One morning in the late summer of 2004, Rachel Soerel took the regional bus to Amsterdam. Leave Purmerend, twenty minutes along meadows and canals, and then through the IJ tunnel into the center of the capital. Just like just about any other day.
The family life of then 16-year-old Rachel took place in Purmerend, where she and her older sister slept alternately with her father and mother. They had been separated for years and lived opposite each other. With new partners in their own terraced houses.
But the Amsterdam Nieuwmarkt neighborhood was the setting for Rachel’s social life. She went to high school there. Her aunt ran a café right on the central square, and like many friends and family, Rachel sometimes worked there as a waiter.
That late summer day in 2004, Rachel sat on the bus with a heavy heart. A family friend, the successful kickboxer Nordin Ben Salah, had been shot dead moments earlier. There had been a silent journey. During the ride she leafed through a free newspaper, which public transport was still full of at that time. Her attention was drawn by an article about the criminal environment in Purmerend, following Nordin’s death. “In that story a certain Dino S. was mentioned,” she says. “That had to be my father, no one else in Purmerend has that name.”
Everything she thought she knew about her father until then – just a funny, sweet man with a strong moral sense and a martial arts hobby – was shaken in that moment, she says. Only then, says Rachel Soerel, did she realize that Dino Soerel was active in the criminal world, and that such work entailed risks. She got scared. Could her father face the same fate as Nordin? “The father as I knew him, and the role he had in the outside world, then came together for the first time.”
We speak to Rachel Soerel (36) in the only café on the Nieuwmarkt that opens early in the day, Café del Mondo, diagonally opposite the business that used to belong to her aunt, and where the family often visited. She now lives in Amsterdam with her husband and children aged five and eight.
Rachel walked in wearing workout leggings and a black hoodie. The café smells of American pancakes, which are heated up behind the bar. “I used to know the café owners in this neighborhood, but everything has been taken over by new entrepreneurs in recent years.”
The documentary series has been available on Amazon Prime since this week Pact with the devil broadcast a series about the Passage trial, in which journalists, judges, police officers, prosecutors and professional criminals look back on the trial that revolved around liquidations in the Amsterdam underworld. Dino Soerel was initially acquitted of those liquidations, but on appeal he was given a life sentence. This was partly thanks to the efforts of two criminals who made a deal with the justice system: Peter la Serpe and Fred Ros.
In the documentary, Rachel Soerel speaks on behalf of her now 63-year-old father. He did not receive permission from the prison to cooperate. Producer Erica Reijmerink asked Rachel if she wanted to tell his side. “It felt unfair if his story wouldn’t be heard.” She cooperates mainly because she is convinced that Dino Soerel has been wrongly convicted for his involvement in the liquidations. Because although the court has ruled that the statements of the criminal witnesses are reliable and that there is sufficient evidence to show that Dino Soerel ordered the murders, Rachel and her father argue that he was framed by La Serpe and Ros.
You were two years old when your father received a long prison sentence. He had to serve four years for the fatal assault of a man in a bar in Volendam, together with two others. What do you remember about that?
“Nothing at all, actually. Only later did I hear stories about what had happened. The funny thing is that I never felt like it was that bad. Where we lived, in Purmerend, almost everyone around me was happy that that man was no longer there. So I didn’t see my dad as a bad man then, you know? And he did not deliver the fatal blows.”
Do you blame him for doing that when he had two young children at home?
“When a group of boys have a fight, I’m not surprised that something goes wrong. One wrong blow thrown and someone is dead. I see beating someone up as an old-fashioned fight. I think you can still be a good person after doing something like that.”
While serving his sentence in the Veenhuizen prison in Drenthe, Soerel meets prominent professional criminals, such as the later murdered Stanley Hillis. In the years after his release, Soerel quickly made a career in organized drug crime.
He could also have looked for a normal job when he got out of prison.
“I think he tried that too. But he was rejected in many places because of the name he had. Maybe he should have fought harder for it. But it was easier for him, with the contacts he had made in prison, to earn his money in another way. I don’t blame him. But I think it’s a shame and I also think it’s a stupid choice. Because that choice has also had a major influence on our lives.”
When you were sixteen, you found out that your father had not been honest about his work. What impact did that have then?
“Because I didn’t know so much, the basis of my life subsequently started to shake, and so did I a little bit. After that newspaper report, I asked my father a lot of questions, but he couldn’t really answer them. He also thought: I’m not going to hold that sixteen-year-old child to task. In the following years, more and more information came out. That book about the Endstra tapes was published. That was also about my father, and I just started reading that.”
Rachel Soerel learned more and more about her childhood. That many of the children she played with had fathers who were criminals. Only over the years did she discover that the Holleeder who came over so often as a friend of her father was also a criminal. “That man is no good, I thought at the time.” She laughs. “My father now agrees with me.”
She has always found it complicated to determine which direction she wants to go. She has had jobs in the catering industry and in a tanning salon, but would prefer to work full-time as a model. That seemed to work, but when her father became famous, she no longer dared. She feared that the link with her father would be made if she herself was in the media. She worked behind the scenes as a stylist for a while, but when the children were born she stayed home to care for them. “I can’t wait to do something for myself again, but I don’t know what exactly.”
In 2009, Dino Soerel was sentenced to eight years in prison by the Haarlem court for his leading role in a criminal organization that organized drug transports of ecstasy, coke, heroin and hashish. He wasn’t at that trial. Years earlier, he had fled and ended up on the National Investigation List as one of the most wanted people in the Netherlands.
“A few years before the conviction, just before he went into hiding, he was standing opposite this in the pub, wearing a backpack,” remembers Rachel Soerel. “I’m going away for a while,” he said. And I thought: it’s okay. That happened more often.” But this time he didn’t come back. “I mainly thought: Dad, I need you. Where are you? He never called. I had to bottle up everything I felt at the time.”
After two years, her father gave occasional signs of life. Strangers put notes from her father through her letterbox, writing that he was doing well and giving instructions to meet him after a while. He stayed in a house on Amsterdam’s Rozengracht. “Then I disguised myself with a cap and glasses. No one was allowed to see where I was going. I left my phone at home so I couldn’t be tracked digitally.” During those meetings they also talked about what he had done. “Things in drugs, he said.”
It never occurred to Rachel to share the information about his hiding place with others. Her older sister also visited their father sometimes, but Rachel went most often. “I’m a daddy’s girl,” she says. “I thought he should just report to the police and I said so. But he still had to think about that.”
In 2010, Dino Soerel was arrested in the house on Rozengracht. The images of Dino Soerel naked and with a dark cloth over his eyes were all over the news. “My father was shown to the whole of the Netherlands as if he were Osama bin Laden. I still think that’s ridiculously exaggerated.”
Justice prosecuted Dino Soerel in the Passage trial for involvement in several contract killings that could be linked to the Amsterdam underworld. Rachel regularly visited her father at that time. Then they talked a lot about the past, about the choices Dino Soerel has made in his life. They were not smart, he admits according to his daughter.
Why do you continue to support your father despite everything he has done?
“I am sure that he is not responsible for those liquidations, that is why I am here. I also think he should have been punished for other things he did. Even if they had given him fifteen years for that. But he doesn’t deserve to be punished for those murders, that’s just not right. He’s not the murderous type. My father gave me a wonderful childhood. He has always been very kind to me. And maybe that’s why I don’t blame him for the other side. Just because people do things that are forbidden doesn’t make them bad.”
When do you think a person is bad?
“I don’t easily find someone bad. People who harm children? Or people who deliberately hurt someone? I always want to see someone’s human side. I always look at motives and circumstances.”
You haven’t been able to do the work you wanted, and your children only see their grandfather in prison. Why aren’t you angry?
“That’s just because of the person my father is. I never wanted to let him go.”
Rachel Soerel was in the public gallery when the judge sentenced her father to life in prison in 2017. She banged furiously on the glass that separated her from her father. She remains hopeful, she says, just like her father. He could be eligible for a pardon in twelve years. He is then well over seventy. And proceedings are still ongoing at the European Court of Human Rights.
In the meantime, she wants to continue to work for her father. She is working on a book about him and talks about his better side in the documentary and in this interview. Earlier this week, Rachel brought her son and daughter to the grandfather-child day at the prison in Heerhugowaard. There is such a moment every six to eight weeks, she says. The children “love it”. She may not be there herself. Her children know that Grandpa “is in jail for something he didn’t do.” If they ask more questions later, she will answer them.
Are you ever afraid that your children will follow in their grandfather’s footsteps?
“I’m really not afraid of that. If I notice that they are starting to find crime cool, I will say: look how your grandfather ended up. Is that what you want? Criminals end up in jail or dead. There is no beautiful road. And for what? For money? That’s really not worth it. It’s better to live simply. Sometimes when I see young boys who are now turning to crime, I would like to take one of them to my father and show them what their future can be like, if they are lucky. My father is really not cool now.”