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NARCO STATE
Inside Holland’s violent narco wars where Moroccan mafia drug lords BEHEAD rivals and torture women to sell drugs to UK
Pictures found on Taghi’s phone revealed a naked woman strapped to a dentist’s chair in a torture chamber
DUTCH King of Cocaine Ridouan Taghi has a simple, blood-chilling rule for those who cross him: “If you talk, you die.”
As the “undisputed leader” of the so-called Mocro maffia — which has left a trail of death and mayhem across the Netherlands — it’s no idle boast.
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Finally caged for life last week after a spate of gruesome murders, Taghi ran a “well-oiled killing machine”, the trial judge insisted.
During the hearing, a supergrass’s brother and lawyer were slain by hitmen, while the most famous TV journalist in the Netherlands was also gunned down.
Dutch drugs and organised crime expert Dr Teun Voeten, 62, told me: “After their first kill some people get a sense of empowerment at taking someone else’s life — and that can get addictive.
“At the end, I think Taghi loved violence, blood and power.”
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Crime lords in the Netherlands — a drugs production and clearing house that helps supply British users — are staggeringly brutal.
A severed head was left outside an Amsterdam shisha lounge where rival mobsters gathered, its bloodshot eyes peering through the windows to warn those inside.
And pictures found on Taghi’s phone revealed a naked woman strapped to a dentist’s chair in a torture chamber.
Little wonder that this land of tulips and windmills, famed for its liberal tolerance, has been called a “narco state 2.0”.
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Its rule of law has come under severe strain.
Even Prime Minister Mark Rutte was forced to beef up his personal security amid fears he was a kidnapping target.
The most powerful narco godfather was undoubtedly Taghi.
At the height of his powers he controlled a third of all cocaine imports into Europe, which is said to have netted him a near £800million fortune.
One in 40 Brits snort the drug — giving the UK the world’s second-highest rate of cocaine use behind Australia.
So anyone in Britain who has snorted cocaine at raves, football matches and dinner parties over the past two decades would almost certainly have sampled Taghi’s wares.
A one-time international drug-trafficker tells me that this demand fuels the cartel violence.
Known in underworld circles as The Tall Dutch Guy, 6ft 6ins Paul Meyer said: “When you don’t have users, you can’t sell your product.”
The urbane 61-year-old explains why much of the wholesale narcotics destined for the UK first transits through the Low Countries.
He says: “I think the ports in England are much more difficult to bring stuff in.
“Also, the punishment is very heavy in England compared with Belgium and Holland.”
According to Paul, many drug consignments landing in the Netherlands and heading for the UK take a circuitous route, adding: “Everything goes through Ireland.”
And he does not believe Taghi’s incarceration will lead to a drop-off in cocaine imports.
“Somebody else takes over,” he insisted.
“There’s too much profit involved.”
But many will still be wary of treading on Taghi’s turf.
“Nowadays it’s clear that our whole society is under pressure from this kind of violence. And they are reacting to that.”
Paul Vugts
Born in Benslimane, Morocco, in 1977, he moved to the historic city of Vianen in the central Netherlands aged two with his parents, who arrived as temporary workers.
The family lived in the De Hagen neighbourhood — a mix of white working class and Moroccan heritage residents — where blocks of four-storey flats surround a shabby shopping precinct.
By the age 17, Taghi had quit school and was hawking hashish on the streets as part of the BAD Boys gang (BAD stands for “black and dangerous”).
Drugs expert Dr Voeten told me: “That’s also why you should be very careful with allowing small kids to deal, because the small fish will become big fish. And Taghi got bigger and bigger.”
Amsterdam has a famously relaxed approach to cannabis, with tourists getting high in its canalside coffee shops for decades.
Intelligent and ambitious, keen chess player Taghi exploited connections in Morocco to buy hashish at source.
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Soon he would set up a supply chain involving speedboats delivering the dope from North Africa to Spain and onwards to northern Europe.
When the South American cocaine cartels began sending more of their product into Europe via West Africa and Morocco, Taghi already had a supply chain in place. Cocaine was far more profitable than hash.
Taghi and his friends were living the gangster lifestyle and — because of their Moroccan heritage — became known as the Mocro maffia.
Switching his formal residency registration to Morocco, Taghi remained under the Dutch police radar, despite becoming a major drugs player.
‘His bloodlust would be his undoing’
Then the blood-letting began.
In 2012 a squabble of drug busts in Antwerp, Belgium, turned into a narco war.
It allowed the ruthless Taghi to eventually rule the Mocro maffia — yet his bloodlust would be his undoing.
In 2015, terrified rival drug trafficker Ebrahim “The Butcher” Buzhu went to cops saying mobsters connected to Taghi were placing tracking devices on his associates’ cars.
A month later police uncovered a vast cache of weapons in Vianen, including 60 pistols, 36 automatic weapons and nine hand grenades.
Investigators believed Taghi had a “standing army” of heavily armed hitmen.
In 2017 Dutch cops accessed an encrypted smartphone system used by Taghi’s men.
It revealed the gang thought Ronald Bakker — who owned a spy shop where they bought their tracking devices — was talking to cops.
In an encrypted message, Taghi wrote: “No more traitors or double-dealing.”
Two days later, Bakker was gunned down outside his home.
Others to meet a grisly end on Taghi’s orders were Samuel Erraghib — thought to be an informer — and former hitman for his mob, Ranko Scekic.
Then, in 2017, Taghi’s assassins blundered when they took out Hakim Changachi, 31, in a case of mistaken identity.
Changachi was a childhood friend of Nabil Bakkali — who supplied vehicles and worked as a lookout for Taghi’s mob.
Bakkali had arranged the car that ferried the hitman to Changachi’s assassination.
He confessed all to his old buddy’s family.
Now a marked man, Bakkali became the supergrass witness who would bring Taghi’s criminal empire crashing down — but at a personal cost.
In 2018 his innocent brother Reduan, 41, was shot dead.
A year later Bakkali’s lawyer Derk Wiersum, 44, was gunned down outside his Amsterdam home.
Author Wouter Laumans, who wrote a book called Mocro Maffia, said: “It was the first time a person in the regular world got hit over something in the underworld.”
Taghi had evaded cops by travelling on false papers and frequently changing his appearance.
Then, in December 2019, he was finally arrested in a Dubai bolt-hole.
Officers discovered disturbing naked photos on Taghi’s phone of a woman strapped to a dentist’s chair in a make-shift torture chamber.
Cops would later find scalpels, pliers, pruning shears and duct tape in the sound-proofed shipping container — known as the “Treatment Room” — during a 2020 raid south of Rotterdam.
Dutch authorities believe the images were of Dutch-Moroccan cocaine trafficker Naima Jilal who disappeared in October 2019.
Police revealed: “One of the photos shows a naked woman tied to a chair with tape.
“Another photo showed a belly with a cut finger and a toe.
“In a third, a woman is lying naked on her stomach on the floor.”
Over six years, Taghi was tried at a heavily fortified Amsterdam court nicknamed The Bunker and guarded by the Dutch army.
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Then came a murder which sent shockwaves around the globe.
Renowned TV crime reporter Peter R. de Vries — who acted as a confidant to supergrass Bakkali — was gunned down.
Two years earlier he had tweeted that police had told him he was on a Taghi “death list”.
As drones and helicopters hovered over The Bunker last week, Taghi was sentenced to life for five murders while 16 of his lieutenants were also convicted.
The three hits during the trial will be dealt with at a later hearing.
A Dutch charity says the cocaine market has not been dented since Taghi’s arrest, with purity high and prices falling.
Paul Vugts, 49, a crime reporter for Het Parool newspaper, told me Dutch politicians and police were “naive” about the threat from narco gangs for years.
He said: “Nowadays it’s clear that our whole society is under pressure from this kind of violence. And they are reacting to that.”
And what of Buzhu The Butcher?
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Kidnapped and brutally tortured, he was found with a bullet in his head in a burnt-out car near Cadiz, Spain, in 2022.
A fate often reserved for those foolhardy enough to double-cross the godfather of the Mocro maffia.
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