Crime reporter John van den Heuvel left for the police academy in Amsterdam in the early 1980s and witnessed the rise of the so-called polder mafia. A time that was perhaps just as intense as now. Even though many books and films from that time have appeared, the 1980s of the polder mafia were anything but romantic, he says in the radio program Wakker! from Omroep Brabant.
John van den Heuvel moved from Eindhoven to Amsterdam in 1981 to study at the police academy. He worked as a cop and became an undercover cop from 1987 to 1989, making drug purchases to gather evidence in the drug scene. “I was lucky in the eighties, the whole Polder Mafia came into existence over the years.”
In 1983, Alfred Heineken and his driver were kidnapped. Van den Heuvel was working at the police station at the time. “I was on duty that night, working at the police station near where the kidnapping had taken place. The whole of the Netherlands was turned upside down, we were busy looking for the kidnappers, only knowing afterwards how professionally they had handled it.”
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According to Van den Heuvel, that kidnapping was the prelude to real organized crime in the Netherlands.
“That developed more and more. Klaas Bruinsma, the first real mafia boss in the Netherlands, got his entire empire off the ground in the late eighties. With liquidations, large consignments of drugs that were smuggled, but also the first, violent violence between organizations.”
“His torso was found in a barrel of concrete in a river. He appeared to have been tortured.”
At that time, according to him, it was really not much better than it is now. “I still remember a kickboxer, André Brilleman, a man of violence in one of those criminal organizations. He suddenly disappeared from the scene. His torso was found in a barrel of concrete in a river. He was tortured and had his limbs amputated. That already happened then.”
He himself notices that the violence of today is not limited to the underworld, but pops up in the upper world. And that the violence is getting more intense.
“Fortunately, in the 1980s it was not yet the case that a journalist, lawyer or brother of the key witness was murdered. That is the biggest difference between then and now, it goes much further and the violence becomes more intense with the use of bomb attacks and automatic weapons. They used to take someone to the woods to liquidate, nowadays they do that openly and nakedly on the street with a lot of violence.”
“It was a tough world where everyone cheated and killed each other.”
Many crime stories from the 1980s, such as the kidnapping of Freddy Heineken and his driver and the rise of drug lord Klaas Bruinsma, have been released in books and films in the years that followed. Those stories are read and watched by many people and sometimes even seem somewhat romanticized.
But according to Van den Heuvel, it was anything but romantic at the time. “It was a tough world in which everyone cheated and killed each other. Whatever those books and movies make it seem, there is no romance. Stay as far away from it as possible.”
Omroep Brabant Radio dives into The Feeling of the Eighties this week. We step into a time machine and go about 40 years back in time. You’ll hear the best music from the 80s all week long. Do you want to see the movie ‘ET’ exclusively in the cinema? Listen to ‘The Feeling of the Eighties’ and win tickets!
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