Host: Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer and really one of the best writers out there on crime, corruption, and misdeeds of all kinds. In one of our earliest stories on the Radio Hour, Patrick introduced us to the informants who put the drug kingpin, El Chapo, in US prison. Patrick has just published a collection called Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels, and Crooks. In the book, he tells the story of a woman named Astrid Holleeder, and how she helped bring down a gangster who was her brother. Crime for the Holleeders was always close at hand.

Astrid Holleeder: Most of the men that I know from my family are dead. I could name not many people that are still alive that I used to know because they were shot.

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Host: Holleeder grew up in an Amsterdam neighborhood that's called Jordaan. It's gentrified now with galleries and Airbnbs. When she grew up, it was big families in narrow apartments, and the street life, it was pretty unsavory. There was street crime, mobsters and tax fraud. She grew up all around that stuff. When Holleeder was 17, her family would be at the center of a crime that became international news

TV Excerpt 1: In Europe, the kidnappers of beer millionaire, Freddy Heineken, today made their first demand, "Silence from the police, Heineken's family, or else."

TV Excerpt 2: Heineken and his chauffeur were abducted last night as Heineken left his office [crosstalk].

Host: Almost four decades later, Astrid Holleeder is still living in the aftermath of that crime. Patrick Radden Keefe interviewed her for the Radio Hour in 2018, and he had to be picked up in a car and taken to a secret location. We've altered her voice in our story to protect her safety. Here's Patrick.

Patrick Radden Keefe: The kidnapping of Alfred Heineken, who everyone called Freddy, the magnate who ran the Heineken Company, one of the richest men in the Netherlands, was news throughout the world. Heineken walked out of his office one cold day. As he was about to get in his car, masked gunmen pulled up in a minivan, grabbed Heineken and his chauffeur and drove off.

TV Excerpt 3: Freddy Heineken [Dutch language].

Patrick: No one was more riveted by this crime than the Holleeder family. Astrid actually remembers talking with her brother Willem, who was something of a local hoodlum himself.

Astrid: I was sitting with him, eating with him, having dinner and telling him, "Who's going to kidnap Heineken? You must be crazy because this man is a friend of the Royal family. He has so much power. They will not get away from this." I was telling him that and he was like, "Do you really think so? Do you think they can't get away with it?" I'm like, "Yes, sure. Who could be so stupid?"

Patrick: The thing is that their father, Willem Senior, worked for Heineken.

Astrid: He was driving the trucks with beers on it, like a beer glass of three-feet high or something. We grew up with Mr. Heineken. We grew up with the company. He admired him so much. He would do anything for him.

Patrick: Their whole life was Heineken.

Astrid: Everything in our house was drenched with the company. We ate from plates from the company, we had pencils and pens from the company. We played with the balloons from the company. We also enjoyed the beer of Mr. Heineken very, very much. My father was an alcoholic, but he was very cruel.

Patrick: The violence in the neighborhood was nothing compared to what Astrid and her siblings were experiencing at home.

Astrid: Coming home drunk, drinking all day, all night and yelling at us, beating us up, beating my mother up. We never knew what to expect because there was no logic. It could just be because I put my hand on the wrong side of the chair, that would be enough to receive a beating.

Patrick: There were four of them. Astrid, who was fiercely independent. There was Sonja, who her mother described as a doll. She's very put together. There was their little brother, Gerard, the baby of the family. Then there was Willem, the eldest, who from his teens started getting involved in the criminal world around him. He did this with his best friend, Cornelius van Hout, who everyone knew as Cor. They were really close. Cor actually started dating their sister, Sonja, when she was in her teens.

Astrid: Cor, he has what I call and what we all lack in our family, he has joie de vivre. When things were bad, he would always see the bright side. Another thing that struck me is that he didn't seem to be afraid of my father. That was something that I was impressed about.

Patrick: Astrid admired Cor, and she liked him. She identified with her brother, Willem, the tough guy. She related to him.

Astrid: I think that if I would've been a boy, then I probably would've been the right hand of my brother because I have the same anger inside me. I have the same aggression inside me, and I was very ambitious. I think my brother's also very ambitious. Because I'm a girl, you could never took part of anything, to anything. You were just a girl. I had to look for other opportunities. His criminal career started with robberies, and those were also spectacular robberies with speed boats and going through the canals of Amsterdam, and then going through the water on the lake. There were a huge amount of money that they laid their hands, were millions.

Patrick: The kidnapping of Freddy Heineken was on a whole different level. It was so well-executed that, for weeks, the police had no idea where to look. Desperate, the Heineken family wound up paying a massive ransom, the equivalent of about $35 million today. Eventually, the police got a tip-off and they found Heineken and his chauffeur. They were also tipped off that Cor and Wim were behind the operation. When they went to Cor's house to arrest him, they found Astrid and Sonja there instead. The sisters were dumbfounded. They had had no idea.

Astrid: I never expected him to have done that.

Patrick: You had no inkling. You didn't even have any sense at all that your brother-- You knew that he was involved in crime, but you didn't think he would do something like this?

Astrid: No, no.

Patrick: One of Astrid's biggest concerns when the police took her in for questioning, was that she was going to miss her German exam. It just didn't compute for her, the idea that her own brother had kidnapped their father's boss. The Heineken kidnapping was an ingenious plot. Cor and Wim had been planning with several associates for more than a year. They built a series of soundproofed cells hidden in a warehouse on the outskirts of Amsterdam. They devised a coded system for communicating with the police and the press. By the time the police came, they'd already fled the country with millions of dollars in ransom money.

Astrid: A lot of people commit crimes. It's something that happens. It's part of society, but it's never that close. With Wim, everybody has a connection to, he turns around and then he commits the crime towards them. I think that started with Mr. Heineken.

Patrick: Willem and Cor weren't at large for long. After a couple of months, they were captured in Paris at an apartment they were staying at in a posh area near the Champs-Élysées.

TV Excerpt 4: [Dutch language]

Peter de Vries: When they were arrested, there were so many questions unanswered.

Patrick: Peter de Vries was a crime reporter for the Telegraph at the time. He followed the whole thing very closely.

Peter: I was anxious to know what happened, how they prepared everything, how they did it. I contacted Cor van Haut. I wanted to write a book inside the kitchen of the criminals from the point of view of the people who did it, the kidnappers.

Patrick: Wim and Cor were giving interviews. They were stuck in a kind of legal limbo in France and their fame started to grow. They were these young, cocksure, arrogant guys from the streets of Amsterdam who'd had the nerve to kidnap the richest man in the country. They cut a dashing profile.

Peter: A lot of people were surprised that a criminal can also be a person with humor, common sense, and stuff like that.

Patrick: Peter de Vries ended up writing this book called Kidnapping Mr. Heineken. It was a huge bestseller. This is the kind of book that people in Amsterdam who don't read books have read this book. Everybody knew the story of Cor and Wim. Cor and Wim were eventually extradited from France to the Netherlands. They were tried and convicted and sentenced to 11 years in prison, but they ended up serving only five. When they got out, they were celebrity criminals. Not only that, but the authorities had never been able to recover all of the ransom money. With the help of some of their criminal associates, Wim and Cor had actually invested some of this money while they were in prison.

Astrid: They bought real estate in the Red Light District in Amsterdam. They bought all kinds of prostitution there. They bought the gambling halls, they bought Casa Rosso, that's also like a sexual live shows, the Banana Bar. It's a bar where women shoot bananas with their private parts, and that's what a lot of tourists come and watch. [laughs] I mean, that they bought it. Yes, they had apartments. They had beautiful cars, not in their names, of course. It was all in names of other people, but they didn't have to work. It's not that you could see remorse or poverty or whatever. No. Then, the life started. The vacations, the house in Spain, all those kind of things.

Patrick: Astrid remembers this as a relatively happy time. With their father long since out of the picture, Wim had assumed the role of the family patriarch. Cor and Wim were still partners in crime and best friends. Cor and Sonja had a second child. Astrid had gone to law school. There was a tentative harmony of the different elements in what was really a crime family.

Astrid: Our families were always together. My sister had a house and we would all eat there. My brother, me, my other brother, my mother, Cor. We had one big family and we thought everything went well.

Patrick: After university, Astrid tried to get a job in corporate law, but the Holleeder name was notorious. When she went out for job interviews, nobody wanted to hire a Holleeder. Wim suggested she meet with some of the criminal defense attorneys he knew. They were excited to talk with her. Being the sister of Willem Holleeder had cachet. She became a criminal lawyer and it turned out she was really good at it.

Astrid: I understood my clients. I understood the mothers. I understood the sisters that were arrested, too, while they even didn't know why. I understood the children, so to me criminal law was, yes, it was me.

Patrick: As her career took off, Wim began to confide in Astrid. He would tell her about things he was doing. Tell her about his fears. She wasn't formally his lawyer, but she did act as a legal advisor, an informal sounding board. During this time you had gone to law school, you had become quite a high-powered criminal attorney with connections throughout the city and the country. You're obviously a very formidable, smart personality, and yet you talk about being under the thumb of your brother during this time. Looking back, how do you make sense of that?

Astrid: First of all, I was his little sister, and in that sense he was always older than I was, so he was always trying to remind me of the fact that he was older and I had to respect him. I was trying to give him the legal advice that would prohibit him from undertake certain actions. Like, when he was planning to shoot a rocket into somebody's house, I have to remind him that I think about him only, not about the victim he's planning to make.

That's why I advised him that he shouldn't do that because if he would've used the rocket, that he would've been an enemy of the state. I would advise him, "Don't do that," but it was difficult. You don't want anybody to get hurt, but you also have to be careful not to get hurt yourself.

Patrick: It was all too easy to get hurt. One day in 1996 an assassin opened fire at Cor as he sat in his car with his family right outside their home.

Astrid: They were sitting in the car and then a guy walked up to the car and shot through the window. He hit Cor. My sister, she opened the door, rolled out of the car and grabbed my nephew who was sitting in the back singing a song at that time, and took him into the house. Cor was hit several times but he survived.

Patrick: Initially there was just panic and confusion. When Cor got out of the hospital, he and the family fled the country and went into hiding in a farmhouse in the woods in France. Wim promised he'd get to the bottom of things. After some investigation, he came back and he said, "I figured out who wants you dead. It's these two rival gangsters. They want to kill you, and they said that unless you pay them a huge sum of money, they're going to." This seemed believable.

What was strange about it to Cor was that Wim said, "I think you should just pay them." Cor himself was no stranger to extortion, but generally he was the guy doing the extorting. In this instance he said, "I'm not going to be extorted, I'm not going to pay the money." This was the beginning of a real wedge between the two friends.

Astrid: Then, it all started. Wim was trying to force me to tell him where Cor was. That went on for a long period. That was that was really awful because it terrorized us.

Patrick: Wim wouldn't let it go. He'd ask Astrid and Sonja for information about where Cor was hiding, and they were reluctant to tell him. Over a period of time, an awful suspicion began to occur to the sisters. What if it hadn't been these gangsters who had ordered the killing?

Astrid: Then, in the end there was a second attempt, and Cor did survive again, and then there was a third time, and that was final.

Patrick: After Cor was killed, the family gathered together and Wim came and he comforted his sisters, but by this point they were pretty certain that he was the man responsible for Cor's death.

Astrid: We were all three of us sitting on the couch and he was in the middle, and he was grabbing us by the shoulders and pulling us towards him. I'm watching, looking at my sister and my sister's looking at me, knowing that this is all fake, and knowing you have to just undergo this because if you do otherwise you would accuse him. If you would accuse him, then he would probably kill us, too. There was not much of a choice

Patrick: Just as Astrid was coming to realize what her brother was capable of, the rest of the country was falling for him. Wim started writing a column for a local newspaper. He was featured on a hip-hop single called Willem is Back.

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Patrick: He even appeared on a national talk show called College Tour.

TV Excerpt 5: [Dutch language].

[applause]

Patrick: People would see Willem around Amsterdam riding his scooter, and he became this well-known iconic figure. They started referring to him in the Dutch press as 'the cuddly criminal'. People would come up to him on the street and ask for selfies. Meanwhile, his associates in the underworld started dying one by one. With Cor dead, Astrid and Sonja were terrified for their children. Astrid's daughter, Miljuschka, and Sonja's children, Francis and Richie.

Astrid: It's always a question, "Is he going to do anything to the kids or not?" We were two women with children and had to survive. That's what we did. You feel hypocrite from the day on that that happened. It was a feeling as if I betrayed Cor, betrayed myself because I just acted the way he wanted, not having the guts to go to the police or anything. Yes, that was the start of feeling dirty.

Patrick: No one was arrested in connection with Cor's death. Wim, for his part, was suspected pretty widely of involvement in a great many murders but he was never charged. He could seem almost above the law, immune, zipping around on his scooter and palling around with local celebrities, but privately he was becoming more erratic. Eventually, crime journalist Peter de Vries found himself in Wim's sights. Peter's popular book about the Heineken kidnapping, which was a big best seller, had been picked up by an American production company.

TV Excerpt 6: That is the way the game is played.

TV Excerpt 7: You know how big this thing is?

TV Excerpt 8: He's insane, very smart.

Patrick: Before the movie came out, Holleeder turned on him.

Peter: He said, "I don't want to have my name mentioned in this picture. At that time, he came to my house in the evening at 10 o'clock, and then the doorbell rang. When I looked out of the window I saw, "Hey, that's Willem Holleeder." I said to my wife, "I don't think this is okay." He was on his motorbike. He had his helmet on. He had a big leather jacket on, gloves, big shoes. He's quite an impressive guy, even without these clothes. I immediately saw that he was fucked up. When I opened the door, and I said, "Hey, Willem," he started yelling at me. At that time, I was thinking, "Oh, in 30 seconds I will be lying on the ground fighting for my life."

Patrick: Peter de Vries is a bit of a tough guy himself and he's a seasoned crime reporter. He managed to keep his wits about him.

Peter: I said, "Willem, calm down. Let's just talk. What's the problem?" He finally calmed down a little bit. He seem to leave, but about three times he also returned to me, standing again very close to me and, "Do I have to do it right now? You know what is going to happen? You can call the police but it won't help you." Finally, after three times, he went away, and that was it.

Patrick: Peter did call the police. He filed a police report, but in the meantime, Astrid had started talking to the authorities, too.

Astrid: I couldn't live on with a thought that he would kill again. That's when I turned on him. The only thing we would have left if we wouldn't go to police was take the rights into our own hands and shoot him. I must say that that would have been the best solution for him and for me, but my daughter didn't want me to. My daughter didn't want to have a killer for a mother.

Patrick: She started to tell the police some of what she knew, but the whole process filled her with terror. What if Wim found out? What if she had to testify in court, but there wasn't enough evidence to send him away? She was a criminal defense attorney, remember. She knew what kind of evidence she would need, so she decided to wear a wire.

Astrid: That in itself was an adventure because, at one point, I thought I had a really good one. I had it stuck between the front of my bra. At one point we were talking and I felt that it was sliding. I felt it fell down and I was with him. If it would fall on the ground, he would have noticed that, he would kill me immediately. There were times that I was really, really afraid, and I kept on being afraid.

Patrick: Astrid eventually compiled hundreds of hours of recordings and she persuaded Sonja to record conversations with them also. The first time I heard these recordings, they gave me a shiver.

Willem: [foreign language]

Patrick: You listen to them, and you can hear, just in the tone of his voice, the kind of figure this guy was and his family. He was a figure of terror.

Willem: [foreign language]

Patrick: Willem was finally arrested in 2014 and charged with involvement in half a dozen murders, including the murder of Cor van Hout more than a decade earlier. Her brother is in police custody now, but Astrid isn't safe. In 2016, a gang member being held in the same prison told authorities that Willem had tried to hire him to murder Astrid, Sonja, and Peter de Vries. What will you do in the admittedly very slim chance that he's not convicted?

Astrid: Oh, then he would go off to me and I would go off to him. I'm not going to sit around and wait till he is killing everybody.

Patrick: Astrid shuttles around the city in armored vehicles. She wears disguises, and she lives in a series of safe houses. When I went to see her, I would be told to wait by a particular canal in Amsterdam, and a driver would show up then take me to an undisclosed location. I never knew where I was going. It was never to her apartment.

Astrid: I'm living in places that are furnished. It's always being in somebody else's house, so that's different. I'm like 52, but I don't really have a place of my own.

Patrick: When she testifies in Wim's trials, she sits behind a screen. She doesn't want anybody to see her, but also, the prosecutors don't want her to be able to see them. She's behind the screen, yet her voice fills the courtroom, and the two of them bicker and argue. They shout at each other at times. It's incredibly tense. If Willem is convicted, he'll probably be held in a maximum-security prison until he dies, but even then, Astrid won't feel safe. I asked her why, and she said that if he gets a life sentence, her brother will have nothing to think about for the rest of his life but revenge.

Like Willem, Astrid has become a celebrity in the Netherlands. She wrote a book called Judas, about how she turned him in. Think about that title. She doesn't see herself as a hero for stopping this murder spree. She sees herself as Willem's betrayer.

Astrid: I think it's awful what I do to him because he will be imprisoned for life. Thinking about that, being the person that sends him away for life, well, that's an agony every day. If I think about the moment he must have heard that I was the one who testified against him, that must have been such a shock. Later on, he did say in court how it felt for him to hear about us, especially me, testifying against me.

Patrick: Watching the trial, what struck me the most was that despite the incredibly raw conflict between these two siblings, as brother and sister, they still share a powerful bond. That, having grown up in this abusive environment, Astrid feels, despite it all, incredibly connected with her brother.

Astrid: I keep thinking about all the factors of our childhood. I'm like, "Well, it could have been me. If I would have been a boy, it could have been me."

Patrick: If you could talk to your brother, if it were just the two of you today, now, together, not in the courtroom, what would you say to him?

Astrid: Well, that I still love him in spite of everything. That I wish I could take him home, that he could be a brother to me. That I could take him home.

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Host: Willem Holleeder was sentenced to life in prison in connection with five murders. Astrid Holleeder spoke with staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe in 2018 and her story is told in Patrick's new collection of reporting, a book called Rogues. One year ago, the reporter Peter de Vries, who was interviewed for our story, was killed. He was shot while leaving a TV studio, and the two suspects are believed to be affiliated with an organized crime group that de Vries was investigating. Their trial began last month.

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