The Belgian justice system hears its most spectacular cases behind walls and barbed wire in the former NATO headquarters in Brussels. Last September, the verdicts were passed there against the Islamist terrorists who had kept the whole of Europe in suspense with their attacks in Paris and Brussels.
Now international drug people are in the dock in the largest criminal trial in Belgian history. And once again Europe has every reason to take a very close look. Belgium is the most important transshipment point for the cocaine that is currently flooding the continent.
There is talk of a “mega trial,” although “mega” does not refer to the prominence of the defendants, but rather to their sheer number. 125 people are charged with organized drug trafficking – many Albanians, but also Moroccans, Russians, Ukrainians, Colombians and Belgians, of course, including a fries producer, a former professional football player, a lawyer and a police officer. They all wanted to make money in this billion-dollar business.
The gang leader pleads guilty: “I played and I lost.”
If you wanted to portray the European drug trade in one person, the choice would be the gang leader Eridan Munoz G.
He is of Albanian origin, married to a Colombian, lives in Brussels, a polyglot person who can communicate in Albanian, German, English, Spanish, French and Dutch, a brilliant performer of himself. He pleads guilty to all charges, he said in his opening statement to the presiding judge: “Madam President, I played and I lost.”
He lost because, like all the other defendants, he used the messenger services EncroChat and Sky ECC to communicate. Drug criminals around the world believed that police would never crack their encryption. When European investigators did manage to do so, the entire spectrum of international drug trafficking opened up to them. There were mass seizures and arrests across Europe in 2021. In Belgium alone, 1,000 defendants have been convicted so far. The Belgian justice system has now consolidated a large number of the cases, which many defense lawyers criticize. The “megatrial” is a kind of show trial.
In fact, the Belgian authorities want to send a signal with the trial: Belgium has a problem, and the whole of Europe has a problem with Belgium. It is not for nothing that the Belgian government has even put the fight against cocaine, which brings so much human suffering, violence and corruption to Europe, on the agenda of its EU Council Presidency in the first half of 2024. Common strategies will be discussed at a meeting of EU interior ministers at the end of January. The meeting will conveniently take place in Antwerp.
At least 120 tons of cocaine were seized in Antwerp in 2023
The Flemish city is considered Europe’s most important drug trafficking center, especially for cocaine. The reasons for this are diverse. Antwerp has a great tradition of trading with South America. The port is the largest in Europe in terms of area and is difficult to control. In addition, customs and federal police in Belgium have always been understaffed and underfunded. Nevertheless, 110 tons of cocaine were seized in Antwerp in 2022, more than ever before and for the first time more than in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
The Antwerp figures for 2023 will not be presented until next week, but apparently the European record from 2022 has been exceeded again. According to information from the Belgian Interior Ministry, there were at least 120 tons.
So far it has been estimated that only ten percent of the material that is shipped from South America to Antwerp has been found. The proportion may now be higher because Belgian customs has had more staff and better technology since last year.
But according to Europol chief Catherine De Bolle, also Belgian, there is currently such an oversupply of cocaine in South America that the white wave sweeping over Europe is unlikely to subside any time soon. An indication of the high availability of cocaine is a low price, and according to police estimates, nowhere is it as low as in Belgium: around 50 euros for a gram.
Growing competition in the cocaine business is leading to more and more violence in Belgium. In Antwerp, incendiary devices are repeatedly thrown and grenades are detonated in the war between the predominantly Moroccan clans. An eleven-year-old girl was apparently accidentally shot at the end of 2021 when one clan wanted to send a Kalashnikov warning to another. But violence in Brussels has reached a new level since last year.
“I’ll pull out the submachine gun, then he’ll pass out.”
Investigators complain that there are now conditions in the city that are only known in Marseille in Europe. Hiring an Albanian contract killer doesn’t cost more than 5,000 euros. In September, a suspected dealer was executed by rivals on the street with 17 shots from a Kalashnikov; he was one of around a dozen people killed in the clan war last year. In total, there were around fifty shootings in the drug community in Brussels, the last for the time being during the pre-Christmas rush on one of the city’s most popular shopping streets. Five uninvolved people were injured.
The Brussels “mega-trial” now offers the opportunity to get to the bottom of this bloody business. “You can be sure, gentlemen, that you are getting the best product available on the market. And we guarantee that the delivery will arrive at the desired location.” That’s what it says, according to the Brussels newspaper Le Soirin an intercepted text message sent from Colombia to Antwerp.
A separate line of business is getting the fabric out of the containers that have arrived in Antwerp. Sometimes greased dock workers or customs officers help, sometimes it’s done by force. “There’s a guard standing at the fence,” says one text message, “I pull out the submachine gun, then he passes out.”
In many cases the cocaine is sold from Antwerp to Brussels. There are mainly Albanian gangs there who produce the substance in laboratories and sell it to other European countries. Most of the defendants in the Brussels trial were presumably involved in this business, including Eridan Munoz G. He ran laboratories in various Brussels apartments, procured sports cars and hired drivers who transported the substance to Germany, Italy and Sweden.
The investigators read the code word “Mario Mario” on Sky ECC when the goods were delivered. “Mario” was one of Eridan Munoz G’s code names. He was arrested on October 26, 2021. He left the Smith & Wesson he was carrying with him.