![]() ![]() “Don't lose my wits I must keep busy to stay alive. The ordeal weighed heavily on Doderer, who had worked for Heineken for 40 years, and the kidnappers themselves voiced remorse about the toll on the driver. Heineken, shackled to a wall of the cold, dank cell, later painted a bleak picture of the conditions: “I always kept one slice of bread to eat at night or the following morning, because you’re never sure that there will be bread the next morning.” The kidnappers were confused by his demands for consommé and other delicacies, and he tried to bribe one of the captors into releasing him. The then 60-year-old butted heads with the gang over food and conditions. He was almost a kind of psychologist,” said van Hout. “He really had a strong character, this man. Van Hout recounted that the kidnappers were impressed by Heineken’s grit and humor. Heineken, who ruled his company with an iron will, did not appear bowed by the kidnapping, even as his detention stretched from days into weeks. His kidnappers celebrated and then returned to their normal routines in order to avoid raising the suspicion of friends, family or police before making their ransom demand. Heineken later said he’d feared that he’d been kidnapped by West Germany’s notorious Red Army Faction and worried that the cell’s air pipe would fail. The driver and the billionaire were stripped of their clothes and belongings and chained inside the tiny rooms, isolated from the outside world and each other. The kidnapping was meant to last only 48 hours, but it eventually stretched over 21 days. Heineken and Doderer were rushed to a West Amsterdam warehouse where a false wall had been built to contain two soundproofed cells. Van Hout would later talk about the painstaking preparation for the kidnapping, with the gang building an arsenal of pistols and Uzis, a fleet of six stolen cars, and a trail of red herrings meant to mislead detectives. Having settled on the Beer King as their target, the men toasted with Dom Pérignon champagne at a New Year’s Eve party and set in motion their plan to snare the billionaire. In a hint of the violent path the gang would follow, Holleeder pushed her aside while one of the other men sprayed her face with tear gas. In another coincidence, one of the witnesses to the kidnapping was a friend of both Heineken and Holleeder’s mother. The victim had to be someone for whom a high ransom could be paid quickly.”Īmsterdam is a small city, with its population barely topping 800,000 even now, and van Hout recounted bumping into the unguarded tycoon running errands on the canal-lined streets of the Dutch capital. “It needed to set us up for life-and that didn’t mean behind bars. Where do you find someone like that? A superman,” said van Hout. In addition the candidate needed a cast-iron constitution. The victim had to be very rich but could neither be royal nor a politician. Van Hout talked of sneaking looks at the beer magnate’s Mercedes-Benz as a child, and his friend Holleeder’s father was a long-term employee of the brewery (before he was dismissed for disruptive behavior). Heineken, a champion of Dutch business, was already on the men’s radar for reasons other than being “filthy rich,” in van Hout’s words. The victim had to be someone for whom a high ransom could be paid quickly,” said van Hout. It needed to set us up for life-and that didn’t mean behind bars. To start with, the entire job had to have … a grand slam. Van Hout claims the men started to seek a big score after an economic downturn cramped their passions for luxury cars, race horses and partying.įormer Dutch police, however, suspect that van Hout’s property deals and business were just a cover for his gang’s involvement in a series of unsolved armed robberies.īefore the kidnapping of Heineken, the Netherlands had largely been untouched by an epidemic in Europe during the previous decade of high-profile kidnappings motivated by profit and politics. But van Hout and the other men began to scour the society and finance pages of the Dutch press for targets. ![]() de Vries, van Hout paints a picture of early success based on a legitimate construction business, scoring property deals by using strong-arm tactics on squatters, along with other shady activities that resulted in brushes with the law. In his account of the kidnapping published by Dutch journalist Peter R. The gritty Amsterdam of charismatic ringleader van Hout’s youth contrasts with the modern Netherlands, which has shuttered prisons as crime rates have fallen to record lows. ![]()
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