“It needed to set us up for life-and that didn’t mean behind bars. Where do you find someone like that? A superman,” said van Hout.
In addition the candidate needed a cast-iron constitution.
The victim had to be very rich but could neither be royal nor a politician. Van Hout talked of sneaking looks at the beer magnate’s Mercedes-Benz as a child, and his friend Holleeder’s father was a long-term employee of the brewery (before he was dismissed for disruptive behavior). Heineken, a champion of Dutch business, was already on the men’s radar for reasons other than being “filthy rich,” in van Hout’s words. The victim had to be someone for whom a high ransom could be paid quickly,” said van Hout. It needed to set us up for life-and that didn’t mean behind bars. To start with, the entire job had to have … a grand slam. Van Hout claims the men started to seek a big score after an economic downturn cramped their passions for luxury cars, race horses and partying.įormer Dutch police, however, suspect that van Hout’s property deals and business were just a cover for his gang’s involvement in a series of unsolved armed robberies.īefore the kidnapping of Heineken, the Netherlands had largely been untouched by an epidemic in Europe during the previous decade of high-profile kidnappings motivated by profit and politics. But van Hout and the other men began to scour the society and finance pages of the Dutch press for targets. de Vries, van Hout paints a picture of early success based on a legitimate construction business, scoring property deals by using strong-arm tactics on squatters, along with other shady activities that resulted in brushes with the law. In his account of the kidnapping published by Dutch journalist Peter R. The gritty Amsterdam of charismatic ringleader van Hout’s youth contrasts with the modern Netherlands, which has shuttered prisons as crime rates have fallen to record lows.
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