Originally Posted by Strax
What is going on with Ridouan Taghi as of now ? Is his group still on top in Holland ?


I think his entire network has been dismantled. Who knows, maybe they're still pulling a few strings from prison, but seeing they are under constant surveillance that must be quite difficult. Law enforcement is coming down hard on the Moroccan groups. And Taghi's group were definitely not the only ones bringing in tons of cocaine. Even though Samir Bouyakhrichan got killed years ago, people from his network stayed active, but many of them as well got busted in recent years.

In recent years, a few criminal circles that were traditionally active in other drug markets have been active in cocaine smuggling as well. Like some of the Turkish/Kurdish groups - who were traditionally mostly active in the heroin business - and some Dutch Traveller groups from North Brabant, who largely control the synthetic drug trade.

Surinamese networks (like the Piet Wortel group) and gangs from Curaçao (most notably NLS) have also stayed very active in the cocaine trade. The Curaçao-based gangs tend to use a large amount of couriers to consistently bring in smaller amounts of cocaine (not more than a few kilos per courier), but somehow they make quite a lot of money.

Old school criminals from the Amsterdam HA circle have also been brought into connection with cocaine shipments. A few years ago a major guy got locked up (Danny K.) but I don't think they actually got enough on him to keep him behind bars for long. I don't even think LE had any proof in linking his group to the big cocaine shipment they were suspected to be behind.

Italians in the Limburg region in both the Netherlands and Belgium have in recent years also been arrested for bringing in tonnes of cocaine. The Limburg region has a huge Italian community (when you combine both the Dutch and Belgian Limburg provinces, there must be close to 50.000 Italians living there) and Ndrangheta, Camorra and Mafia figures have all been detected there.

It's hard to say who's exactly on top, because the market for cocaine in the Netherlands and the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium is so enormous and there are so many different groups active. Taghi's network was most definitely big time, but they were never the only ones behind all of that cocaine coming through the port. Far from it.
The Amsterdam/Utrecht region Moroccan groups got a lot of heat because a lot of violence was associated with them and they were connected to a few other major European crime syndicates - like Taghi's group had widely publicized connections to the Kinahan crime family from Dublin, the Gacanin clan from Bosnia, the Gillespie crime family from Glasgow and Raffaele Imperiale's Camorra group, whereas Bouyakhrichan's group had connections to the Dawes crime family from Nottingham - but at the same time you also had Rotterdam-based Moroccan groups that were active in bringing in tonnes of cocaine with far less violence.