Drug Lords (2018) s02e04 Episode Script

Klaas was, in the eyes of our clients, just a rookie, a young student type.
He spoke very posh, wore different clothes.
He wasn't the average dealer in the city.
They didn't think he would do it.
But he had no choice.
Pieterse had stolen Klaas' stash.
Obviously, Klaas went ballistic.
And it resulted in a massive shoot-out.
From the moment he killed that guy, Klaas was seen as a serious player.
And then, I think, he just lost it.
Amsterdam, 1990.
The playground for one of Europe's most cold-blooded drug lords.
Bruinsma was the biggest drug lord in Europe, and probably in the world, when it comes to hash.
He makes millions of dollars a week He was worth 500 million guilders.
He saw himself as a Roman general.
and heads a ruthless organized crime empire.
He was the first guy who really introduced killing.
Before, there was no killing in Amsterdam, not in the so-called underworld.
Killing was not done.
Shoot-outs in broad daylight.
The Bruinsma organization was the biggest and the most violent criminal organization in the Netherlands.
As Klaas Bruinsma spirals out of control, Dutch and international police fight a decade-long battle to bring him down There was a strong camaraderie.
"We have to do something about this and we have to do it together.
" before his violence brings the city to its knees.
Amsterdam, the 1950s.
Klaas Bruinsma is born into a wealthy family in a wealthy neighborhood, an heir to his father's booming business, Raak, the Netherlands' largest soda company.
But the rich kid is raised with an iron fist.
He had a lot of anger and hatred towards his dad.
I think it was because his father consistently belittled him.
Klaas Bruinsma told me that his father would make him jump from a cupboard and then his father would catch him three times.
The fourth time, he would just let Klaas drop and told him, "You should learn that you can't trust anyone in this world.
" And the person he trusts least is his own father.
When we talked, he would always say he wanted to become bigger, more powerful and richer than his father.
He wanted to overtake his dad at a young age.
Ever the rebel, the teenage Klaas turns to drugs and finds easy money peddling hash at school.
When he's kicked out, there's an ideal spot to make a bigger fortune from narcotics, right on his doorstep.
In the early 1970s, there's nowhere better to push drugs than Amsterdam, Europe's dope capital.
Every minute, hundreds of spliffs are being lit all over town, and Amsterdam's famous coffee shops become distribution centers for the trade.
Oh, it was like a golden period, you can say, in Amsterdam.
Lots of people filled their pockets, even the small people on the street and the big people on the top It was really the golden ages.
They made millions and millions of guilders.
At the heart of Amsterdam's red light district is a street known as the Zeedijk a dark world of prostitutes and drugs, to which Bruinsma is inevitably drawn.
Bruinsma started selling hash in a bar called Popeye near Leidseplein.
That's how business really started.
Not big quantities imported from abroad, but small amounts, which they cut themselves and sold to customers.
But "the Tall One," as Bruinsma is known, finds his boyish looks are a drawback on the tough streets of Amsterdam.
You could say he was seen as a pushover, someone you could easily mess with and nothing would happen.
To further his budding career in crime, Klaas needs a partner, someone with the street cred he lacks.
Enter Thea Moear, child of the Amsterdam red light district.
Life on the Zeedijk was very different in those days.
Everyone was always on the streets.
The local prostitutes used to eat in my mother's diner.
And I was also working there at the time.
Thea is also an emerging talent on the drug scene.
At the same time, Thea Moear was also selling small quantities of hash around the Leidseplein area.
She had several dealers working for her and one of them sold hash in the Popeye.
Bruinsma sets up a meeting with Thea.
It's a night that will change Amsterdam's crime world forever.
I was waiting in the Popeye for the Tall One, because we had an appointment.
And for quite a while there was someone sitting opposite me, but he looked so prim and proper, just like a student.
I had no idea what he looked like, and I never expected it to be him.
After a while, we understood that it was us, having a meeting.
He talked in a posh way, wore expensive clothes.
This was my first meeting with the Tall One.
It's a match made in hash.
Within months, the two of them form a narcotics partnership and establish the Buggie, a coffee shop that becomes the public face of their hash business.
But times are changing in the Netherlands.
The drugs trade is starting to appear on the cops' radar.
Ambitious young detectives join the Amsterdam police with a mission to fight the crime wave drugs are bringing in their wake.
I think that we were a little naïve in those days.
We knew about gangs and about robberies and some drug trafficking, but, um, real organized crime, we didn't know much about.
But the police are learning fast.
In 1974, the scale of the narcotics problem becomes all too clear, when they seize almost 2,000 kilos of hash, the biggest drug bust in Dutch history.
In the docks of Den Helder, lies the smuggling boat, Lammy.
Hidden in the fishing net, wrapped in plastic bags, lie big quantities of hash, imported from Lebanon.
The man behind the shipment is Frits van de Wereld, a longtime associate of Thea's underworld clan.
Uncle Frits used to be this old cigarette smuggler.
He could smuggle anything over the border, even a cow.
Uncle Frits would smuggle it in.
He was good at that.
He often went to Lebanon to get it.
And we would sell it through the shop, my mother's diner.
People bought chips and left with a few kilos in a package.
It was a great business, of course.
By now, Klaas and Thea are selling so much hash that they need a bigger supplier, and Frits is the perfect fit.
Thea introduces her ambitious new partner.
Uncle Frits was a real Amsterdam dude.
And when I introduced him to Klaas, he asked me, "Who is this idiot?" That's how Frits was.
Uncle Frits said, "I don't want to see him anymore.
He talks posh, with a plum in his mouth, and he's negative about everything.
" But it was all good, because he recognized Klaas' business-like manner.
The new contact gives Klaas the chance to build his international connections with hash suppliers.
That's when things really started looking up for him.
With low costs, no more middle men, they just shipped in their own product.
Klaas never liked the small-time selling.
He wasn't into that at all.
But he was very good with our other connections, the ones producing it, in Pakistan and Morocco.
So, that's what the Tall One started to do: the smuggling itself, as well.
He always used to say, "When we bring it in ourselves, we earn more.
" In Morocco, Klaas had these special buyers working for him.
These guys went from farm to farm all winter long.
The mule train would come down through the mountains to the beach.
And then the dinghies were loaded and brought to our ship.
Their smuggling boats carry record quantities, between 1,000 and 2,000 kilos of hash every shipment.
By the late '70s, the son of the soda king is running a thriving hash business, a world away from his respectable roots.
And while Klaas specializes in international trade, Thea holds court at Amsterdam's hash headquarters.
The first time I came in there, I was a little bit impressed.
She was sitting on a kind of throne, big chair high in the middle of the room, and she had, like, the fanciest clothes you can imagine, very expensive: all brand clothes, diamonds, Rolex, the whole charade.
And she was sitting there as a queen, with people around her, and then you could talk with her and you'd do an order, and it was so busy that before you could speak, say, with "Queen Thea," you had to sit in a waiting room.
All the people from all the Netherlands came to buy the hashish and weed.
They were actually the biggest importer.
With Queen Thea on his side, King Klaas is raking in serious cash and adopting the drug dealer lifestyle to match.
He gets a taste for cocaine and high-class prostitutes.
That night we went to the rooms, drank a lot, laughed a lot and Klaas was snorting.
And then I saw wads of cash, spilling out of his trouser pockets, the pockets of his jacket.
There was money and it wasn't just a little cash you know, with those rubber bands around it.
Once the rich kid, Bruinsma is earning himself a bad-boy reputation.
But Thea's always on hand to keep him in check.
The duo are now tied by a powerful bond.
Klaas was always extremely protective of me.
He was like a brother, and I was his sister.
We did everything for each other.
But Klaas isn't the only dealer in Thea's life.
She's married to Hugo Ferrol, a gangster in the violent drug world, with an addiction of his own.
Hugo was shot in the leg.
He was in a lot of pain, so he was given morphine.
And then he started taking heroin.
And then it started going downhill between us.
When Ferrol's drug habit reaches a crisis point, in a fit of madness, he attacks Thea.
It got so out of hand that he came running at me with this wild look in his eyes.
Then he sat on top of me.
And at one point he shoots at me.
The shot passes inches from Thea's head.
So, I just lay there, dead still.
And, afterwards, I waited and left.
When he finally left, I escaped from the house.
Klaas is so furious that he orders a hit on Ferrol.
Bruinsma ordered Marianovic and one of his bodyguards, kickboxing champion André Brilleman, to kill Ferrol.
In February 1982, Marianovic and Brilleman plant a bomb at Ferrol's home.
That didn't work.
He survived the attack, heavily injured.
Klaas went mental, of course, because it all went wrong.
In his anger, Bruinsma refuses to pay the failed assassins, a decision that will come back to haunt him.
Bruinsma then ordered Marianovic and Brilleman to make yet another attempt on Ferrol's life.
However, Brilleman and Marianovic made a deal with Ferrol.
And the hitmen decide to pay Klaas back with a scam.
They gave Klaas these pictures, showing Hugo on the floor, tied up with some sort of blood, which later turned out to be ketchup.
They had agreed with Hugo to stay out of town for a while.
Two weeks or a month later, he heard that Hugo was alive and back in town.
He had it checked out, and it was all true.
Bruinsma realizes he's been fooled.
And he's furious.
And then, yes, he had beef with Brilleman and the Yugoslavian.
Desperate not to lose face, in July 1982, Klaas orders a hit on one of the guilty henchmen, Marianovic.
The bodyguard, Brilleman, gets a stay of execution for now.
To begin with, Bruinsma gave the impression to Brilleman, "I'm not holding it against you like I am with Marianovic and stay with the gang for now.
" He was then forced to set a trap for his buddy Marianovic.
Bruinsma ordered Brilleman to call Alexander Marianovic with a story like, "Klaas might be on to us, and maybe they will try something.
I have to speak to you immediately.
" So, it was arranged that Marianovic would return back to his house on the Amsteldijk.
Marianovic parked his silver-grey Mercedes there.
And he was shot in his car, right there and then.
The guy who killed Alexander had to say, before he shot him, "Greetings from Klaas.
I'm shooting you to hell.
" It's Klaas' first successful contract killing.
It won't be his last.
And Bruinsma's reputation for ruthless violence is born.
Klaas was the boss, number one.
By far.
It was not like a so-called godfather who was beloved and respected.
He was hated.
And they were very afraid of him, because he was considered as a completely sadistic, crazy guy who enjoyed that people get beat up, broken bones, or get killed.
By now, Klaas' smuggling routes stretch from Amsterdam across Lebanon, Morocco, even as far as Pakistan, far surpassing the original godfather, Frits van de Wereld.
Having grown up in a business family, Klaas reorganizes his operation like a corporation, with him as CEO.
He had a division for violence, with his bodyguards, the tough guys.
A narcotics division, with his drug dealers.
And a money laundering division, with his accountants, tax advisors and lawyers.
Bruinsma's operation is now making millions of dollars a month.
After years of feeling inferior, Klaas is finally richer and more powerful than his sadistic father.
By the early '80s, the Dutch police are gaining ground against the violent organized crime plaguing Amsterdam.
And Bruinsma's name keeps popping up in Agent Slort's investigations.
For the first time, we saw a Dutch person as a criminal entrepreneur.
We saw that he had an international network.
The level of violence was something that was really disturbing.
And I think the thing that had the most impact was the involvement in the legal world, the aspect of money laundering and also the aspect of corruption.
So, from an Amsterdam local problem, it was, all of a sudden, a national issue.
As Klaas' street reputation grows, he looks to cement his place in Amsterdam's underworld.
Klaas said, "I'll show those small-time criminals that I'm much tougher than them.
One day they will all look up to me.
" Klaas soon gets his chance.
In August 1983, he gets a call from an ex-boyfriend of Thea, Pietje Pieterse, who's refusing to hand over some of their hash.
On my birthday, August 23rd, the Tall One calls me early morning.
He says, "Pieterse called me and asked me if I can swing by.
" I didn't know, but I thought, "This can't be good.
" Unusually, Klaas visits Pieterse's house without bodyguards.
The Tall One would always put his gun on the table in front of him.
And then Pieterse says, "I have stolen the stash.
" Well, of course, the Tall One went ballistic.
So, he got his gun and shot Pieterse in the leg.
Pieterse had backup in case things went wrong.
They heard the shot and came running down, Leo Frantzen and two other guys.
So, Klaas shot and hit Leo Frantzen.
And Leo was killed.
The gunfight seals Klaas' reputation, but at a cost.
He's shot several times in the stomach.
"It was a mess," the cleaning lady later told me, and that she had to scrape pieces of flesh off the wall.
It was like a crazy war zone.
Thea's gangster connections put Klaas in the hospital and under threat of arrest.
I felt awful seeing him in hospital after the shoot-out.
I also felt very guilty.
Once again, it revolved around a boyfriend of mine, and that was not the first time, but the second.
Something had to be done so it could be made clear why this shooting had happened.
I was prepared to do just about anything to help him.
With Klaas facing a long prison stretch for murder, Thea devises a plan to save her partner.
She wants to prove that Klaas was set up and acted in self-defense.
I went to Pieterse with a little tape recorder and said, "I want to speak to you, to know what happened.
" We went to the roof terrace, whilst I was wearing the recorder and he explained everything to me there, how they set it up beforehand.
I recorded everything and, afterwards, I went straight to the notary, who transcribed it all.
Thea's recordings helped prove Klaas' self-defense claim.
On January 31, 1984, he is convicted for manslaughter, not murder, and only serves two years in jail.
But Bruinsma's bloodlust isn't cooled behind bars.
His bodyguard, André Brilleman, has been living on borrowed time since the fake murder of Hugo Ferrol.
Klaas allegedly orders his revenge.
The story is this: They were waiting, about eight or ten gypsy guys from the camp, with baseball bats, so they beat him silly, unconscious, and they brought him to a shed somewhere by the water.
Klaas wanted this enforcer to cut his dick off with a saw, a machine saw, and torture him for 45 minutes and kill him.
There were rumors that Brilleman's limbs and other parts had been cut off and dumped into a barrel with concrete.
They were sailors or people with a river ferry.
They found a barrel, and Brilleman turned out to be inside.
He enjoyed violence.
He had something really sinister and dark something a little bit sick.
In 1987, with Bruinsma now out of jail, the scale of violence starts to spiral out of control.
Agent Slort pushes the country's highest authorities to bring Bruinsma down.
Actually, without exception, every presentation that we gave, um, had a kind of a shock effect, with the reaction like, "Is this happening in the Netherlands?" And also the fact that Mr.
Bruinsma seemed to become invincible.
After years of lobbying, the police efforts finally succeed.
A special task force is set up just to target Bruinsma, headed up by Gert Van Beek.
The special task force's sole goal was to bring down Klaas Bruinsma.
We were convinced we were dealing with a serious criminal, who masterminded several violent crimes in Amsterdam, and we wanted to catch him red-handed.
They start watching Bruinsma's every move and tapping his phones.
But Klaas is careful.
He never talks openly about drug deals.
Okay, bye.
Bruinsma's always one step ahead of the law.
Even within the task force itself, he has paid moles: corrupt cops who can act as his eyes and ears.
They found a 43-page document in the house of one of the organization's key men, containing every single surveillance car operating in the Netherlands used to observe criminals, including car registration numbers and which police department it was used by: the special task force, military police, secret service, Amsterdam police.
So, in other words, because databanks already existed at that time, when his guys saw a suspicious car, all they had to do was type in the plates to find out who it was.
Klaas now sees himself as untouchable, but, since the killing which put him in prison, Thea feels the violence has become too much.
I wasn't feeling good about it anymore.
For what happened to Klaas, that made me feel bad.
I just had to leave.
Thea parts company with him, leaving Bruinsma on his own.
Without his partner, Klaas has nobody to hold his temper, or his ego, in check.
And he's starting to lose his grip on reality.
He started to believe he was on par with legendary men, like Napoleon.
In the late 1980s, Klaas started to terrorize a lot of people involved in the hash trade.
In Morocco, or elsewhere, he started to stick his nose into everyone's business.
He forced people to work for him.
And if people didn't do what he wanted, he would go after them and after their families.
By 1990, Bruinsma is at the peak of his power.
The biggest drug lord in Europe, he's worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but it's still not enough for him.
He was constantly talking about "the mother of all deals.
" He explained that if he could pull it off, he would never have to work again.
He said, "Then I will buy a boat and sail around the world.
" True to his word, Klaas masterminds the biggest hash deal of all time.
This last big job would have 45,000 kilos of prime quality Pakistani hash, with a street value of half a billion guilders.
Klaas' audacious plan is a first.
No one has ever tried to move this much product in a single shipment.
Bruinsma invests millions of dollars in the deal.
It's a huge gamble.
Klaas' associates load 45 tons of hash into an open container in a port in Pakistan.
And the ship sets course for Europe.
En route, the hash changes ships several times, and it takes ten months to finally arrive in Amsterdam.
The police got wind of the shipment through an anonymous tip.
They then tracked how the stash was unloaded in the Amsterdam port and then followed it to a storage unit in Leusden.
And that's when they busted it.
On February 24th, 1990, the Dutch authorities discover and confiscate the entire 45 tons.
But they don't have enough evidence to link the hash to Klaas.
He gets away, but so does his quarter of a billion dollar profit.
That was a massive financial blow for him.
It meant no pension for him.
Overcome with anger and disappointment, Klaas starts taking industrial amounts of cocaine, which fuels his vicious temper.
The last two years I saw Klaas, he was going downhill fast.
He was just getting paranoid and suspicious, because of all the cocaine and booze.
He could hardly sleep.
He was suffering from insomnia.
He didn't trust anyone.
Of course, I heard all sorts of things around town.
He was snorting coke, shagging hookers, wasting money, driving around in expensive cars.
And I probably just didn't want to see.
If they told me those stories, I didn't want to hear.
He was violent towards the girls.
Most prostitutes didn't like him at all.
He was arrogant.
When one of the prostitutes made a joke about his support stockings, which he wore because he had been shot in the leg he got so angry that he cut her face with the back of his gun and seriously injured her.
Klaas was becoming a liability.
One of his associates told me, "We were getting close to the point where we would have had to get rid of him ourselves.
" Storm clouds are gathering around Klaas.
Not only are his own associates out to get him, the Netherlands' fraud squad is investigating his international affairs.
The trail leads them to Florida.
Eventually we found out, through the records of his properties, that Bruinsma had a money laundering guy in the U.
S.
We also came to know that he had bought a villa in Boca Raton, close to Miami.
We were being assisted through a joint cooperation with the U.
S.
Customs.
Back home, in Amsterdam, Klaas' paranoia makes him even more violent.
He was behaving like Hitler in the last week in Berlin, in the bunker, completely out of touch with reality, but also really dangerous.
He orders two hits in less than a month.
In September 1990, at the American Hotel, one of Klaas' closest associates, Roy Adkins, is sitting in the bar.
Roy Adkins was always a bit of an enigma.
Little was known about him, except that he was a central figure in the Bruinsma gang, focusing mainly on drug transportation.
He supposedly had strong contacts within the IRA.
Basically, the story was that from the waterside two men ran in through the lobby, the doors of the Nightwatch bar.
They approached the victim from behind and shot him in the head.
What exactly went wrong between him and Klaas was never clarified, but one theory is that it had something to do with the "mother of all deals," the 45,000 kilos of Pakistani hash that was confiscated in early 1990.
Klaas told me that he'd lost a lot of money.
That he wanted to tax other criminals for his losses.
I warned him and said, "If you do that, you'll be dead.
" On June 27th, 1991, Bruinsma's excessive arrogance and drug taking finally catch up with him.
In the early hours of the morning, at the Hilton nightclub, Klaas is high on coke.
Also there is another notorious Amsterdam criminal, Martin Hoogland.
Martin Hoogland used to be a policeman, but they throw him out.
He was too corrupt even for those days, and, from then on, he become a hitman.
According to intelligence, there was friction between the two of them.
Klaas came out of the Hilton disco, stoned as a rabbit, Hoogland was also stoned as a rabbit, and he got into a quarrel.
Tensions were running high, and a fight can get out of hand.
And, for some crazy reason, he shot him two or three times in the chest.
So, he went on the floor.
Then, he walked around him, stand with his head in the middle, and then shot one time in his head.
I arrived around 6:30 a.
m.
at the Hilton hotel.
No doubt in my mind.
This was Klaas Bruinsma.
Klaas lay there on his back, with his arms spread out, blood trickling down his face.
It was a sad picture.
In hindsight, I have sometimes wondered how would things have played out if I hadn't left him.
An ingenious psychopath, who became very powerful and then lost it.