's exhilarating.
Drug traffickers are not the sort of people we wanted to allow
to be on the streets of the UK.
At that time, it was the biggest seizure
ever, in London history, of cocaine.
Understanding you're going to spend the next number of years in prison
wasn't a wonderful thought.
Obviously, there's the danger of getting caught
and for many people jail was a really scary thing.
That is what occupies you most of the time.
You just have to be really, really careful,
and you can never really let up.
Even with the IRT helping us,
they had no way of keeping us safe
from the other cops looking into what's happening.
'So, now we have a problem.'
I got a call from a colleague from the IRT.
And he said..."Man, you're crazy you can't stop this."
Why can't I stop this? It's illegal.
And he said, "Well, you know..."
I can't control these criminals and these informants,
and they told me, "If this Amsterdam guy tries to stop our operation,
"We're gonna stop him."
It was a severe threat.
I make a report of what I found out.
I had to get my report out to the public.
There were a lot of people involved with this drug business...
..from the IRT team itself,
to the Delta group, the criminals.
It's hard to find out where the danger is coming from.
But it was clear that I had to stop the whole operation.
The same day, my report was in the hands of the minister.
A commission was set up to investigate what was going on.
I thought that finally this whole issue was going to be resolved.
When I was interrogated by this commission...
..I told them what I had seen.
Of all the drug transports,
where the drug transports had ended, on the free market.
I thought it was an open-and-shut case,
but after looking at the evidence, the commission concluded,
in fact, there was nothing wrong
with the investigation method of the IRT.
And I was, in fact, the bad guy
in this whole situation.
And I felt very...let down.
How can you draw such a conclusion?
Were they corrupt?
Or were they much too stubborn to admit their own mistakes?
For me, it's hard to say,
but after this commission went nowhere,
I thought, "This is the end of the story."
(PEOPLE CHATTERING)
But after a while there were some journalists
from one of the newspapers in the country...
..and they started looking into the IRT.
They showed that the conclusions of this commission, they were false.
And there was a lot of publicity about it in the newspapers.
This put a lot of pressure on the Dutch government,
so quickly after that there was a second special enquiry,
and that was the Parliamentary enquiry.
(PEOPLE CHATTERING)
(CAMERA SHUTTERS CLICKING)
(MAN SPEAKS DUTCH)
All the hearings of this commission took place over several years,
and they were broadcast live on television.
So, the Dutch public could see and hear
what are the testimony of all these relevant authorities.
# STEALERS WHEEL: Stuck In The Middle With You #
The detectives involved were covered with wigs
and moustaches, or even motor helmets,
because they didn't want to show themselves to the public.
# I'm so scared in case I fall off my chair...
That's a very funny situation.
# Clowns to the left of me
# Jokers to the right
# Here I am, stuck in the middle with you
# Yes, I'm stuck in the middle with you... #
In the Parliament enquiry, it came out
that there was a lot wrong with this method.
(THEY SPEAK DUTCH)
Then the numbers came out: 298,000 kilos of hashish,
20,000 kilos of coke,
tonnes of ecstasy pills,
and an unknown amount exported to the UK.
There was outrage, really, yeah.
(THEY SPEAK DUTCH)
Nobody could believe it, that they even thought of it,
that they even considered it.
And so there was one minister that said, "We have to stop this IRT.
"Until the last brick, break it down."
But the investigation,
they never got to the truth
until I wrote a book about it.
(UNSETTLING MUSIC)
There was a big question:
Were the police making money?
But it wasn't about corruption.
They just kept on going.
Like when you're on a gambling table,
you keep on putting money on red
because next time it's going to be red.
But that wasn't the end of the story.
I talked to the criminals,
I talked to the authorities.
I interviewed, like, 150 people.
They all pointed to one conclusion.
(AUSTERE CHORAL MUSIC)
The IRT, they were focused at this triangle, these three people.
They wanted to get this triangle
because in the newspaper it said this triangle,
they are the real kingpins of drugs.
But I found out they didn't exist.
It was one big scheme,
one big...scam.
The middlemen said,
"If you help us get the drugs through..."
(TRUCK'S HORN BLARES)
"..we'll get you to the crime bosses."
But the real bosses were this middle management.
They were the triangle.
The middlemen was the triangle.
(LAUGHS)
They had in their heads this whole story,
and it had no bearing on reality whatsoever.
It was just ridiculous.
And these people are then advising the Justice Department
and politicians on what is happening in Amsterdam crime life.
It just beggars belief, really.
I cannot believe it happened.
I cannot believe they fell for it.
It's so incredible, so amateurish,
and they made a mediocre criminal organisation,
they made them the richest criminal organisation at least of Europe.
# JOHNNY CASH: Ring Of Fire #
This whole story started with good intentions,
but completely ran out of hand,
and I think it's a question of incompetence.
They had used methods that were, in fact, highly illegal,
which made it impossible to prosecute us for anything we'd done
because they were, basically, full accomplices, in fact.
Nobody was convicted, nobody was caught, nobody was arrested.
Everybody got away with it.
Even if you scripted it, you couldn't have invented this.
When I got a hung jury,
I remember the prosecution and she physically, physically cried tears.
I was always a debt collector,
and now it's with my face and my heart and with my lips
and with my smile,
and not with a gun anymore.
# The flames went higher
# And it burns, burns, burns
# The ring of fire...
The whole story of Amsterdam and drugs,
whether it was hash in the '70Ss or '80s...
..or ecstasy or cocaine in the '90s...
..it shows whether you're lenient or tough on drugs,
the criminals will always find a way to exploit the system,
and the cops will always try to stop them.
After the IRT affair, the criminals won the battle
but they didn't win the war.
It's still ongoing.
The war on drugs can't be won...
..by any side.
# The ring of fire
# The ring of fire. #
# PRIMAL SCREAM: Movin' On Up #
# I was blind
# Now I can see
# You made a believer
# Out of me
# I'm movin' on up now
# My light shines on
# My light shines on... #
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