Judas

by Astrid Holleeder

  No matter how we looked at the situation, we kept arriving at the same conclusion—if we took action against Wim, it would mean the end of our lives. All we could hope for was that the Justice Department would prosecute him one day. But Wim remained a free man, and even worse, he kept riding his Vespa, the “Holleeder scooter” as the media started calling it. He seemed untouchable.

  It took until 2006 for him to be arrested. Not for the liquidations but “only” for extorting, assaulting, and threatening Willem Endstra, Kees Houtman, and Thomas van der Bijl, another old friend of Wim’s.

  Wim had known Thomas for as long as he had known Cor. Thomas was more than a friend to Cor. He was like a brother, and because of that, he was part of the family. He was always there, at all the important family gatherings, and after every pivotal event—from the moment he gave his car to Cor and Wim to use as an escape vehicle after the Heineken kidnapping, up to carrying Cor’s coffin at his funeral.

  Thomas had been witness to all of Wim and Cor’s crimes. He was always around during Cor’s entire career in the underworld, and he helped him out on many occasions. He and one of Cor’s family members dug up the Heineken ransom in Paris and exchanged the registered and marked money so it could be invested. He ran the affairs at the Achterdam and took care of cleaning the companies in Amsterdam’s red-light district.

  You could trust Thomas totally; he was as silent as the grave.

  The last couple of years before Cor’s death, their relationship suffered under increasing pressure. Cor had always been a heavy drinker, and two attempts on his life, and Wim’s treason, he had become a serious alcoholic. His sunny character gave way to a grim side.

  His old friends, Thomas, for instance, had known Cor from the time he didn’t have a dime. His new friends knew only the Cor who always picked up the bill when he was drunk and threw money at people. Cor gave you money or he could make you some money, and certain people were drawn to that. And Cor let it happen, because paid friends don’t walk away when you’re drunk and obnoxious. It turned Cor into an intolerable person. He had his “friends” kiss his feet for a thousand guilders; they would stand in line.

  Thomas couldn’t tolerate that behavior, but Cor was not going to improve. He wanted to, but he couldn’t, and shortly before Cor’s death, Thomas had enough. Their twenty-year friendship cooled.

  Throughout that friendship, Thomas had been there not only for Cor but also for Sonja. When Cor and Wim were arrested, Sonja didn’t have a dime to spare. She had to scrape together the money for her visits to see Cor at Le Santé prison in Paris, and Thomas pitched in. She had barely enough money for gas, so Thomas would line her car up next to another one and siphon gas from that car into hers.

  When Cor’s life was in danger and his family needed to be extra careful, Thomas took Sonja to where Cor wanted to meet her and kept on doing it faithfully even after he fell out with Cor. Sonja hardly ever had a man in the house, because Cor was mostly out or in prison, or in hiding. And when Cor was there, his two left hands prevented him from even changing a light bulb. Thomas helped her out with household chores. He was always there for her.

  Thomas didn’t like Wim. And not because—as Wim always says—Cor went out with Thomas’s sister Anneke when he was sixteen and left her for Sonja, Wim’s sister. It was true that Cor betrayed Anneke with Sonja and Sonja with Anneke, until Sonja put an end to that by getting pregnant.

  But all these shenanigans were going on when all three of them were still young. Sonja and Anneke would later spend time together as mothers at the school playground. Anneke would make pancakes when Francis played with her daughter Melanie during a lunch break at school. The women had long since normalized their relationship. There were no old wounds left, and it never was the reason Thomas didn’t like Wim. Thomas didn’t like Wim because of his character.

  Wim, in turn, had never liked Thomas, either. Why? Maybe because Thomas had once driven Wim’s then-girlfriend Beppie from Amsterdam to Hotel Beauvais to visit Wim. Because Beppie had been in a car with Thomas for hours, Wim would later suggest that his daughter Evie wasn’t his but Thomas’s. I suspect that he didn’t like Thomas because he doesn’t like anyone.

  But Thomas was sincere in his friendship for Cor right up until the very end. Even though he wasn’t interested in shallow Cor, who drank, partied, and allowed people to live off him, he honored their friendship. So after Cor’s murder, Thomas stood up for him and turned against the people he held responsible for his death. He directly accused Wim of murdering Cor.

  Determined to get justice for his friend, Thomas, who never talked, started talking. Thomas understood the risk involved, but he thought he’d be safe, because at this point Wim was locked up, convicted for extortion. What he didn’t know was that Wim had made arrangements for the liquidation before he went in. That’s why Thomas was murdered on April 20, 2006. A man named Fred Ros was prosecuted and found guilty of Thomas’s assassination.

  No fewer than two of Wim’s victims—Thomas van der Bijl and Willem Endstra—had predicted their own assassinations to the police. Both had pointed to the perpetrator while alive.

  Nevertheless, the police were unable to gather enough evidence for the prosecution of one single liquidation.

  Wim got off lightly: he was sentenced only for extortion and got a measly nine years.

  For us, his detention didn’t change a thing.

  Wim was behind bars, but he still had an impressive network of connections of whom we were just as scared. We knew that the prison walls were no obstacle to him; Thomas van der Bijl’s death had proved that.

  To us, it was the ultimate demonstration of power, having somebody killed while being incarcerated in the most secure prison in the country. So we did what he wanted us to do: We lived by his rules. We were there for him twenty-four hours a day. We kept quiet. And every day we felt like we were betraying Cor.

  From 2006 to 2011, we desperately hoped that the Justice Department would come up with enough evidence to prosecute Wim for Cor’s death and for other liquidations. Some of the hit men were being prosecuted by this time, but not Wim. Nobody dared testify against him.

  One of the contractors, Peter La Serpe, admitted to having killed Kees Houtman, together with Jessy Remmers. In return for the confession, the Justice Department agreed to give him a new identity and all necessary protection, but even he didn’t dare make statements about Willem Holleeder in public. La Serpe had privately pointed to Willem as the commissioning party for the killing of Kees Houtman, but he demanded that this part of his statement be excluded from official testimony—for fear of his life and the lives of his family. Once again Wim got away with murder.

  Then, in February 2011, Stanley Hillis was assassinated. He was Wim’s partner in crime before he was locked up in 2006. Wim always spoke respectfully of the Old Guy, as he called him. He was only in awe of people who were even more ruthless than he was. Hillis was a powerful criminal with international connections, Wim was proud to tell others. He was big in Yugoslavia: he could arrange for a whole army of Yugoslavs and even owned a couple of tanks.

  Wim talked to us about Hillis’s involvement in extorting Endstra and his liquidation. Hillis was, according to Wim, the one who decided in a final meeting with Endstra that “he [Endstra] couldn’t pay anymore.” It meant that paying up wouldn’t extend Endstra’s life any longer: he would be assassinated. With Hillis free and doing Wim’s dirty work, I resigned myself to the fact that testifying against Wim and surviving was out of the question.

  But with Hillis’s death, Wim had lost a powerful ally, someone that he could rely on while inside.

  It was the first time Sonja and I seriously considered testifying against Willem.

  If we wanted to act, I thought, we needed to do it before Wim’s release in January 2012. At least now he was still in prison, and through information from criminal circles and my visits to him, I knew that his position in the criminal world had weakened considerably. As soon as he got out, t
hough, he would be back at the top in no time and testifying would become impossible.

  Sonja was receptive to my argument.

  We decided to ask Peter de Vries for advice.

  Sonja and I agreed that Peter—like nobody else—could assess the step we had in mind. As a crime journalist, he had solved several cases for which the Justice Department could not gather the evidence. He knew our whole family, he knew Wim’s character, and he had been very good friends with Cor until Cor died.

  After Cor’s death in 2003, Peter was, unlike Cor’s other so-called friends, the only one to take a permanent and unconditional interest in Cor’s children. Peter was not interested in a friendship with Wim. So we would not have to be afraid of him telling Wim about our conversation.

  Sonja and I had discussed all the risks we’d run if we shared what we knew with Peter. My only doubt was that he was, after all, a journalist. Had he not, despite his friendship with Cor, tracked down the co-kidnapper Frans Meijer? Maybe he would let the journalistic value of our story prevail over our friendship. That could jeopardize our lives. But Sonja didn’t doubt Peter for one second.

  “He would never do that, As. He would never betray us. He knows what Wim is like, and he knows what is at stake for us. Believe me, he won’t.”

  “But what if he accidentally lets something slip? He won’t mean any harm, but you know what Wim is like. Whether it’s the neighbor, the baker, your best friend, or his worst enemy, he wins people over and extracts information from them, even their deepest secrets, without them realizing it. We can’t take that risk.”

  “As, Peter is no fool. He’s known Wim for more than twenty-five years, he knows what he’s made of. It is time to start trusting someone,” she said, “and I trust Peter fully.”

  “All right,” I said, “I’m convinced. If you say it’s okay, we’ll do it.” Still, I dreaded confiding in someone who was not a family member. Sonja and I had never spoken to an outsider about what we knew.

  Sonja asked Peter to come to her house. We asked him to take a walk with us, because we didn’t want to be recorded by wiretap.

  “Peter,” Sonja said, “can we tell you something without you repeating it? You cannot publish it, either, because you will put us in danger.”

  “Of course. If you don’t want that, it stays between us,” Peter said.

  Sonja looked at me and said, “You tell him.”

  “Peter,” I started, “we want to tell you that we’ve known for quite some time that Wim ordered Cor’s assassination and that we can no longer live with that knowledge. We want Wim to pay for what he has done. We are planning to go to the Justice Department, before his release, hoping for him to get arrested for giving the order. We think he should be locked up for good. Cor is not his only victim. This man is a menace to society, and I’m afraid he’ll start killing again after his release. That’s why we want to make statements about everything we know, but we’d like your opinion first.”

  Peter was not surprised; rather, he seemed sad. He asked about details as if he hoped our stories were untrue, that we hadn’t lived through all this. But when our answers and explanations made clear to him that this was our reality, he fell silent.

  Peter thought our plan to go to the Justice Department was very dangerous. He was worried for us, and for Francis and Richie.

  “Just look at Endstra, and Thomas,” Peter said, “they didn’t survive their talks with the Justice Department.”

  “But,” I said to Peter, “that was when he was at the top of his game and he and Stanley were still out there. Now he’s in jail and his network has all but disappeared. If we want to take action, it has to be now.”

  Peter had his doubts. “You don’t know what he’s still capable of,” he said. “It’s an enormous gamble, and you can’t assess the risk.”

  I was disappointed, but I knew it was true. Telling our story would be suicide. The relief it would bring, finally telling the truth, would soon be outweighed by the fear and danger we’d have to live with.

  I figured the subject was closed, but then Peter asked a question: “How can you prove he has shared this information with you?”

  How could I prove it? What kind of question was that? Would I just make it up? Why would anyone not believe me? As if I would risk my life for nothing.

  But Peter was right. Suppose I did tell everything I knew; it didn’t guarantee that Wim would actually be convicted. Wim, a master performer, would simply deny what he had told me, and I wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. If I was that afraid of him, why did I spend so much time with him? Why would he confide his criminal activity to his little sister, a woman, no less? He would do anything to distort the facts and make it seem as if I would benefit from him being wrongly sent to prison.

  Peter was right again—I couldn’t prove that Wim had confided in me about his crimes or that he told me that he ordered the various liquidations. Without that evidence, and with Wim’s irresistible charm, no one would believe me. If, in the best case, they did believe me, the question of whether my declarations were seen as solid proof still remained.

  Sonja accepted Peter’s arguments immediately. “If Peter says so, we shouldn’t do it. Peter is an expert. He knows Wim well and often cooperates with the police. I am glad we asked for his advice. We won’t do it.”

  “Let the Justice Department handle it,” Peter said.

  But they couldn’t “handle it” alone, not without more evidence. I decided to take matters into my own hands.

  Wim had used me as his sounding board for years. I knew the ropes in criminal circles, and when I became a criminal lawyer, he started seeing my value to him. I was the ideal combination: someone with judicial knowledge who could think like a criminal. Plus, our family ties guaranteed him my unconditional loyalty and silence.

  Over the years, I had developed from his annoying little sister into a full-fledged discussion partner. He had started sharing more and more with me.

  I wasn’t happy about this myself, but it was not up to me. I didn’t decide on our relationship. Wim comes as he pleases and that’s only if he can use you. Your needs don’t count, and his do. That’s why you can’t get him out of your life. He decides when to meet, and you have to be available. If not, he comes looking for you and torpedoes your social life or job, so that you know you’d better be available next time. If you resist, he will turn on you: “If you’re not with me, you’re against me.”

  And then things will end badly for you.

  So I couldn’t avoid contact with him. To stay on his good side for as long as possible, and not become his adversary, I had accepted the position of confidante. He could rely on me; at least, it was imperative that he thought he could.

  Wim would soon be let out of prison. With his release in sight, I decided to try to expand that position, hoping I would end up with enough evidence to put him behind bars. And, almost as if Cor was helping me, I soon got an opportunity to set my plan in motion.

  At the end of 2011, during the lead-up to his release, an incident occurred between Wim and Dino Soerel, who was also being prosecuted for extorting Willem Endstra. Soerel claimed that Willem had misused him while extorting Endstra by falsely naming Soerel to Endstra, though he had had nothing to do with it. He wanted to call Willem as a witness, and he asked him, through his lawyer, if he was willing to do it.

  Wim refused because he had not admitted to extorting Endstra and never would. In order to make Soerel’s statements—that Wim had wrongly implicated him—seem untrustworthy, Wim put his own spin on the narrative: Soerel had forced Wim into making “false statements” under threat. He deliberately shouted this story over the prison phone to both his lawyer and to me. So the Justice Department knew his story, a story that would also be his alibi should Soerel testify against Wim. He knew that doing this wouldn’t be looked upon favorably by the underworld, and, indeed, some of his criminal colleagues thought he was a backstabber.

  Wim could no longer trust his old friends
, and I grabbed the opportunity to strengthen my role as a confidante. Friends come and go; family is forever. He needed me. And just as he had with Cor and his best friends, this time I also had my own hidden agenda.

  The Release

  2012

  ON FRIDAY, JANUARY 27, 2012, I WAIT FOR WIM AT THE PARK AND RIDE at the Arnhem exit, a place we agreed upon before his release from prison. Apart from Stijn Franken, his lawyer who would drive him here, nobody knew about this meeting. Stijn had arranged with the district attorney’s office for Wim to leave the penitentiary a day early to keep him from being mobbed by the press, or worse. During his time in prison and his trial, he’d gotten so much publicity—books, articles, TV shows—that he’d become a celebrity, and he needed the extra security.

  I’ve been waiting here for an hour when they drive up. Wim gets out and approaches me, brimming with energy. Happy as a child.

  “Hi, sweet sister of mine,” he shouts excitedly. We say goodbye to Stijn and I tell him to get in. “Is the car clean?” he asks.

  “Of course it is.” I’ve done as he taught me, arranging for a car that I know has no wiretap or tracking device.

  I drive him to the location I’ve arranged for him, a chalet at a holiday resort some fifty miles from Amsterdam, rented in my mother’s name.

  During his second detention, which began in 2006, my brother developed a serious heart condition; he suffered from leaking heart valves. He barely survived heart failure, but as my mother used to say, a weed doesn’t perish. Frankly, I was surprised he had a heart at all.

  He claimed the doctors had given him no more than two years to live. The end of his life was near, and he threw himself into the role of feeble coronary patient until the last day of his detention. He denied himself everything, with a hardened discipline: he didn’t use salt and stuck to his maximum intake of fluids, six cans of Diet Coke per day.