For nearly a decade, the Netherlands has been trying to put Europe’s most dangerous drug lord behind bars. The cost has been lawyers in prison, journalists shot in the street, and a justice system that no longer feels safe defending its own rules.
Key Takeaways
The Marengo trial exposed a criminal network so deeply embedded in European organized crime that convicting its leader has done little to disrupt its operations.
The Mocro Mafia’s campaign of intimidation against lawyers, journalists, and witnesses has so destabilized the Dutch legal system that no attorney will now represent Taghi in his appeal.
The Netherlands created the ideal conditions for organized crime to flourish — world-class ports, financial infrastructure, global connections — and is now paying the price.
On the western edge of Amsterdam, between a cemetery, a public park, and rows of identical middle-class residences, sits a building called “the Bunker.” From the outside, it looks like an unassuming office space – and at one point in time, it was. Since 1997, though, it has functioned as a courtroom: the most heavily guarded in all of the Netherlands, used for the hearings of such notorious criminals as Willem Holleeder, who in the eighties made headlines for kidnapping Freddy Heineken, then CEO of the internationally renowned brewing company of the same name.
For nearly five years, the Bunker has been the stage of another, even more infamous event in European criminal history: the Marengo trial. The events that led to the trial began in 2017, when a member of the so-called Moroccan (“Mocro”) Mafia – a leading crime syndicate trafficking cocaine and synthetic drugs through Europe via ports in Spain, Portugal, Belgium, and the Netherlands – turned himself over to the police. His testimony as a crown witness, along with hundreds of thousands of decrypted PGP-secured messages, brought to light …
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Author: Tim Brinkhof / High Times
