Super Cartel Trafficker Ridouan Taghi Sentenced to Life at 6-Year Long Trial in Bunker Court Room

"Socalj" for Borderland Beat

A Dutch court has sentenced the head of a brutal cocaine cartel to life imprisonment over a campaign of murders and attempted killings that prosecutors described as “a well-oiled killing machine”. In the Marengo trial, 17 people were convicted for 6 murders and 4 attempted murders.

Ridouan Taghi was among three gang members handed life terms, with 14 others sentenced to between 21 months and 29 years in jail after one of the largest trials in Dutch criminal history, whose nearly six years of hearings were marked by three more related murders.

Masked and armed police surrounded the courthouse, known as the Bunker, "Ze Bunker," in an Amsterdam suburb as the judges, who were not named and whose faces were hidden from view, read out the sentences. Drones and a police helicopter circled overhead, and armed guarders surrounded the courthouse bunker.

Ridouan Taghi, head of the Mocro Mafia.

“We are sentencing all the suspects. Ridouan Taghi gets life,” said the presiding judge. The court ruled that Taghi was the “undisputed leader” of the gang, thought to be one of the Netherlands’ biggest drug cartels and that the proceedings, known as the “Marengo” trial after the judicial codeword for the case, had been fair.

Taghi, who was arrested in Dubai and extradited in 2019, and several of his co-defendants did not attend the final day of the trial, which has enthralled and shaken the Netherlands as details of the country’s violent drug underworld were exposed.

The case revolved around six charges of murder, four of attempted murder, and several more of planning various hit operations between 2015 and 2017, mainly against people the gang suspected had become police informants.

The court convicted Taghi in five of the murders. “He decided who would be killed and spared no one,” the judge said. “The amount of suffering Taghi caused to the victims and their loved ones is barely imaginable.”

The judges also ruled that Taghi had used extreme violence to intimidate enemies and potential police informants. “By doing so he prevented people from cooperating with the police. Such terror has a disruptive effect on society,” the judge said.

Insiders said that images of torture chambers discovered during the EncroChat busts supposedly belonged to an alliance of local Dutch criminals working against Taghi.

Dutch officials were only able to try Taghi after members of his family in Morocco accidentally murdered the son of a famous Moroccan judge in a case of mistaken identity.

“Taghi would probably be sitting in Dubai right now but he fucked up and killed the son of a [Moroccan] judge,” said the Italian law enforcement source. “That meant the King of Morocco got involved and sent his guys to Dubai. The UAE might ignore the Dutch but they aren’t going to deny another Arab king revenge. That’s how Taghi got sent to Holland.”

Ridouan Taghi allegedly sent some of his closest allies to South America to negotiate cocaine deals. One top lieutenant, Saïd Razzouki, was arrested in Medellín, Colombia, in 2020 while allegedly operating under the protection of Los Urabeños. Other Taghi allies were arrested in Suriname. He himself was arrested in Dubai in 2019.

Dubai Super Cartel

In November 2022, Bosnian crime lord Edin "Tito" Gačanin, the Panamanian cocaine boss Anthony "Hassan" Martínez Meza, and the British drug trafficker Ryan "Robo" James Hale were all arrested in Dubai for their criminal involvement in a “Super Cartel,” which is alleged to control about one-third of the cocaine trade in Europe.

The criminal network had two separate structures, one for importing the cocaine into Europe and the other for laundering the proceeds. The large amount of cocaine that the Super Cartel is suspected of shipping into Europe in recent years, is worth an estimated €30 billion. Spanish police say the mega cartel managed to send 10 metric tons of cocaine, worth €760 million through that country in the span of just the last two years.

Police first noticed the connection in Dubai between the criminal groups and coined the term back in 2017 as several members had attended the wedding at the Burj Al Arab Hotel of Irish drug kingpin Daniel Kinahan, leader of the Kinahan Clan founded in Ireland, then based in Spain and Dubai up until recently.

The network of Dubai-based traffickers included leaders from the Mocro (Moroccan Dutch) Mafia, Italian Camorra, the Kinahans, Albanians, and Australian bikies dubbed the 'Super Cartel'.

Key witness Nabil B.

Witness Intimidation Killings

Three murders, all related to a suspected gang member named Nabil Bakkali, who handed himself in to police and agreed to be the prosecution’s main witness, were also committed during the trial and are the subject of separate court proceedings. As part of a plea deal, Nabil B, whose testimony the court ruled was trustworthy, was himself sentenced to 10 years in prison. 

Nabil B’s brother was killed in 2018.

Nabil's lawyer, Derk Wiersum, was shot dead outside his home in Amsterdam the following year in September 2019. Taghi was arrested in Dubai months later.

Peter de Vries, a crime journalist was assassinated in 2021.

Taghi, from prison, is said to have ordered the murder of TV crime journalist Peter de Vries in 2021. His assassination was seen across social media. The reporter was helping to prep the witness, Nabil B.

Dutch TV journalist Peter de Vries, killed in 2021.

De Vries, who had said he was on Taghi’s hit list, was shot in the street five times as he walked to his car from a television studio and later died of his injuries. Prosecutors sought life sentences for three of the suspects in his killing.

Those three murders had given the already grim trial “a pitch-black edge”, the presiding judge told a packed courtroom on Tuesday, regretting that De Vries would “never again be sitting on the press benches” at the court.

Once the Netherlands’ most wanted man, Taghi allegedly continued to pull strings and send secret messages from prison.

His defense lawyer, Inez Weski, was accused of passing messages from her client to the outside world and arrested in April last year. She has since been released and has yet to be charged, although she remains a suspect. Her lawyers said lawyer-client privilege prevents her from making any statement to police.

State prosecutors alleged in their 800-page case – which besides evidence from Nabil B was partly based on the contents of thousands of encrypted phone conversations – that the defendants were part of an “utterly unscrupulous murder organization”.

Mocro-Mafia

The gang, dubbed the “Mocro-Mafia” because most of its members are of Moroccan and Antillean origin, had “carelessly and indifferently killed people”, the prosecutors argued, adding that the fallout had “not only been felt by the next of kin but also more broadly in society”, they said.

None of the suspects made any statements during the trial. Still, Taghi reportedly denied all charges, saying the money spent on a “sham trial” should have been spent instead on “employing more teachers and police and health care,” Het Parool newspaper said.

“The Dutch guys from the ‘Mocro Mafia’ used to be bosses and the Antwerp clans would specialize in getting drugs out of the port,” said a Belgian police official, using the Dutch term for the Moroccan Mafia. “There’s been a lot of arrests of Dutch traffickers, so the Antwerp clans have stepped in to replace them.”

Police officials said the power center for the cocaine trade appears to be moving south across the Belgian border into Antwerp. Especially following the arrest of Taghi's lawyer last year and now his conviction.

Sources The Guardian, Borderland Beat, Borderland Beat