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By Matthias Bartsch, Jürgen Dahlkamp, Jörg Diehl, Tobias Großekemper, Roman Lehberger, Claas Meyer-Heuer und Ansgar Siemens
24.10.2024, 08.29 Uhr
It’s shortly before 6:30 p.m., and his girlfriend wants to know when he is going to finally come home. Back to Eitorf, a small town near Bonn. Habib I. is at an Autobahn rest stop some 300 kilometers away. He just told his girlfriend a few hours before that there was something he still had to do. Now, she’s asking again. When? Before midnight, he responds, hopefully. And then Habib I. makes a promise that so many others have made before him, even if they don’t really believe it themselves. That this will be his last deal. Just this last one, and that will be “the end.” But his girlfriend knows him. Yeah sure, he’s saying that now. But in five months, it will start all over again, she says.
Five? Not even one month passed before the next cocaine delivery, and Habib I. was again involved, if one can believe the police file. A case file that mentions “narcotics in not small quantities,” which could be the understatement of the century for drug investigators. The intercepted phone calls and surveillance photos paint a picture of the largest known amount of cocaine ever smuggled into Germany. One gang, 10 deliveries, 35.5 tons of cocaine, street value: 2.6 billion euros. A mountain of blow of a size never before seen in Europe – though likely only the tip of the iceberg. Investigators are certain that they haven’t come close to intercepting all of it.
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 44/2024 (October 19th, 2024) of DER SPIEGEL.
In May, the authorities made their move, making seven arrests, including the 30-year-old Habib I. Düsseldorf prosecutors consider the Bulgarian national to be an important player in this gang that elevated cocaine smuggling to a whole new dimension. Habib I. is thought to have been the leader of the team assigned to extract the narcotics out of the containers once it arrived in the Port of Hamburg from South America.
Apparently also on August 17, 2023 – the day on which he promised his girlfriend that he was going to finally get out of the game. That afternoon, a truck laden with a container drove out of the port and onto the autobahn toward Bremen, followed by a Mercedes that Habib I. is thought to have been driving. The container was full of tropical wood, exclusive material for yachts and villas – according to the papers. Which makes it all the odder that the convoy ended up at a farmhouse at the edge of the tiny village of Kuhstedt – a place so dilapidated that it looked as though the farmer had long ago given up his battle with the soil and with the banks.
Five men were waiting to carry the wooden planks into a barn. The sixth, though, was apparently waiting in the Rhineland for news about what else might be in the container: Ümit D., 39, thought to be the leader of the gang in Germany. A man who used to be a member of the outlawed motorcycle club Hells Angels.
By 9:08 p.m., the men in Kuhstedt had seen enough. No cocaine, not a single gram. They closed up the container. Exactly 10 minutes later, a surveillance team of criminal investigators were watching as Ümit D. parked in front of a McDonald’s in Rhineland. How he jumped out of his BMW and walked agitatedly back and forth, yelling into his mobile phone. A coincidence? Or was this the moment that he realized that customs officials had already searched the container that morning back in the port and confiscated the goods? Not just a couple kilos, nor a couple hundred. It was 7.2 tons of coke worth hundreds of millions of euros. All of it gone.
Today, Ümit D. is sitting behind bars awaiting his trial. Habib I.’s girlfriend also no longer has to wonder when he is coming home. Not before midnight. And not after midnight either. It could be a couple of years.
SITUATION REPORT
It’s so much cocaine – 35.5 tons – that not even a semi-truck would be enough. Even if only 25 tons were discovered in Hamburg, and the rest overseas: It is such an immense amount that it seems logical to assume that it is the exception. A one-time only affair. But the 35.5 tons have become the new normal in cocaine smuggling. The numbers are spiking dramatically.
“We have cocaine deliveries that would have been unimaginable five or 10 years ago,” says Oliver Erdmann, until recently the lead drug investigator at the Hamburg State Criminal Police Office. His fellow investigator, Michael Schrader from customs, tells the story of the time they found 700 kilograms, hidden in a container full of scrap metal. That was 2017 and a huge deal in the press. Today, the discovery of even a ton of cocaine is worth only a brief mention in the regional paper Hamburger Abendblatt. Thirteen lines on page seven.
“More cocaine is being produced than ever before.”
Catherine de Bolle, Europol director
In 2013, German officials managed to confiscate one ton of cocaine, five in 2016, another 10 in 2019 and then 20 in 2022. Last year it was 43 tons. Investigators presume that in the best-case scenario, they are only able to intercept 30 percent of the deliveries, but it could be as low as 10 percent. In other words, the more they find, the more ends up slipping through their fingers. How else can it be explained that even after record-setting finds, street prices have remained stable? Purity also hasn’t dipped, and supply has kept up with demand.
“The situation is dramatic. In South and Central America, more cocaine is being produced than ever before,” warns In addition to Hamburg, she has her eye on Europe’s other largest cocaine ports: Rotterdam and Antwerp. A total of 175 tons were discovered there in 2023, much more than in the Port of Hamburg. But what has alarmed German investigators is that the amounts found in Rotterdam and Antwerp only rose by just short of 10 percent from 2022 to 2023. The increase in Hamburg was 500 percent, from six tons to 35.
Is the situation changing because checks are stiffer in Rotterdam and Antwerp? Because traffickers are always searching for the path of least resistance and Hamburg has become their new favorite? Investigators like the Hamburg-based drug inspector Erdmann haven’t yet made a final determination on that point, with the mega-find having distorted the picture. But the latest drug situation report compiled by the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) certainly provides fodder for such a scenario: Cases like the 35-ton discovery, in which “narcotics in not small quantities” were found, increased by 25 percent in Germany last year.
Suspected cocaine dealer Ümit D. (right) with a Mercedes AMG GT R; an isolated farmhouse near Kuhstedt suspected of being the unloading site for a cocaine delivery
Foto: Google Maps
Politicians and the public ignored the situation for quite some time. Cocaine didn’t play much of a role in the back-and-forth between public uproar and political reaction. Nobody seemed particularly bothered by the fact that the beautiful and the wealthy were powdering their noses, the scions of the upper crust, the stars who only seem to be able to handle their fame if they shoot themselves into euphoria in moments of hubris. When it came to drugs, cocaine seemed to be the smallest evil – illegal, to be sure, but somehow also glamorous and exclusive.
Not only that: Before the cheaper version crack, which is smoked and is extremely addicting, began appearing more often on the streets of Germany, cocaine didn’t seem to produce widespread misery. And deaths were also rare. To put it cynically: They were deaths that society could live with. And so, therefore, could politicians.
Two things have now changed that calculus: First, the sheer quantities that are now arriving – and being consumed. Never before has so much cocaine been snorted. Of 72 European cities examined, 49 showed rising traces of cocaine in wastewater, while only 10 cities showed a reduction. Students now take cocaine, as do plumbers and carpenters, and – as cases from Bavaria show – police officers.
It is no longer the drug of high society. Rather, at six to seven euros per line, blow has become an everyday drug of the masses, for all those looking to dial back their anxieties or dial up their performance. It will be a few years until the consequences become apparent: Cocaine users have a much higher risk of heart attacks and strokes.
The real wake-up call that has changed everything is the brutality of the cocaine gangs, particularly in Belgium and the Netherlands, including contract killings, bombings, drive-by shootings and more. A Belgian justice minister who the cocaine mafia wanted to kidnap. The daughter of a Dutch king who had to abandon her studies in Amsterdam out of fear of the drug gangs. A famous television journalist who was murdered by a shot to the head. All the blood on the streets, spilled by the criminals themselves, but also by passersby who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And behind all the attacks, the pure disdain for the police, the judiciary and the state.
All that has shaken Europe out of its slumber and made clear that while cocaine might be in the foreground, this battle is for something much bigger: the rise of the dark power of organized criminality, referred to by German investigators by its initials. OC.
One can imagine OC as a giant kraken, with many different arms. There are migrant smugglers, arms dealers, those who have specialized in cracking open ATMs with explosives. There are the fraudsters going after the unsuspecting with phishing mails, fake online stores and those stories of the nephew suddenly stranded in some foreign city badly in need of money. There are gangs for stealing cars and for stealing car parts. And much, much more. Their schemes all extremely well organized, highly specialized and highly lucrative. Organized crime can, of course infiltrate a society without drugs as well, undermining its rules and disrupting the legitimate economy with laundered profits. The Federal Criminal Police Office has just recently estimated the damage for 2023 at 2.7 billion euros, more than twice as high as in 2022.
There is hardly anything more tailor-made for organized crime than the drug trade. Some 41 percent of legal proceedings dealing with organized crime last year focused on drugs – far more than any other crime. Drugs are so compact and so easy to define. And so complex at the same time. The stuff has to be brought to the street from the field or the laboratory – and half the globe often lies between the two. The money, meanwhile, has to be laundered and invested in things like real estate, companies and luxury items. Nobody can do it all by themselves: Specialists are required – a whole slew of them. Which means that where there are drugs, there are drug gangs. Organized crime. Attracted by the extremely high profit margins that can be earned. And the largest such margins can be found in the cocaine trade: A kilo of cocaine packaged for shipping in Colombia or Peru goes for $3,000 – and that same amount is worth $80,000 when it is sold in Germany.
A container terminal in the Port of Hamburg; confiscated cocaine
Fotos: depositphotos / IMAGO, Zollfahndungsamt Stuttgart
Which means that if drugs drive the motor of organized crime, then cocaine is the highest-octane fuel available. The gasoline that allows the criminal money machine to perform at its best. It is also, however, the drug with which those involved lose their cool the quickest – as the situation in the Netherlands has demonstrated. “The more money, the more violence” is the tried-and-true rule of criminal investigation. And rarely has it been proven to be so accurate as in the cocaine wars on the streets of Amsterdam and Rotterdam.
This war has clearly shown that the drug gangs live in their own world and follow their own rules – in accordance with the law of the jungle, taking what they can get and exploiting the loopholes left by the state. The gangs confront the rules of civil society with untamed capitalism, ruthlessly and with plenty of brutality. They don’t negotiate, they act – which increasingly means they engage in blackmail, torture and murder. Only a third of the gangs, according to Europol, still adhere to the motto that blood is not good for covert activity. And when it comes to drugs, the violence is often extreme.
That is the wakeup call that all of the EU has now heard. Nobody is interested in the current situation in the Netherlands becoming the European norm. “We have managed to make the issue a priority in almost every European country,” says de Bolle, the Europol head. “Politicians can no longer close their eyes to the massive damage that organized crime causes.”
The only question now is whether it is already too late. Can the gangs still be brought under control? The 35-ton drug bust clearly demonstrates the growth of the drug gangs’ influence in Germany, as does the kidnapping of a couple in the Ruhr Valley by the Dutch drug mafia, in conjunction with 13 bombings thus far in the Rhineland that may be connected. “It is clear that the situation is coming to a head,” says a high-ranking investigator. There has been talk of an approaching “tipping point.” The moment at which the gangs begin to intimidate the state, not the other way around.
For every gang that is busted and every criminal caught, new ones spring up. The mafia doesn’t have a labor shortage: Finding recruits who believe that the path to Mercedes AMG GT R goes through the gang rather than through school is rather simple. Only organized crime can promise them the lives they envision for themselves. The gangsta lifestyle from the rap videos, that trinity of rapid narco-wealth: cars, women, drugs.
How might it still be stopped?
THE CRIMINAL STRUCTURES
On the evening that Ümit D. was yelling into his mobile phone in the McDonald’s parking lot in the Rhineland, on the evening when it became clear that 7.2 tons of cocaine was gone – on that evening, Ümit D. had a rendezvous with someone who apparently didn’t shy away from murder. At 9:30 p.m., a white Mercedes entered the parking lot and a man climbs out who is almost a carbon copy of Ümit D. – muscular and broad-chested with a crew cut. The two of them go inside and sit down at a table to eat.
According to police information, Ümit D. and Hami S. used to be members of the now defunct Hells Angels charter “Rhine Area.” Hami S. is the brother of former charter boss Kamil S., and his right-hand man was Ümit D.
Investigators are puzzling over the role that the Hell Angels connection might have played.
It’s a milieu in which organized crime goes hand in hand with organized violence – a very specific kind of violence. Kamil S. is thought to have tortured lower-ranking gang members – so-called “prospects” and “hang-arounds” when displeased. There are stories of whippings and of a truck battery that Kamil S. clamped to the scrotum of a fellow charter member, according to a report in the German tabloid Bild.
One of those who the gang boss apparently tormented in the basement was found in a Cologne park in May 2023 with a gunshot to the head. It was a “classic contract killing,” according to a recent – though not yet finalized – verdict by the district court in Cologne that would send the alleged contractor to prison for life. That contractor? Hami S., the man who appeared in the McDonald’s parking lot on the evening of the failed cocaine deal in August 2023 to meet with Ümit D., the suspected head of the drug gang. Two days later, the two were scheduled to fly to Turkey, with Ümit D. already having booked two business-class tickets from Cologne to Istanbul.
Confiscated cocaine from the 35.5-ton discovery in 2023
Foto: Innenministerium Baden-Württemberg / dpa / picture alliance
Investigators are puzzling over the role that the Hell Angels connection might have played in the case of the 35 tons of coke, but it certainly looks as though – should the charges be proven – that Ümit D. was not at the end of the food chain. The trail leads further, into Turkey, with money from the country repeatedly ending up with German companies that were apparently controlled by Ümit D. These mini-companies apparently had only a single purpose, that of disguising the cocaine deliveries from South America as normal deals involving tropical hardwoods or bananas. There were, in other words, lots of people involved, an international network made up of service providers and financiers with clear structures reflective of organized crime. Such a blueprint is typical of today’s cocaine industry. And the case file of the 35-ton discovery clearly shows how such deals typically unfold.
BACKSTORIES
In 2017, a Turkish national founded a transportation company called DP-Log in the Rhineland town of Siegburg. He could hardly speak a word of German, but the man who immediately registered power of attorney did: Ümit D. Less than a year later, Ümit D.’s father took over control of the company and after that, the son no longer had anything to do with it. Officially. Investigators are convinced, however, that he continued to pull the strings.
Ümit D. seems to have become especially cozy in a comfort zone between appearance and reality. In 2019, he was allegedly broke and in personal bankruptcy, with the only vehicle registered to his name being a Segway. But it wasn’t the only vehicle that he drove. Apparently, he had quite a fleet at his disposal, including a Lamborghini Huracán, a Brabus Mercedes AMG G63, a Mercedes AMG GT R, a Porsche 911 Turbo, a BMW M8 Competition. And a few more. DP-Log was apparently doing booming business. It was just a question of which sector.
Those interested in moving massive amounts of cocaine from South America to Europe needs shipping containers and a good story. The containers are necessary for the typical drug smuggling system used today known as rip-on/rip-off. Before the ship casts off, a container full of bananas of tropical hardwoods is broken open and the cocaine is stuffed in before it is then taken out again in Europe before the banana or wood delivery is completed. With the downside that the drug dealers have to find the container in the port before the clueless banana or wood dealers pick it up.
The other possibility: The smugglers ship the container full of bananas or wood themselves, with the cocaine already in it. To do so, you just need a company in South America that works for the drug cartel and a shell company in Germany that orders the bananas or wood, and voila! The mafia receives the cocaine container delivered straight to their front door, or to a remote, rundown farm like the one in Bremen.
This trick, though, only works with a really good story. The perpetrators are aware that not all containers are scanned in port for drugs – in Hamburg, the procedure is used for only one out of every 10 from South America. Customs officials focus on deliveries that the computer has determined could be suspect. Such as if a company has never before imported bananas or wood. Or if it has no website. So the cartels create a story surrounding the companies that order the tropical hardwood or the bananas, but which really just want to smuggle cocaine into the country.
A mobile scanning device belonging to German customs; a container used for torture in the Netherlands
Fotos: Armin Weigel / dpa / picture alliance, Netherlands Police / AP
DP-Log began importing containers full of tropical wood in August 2022, always from the same provider in Guyana – 55 containers by the time the 7.5-ton cocaine delivery was discovered in August 2023. The first containers were likely clean – test deliveries to see if customs would inspect them, and also to lull officials into believing they were legitimate. Investigators still don’t know if the 56th container was the first to contain blow, or just the first that was found.
The trail leads directly from DP-Log to Ümit D. and his family. Perhaps that is the reason that containers for DP-Log are the exception. Usually, they are ordered by other German companies – shell companies without a real business.
Assistance in such instances is provided by Martin F., a man who establishes so-called “shelf corporations.” Such constructs are actually intended for startup founders who are in a rush to develop their business idea and don’t want to waste any time with founding a company. Instead, they buy a pre-fabricated company shell, make it their own and rename it. Martin F. has dozens such shelf-corporations available, and Ümit D. apparently becomes a reliable customer of his.
In April 2023, one of these artificial companies ordered a load of bananas, with the container also containing 1,358 kilos of cocaine. The pattern repeated itself in 2023, with a company founded by Martin F. again behind the order. Customs officials in Hamburg wanted to scan the container and a logistics firm – also created by Martin F. – picked it up in the container terminal for the purpose, but only showed up at the scanning facility several hours later. And the container was suddenly much lighter, with several tons of cocaine likely missing. The black box onboard the truck would later reveal to investigators that the vehicle had parked on a farm near Hamburg.
Doesn’t Germany have enough soap of its own?
Another standard element of such covers is the fact that Ümit D. apparently registered internet presences for the bogus companies to make them look real. Company broker Martin F. in turn sold several of these small companies to China as soon as they were no longer needed, never to be seen again. He, too, is now in investigative custody. It is unclear what he has to say about the accusations: His lawyer did not respond to a request for comment from DER SPIEGEL. Neither did the defense attorneys for Ümit D. and for Habib I.
The investigators are relatively certain of how the procedure worked because they already had Martin F. on their radar by April 2023, at the latest. They received a tip that spring from the port authorities in Cartagena, Colombia. A company from Mannheim had ordered two containers full of hand soap. Hand soap? From Colombia? Doesn’t Germany have enough soap of its own?
The two containers may not have contained any cocaine, but there was good reason to take a closer look at the owners of the company – and what it was in the habit of ordering.
Ultimately, investigators stumbled across what are likely the gang’s three largest cocaine deliveries: 12.5 tons, 8 tons and the 7.2-ton shipment from August 17, 2023. With the final find, 1,648 kilograms in September 2023, it likely really did come to an “end.” Even before that, Ümit D. complained in an intercepted phone call: “We’re fucked! We’re finished!” It’s done. “Our mothers are fucked.”
THE POLITICIANS
One of the high arts of politics is making a failure look like a success. Preferably by simply ignoring the failure part. On October 30, 2023, the chief of the domestic affairs portfolio for the city-state of Hamburg, Andy Grote of the Social Democrats (SPD), spoke to the press. A port security summit had just come to an end, a gathering which included the mayor of Hamburg, president of the Federal Criminal Police Office and a state secretary from the federal Interior Ministry in Berlin. The summit had resolved to go after the cocaine gangs in the port of Hamburg with all the power the state has to offer. And that includes a port security center, a situation room where customs officials, police and port leaders are constantly sitting around the same table. The goal: Speeding up decisions when indications are received of a potential cocaine delivery. “Today, we have set out on a path of more effectively protecting our ports against organized crime,” said Grote.
Commendable, to be sure. But it raises the question: Why now and not sooner? Why not five years earlier when the idea of a port security center first arose, as Erdmann, the drug investigator from Hamburg, recalls – and was not acted upon.
German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser on a visit to Peru in February; a meeting of European interior ministers in Hamburg in May
Fotos: Laurin Schmid / BMI, Georg Wendt / dpa
It was a time during which investigators with Europol, which is headquartered in The Hague, and those with European Union Drugs Agency (EUDA) in Lisbon were quietly complaining that the issue of drugs had “somehow fallen off the political agenda” and that other things were “more urgent.” The result was that time continued to go by, and organized crime continued to grow. It was only in 2023 that the plan to gather everyone at the same table in the fight against the cocaine avalanche began to take shape. Hamburg Mayor Peter Tschentscher, of the SPD, apparently had an epiphany, according to a source well positioned to know such a thing, when speaking with his counterparts from Rotterdam and Antwerp. According to the source, they told Tschentscher that they had been personally threatened by the drug gangs. Would he be next, in Hamburg?
German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) allegedly only understood just how serious the situation had become after a kind of shock therapy. It is said that information gleaned from chats on Sky ECC or Encrochat was presented to the minister. Criminals had planned their crimes on these messenger services because they didn’t realize that investigators had cracked their encryption. The chats included discussions of weapons, torture, drugs and murders – along with photos. Thousands of arrests across Europe were the result.
Since last fall, hardly a month passes without a political manifesto to protect the state and hunt down the mafia. In October, the EU presented an action plan and made 200 million euros available for the upgrade of European ports. Belgium, which has, together with the Netherlands, borne the brunt of the drug trade made the fight against cocaine into a primary focus of its EU Council presidency during the first half of 2024. European Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson initiated a European Ports Alliance that includes 16 cities. Hamburg’s mayor, Tschentscher, flew to South America, with Interior Minister Faeser following one month later. At a European port conference, she pledged “maximum investigative pressure.” And after five years, it finally happened: On May 31, the port security center for the Port of Hamburg was established.
THE INVESTIGATORS
The man who leads proceedings in the sparsely furnished room on the fifth floor of an old port warehouse is the same Oliver Erdmann who previously worked as a drug investigator for Hamburg’s State Criminal Police Office. Wiry and fit at 59, Erdmann also has the face of a man 10 years younger. He is now the chief police officer of the security center, a title which sounds more impressive than it actually is. The term “security center” is overstated, because it is really just a large white table where everyone sits working on laptops they bring in themselves. And the title of “chief” is also an overreach, since Erdmann was only able to bring over three investigators from the state police office along with another officer from the Waterways Police. He has no power over the others – six people from customs and one from the Hamburg Port Authority. Still, at least they are talking to each other.
The list of duties they have to fulfill is long. They are to be the single point of contact for all information and questions pertaining to drug smuggling in the Port of Hamburg. They are supposed to collate everything the authorities know about a specific case as rapidly as possible and assemble a monthly situation report on drug discoveries and new smuggling tricks. They are also tasked with prevention, which for now essentially means warning port workers about the dangers of becoming involved with the narcos and helping them find their product in the maze of containers at the terminals. That, after all, is something the gangs are constantly searching for: their coke, and for port people willing to help them find it for a price.
The list of responsibilities enumerates what must be done, but also shows all that has been ignored over the years. Years in which there may have been successful teams of investigators in customs and police, such as in the case of the 35-ton discovery – but also years during which the two agencies often worked in complete isolation from each other.
A lot of summits, a lot of alliances, a lot of blah blah, but little in the way of new funding for more people and better equipment.
Now, though, customs and police are supposed to really get moving. Just a shame that they have been paralyzed for so long. Paralyzed by the austerity tactics of politicians so often praised for spending cuts and slashing the budget.
That, at least, is the view taken by police and customs unions. Their impression is that political leaders may have finally comprehended what is at stake, but not yet fully realized the amount of resources that will be necessary. Years of budget cuts have reduced customs to the bare minimum. How is the agency now supposed to confront the drug cartels with maximum strength, wonders Thomas Liebel, head of a labor union that represents German customs workers. The new German budget also doesn’t lead him to believe that a massive offensive against organized drug smuggling is on the horizon.
Instead, there are a lot of summits, a lot of alliances, a lot of blah blah, but little in the way of new funding for more people and better equipment. At least not in the Port of Hamburg, as things currently look. “According to our knowledge, no increases are planned in the new budget either,” says Liebel. Customs hasn’t commented.
Finance Minister Christian Lindner with customs agents
Foto: Jens Schicke / SZ Photo / picture alliance
Whereas the mafia is swimming in drug money, customs agents are complaining about orders from above to cut down on the use of agency vehicles. Indeed, the desolation is also apparent in the new port security center, the flagship project. Five police officers for the 7.7 million standard containers that arrive in Hamburg each year. At least the agents who moved over from the State Criminal Police Office were replaced. The six from customs, agents say, left behind gaps in their old units. Customs hasn’t commented on that either.
German Finance Minister Christian Lindner of the liberal Free Democrats is responsible for customs. In May 2023, Lindner issued a “Strategy for the Combatting of Organized Criminality.” Lindner promised more personnel, modern equipment and improved digital networking. “We are upgrading. We are strengthening customs,” Lindner promised.
But the finance minister is also responsible for cutting government spending, and customs is usually the first security agency to experience those cuts. Last year, the interior senator from the city-state of Bremen, Ulrich Mäurer, and his cabinet colleague from the judiciary, Claudia Schilling, both of the SPD, sent a letter to Lindner begging for more resources for more people to support the Port of Bremerhaven on the search for cocaine smuggling. Lindner rebuffed their request.
Frank Buckenhofer, who is in charge of customs officials within the Gewerkschaft der Polizei, a police union in Germany, isn’t surprised. Senior customs officials, he says, still see their people as being responsible for bringing in money for the state and not as an agency on the frontlines of the battle against the mafia. “Customs,” says Buckenhofer, “is miles away mentally from saying: We have a huge problem with cocaine smuggling. We have to deploy far more controllers and investigators.”
Erdmann, the police officer in the new port security center, knows that cocaine investigations have their limits – namely if such investigations delay port operations. “The port is the heart of the city,” he says. And that heart must beat. The more interventions, the slower the pulse. And the slower the pulse, the fewer container ships will be sent to Hamburg. That is something that even the Hamburg police don’t want.
But simply waving containers through also carries a price, one that is well known. In Rotterdam and Antwerp, attentions were long focused almost exclusively on the competition with other ports. More turnover, new records in TEU, the unit for standard containers. The two countries have paid a high price in the form of crime. Now, they are upgrading their ports with video surveillance, drones and mobile scanning devices.
Germany, by contrast, still seems to be at the beginning of the learning curve. “We have surveillance cameras in the Port of Hamburg, but not enough,” says Erdmann. “When I see what the ports in Rotterdam and Antwerp are doing, I get the impression that we here in Germany apply a stricter interpretation of data protection laws.” A customs official who asked not to be identified says that Rotterdam and Antwerp have ramped up their controls. “The are far superior to us from a technical standpoint.”
Scanning, for example. In Rotterdam, every terminal on the port island of Maasvlakte has a scanner for the containers coming in. Eight terminals, eight scanners. Antwerp has 11, with four more coming by the end of this year. In Hamburg, customs officials have just a single scanner, and it is located outside of the terminals – essentially an invitation, as the case of the 35-ton discovery shows, for drug smugglers to ensure that the cocaine disappears on the way there. And that’s not the only problem: The device is able to scan just 180 containers per day, if it is operated around the clock, says the insider.
Sunday, though, is the day of rest. And there are also other days during the week when nothing happens. It is only permitted to be in operation when the radiation protection officer is on duty. There are four of them, but in cases where one is sick and another on vacation, the facility is often out of operation. When it comes to mobile scanners, which can peer electronically into containers as they move past, there is thus far just one, stationed in Lübeck. In serves all of northern Germany.
Once again, customs officials do not comment, this time for “tactical reasons.” Customs, however, are fully aware that the Port of Hamburg has a security problem. Chief investigator Schrader recently admitted in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung that “we have neglected port security in the past. We were a bit naïve.”
The reason for Schrader’s rather unusual contriteness: Shortly before his interview, 46 people from the Netherlands, one after the other, easily climbed over the fence of the Altenwerder container terminal. They were carrying bolt cutters and GPS devices. Most of them had Moroccan roots, a potential indication of who they were working for: the brutal drug gang in the Netherlands known as the “Mocro Mafia.” It is a controversial moniker, given that the gang, even if it was led early on by immigrants from Morocco, now includes many other nationalities. It is likely, say investigators, that they were looking for a container full of cocaine.
THE STATE AS ENEMY
It was a new development that a cocaine gang was sending its lackeys with complete impunity – people who are young, foolish, indifferent, and available for hire to do anything needed in the neighboring country, including even arson and murder.
They are the foot soldiers the mafia uses to intimidate its opponents, including its largest opponent: the state. A Hamburg customs official says that they discovered a man hanging around on the fire escape of the main customs office a few months ago. When asked who he was, it became clear he was Colombian, and he quickly withdrew, a smile on his face. The customs official says it was a warning: We have our eyes on you.
Officials in Bremerhaven have reported broken windows in the customs office and a shot fired at a sniffer dog. Threatening the state and its officials has become routine for organized crime operations.
The Federal Criminal Police Office only recently presented a special report on the practice, focusing on how those involved in organized crime seek to intimidate police officers, judges and state prosecutors. The initial focus was on clan criminality. A survey among officials in German states found an “accumulation of cases” in which “employees of police authorities have been threatened, sometimes subtly, sometimes directly,” according to the report.
Such as a clan member standing in front of a police officer’s front door, sending a clear message: We know where you live. There have also been instances of the tires of investigators’ private vehicles being slashed. Or a car appearing in the rearview mirror, trying to force an officer off the road. “Blatant hostility and threats” have also become the norm for judges and public prosecutors. Including death threats.
Ultimately, though, the repertoire of gang leaders tends to emphasize killing over threats. As it always has. The best enemies are dead enemies. In June 2022, for example, a drug gang lured a Serbian man from Offenbach to Marbella. They wanted to beat money out of him that he owed. But when the gangsters began scrolling through his mobile phone and realized that he worked for the Frankfurt police, they liquidated him with two bullets.
In countries like the Netherlands and Sweden, meanwhile, murders in the gangster milieu are often no longer the last resort, but the first. Sometimes, says a Europol investigator in The Hague, there are instances when a killing wasn’t strictly necessary, but was carried out anyway. The perpetrators tend to be young, convinced that being evil is a good thing. And that has fueled the brutality. The gangs treat murderous violence as though it were just an ego-shooter game on PlayStation. And anyone who still thought recently that Germany isn’t Holland and that things will never get that bad – or, at least, that it will take some time until the Dutch cocaine gangs expand the warzone to Germany: They now have to reconsider.
NAKED VIOLENCE
The police headquarters in Essen; 9:10 a.m. on July 5. During the interrogation of Fauzi K., a witness who suddenly appeared, he delivered the following testimony: We’re in this villa in Cologne and Ahmad is down below in the basement, kidnapped, tied up and naked. Covered in blood from the beatings. And then one of them came up to me, Xidir, or “X1,” that’s what he’s called, one of the gang leaders, and he gives me a pistol and says, shoot Ahmad, then we’ll know that we can trust you. And I act cool, yes of course, no problem, but first step out to have a smoke. And as I am standing outside, “X1” is also there and thinks I can’t hear him. And “X1” says to the others that they’re going to fuck me too afterwards. I start running faster than I ever have, past the Aral gas station to the Autobahn, and there was a guy with his dog who gave me his phone to call.
Such was Fauzi K.’s story as to why he decided to come to the police. As one of those involved in the kidnapping of Ahmad C., he also testified about what had taken place the previous day. It was the beginning of a case that Cologne’s chief criminal investigator, Michael Esser, would later describe as “one of the most difficult” in the history of the North Rhine-Westphalian police. One which exhibited a “new dimension of violence that, as far as I know, has never before been seen in Germany.”
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Who Watches the Watchers? 