Alleged drug lord Piet S. denies: ‘I was some kind of referee’

The prosecution suspects the man, also known as “Dikke Piet”, of drug trafficking and money laundering. This would concern cocaine and heroin and synthetic drugs. Justice wants to withdraw tens of millions of euros in criminal earnings, which would have gone to luxury cars and watches, for example.

Hearings are scheduled for the next four months in the case, which has been named Taxus. More than 20 suspects were arrested, in part because officers were able to read encrypted messages from the Encrochat communications service. Among them are also relatives of S.

Piet S. said that after his last prison sentence, around 2008, he thought prison was “enough”. In his own words, he was a kind of mediator, an arbiter, for criminal groups.

“Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Dubai, Colombia. I’ve been everywhere,” S. told the judges about his role as mediator. S. has a decades-long reputation in the underworld. He said this meant that after the Amsterdam Staatsliedenbuurt shooting in 2012, which stemmed from a dispute between two drug gangs, he was approached by other criminal groups to mediate possible disputes.

decades

“I think I had a good reputation,” says the man, who says he has been involved in the world for forty years. “If you’re right, you’ll get it automatically. It also has to do with reliability.” For example, he stepped in during a dispute over “a payment that didn’t go well.” For this mediation, he received money, sometimes up to 50,000 euros.

There were no concrete examples, because as S. often repeated: “I don’t talk about others”. He has, however, made many statements about his own role: his statements are summarized in almost 200 pages.