The Liquidator

On 26 February 2024, a Dutch court sitting inside a purpose-built fortified courtroom — the Extra Secure Court, known locally as De Bunker, located beneath a prison in Amsterdam — handed down a life sentence against Ridouan Taghi. The verdict closed the Marengo trial, the largest and longest criminal prosecution in Dutch history. Over five years, the court had examined billions of euros in cocaine trafficking, at least five murders ordered from inside the organisation, and a witness protection regime that partially collapsed around the man it was built to protect.

The Netherlands, a country known internationally for its tolerance, its ports, and its tulips, was forced during these proceedings to confront a question it had been slow to name: that it had become, for a period in the 2010s and early 2020s, a narco-state in functional terms — a jurisdiction where the criminal economy had enough reach to influence the physical security of the legal system itself.

Who Taghi was, and what he ran

Ridouan Taghi is a Dutch-Moroccan national, born in the Netherlands, who prosecutors alleged built one of the largest cocaine-distribution networks in Western Europe. The operation ran through the Port of Rotterdam — one of the world's busiest container ports and, for roughly a decade, a principal entry point for South American cocaine into the EU. The prosecution alleged that Taghi had personally ordered at least six murders between 2015 and 2018, most to protect the security of the organisation. One of the victims was Taghi's own brother-in-law, suspected of being an informant. In the business he ran, suspicion was a death sentence. Family included.

The witness and the men killed around him

The Marengo trial was built around the testimony of a former associate known publicly as Nabil B. He had agreed to cooperate with Dutch prosecutors under the country's kroongetuige regulations — the Dutch equivalent of a cooperating-witness regime. What followed was not a normal witness-protection case. The people around Nabil B. began to die.

On 18 September 2019, his lawyer — Derk Wiersum — was shot dead outside his home in Amsterdam, in front of his family's windows. A lawyer, murdered for representing a witness, in the capital of a Western European country. On 6 July 2021, Peter R. de Vries, the Netherlands' most famous investigative journalist, was shot in the head on a busy Amsterdam street at seven thirty in the evening. He had just walked out of a television studio. He had been serving publicly as a confidant to Nabil B. He died nine days later. The Dutch press described the killings as the country's Falcone moment — the comparison to the Italian anti-mafia magistrates murdered in Sicily in 1992.

Arrest in Dubai, command from inside

Taghi was arrested in Dubai in December 2019 following a nine-month international manhunt. Extradited back to the Netherlands, he was held in a maximum-security facility designed for exactly his case. The murders, however, did not stop. Dutch investigators would later introduce into evidence a letter, intercepted after smuggling, that prosecutors said contained operational instructions for further killings — allegedly written by Taghi from inside prison. His lawyers disputed the letter's authenticity throughout the trial. The court, in the end, weighed the evidence and found against him.

EncroChat

The evidence base for the Marengo case was transformed in 2020 by the EncroChat breakthrough. French and Dutch police, working jointly, penetrated the encrypted-phone network that European organised crime had adopted as a primary secure-messaging tool. Millions of messages were harvested. European prosecutions in multiple countries drew on the data. For the Marengo trial, EncroChat material supplied what had been missing from most prosecutions of Taghi-adjacent cases: direct, contemporaneous operational communications between alleged principals.

The verdict

On 26 February 2024, Ridouan Taghi was convicted of the murder of five people, drug trafficking totalling billions in value, and leading a criminal organisation. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Only the fifth life sentence handed down in Dutch history since the 1970s. The court rejected every substantive defence argument. The verdict ran to hundreds of pages. When it was read — inside De Bunker, under armed guard — the message was that the Dutch state had survived the worst direct attack on its legal infrastructure since the Second World War.

What the trial leaves

It leaves a lawyer dead. It leaves a journalist dead. It leaves a cooperating witness whose entire personal support network was systematically targeted for years. It leaves a legal system that had to build a bunker to conclude a trial in safety. And it leaves a country that now has to reckon, openly, with how much of its economy still depends on a port it cannot fully police and a drug trade it cannot fully dismantle. The system delivered justice. It also demonstrated how close it came to failing.

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Listen to the full story on Courtside Europe, Episode 2. Stream the episode here.