141: Mitchell Prothero | Grenades, Cocaine & Dirty Money In Europe

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Mitchell Prothero is a war correspondent and two time bureau chief in Iraq for both UPI and McClathcy Newspapper’s. He is a senior writer at VICE news, has written for Buzzfeed, and is now, the host of gateway, Project Brazen’s latest series which is guns, cocaine and dirty money in Europe.

This is truly one of the most fascinating and important stories happening in northern Europe at the moment. As Europe as a continent  is set too, apparently, overtake the USA as the gross largest consumer of cocaine in the world. And along with the increase in consumption comes the requisite increase in violence, corruption, money laundering and other criminal networks that the scale and money behind cocaine enables.

Time Stamps For Mitchell Prothero

• 00:00 – Introduction
• 01:54 – From Covering ISIS To Cocaine
• 05:49 – Anecdotes With Christopher Hitchens
• 12:05 – Deep Diving Into The Cocaine Wars Of Europe – Mafia, Violence & Narco States?
• 36:59 – The Role Of Globalisation In All Of This + The Question Of Legalisation
• 1:00:34 – The Stigma Around Cocaine
• 1:08:08 – More On Cocaine In Europe + Who Are The Keyser Söze’s?
• 1:29:12 – Who Is Mitchell Prothero & What Is This Project (Where To Find Him)

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Curious Things Mentioned During The Episode

• Bradley Hope
• Nicky Woolf
• Christopher Turner
• Justin Scheck
• Gateway By Project Brazen

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Mitch Prothrow is a war correspondent and two time bureau chief in Iraq for both UPI and McClathkey newspapers. He's a senior writer at Vice News, has written for BuzzFeed, and is now the host of Gateway, Project Brazen's latest series, which is Guns, Cocaine, and Dirty Money in Europe. This is truly one of the most fascinating and important stories happening at the moment, as Europe as a continent is set to apparently overtake the USA as the gross largest consumer of cocaine in the world. And along with the increase in consumption comes the requisite increase in violence, corruption, money laundering, and other criminal networks that the scale and money behind cocaine enables. This is another home run by Project Brazen. Some of you have heard me make a big deal about them before. Co-founded by former guest and friend of the podcast, Bradley Hope, these guys are doing some of the best investigative journalism content for podcasts, period. From this podcast, you can expect to hear some of the following. No spoilers for the gateway narrative, but broad context for how and why so much cocaine is slipping through the Rotterdam and Antwerp ports. A bit about an uh a few anecdotes uh with Christopher Hitchens, deep dive into the cocaine wars of Europe, the mafia violence, and even narco states, the underlying role of globalization in all of this, the falling stigma around cocaine use, and in my opinion, lots and lots and lots of other interesting stuff. Mitch was a fantastic guest. So before I get to it, um I think you all know what I will instruct you to do at this point. It is to pump that good juice into the algorithm. Five stars and a juicy, nice, positive review on Spotify, swipe it up, go to the top, leave a five star, Apple, same story, leave a review, and with absolutely no further ado, here is the great Mitch Prothero. Alright, mate. So, how did you go from covering ISIS attacks in this great continent of Europe to uh covering the drug trade?

SPEAKER_02 2:04

Well, a it even backs up before that. Um, I had originally been a congressional and political correspondent in DC, like a cub version of it. I'd only done it for a couple of years, but I was working for a wire that was around at the time, and I was really bored and wanted to be a foreign correspondent. And then 9-11 happened. And I was the person in the newsroom that they sort of felt like had some of the you know crazier tendencies that might be able to handle the story or whatever. So I started covering that. And so by 2003, I was based in the Middle East, full-time, and you know, spent about 15 years doing that. And so as I my last not straw, but I'd realized like I don't want to spend my entire career covering one story. So I'd become an inter increasingly interested in organized crime, particularly studying like transnational groups and the overlap, like Hezbollah money fundraising in Africa involving diamonds, stuff. I'd started to learn about a lot of these different things. So I started getting insights into this world that wasn't really Arab politics, even though I was covering like the occupation of Iraq. I did a bunch of tours in Afghanistan. I was a bureau chief in Iraq twice, lived in Beirut for 10 years. So I was focused on that stuff, but I was always really interested in some of the bigger picture. And right as the Syrian civil war was breaking out, I said, you know, okay, fine, I'll uh this one's gonna be really terrible. And I was living in Beirut, uh, and we sort of basically finished up Iraq or whatever, and the Arab Spring had been raging. And I knew how bad Syria was gonna get. Uh, although I did even underestimate it. I think by most people's accounts, like nobody counted on jihadists taking over a third of you know the Levant as they ended up doing. But we all knew it was gonna be bad, so I said, you know, I'm gonna transition to doing like organized crime in Europe. I'm gonna start paying attention to that. I gotta get out of the Middle East, I've been here for too long. And everybody went, good luck with that. And then like within a few weeks, uh, ISIS had taken over Mosul. I was a bureau chief in Iraq again, you know, and uh so I'm covering that stuff. But the whole time, you know, the flip of this was as we were covering Dash and covering ISIS, um, I was doing it from Baghdad and from Erbil, you know, you could see these international connections. There was these flows of foreign jihadists that were coming in, and they were coming in from the diaspora communities for the most part across Europe. So there was a connection there that became interesting. So we started looking at that, and then of course the attacks started happening across Europe. So I found myself commuting between Erbil, Istanbul, Antwerp, Paris, you know, and covering this stuff. And at that stage, basically, BuzzFeed News was expanding and had decided that it was worth giving me the you know a fellowship, the Michael Hastings National Security Fellowship, to move to Europe for a year to, you know, study these groups as they came in. And while I was doing that, I learned about some of the nexus of organized crime and terrorism in Europe. And, you know, a bunch of people were telling me, you know, as it turned out, some of the communities that I was looking at were Moroccan diaspora communities in Brussels. And a bunch of cops were saying, hey man, actually, you know, like there's a problem, but these guys aren't it like Antwerp and Rotterdam. It's the guys that aren't sending people to Syria that are the problem. And so that really stuck with me. And over time I started paying attention to it, and uh, as I transitioned out of covering ISIS attacks in Europe, I started trying to pay more and more attention to it. And then we had COVID and everybody got locked down for two years. So And now you're in Albania. Exactly. A year later, I'm in Albania. But that's originally the the project that I was sort of working on, and that's the thing that uh Bradley and I had discussed. And he I we were talking about another project actually, and uh, you know, the Project Brazen guys came back to me and said, We're actually interested in that other thing you're working on. Can you, you know, bring that to us? And we managed to work something out, and it turned out to be a lot took longer than we thought it would, because of course I had no idea I had a podcast. But uh, you know, it had ended up being like a good 10-month investigation into Holland, Antwerp, you know, and the drug trade and sort of what the changes in European drug cartel behavior in Europe over the last like 10 years. Because it's significantly shifted, particularly in the last five.

SPEAKER_00 6:40

Couple of really interesting uh small diversions from everything you just said. First of all, Washington, and then into uh the Middle East. I wonder whether you ever had any anecdotes or interactions with Christopher Hitchens.

SPEAKER_02 6:56

I actually knew Christopher Hitchens a little bit. Um I knew him in DC, um, you know, and I was a Cub reporter of very little note or merit at the time, but I I've I managed to hang out with him a few times. And, you know, I I I always like he's a really he was a really charming guy and uh very fun at DC parties and stuff like that. But uh it was funny as I became more and more prominent or whatever, because I was spending more and more of my time just covering the Middle East and covering the war on terror, that he was incredibly opinionated about. Uh I wouldn't have said that we were friends by any means or anything like that, but we'd actually become a little bickery on the whole thing because like what I was learning was not what he was articulating for. So it's it's funny how like you know, we ended up having not, you know, he hardly ever noticed me. I wouldn't say we had a relationship relationship, but like, you know, I remember he came to Beirut and we hung out, and you know, we had this conversation, like, and you know, he was in this room of guys, you know, room of all these Lebanese kids lecturing them about why the war on terror was good, and you're just dying. Like, this is this is cool stuff for like, you know, talking about US politics, talk about US culture, talk about like talk about the failure of the left, talk about communism, all this stuff. But come on, hitch, you're in a room full of Arab college kids, man. You know, like you know what I mean? Like, and they were entertained, but it was just, you know, don't get too far above over your skis on these things. And that's why I try really hard not to opine on too much. But actually, the older I get, the more things I've covered. So now I feel more entitled to yell about more stuff than I was younger.

SPEAKER_00 8:37

But yeah, maybe that's where Hitch was.

SPEAKER_02 8:39

Well, definitely, you know, um, and also, you know, 9-11 had a huge effect on a lot of these guys intellectually, I think. For me, it was this news story, and that's what it stayed being. I mean, now I've got some intellectual opinions about it, but I think a lot of people jumped into ideology very, very quickly on it. And it probably would have been cool to like gather facts for five years and then start to try to piece things together because you know, I came out of the whole thing not particularly ideological, but also pretty sure that what the West had done had failed and made things worse. But also there was no great solutions, there's like no utopian thing. Like, I guess I don't know, in covering it, the one thing I've learned, and this definitely applies to you know what we're talking about with cocaine trade, uh cartels, the war on drugs, you know, there's no one thing. If there was like one thing you could do right, people would do it. You know, like you know, it's like it's because it's incredibly complicated and not everything works right, and you don't quite know what works, and you've got to keep trying, and you've got to try a different thing. And it turns out you might be wrong, and the other guy might be right about how you know what I mean, and so this is what makes them all such terrors for people to deal with. Because, you know, I I remember being put on these panels talking about Hezbollah, Lebanon, you know, which for a while I wouldn't say I am now, but you know, for for a good bit, I was, you know, at least very familiar with them on the ground. And, you know, I'd explain how the whole setup went and like why they were good at what they did, and you know, how dangerous they were and kind of how they thought. And inevitably at the end of the panel, somebody would be like, okay, cool, what do we do? And I'm like, I don't know. I didn't invade build a time machine and go back to 1982 and don't invade South Lebanon. Like, I don't know. I like that's not my job. Like, you know, my job is to try to break out for people what is actually happening, so they've got a system of facts and sort of understanding, and then everybody can kind of take it from there. I mean, within reason, obviously, but like, you know, when it comes to that, like just because I can tell you why you can't occupy South Lebanon doesn't mean I have a solution for your Hezbollah problem. It's not the same thing, you know. And that's very much how I felt doing this this pro you know, doing Gateway for Project Brazen, is again, I'm in a situation which you're just dealing with an intractable problem in which there's almost no obvious right answer. And that's something that I found really interesting about the whole thing. So, you know, basically we came up with this idea is like we'll take a look at the northern ports of Europe, how the cocaine trade has shifted up there right at the same time that um Europe became the largest market, and start looking at the money and the, you know, in this case, in the first season, we really hinged a lot on the violence because I don't think people realize how unbelievably violent Northern Europeans' drug wars get. You know, they don't have the random shootings America's America does. But like, if there's like 22 murders in Amsterdam in a year, like 17 of them are from the same Maloo, you know, and like they all know each other, you know, that type of thing. These numbers add up quick and make it really intense if you think about it that way.

SPEAKER_00 12:02

There was a detail in episode two of this fella walking through Vondels Park on his way to work. I rode my bike through Vondels Park on the way to work over two, three hundred times, and I was just thinking, holy shit. And also it was the same time timeline, time period when this was happening. Looking over, thinking, Yeah, wow, I mean, how many of these guys that I I never knew him, but that I saw and passed and heard of, how many of them were violent, and um you know, so basically this detail just for the audience, the detail is that this guy's walking to work and uh there's a severed head just there on the floor. Um which you know you he could have been walking through Vondels Park, you assume safe that you could be there at two in the morning with a thousand euros in your pocket and walk through the park and feel safe as houses.

SPEAKER_02 12:56

Nonetheless, it's not just a nice section of a city, it's like one of the nicest sections of the nicest city with the lowest levels of crime, you know, like it's truly like crazy urban utopia down there. But that is the Netherlands weird thing, is like even when you visit some of these areas, you know, because I spent a lot of time in different neighborhoods where a lot of these traffickers came up. And you know, I grew up in the 80s in you know, in in America on the West in the East Coast, on American cities for the most part, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York. And I you know, the level of like weirdness and violence and and crazy urban decay, like the Dutch don't have any of that. So it seems actually pretty mellow and pretty nice, and things are really clean, and services are pretty good. But behind the scenes of that's a multi-billion dollar industry that these guys are fighting over. And as somebody says in one of the episodes, one of the crime reporters, you you can't call the cops if there's a problem. When they were dealing hashish, yeah, you could work it out because you're talking like tens of thousands, maybe a hundred thousand euros, you can fix a hashish problem. But the minute you start doing cocaine, there's there's no bank. There's no, you know, there's no, okay, sorry, I'll come up with the 10 million. And so as a result of that, you've got to be known as somebody willing to like break some, as they say, break your spine. And if you're not a guy that'll break your sp break somebody's spine, then you probably can't do business because you'll be seen as a mark. But the severed head uh came about because there's this incredible story, which I'll try to tell here in a condensed way that leads to what we're doing in the podcast, which is that in 2012 a smuggling clan of Moroccan Belgian family that lives near the ports, uh a deal went wrong. Something something funny happened. And my favorite part of this is I have yet to establish actually what happened. But 200 kilograms of cocaine went missing from the port. Uh the Belgian police may have seized it and never announced it. The Belgians have this incredibly I don't have a high opinion necessarily of the success rate they have in dealing with drug trafficking, but I will give them points for trolling. And one of the things that they do is they simply don't announce drug busts.

SPEAKER_00 15:33

I mean, that's a good way to really fuck with the the dealers, right?

SPEAKER_02 15:37

Like if they take a metric ton out of a out of a ship and hit the Antwerp port, they don't say anything for about a month. And they just listen, hoping they're hearing the phones, waiting to hear if people panic. And start. Now, the downside to that incredibly clever troll is sometimes you accidentally spark what we ended up calling the Moroccan Mafia War. And with people blaming each other for the different, you know, for blaming each other for the missing drugs, which again, to this day, it's really unclear what happened to that 200 kilograms, at least as far as I can tell. But you essentially, you know, photos were passed of like teenage kids duct taped hungover meat grinders in order to get like people, you know, kids were kidnapped. Uh, two drug lords that were rather famous in the Maloo at the time, Scarface and a guy named Gwyneth Martha, who he wasn't uh he wasn't from the Moroccans, but he was he was an Afro-Caribbean guy who'd played a major role in the drug trade. And they'd been partners. Scarface and Gwyneth Martha then broke apart, went at each other, and started this war for control of it. And it gets we tr we actually originally tried to tell that story, but it's too chaotic. Uh it's not linear because once these drug gangs start breaking apart, they're you can't just say, okay, and then this guy worked for this guy, and then he worked for this guy, and then he fought this guy who worked for it's chaos. The the switching over. You couldn't understand it. A friend of mine or a source of mine, when I asked him, I was like, okay, 10 years ago, in 2012, the turtle clan may or may not have stolen 200 kilograms of cocaine. And he was like, Yes. And I was like, and today we have Dutch special forces on the roof of the highest security prison with stinger missiles in case they try to break out Rudwan Taggy from prison using like spets knots and a helicopter. And he went, Yeah, that's true. And I said, These things are related. He was like, Yeah. I was like, How do you explain that? And he goes, Come on, man. He was like, it's like asking an Italian conscript in 1916 on like the Austro-Hungarian front, like how World War I started. He doesn't know, he just knows he's at war, you know, and I was like, so it's not just me. I I because I can't quite literally figure out what happened. And he's like, either it's not visible or you can't know it. You know, and this is a guy who spent all of his time covering this. And he was like, But can like, and that made me feel a lot better because what what I realized at that point was that this is not one of these true crime stories that you can tell in a linear manner. You know, like too much didn't make sense at times. Like the the the the different alliances and everybody's motivations, like in a lot of cases, it just came down to like they liked money, you know, and things like that. So it, you know, it that that was really interesting and it made the project a lot harder. But as a result of that, we decided to focus on this one character, Rudwan Taggy, who's currently on trial and who sort of came out at the top of all of that. And with the level of violence associated with Taggy, Europe hasn't seen anything like it since the 80s and 90s with Lacosa Nostra in Sicily. That was worse. Um, I would say, in terms of America, the United States, or the UK, I mean, maybe the IRA in the UK. Like in terms of worrying about somebody trying to kill a prosecutor or something like that. This stuff doesn't really happen. In the US, I think the last U.S. prosecutor to even be shot was, you know, or a lawyer, major lawyer affiliated with the case that U.S. prosecutor, I think, was shot in 1990. I'm not 100% right, you know, sure about that, but it's so incredibly rare that myself, a crime reporter, can't even think of it. And then what you were seeing is just non-stop. Witnesses killed, families of witnesses killed, journalists killed, you know, lawyers killed, uh, you know, lawyers living in safe houses 24-7. I had to sign a thing saying that I will never physically describe certain people I saw in the courtroom. You know, it's like true, like true, like Dutch law, you know, like I can't tell you what certain people even vaguely look like because they're absolutely terrified these people are gonna get out because they might get hurt. It's really wild.

SPEAKER_00 20:12

Given everything you've just said, uh making highlighting the fact that there are so many um missing parts of the story. You're you're you're sort of looking through a stencil and you can read some of what's behind, but there's big gaps. Put this all into context for us as much as you can, because you've said yourself, maybe the Netherlands is a narco state. I mean, that's a really dramatic thing uh for someone to hear who might not think that is to be the case. Give us some numbers, make a comparison to say the horrible violence in Medellin, the horrible violence in Miami, maybe some of the horrible violence in other drug hotspots and trade routes throughout the world. Uh try set the context for us as well. Cocaine in Europe, what are the numbers?

SPEAKER_02 21:00

Well, we know that insofar as any numbers can be trusted, and I'm gonna caveat with I am not satisfied with any statistics I see involving drugs. They're the the street values, I mean, uh as far as I'm concerned, the only things we know for sure is how much is seized, roughly what the retail price is of a gram, and roughly how pure that gram is. Because these are no, but those are things we can test. You know, everything else gets really shaky. Um I've seen numbers by international organizations, or you know, and I don't want to call anybody out or make them feel bad because I know they've even told me on background they don't really know that if you kind of look closely and do the math, nobody's numbers line up. You know, in terms of metric tons and how many are being shifted, they they don't know. But what we do know is that Europe. Upper and middle class Western society loves cocaine. It's just they love it. They do the living hell out of it. Um, it's become more socially acceptable. Uh, I think that, you know, the idea of like 20 years ago, partners in London law firms doing lines of cocaine at office parties would have been a thing that they would have been more careful about. I think today it's probably considered basic behavior. And I've had I've had people tell me that. I mean, I'm not impuning and switch that law firm. If if anybody's offended in London, switch it to Oslo, switch it to Stockholm, switch it to Berlin, switch it to New York. I just think that it on some level there's been a a social relaxation on it.

SPEAKER_00 22:42

And I'll go back to stigma against it.

SPEAKER_02 22:44

Right. And I think I've got the explanation for that. But also what's happened is there's been an expansion in the market. As Eastern European countries that were former Soviet Union or former Warsaw Pact, you know, these are well-educated countries with significant middle classes that are developing. And so, like each year, millions of more Poles, Slovaks, Czechs, Ukrainians can't afford 100 euros for a gram or 50 euros for a gram on a night out. Just more and more of them can. Even though these countries are not necessarily rich, there is still like a million more than there, you know, at least people that can. So what we saw is Europe probably take over for America's the single largest drug market. Yeah. More cocaine is sold in Europe, we believe. That's what the UN thinks. That's what, again, I caveat all this stuff with nobody really knows. But right now it does look like Europe consumes more cocaine than North America.

SPEAKER_00 23:47

That's a frightening statistic.

SPEAKER_02 23:50

Yeah, it's if you think about it, it kind of makes sense, though. There's like a lot of people in Europe, and a lot of people do a lot of cocaine in Europe, you know? And the other thing is the market's growing. Like next year, there will probably be 100,000 or 200,000 more poles who can afford 100 grams on a night out. Or I'm not an economist, but whatever the number is, but it's a significant number of people that show up every year, and a certain number of them are going to want to party. Um, so that's that's one thing. When we say narco state, I've been trying to wind this back because it's a narrow definition. It's like a mafia. It actually, or even terrorists. I mean, you know, all of these words have super, you know, very specific meanings that are used by the experts to describe them. And so, in the sense, I do not know that Belgium or Holland or the Belgium or the Netherlands are necessarily in danger of falling into what we would call traditional narco state. And the reasons for that, it's not actually the violence. And the violence doesn't even remotely compare to, it doesn't compare to like an American mall, let alone, you know, the again, as I was saying, like the murders have a tendency to be pretty narrow and targeted. It's extremely dangerous to be like a Moroccan or a Serbian or an Algerian drug trafficker in Northern Europe, or even, you know, a Dutch or French, ethnic French. They we come across all of them. Um, it is surely, you know, multi-ethnic. The the crime loo does not care about each other's ethnicity or or or religion or any of that crap. It's really interesting. Just in in sheer numbers, it's pouring through the north, and we had to try to figure out why. And that's one of the things that had gotten complicated. And one this is one of the reasons why we're having a hard time tracking the numbers. And in the past, what had happened was it was all very controlled. Uh, it was run by uh the Andrangeda, where you're pretty much the Calabrian mafia is by far the most powerful Italian mafia, and they would broker these deals that if you wanted to buy cocaine and import it into Europe, you had to go through them. And they had their connection, and their connection was with the right-wing paramilitaries, the AUK in Colombia. So after the 2016 peace deal, the AUK got broken up. And on the other side, the Fark got broken up. So that was a key moment. Another key moment was the Andrangata started having a little bit of a problem at home in some of the things that they were doing. And honestly, they'd also, in my opinion, gotten so rich and so powerful that they'd started moving up a level into money laundering, brokering, running legitimate construction funds. Uh there are people that will say with a straight face that the Andrangeda has about asking for numbers, that the Andrangeda could possibly have the same GDP as Croatia.

SPEAKER_00 26:43

And this is an organized crime group in Colombia.

SPEAKER_02 26:46

Calabria. This is southern Italy. In Italy. This is the most powerful European mobs, mafia organization. Sicily has La Cosa Nostra, and they're the famous mafia of the Godfather and stuff like that, and they are not quite what they once were. Uh they've been broken up pretty hard, uh, in large part because they did go after the state like a narco-state in the 80s and 90s. And this is what I was going to flip back to. So you've got like the Calabrians do very much control organized crime in Europe, but they don't have the same grasp that they probably did 10 years ago. So you're talking about an organized crime group composed of rural Calabrians. Wow. Poorest part of Italy, by the way.

SPEAKER_00 27:28

Where is Calabria?

SPEAKER_02 27:30

The southernmost part. It's next to Sicily. It's like the boot. The toe of the boot.

SPEAKER_00 27:34

Yeah, the toe of the boot.

SPEAKER_02 27:35

The toe of the boot. It's the poorest part of Italy. It's yeah, no, and they're called the Andrangeda, and they really have managed to keep themselves out of the press. So then what you have up in up in Naples, in Napoli, Napoli, sorry, uh, is you've got the Gomorra, which are slightly more disorganized, and they're famous for the show Gomorrah and things like that. And they're a little bit more disorganized, a little bit more clannish, and a little bit more local, uh, sort of freelance Italian organized crime investigators jokingly say they've got organized crime in Sicily, they've got organized crime in Calabria, and they have extremely disorganized crime in Naples. So, you know, it's so those are the main guys. But the they, I mean, Lacosa Nostra is still very powerful in Sicily, but if you're talking about international stuff going on, it would it was the Indrangina. They're the most powerful organized crime group in Europe. Like I said, it's been estimated, their GDP is the size of Croatia.

SPEAKER_01 28:34

Yeah, amazing.

SPEAKER_02 28:35

Milan construction, pizzeria, money laundering, uh, Eastern European shopping malls. Like these guys are experts at it. Uh they have a diaspora that they send throughout Europe because of Schengen. And it's spectacular. It's a whole nother season that we should probably do for Gateway. But the movement of these guys up a step opened up a lot of other things for other organizations. And now Colombia was no longer controlled by a left-wing, right-wing monopoly of who you could wholesale from. So as a result, people could start cutting their own deals, uh, which is a was a major change, and that's been since 2016. And then over that time period, what really started happening was, and this is a similar thing that repeated itself or had previously happened, I should say, in Mexico, is for the longest time the Mexicans were the Colombians' logistics. The Colombians sold cocaine in America, the Mexicans got it from Colombia to America, and they were paid. Each step along the way for a kilo of cocaine is roughly three or four thousand dollars or euros. Like every time it moves a step. That's roughly the price. Uh, you know, and that's roughly what you get paid for moving it. But so, you know, they were getting their three to four thousand per kilo. Suddenly they said we want to get paid in cocaine, and suddenly that sounded cheaper to the Colombians because you just have to give them cocaine. You don't actually have to give them money. And it was cheaper until, of course, once they have cocaine, they exponentially grow. And now the Mexicans buy wholesale from the Colombians and control the cocaine trade. So that's a similar thing that happened as the Andrangutus stranglehold was starting to dissipate. And I don't mean that, again, I'm going back to the Italian mafia thing. It's not that they became less powerful, it's just that they read the room and stepped up a knot uh, you know, and became more of a bank and was a subs you know, organization that like stays out of direct trafficking to a certain extent. There's still a lot of cocaine trafficking by them. But as a result of that, the Moroccans had been spending 20, 25 years as the immigrant community, diaspora, living next to a bunch of ports, had been port workers and dock workers, and you know, a certain segment of the Moroccan community had long specialized in getting stuff off the docks. And so they'd been working for various organized crime groups for years, getting cocaine out of Rotterdam and Antwerp in particular. And then one day they started getting paid in cocaine. And that's when everything really changed. It wasn't a it's over a period. It's it's been it started happening about 10 years ago, and then within about five years ago is when we saw just the complete takeoff. So why didn't the Colombians learn their lesson from Mexico? Well, the Colombians are just happy to sell cocaine in in Europe because for them, you know, it's it's a new market and they don't have to compete with the Mexicans. In fact, the one thing that has the all of Europol and all European law enforcement terrified is like they're still waiting for all Chapo's guys to show up like to try to take over the trade here, which really hasn't happened yet. And I don't think it will, because again, if you're there's a long history of how do you get drugs to Europe from Colombia. So um the people who control that are bosses, you know.

SPEAKER_00 32:04

Yeah, th this might seem like a random no, it doesn't. But I watched a great ABC Four Corners documentary just two nights ago, Australian cocaine trade, and one of the first interviews from um a high-level dealer there was that it's Mexican. Apparently we're getting it from Mexico, and he said they're everywhere. Like the the hitmen, the muscle, the the threats. So is that the same dynamic where the you know the the source of the cocaine, um the people that are responsible for that are also in Rotterdam, Antwerp, Stockholm, and they're sort of keeping a high-level overview and um enforcing muscle, or does that dynamic not exist yet in Europe, from what you've seen?

SPEAKER_02 32:50

The Europeans have their own dynamic right now. There's a concern that the pushing into Australia if you've got cocaine is a little bit easier than because it's it's how do I put this? It's a sidebar, but Australia's uh cocaine situation is it's the again, Australians love cocaine.

SPEAKER_00 33:09

We're the highest per capita in the world. Gambling, drug-taking cocaine, a lot of great vices.

SPEAKER_02 33:16

And it sells at the highest wholesale price in the world. And so it's it's the promised land for all the cartels. Like if you can get cocaine to Australia, that's the dream. Um, but as a result, no, like if if that's the the Mexican cartels coming in and and and taking over directly, uh, they'd be competing with the Andrangeta to a certain extent, they and probably working with them. You know, these guys are eminently flexible. But I don't know about that dynamic. Uh but what to go back to what we were saying about a narco-state, this is what I think is appropriate, a good time to point it out. To the reason why I don't think the Netherlands or Belgium necessarily are in danger of falling into what we call traditional narco-state is these guys have all tried to intimidate the state to a certain extent. There have been attacks on the government. There's been murders of lawyers, threats against crown witnesses. Uh, just last summer, two guys with a Kalashnikov were following the interior or the justice minister of Belgium around, casing him. Uh, these are obviously intimidation tactics, but they're not embedded in the same way culturally, in terms of nailing yourself into the government that you would have seen in, let's say, historic Sicily, where the line between the local government and the organized crime guys is it's negligible on any level. It's all symbiotic. And so you don't see that same level of corruption. You did see Taggy attempt it, both Pablo Escobar style by trying to, you know, kill lawyers until they dropped the case against him. Well, the Dutch weren't gonna do that. You know, and you also saw them, you know, obviously they could bribe officials, but when they were bribing officials, you're talking about like port workers. One of Taggy's biggest people that got busted for him was selling like fake passports for a thousand euros each, a local official. There's not much danger, at least from what we can tell, you know, and I'm I reserve the right to change my mind in future scandal, above, you know, like have you know 50 million euros going to the defense minister of, you know, a northern European or western European country to overlook drug shipments and to help with stuff. Like it's not on that level, and that's what you get for narco-states. I would flag that the Balkans is starting to have some problems in that regard. Um, if anybody in Europe was going to get end up was going to end up in that same similar thing, it might be Albania, Serbia, Montenegro. We're starting to see it there where those governments are more malleable to corruption. And when you're looking at the billions, you know, a hundred million might be able to buy you a minister in Bosnia. 100 million probably can't get you a minister in Belgium.

SPEAKER_00 36:09

You know, what's some of the evidence you're seeing to make that claim?

SPEAKER_02 36:13

They're just incredibly powerful mafias. Uh, you know, we're seeing this more and more. Um, and in fact, there was a very good recent cover story in the New York Times magazine. It's a subject that I've been working on a little bit myself by a friend of mine named Robert Wirth, about Vucic, the president of Serbia and his ties to organized crime, past ties alleged, and the history of a major drug cartel civil war, actually incredibly similar to what we're talking about in northern in in Antwerp and Rotterdam, is like a bunch of guys were working together and then 200 kilos went missing. And next thing you know, 20 people are dead around Europe, and everybody hates each other now.

SPEAKER_00 36:54

So um, you you made a very interesting uh teaser earlier. Said you have a theory for the explanation for the stigma of cocaine going down. I'll just say, uh, having seen it firsthand, this is a bit of a hobby horse of mine as well, and probably annoys the audience at this stage, but I'm like particularly judgmental and against uh it's maybe I should retract that. I don't know if that's even true, but nonetheless, this this idea I've I've observed having returned to Australia multiple times since I moved to Europe, and as well as just observed uh generally when I go out uh here in Europe, over time the stigma around taking cocaine, around taking a couple of pills, around taking other stuff as well, has just gone from you at least you wouldn't even talk about it, to you would try to hide it, to you would try to hide it less, to you're just doing it in front of everyone, you're not even taking a m a read of the room, like is this are people gonna judge me? Are people gonna you know it's what are they gonna think? Like this idea of the stigma falling through the floor is so um for me, it's like what the fuck is going on? Because why isn't there a stigma against buying genuinely one of the most blood-soaked products in the world? You know, you talk about the amount of violence involved in the cocaine supply chain. I mean and like what does it do for you? You know? It's not as good as a couple of beers. Anyway, that's me getting a bit preachy about it, but I'd love to hear your um your explanation for the uh the being stigma for the cocaine has gone down and down and down.

SPEAKER_02 38:33

Well, okay, first off, you know, there's a lot of people who really study drug use, and I'm not one of them. You know, in this in this regard. So this is sort of a tangential uh thing that I came across while studying what we call the supply chain. You know, that's something that I can speak to a little bit better. But the minute you look at the supply chain, one thing that becomes just immediately obvious is the role of globalization and democracy in all of this. And so there's two things that that I that I came away from. If you ever get a chance to take the hour-long port to port tour of Rotterdam, only doing that will give you like any sort of perspective on the size of globalization. Like until you've seen a ship that holds 28,000 shipping containers that's going to be unloaded by robots in 24 hours. Like, I can tell you that, but you've got to be next to the ship. You're st your brain still can't process that information, but at least you're in awe of the sheer bulk of it. And when you see that, you realize that there's been this system that's been designed as ruthlessly and efficiently as possible to move whatever anybody wants wherever they want, as fast as possible, as cheaply as possible. That's it. Even if it's really not necessary. Uh, one Belgian crime expert pointed out to me that they ship up apples from New Zealand to sell in Belgium, which has tons of fucking apples. It's not even. Yeah, and it's like because it's a slightly different thing at the supermarket.

SPEAKER_01 40:15

Right.

SPEAKER_02 40:15

You know, and like I don't mean to get all old man on people, but like, but no, but when I was a kid, like, you know, mangoes weren't a thing. Avocados weren't a thing. Like maybe if you lived in California at a certain season or whatever, you know, you had this stuff. But whereas now, in the exact place I grew up, you can get a fresh mango, a fresh avocado 24-7. Sushi in particular. So when you start looking at a place like Antwerp and why they're the it's the second largest port in Europe, it's the physically largest port in the world. It's got the largest fruit port in Europe. And you start to see the stuff pouring through. And you realize, you know, the Dutch or the Flemish speakers, Rotterdam and Antwerp, they didn't get to be this fucking rich by making people's fruit and sushi laid. Like that's what they've done their entire existence, is move things from point A to point B while asking a minimal of questions, while arranging, you know, insurance and borses and inventing basically the backbone of capitalism, which I will give the Dutch credit for this. They did invent large chunks of modern capitalism. But the flip side to that is, you know, they get stuff off the docks and they get it to the places fast. So now you've got the pressure of people want 24, you know, 24-7 perfect sushi year-round. They want fresh mangoes year-round, they want pistachios year-round, all this stuff that's like, you know, and then on top of it, more cheap manufactured crap from China than you could possibly get your mind around. Like, you know, just and so when you start seeing this stuff, I know it sounds like a tirade against globalization, and maybe it is, but that's not really the point when it comes to cocaine. The point is there's no way to have that system and not have tons of cheap cocaine. They're going to get it through. You've built the ultimate freaking system for delivering drugs. When you send hundreds of metric tons of bananas every week by ship from South America to be distributed as quickly as possible through all the supermarkets of Europe.

unknown 42:27

Come on.

SPEAKER_02 42:28

You know, and so the reason why, you know, so that's one thing. You've got the economic side. And then on top of the economic side, the numbers aren't great in terms of what we know, but it's a hell of a lot of money. Okay, so you know, Interpol will publicly tell you 8 to 10 billion euros annually. They'll also privately tell you they have no idea. But it's like, no, but it's true. It's it's just at some point that became the number that people came up with. And what that number reflects is the many billions of euros nobody's really sure. You know, I almost don't hold it against the bureaucrats on this one. They got to tell you something. And they don't, you know, so they're they're going with eight to ten. It could be 15. I doubt it's six. But you know, that money washes through Europe. Yeah. So now you've got a capitalist system on top of a globalist system that, like, the one question no one could ever answer for me when I was doing this, and it made a lot of cops kind of uncomfortable. And also, let me point out, no law enforcement spoke on the record for this podcast. But it would make people uncomfortable because the simple question, which as a society, we haven't even come close to addressing, which is when does money go from being illegal to legal? Money. Money. Yeah. Okay, so like a hundred kilos of cocaine in a shipping container in Rotterdam, that's illegal. Everybody's sure about that. All right. Despite the fact it's only a hundred and fifty euro fine if you're under 18 and you get caught taking cocaine out of one of those containers. But it's still illegal. We're just not that upset about it. Um okay, so you sell that cocaine for money. That's illegal. Okay. You know, and all that stuff. Well, eventually that money turns into apartment buildings.

SPEAKER_00 44:22

Yeah, well, I mean, shit. That's like you're getting into the cancerous tentacles of offshore finance and um all the offshore accounting tools. I mean, the it's like uh uh Bradley Hope can tell you firsthand from uh uh researching Joe Lowe scandal, it's just like shell within shell within shell. It's impossible.

SPEAKER_02 44:45

So what you get is you've got a completely deregulated system of commerce in which everybody expects whatever they want, whenever they want, at a cheap price, 24-7. And that's just it. Like, and they'll go to somebody else. They're gonna get their goddamn sushi. And you can get it in like again, it's like, but it's wild to me. Like, again, old man, the notion that you can be like in a rural rural town in America and get good sushi is like really new. Like my parents haven't adjusted to that. Like, I'm used to it, but in my adult life it became a thing, you know. Like, I didn't see this when I was 10.

SPEAKER_00 45:23

Can I tell you something crazy? Yeah, at the risk of interrupting you and derailing your thought. Remember where you are. But um, on that point, exactly, my uh my wife's grandfather grew up in rural Sweden. We took him out for dinner about a year ago. It was the first time in his life he'd had garlic bread. Because it's just like that shit wasn't on the menu where he was from, and he never like hung out with young people to discover that there were restaurants that sold this stuff now, and when he went to the grocery store, he never looked at it. But basically, it is this for me, it was this unbelievable. We're only separated by like 60 years, but I've tried every food that has ever, you know, grown from the ground, and that started in the mid-90s.

SPEAKER_02 46:09

You being able to do that started in the mid-90s, and around the time they started globalizing, you know, deglobalizing or globalizing everything. And the other thing is, as you were saying, is on top of that globalization, so it's just like the purest form of capitalism, just raging. You've also deregulated the financial markets to the point where, as you were saying, it's easier than ever to move money around. And so you see the money flying out. So what I now people are like, are you an expert in the European drug trade? I'm like, well, no, but I'm an expert in a certain level of logistics, because the guys that I've tracked and dealt with and that I've tried to study might as well have dinner with Jeff Bezos and talk about on-time shipping and talk about logistics, you know, and like like how to minimize holding inventory when you don't need it, because that's what these guys all do. You know, they're they're in an amoral reflection of it. Um, but then on the democracy side, and here's where I'm not gonna blame every everything on the capitalist system, because I'll just point out everybody voted for that. But the other thing they're voting for, in my opinion, is, and I think this is why the war on drugs is is a bit lost, is that they're voting for cocaine. They've made this abundantly clear as voters, is the Western system right now is trying to figure out, like in America, they wanted cocaine, but they wanted somebody to blame. So as long as we're locking up poor and black people for it and jamming the prisons full of these guys on drug charges, white people could do cocaine and feel like there was a battle being fought against the evil. But it's bullshit, it's just to make them feel better. Because at the end of the day, they want cocaine. You know, and this is what you're saying. It's like the level, you know, your shock at the lack of stigma. That's democracy voting for cocaine. So that filters down now throughout all of society. Everybody knows it's BS. So you're just sitting there, like, I'm supposed to tell the Moroccan kid for grew up in south southeast Amsterdam, right? And I'm supposed to see tell this kid, okay, you've got a shot, and I came across these people, I couldn't believe how many of them there were. And for every one of these guys, a thousand fail. But like going from a kid as a it's a cliche, but we use it and because it's a hundred percent true. A kid on a north face in a northface jacket on a scooter delivering grams of cocaine to partiers. You can go from that guy to living in Dubai in three to four years, and you'll control hundreds of millions, or millions of millions, or whatever. Uh, you won't live to spend it, probably, but you're gonna have a good time, and it's the golden ticket out. So those guys are basically all living lives. Where we were dealing with this, like saying a lot when I was doing the reporting is in Dutch, I'm sure it sounds better, but you know, nickels never become dimes, is what the whole system kept telling these kids. You're nickels, you're never gonna be a dime. Okay, they see that. Then they see a society that's completely fine with cocaine that will pay them for it. You know what I mean? And then you start, it just starts rolling through. Then you see the lawyers, then you see the bankers, like everybody's going through. It's it's it's really interesting. So there's, you know, law firms are out there like setting up Panamanian shell companies for Moroccan guys I know who live in Dubai who ship cocaine through Rotterdam. And they're buying places in Man, and they're put buying place so also when you talk to like the Dutch cops or the Belgian cops, like Europol's trying. Um, and they might have the resources if everybody pulled together in Europe. And the USDEA does a really good job with the Treasury Department, but they've got to care. It's got to be a case that's interesting to them. So, what I found a lot of is like the Dutch will catch a guy, they'll bust him with the drugs, charge him for having the drugs, never ask him where he got the drugs, and never do any like you are the drugs, you have them, we have them on the CCTV, your DNA is on it, that's 10 years.

unknown 50:30

Good done.

SPEAKER_02 50:31

They don't go further. And when I ask, like, why don't you try to track the money? They're like, come on, man, how many people do we have? Like, you want me to go through like a hundred Panamanian shell companies? They've got lawyers, you know. Like, I am a I had a Belgian cop tell me I've got a college degree. Most of my guys have university degrees, but we are not forensic freaking guys. Like, how many forensic investigators does the Belgian federal police have?

SPEAKER_00 50:56

And the supply-demand is such that the best, most sophisticated accountants are working the other side of the equation. There'll always be one.

SPEAKER_02 51:06

It's just it. So that's why when I say like society is kind of voted for this in a in in a strange way, and it doesn't want to admit that that's what it's done.

SPEAKER_00 51:16

And by society you just mean general attitude shift towards but is it drug taking, or is it specifically just you see so much cocaine and slowly over time, by seeing it all the time, by seeing how evil easily it's delivered, you know, for instance in Amsterdam, you text a guy, he drives to your house, he opens up his bag, he's got ten different drugs in there, you point the one you want, you pay him cash, and he buggers off on his scooter.

SPEAKER_02 51:48

And there's no chance he'll rip you off because there's so much pure cocaine, that guy's not actually worth his time to rob you. He might as well just give you pure drugs. That's the most like that's the thing that I found the most shocking. Um my opinion is people want it and they but they don't quite want to deal with what legalization would entail. If that makes sense. Well, I I don't know. Legalizing hard drugs is something that would really be a thing.

SPEAKER_00 52:17

What do you think about that? Um from a not from an ethical perspective, from how it would affect the way society operates. If tomorrow I could snap my fingers and you will no longer be criminalized according to the amount of cocaine, heroin, ketamine, whatever you want to do. And because it's legalized, the uh you know, the price of it has sort of dropped through the floor. So it's affordable to more people, um, it's more pure. Uh you can like in the legal.

SPEAKER_02 52:44

Well, those are all ideals, so you see, right there, you're you're you're utopiaing. Are you a but I would see you as a Yeah, okay. No, that's a good one. Is as a scenario, but like even some of your assumptions right there, they're easy to agree with, but would the prices fall?

SPEAKER_00 53:00

Would they be more pure? I wonder, would the prices fall? Did that happen in in America with with wheel? Not really. Yeah, really. Okay, so maybe fall. You know what I mean? Like, not really. Yeah, maybe the supply chain's gotten so good with illegal.

SPEAKER_02 53:15

Honestly, I think anybody that can tell you what the effect of legalizing, let's say, cocaine and heroin would be, like straight legalization where you could just buy it and stuff, nobody can really tell you.

SPEAKER_00 53:24

And there's no stigma. I can do it in for breakfast in my coffee in the middle of the office and no one's.

SPEAKER_02 53:28

Well, it just but yeah, I I just don't think we can we can we can anticipate that. But what do you think? My personal thing is uh as far as I'm willing to go on that, is well, people should just be more socially aware of their con of their actions. I mean, on everything. And like I won't say that I'm perfect. I've done drugs, I don't recycle all the time, and all of these different things. Like, but you know, you do need to see yourself as part of a bigger thing. And I do think that like modern society does make it very easy to be kind of selfish and think of yourself like I get my delivery of my drugs from a guy who doesn't kill anybody. It's like you said, it's cool. He shows up on a scooter, it's all very chill, and you know, I do my thing and nobody really gets hurt, and you don't have to think about, you know, but you don't think about where your iPhone comes from either. You don't think about, you know, how come everything is so cheap that you can replace it almost overnight. I saw a thing about like the difference in real buying price of a colored television compared to like you know, 20 years ago or whatever, it's it's ludicrous. It's like you know, it's like it's literally you can throw them out when you're done with them and shit like that. But so the flip side, the furthest I'm willing to go is I would just say is you know, beware of unintended consequences. If there was one thing that could fix everything, we would have done it by now. It's a good, you know, like there isn't one overnight thing to change the fact that people like to get high and that there's organized crime and that you know, that that people like they're still going to exploit the soil of Colombia. It's not like that's suddenly gonna turn into a union shop producing kilos. Do you know what I mean? Like the OSHA's not flying down there, like the occupational health and safety people are gonna suddenly set up a nice lab, you know. So like these are utopian things. But what I would say, but I'm not saying that I'm not dismissing them. I'm just saying that like there's a long line of questions that need to get answered. The one thing that I will say with some certainty, though, is, and I know you can't 100% quit so long as you're trying to convince everybody that you're against cocaine, because again, I think it's somewhat theater. Um, but interdiction versus treatment is the most ludicrous cost-benefit analysis. And I'll just say that as somebody who can follow money and somebody who like can see both. And we didn't really spend much time, if any, on victims on this, like people who use cocaine. I wasn't that interested in it. I think people have done a really good job, you know, whereas I think people have haven't done as good a job on the globalization and the taggy, and you know, I felt like there was a story there. But so it's not to dismiss that, but just going back to all the damage that's done to human beings that they do to themselves through addiction and society. Getting people to use less and mitigating the damage they do to themselves and to the people around them is a much better way to spend money than to try to take kilos off of shipping containers in the middle of the Atlantic. It's just like cost-benefit analysis. Like, I know they have to do a certain amount of it, but when you look at like how much it costs for the Dutch to send a frigate off the Canary Islands to act on intelligence on a shipping, you know what I mean? From like they hear that a ship's coming out of Cartagena. They know it's headed for Rotterdam, they know that there's cocaine on it, so they stop it with the Dutch Navy somewhere off the Azores. It's a lot of money, man. You know, like, do you see what I mean? Like, and you say when we've got limited resources, I think you might want to spend that money on addicts. And I think you can probably clean up some people, and I think you can discourage some people from using drugs because it seems like they have given up on that. But, you know, those are really, again, going back to the utopian solutions, it's really hard to explain that to a politician because I can show a politician how many kilos I seized last year, and I'd probably be pretty good at seizing kilos, frankly, if I was in charge of an interdiction effort. That's something I'd probably be okay at. But then going and showing them the societal benefit from the other programs, it's more abstract. It's harder to put a number on it. Yeah, you can't say, Oh, I made a thousand people better members of society. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, a hundred of them might be scumbags no matter whether they're high or not, you know. So it's it's a very difficult thing to explain to policymakers and to voters. But that would be my biggest thing is if you've got a million dollars for your community and you want to make it better off in terms of like the damage from cocaine or from heroin or something, I'd spend the million on your soci on your on your community and less on trying to keep it from coming in.

SPEAKER_00 58:12

I know you just said you didn't spend much time on the victims, but I wonder if you have in your research, in conversations you had any insights into actually how cocaine does affect an individual who becomes addicted to it beyond their wallet. You know, does it does it have any broader effect than that?

SPEAKER_02 58:31

I mean, uh, you know, I mean, I've I've I've been you know I was a war correspondent for 20 years. I know a lot of people who've done a lot of cocaine. Um I think that this is all just it it's sort of a different thing, um, and it's very individual. You know, some people like can use it heavily for 10 years and walk away over changes in their life. Like that's jokingly referred to as a drug habit, as opposed to an addiction. You know, they were in the habit of doing cocaine every weekend, and then they stopped doing that. And then, you know, there's other people who can. So that's really it's it's a little out of my purview because like this is this is something that's very I with no disrespect to the people who study it. I say it's very well studied, but also not very well understood.

SPEAKER_00 59:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 59:19

And so I think they'd be the first ones to tell you that. So like I'll just stick to that is the smartest thing I think you can do is spend money on your community trying to make things a little bit better for the people in it, even if they're drug addicts or not, not judge them too much. And that seems to be more effective than trying to interdict and bust dealers and stuff. But then some of these guys are so bad and so ruthless, of course. Like Ridwan Taggi was definitely a worthy person for Dutch law enforcement to spend their time on. You know, it's you know, this was a guy who, you know, had really gone out of control and frankly might even be out of control right now, but they've got him locked in prison where he literally can't communicate with anybody because last they saw he was ordering murders.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:07

Yeah, as far as they know, at least.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:10

His his lawyer's in prison right now. That's since since the uh podcast was recorded, Ridwan's lawyer has been arrested and pr imprisoned. So I don't know how they get out of a mistrial this time because but she's accused of of passing messages out from her client to his team to kill people.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:33

Well, I mean uh to tag on to the broader point you're making, I think generally the stigma question is like at the core of it, the core of the usage, um, the any sort of preventative measure. You know, just somehow I I remember it was at one stage, you're a bit of a you were like a it was like, oh, is he rich or something? He can do cocaine, and and and people didn't want to necessarily, you know, be associated that way with the drug. Um that was the 80s cliche.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:05

Yeah, it was the 80s cliche is the rich asshole who's got too much money to sell it.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:09

Yeah, exactly. So I didn't live through the 80s, but like even in the in the early two uh 2010s, when I saw people start doing it, I was like, you know, that was still the vibe. Um and it was someone who who who looked like they wore suits to work, you know. And and it's so it's so it's almost immature to try to to to almost say out loud, but like this these stigmas attached to a certain thing, like the same way, you know, if if one of your mates started doing heroin, you'd be like, bro, that's fucked. What on earth are you doing? You know, like there's a stigma attached to it. If someone was drunk all the time, there's a stigma attached to it. It's just this stigma doesn't exist the same way, and and and I think maybe somehow it as a preventative measure at least, or as a way to curtail curtail it, I don't know. How can you bring back stigma again? Make stigma, you know, make stigma stick again.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:02

Here's an example that you know, going back to like my my creepy 70s, 80s childhood. Um no, this is it's really funny. I find this to be fascinating because it's like the one time that something really worked. And I'm not saying that these the these types of social campaigns can necessarily work. I I think you can stigmatize it a little bit more than we do. Uh, but also, you know, you can treat it and you can go out of your way too. Like, really, there's not much effort put into keeping kids from doing drugs other than like some really basic stuff that they're gonna completely ignore. But in my in my lifetime, there's been one massively successful campaign, which I can't get over how successful it was, was prior to like the 70s, you know, America's highways were absolutely disgusting. Uh, everybody would just throw shit out the window of their car, trash, like non-stop. And uh they did this for like a generation, and it was really gross. And in the 70s, the federal government started running this, like probably completely unacceptably racist or cliche act about how like there was like this old American Indian guy watching you trash all these roads crying, like being sad about it, and like how you're trashing the natural beauty, and like every adult who saw that laughed and like kept throwing shit out their window. But every kid who said that can't throw a can out their window or saw it. I am because when I was working, I worked in Iraq for years, and that is just like straight up like soda can disposal in Iraq is throw it out the window, man. Like we're in the desert. Like, and as like I'm I'm saying, like, you know, as American, like the biggest thing I've ever noticed about being an American was a physical inability to throw a soda can out the window of a moving car. And that came from non-stop woke brainwashing on like Saturday morning cartoons. It was complete Marxist indoctrination, but it also makes our highways a lot nicer and a lot, you know, but but it didn't work on the adults. Like my grandparents would have never stopped. I'm sure my dad probably stopped over time because of stigma and peer pressure. You know what I mean? But when they first saw the ad, I'm sure they were like, oh, this is bullshit, you know. But like your kids, you think about it, like for me, it makes like my skin crawl, the idea of throwing a cocaine out of a window on an American highway. So I don't think you can do that with cocaine, because honestly, cocaine feels better than throwing a cocaine out of a window. But like, there's ways to approach it as a society, but what they are is they're long-term investments. I guess it's a long-term way of telling a story, but like it's a long-term investment, is you don't get people to quit doing stuff overnight. You get people to quit doing stuff generationally. And if you're not willing to invest in generational stuff, you're not gonna be very successful. And it does feel like people don't want to do that anymore. Like I was joking about it being woke indoctrination, but I could literally see the outcry that would come out today in America's Cultural Wars from the Right, screaming about how like telling kids not to pollute is like against freedom or whatever, you know. So, but you know, going back to what this what's that? Go ahead. I was like, but bringing it back to Europe, you know, Europe's got its own entire thing on this because how do I put this? It does Northern Europe feels like a little bit of a utopia. You know, it's kind of like it's it's it it doesn't have the dystopic feel that sort of rich America and poor America and the middle class America with the strip malls can kind of come up with. You can kind of walk around Amsterdam like doing cocaine and not thinking about poor people that much.

unknown 1:05:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:57

Do you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:58

Yeah, of course. No, I I Completely understand.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:00

Like it's a bubble, man. You know, and like even if you're in London, you are probably not getting out to the council flats.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:08

Such a bubble. Oh my god. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_02 1:06:10

To where the damage is coming from. Yeah. And I'm not saying that people are responsible. Like, it's not a free pass. Okay, you don't get to do cocaine if you spend a night out each week in like Southeast and you know in Amsterdam. Like it that I don't mean it that way. But I do think that makes it easier, too. Like the people who heavily use cocaine are not living in drug-ravaged communities.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:34

That's just it.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:36

Like it's uh that was a point exactly made by a crime correspondent here in Sweden called Diamant Sarihu. Um I'm not sure in your research how much you went north up to Stockholm, but you're probably aware that there is quite a lot of drug violence in Stockholm. Anyway, he gave an ex he wrote a book um called Until Everyone Dies, which is just really powerful firsthand interviews with uh the kids, the parents of the kids. It's all kids, the the dealers, the pushers, the violence, everything. Anyway, um social worker, Swedish woman who deals with these kids, you know, sees more than anybody else, except for those who experience it, the violence, the horror, you know, the destruction that comes from all of it. But she'll still go out on the weekend and do a couple of lines with her friends. And he couldn't he couldn't square it, couldn't make sense of it. And I guess like again, it just comes back to the stigma thing. It's like, I don't know, you know, so quickly. Um if no one's gonna really hold your feet to the fire, are you going to make ethical purchasing decisions when it comes at a bit of a social cost? You know, it's so clear in fashion, people aren't willing to do that. You know, everyone will still buy fast fashion, even though everyone knows how bad it is for the environment. Um but then people still buy cocaine, even though they know that it's the most blood-soaked, blood-ridden supply chain in the world. And speaking of which, I mean, what have you learnt about the cocaine supply chain?

SPEAKER_02 1:08:05

Uh it's interesting. I did this project right around the time that a lot of was a lot of the results of the Sky ECC and a couple of other hacks had come out. And so this was, you know, over the past few years, there's been three major hacks of uh encrypted phones that were heavily favored by drug traffickers, uh, including Sky ECC, which was by far the biggest. And so these are like millions upon millions of messages now that are in the process of being decrypted by law enforcement around the world. It's it's it's a staggering project, actually. At one point, I at one point I was led to believe that a Northern European police, Federal Police Department, had decided not to make a police officer available to me for an interview because of just the off chance the next message they decrypt is that it turns out he's working for a cartel or something. Like they were finding, like, as they descript these messages, they're finding like illegal workers and stuff. Like every couple of months, a cop somewhere gets arrested. Like a bunch of these cases. So that, and uh, and this was a good way to describe it. I mean, it's his job as the spokesman for Europol, but I think he was really accurate. Is Jan, who who works for Europol, described it as um we'd all known that we were in a house and that the house was dark and that there was a lot of furniture and bumping around, and we but we didn't know anything else. You just kind of knew that. And it was like somebody flicked the light on for about 30 seconds. And the lights back off again. But suddenly you have a vast idea, like you have an idea of the house.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:43

Yeah, that's such a good metaphor.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:45

You know, and like all those for like a two-year period, law enforcement gets to look at the cocaine trade. And so the the results of that haven't quite come back yet. You know, they're still in the process. Every single week there's an indictment in the Holland in Holland or Belgium or the UK or something like that, where some guy gets taken down for like conspiracy to import 70 kilos of cocaine. And if you read the indictment, based off of evidence collected from Sky Ecc, they just got around to it, like from decrypting the messages. Yeah. So that really brought a lot of the organization and stuff to light. Uh, I asked that same question to some of the Dutch reporters that have really spent their careers on this. Like, you know, I'm a day trader on this in some ways. Um, you know, and and a lot of my work, I just want to say this, is is the direct result of a lot of long, hard, brave work by like reporters at Het Parole, by Joris Vanderah in in Antwerp, Walter Lamas, Paul Wutz. These guys are rock star reporters, you know, and have been doing this for 10 years, living under police protection and getting threats. Incredible. Yeah. Yeah, Walters had Walters had an RPG shot into his newsroom at night to stop reporting. You know, I mean, it's like these guys are really good.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:04

And so they were shocked at the level of casual violence and like how much everybody seemed to enjoy it. You know, and like you'd have like guys were circulating. This is there's this one famous story, it's really grotesque. It's like uh a woman who's a broker, she was known as like Auntie, who is a Moroccan Dutch woman who's known to be, or Belgian maybe, she's Moroccan Belgian or Moroccan Dutch. And she was known as basically one of the few women working as underworld brokers dealing with major shipments. Something had gone wrong with the shipment. She got into a BMW a year and a half ago and it's never been seen again, two years ago. Except we know she's dead because somebody like videoed and photographed her being tortured to death. Jesus. And they foot they sent, but they also, this is the this is the creepiest part. They sent it to other guys. Like the reason why we know it, it's it's on Ridwan Taggy's phone. But the thing is, Taggy wasn't involved. Somebody just forwarded it to Taggy for giggles or whatever. Yeah. And so that I think was really shocking for a lot of these guys. Because like, I know people who like when I first started working on this, I was I was used to dealing with, you know, what straight up jihadist, you know, Salafi jihadism, Hezbollah and the Shi Sai, Iranian Revolutionary Guard, you know, that type of thing, Islamic Revolutionary Guard. You know, and all these guys kind of have an ethos, even though it's it's a little, it can be very dangerous. You know, there's sort of an organizational ethos to it. So when I'd first started looking at organized crime, I'd been told, like, you got to be careful, but like if you're dealing with like the Italians and some of these larger groups, like it's always business, it's never personal, the cliches are true. It's almost never worth hurting a journalist or cop or a public figure over you're making too much money, you know, just why draw the attention? Uh and so somehow that had shifted, and I think that really shocked everybody when they started seeing the PGP messages of Taggy begging for blood, not being satisfied with just killing one guy. Yeah. Uh, you know, and then sitting there like literally ordering hits on like members of the bar, famous journalists. You know, at one point one of his colleagues talks him out of like trying to kill the interior minister, you know, and like maybe that's not such a good time right now, bro. You know, like so that level of violence and cruelty, I think, surprised people who thought that maybe it was a little bit more of a just straight business, not personal. And what you find out is like these guys are, in fact, a lot of more sociopaths, you know, and um that's how you make it. I talked to somebody once, I joked with him who's a who's a cocaine dealer in in Amsterdam, who'd been a sort who's a source of mine. And I was talking to him about this, and I had been told repeatedly the goal for a lot of guys is they want to you gotta save up 25,000 euros, roughly. It's probably a little less right now. You get 25,000 euros, you can buy what they call a container kilo. Like a kilo off thing, you can break it up into two kilos or whatever, three maybe if you're not nice, sell it by the gram. Now you've got you know three times as much. You buy three kilos, and this is how you exponentially grow. So I meant, and they this is a well-known thing. And so among again, the kid in the north face jacket on the scooter who doesn't want to be an electrician, he wants to like live in Dubai and be a drug kingpin. And uh, so I asked this guy, and he just like laughed and was like, no, man. He was like, if I save up 25 euros, it's to replace my Ducati motorcycle that got stolen last year. And I was like, well, why not? He's like, because that's where everybody messes up. He was like, once you start going that route, he was like, what are you gonna do when you have your three kilos? Carry it around with you? He's like, now you've got something you've gotta protect. And then people are gonna know you have it, and then people are gonna want to come get it. And he was like, very quickly, you're in a position where you have to hurt or kill somebody to make sure it doesn't happen again. And now you have to bring in people to guard your stuff because you can't be around it all the time and handle the money. So now you've got guys that might kill you to overthrow you to take it over. He's like, it's not worth it, man. You know, he's like, he has a nice little like life, and he was like, his level of it, but he's a little bit older guy. He's a Dutch white dude, you know, and he was just like, that's a decision that gets made by like 18-year-olds, 17-year-olds who are like, you know, dumb because they can't see the repercussions. He's like, I'm 30. He's like, I get to go to Barbados, I have a nice car, nobody knows my name. Yeah, amazing. Nobody's gonna kill me.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:57

I love it. So like the sensible Dutchman.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:00

Yeah, he was like, he was like, I'm good. I was like, if I he goes, if I get any bigger.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:06

Yeah, draw unnecessary attention.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:08

I'm gonna have to kill somebody, or they're gonna have to kill me. Like, and that's you know, or they're gonna try. So that's the thing that I learned is that there's a there's a line that you kind of go over, and for every situation, I'm sure it's different. It's not cut in stone. But there is this line where these guys cross, where there's no no real going back. And to sort of like close on this or whatever, there's a friend of mine had talked to this guy, and he was one of the original subjects we wanted to do. Uh, we were trying to do people that, you know, as good as the the Taggy story just became too good as we were doing following it, it kept developing and developing, and finally I couldn't ignore it anymore, and we switched over to doing it, but we'd been looking at some Antwerp guys that because probably bigger than Rudwan Taggy, to be perfectly honest. These two guys that I'm thinking about are like two of the biggest traffickers in Europe, and uh if not the biggest. Uh although I do caveat that with you're only as big as your last shipment. I think a lot of the times when people say who's the biggest, it's like three months ago it was that guy, you know, and like next month, if this guy gets it through, it'll be, you know. I think it's more flowing than it is a non-stop thing. But right now, these guys are at the top, from what I can tell. And so a friend of mine was talking to one of them who he talks to by signal, guys in Dubai. And he said, you know, what's your plan? You know, what's going on? Like, you know, you gotta know eventually they're gonna extradite you. You can't buy your because he's basically paying off Dubai to not extradite him back to the low countries. Well, we won't say the country. Or no, I guess he's Belgian. I said already, he's he's from Antwerp. The Low Countries, yeah, so the Low Countries, Benelux. Uh no, so the guy's from Antwerp, and so the Belgians want him, and there's a warrant out for him, and the UAE hasn't hasn't extradited him. So my buddy asked him, like, what's your plan? You can't get away with this forever. And he wrote back, and it was like the clearest, concisest thing I've ever seen. Like the self-awareness was amazing. He goes, Well, bro, I'm about 30, you know, I'm 35 years old or 34 years old. He's like, I know I'm doing 15 to 20. They're going to get me. If I get lucky, 12. More like 20. I might get out in 15. So what I'm doing now, and they're gonna seize all my assets in Dubai, they're gonna seize all the bank accounts they can find. So I'm doing deals and hiding money in as many different places as I can so that when I get out of jail at about 53, I don't have to work. And take care of my family and stuff. That's his plan. Is he's holding off getting sent over. He knows he's going. But if he can stay out two more years, he can sock away this much more money that he might have a chance of being access to when he gets back out. And then he'll be able to take care of his family and take care of his kids and live a normal life. And then he asks, would you be retired at that point? He's like, Oh hell yeah, of course I'll be retired at that point. Like, if he succeeds. So like that guy's got a dream, and that's the only one that I could imagine being even slightly realistic. But when you talk about like how grim are these guys' lives, that's his plan. You know, setting up, hoping like 10% of what I've earned gets through. So that is there in 20 years when I get out of prison. It's realistic. You know, but like when you hear stuff like that, you start understanding what a bottom line business this entire thing is.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:39

You know, and like So your point is there, is that it's jail or death. Or maybe this guy who is hyper-realistic.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:55

We know there's some people out there that we don't know who they are. Like, there's definitely other fish in the sea, and some of them are probably bigger and smarter and and more careful because people have a long have had a long time to learn how to get really good at this, and also have seen enough to realize that you should never talk about it or draw any attention to yourself. Like, it's not rocket science at this point. I mean, I hope everybody cooperates with interviews, but I really don't expect them to. It's like, you know, but like I've been told at least there's a couple of like Serbian guys and a couple of Albanian guys that nobody's ever heard of, who are some of the biggest traffickers in the world. So I don't know what those guys think they're gonna get away with. And so that's where it gets strange. Like the other thing that I have I learned in this, and this is speculation, it's informed speculation, is I was told that like these guys, like when they're fighting for the ports in Rotterdam and Antwerp, and you know, they're fighting each other, Moroccans usually, but also Albanians, Cosa Nostra, and Drangina. Everybody's competing to get stuff. They're working together, but they're also competing to get stuff in and sell it all throughout Europe. Um, a lot of them are just placeholders for a larger structure. So I've always gotten the impression that let's say you're you know, Rudwan Taggi or you know, some of these guys from Antwerp that I was talking about, uh, Scarface, Gwyn, I don't know about Gwyneth Martha because he was Afro-Caribbean. But a lot of these guys, you get the impression that they're the ones winning the reality show, like to be the ones that get to live in Dubai and run the shit from Rotterdam and Antwerp, and that behind them is a bigger machine. And that one doesn't really ever go down. Uh one person told me that there's, you know, it's like it's the Kaiser Sose thing to an extent, but it makes sense is, you know, in Dubai, there's guys that are financiers. Because one thing I did learn about this that also surprised me is how cash poor everybody is. It takes forever to get paid, and everybody has a lot of fixed costs. So if you've been running a drug organization like Rudwantagi or any of these guys, you have a number of people that are in prison and you're paying them to not rat on you. You know, you're you're taking like you're paying, like I can tell you how much you're getting, depending, you know, like your family's gonna get two to three thousand euros a month for every month that you're in, and then you get a bonus when you come out, depending on how long you were in for. And that money has to get paid for very obvious reasons. So these dudes have cash flow problems moving money around and stuff like that. Um, and as a result, these shipments take forever to get paid for. Um, I've heard it's seven months to a year to get paid for a European shipment for all the money to sort out between Dubai, Colombia, or wherever Peru, and and and the port in Antwerp. Uh so in that time, I believe that there's probably financiers, as in the wire they call them, the bank, who front these guys like a million dollars for a year and get a million and a half back or whatever, or more, who knows? And none of them are probably ever in a room with drugs. They're probably never, I mean, they're certainly never in a room with drugs or money. Yeah, you know, like these are like respectable high-end finance guys. And these are the Casas Zose. If the if the if these guys are real, those are the people that are out there. Those are the people that are that are basically making sure shipments go through okay, sort of working as insurance brokers, fronting money so that you can run your operation until you get paid for it, and getting an extravagant cost because of why.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:37

These are the lawyers and accountants, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:23:39

I mean, on top of them, they're the ones on top of them. I'm talking about like a guy who knows that you're a gangster and he's a gangster too, and is giving you off the book a suitcase, off the book suitcase of a million dollars for you to run your operations until it comes through, and that he does this for or does this for a number of different people. And I've had them profiled to me, but I've never really heard a name. Like business owner, like supermarket owners from Pakistan, you know, you know what I mean, or whatever. It's all very vague.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:11

And so if you caught wind of say one of your sources remarkably, you know, you could two, three times confirm it from different sources, you got a name, or you got a decent profile. Would you be scared of uh talking about that?

SPEAKER_02 1:24:30

Not really. Um I mean, there's I've d I dealt with terrorism for a long time, and like interviewing and talking to terrorists or people that have been accused of being terrorists, and so there's ways you can kind of do it. You know, if you make sure that everybody knows it's not personal and you're not trying to be too cute, like tweaking gangsters isn't a good idea. You know what I mean? Like shit talking them, like but if you're doing a story that's just straight and it's like you're you give them a chance to comment. I think this applies a little bit too with organized crime. Is I had a Hezbollah guy tell me right when I first moved to Lebanon that uh that I'd be fine with Hezbollah, don't worry about it. You know, I've got a bad reputation. That's that was the 80s, you know, that type of thing. But he was like, but if you're gonna report on us, you know, we're gonna be okay with it, but you know, you can't make any mistakes. And I was like, well, what do you mean? And he was like, look, man, if you write that we did something and we did it, he's like, we might want to know where you heard it, but we're not gonna be mad. Because he wrote it. He's like, if you wrote that we did something and we didn't do it, we're gonna start wondering if somebody's paying you to write lies about us. And or whatever, you know, or we're gonna take not trust you because, like, why are you getting it wrong? Who's giving you bad information? Blah, blah, blah. But if you're right, you're right. You know, like be respectful, you know, but and there's ways to be respectful. Uh, I joked at the end of this, I was willing to play this podcast for Edwantagi in prison. I don't think there's anything in it he hasn't heard. I think he'd probably be like, yeah, okay, that's a pretty superficial view, but you know what I mean? Like, I don't think he'd find he'd complain about certain things, but I don't think he'd find it insulting. I mean, he's the one we know how he treated murder. He's got an opportunity to defend himself on it. He hasn't pretended like he's innocent. Yeah. So, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:27

I I was more just because you you've made it really clear that like these people, the the very, very the Kaiser Sose, you know, uh the greatest trick the devil ever pulled is convincing the world he didn't exist. Like these types, if if their name is now in the media, they're gonna look to you and say you're the fucker who drew all this attention towards me. Uh I just wonder if that's something that that's nerve acting to do.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:53

I I have not encountered that type of situation covering this stuff. Um the biggest thing I worry about is the safety of sources. The people that I'm the people that are talking to me, a lot of them have a tendency to be in situations that could be dangerous for them. Um so that that's always my primary concern. I've never really like I don't have the Kaiser Sose guy's name, and I'm not planning on running it. So, but in the case of that, what I'd say is usually people on that level, to be perfectly honest, well, once the story is out, the damage is kind of done. Revenge murders on journalists, unless you're continuing to go at them, they have a tendency to be it's usually local cops and politicians killing local journalists who are on, you know, who are uncovering local corruption. That's almost always the murder. That's what you see in like it's a that's how you see in Slovakia with Jan, uh with uh Dauphin in Malta, you know, the bigger, higher profile murders. There's a murder of a guy, a famous journalist in Greece that's a little bit less solved. But those others, it was just very clear like local real estate to Developers fucking killed them because they were doing local corruption. Messing with local cops, that's always incredibly dangerous. You don't want to be doing a project in rural somewhere and start accusing like the any country. And look, like I was about to say, like some South American country, but you don't want to be in Oklahoma and you don't want to be in a lot of countries and you know accuse like some local local police chief of drug trafficking. That's when things get really gnarly. Um, but in general, uh, you know, if I was gonna do it, yeah, I'd probably run their name, but the question is, can you get it past the lawyers? Because that's usually how guys like that would fight.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:38

Really, yeah. Well, look, Mitch, um I don't think we've uh really we've just provided a bunch of context for uh for the show.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:47

So has it been too rambling? Like, do you do you need any do you want to go back and have me hit some points or anything like that?

SPEAKER_00 1:28:53

Well, I don't know. I I was thinking like, yeah, we didn't uh I I think it serves as really uh good context for being told the specific story that you tell. So um if you agree with me, um yeah, then uh tell the the audience what it's called, when it's gonna come out, um, and as well, excitingly, it sounds like this is the first of many seasons. So this is a story that's only going to get richer and richer over time.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:22

We'd we'd like to think it will. Well, I'm Mitchell Prothero, and uh I'm a longtime foreign correspondent who last year uh started working with Project Brazen on what we're calling Gateway, which is this you know, long term it's been long term so far, we hope it goes longer, where we look at how Europe became the single largest market for cocaine in the world, overtaking the United States, and about how the cocaine trade itself is so closely tied to the economies of Europe and to globalization that it almost feels like an intractable problem. And we've done that with our first season, it'll be coming out in June 5th. And what we do is we track sort of the rise and fall of this almost cartoonishly devilish scarface-like figure from the Moroccan mafia named Ridwantagi, who uh, you know, has been at the at the forefront of this battle against the Dutch state for five or six years now, that has, you know, killed a bunch of different people. Uh, he essentially went to war against the state and is even from prison considered one of the most dangerous people in the Netherlands. So we thought by telling his story, he rose from being like a small-time hashish dealer in suburban Netherlands to like a big-time hashish dealer living on the beach in Morocco to like an absolutely huge cocaine kingpin living in Dubai, and then now he's in jail. So through through Ridwan, his many murders, which I think were unusual for Europe, and this is what really started terrorizing, I think, people, was the knowledge that like defense attorneys and crown witnesses and things like that could get shot in Amsterdam was unheard of, I think a few years ago. And so we track this over the course of the, you know, it's it's a six-year span that we tell the story over, and you know, we tell it across the course of the season.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:13

Incredible, mate. Absolutely. And when does it come out? June 5th. Okay. Beautiful. Well, um, I think actually I will be publishing this after then. So there'll be a bunch of links to that of the description, and um I am really, really happy that uh, you know, I I discovered this and discovered Brazen, because I think it's incredibly interesting. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:39

Once you've had a ch once you've once you've had a chance to listen to it, and I get through some of the publicity, and we get through this thing launching. If you want, I can come back and do a 20-minute thing about the Martin Koch, who is our superstar figure. He starts in the in the third and fourth episodes. And he's the crime blogger that was a criminal that first that first revealed Taggy's name. And like Taggy eventually killed him, but it was like over the course of three assassination attempts, they kept failing. And they finally got him in the in the parking lot of an Amsterdam sex club. And his funeral, which is on YouTube, um his pallbearers were his favorite escorts and dancers. And you can watch, and they they were shooting fireworks and toasting champagne. It's on YouTube, it's the most incredible thing you've ever seen. And I won't lie, we kind of wish we'd done a six-part series about the life of Martin Koch, because it was just everything about him was incredible. Like his his sociopathic criminal career down to his blogging. So each each episode sort of populated with a character that I just could not believe was running around the Netherlands blogging and committing crimes. It was it's a it's a remarkable experience. What a force of nature.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:58

It's Holland, man. Alright, Mitch. Uh, yeah. Well, I will uh 100% take you up on any future episodes you want to record, and I'll probably come down to Tirana and do it at.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:10

Oh, and also I'm I'm officially the uh Tirana spokesman for Albania. Like, this place is ludicrous. Like I keep telling you, like, you've been, so but I keep telling everybody if you can telecommute and like the outdoors, like you've just got to move here. Like, it's like completely unspoiled wilderness and Italian food and cheap rent.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:34

Yeah. It's a Mediterranean paradise. Uh the Roman.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:37

And then you hit the mountains and it's like Balkan crazy. So like three hours from here, it's like the straight crazy mountains, but right here it's like Calabria East or something, you know?

SPEAKER_00 1:33:48

All right, man. Cheers. Cheers.