Inside Marengo: The Mob Trial No Lawyer Will Touch

For nearly a decade, the Netherlands has been trying to put Europe’s most dangerous drug lord behind bars. The cost has been lawyers in prison, journalists shot in the street, and a justice system that no longer feels safe defending its own rules.

On the western edge of Amsterdam, between a cemetery, a public park, and rows of identical middle-class residences, sits a building called “the Bunker.” From the outside, it looks like an unassuming office space – and at one point in time, it was. Since 1997, though, it has functioned as a courtroom: the most heavily guarded in all of the Netherlands, used for the hearings of such notorious criminals as Willem Holleeder, who in the eighties made headlines for kidnapping Freddy Heineken, then CEO of the internationally renowned brewing company of the same name. 

For nearly five years, the Bunker has been the stage of another, even more infamous event in European criminal history: the Marengo trial. The events that led to the trial began in 2017, when a member of the so-called Moroccan (“Mocro”) Mafia – a leading crime syndicate trafficking cocaine and synthetic drugs through Europe via ports in Spain, Portugal, Belgium, and the Netherlands – turned himself over to the police. His testimony as a crown witness, along with hundreds of thousands of decrypted PGP-secured messages, brought to light the existence of what Dutch media has repeatedly described as a “well-oiled killing machine,” responsible for liquidating dozens of people in the criminal underworld. 

During the trial, however, this killing machine also began targeting the civilian overworld, threatening law enforcement and judges, and killing lawyers, journalists, and family members of witnesses in an unprecedentedly brazen attempt to obstruct justice. For these reasons and more, Marengo – its long-awaited verdict appealed after the mafia’s kingpin, Ridouan Taghi, was sentenced to life imprisonment in February 2024 – has shaken Dutch society to its core. Likened by one person to a “virus you never get rid of,” many fear it sets a new standard, one where violence and intimidation can effectively undermine the rule of law. 

Mocro Mafia

According to Dutch crime journalists, the Mocro Mafia is but one element of a larger super-cartel that includes other criminal organizations from Italy, Ireland, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Operating from Dubai, where a fugitive Taghi was apprehended in 2019, the cartel is thought to smuggle more than 100,000 kilograms of cocaine per year into the Dutch harbor city of Rotterdam alone, most of it imported from Colombia and Ecuador and transported to Europe by way of the fruit trade. 

Taghi and his co-defendants – 17 in total – were not brought to trial for drug trafficking, though. Instead, they stand accused of orchestrating a string of liquidations that can be traced back to 2015, when an employee of a shop selling GPS trackers, burner phones, audio recorders, and other security and surveillance devices was shot in front of his own residence – ostensibly for leaking information to the police. 

Also killed around this time was criminal-turned-crime blogger Martin Kok, one of the first journalists to mention Taghi by name and killed – presumably – for that very reason. In 2018, after writing a story about the Mocro Mafia, the Amsterdam offices of crime magazine Panorama were blown up by an antitank weapon. The perpetrators were members of motorcycle gang Caloh Wagoh, subsequently revealed as the Mafia’s go-to hitman service. Later, a car filled with sixteen jerrycans of gasoline crashed into the front office of the national newspaper De Telegraaf, catching fire. Neither attack resulted in casualties; their objective, it seems, was not to silence but to send a message. 

Once underway, the Marengo trial bore witness to another series of attacks against the civilian overworld – several of them deadly. The brother of the aforementioned crown witness was killed in 2018, after the latter argued in vain that the police should protect not just his wife and kids but also his extended family. Killed next were the crown witness’s lawyer, Derk Wiersum, and confidant Peter R. De Vries, the country’s most famous crime reporter, shot in the streets of central Amsterdam moments after stepping off the set of a television studio.

Each of these hits is thought to have been ordered by Taghi personally, communicated to the outside world through the lawyers visiting him at the maximum security prison where he was being held. Later stages of the Marengo trial saw the arrest of both Youssef Taghi, his cousin and personal attorney, and his criminal defense attorney Inez Weski, who has since been accused of relaying more than 8,000 messages to Taghi’s eldest son, among others. 

Narco-state

The collateral damage incurred throughout Marengo led some to conclude that the Netherlands has devolved into a narco-state. Trial hearings at the Bunker certainly call to mind scenes from Medellín or Sonora: heavily armed cops and military officers stand sentry on street corners, their identities hidden under balaclavas. Snipers line the rooftops of surrounding buildings, drones buzzing overhead. “When he’s there,” one person told newspaper Groene Amsterdammer back in 2023, meaning Taghi, “there’s a helicopter, too, with one of those machine guns sticking out the side.” (“My bicycle is parked next to the entrance,” another quipped in the same piece. “It’s the only one in the city that doesn’t need a lock.”)

Also reminiscent of narco-states is the culture of fear and paranoia that now looms over the Dutch legal system and those who work in or around it. Lawyers, public prosecutors, judges, and reporters tied to the trial have been forced to take all kinds of safety measures, from monitoring cars in their rearview mirrors to telling their children never to open the front door without knowing who’s on the other side. Some have changed their locks and installed fire escapes under their windows in case they need to get away quickly. 

As documented by Groene Amsterdammer, the constant vigilance has taken its toll on people’s mental health. One journalist admits to mistaking a deliveryman from a nearby restaurant for a hitman stalking his building, while a lawyer said he had taken to writing down the appearance and license plate of any stranger who gave him a bad feeling. 

“Once, while I was chatting with the lady who lives next door,” a prosecutor who talked under condition of anonymity told the newspaper, “a man walking by reached inside his bag. I biked away as fast as I could. Later, I heard he was her new cleaner. That’s what it does to you.” 

Many of those interviewed preferred not to disclose their identities, but this fear extends to the underworld as well. Apparently, patrons of hookah lounges frequented by the Mafia talk about Taghi as if he were Lord Voldemort; rather than speak his name, they cross their fingers to make a “T.” 

Growing fear has led to tighter security. The judges presiding over the trial have remained unknown to the public, and many public servants were granted bodyguards by the government. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough personnel to keep everyone safe at all times; one lawyer recalled having to cancel weekend plans because no one was available to accompany them. 

Among journalists, fear led to self-censorship. Different newspapers began reporting on the trial as a single unit, their reporters hiding among one another like fish in a school. Articles were often published without bylines, and newsrooms held meetings to identify “Taghi triggers” – information that could, on its own or if worded a certain way, attract the Mafia’s attention. Some journalists have attested to retracting details out of fear, while others now avoid covering certain topics altogether. Indicative or not, it’s worth noting that – even to this day, two years after the trial’s initial verdict – none of the sources High Times reached out to wished to comment. 

Something Rotten in the Netherlands

As Marengo unfolded, many wondered whether the trial and the criminal activities behind it were exceptional or whether they signified a new norm moving forward. Today, the consensus seems to be that the Mocro Mafia represents a break from previous strands of organized crime in the Netherlands. Where Holleeder’s generation was homegrown and operated almost exclusively within the country’s own borders (he once, incidentally, came to my high school’s parking lot to intimidate the son of a former associate he’d fallen out with), the Mocro Mafia is much more multicultural and multinational, and their use of violence – like placing the severed head of a 23-year-old in the middle of a busy street – more performatively brutal. 

Where previous generations of criminals laid down their arms when caught and recognized the legitimacy of the justice system, the Mocro Mafia has proved willing to wage war against the state itself. According to Groene Amsterdammer, Marengo has not just exposed cracks in the foundation of the Dutch rule of law but has also deepened and expanded them, further obstructing the administration of justice. The Mafia’s control over criminal defense attorneys, through coercion or other means, has prompted more than one legal scholar to ask: What do we do when the risk becomes so great that no one wants to take up Taghi’s defense – his constitutional right?

More broadly, there is worry that this control has created a rift between said attorneys and the public prosecution service. Some prosecutors have attested to distancing themselves and withholding personal information from attorneys, lest they are in cahoots with their defendants. Meanwhile, attorneys have complained of increased suspicion and surveillance – at one point, two were spied on by the state while on a work trip in Dubai. Where the various elements of the Dutch judicial system once acted in unison, pursuing a common goal, now they are divided – or, at least, seem to be. 

If Marengo represents the future of crime and criminal justice in the Netherlands, how should the legal system adapt? Sven Brinkhoff, a law professor at the University of Amsterdam, has argued that the trial shows the dangers of using a crown witness to build cases, regardless of how strong the resulting case might become. Not only can crown witnesses provoke retaliation from their former associates, but it’s also difficult to ascertain the reliability of their testimony. In short, they’re a “contaminated investigative measure” better left unused.

Speaking to the Dutch newspaper Trouw shortly after the Marengo verdict was reached, Laura Peters, an associate professor of criminology at the University of Groningen, suggested that the Netherlands should learn from the Italian justice system, which is more experienced in prosecuting its own, equally powerful mafia organizations. In Italy, they also work with crown witnesses. Only there, she says, security measures are much more extensive, protecting both the witnesses and their family members.

Marengo has also prompted journalists and researchers to examine what has made the Netherlands so attractive for organized crime in the first place. Damián Zaitch, an associate professor of Law, Economics, and Governance at the University of Utrecht has proposed that “the conditions which make the Netherlands attractive to illegal trade are the same conditions that make it attractive to legal trade,” including high-quality infrastructure, a high density of sea and airports, fast internet speed, favorable tax regimes that facilitate the whitewashing of drug money, and a judiciary slowed down by its extensive bureaucracy.

For the time being, Marengo appears to have done little to combat organized crime. The mafia is too large and too well-connected to other organizations in Europe to be dismantled piecemeal; whenever one person is put behind bars, another comes to take their place, though even in jail, Taghi seems to have remained in charge of his section of the larger network – a testament to its stability and sophistication. And with the appeal process in motion, more chaos has followed. 

As of May 2026, no Dutch criminal defense lawyer will represent Taghi in his appeal. The council of deans approached every criminal defense lawyer in the country under a framework designed specifically for high-impact cases. All declined. Three of Taghi’s previous lawyers have been arrested for passing messages on his behalf. A fourth withdrew. His appeal is now at a standstill, and the question legal scholars have been asking throughout Marengo, what happens when the rule of law can no longer guarantee even the right to a defense, is no longer theoretical. 

This article is reported analysis based on publicly available court records, Dutch and international news reporting, and academic sources. All individuals described as accused or suspected have not been convicted of those charges unless explicitly stated. The Marengo trial remains under active appeal as of publication. High Times does not endorse or encourage illegal activity of any kind.