Eighteen operations already has former criminal Duško on it when he gets the bad news: the rectum cancer is back and it has spread to its bones and bladder. The prognosis is that he still has about three months to live. “It hurts so terribly, it’s really a kind of hell. I didn’t deserve this.”
Duško registered for the new Merlijn Passier program: Merlin and the night owls. In the series, Merlijn investigates what happens in our province when everyone is sleeping. Duško sent a message that he is awake at night with pain and that he will soon die. Duško has experienced so many crazy things in his life that according to him you can ‘write a book about it’.
A kind of mafia boss
What kind of stories he wants to share soon becomes clear when Merlin enters Duško at home. There is an impressive portrait of Duško on the wall: bared upper body, tattoos everywhere, a good dish cocaine on the table. “You look like a kind of mafia boss!”, Notes Merlin. “Yes, I have been in the criminal circuit,” Duško admits immediately.
Duško is very proud of the painting. “I don’t have any money now, but I wouldn’t put it away for 100,000 euros.” He admires the version of himself that can be seen in the painting, he tells Merlin. “That’s me. I love myself.” Although that cocaine is now a thing of the past. “I have been addicted for 32 years,” he says. “But now I don’t dare, with that cancer.”
Regret missing shot
At the end of the 1980s, Duško Portier became in the Roosendaal nightlife and there he comes into contact with drugs, illegal trade and violence. “It wasn’t really necessary, but you could earn so much money from it at the time. Nowadays no longer though, but at the time it was millions,” he says.
It all doesn’t end well. Duško regularly ends up in prison. “Five years before running an MDMA lab, two years for something else, ten months for a crime against life.” Yet he does not regret anything.
Although, one thing is still bothering: “I shot someone, but that person did not die. I am sorry that it has failed.” Merlin is not sure what to say to that. “But that person earned that,” says Duško. “He himself declared against the judge that he understood that I shot him. That is why I got less punishment.”
In the meantime there is a different man opposite Merlin than the Duško of the painting. He needs a stoma, catheter, kidney cross and many medicines to stay alive. The money is up and he is in social assistance. Although there are still a few silent witnesses of his past in Brabant.
“In 1991 I buried a bag of pills and 50,000 euros at a small tree at Visdonk in Roosendaal,” he says. “I had made a small notch in that tree, so that I could find it later. But when I was released, there were suddenly three hundred of those trees! I never found it again. If anyone still finds it, he can keep it!”
Duško died on January 2, 2025, two weeks after the recordings of Merlijn and the night owls.
Merlin and the night owls on Brabant+
In the Merlijn and the Night owls series, Merlin Passier goes in search of special stories in the nightlife in Brabant. The series consists of eight episodes and can be seen exclusively on Brabant+.
Every Wednesday a new episode appears on the free video platform of Omroep Brabant. In Episode 3 After his visit to Duško, Merlin will visit the Tilburg observatory to investigate why people stay awake in the middle of the night to go to a dot in the distance that the same always looks.
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