Drug lord copycats: why regular people now bomb homes to settle scores
Organized crime is shaping society
Early last Saturday morning, an explosion at an apartment building in The Hague killed six people. It was one of the largest mass-death incidents in the Netherlands in modern history. The blast destroyed five homes, damaged fourteen more, and injured four other people. Special teams dug through the rubble looking for victims for days.
Bombings are far more common in the Netherlands than you might think. The number of explosions double every year; we will likely reach 1,000 total for 2024. Bombs have long been the preferred method for drug criminals to send messages to each other. This used to typically happen when, say, a bunch of cocaine would go missing and the one gang wanted to threaten the supposed thieves from another gang to pay up. Bombs are an effective way to send a message because they’re cheap and easy to make. You simply attach a detonator to a heavy firework, pay some teenager to lay it at your enemy’s door, and you’ve just sent a very scary message for very cheap. I wrote in detail about how this works last year. And in case you are unfamiliar with the scale of drug crime in the Netherlands, it’s so bad that there’s an ongoing debate about whether or not the country should technically be considered a narco-state.
Explosions hardly happen in other European countries. Police blame the trend here on “Dutch fireworks culture,” but it’s not only that. What’s changed in the last year or two is that it’s no longer only professional criminals who lay bombs.
Police now estimate that more than half of the attacks are not related to the criminal world. This year there were explosions at a hairdresser in Winschoten, a beauty salon in Groningen, and the homes of feuding roofers in Den Bosch, among many more, all of which had apparently nothing to do with organized crime.
As the police told the NOS:
Fireworks are widely accepted in the Netherlands and are still seen as harmless. A major problem is that private individuals can obtain heavy explosive material far too easily and that the threshold for using it is low.
And it seems this is what happened in The Hague, with much heavier firepower. Four men have finally been arrested for the crime. Reporting suggests that a man named Mostag B. wanted to take revenge on his ex-girlfriend who owned a bridal shop on the first floor of the building. He allegedly paid the three other men who were arrested to carry out the attack.
So the whole thing, the six deaths, the nineteen destroyed or damaged homes, had to do with a romantic dispute? A bad breakup? It’s mind-boggling. It reminds me of a line from Steven Soderberg’s film The Limey:
That’s usually what senseless mayhem comes down to isn’t it? Bad loan, bad judgment, bad faith.
In a major police fuck up, two of the suspects were arrested a week before the attacks. They had been parked in a van with the engine running, and when police checked inside “they found fourteen jerry cans with an unknown content, heavy fireworks, flares, a fire extinguisher and extra clothing.”
There are still many unanswered questions about the The Hague attack. Why did police release the suspects, who both had criminal records, when they were obviously planning an attack? Why did the suspects carry out the attack when they knew the police were onto them? What was the dispute between Mostag B. and the bridal shop owner, anyway?
And most importantly, how did a revenge attack on one business and one woman wind up killing so many people? Experts told the Het Parool that “inexperience and lack of expertise among the attackers could have played a role.”
Stupidity is a very unsatisfying explanation for all of this. I mean, you don’t need to be smart and experienced to figure out that fourteen jerry cans (usually used for gasoline) are overkill for one shop and a Range Rover.
We’ll have to wait to figure out whether sheer stupidity or something else was to blame. For now the suspects are in “full custody,” which means they are only allowed to have contact with their lawyers, and the Public Prosecution Service isn’t talking either.
It’s unclear how the police are going to tackle bombings, or to what extent they have any power over it. Experts suggest heavier sentences won’t serve as an effective deterrent for the young men who typically lay the bombs. Cobras, the heavy firework used in eighty percent of bombings, are already illegal, but they’re widely available on the black market. Obviously you can get gasoline anywhere. It’s hard for authorities to take a pan-European approach, since other European countries don’t have the same problem. The Strategic Offensive Against Explosions, a national effort launched only this month, hasn’t come to any conclusions yet.
What is clear now is that we are in store for more, and more, deadly attacks. This increasingly narco-state-esque culture we’re living in has trained up more and more people outside the criminal underworld to act as drug lord copycats, and to view explosions as an effective way to settle scores. There must be something alluring about bombings, which typically inflict hands-off and low stakes terror. The aggrieved can hire someone else to set off the bomb—even Mostag B. didn't do his own dirty work—and usually some windows explode and no one gets seriously injured. But of course, explosions are only as low stakes as attackers choose to make them.
In 2016, an innocent Amsterdam man who lived on the same block and drove the same car as a drug criminal was killed in a case of mistaken identity. His girlfriend was shot and their two year-old daughter narrowly avoided injury. This is how you expect the underworld to bleed out into the lives of regular people, with occasional brutality and unfortunate stray bullets. Tragic stuff, but easily dismissed as a fluke, not a social problem.
Bombings are different, now woven into the fabric of society. Living in Amsterdam you hear them at night in all different parts of the city. They’re everywhere. Now, even if the cocaine mafia was somehow magically extracted from the country, the bombings wouldn’t stop. The final layer of the tragedy in The Hague, and the many more deadly bombings to come, is that they are all indirectly inspired by drug crime, even when drugs aren’t involved.
🔥 Hot Linkjes
Society
It hasn’t been this cloudy for this many consecutive days in THIRTY ONE YEARS. 2024 has been one of the top three wettest years on record. Sigh.
The Miss Netherlands Pageant has been cancelled for good. CNN.
Archeologists found a 500 year-old clog and a floor made of cattle bones in Alkmaar, and the remains of a Roman solider from “year zero” in Heerlen.
In Deventer last weekend 950 people showed up the celebrate a Charles Dickens Festival. Here are some cute pics from the event.
Politics
The drastic education budget cuts I wrote about last month won’t be as bad as initially expected. The Pie.
The Department of War
A Dutch court through out a case brought by pro-Palestinian groups hoping to ban Dutch arms exports to Israel. Barron’s.
Business
The Dutch Data Protection Authority fined Netflix €4.75 million for customer privacy violations. TechCrunch.
Dutch startups raised $3.5 billion in 2024, the second most lucrative year ever. TNW.
Arts & Books & Design
Claude Kmb will represent the Netherlands in the 2025 Eurovision song contest.
Sport
The Dutch are world-class darts players and have won four out of 32 World Darts Championship trophies. The Sporting News.
Crime
Police found 12 million euros worth of cocaine hidden in… coffins, this time. What will they think of next? The Telegraph.
🥳 Leuke Dingetjes
“Bruh” is 2024’s children’s word of the year. It is “mainly used to indicate that something is not nice or to express disappointment” according to the AD. 130,000 votes were cast, and the other contenders were bro, sigma, slay, glamour, ohio, rizzler and skibidi. You’re gonna have to find a child to explain those to you.
📺 Kijk/Lees/Luister List
Not necessarily Dutch stuff I enjoyed watching, reading, and listening to this week.
TV / Movies
Jonathan Glazer is the director most recently known for The Zone of Interest (2023), one of the best films of the last decade. I rewatched his 2002 debut Sexy Beast last week and loved it. It’s totally different movie than Zone of Interest, but defies convention in a similar way. It’s about a retired gangster whose dream life in Spain is shattered when his old boss shows up and demands he participate in one last heist.
Fun fact, Glazer got his start as a music video director and is responsible for Jamiroquai’s “Virtual Insanity” (1996) music video. You remember.
Music / Podcasts
This Christmas dinner playlist from Amsterdam DJ Michel de Hey is SO GOOD and will carry you through many more nights after the holidays.
Whenever something insane happens in America I impatiently wait a new ep of the True Anon to drop and explain to me wtf is really going on. This episode does a deep dive into how internet culture shaped the Luigi Mangione’s political ideology; it is almost three hours long and I wish it had been eight.
This ep of 60 Songs the Explain the ‘90s goes beyond Avril Lavigne and dives into early-2000’s girl pop artists, and explains how they all had to orbit around Britney Spears in one way or another. Great listen.
Articles / Books
Shot: “The Ghosts in the Machine” by Liz Pelly in Harper’s Magazine
“It is in the financial interest of streaming services to discourage a critical audio culture among users, to continue eroding connections between artists and listeners, so as to more easily slip discounted stock music through the cracks, improving their profit margins in the process. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which the continued fraying of these connections erodes the role of the artist altogether, laying the groundwork for users to accept music made using generative-AI software.” UGH
Chaser: “Herb Sundays 137: 1010Benja” by
in“Indeed the glamour of “indie” has moved from music to film/TV, with A24 wielding the kind of mass cultural reverence a legendary label like Sub Pop would have 30 years ago (and still warrants), and no independent music label or band carries a mainstream awareness even close, much like the dominance of Rockstar Games a decade back or cursed Miramax in the ‘90s. The culture game has simply moved to a different arena, music is an aspect of its offerings. Now a full roll-up of all of these touch points is necessary to hit mass adoption.”
*all typos in this post are on purpose
Thanks and subscribed! I only just started exploring Substack and I’m glad I found you.
Another wonderfully comprehensive and informative posting, Kate. Echt heel erg bedankt!
Vrolijk kerstfeest 🎅 ⛄️ 🎄🎁 en gelukkig nieuwjaar!