The Liquidator
Amsterdam, 26 February 2024. A Dutch court, sitting inside a purpose-built fortified bunker under a prison — the Extra Secure Court, known as De Bunker — hands down a life sentence against Ridouan Taghi. The verdict closes the Marengo trial, the largest criminal prosecution in Dutch history. Over five years, it examined billions of euros in cocaine trafficking, a witness protection regime that collapsed around the people it was meant to shield, and the assassinations of lawyer Derk Wiersum and investigative journalist Peter R. de Vries.
This episode traces how a Dutch-Moroccan dealer built a cocaine empire running through the port of Rotterdam, how the key witness against him watched his own lawyer and his own confidant shot dead in Amsterdam streets, and how the Dutch state was forced to conduct a trial in a windowless courtroom because the regular one was no longer safe.
Ellis and Maren cover the EncroChat breakthrough, the smuggled prison letter, and why prosecutors called this the Netherlands' Falcone moment.
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The Middlemen
March 2016. The Age in Australia and The Huffington Post publish the Unaoil Files: hundreds of thousands of leaked internal emails from a Monaco-based oil-services company run by the Ahsani family — father Ata, sons Saman and Cyrus. The emails document, in barely coded language, more than a decade of systematic bribery: blue-chip corporations in the US, UK, Australia, and Europe paying a family-run firm to win oil contracts in Iraq, Libya, and Kazakhstan, and that firm paying off the officials who made the decisions.
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