Willem (Wim) Holleeder, described in court earlier in the trial as “the best-known Dutch product after cheese” in criminal circles, was arrested in 2014 over the murder of two men before the charges multiplied.
Holleeder was found guilty of ordering the murder of Van Hout, Sam Klepper, Willem Endstra, Kees Houtman, Thomas van der Bijl and the attempted murder of John Mieremet, who survived but was killed in 2005 in an unsolved murder.
Holleeder was found guilty of the manslaughter of boat trader Robert ter Haak, who was shot dead during Van Hout’s assassination.
Willem Holleeder: On trial for murders
- Sam Klepper, criminal – shot dead, 2000
- Cor van Hout, friend and ex-accomplice – shot dead, 2003
- Willem Endstra, property developer – shot dead, 2004
- John Mieremet, Klepper’s business partner – shot dead in Thailand, 2005
- Thomas van der Bijl, bar owner and family friend – shot dead, 2006
The main witness statements were from his former girlfriend Sandra den Hartog and his sisters, Astrid and Sonja, the latter of whom had been married to Van Hout.
Holleeder sought to undermine their testimonies by describing their evidence as a conspiracy, and falsely accused Astrid of having psychological problems.
Astrid always feared the judges would be vulnerable to her charismatic sibling’s capacity to charm.
“He knows how to manipulate people into believing him. If you talk to him for 5 minutes you like him, even though you know he committed a lot of crimes.
“After 10 minutes you don’t believe what I’ve said about him anymore, after 15 minutes you think I’m crazy because he’s fantastic.
“I had the same problem. Every time he wins my heart.”
The only way to come up with compelling evidence, she concluded, was to wear a wire, without the help of Dutch authorities.
She had no trust in the justice department, as her brother had boasted that they were in his pocket.
She customized recording devices in her bra and sewed them into collars. “He used to pat me down. I had to be careful he wouldn’t see the red light flashing through my top, so I taped over them and colored them in.”
Holleeder, claimed the “unprecedented media campaign my sisters have conducted against me with the help of journalists” made the judgment unsafe.
His lawyers vowed to appeal against the conviction. The judge told the court the verdict had not been swayed by the media coverage and the women should be believed.
He said: “We have found no substantiation that the statements are coordinated. Their story has proven to be reliable in other areas than just the murders. They can be used for proof without hesitation.”
The judge said Holleeder lived in a world of violence and lawlessness.
Which is why it was so dangerous for his sisters to testify against him – everyone else who has ended up dead.
It was Sonja’s husband, Cor Van Hout, who was a criminal partner with Holleeder starting with the Freddy Heineken Kidnapping.
They sent the Dutch police a note demanding a ransom to the equivalent of more than 30 million dollars in today’s money.
By then, Sonja was living with Cor van Hout, with whom she’d recently had a daughter, Frances.
One night, Astrid and Wim joined them for dinner as they watched the news.
“It’s extremely stupid,” Astrid remembers saying. “Who would kidnap Heineken?
They’ll be hunted the rest of their lives.”
“You think so?” Wim asked.
“I’m pretty damn sure of it,” she replied.
Cor and Wim escaped to France, but while Astrid was staying at Sonja’s house heavily armed policemen burst through the door and placed the sisters under arrest. Astrid was 17.
Astrid and Sonja told investigators that they’d been unaware of the plot; anyway Wim wouldn’t have confided in his sisters.
The women were released without charges.
It looked as though Cor and Wim might actually get away with it, but because this is a family story Cor ends up calling back to Amsterdam to talk to Sonja with whom he shares a child and is romantically involved with.
She is also Wim’s sister, so the authorities know they should be watching her most of all.
They are trace her calls, so they figure out where the guys are hiding in Paris.
6 weeks later, Wim and Cor were captured at an apartment near the Champs-Élysées.
They were placed in French prisons until their extradition, during this period, Wim gave occasional interviews to the Dutch press, coming across as insolent, handsome antiheroes—working-class toughs who’d dared to kidnap the richest man in the Netherlands.
Though Astrid was privately appalled by their self-promotion, her feelings were complicated: Wim was her brother, and Cor was her sister’s partner.
Sonja never wavered in her support for Cor, travelling to France every week to visit he and Wim in prison.
Astrid had worked very hard to go to college, start a career, and become her own entity.
She married an Artist and at 19, Astrid gave birth to a girl, Miljuschka.
Astrid’s ambition to distance herself from her family was thwarted, because she now felt a sense of embattled allegiance to them—also because her last name had become infamous and no one at that time wanted to hire her, she was now a liability.
It wasn’t until she became a criminal lawyer where her name became an asset.
For several months, she tried to shield her baby from her family, including her mother, because she was afraid that Miljuschka would be infected by “the mechanisms of my family.”
Today When Astrid decided to turn on Wim, she discussed the possible consequences with Miljuschka.
“I told her I could get killed—and she could get killed,” Astrid said. But Miljuschka endorsed the idea. “It’s about honor,” she said .
“Also, you know, doing the right thing, by deciding to testify, we are ready to die.
I’m a public person. He can find me if he wants to.”
If she were murdered, she said, “it would be tough for my kids, but they would manage.”
The fact the family can finally confront Wim feels like a “revolution,” Miljuschka went on. “I saw my mother working her ass off. I saw this strong woman being abused by her brother. When she told me what she was doing, that she was taping him—I’d been waiting for this moment all my life.”
Miljuschka used to be a model, but now has a cook book which stands side by side with her mother’s in bookstores.
Astrid began seeing a therapist when her daughter was born.
This was not something that people from her neighborhood did—“It meant you were crazy”—but she was determined not to subject her daughter to the pathologies that had warped her own childhood.
“My first questions to the therapist were: ‘What is normal? How do normal people act?’ ”
After Wim and Cor were finally extradited to the Netherlands in 1986, and sentenced to 11 years in prison,but under the country’s liberal sentencing regime, they were released after only 5.
The Dutch police were scandalized when the kidnappers marked the occasion by throwing a decadent party where a band performed a Heineken jingle.
The men had ample reason to celebrate: “the authorities didn’t get the money.”
The Dutch police claimed to have found most of the ransom buried in a wooded area near the town of Zeist, 35 miles southeast of Amsterdam. But roughly a quarter of it—the equivalent, today, of 8 million dollars—was never recovered.
According to Astrid, Wim and Cor entrusted some of these funds to criminal associates, with instructions to invest in the drug trade.
“So, while they were in prison, the 8 million was working for them,” she said.
They went into prison as rich men and came out richer.
Cor and Wim were still partners, and through Cor’s relationship with Sonja the Holleeders had effectively become a crime family.
Astrid’s father had died while Wim was imprisoned, and Wim returned home as the paterfamilias. (Astrid’s other brother, Gerard, drifted away from the family.)
Peter de Vries, the crime reporter, got to know Cor and Wim while they were being held in France, and in 1987 he published “Kidnapping Mr. Heineken,” which became a best-seller.
In the book, Cor says that he has no major regrets about his actions, and celebrates his bond with Wim and the other kidnappers as a “unique, indestructible, all-encompassing, eternal .
Later are still very close, and still criminal partners. Their families spend a lot of time together and at a certain point somebody tries to shoot Cor Van Hout to kill him.
Of course terrified, he doesn’t know who’s trying to kill him and Wim says, “Oh I think I figured it out. It’s these these 2 gangsters in Amsterdam and they want to extort money from you. They want you to pay and he kind of urges Cor to pay.”
Cor doesn’t want to, so there’s a 2nd attempt – a sniper tries to shoot Cor in front of his house. Again he gets away and survives.
But then there’s a 3rd and attempt. Cor’s out in front of a Chinese restaurant one day when motorcycle came spraying him with bullets.
At that time, because he was jealous of Cor, Wim felt threatened because he was paranoid because he was going to actually going after more of Cor’s share of the Heineken ransom which they still had.
He wanted to eliminate Cor and did so.
Between 1999 and 2000, just before the 2nd failed assassination attempt on Cor van Hout at his home in Amstelvee, Holleeder regularly tried to get information about his whereabouts from his sister Sonja.
The 2 were once best friends, but had a falling out just before the millennium.
“Willem continued to put me under pressure”, Sonja told the De Tellegraf.
He even put his gun to our son’s head to force me to contribute to the death of Cor. I constantly had to tell him where Cor was. I also had to put the blinds in a certain position when Cor was home.” On one assassination attempt she and her son were shot at as well.
Sonja said. “He is considered a master criminal, but that is an inappropriate term because it sounds something like a compliment.
In reality he is the devil. A woman was killed around here. Everyone thought it was me.
My brother grinned; you’d better buy a bulletproof vest because that will happen to you.” she said.
“He made our lives hell, from which no escape was possible.”
Sonja said. “He not only threatened to murder us, but also my 2 children.
To show how insane he has become, he thought it a favor that I could choose which of my two children would be shot first.”
“He regards the growing children of the people he assassinated as potential future threats. He was afraid that they would later take revenge.”
The conversation between Holleeder and his sister Sonja was speedy and the chairman of the court interrupted the two by saying that he felt like watching a tennis match.
“Yes, the Holleeders can play tennis”, Holleeder responded with a laugh.
“But listen very well, Boxer”, he turned to his sister again. “You have to know yourself that you are lying, and you have to be ashamed, I have arranged everything for you.”
“Dirty liar”, Sonja bit him again. “Do you know what I think is the worst – when you were in a coma, you dreamed that you saw light at the end of the tunnel and that I had called you back, I should have let you go”.
Sonja is refering to the serious heart problems which her brother was hospitalized for in 2007.
“Then you should have pulled out the plugs, child,” Holleeder reacted.
To the outside world it seemed that Holleeder’s family and friends were a united front, but in reality mostly fear prevailed within the inner circle.
“Twenty-four hours a day we were under monitoring. The pressure increased more and more.” Sonja said.
Inside this family you have this crazy dynamic. Wim is still this very forceful figure.
He sees both of his sisters all the time. He sees his niece and nephew whose father he had killed and privately they all know he actually did this.
But it takes them a long time to summon the nerve to turn on him. Astrid has a friend go to surveillance stores to pick up recorders. She cannot go herself because Wim also goes to the same stores for his own reasons.
Astrid and her sister Sonja secretly started wearing a wire and recording conversations in which he made admissions to criminal activity.
He belittles his sisters, to kill them, and to beat them.
Willem Holleeder, 60, can be heard screaming eye-watering insults at Sonja, calling her a “cancer whore”.
Reflecting on the courtroom drama, Astrid says: “It’s not cool to treat a woman like that. A lot of people heard the tapes and decided, well, I’m not going to help him.”
The vulgar, abusive language blew apart the image of a lovable rogue.
Joining the 2 sisters in giving evidence against him was his ex-partner Sandra den Hartog Klepper, who was also the widow of one his alleged victims.
Astrid Holleeder’s autobiography Judas started out as a personal record for her daughter, popular TV chef Miljuschka, in case she didn’t live long enough to tell her story.
But it has also made her wealthy.
Her brother said at his trial: “My sisters are trying to trick you. They’re lying and their only motive is money”.
He’s a guy who is every bit as abusive as their abusive father.
The “mega-trial,” as the Dutch press calls it, has become such a spectacle that people often line up at dawn in the hope of securing a seat in the small public gallery. Part of the allure is Astrid herself.
In 2016, she published a memoir, “Judas,” about growing up with Wim, and about her decision to betray him.
Through sobs, she explained that, despite Wim’s many crimes, she still loves him.
It was “crazy and horrible” to be testifying against him, she admitted. “But, if you have a very sweet dog that bites children, you have to choose the children, and put the dog down.”
Astrid has lived in hiding since becoming the star witness in a murder trial against her brother. She is in exile in her own city living in a series of furnished safe houses.
She prefers buildings with basement parking, in order to minimize her exposure during the brief transit to a bulletproof car and owns two bulletproof vests.
She thinks a lot about how she might be assassinated, gaming out fatal scenarios.
Whenever she stops at a red light and an unfamiliar vehicle sharks up alongside her, she clutches the wheel, her heart hammering. Then the light changes, and she exhales and keeps moving.
Amsterdam, a city of fewer than a million people, is a difficult place to stage your own disappearance, particularly if you grew up there.
Fortunately for Holleeder she guarded her privacy even before her life became threatened, no photographs of her as an adult can be found on the Internet.
Today, she arranges visits with a small circle of friends, but otherwise stays mostly at home.
When she moves through Amsterdam, she does so in secret, and sometimes in disguise: she has a collection of fake noses and teeth.
Astrid typically dresses in black, but if she suspects she’s being followed she may duck into a bathroom and emerge in a wig and a red dress.
Occasionally, she has posed as a man.
Certainly, it is risky for her to meet anyone she doesn’t already know. Holleeder is a vibrant woman who draws energy from having people around her, but she has armored herself.
In 2016, Wim allegedly asked gang leaders at the prison to enlist members on the outside to execute Holleeder, along with 2 other witnesses in the case against him.
The plot was disrupted when one of the prisoners confessed to officials. But the threat lingers. “Of course he would do it,” Holleeder said. “He would kill me.”
The contract is out on both Astrid and her sister Sonja, so even if Wim dies somehow, the contract would still be carried out.
In an interview with Astrid for the Medium Corp. it is mentioned , “He pays 35.000 euro’s per sister and explicitly mentions you going first.
“In response she says, “Only when you have lived with him, you can tell how Willem operates. After a brief period in the MSP the justice department told me:
‘He doesn’t get any visitors, so that is a good sign’.
No, it’s the opposite. It means he is preparing something, but when something happens he can say: ‘Me? I didn’t even get one visitor!’ And indeed it transpired that he had been busy arranging for our liquidation in the MSP. That is why he didn’t want any outside lines.
Willem’s motto: what you see is not what is there. And believe me, as soon as he is transferred to a regular facility he will have arranged for our liquidation within 2 weeks.
We don’t have any illusions about that.”
You live in spare time, says the writer.
“Yes, but if I am disciplined, I can buy some more time.”
On tapes , Wim stated if he was convicted their children would be killed first.
If she speaks with unusual conviction about what her brother might do,it is in part because she used to be his legal adviser: until Holleeder went into hiding, she was a successful criminal-defense attorney.
More to the point, she is his younger sister.
The proceedings took place in a secure courtroom, on the industrial outskirts of Amsterdam, known as the Bunker.
When Astrid testifies, she sits in an enclosure behind an opaque screen, which guarantees that nobody in the courtroom can see her face except the judges.
It also insures she cannot see Wim, who might seek to inhibit her testimony with a menacing glance or a gesture that only she could understand.
As one prosecutor recently explained in court, Wim “can be extremely intimidating.”
The book’s title reflects her profound ambivalence about her decision to accuse her brother of murder, but the high drama of that choice is what made the book a success.
What attracts so many onlookers to the highest security jail in the country is the clash of the Holleeders – a sibling rivalry distilled to a courtroom duel.
Her voice fills the courtroom as she testifies and you can see them there.
It clearly drives Wim mad to have his sister telling these stories about them and actually playing audio of secret conversations the two of them had.
If you watch him, he’s just like a symphony of ticks it’s all this kind of passive aggression he’s kind of moving all around, he’s twirling his glasses, he’s scoffing, he is laughing, clearing his throat, whispering to his lawyers, so the drama of this scene is really something.
Astrid’s father, who was also named Willem, worked at the nearby Heineken brewery.
He revered Alfred (Freddy) Heineken, the potentate who ran the company. Heineken’s green bottles reportedly came to account for 40% of the imported beer consumed in the United States, and Freddy Heineken was one of the Netherlands’ richest men.
The house was “drenched in Heineken,” Astrid recalled. So was her father: he was an alcoholic and a tyrannical sadist who abused Astrid’s mother, Stien, and their children.
When Astrid reflects on the circumscribed nature of her current existence, she sometimes recalls her childhood.
“I’m used to being in prison, because home was a prison.”
Wim was a tall and handsome teenager, but like his father, he was temperamental, and the two often clashed; Wim started going out in the evening and coming home very late.
He sometimes woke Astrid on his return and whispered, “Assie, are you asleep? Has Dad gone to bed yet? Did he go crazy again?”
Astrid whispered back, “He was yelling that you were late. But Mom turned back the clock so he wouldn’t catch you.”
Their mom noted, “I didn’t know that he was hanging around with the wrong people.” Then again, she pointed out, “they were all criminals in the neighborhood.”
The Netherlands officially has one of the world’s lowest crime rates. In recent years, some two dozen Dutch prisons have shut down, because there aren’t enough convicts to fill them.
Toleration of cannabis and prostitution, combined with low levels of poverty and robust social-welfare protections, has burnished the country’s reputation as a peaceful, progressive utopia.
But a recent confidential report by the Dutch police, which leaked to the press, suggested that official figures don’t reflect the actual volume of crime in the country.
The police estimated that millions of minor thefts and other violations go unreported every year, because victims conclude that crime is an inevitable nuisance or that the authorities are unlikely to apprehend the perpetrators.
There is also a fair amount of serious crime.
According to a Europol report, as much as half the cocaine that enters Europe passes through the port of Rotterdam. When a jumbo shipment went missing a few years ago, a gang war erupted; more than a dozen people were murdered, and hit men sprayed bullets down Amsterdam’s streets.
Wim Holleeder’s early forays into the underworld were modest: he provided muscle for landlords who were looking to evict squatters, and dabbled in various fraudulent schemes.
By his early twenties, he’d advanced to armed robbery. He’d begun showing some of the abusive tendencies of his dad, including menacing his sisters. According to Astrid, he would tell them, “I’m the boss.”
“He’s a narcissist, like his father,” she said.
He came home occasionally, to visit his siblings and their mother, and often brought along his childhood friend Cornelius van Hout, who went by Cor.
Astrid liked him. “He had a joie de vivre,” and he didn’t take the tempestuous Wim too seriously. Sonja also found Cor charming, and, to Astrid’s delight, began dating him.
Wim Holleeder and Cor van Hout in Beauvais, France, in November of 1985.
Photograph by René Bouwman
Astrid and Sonja were close but very different. Sonja was beautiful, blond, perfectly dressed and Astrid was like a tank so fiercely independent that her siblings joked that she must have been a foundling.
Astrid excelled in school, and, feeling confined by the Jordaanese slang she’d grown up speaking, made a point of mastering “proper” Dutch.
Wim mocked her for putting on airs.
She learned English, too, and found it comforting to have access to a language that her abusive father could not comprehend.
Even today, she finds that slipping into English provides an emotional refuge.
As Astrid grew into adulthood, she had a tendency to think in starkly gendered terms: women were victims and men were perpetrators.
“I was like a man,” she stated. “I didn’t want to be a victim.
I never wore a dress.” She played basketball, eventually rising to a semi-professional level.
At 17, she left home, turning her back on her father forever. Her plan was to flee the Netherlands by winning a college scholarship abroad. “I was ready to go to the United States,” she recalled. “It was only with the Heineken kidnapping that I got sucked back in.”
Astrid’s publisher, Oscar van Gelderen has experience representing a star author who is subject to death threats: he was the first foreign publisher to translate Roberto Saviano, the Italian journalist who wrote the 2006 book “Gomorrah,” about the Neapolitan Mafia, and has lived in hiding ever since.
Without a doubt, she observed, there was a patricidal impulse behind Wim’s decision to kidnap Freddy Heineken, the man her father revered but who also “provided the beer that he drank all day.”
Even so, she said, “Wim would never have consciously decided to take Freddy Heineken for that reason—he’s not self-aware enough for that.”
Astrid wishes her brother could be locked away in a palace and accepts their fates will always be entwined.
“We’re both sentenced to life if he gets convicted. If he doesn’t get convicted, then we both have the death penalty because I think we have to kill each other.”
But telling her life story was a liberation, sharing her words an opportunity to regain control.
“I’m not ashamed of the things I’ve done. I don’t want to be a hero, or powerful. I just want to be me.
“I hope that people can see coming from a dysfunctional family doesn’t mean you have to be crippled for life.”