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The New Yorker Radio Hour
Astrid Holleeder’s Crime Family
00:29:56
All her life, Astrid Holleeder knew that her older brother Willem was involved in crime; in their tough Amsterdam neighborhood, and as children of an abusive father, it wasn’t a shocking development. But she was stunned when, in 1983, Willem and his best friend, Cornelius van Hout, were revealed to be the masterminds behind the audacious kidnapping of the beer magnate Alfred Heineken. Although he served some time for the crime, it was only the beginning of the successful career of Holleeder. He became a celebrity criminal; he had a newspaper column, appeared on talk shows, and took selfies with admirers in Amsterdam. He got rich off of his investments in the sex trade and other businesses, but kept them well hidden. But when van Hout was assassinated and other of Holleeder’s associates started turning up dead, Astrid suspected that her brother had committed the murders. She decided to wear a wire and gather the evidence to put him away. If that didn't work, she told the New Yorker ...
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- [00:02]
Narrator/Host
From one World Trade center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.
- [00:11]
David Remnick
Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Think a little bit about the family you grew up in. There's probably someone in there that you're a little, I don't know, ashamed of or afraid of. A sister who tells racist jokes. A brother who drinks too much and screams at the kids. An uncle who seems to have a little bit more money than anybody can account for. Every family's got someone. But I'm going to bet your family doesn't hold a candle to Astrid Holeders.
- [00:39]
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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David Remnick
Holeder grew up in an Amsterdam neighborhood that's called Jordaan. It's gentrified now with galleries and Airbnbs. But when she grew up, it was big families in narrow apartments and a street life that was pretty unsavory. There was street crime, mobsters and tax fraud. She grew up all around that stuff. But When Holeder was 17, her family would be at the center of a crime that became international news in Europe.
- [01:16]
Astrid Holleeder
The kidnappers of beer millionaire Freddie Heineken today made their first demand. Silence from the police.
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Patrick Radden Keefe
Heineken's family, or else Heineken and his chauffeur were abducted last night as Heineken.
- [01:28]
David Remnick
Almost four decades later, Astrid Holeder is still living. In the aftermath of that crime, the New Yorker's Patrick Radden Keefe wrote about Astrid and her family in 2018. And when he went to meet her, he was picked up in a car and taken to a secret location. We've altered her voice in this recording because telling her story put her in great danger. Here's Patrick.
- [01:52]
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, and as he was about to get in his car, masked gunmen pulled up in a minivan, grabbed Heineken and his chauffeur, and drove off.
- [02:13]
Peter de Vries
Freddy Heineken.
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Patrick Radden Keefe
No one was more riveted by this crime than the Haleder family. Astrid actually remembers talking with her brother Willem, who was something of a local hoodlum himself.
- [02:34]
Astrid Holleeder
I was sitting with him, eating with him, having dinner and telling him, well, who's going to kidnap Heineken? You must be Crazy, because this man is a friend of the. The Royal Family. He has, like, so much power. They will not get away from this. And I was telling him that, and he was like, oh, do you really think so? Do you think they can't get away with it? And I'm, yes, yes, sure. Who could be so stupid?
- [02:55]
Patrick Radden Keefe
The thing is that their father, Willem Sr. Worked for Heineken.
- [02:59]
Astrid Holleeder
He was driving the trucks with beers on it, like a beer glass of three feet high or something. So we grew up with Mr. Heineken. We grew up with a company. He admired him so much. He would do anything for him.
- [03:15]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Their whole life was Heineken.
- [03:16]
Astrid Holleeder
Like, 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 had, like, balloons from the. We played with the balloons from the company. So we also enjoyed the beer of Mr. Heineken. Very, very. My father was an alcoholic, but he was very cruel.
- [03:43]
Patrick Radden Keefe
The violence in the neighborhood was nothing compared to what Astrid and her siblings were experiencing at home.
- [03:50]
Astrid Holleeder
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, like, my hand on the wrong side of the chair. That would be enough to receive a beating.
- [04:13]
Patrick Radden Keefe
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 her little brother Erard, the baby of the family. And 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 Sonia when she was in her teens.
- [04:41]
Astrid Holleeder
Well, Cor was like, he has what I call what we all lack in our family, 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. And that was something that I was impressed about.
- [05:04]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Astrid admired Cor, and she liked him. And she identified with her brother Willem, the tough guy. She related to him.
- [05:13]
Astrid Holleeder
I think that if I would have been a boy, then I probably would have been the right hand of my brother. Yes, because I have the same anger inside me. I have the same aggression inside me. And I was very ambitious. And I think my brother is also very ambitious. And because I'm a girl, you could never took part of anything, to anything so you were just a girl, and I had to look for other opportunities. His criminal career started with robberies, and those were, like, also spectacular robberies with speedboats and, you know, going through the canals of Amsterdam and then going through the water on the aisle, the lake. And there were a huge amount of money that they laid their hands on, like, millions.
- [06:10]
Patrick Radden Keefe
But 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. But 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.
- [06:45]
Astrid Holleeder
I never expected him to have done that.
- [06:47]
Patrick Radden Keefe
So 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?
- [06:55]
Astrid Holleeder
No, no.
- [06:56]
Patrick Radden Keefe
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 kind of an ingenious plot Korn 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. And by the time the police came, they'd already fled the country with millions of dollars in ransom money.
- [07:29]
Astrid Holleeder
A lot of people commit crimes. You know, it's something that happens. It's part of society, but it's never that close. And with Wim, everybody he has a connection to, he turns around and then he commits a crime towards them. And I think that started with Mr. Heiniker.
- [07:51]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Willem and Kor 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 Elysees.
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Astrid Holleeder
Van Houten, Holleder, Krecher, von der Franzen.
- [08:04]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Hauser Est and Slater Hundare in hotels.
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Peter de Vries
When they were arrested, there were so many questions unanswered.
- [08:15]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Petr de Vries was a crime reporter for the Telegraph at the time. And he followed the whole thing very closely.
- [08:24]
Peter de Vries
So I was anxious to know what happened, how they prepared everything, how they did it. So I contacted Korf van Hout. I wanted to write a book Inside the Kitchen of the Criminals from the point of view of the people who did it.
- [08:43]
Patrick Radden Keefe
The kidnappers, Wim and Kaur, were giving interviews. They were stuck in a kind of legal limbo in France and their fame started to grow. There were these young, cocksure, kind of 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.
- [09:03]
Peter de Vries
A lot of people were surprised that a criminal can also be a person with humor, common sense and stuff like that.
- [09:12]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Pedro 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 Cora and Wimbledon. Cor and Wim were eventually extradited from France to the Netherlands. And they were tried and convicted and sentenced to 11 years in prison. But they ended up serving only five. And when they got out, they were like celebrity criminals. Not only that, but the authorities had never been able to recover all of the ransom money. So with the help of some of their criminal associates, Wim and Core had actually invested some of this money while they were in prison.
- [09:55]
Astrid Holleeder
They bought like real estate in the red light district in Amsterdam. So they bought all kinds of prostitution there. They bought like the gambling halls. They bought Casa Rosso. That's also like a Gives life sexual live shows. The Banana Bar. It's a bar where women shoot bananas with their private parts. And that's where a lot of tourists come and watch. I mean, 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.
- [10:54]
Patrick Radden Keefe
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. Cora and Vim were still partners in crime and best friends. Cor and Sonja had a second child. Astrid had gone to law school. So there was a kind of tentative harmony of the different elements in what was really a crime family.
- [11:16]
Astrid Holleeder
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 you know, so we had one big family and we thought everything went well.
- [11:35]
Patrick Radden Keefe
After university, Astrid had tried to get a job in corporate law, but the Holeder name was notorious. When she went out for job interviews, nobody wanted to hire a Holeder. 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 Holeder, head cachet. So she became a criminal lawyer. And it turned out she was really good at it.
- [12:00]
Astrid Holleeder
I understood my clients. I understood the mothers. I understood the sisters that were arrested too. While they didn't even know why, I understood the children. So to me, criminal law was. Yeah, it was. It was me.
- [12:14]
Patrick Radden Keefe
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 kind of legal advisor, an informal sounding board. So you, 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 kind of being under the thumb of your brother during this time. Looking back, like, how do you make sense of that?
- [13:01]
Astrid Holleeder
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 be and 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 undertaking 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. He's planning to make. So that's why I advise him that he shouldn't do that. Because if he would have used a rocket, that it would have been an enemy of the state. So I would advise him, don't do that, you know, but it was difficult. You don't want anybody to get hurt, but you also have to be careful not to get hurt yourself.
- [13:57]
Patrick Radden Keefe
And 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.
- [14:08]
Astrid Holleeder
They were sitting in the car. And then a guy walked up to the car and shot through the window. And he hit Cora. And 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. And Cor was Hit several times, but he survived.
- [14:37]
Patrick Radden Keefe
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 say that unless you pay them a huge sum of money, they're going to. This seemed believable. What was strange about it to core 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. So in this instance, he said, I'm not going to be extorted. I'm not going to pay the money. And this was the beginning of a real wedge between the two friends.
- [15:21]
Astrid Holleeder
And then it all started. Wim was trying to force me to tell him where Cor was. And that went on for a long period. And that was really awful because it terrorized us.
- [15:35]
Patrick Radden Keefe
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?
- [15:51]
Astrid Holleeder
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.
- [16:08]
Patrick Radden Keefe
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.
- [16:21]
Astrid Holleeder
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. And I'm like 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. And if you would accuse him, then he would probably kill us too. So there was not much of a choice.
- [16:56]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Just as Astrid was coming to realize what her brother was capable of, the rest of the country was falling for him. Dim started writing a column for a local newspaper. He was featured on a hip hop single called Willem is Back. He even appeared on a national talk show called College Tour.
- [17:31]
Astrid Holleeder
Without.
- [17:40]
Patrick Radden Keefe
People would see Willem around Amsterdam riding his scooter, and he became this well known, kind of 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. And with Kordad, Astrid and Sonja were terrified for their children. Astrid's daughter Milyushka and Sonja's children, Frances and Richie.
- [18:08]
Astrid Holleeder
It's always a question, is he going to do anything to the kids or not? We were two women with children and.
- [18:16]
Sonja Holleeder
Had to survive, so that's what we did. You feel hypocrite from the day on that that happened. It was a feeling as if I betrayed or betrayed myself because I. I just acted the way he wanted, not having the guts to go to the police or anything. So, well, that was the start of feeling dirty.
- [18:54]
David Remnick
That's Astrid Holeder talking about her brother Willem. We'll continue in a moment with this story from Patrick Radden Keefe. This is the New Yorker Radio. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. We've been hearing about the story of Astrid Holleeder, whose brother Willem, she calls him Wim, was one of Europe's most notorious gangsters. The New Yorkers. Patrick Radden Keefe wrote about Astrid and Willem in a piece called crime family in 2018. Here's Patrick.
- [19:38]
Patrick Radden Keefe
No one was arrested in connection with Cor's death. Vim, 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 Petter de Vries found himself in Wim's sights. Petter's popular book about the Heineken kidnapping, which was a big bestseller, had been picked up by an American production company.
- [20:10]
Astrid Holleeder
That is the way the game is.
- [20:14]
Narrator/Host
You know how big this thing is.
- [20:16]
David Remnick
He's insane or he's smart.
- [20:21]
Patrick Radden Keefe
But before the movie came out, Holedor turned on him.
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Peter de Vries
He said, I don't want to have my name mentioned in this picture. And. And at that time he came to my house in the evening at 10 o'. Clock. And then the doorbell rang. And when I looked out of the window, I saw, hey, that's. That's Willem Hollaeter. And I said to my wife, I don't think this is. This is okay. He was on his motorbike, he had his helmet on, he had a big leather jacket on, gloves, big shoes. And he is quite an impressive guy even without these clothes. And I immediately, immediately saw that he was fucked up. And he was. When I opened the door and I said, hey, Willem, he started yelling at me. And at that time I was thinking, oh, in 30 seconds I will be lying on the ground fighting for my life.
- [21:31]
Patrick Radden Keefe
But Peter de Vries is a bit of a tough guy himself, and he's a seasoned crime reporter, so he managed to keep his wits about him.
- [21:37]
Peter de Vries
I said, willem, calm down. Let's just talk. What's the problem? And he finally calmed down a little bit and he seemed 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. But finally, after three times, he went away. And that was it.
- [22:14]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Petter did call the police. He filed a police report. But in the meantime, Astrid had started talking to the authorities too.
- [22:22]
Astrid Holleeder
I couldn't live on with the thought that he would kill again. So 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 hand and shoot him. And 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 mother, a killer for a mother.
- [22:55]
Patrick Radden Keefe
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.
- [23:16]
Astrid Holleeder
That in itself was a adventure because at one point I thought I had a really good one and I had it stuck between my. The. The front of my bra. At one. At one point we were talking and I felt that it was sliding, so I felt it fall down. And I was with him. So if it would fall on the ground, I mean, he would have noticed that. He would. He would kill me immediately. So there were times that I was really, really afraid. And I kept on being afraid.
- [23:52]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Astrid eventually compiled hundreds of hours of recordings and she persuaded Sonja to record conversations with Wim also. The first time I heard these recordings, they gave me a shiver. You listen to them and you can hear, just in the tone of his voice, the kind of figure this guy was in his family. He was a figure of terror. Willem was finally arrested in 2014 and charged with involvement in half a dozen murders, including the murder of Corvan 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 Pedro de Vries. What will you do in the admittedly very slim chance that he's not convicted?
- [25:03]
Astrid Holleeder
Oh, then he would go after me and I would go after him. I'm not going to sit around and wait till he is killing everybody.
- [25:14]
Patrick Radden Keefe
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.
- [25:35]
Astrid Holleeder
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, and I don't really have a place of my own.
- [25:47]
Patrick Radden Keefe
When she testifies in Wim's trial, 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 Wim. So 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 to men. Think about that title. She doesn't see herself as a hero for stopping this murder spree. She sees herself as Willem's betrayer.
- [26:40]
Astrid Holleeder
I think it's awful what I do to him because he will be imprisoned for life. So thinking about that being the person that sends him away for life, well, that. That's an agony every day. If I think about the moment, he.
- [27:01]
Sonja Holleeder
Must have heard that I was the one who testified against him.
- [27:09]
Astrid Holleeder
There must have been such a shock.
- [27:10]
Sonja Holleeder
And later on, he did say in.
- [27:12]
Astrid Holleeder
Court how it felt for him to hear about us, especially me, testifying against him. Yeah.
- [27:22]
Patrick Radden Keefe
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.
- [27:44]
Astrid Holleeder
I keep thinking about all the factors of our childhood.
- [27:50]
Sonja Holleeder
I'm like, well, this could have been me, you know, if I would have been a boy. It could have been me.
- [28:00]
Patrick Radden Keefe
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?
- [28:12]
Astrid Holleeder
Whoa.
- [28:17]
Sonja Holleeder
That I still love him in spite of everything. That I wish I could take him home. That he could be a brother to.
- [28:24]
Astrid Holleeder
Me.
- [28:27]
Sonja Holleeder
And, yeah, that I could take him home.
- [28:38]
David Remnick
Astrid Holeder talking with the New Yorker's Patrick Radden Keefe In 2018, Willem Holeder was found guilty on multiple counts of murder, and he's now serving a life sentence. You can find Patrick's article crime family@newyorker.com I'm David Remnick and that's our show for today. You can find much more of the New Yorker Radio Hour by subscribing to our podcast. Thanks for joining us. Be well and see you next time.
- [29:17]
Narrator/Host
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Botin, Ave Carrillo, Rhiannon Corby, Callalea, David Krasnow, Gofen Mputubwele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses and Steven Valentino, with help from Allison McAdam, Morgan Flannery, Meng, Fei Chen and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Tsarina Endowment Fund.