Organised crime infiltration in the Netherlands: transportation companies hiding transit crimes

Abstract

Because of its historical development and geographical location, the Netherlands is especially attractive for the through-flow of crime and vulnerable to transit crime. Here we understand transit crime in a very broad sense as the throughflow of criminal assets from an origin country where the crime has been committed to a destination country with the use of an in-between ‘transit’ country (Unger et al., 2006). In order to determine the role of transportation companies in drug trafficking and other forms of transit crime in the Netherlands, we shall first explore what makes the Netherlands so particularly attractive for drug trafficking and other transit crimes, what are the organised crime groups involved in illegal businesses, what types of transit crime are committed, and what is the magnitude of these transit crimes (Sections 1 and 2). Section 3 then shows the use of transportation companies by organised crime for drug trafficking and other forms of transit crime in the Netherlands. What makes the Netherlands so particularly attractive for drug trafficking and other transit crimes? Already in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, Dutch ‘merchant capitalism’ was based on trading, shipping and finance, rather than on manufacturing or agriculture. Merchant capitalism included investments in highrisk ventures such as pioneering expeditions to the East Indies to engage in the spice trade. These ventures were soon consolidated in the Dutch East India Company (VOC), which established the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, subsequently renamed the Amsterdam Bourse, in 1602. This was the first stock exchange to formally begin trading in securities. Trade and ship building also helped Rotterdam become Europe’s largest harbour (de Vries & van der Woude, 1997). Still today, the port of Rotterdam is the largest port in Europe, and until 2002 also functioned as the world’s busiest port, only later to be surpassed by ports in Singapore, Dubai and China. The trade and finance orientation of the Dutch, combined with their central geographical location on the North Sea amidst large European countries, a big harbour and an important airport, Schiphol, make the country attractive for legal as well as illegal trade and finance. Organised crime groups (hereafter OCGs) inthe Netherlands have adjusted to the Dutch trading patterns and to the country’s multi-ethnicity. They use mainly ethnical networks, which are established for specific criminal transaction purposes, rather than relying on strongly hierarchical structures (Kleemans, 2007). This is why ‘mafia-type’ organisations such as those present in Italy and the United States have not been identified (Kruisbergen et al., 2012). The Netherlands has been an attractive through-flow country for crime (see Unger et al., 2006). The major criminal groups in the Netherlands engage in international smuggling activities (drugs trafficking, smuggling of illegal immigrants, human trafficking for sexual exploitation, firearms trafficking, trafficking in stolen vehicles) and other transnational illegal activities, such as money laundering, tax fraud and cigarette smuggling (Kruisbergen et al., 2012). Committed crimes, as mentioned above, are mostly transit in nature: organised crime groups are involved in international illegal trade using the same opportunity structure that facilitates regular Dutch economic activities. In order further to investigate the types of transit crime in the Netherlands, their magnitude, and the role of organised crime in them, we were able to create a database on organised crime cases in the Netherlands. We are grateful to the Dutch Public Prosecution Office (hereafter PPO) for granting us access to its database to study what criminal groups are active in the Netherlands, on which illegal markets they operate, and how big these illegal markets are. After filtering out the most serious and relevant cases of organised crime, Ferwerda & Unger (2015a) ended up with 12,946 suspects in 4,397 cases between 2003 and 2014, on which our analysis below is based.1