The Netherlands’ most notorious gangster Willem Holleeder was jailed for life on Thursday for ordering the “liquidation” (killing) of 5 people including his accomplice in the 1980’s kidnapping of a Freddy Heineken the beer tycoon.
Willem Holleeder, nicknamed De Neus due to the size of his nose, was determined by the judge of being “unscrupulous and indifferent” to “life and death” at the end of a 17-month trial in a secure Amsterdam courtroom known as the bunker in longest murder trial in Dutch history.
In scenes reminiscent of Hollywood mob movies the Godfather and Goodfellas, it was revealed he ordered the murder of Cor van Hout, his former friend and partner in crime in the Heineken abduction.
Freddy Heineken
Two years before the actual kidnapping took place, four friends Cor van Hout, Willem Holleeder, Frans Meijer and Jan Boellaard decided they wanted to become rich quickly.
The best way they could come up with, was planning the kidnapping a wealthy and famous person.
During the preparation it was initially unclear who would be the victim.
They had several candidates. Including:
Wisse Dekker (CEO of Phillips)
Albert Heijn (CEO of AHOLD)
Anton Dreesmann (Director Vroom & Dreesmann)
Alfred Heineken (Major shareholder of Heineken)
But it was beer magnate Freddy Heineken (the wealthiest man in the Netherlands at the time) and his driver Ab Doderer were kidnapped.
They demanded 30 million euros in ransom.
Freddy Heineken and his driver Ab Doderer were kidnapped on 9 November 1983 at 18:56 in front of Heineken’s office at the Weteringplantsoen Netherlands.
Heineken Office Amsterdam
The hostages were thrown in a van and helmets shoved on their heads with the the facemasked taped so they couldn’t see.
A taxi saw the abduction and followed as the van they were taken in stopped in an underpass to separate the hostages in separate cars, the gangsters saw him and approached the driver with a semi automatic and began shooting. The taxi was able to back away unharmed.
Heinken and Doderer were imprisoned in a Quonset hut, belonging to Boellaards wood manufacturing company, at business park De Heining in Westpoort, in the western part of the Amsterdam harbor area.
Ab Doderer. driver
The preparation required a lot of thought, time and money. The four friends invested 100,000 dutch guilders to pay for what they needed. Jan Boellaard possessed a 140 feet Romney Shed in the western harbor area of Amsterdam.
The hut was prepared in advance by the creation of a double wall on one end, with two soundproof cells with a hidden door. This made the 42 meter long hut shorter on the inside by 4 meters, which went unnoticed.
They built two cells behind a wall with a secret door. From the workshop wich was located in the shed, you could not see the cells and nobody noticed that the room was now twelve feet shorter than before.
During the kidnapping, when Heineken and Doderer were locked in these cells, people walked in and out the workplace without noticing anything unusual.
When the SWAT team came, they thought they were given a bogus tip and after several hours a policeman was able to find the hidden door.
The two hostages were held for 21 days, they were given food and access to a chemical toilette, however Holleeder would toy with Heineken whenever possible , turning off breathing vents and playing horrible music.
Holleeder’s sister turn star witness against him, Astrid feels her brother Willem inherited a sadistic trait of their father who also worked for Heineken.
She said her father was obsessed with him in a stalker type way, so subconsciously this also served as revenge for the abuse their father committed against them.
When the preparations were in full swing, Martin Erkamps was added to the team. He had a limited role in the kidnapping. He helped the four friends planning the kidnapping and to steal cars that were used during the crime.
Martin Erkamps
The money transfer was the most complicated part of the kidnapping. They came up with an idea to use pneumatic tube transport. That way they could stay at a reasonable distance while receiving the money. However, a test showed that this entailed a lot of risks and it was too difficult to achieve.
Another option was to get the money thrown in the water by the negotiators so that the kidnappers could collect it using diving equipment. A problem with this method was the weight of the money. The millions of paper money would be hard to handle underwater.
The weight of the money was a big problem for the kidnappers. They didn’t want to demand bills of 1000 dutch guilders to decrease the chances of getting caught afterwards. The bags with bills of smaller values would weigh at least 800 pounds total.
Hut where Heineken was held
The kidnappers wanted the police to think they were German. They bought almost all the materials in Germany such as a manufactured typewriter, A4 paper with a German watermark and all that was found in the cells came from Germany.
The kidnappers and the police communicated by letter, coded newspaper ads or they recorded Heineken or Doderer on tapes which they used to give instructions by phone. The kidnappers demanded a ransom of 200,000 Dutch, German, French and U.S. banknotes with a total value of 35 million dutch guilders (22 million U.S. dollars).
The first attempt at ransom payment failed because it was not able to make the drop without the public or press noticing.
The second attempt was on November 28th. The kidnappers demanded that the driver of the car with the ransom was alone and not followed. The driver was led to a chain of instructions.
The kidnappers had buried these in plastic cups earlier. On the way the driver was instructed to transfer with the ransom to another car. Eventually, at the top of an overpass, the agent had to stop.
Heineken and driver released
Through a radio, he was instructed to slide the moneybags down through a drainage channel. The kidnappers stood below the overpass and loaded the ransom into a Mercedes Hanomag and drove away. Earlier, in the woods near Zeist, they had buried several barrels in the ground. This is where they hid the money.
When the second ransom note was typed and xeroxed the crew of four realized one of them left their hand prints on the letter, so they had to act fast, the drop was made and they called in an anonymous tip on themselves after departing so the hostages would be found.
According to the police, three of the five kidnappers were named in the tip. The police never revealed any further information.
On the night of the ransom drop the night vision camera was attached to a police helicopter and the helicopter followed the car sent to drop off the ransom – on a viaduct without on- or off-ramps the bags of money were dropped through a drainage gutter to the kidnappers’ pickup point.
Cor Van Hout and Willem Holleeder
Up until this point, all went well. “The gyroscope with which the camera was attached to the helicopter came loose and was no longer controllable”, according to the old Minister. “
The camera stared out at the night landscape”, while the kidnappers took off with the ransom unchecked. You can hear the helicopter crew swearing at the camera on the audio recordings, Krothals Altes writes.
Jan Boellaard and Martin Erkamps were arrested soon after the invasion of the shed. The other three kidnappers managed to escape.
Willem Holleeder, Cor van Hout, Jan Boellaard and Frans Meijer.
Frans Meijer spent several weeks in Amsterdam, but turned himself in on December 28th. Willem Holleeder and Cor van Hout fled to Paris.
Martin Erkamps was sentenced to eight years in prison in October 1984. Jan Boellaard was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
Van Hout and Holleeder were sentenced to 11 years in prison in February 1987. Because the earlier extradition was withdrawn by France, they could not be brought to trial for the indictment ‘written death threats’. This resulted in 1 year in prison less than Boellaard.
Cor Van Hout and Willem Holleeder
They stayed in an apartment several months but were arrested by the French police on February 29, 1984.
Cor van Hout was in a relationship with the sister of Willem Holleeder, Sonja who was pregnant with his child at the time.
They were placed in french prisons and also under house arrest in various french hotels, until October 1986, when almost two years after the abduction, they were extradited to the Netherlands.
Frans Meijer was given a psychiatric examination. He escaped from the mental hospital on January 1, 1985. Without his presence he was sentenced to 12 years in prison later that year.
Heineken kidnappers Frans Meijer (left) and Jan Boellaard (right)
In 1994 he was found by crime reporter Peter R. de Vries in Paraguay. Meijer had started a family here. In 1998 he was arrested in Paraguay and 4 years later extradited to the Netherlands. After his release in 2005 he returned to Paraguay.
Last year ,Meijer, 66, was gunned down by a motorcycle cop in Amsterdam on Monday morning after fleeing with another man when he was challenged by police in the city’s Staatslieden neighborhood.
He was taken to hospital with multiple gunshot wounds, where he remains under guard. The second man, his son according to unconfirmed reports, was arrested. The pair are suspected of planning a robbery in the district and Meijer was reported to be carrying a firearm.
The motorbike officer, who was responding to call from a member of the public about the men acting suspiciously, was forced to shoot Meijer, police told the De Telegraaf newspaper.
When the kidnappers were on the run, they took 15 million dutch guilders from the barrels they had buried in the forest close to Zeist – 3 million each.
About a week later, the police found the buried barrels and the rest of the 35 million guilders. During the hunt for the kidnappers, the house searches and arrests the police confiscated 7 million guilders. Eight million has never been found.
The kidnappers told the police that Frans Meijer had burned the money at the beach and found God.
However, there have been reports of Thomas van der Bijl (Who was murdered in 2006) that 7 million was buried in a forest in Paris. According to Van der Bijl these millions were used to purchase apartment buildings in Zaandam and brothels in Alkmaar.
Which is how Holleeder and Van Hout became extremely wealthy, one the Heineken family found out , they no longer allowed the beer to be sold at those establishments.
A movie was later made about the kidnapping. Holleeder sued filmmakers from his cell in the high-security prison where he is serving a new nine-year sentence in an unrelated extortion case, and the Justice
Ministry did not grant him leave to appear in the courtroom.
Producer IDTV Film argued the Dutch-language movie “The Heineken Kidnapping,” which cost $6.4 million to make and stars Rutger Hauer as Heineken, is a fictionalized version of events. They said halting it days before its scheduled Oct. 24 opening in Amsterdam would be financially ruinous.
Holleeder, now 53, is not named in the movie, and filmmakers merged his character with that of another of the four real-life kidnappers — though one of the actors resembles Holleeder physically, right down to the prominent nose that prompted his nickname.
Holleeder’s lawyers say the movie portrays the kidnappers as more violent than they actually were, and it will stymie Holleeder’s attempts to reintegrate with society once he is released. They say he wants to be known for what he actually did, not as the character in the movie.
In an interview with Dutch press agency ANP, the film’s director Maarten Treurniet said Holleeder’s suit has no merit.
“In my eyes, he suffered the bulk of the damage to his reputation when he kidnapped Heineken: this is peanuts by comparison,” Treurniet said. He said viewers will have more sympathy for the character that most resembles Holleeder than he deserves.
Van Hout was the father of the children of Holleeder’s sister Sonja but was nevertheless gunned down outside an Amsterdam restaurant in 2003, after two earlier attempts on his life.
Both of Holleeder ‘s sisters Astrid and Sonja would later testify against him in massive public spectacle.
