Astrid Holleeder has arresting eyes—they are swimming-pool blue—but that’s all I can reveal about her appearance, because she is in hiding, an exile in her own city, which is Amsterdam. For the past two years, she has lived in a series of furnished safe houses. She prefers buildings with basement parking, in order to minimize her exposure during the brief transit to a bulletproof car. She bought the car used, for fifteen thousand euros. She also owns two bulletproof vests. She thinks a lot about how she might be assassinated, gaming out fatal scenarios. Whenever she stops at a red light and an unfamiliar vehicle sharks up alongside her, she clutches the wheel, her heart hammering. Then the light changes, and she exhales and keeps moving.
Amsterdam, a city of fewer than a million people, is a difficult place to stage your own disappearance, particularly if you grew up there. Fortunately for Holleeder (which is pronounced “Hol-lay-der”), she guarded her privacy even before her life became threatened, and no photographs of her as an adult can be found on the Internet. Today, she arranges furtive visits with a small circle of friends, but otherwise stays mostly at home. When she moves through Amsterdam, she does so in secret, and sometimes in disguise: she has a collection of fake noses and teeth. Holleeder typically dresses in black, but if she suspects she’s being followed she may duck into a bathroom and emerge in a wig and a red dress. Occasionally, she has posed as a man.
Such subterfuge is not conducive to a social life. Certainly, it is risky for her to meet anyone she doesn’t already know. Holleeder is a vibrant woman who draws energy from having people around her, but she has armored herself. She told me recently that, at fifty-two, she is single, and added, “Relationships are overrated.”
The threat to Holleeder’s life stems from a decision that she made, in 2013, to become the star witness in a mob trial. She agreed to testify against the most notorious criminal in the Netherlands, a man known as De Neus—the Nose, a reference to his most prominent facial feature. This was a risky choice. “Everyone else who has turned on him ended up dead,” she pointed out. The Nose is being held at the Netherlands’ only maximum-security prison. In 2016, he allegedly asked gang leaders at the prison to enlist members on the outside to execute Holleeder, along with two other witnesses in the case against him. The plot was disrupted when one of the prisoners confessed to officials. But the threat lingers. “Of course he would do it,” Holleeder said. “He would kill me.”
If she speaks with unusual conviction about what the Nose might do, it is in part because she used to be his legal adviser: until Holleeder went into hiding, she was a successful criminal-defense attorney. More to the point, she is his younger sister.
The Nose’s name is Willem (Wim) Holleeder. He is standing trial on five counts of murder, two counts of attempted murder, and “participating in a criminal enterprise.” The proceedings take place in a secure courtroom, on the industrial outskirts of Amsterdam, known as the Bunker. When Astrid testifies, she sits in an enclosure behind an opaque screen, which guarantees that nobody in the courtroom can see her face, and also insures that she cannot see Wim, who might seek to inhibit her testimony with a menacing glance or a gesture that only she could understand. As one prosecutor recently explained in court, Wim “can be extremely intimidating.”
The “mega-trial,” as the Dutch press calls it, has become such a spectacle that people often line up at dawn in the hope of securing a seat in the small public gallery. Part of the allure is Astrid herself. In 2016, she published a memoir, “Judas,” about growing up with Wim, and about her decision to betray him. The book sold half a million copies in a country of seventeen million people. Although Astrid is now a famous author, she has met almost none of her readers. A bookstore signing is out of the question.
The book’s title reflects her profound ambivalence about her decision to accuse her brother of murder. But the high drama of that choice is what made the book a success, and what attracts so many rubberneckers to the Bunker: the clash of the Holleeders is sibling rivalry distilled to a courtroom duel. “This is the ultimate betrayal,” Astrid told the court in March. Through sobs, she explained that, despite Wim’s many crimes, she still loves him. It was “crazy and horrible” to be testifying against him, she admitted. “But, if you have a very sweet dog that bites children, you have to choose the children, and put the dog down.”
Wim is the oldest of four kids, Astrid the youngest. Sonja and Gerard are the middle siblings. They grew up in the Jordaan, a picturesque district of narrow homes and canals in central Amsterdam. Today, the Jordaan is full of expensive boutiques, but in the sixties it was a working-class neighborhood. Astrid’s father, who was also named Willem, worked at the nearby Heineken brewery. He revered Alfred (Freddy) Heineken, the potentate who ran the company. Heineken’s green bottles reportedly came to account for forty per cent of the imported beer consumed in the United States, and Freddy Heineken was one of the Netherlands’ richest men. When Astrid was young, the children did their homework with Heineken-logo pens and drank milk from Heineken-logo glasses. The house was “drenched in Heineken,” Astrid recalled. So was her father: he was an alcoholic. He was also a tyrannical sadist who belittled and abused Astrid’s mother, Stien, and their children. When Astrid reflects on the circumscribed nature of her current existence, she sometimes recalls her childhood. “I’m used to being in prison, because home was a prison,” she told me.
Wim was a tall and handsome teen-ager, with muscular arms and a Gallic nose. Like his father, he was temperamental, and the two often clashed; Wim started going out in the evening and coming home very late. He sometimes woke Astrid on his return and whispered, “Assie, are you asleep? Has Dad gone to bed yet? Did he go crazy again?” Astrid whispered back, “He was yelling that you were late. But Mom turned back the clock so he wouldn’t catch you.” Stien told me that her son was sweet “until he was twelve or thirteen,” adding, “I didn’t know that he was hanging around with the wrong people.” Then again, she pointed out, “they were all criminals in the neighborhood.”
The Netherlands officially has one of the world’s lowest crime rates. In recent years, some two dozen Dutch prisons have shut down, because there aren’t enough convicts to fill them. Toleration of cannabis and prostitution, combined with low levels of poverty and robust social-welfare protections, has burnished the country’s reputation as a peaceful, progressive utopia. But a recent confidential report by the Dutch police, which leaked to the press, suggested that official figures don’t reflect the actual volume of crime in the country. The police estimated that millions of minor thefts and other violations go unreported every year, because victims conclude that crime is an inevitable nuisance or that the authorities are unlikely to apprehend the perpetrators. There is also a fair amount of serious crime. According to a Europol report, as much as half the cocaine that enters Europe passes through the port of Rotterdam. When a jumbo shipment went missing a few years ago, a gang war erupted; more than a dozen people were murdered, and hit men sprayed bullets down Amsterdam’s streets.
Wim Holleeder’s early forays into the underworld were modest: he provided muscle for landlords who were looking to evict squatters, and dabbled in various fraudulent schemes. By his early twenties, he’d advanced to armed robbery. He’d begun showing some of the abusive tendencies of his dad, including menacing his sisters. According to Astrid, he would tell them, “I’m the boss.”
“He’s a narcissist, like his father,” Stien told me. He came home occasionally, to visit his siblings and their mother, and often brought along his childhood friend Cornelius van Hout, who went by Cor. Astrid liked him. “He had a joie de vivre,” she told me, and he didn’t take the tempestuous Wim too seriously. Sonja also found Cor charming, and, to Astrid’s delight, began dating him.
Astrid and Sonja were close but very different. Sonja was beautiful, blond, perfectly dressed, and subservient to men. “Sonja was like a doll,” their mother told me. “Astrid was like a tank.” Astrid was so fiercely independent that her siblings joked that she must have been a foundling. She took this notion half seriously, sometimes wondering when her real family would show up to retrieve her.
Astrid excelled in school, and, feeling confined by the Jordaanese slang she’d grown up speaking, made a point of mastering “proper” Dutch. Wim mocked her for putting on airs. She learned English, too, and found it comforting to have access to a language that her abusive father could not comprehend. Even today, she finds that slipping into English provides an emotional refuge. As Astrid grew into adulthood, she had a tendency to think in starkly gendered terms: women were victims and men were perpetrators. “I was like a man,” she told me. “I didn’t want to be a victim. I never wore a dress.” She played basketball, eventually rising to a semi-professional level. At seventeen, she left home, turning her back on her father forever. Her plan was to flee the Netherlands by winning a college scholarship abroad. “I was ready to go to the United States,” she recalled. “It was only with the Heineken kidnapping that I got sucked back in.”
On November 9, 1983, Freddy Heineken was leaving his office in Amsterdam when an orange minivan pulled up beside him. Several masked men shoved him and his chauffeur into the vehicle at gunpoint. The minivan careered along a bicycle path and headed to a warehouse on the edge of the city. Heineken and the chauffeur were thrust into a pair of soundproofed cells. That night, the Dutch police received a note demanding a colossal ransom—the equivalent of more than thirty million dollars in today’s money.
“Kidnapping was the sort of thing that happened in other places, like the United States,” Peter R. de Vries, a Dutch crime journalist who wrote a book about the kidnapping, told me. Freddy Heineken was a national icon, and the Dutch public was riveted by the story. By then, Sonja was living with Cor van Hout, with whom she’d recently had a daughter, Frances. One night, Astrid and Wim joined them for dinner and watched the news. “It’s extremely stupid,” Astrid remembers saying. “Who would kidnap Heineken? They’ll be hunted the rest of their lives.”
“You think so?” Wim asked.
“I’m pretty damn sure of it,” she replied.
Three weeks later, the authorities had made no progress in solving the crime. The Heineken family handed a driver five sacks containing the ransom money in four currencies, as the kidnappers had specified. The driver went to Utrecht, deposited the sacks in a storm drain, and left.
The hostages were not released when the money was delivered, but around this time the police received an anonymous tip that led them to the Amsterdam warehouse. Inside, they found Freddy Heineken and the chauffeur. “I was chained by my left hand, limiting my freedom of movement to almost nil,” Heineken said, in a statement, adding that he’d combed his hair with the tines of a plastic fork. “Trying to establish a rhythm gives you something to do,” he said.
The captives had been rescued, but the culprits had disappeared, apparently getting away with the crime, and the ransom money. One morning, however, while Astrid was staying at Sonja’s house and Cor was away, heavily armed policemen burst through the door. An anonymous informant had provided Dutch authorities with the identities of the kidnappers. The alleged ringleaders were Wim Holleeder and Cor van Hout. The police placed the sisters under arrest. Astrid was seventeen.
Early this spring, I contacted Astrid’s publisher, Oscar van Gelderen. A jaunty man with an impish smile, he has experience representing a star author who is subject to death threats: he was the first foreign publisher to translate Roberto Saviano, the Italian journalist who wrote the 2006 book “Gomorrah,” about the Neapolitan Mafia, and has lived in hiding ever since. Van Gelderen connected me with Astrid, who agreed to see me, but on her terms. I could not know in advance where in Amsterdam we would meet: if Wim’s associates were aware that I had a rendezvous with Astrid, they could tail me. Before I met her, van Gelderen urged me to be sensitive about the emotional toll that Astrid’s precarious situation had taken on her. “She is very intellectual,” he said. “But she is a raw nerve.”
One evening, as dusk fell over Amsterdam, a driver picked me up and brought me to a sleek hotel, where we descended to the basement parking lot. I took an elevator to a Japanese restaurant, where I was escorted to a low table in a private room enclosed by shoji screens. Then a screen slid open and Astrid entered. For a hermit, she is impressively fit. Dressed in black, she greeted me warmly, then commenced a serious perusal of the menu. “I don’t go out to eat much, only when it’s a private room,” she said, with undisguised exuberance, before selecting the most extravagant option, a twelve-course tasting menu, and recommending that I do the same. Then she started speaking about her brother—rapidly and assuredly, in perfect English—with the babbling-brook urgency of a shut-in who is starved for conversation. Without a doubt, she observed, there was a patricidal impulse behind Wim’s decision to kidnap Freddy Heineken, the man her father revered but who also “provided the beer that he drank all day.” Even so, she said, “Wim would never have consciously decided to take Freddy Heineken for that reason—he’s not self-aware enough for that.”
When the police arrested the Holleeder sisters, Wim and Cor fled to France. Astrid and Sonja told investigators that they’d been unaware of the plot; Wim wouldn’t have confided in his sisters, and Sonja knew better than to ask Cor about his work. The women were released without charges. Six weeks later, Wim and Cor were captured in Paris, at an apartment near the Champs-Élysées; Cor had been making calls to Sonja, which the authorities had traced. The Dutch government initiated an extradition of Wim and Cor, but the process became mired in legal complications, and the men remained in French custody for nearly three years. During this period, they gave occasional interviews to the Dutch press, coming across as insolent, dashing antiheroes—working-class toughs who’d dared to kidnap a plutocrat. Though Astrid was privately appalled by their self-promotion, her feelings about them were complicated: Wim was her brother, and Cor was her sister’s partner. Sonja never wavered in her support for Cor, and Stien travelled to France every week to visit Wim in prison. Astrid’s ambition to distance herself from her family was thwarted, because she now felt a sense of embattled allegiance to them—and because her last name had become infamous.
While Wim and Cor were in France, Astrid fell in love with an artist named Jaap Witzenhausen, who was twenty years her senior. He was nothing like the men in her family; he had a mild temperament, and was happy to subordinate himself to Astrid. “He was my housewife,” she recalled, fondly. “He did the household chores. He cooked very nicely. He was the total picture.” When Astrid’s family visited and saw Witzenhausen vacuuming, they found it hilarious. At nineteen, Astrid gave birth to a girl, Miljuschka. For several months, she told me, she tried to shield her baby from her kin, including Stien, because she was afraid that Miljuschka would be infected by “the mechanisms of my family.” She began seeing a therapist. This was not something that people from her neighborhood did—“It meant you were crazy”—but she was determined not to subject her daughter to the pathologies that had warped her own childhood. Astrid told me, “My first questions to the therapist were: ‘What is normal? How do normal people act?’ ”
Wim and Cor were finally extradited to the Netherlands in 1986, and sentenced to eleven years in prison. Under the country’s liberal sentencing regime, they were released after only five. The Dutch public was scandalized when the kidnappers marked the occasion by throwing a decadent party at which a band performed a Heineken jingle. The men had ample reason to celebrate: as Astrid explained to me, “the authorities didn’t get the money.” After Heineken and the chauffeur were liberated, the Dutch police claimed to have found most of the ransom buried in a wooded area near the town of Zeist, thirty-five miles southeast of Amsterdam. But roughly a quarter of it—the equivalent, today, of eight million dollars—was never recovered. According to Astrid, Wim and Cor entrusted some of these funds to criminal associates, with instructions to invest in the drug trade. “So, while they were in prison, the eight million was working for them,” she said. They went into prison as rich men and came out richer.
When Cor was released, he and Sonja settled into a life of gangster splendor, with ostentatious cars and holidays on the Mediterranean. They had another child, a boy, and Cor named him Richie, for its aspirational overtones. Cor and Wim were still partners, and through Cor’s relationship with Sonja the Holleeders had effectively become a crime family. Astrid’s father had died while Wim was imprisoned, and Wim returned home as the paterfamilias. (Astrid’s other brother, Gerard, drifted away from the family.) Peter de Vries, the crime reporter, had got to know Cor and Wim while they were being held in France, and in 1987 he published “Kidnapping Mr. Heineken,” which became a best-seller. In the book, Cor says that he has no major regrets about his actions, and celebrates his bond with Wim and the other kidnappers as a “unique, indestructible, all-encompassing, eternal comradeship.”
The Heineken family never attempted to recover the balance of the ransom by pursuing legal action against Cor and Wim. De Vries explained to me that Freddy Heineken was traumatized by the kidnapping, and fearful that these criminal entrepreneurs might strike again. The Dutch culture of permissiveness is sometimes said to stem not merely from a liberal spirit of tolerance but also from clear-eyed pragmatism: what is the sense in prohibiting prostitution if doing so won’t stop it? Heineken was a rich man who wanted to live in peace. In the early nineties, de Vries brokered a meeting in which Wim and Cor sat down with Heineken’s head of security. “They told him, ‘Freddy doesn’t have to be afraid,’ ” de Vries recalled. But this promise was given with an implicit expectation: that Heineken, in a spirit of reciprocity, wouldn’t attempt to get his money back. As de Vries put it, “They would stay out of each other’s way.” After the kidnapping, Heineken became something of a recluse. He died in 2002. (The Heineken family did not respond to a request for comment.)
The Holleeders suspected that the authorities would begin monitoring them, so they spoke about nothing of consequence in their homes or their cars. “To protect the money, we had to keep quiet,” Astrid recalled. She told me that they communicated in code—“I got you some dried pineapple” meant “Come over, because we have a problem”—and in improvised silent gestures. When Wim wanted to talk candidly with Astrid or Sonja, he ordered them to join him on a walk. (“I am an outdoorsman,” he later joked in court.) Even then, Astrid covered her mouth when discussing delicate subjects, in order to stymie any police lip-readers who might be watching them with binoculars. If Wim needed to say anything potentially incriminating, he whispered it into her ear. “We got better at it, sharing the secret, letting them live off the Heineken money,” Astrid told me. She recognizes now that her instinct to be loyal to her family amounted to a form of moral compromise. “That was when we all became accomplices,” she said.
One sector in which Wim and Cor invested the ransom money was the sex trade. They acquired interests in several prominent establishments in Amsterdam’s red-light district. Their names were not on any of the paperwork, because the investments were made through proxies. “Legally speaking, there was no Heineken money,” Astrid said. When people asked Wim what had happened to the missing millions, he recounted a vague story about the money having been burned on a beach. “There’s what everybody knows, and then there’s what you can prove,” Astrid said. Wim and Cor’s involvement in red-light businesses became an open secret in Amsterdam. After they invested in the Casa Rosso, a venue famed for its “erotic theatre,” the Heineken company reportedly informed the management that its beer could no longer be sold there.
Astrid felt that Wim bullied and derided women, and that he was becoming every bit as abusive as their father had been. Nevertheless, the siblings maintained a deep connection, having survived a nightmarish childhood. “Our bond is based on misery and secrets,” she told me. “The closest relationships are the ones that are based on fear, threats, and violence. If you are together with someone in that situation, you have a bond for life.” There was “co-dependency” in her family, she continued. “I learned to love people I don’t like.” For a time, she worked behind the counter at one of her brother’s clubs. “Maybe I wanted to belong to my family,” she said. “I didn’t have a problem with prostitution, because it was so close to me. It was the only way to become independent of a man if you had no brain, no ability to learn. It could have been an option for me.”
Instead, when Astrid was twenty-three, she went to college and studied law, drawn to its rigor and clarity. She was the only young mother in her program, but her husband accommodated her ambitions, and helped care for Miljuschka. Astrid planned to specialize in corporate law, but once she obtained her degree she found that prospective employers were put off by her family name. Once again, she had failed to break free of the Holleeder legacy.
As it happened, Wim was acquainted with some of the top criminal-defense attorneys in Amsterdam, and he arranged introductions. In these circles, Astrid discovered, her name was an asset: “They thought I was fantastic, because I was Wim Holleeder’s sister.” Even in the underworld, nepotism has its benefits.
Astrid developed a real affinity for defense work. Having learned to code-switch between the fusty Dutch of the courtroom and the richly accented argot of her youth, she found it effortless to connect with the hardscrabble relatives of her criminal clientele. “I knew how to talk to the families,” she told me. “I knew how important hope is. It’s like with my family—I don’t know them as criminals, I know them as people.” As she recalled her work with clients, there was a tremor in her voice, and I asked her if she missed the job. After a pause, she said yes: “You meet people in the depths of their misery, and they cling to you.” Once she became a witness against Wim, doing legal work got too risky, for her and for her clients. She shook her head and said, “The truth is, I’m between four walls, just like my brother.”
Astrid talks about Wim as if he were a black hole, sucking in and corrupting everything that gets caught in his orbit. Even her husband—the gentle, progressive artist—was not immune. When Miljuschka was an infant, Witzenhausen took a job as the manager of one of Wim and Cor’s bordellos. “Jaap likes to rescue women,” Astrid said. “Every woman in a brothel needs to be saved.” At a certain point, Astrid discovered that he was skimming money from the establishment—a potentially suicidal gamble, because if Wim found out he might kill him. “Jaap gradually went from an intellectual to a thief,” Astrid recalled. In 2005, Witzenhausen was interviewed by detectives, and told them that Wim had physically abused Astrid and Sonja, and that there was “enormous intimidation” in the family. Astrid antagonized Wim, Witzenhausen told the police, because she defied him. “That’s why she gets a beating every time,” he said.
When I mentioned this remark to Astrid, she said that she didn’t have any recollection of Wim abusing her in adulthood. She didn’t dispute that it happened, though, adding, “As long as it wasn’t my face, I didn’t see it as hitting.” Wim spat at her, shoved her, and tried to break down the door of her office. “But it was normal to me,” she said.
Today, Astrid recognizes the contradiction: “I had two lives—I had my own life, with my friends and my work, and I had my life with my family, in which I played a certain role.” In the professional realm, she had blossomed into a vigorous, well-connected attorney. Yet, as the little sister of Wim Holleeder, she was locked into the role of the victim. Eventually, she discovered that Witzenhausen was cheating on her with women from the bordello. They split, and she began raising Miljuschka alone. It was such a clean break that neither mother nor daughter knows where Witzenhausen is today. (I tried to track him down, without success.) But Astrid was unable to show the same strength in jettisoning her family. “I should have walked away,” she said. “It would have been easier for me. But I can’t let them go.” She has been seeing the same therapist for nearly thirty years, and I was struck, in our conversations, by the fluid candor with which she interrogates her own decisions. At one point, she said, of her inability to break free, “Is that thrill-seeking? Is that empathy? I think it’s maybe both. Living a dangerous life is what I’m used to.”
One spring day in 1996, Cor and Sonja drove Richie home from preschool. Before going inside, they lingered in the car: a song by Andrea Bocelli was on the radio, and Richie wanted to sing along. As he did so, Sonja saw a man approaching. He pulled out a gun and started shooting. Sonja frantically clambered out of the car, opened the rear door, and pulled Richie out of the back seat. The shooter ran off. Cor had been hit in his arm and his shoulder, and a bullet had shattered his jaw, but he survived. Astrid met them at the hospital, and noticed a trail of tiny feathers leaking from a hole in Sonja’s down coat. She stuck her finger in and fished out a bullet.
As soon as Cor was released from the hospital, Wim helped to shuttle him, Sonja, and the children to France, where they went into hiding. After some investigation, Wim reported that two Amsterdam gangsters, Sam Klepper and John Mieremet, had apparently authorized the hit. It seemed that Cor and Wim had become too prominent in the Dutch underworld for their own good. According to Wim, the gangsters promised to stop pursuing Cor if he paid them a million Dutch guilders. Wim urged Cor to be pragmatic: pay the money and make the problem go away. Cor indignantly refused. While he recuperated with his family, at a French farmhouse hidden in the woods, Wim returned to Amsterdam to deal with Klepper and Mieremet.
Cor had always been the dominant personality in the criminal partnership; when they were young men, Wim picked up breakfast for him each morning. But by the time of the attempt on Cor’s life their relationship had grown strained. Peter de Vries, who saw both men during this period, told me, “They were arguing quite a lot. Willem didn’t want to play his role anymore.” Whereas Cor was becoming more involved in the drug trade and other criminal activity, Wim maintained that he wanted to go legit. “It was my goal to launder all my money and then quit the underworld,” he later testified, adding, “I am a long-term thinker.”
Another source of tension was Cor’s drinking. He had a garrulous, life-of-the-party persona, but Wim—mindful, perhaps, of his father’s pathologies—rarely touched alcohol. Cor acknowledged that he had a problem. Sometimes he raised a beer, flashed a sardonic smile, and said, “Heineken caught me.” He, too, was physically abusive, and beat Sonja. Yet it never occurred to her to leave him. “Sonja had an alcoholic father and sought an alcoholic as a man,” Astrid told me. In their world, this was how men treated women.
Cor, fearful that his enemies would eventually find him, started stockpiling weapons. He told Sonja that, should he be killed, he wanted a funeral with a horse-drawn carriage hearse. Wim, meanwhile, continued to pressure Cor to pay the extortion that the gangsters were demanding, to the point that Cor began to question his friend’s loyalty. Wim insisted that he had only Cor’s interests in mind. But Cor, disgusted, denounced Wim as a Judas.
In the winter of 2000, a few days before Christmas, Cor narrowly escaped a second attempt on his life. A sniper tried to gun him down as he was about to enter his house, but he wasn’t hit. The family panicked. Astrid dates some of her obsessive survival instincts to this period. “We were always expecting someone to get killed,” she recalled. One day in January, 2003, Cor was chatting with an associate outside a Chinese restaurant when two men drove up on a red motorcycle and opened fire, killing him.
In accordance with his request, Cor arrived at his grave in a white carriage hearse pulled by Frisian horses. Guests rode in white limousines. Some Amsterdammers were put off by the pimped-out funeral. “It shook the whole town,” Astrid recalled. “We were just trying to do what he wanted.” She was shattered by the murder. Cor was hardly an ideal partner or father, but Sonja and the children loved him, and Astrid had long regarded him as another brother. It may be that Cor’s early death allowed the Holleeder women to sentimentalize him in a way that they cannot with Wim; in any case, Astrid and Sonja speak of Cor with great tenderness and affection.
After the murder, Wim appeared to consolidate his authority in the underworld. One by one, his criminal associates were killed. He was never explicitly connected to any of these murders, but they were a bit like the Heineken money: nobody could prove anything, but everyone assumed that he was behind the crimes. Wim began spending more time with Sonja and her family. But he made no pretense of mourning Cor—indeed, he openly denigrated him. As Richie grew into a gangly adolescent, he increasingly resembled his late father, and Wim picked on the boy, telling him that Cor had been a “nobody.” Meanwhile, he suggested to Sonja that all assets tied to the Heineken kidnapping should belong to him. Unlike her, he’d taken the risk of orchestrating the operation.
In 2007, Wim was convicted of blackmailing several businessmen in Amsterdam and was sent back to prison. On his release, five years later, he became more famous in the Netherlands than ever before. He took to riding a Vespa around fashionable districts of Amsterdam, and recorded a hip-hop single, “Willem Is Terug,” or “Willem Is Back,” with the Dutch rapper Lange Frans. (“I was imprisoned like an animal, and released as a man.”) He began writing a boastful column in the magazine Nieuwe Revu, name-dropping famous acquaintances and suggesting that, having become a writer, he’d now be embraced by the journalists who had “always written dirt about me.” He engaged a personal paparazzo to compile images of him fraternizing with celebrities. Books about his criminal exploits, with titles like “Holleeder: The Early Years,” became a cottage industry. A film was made from de Vries’s book about the Heineken kidnapping, with Anthony Hopkins playing the part of Freddy. Wim even appeared on “College Tour,” a popular Dutch television show that featured interviews with such notable figures as Bill Gates and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The press took to describing Wim as a knuffelcrimineel, or “huggable criminal.” When young people in Amsterdam saw him out on the town, they asked him for a selfie. One local mob boss, a Serb named Sreten Jocić, joked that Willem Holleeder was the Netherlands’ best-known product since cheese.
For Astrid, the public’s embrace of her brother was confounding. One explanation was nativist nostalgia. Immigrants from Morocco and the Dutch Antilles were said to have taken over the Amsterdam underworld, and Wim was often portrayed as a member of a dying breed: the homegrown criminal. With his broad accent and white skin, Wim was a crowd-pleasing anachronism, and he was celebrated in Amsterdam in the same fashion that John Gotti was once celebrated in New York.
But it seemed a bit strange to herald someone as the last of the dinosaurs when there was a distinct possibility that all the other dinosaurs were dead only because he’d killed them. People around Wim Holleeder had an alarming mortality rate. When I asked de Vries to name friends of Wim’s who knew him well, he thought for a moment, then said, “Most of them are dead.” The 2007 case against Wim was largely drawn from a series of clandestine interviews that a onetime associate of his, Willem Endstra, had given to Dutch investigators. Endstra estimated that Wim was responsible for two dozen murders. Wim had long boasted that he maintained paid informers in the police department; if this were true, it posed a risk for anyone who might turn on him. Not long after Endstra became a witness, he was shot to death. Wim has been charged with ordering his murder.
Astrid knew that her brother was a killer. He often turned to her for legal counsel, and, for each murder in Amsterdam in which Wim might potentially be implicated, she created a detailed dossier, sketching out possible witnesses and means of discrediting them. The knuffelcrimineel routine was, in her estimation, an elaborate diversion. “He was laundering his past,” she told me. It sickened her. Wim would arrive at her house early in the morning and insist that they step outside for a walk. She began waking up very early herself, so that she’d be dressed when he showed up. Sometimes, when he needed “clean cash” to cover his expenses, she supplied it. More than once, she deliberately misled investigators in order to protect her brother. When she was subsequently questioned in court about such transgressions, she replied, “If you have to choose between having justice on your neck or Wim on your neck, you choose justice.”
As one confederate of Wim’s after another turned up dead, Astrid nursed a dark suspicion. Although her brother had blamed the early efforts to kill Cor van Hout on the gangsters Sam Klepper and John Mieremet, he had ended up going into business with Mieremet himself. By the time Cor was killed, in 2003, Klepper had been gunned down in Amsterdam. Mieremet was murdered in Pattaya, Thailand, in 2005. The more Astrid thought through the sequence of events leading to Cor’s death, the more evident it became that Klepper and Mieremet had not ordered Cor’s murder. Wim had.
One Sunday morning, a driver picked me up by a canal in the center of Amsterdam, and we drove to the apartment building where Sonja lives. Astrid greeted us at the door. She had arranged to have lunch with her family, and had invited me to join her. Sonja presided in the kitchen. She has honey-blond hair, a deep tan, a quiet smile, and, like Astrid, a tendency to dress in black. The apartment was spotless and furnished in white; sunlight filtered through closed blinds. Astrid is surprisingly forthright about the fact that Sonja continues to live on the proceeds of the kidnapping. “The state didn’t take it away from them, and Heineken didn’t start a proceeding to take it back, so it was theirs,” she said.
On the walls, framed photographs of Cor hung alongside pictures of Sonja posing with the stars of the film “Kidnapping Mr. Heineken.” Her children, Frances and Richie, sat at the dining-room table; Stien sat on a couch by herself, carefully eating from a bowl of soup. Pastries and little cubes of cheese were passed around. “We were fighting before you came,” Astrid announced, explaining that Richie may testify against his uncle in the trial, even though Sonja thinks that he shouldn’t.
Richie said, “The media makes it look like we had such a great time as a crime family, but he was a terrible man for me and my sister.” He looks uncannily like his father, with long limbs, close-cropped blond hair, and a small, round face. He reminded me that he was three years old—and in the car—the first time that men tried to kill his father, and nine years old when Cor was murdered. “Now I’m twenty-five,” he said. Richie could have slipped into a life of crime himself. As the nephew of Wim Holleeder and the son of Cor van Hout, he was underworld royalty. Instead, he did what Astrid had hoped to do before the Heineken kidnapping: he left for the United States on an athletic scholarship, playing tennis at the University of San Francisco. After college, he returned to Amsterdam and set up a business as a personal trainer. But he harbored deep resentment of his uncle, he told me. “I thought about killing him,” he said. “He took someone that I loved. Still love.”
Several months after the 1996 assassination attempt, Cor returned from hiding in France and bought a villa in the Netherlands. Wim pressed Astrid and Sonja for details on where it was, but they resisted, having promised Cor to keep his location secret. At one point, Wim brandished a gun and pointed it at Richie, hissing, “Tell me where he is!” (Wim has called this account “a nauseating lie.”) Astrid told me that her brother subscribes to the logic of Greek tragedy: he was always uneasy around the children of his victims, because they might grow up to seek vengeance.
Frances, a thirty-five-year-old with a warm face and green eyes, told me that Wim used to spit when he shouted at her, but she couldn’t wipe the spittle off her face, for fear of offending him. “It was tough to pretend to like him,” she said. She recalled that her father’s casket had been open at his funeral, and that Wim had instructed the funeral director to apply extra makeup to Cor’s face. “He looked like a clown,” Frances said, with a bitter sob.
Astrid seemed happy to be surrounded by her family, and there was a sense of collective relief at being able to speak openly about Wim’s abuse, after years of fearful silence. At the same time, it was anguishing to revisit some of these memories. Sonja did not say much but hovered near the table, refilling my coffee and making sure that everyone had enough to eat. For years, she told me, Wim worried that someone might hide an incendiary device in his car. So whenever he wanted to drive somewhere he instructed Sonja to go out and start the engine for him. (Wim denies this.) “Now I think, How could I do that?” she said. “But I did.”
Both Astrid and Sonja had long suspected that Wim had orchestrated Cor’s murder, but they never spoke about it, treating the subject as another family secret. Finally, in 2012, they confided in each other and devised a plan. They asked Peter de Vries, who had become a trusted friend, if they should approach the authorities as potential witnesses. He urged caution. Wim killed people who crossed him, and if they turned on him and he found out—which he probably would, given his alleged police connections—he’d have them murdered.
But Astrid would not abandon the idea. “Wim was a suspect in murders, but they never had the proof to bring him to court,” she told me. She was almost uniquely positioned to supply such proof, and, as an attorney, she was intimately acquainted with the rules of evidence under Dutch criminal law. She worried that if she and Sonja took the risk of becoming witnesses it would end up being their word against his. But what if they could surreptitiously record him talking in the unfiltered and brutal fashion in which he spoke to them?
Astrid started researching hidden microphones. There was a shop in Amsterdam that specialized in spy gadgets, but she dared not go herself, she told me, because Wim went there sometimes, and “he might see me.” Instead, she sent a friend. Initially, she hid a small, wireless, voice-activated microphone in her bra. Wim was so distrustful that he was not above searching his sisters: she had seen him rifling through her drawers and going through her mail. But she figured that he wouldn’t search his sister’s décolletage.
In January, 2013, she began wearing the wire on their walks. The first few times, it didn’t pick up Wim’s whispers, so Astrid pried apart the casing of the device, to reduce its bulk, then sewed the microphone into the collar of her jacket. This worked, and she supplied Sonja with similar equipment and coached her on how to use it.
The sisters were convinced that if Wim discovered their betrayal he would fly into a rage and beat one or both of them to death. But when I asked Sonja if she was terrified she told me that she wasn’t. Astrid chuckled. “I look like the bitch, but I’m the softie of the two of us,” she said. “If you want to rob a bank, she’s the one to do it.” Sonja just smiled.
By the time the sisters started recording Wim, he had few confidants left. In the tabloids, he continued to play the part of the raffish bad boy. But in private conversations with Astrid and Sonja he revealed that he was consumed by paranoia and hostility. He was fixated on money and, in particular, on what was left of the Heineken ransom. In January, 2013, the press reported that Sonja had reached a million-euro settlement with the Dutch state, over allegations of money laundering and tax fraud connected to Cor’s estate. To Wim, the settlement suggested that Sonja was sitting on a much larger sum. In conversations she recorded, he berated her, calling her, among other epithets, a kankerhoer, or “cancer whore.” Any hint of real or perceived defiance by the sisters provoked a torrent of abuse. “I’ll kick your diseased head in,” he told Sonja in one recording. “I’m a Dutch celebrity. Nobody gets to bawl me out.” He raged to Astrid about Sonja, saying that if she were to betray him to the authorities he’d “beat her in the bushes”—or even shoot her. Wim also warned, “If I go inside for a day, her children will go first.”
Not long after we sat down to eat at Sonja’s, there was a knock at the door. It was Miljuschka, Astrid’s daughter, who is thirty-three and beautiful, with a mane of brown hair and Astrid’s blue eyes. She is divorced, with two small children. She and her mother embraced. With only nineteen years between them, they are very close, but Miljuschka told me that it was refreshing to see Astrid in person, because these days they speak mostly on FaceTime. Miljuschka is a former model who now hosts a popular Dutch cooking show. Her celebrity adds a layer of complication to Astrid’s plight: because strangers recognize Miljuschka on the street, Astrid cannot spend time in public with her daughter.
When Astrid decided to turn on Wim, she discussed the possible consequences with Miljuschka. “I told her I could get killed—and she could get killed,” Astrid said. But Miljuschka endorsed the idea. “It’s about honor,” she told me. “Also, you know, doing the right thing. By deciding to testify, we are ready to die. I’m a public person. He can find me if he wants to.” If she were murdered, she said, “it would be tough for my kids, but they would manage.” The fact that the family can finally confront Wim feels like a “revolution,” Miljuschka went on. When she was growing up, she told me, “I saw my mother working her ass off. I saw this strong woman being abused by her brother. When she told me what she was doing, that she was taping him—I’d been waiting for this moment all my life.”
As we were talking, I was distracted by a stranger who had suddenly appeared in the doorway: a bald man, dressed in black, with squishy facial features. I half stood, my heart racing. Then everyone burst out laughing, and I flushed with embarrassment as Astrid, striding across the room, pulled off an intricate latex mask. She tapped me playfully on the shoulder and said, “I told you, I have disguises.”
In the summer of 1995, a philosophy professor in upstate New York, Linda Patrik, sat down for a difficult conversation with her husband, a social worker named David Kaczynski. She asked him, gently, if it had ever occurred to him that his brother, Ted, might be the terrorist known as the Unabomber. She’d been reading about the Unabomber’s manifesto, a screed on the perils of technology, and thought that it sounded a lot like her troubled brother-in-law. Initially, David was dubious. He believed that Ted was mentally ill, but, to David’s knowledge, he had never been violent. David began to investigate, however, and came to suspect that his wife was right. He approached the authorities, and in April, 1996, Ted was arrested. David attended the subsequent court hearings, in which Ted pleaded guilty to numerous killings and was given a quadruple life sentence. Throughout the proceedings, Ted refused to look at him. David had been anguished about his decision. “It was a feeling of being trapped,” he said afterward. “Trapped in this brother relationship.” If he did nothing, more people might die. If he contacted the authorities, he’d likely condemn his own brother to life in prison.
Many people, faced with such a test, would side with family. Antigone, in the tragedy by Sophocles, argues that loyalty to her brother trumps the laws of Thebes. During the years when the Boston hood James (Whitey) Bulger was responsible for at least eleven murders, his brother, Billy, served as the president of the Massachusetts State Senate, but he never turned Whitey in. Cases in which a witness voluntarily reports on a sibling are rare. “I hope that Ted will someday forgive me,” David Kaczynski said after his brother’s sentencing. But Ted never has.
In December, 2014, Wim was arrested and charged with the murder of gangland associates. Four months later, the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad revealed that Astrid and Sonja had been coöperating with authorities and gathering evidence against him. The headline was “My Brother Willem Holleeder is a Psychopath.” Astrid gave an interview to the paper, calling Wim a “serial killer.” Wim was stunned by the betrayal. Later, in court, he likened it to “thunder in clear skies.”
The police had given Astrid and Sonja emergency buttons, which they could press if they needed help. They had guided Wim into making a series of important legal admissions. But, by releasing to the press some recordings of their conversations with him, they also radically upended the public image of the Nose. There was nothing huggable about the thug who screamed at members of his family and threatened to murder them. The revelations electrified the Dutch press, and an author friend of Astrid’s suggested that she write a book.
“It’s already halfway done,” she told him.
Astrid had started writing not so much to publish anything as to create an honest record of her story for Miljuschka, in case something happened to her. In her efforts to shield Miljuschka from the family legacy of dysfunction and violence, she told me, “I never spoke to her about my upbringing—about my father.” Her writer friend introduced her to his publisher, Oscar van Gelderen, who was interested in Astrid’s project. “It wasn’t about the crimes,” van Gelderen told me. “It was about the family.” Astrid said that she found the act of writing cathartic but unnatural: “Normally, I wouldn’t write anything down, because anything that you write down can be found!” Eventually, she handed van Gelderen a memory stick with three hundred thousand words on it. It was just a cascade of vivid fragments—van Gelderen would have to turn it into a book. “I had to, as we say in Dutch, ‘make chocolate,’ ” he told me. Astrid selected “Judas” as a title because it captured both her brother’s betrayal of Cor and her betrayal of her brother. “He hates that I portrayed him as the person he does not want to see,” she told me. “I’m his mirror.”
Van Gelderen edited the book in secrecy, and arranged for it to be printed outside the Netherlands, lest the manuscript leak. And, even though Astrid was preparing to testify in the mega-trial against Wim, she elected not to inform her government handlers, much less the prosecution, that she was about to release a memoir. Shortly before publication, van Gelderen said to Astrid, “Normally, we do a party. Do you want to have a party?”
“For this?” she asked. “This isn’t a party. I’m doing this to another human being. It’s not a comic book.”
Van Gelderen threw a party anyway. He knew a hot commodity when he saw one. He mentioned to me that he’d been an early collector of the street artist Banksy, whose identity is a closely guarded secret. Van Gelderen understands the theatre of spectacle, and he has cannily capitalized on the intrigue surrounding his author. At last year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, he threw an invitation-only dinner for buyers of foreign-publication rights. When everyone was seated, Astrid strode in. “People were really in shock,” van Gelderen said, with a grin.
“Judas” was released in the Netherlands on November 5, 2016, and the first printing—eighty thousand copies—sold out that day. Not unlike the television series “The Sopranos,” the book presented a lurid crime story in the form of an intimate domestic drama. Astrid vividly recounts the sadism of her father, who, among other cruelties, demanded that his children finish every bit of food on their plates. One night, Astrid was forced to eat so much that she vomited. He then ordered her to consume her own vomit, bellowing, “Eat it, ungrateful bitch.” Astrid fainted. On regaining consciousness, she writes, “I saw my father beating my mom. She’d pulled the plate from under my nose and was being beaten for it.” Elsewhere in the book, Astrid describes a drive she took with Wim, in which she brought up the murder of one of his associates. “Pull over,” Wim tells her. They stop the car and walk a safe distance away, in case it is bugged. “He stands in front of me, a savage look on his face. ‘We killed them all, all of them.’ ” (Wim denies saying this.) A stage play and a Dutch TV adaptation of “Judas” are in the works, as is an American series, to be produced by Amblin Entertainment, Steven Spielberg’s company. When Wim recently complained in court that there would soon be “a television series in America,” one of the judges pointed out, “It wouldn’t all fit in one episode.”
Van Gelderen often speaks about Astrid’s life in the snappy cadences of promotional copy. “She made a decision: if he will be the best criminal, I will be the best witness,” he told me at one point. “He was unrivalled—and now he’s met his rival,” he said at another. Astrid possesses a similar flair. Not long ago, she told a Dutch newspaper, “Wim will rest only when I am dead. And I will rest only when he is gone. Maybe a shoot-out is the best solution: us together in one room and then, afterward, you can carry the bodies out.”
From time to time, I wondered if Astrid’s elaborate security protocols did not themselves have an element of theatre. How much danger was she in, really? Over several months, I spent some twenty hours speaking with her, and there were a few small ways in which her story evolved. When we first met, she informed me that she owned not one armored car but five, and launched into an amusing—and entirely convincing—riff on the challenges of purchasing a bulletproof automobile: “If you need one, it costs a lot, but if you want to get rid of one there’s nobody who wants to buy it.” She then noted that, on the Internet, secondhand bulletproof vehicles can be had for a song. But when I pressed her on the mechanics—Why five? Where do you keep them?—she was evasive. At our initial meeting, she told me that she split her time between two safe houses (both comprehensively bulletproofed), and in court she gave a grim account of her life in hiding, announcing, “My daughter does not know where I live.” But after visiting Sonja’s place I had another meeting with the sisters, and Astrid acknowledged in passing that “at the moment” she was living with Sonja—in the very apartment where we’d had lunch. (She has since moved to yet another safe house.)
In court, Wim Holleeder has insisted that Astrid is not in peril. “I have not terrorized my family,” he told the judges. Wim’s denials, however, are impossible to square with the many threats that Astrid and Sonja recorded him making against them. Jan Meeus, the Dutch journalist who broke the news that Astrid was coöperating with the authorities, told me that, even without an explicit command from the Nose, an aspiring gangster might try to hunt down Astrid in order to impress him. “There are people who might think that it would look good on their C.V.,” Meeus said.
I spoke recently with Wim’s lawyer Sander Janssen, who said, “It’s possible that she really believes she is in danger. For my part, it is impossible to say that she is not in danger. I would have to be godlike to have that kind of certainty.” He continued, “Willem says that she is not in danger, that he is not going to hurt her.” Nevertheless, Janssen acknowledged, Wim is “very angry with Astrid.”
In April, 2016, Wim was arrested yet again, in his prison cell, for allegedly soliciting two members of a gang known as the Curaçao No Limit Soldiers to kill Astrid, Sonja, and Peter de Vries, who is also a witness in the mega-trial. Wim dismissed the charge as “nonsense,” insisting that it would not be in his “interest” to kill his sisters. The gang member who informed the authorities about the plot subsequently recanted his confession, though Astrid believes that he did so only because he, too, is afraid of Wim. A representative for the prosecutors told me that it is still their position that Wim ordered Astrid’s murder.
I ended up concluding that Astrid was sincere in her fear that Wim wants her dead. If she was sometimes inconsistent when I inquired about the logistics of her life, it was more likely out of a cautious disinclination to give too much away than from a desire to heighten drama. By talking to a journalist about bulletproof cars, Astrid was sending Wim a message: she’d figured out how to keep herself safe, and he shouldn’t even bother trying to catch her.
She was terrified by the news about the Curaçao No Limit Soldiers, she told me. The notion that Wim might enlist a street gang, rather than discreet assassins, struck her as a sign of desperation—an indication that he’d do anything to kill her. She doesn’t trust the Dutch authorities, whom she derides as “amateurs,” to protect her. Not long after she and Sonja were given their panic buttons, they discovered that they didn’t work. But, despite her dread about being a target, she was not entirely displeased when she was informed that Wim had made plans to assassinate her. Some people had dismissed her as a hysteric. Now, perhaps, they would believe her.
One day in March, I took a taxi to the western edge of Amsterdam and passed through a line of onlookers and a cordon of security, arriving at the press gallery of the Bunker. The proceedings of the mega-trial are spread out over many months, and presided over by three judges. As the hearing commenced, one of them joked, “The courtroom is not a theatre, although it sometimes looks like one.” Wim Holleeder sat at a long table facing the judges. He was dressed casually, in a dark pullover, and he fidgeted and whispered with his lawyers. Then, from behind a screen, Astrid’s commanding voice filled the room. Having practiced law for so many years, she was on a first-name basis with the attorneys and the judges, and she spoke in spirited, peppery Dutch, occasionally sliding into Jordaanese vernacular when her emotions got the better of her. At one point, Sander Janssen, Wim’s lawyer, interrupted her, and she snapped, “You’re not letting me talk.”
“But there’s no end to it,” Janssen protested. “You keep talking!”
At the outset, the prosecution had announced, “The man on trial is not a master criminal or a huggable criminal but a cold, everyday kidnapper.” Whenever Astrid was giving testimony, Wim performed a symphony of passive-aggressive gestures: shifting in his chair, shaking his head, taking off his eyeglasses and twirling them like a propeller. His lawyers have asserted that he was only a minor figure on the periphery of the Amsterdam underworld who, through sheer coincidence, became acquainted with a multitude of people who happened to have met tragic ends. Janssen told me, “The prosecution’s theory is ‘Ultimate criminal kills everybody,’ but, of course, it is not that simple. There is really not very much evidence linking him to these murders.” A major strategy of the defense was to read the transcripts of cordial conversations between Wim and his siblings that were captured by police wiretaps. When Sonja was challenged in court to account for her warm tone toward her brother, she retorted, “He killed Cor. What do you think, man, that I’m going to contradict him?”
As for the many recordings in which Wim was threatening or abusive, the defense maintained that he had simply been trying to “scare” or “persuade” his sisters. He may have spouted the odd empty threat, but he never intended to batter or to kill anyone. Epithets like “cancer whore” might be inelegant, but they were part of his native idiom. “Every bird sings in the way it was raised,” Wim declared in court. “I am Willem, a boy from the street.”
Wim has argued that he is actually the victim in this family saga: a devoted, unwitting brother tricked by his conniving sisters into making verbal indiscretions. He warned the judges not to be fooled by “the games that Astrid plays,” and characterized the entire proceeding—including the hundreds of hours of secretly recorded conversations—as a spectacle that she’d engineered. Her testimony was a show, he said: “the Jordaan cabaret.”
Astrid told me, “If this case were decided by jury, he would probably win, because he’s so charismatic.” Wim is an earthy presence in court, joking with the judges, guffawing at statements he disputes, and murmuring remarks out of turn. “I do not care about money at all,” he said at one point.
“That’s quite a statement from someone who has kidnapped people to get millions,” one of the judges replied.
Without skipping a beat, Wim said, “I had to start somewhere.”
But, when the subject turned to Cor, Wim had no good-guy routine—he seemed unable even to feign compassion. “That man was really impossible,” he said. “If you did not quarrel with him, something was wrong with you.” At one point, the defense played a recording in which Wim informed Sonja that he had no intention of killing her children.
“To him, that’s empathy,” Astrid told me later, with amazement. “He wanted his lawyer to play that tape. No lawyer in his right mind would play that tape! You’re talking about not killing your sister’s children? So the other option is killing them? Is that normal? If I had done this case, I would have done it totally differently.” Shaking her head, she said, “Normally, he has me.” Astrid knows Wim’s lawyers, and thinks that they’re good, leading her to suspect that he’s been ignoring their advice. When I relayed this to Janssen, he called it an “insult in disguise.” But he conceded that Wim is a “very strong character” who “knows what he wants” to happen in court.
Before every court date, Astrid forms a game plan for her testimony, then thinks about how Wim might react to each move she makes. But she knows that he is probably sitting in his cell, playing a similar game of conjectural chess, trying to anticipate how she will react to his stratagems. “I can’t see my brother in the courtroom, but I can hear him,” she told me. “He’s maybe two or three metres away from me. I can hear his laugh. I can predict everything he is going to do.” Astrid has not spoken with Wim outside the courtroom in more than three years. I asked her if she felt as though she were still communicating with him. “I am,” she said.
After Salman Rushdie published “The Satanic Verses,” in 1988, the Ayatollah Khomeini, of Iran, declared the book blasphemous and issued a fatwa urging Muslims to murder him. Rushdie spent the next decade in hiding, under round-the-clock police protection, a life that he later described as “a fretful, scuttling existence.” In 1998, the Iranian government announced that it was no longer enforcing the fatwa, and the danger to Rushdie subsided. The threat to Astrid Holleeder is much more limited—only one person wants her dead—and I wondered about the circumstances in which she might be able to emerge from hiding. If Wim’s trial ends in a conviction, he will likely be imprisoned for the rest of his life. But, when I asked her if she would be safe at that point, she said, “No. There’s no happy ending. I know him very well. As long as he has the slightest hope of freedom, we have a chance to live. But as soon as he hears the life sentence it will be only revenge.” In his cell, there will be nothing to focus on but retaliation. “I will pay for what I’ve done,” she concluded. “Even if he kills my kid or kills Sonja, because he can’t get to me.” Sonja agrees: “Even if he’s convicted, he will not let us be.”
Astrid speaks about this alarming prospect in her customary straightforward manner, with no trace of indignation. “If I were in his shoes, being betrayed like that, I would do the same,” she said. “I would kill him.”
While the mega-trial grinds on, Astrid is furthering her publishing career. In October, 2017, she released a second book, “Diary of a Witness,” an account of her time in hiding. “Judas” will be published in English later this summer, and she is working on a third book, the subject of which she will not disclose. In court, Wim has suggested that Astrid was always obsessed with money and fame, and that she is shamelessly exploiting her family’s story. “Now she has plenty of money,” he said. “She will notice that it does not make people happy.” Astrid has responded, angrily, that she made a very comfortable living as an attorney. But she freely acknowledges that she hopes to sell as many books as possible, because the profits might provide a means of escape. She mentioned to me several times that she would like to move her extended family out of the Netherlands, perhaps to America.
Another potential outcome, which the Holleeder sisters are trying not to dwell on, is an acquittal. Thus far, the mega-trial has unfolded very much on Wim’s terms. Weeks of testimony have been devoted to analysis of the recorded conversations, and to scrutiny of his sisters, from Sonja’s finances to Astrid’s sex life. When Janssen alleged that Astrid had been romantically linked to a prominent drug trafficker, she denied it with a tart riposte: “Have you seen me fucking him?” Janssen conceded, primly, that he had not. Later, Astrid told me, “These lawyers want to have a discussion with me, but they aren’t from the street, so I fuck with them. I can talk dirty all day. The judges are confused, because they know me as a lawyer.”
Astrid might cherish the clarity and order of the law, but the trial feels like a circus. Astrid and Sonja are under oath, because they are witnesses, but Wim, as a defendant, is not, and he freely makes misleading statements and throws out red herrings. Even with three judges, the court seems incapable of constraining the hullabaloo. “You are a fabulist, a liar, and a parasite!” Wim barked at Astrid a few weeks ago.
“You destroyed my life!” Astrid shouted back. “I should have shot you through the head!”
Family tension was on abundant display at the trial, but I was surprised to hear relatively few details about the murders of which Wim stood accused. When I asked Astrid about this imbalance, she explained that, in a Dutch criminal case, due process can be taken to extremes: “They don’t want to have a European court reverse them and say that they didn’t give him every opportunity to defend himself. So they give him a lot of space.” A verdict is unlikely before next year, and Astrid noted to me that one Dutch criminal trial lasted a decade. For now, at least, Wim’s mega-trial has been hijacked by psychodrama. When I asked Astrid about her outburst regarding shooting Wim in the head, she said that he had been provoking her with the tone of his voice, in a manner that others in the courtroom couldn’t recognize. (One of the judges subsequently admonished both siblings for their theatrics.)
During the lunch at Sonja’s house, Astrid’s niece, Frances, had mused, “It would have been nice to prosecute him in the U.S.”
“It would have been nice to prosecute him in Iran,” Astrid replied.
At times, Astrid seemed to be manipulating the proceedings with an aplomb to match her brother’s. She made it clear to me—and to Wim, in court—that she has not supplied prosecutors with all her recordings. She’d made a habit of taping not just Wim but anyone who might later be inclined to lie about her. “The problem with criminals is that they change their stories,” she told me. “They’re like whores. They’ll spread their legs for whoever pays.” In her testimony, she has suggested that, if other witnesses lie, she may unveil further recordings, in order to impeach their testimony. “Wim knows I know about other murders,” she said. “This is my insurance. If anything happens to my children or my grandchildren, the tapes will come out.” Once, in court, when she felt that the judges were not giving her adequate time to speak, she threatened, “If you do not let me finish, I’ll put everything I cannot tell you here on YouTube, and then we will have a public resource that everyone can take notice of.”
Sander Janssen suggested that part of the reason that the trial is dragging on is the weakness of the prosecution’s case. “If you have a murder weapon and someone’s DNA on it, you don’t need all this testimony,” he noted. Astrid and Sonja, he continued, were basically saying, “We know he did this, because we’ve lived with him all his life.” But, Janssen said, it wasn’t clear why anyone should trust them: “Willem says we should regard them not as normal female citizens but as fellow-criminals, which they have been, from Day One.” I asked him what would possibly motivate the sisters to frame their brother for murder at such high personal cost. “That will be one of the most important questions for the court to answer,” Janssen replied, adding, vaguely, “We are still investigating.”
Astrid is confident in her trove of evidence. She has recordings of Wim obliquely acknowledging his role in the murder of Cor and in other slayings, and naming one of the individuals who was directly involved in killing Cor. But in many of their exchanges Wim stopped short of an explicit confession. I wondered what would happen if, by some slim chance, Astrid’s testimony and recordings are not enough. What if the risks that she and Sonja undertook do not result in a conviction, and Wim gets off?
“Then I’ll have to kill him,” she said. “I should have done it years ago.”
Astrid’s mother, Stien, is eighty-two. Two years ago, she wrote a letter to an official at the prison where Wim is being held, saying that, should she succumb to illness, “I under no circumstances want Willem Holleeder to be able to visit me at the hospital or come to say goodbye at my funeral.” She continued, “The reason is that I know that my other children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren would be in danger if he were allowed to leave prison.”
Nevertheless, Astrid told me, her mother hasn’t entirely let go of Wim. She used to hang on to pocket money for him, so that he could pay his bills, and she still keeps fifteen hundred euros of his in an envelope in a drawer. Astrid, her eyes rimmed with tears, told me, “Sonja says, ‘Throw it out,’ and my mother says, ‘No, because maybe he’ll need it,’ and I’m, like, ‘He’s not going to need it.’ ” She continued, “There is no sense of revenge. I don’t even feel hate. I hated my father. I never had contact with him again. But with Wim it’s different, because he’s in my system.” In one of our final conversations, I asked Astrid what she would say to Wim if they could speak to each other outside the tense arena of the courtroom. “That I still love him, in spite of everything,” she said. “That I wish he could be a brother to me. And, yeah, that I could take him home.” ♦
