One of the biggest drug trials in Belgium’s history opened this week — without Europe’s most wanted cocaine gangster.
Jos Leijdekkers, who is at the helm of a merciless gangland trade in cocaine, remains a fugitive, with a bounty of €200,000 on his head.
Leijdekkers, 33, who has a personal fortune estimated at €1 billion, has been convicted three times in absentia, most recently by a court in Rotterdam in June, where he was sentenced to 24 years for cocaine trafficking on a vast scale.
He is thought to be using his time on the run to direct smuggling operations as the second-in-command to Ridouan Taghi, Europe’s most feared mafia boss, who is serving a life sentence in a Dutch prison.
The Dutch national is also known as “Bolle”, meaning tubby. Investigators know his whereabouts after images — including some posted on the Facebook page of the first lady of Sierra Leone — showed him in west Africa, which has become a major hub for cocaine trafficking from south America to Europe. The Netherlands has no extradition treaty with Sierra Leone, and the Dutch justice minister has appealed directly to his counterpart to facilitate his return.
Leijdekkers was described in a recent trial by Belgian prosecutors as an enforcer who “ordered murders with the same ease as ordering pizza”. This made his appearance at a church service with President Bio and his family all the more remarkable when a video was posted on the page of the first lady, Fatima Jabbe-Bio, earlier this year.
Separate videos have emerged of Leijdekkers at an exclusive nightclub and, wearing a black-and-gold patterned Versace shirt, handing out gifts at a birthday party of Sierra Leone’s top immigration official. A senior figure from the drug law enforcement agency was also pictured at the celebration. The immigration official, Alusine Kanneh, has now been sacked.
Despite his appearances at high-profile events and evidence that he has been in Sierra Leone for at least two years, the authorities in Freetown, the capital, said they were unable to locate him.
The conspicuous sightings have drawn local fury and accusations that state mechanisms have been captured by foreign criminals. Certainly they have hardened Sierra Leone’s reputation as a key player in cocaine smuggling. West Africa’s geographical location between points of cultivation and consumption, its gaps in governance, porous borders and expanding transport network have helped to turn the region into a busy international trafficking route.
West Africa has been a hub of international cocaine trafficking for at least two decades but its role has grown sharply since 2019 as direct routes from Latin America to Europe have drawn more scrutiny, said Lucia Bird, director of the West Africa observatory of illicit economies at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime.
Established figures from European crime networks, including from the Netherlands, Spain and the western Balkans, have been observed setting up shop in the west African Atlantic coastal states where cocaine arriving from South America is stored, sorted and repackaged for its journey north to Europe and elsewhere.
“We have seen more and more European criminal actors basing themselves in west Africa, either permanently or for periods of time, and operating as ‘brokers’ and overseeing logistics for trafficking networks,” Bird said.
Multi-tonne seizures of consignments from West Africa, once rare, have spiked since 2019. These include one in 2022 by the UK’s national crime agency which intercepted a consignment of 1.3 tonnes of cocaine with an estimated street value in Britain of £140 million hidden in a flour shipment from Freetown.
Higher quantities include the six tonnes that Belgian authorities found entering their ports last year that were also traced to Sierra Leone, and the Brazilian tugboat stopped by the French Navy 400 miles off Sierra Leone’s coast that was carrying 4.6 tonnes of cocaine worth approximately €150 million.
Leijdekkers’s brazen appearances are likely to bring more scrutiny to shipments from the region, strain relations between Sierra Leone and its international partners and deter foreign investment.
He is the son of a feared gangster and brothel-keeper in Breda, later known to Latin American drug cartels as “El Presidente” or “El Ganado”, the victor.
Leijdekkers was directly linked to photographs of a woman — naked, tortured and murdered — found on a Blackberry phone seized in 2019 when his boss, Taghi, was arrested in Dubai.
Taghi, 47, a gangster of Moroccan origin, is alleged to have been behind the killings of prominent Dutch figures and conspiracies that threatened the safety of its royal family and prime minister.
Naima Jillal, 52, disappeared in Amsterdam in 2019 and was killed in a dispute over missing cocaine. Pictures of her gagged face, bloody naked body and severed fingers were circulated by Leijdekkers as an underworld warning.
Leijdekkers rose through the ranks to become “King of the Quays” in the port of Antwerp, as head of the “octopus gang”, nicknamed thus for hiding drugs in shipments of frozen squid.
He has properties in Palm Jumeirah in Dubai, Bodrum and Istanbul in Turkey, Marbella in Spain and elsewhere in Europe, prosecutors say.
He has been sentenced to a total of 49 years in Dutch and Belgian prisons, including a 13-year sentence in absentia three weeks ago for ordering an “armed commando” to steal ten tonnes of cocaine that had been seized by Belgian customs. Both Belgian and Dutch police are seeking him to answer to new charges, including murder.
This week in Belgium, one of the biggest drug trials in the country’s history opened in Tongeren with five gang bosses in the dock. They include the alleged lieutenants of Leijdekkers: Willy Van Mechelen, 81, a former police officer, Tom Bastiaanse, 55, nicknamed “Escobar”, Nathan Steveniers, 38, Lucio Aquino, 63, and Geert Frisson, 51.
They are accused of running an “international, well-structured criminal organisation … said to be able to ship large quantities of cocaine from South America to Belgium on a very regular basis”.
Their alleged extensive crime organisation — there are 49 other suspects charged — had links to Leijdekkers and the Taghi gang as well as the Italian mafia, via Aquino, handling illegal assets estimated at €3.5 billion. Cash was laundered via real estate, mostly villas in Spain and Dubai, funding an elite social life revolving around luxury cars and expensive watches.
Steveniers is thought to have been a right hand man for Leijdekkers. Aquino had links to “Ndrangheta” and is from a notorious crime family known as the “Sopranos on the Meuse” in Belgium. Frisson is covered in tattoos, including one of a Kalashnikov on his forehead, the name of his biker gang Bandidos and the slogan “F*** the police”.
The trial continues.
