One of the world’s biggest cocaine traffickers is a Dutch fugitive named Jos Leijdekkers. As the Alexander Clapp reports at the Economist, “Chubby Jos” has in the span of a decade gone from being a hitman in the Netherlands to the organizer of a network that brings in more than $2 billion a year. Bricks of cocaine stamped with his underworld name of “Holly,” short for Hollywood, have been recovered across the globe. His quick rise has surprised criminologists, but “Leijdekkers’s greatest caper yet looks to be the takeover of a country,” writes Clapp. That country is Sierra Leone. Clapp traces how Leijdekkers slipped into the West African nation in 2022 under the alias “Omar Sheriff,” bought influence from the capital’s slums to the president’s inner circle, and helped reroute a major share of Latin America’s cocaine trade through the country.
He’s believed to hold a diplomatic passport, bankroll elements of the security forces, and even fathered a child with President Julius Maada Bio’s daughter, all while wanted in Europe for trafficking and suspected murders. Clapp details how Sierra Leone’s weak institutions, history of conflict, and economic desperation made it fertile ground for what experts call “narco-capture”—referring to the capture of a state by drug cartels—with cocaine flows now estimated to be the equivalent of a quarter of the country’s GDP. European authorities have weighed kidnapping-style operations, but attempts to nab Leijdekkers have repeatedly fallen apart. The piece ends with the author actually spotting Leijdekkers in Freetown, being saluted by officers while heading into a police station. Read the full story.