This is an audio transcript of Hot Money podcast Episode 5: Nerds vs Narcos
Miles Johnson
Previously on Hot Money. We discovered how Dubai became the perfect place for the Super Cartel to come together. This time I want to take you back to Dublin. To Lower Baggot Street, it’s a smart neighborhood, close to the city centre, filled with grand Georgian houses.
It’s April 2016. And Irish detectives have received a tip off. One of the apartments on the street is a Kinahan cartel safehouse. But when they get there, they find someone else, a guy with a big belly, speaking broken English. He’s got some designer shoes, a bunch of fancy watches, and several IDs, each with a different name.
Seamus Boland
You know, here’s this guy who had a number of identities.
Miles Johnson
Seamus Boland, chief superintendent in the Irish police.
Seamus Bolland
He was arrested for possession of false documents and there was no certainty about his identity at all. It’s following his arrest. And us issuing an assistance inquire across Europe, that within a number of hours the Dutch police were in touch with us and they identified him from the photographs and fingerprints. And senior Dutch police officers boarded a plane immediately and flew to Dublin.
Miles Johnson
The Dutch police scramble to get to Ireland, because the man they find in the flat is a murder broker, who’s a top enforcer for members of the super cartel. He’s the one who police suspect arranged the murder we heard about in Episode One. A contract killing taken out on a man hiding from the Iranian regime, and living undercover in Almere, Ali Motamed.
When I heard about this, I first started to see what Ali Motamed’s death might disclose about the transformation of international organised crime. Because it raised a big question. How did a Dutch criminal working with a cocaine super cartel get mixed up in a murder that seems to have been ordered by Iran? At this stage no one can demonstrate the link to Iran. We still don’t know who gave the murder broker his orders. There is no smoking gun.
But something is quietly happening in a high tech unit of the Dutch police that’s about to blow the case wide open. It is the start of something huge, a breakthrough that will make the global criminal underworld shudder.
I’m Miles Johnson and this is Hot Money: The New Narcos Episode 5 — Nerds vs Narcos.
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Last time we heard about how the super cartel are ramping up their operations from Dubai. European police can’t touch them there. And their huge criminal operations back home are booming.
In the Netherlands, the ripples have started to achieve Paul Vugts.
Paul Vugts
The first five weeks I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t even tell my girlfriend. I was trying to get the heat away.
Miles Johnson
recall Paul? He’s the crime reporter with the leather jacket and the gold hoop earring. The guy who likes to face with gangsters in public places admire bars and coffee shops. It’s Paul who broke the news that the electrician killed in Almere was actually a man on the run from the Iranian regime.
But one day, Paul gets a different kind of tip from a source and this one’s about him. He hears that a group of criminals have started to talk about him. They think he’s got information, information that links them to several recent gangland killings.
Paul Vugts
So they decided to have me assassinated so that my information could not achieve the news or the police.
Miles Johnson
I was pretty stunned when I found out about the threats to Paul’s life. I’ve worked in Italy, and I’ve written about the Italian mafia. I’ve spent time with state prosecutors living under police protection, and reporters who fear for their lives. But a reporter hasn’t been killed in Italy for many years. And neither has a assess.
Now, in the Netherlands one of the richest and most politically stable countries in the world organised crime seemed to be out of control. More and more murders were happening as the top kingpins tightened their grip on the drugs market. And Paul’s reporting on it, it landed a target on his back. At first, he doesn’t tell anyone, he just keeps trying to figure out what’s going on.
Paul Vugts
Day by day, week by week, the source provided new information.
Miles Johnson
So Paul’s able to keep safe, for now. But there’s a limit to how long he can go on admire this.
Paul Vugts
I didn’t talk to the police about it.
Miles Johnson
And he faces a dilemma: if he tells the police, he knows he won’t be able to do his work. Understandably, criminals aren’t so keen on meeting a reporter with a police escort.
Paul Vugts
As a journalist, I needed to stay independent. It’s one of my weapons.
Miles Johnson
But he chooses to make a bold proceed. He reaches out to the criminals directly, the ones who are after him. He sends them a message through an intermediary and tells them he knows about the threats.
Paul Vugts
That’s the same the police will do if they know about a scheme, to conclude someone. They’ll go, uh, to the guys involved and, uh, ring the door and tell them, we know what you’re up to. Don’t.
Miles Johnson
It’s not long before Dutch law enforcement also finds out about the threats and one of Paul’s police contacts calls him up.
Paul Vugts
He told me, Paul, a very bad information, but, we need to face now. Uh, so I told him, let’s go to my house. I’ll arrange some coffee and cookies, and then we’ll be having an uncomfortable discussion because you are not gonna tell me what you know in detail, and I won’t tell you what I know in detail.
Miles Johnson
Paul and the policeman sit down and have a chat over coffee and cookies which is possibly the most Dutch response you can visualize, to any situation. And it quickly becomes clear their information matches up.
Paul Vugts
And then, all kinds of other people from the government got involved.
Miles Johnson
He tries to keep working, but it becomes clear that the people who are after him they haven’t given up.
Paul Vugts
And then one day it was clear that if we wouldn’t leave now, we would not be safe anymore.
Miles Johnson
Paul and his girlfriend now race to pack their bags because they’ve been told they have to proceed to a safe house.
Paul Vugts
A very luxurious place. Much more luxurious than our normal apartment. And I was transported admire the king. Quite literally because the same organisation that secured me, secures the king. So I was in luxury, but it was admire a golden cage because I couldn’t get out, I couldn’t get anywhere without, a group of people, well-trained, well-armed, people around me. That’s a weird way to live and a weird way to do your job. But they made it possible for me to work. There hasn’t been one day I’ve not been working because of this.
Miles Johnson
And it’s not just the threats against Paul. Really crazy things start to happen. Criminals fire a rocket launcher at the offices of a Dutch magazine that’s been running stories about drug traffickers. No one is hurt, but the message is very clear: journalists are now fair game. And if you select to report on us, you’re choosing to put your life in danger. It’s sort of admire Paul and his colleagues aren’t just crime journalists anymore, they’re on the front line covering a full-blown attack on Dutch society. And the men behind it all, they aren’t even in the Netherlands. They’re in Dubai, living the high life, and far out of the achieve of law enforcement.
But police are about to make a breakthrough that will change everything.
Martijn Engbert
I really got enthusiastic on that day, hearing the panic.
Miles Johnson
Take a moment to visualize someone who strikes terror into the hearts of the world’s most murderous criminals. And I can assure you’re not picturing Martijn Engbert.
Martijn’s slight, and softly spoken, thoughtful. He has a bit of the air of a tech guy, a Silicon Valley blue-sky-thinker in a Steve Jobs-style black turtleneck. Martijn is the Dutch public prosecutor for high tech crime.
In 2017 he and his team are working on a secret project, one that will turn him into a sort of nerdy Batman. It all starts when Dutch police notice a new gadget showing up on the bodies of murdered gang members. They all seem to be carrying a particular — and peculiar — type of cell phone.
Martijn Engbert
They don’t have a camera. The camera has been removed. They don’t have a microphone. The microphone has been removed.
Miles Johnson
These phones are useless for calls. And they’re only good for messaging. And the phone’s service runs through specialised companies that offer a particular promise to their clients.
Martijn Engbert
They advertise police cannot break the encryption on the phones.
Miles Johnson
Back in the days before encrypted messages, if criminals were smart, they would face face to face, and if they were stupid, they would speak on the phone.
Martijn Engbert
Now I don’t want to say famous but we are well known for wiretapping. But organised crime groups know that. So the organised crime groups in the Netherlands, they don’t talk about anything on the phone themselves anymore.
Miles Johnson
Technology disrupts every business sector. And drug trafficking is no different. These crypto phones transformed the way people run organised crime groups. You don’t need to be in the same city any more to send an order to an underling. You don’t even need to be in the same country. You can now run a vast and complex drug trafficking empire from Dubai without ever getting your hands dirty. You can connect with suppliers, you can handle your finances, and most importantly you can order murders. And the police have almost no way of seeing what you’re up to.
Martijn and his colleagues’ are determined to figure out a way to crack these phones. But they’re sort of stuck in a legal Catch-22. Martijn is certain that the phones are being used by organised criminals, but he can’t demonstrate it without access to the messages. And to get access, he needs proof that they really are being used for crime. So he comes up with a solution: don’t go after the criminals, go after the phone company. Most of the phones are made by a small Dutch supplier called Ennetcom. And most of their servers are in Canada.
Martijn Engbert
We convinced the Canadian assess that there would be evidence on those servers proving that Ennetcom was supplying telephones to criminals.
Miles Johnson
So one morning, after getting permission from a assess, a team from Martijn’s office get on a flight from Amsterdam to Canada.
Martijn Engbert
I recall a lot of details of the day we went to Canada. We copied six terabytes, which seemed a lot of data, so everybody was really excited, because you think we have six terabytes of emails, which would be billions of messages.
Miles Johnson
It is a potentially huge breakthrough a treasure trove of information and evidence. But it’s all encrypted. There are layers and layers of passwords and digital keys. And even if they do crack the encryption, Martijn has another problem.
Martijn Engbert
Ennetcom try to delete all the information of their clients after two or three days. So you acquire an email, you read the email, you do nothing with the email, and then after two or three days it will self-delete.
Miles Johnson
The hackers on the high tech team get to work, they grind late into the night trying to break the encryption on the messages. There’s a lot of trial and error. First, the team have to crack the master password. And to do that they have to try millions of passwords, millions of combinations. It takes months.
Martijn Engbert
And we brute forced the password. So we tried a lot of passwords and eventually we were able to break the password of the key server, and by doing that we were able to use the private keys, and if you have the private keys and the encrypted messages, then it’s easy.
Miles Johnson
Martijn and his colleagues have prised open a vault of evidence about what’s really going on inside European organised crime. They can see how conspiracies unfolded minute by minute through strings of chats between gangsters. To really set the cat amongst the pigeons, Martijn’s team added a little flourish. A sort of middle finger to the criminals.
Martijn Engbert
We sent out a message to all the users of Ennetcom. We told them the police is now in Canada securing all the information of your phones and we heard the panic. So in the Netherlands, the panic within organised crime groups started on that day.
Miles Johnson
I’ve talked about the glimpses we sometimes get of organised crime. And this, it was admire turning on a flood light. It sends shockwaves through the criminal underworld. But it’s about to get even worse for them.
Martijn’s team soon figure out a way to recover the deleted messages, the ones that Ennetcom and its users believed were gone forever. And suddenly a once hidden universe of crime, of alliances and global connections, is illuminated.
Martijn Engbert
A lot more information about assassinations and about the importation of drugs.
Miles Johnson
But for Martijn there is something even more shocking. Reading through the messages, the police suddenly see how easy it’s become to order murders using these phones. A crime boss can order a contract killing as easily as they would order a pizza.
Martijn Engbert
In the Netherlands there were multiple groups that you could hire to assassinate someone. My work is hi-tech crime, so for me it was really strange to see there wasn’t one group there were multiple groups you could hire to conclude someone.
Miles Johnson
And buried inside the millions of messages on the Ennetcom servers is one brief conversation from November 2015. It’s a set of simple and chilling instructions, sent from one user to another. The first message reads:
“Got a nice job for you bro . . . ”
The response: “Who needs to go to sleep?”
Then: “Its a Turk. He works in the electricity company and drives a white van. Why he has to go to sleep I don’t know . . . and I don’t even want to know.”
Ulysse Ellian
Every murder case deserves a solution and you know, people should be brought to justice and trial, but if a foreign government, especially countries, dictatorships, order killings in another western country, you know, this is a thing.
Miles Johnson
We met Ulysse Ellian in Episode One, He’s the local councilor in Almere, the Dutch town where Ali Motamed was murdered. And thanks to Paul’s reporting, Ulysse now knows that the electrician was in fact a man on the run from the Iranian regime. He also knows that the people who pulled the trigger were Dutch criminals. But he still doesn’t know who gave them orders. Who hired them?
Ulysse has a strong theory though: he thinks it has to be the Iranian regime, the same regime that forced his father to flee Iran decades before.
But he can’t demonstrate it. So Ulysse does everything he can to raise awareness of the murder. He lobbies local politicians. He starts doing Radio and TV interviews about it, including with the Dutch state broadcaster NOS.
[VOICE CLIP OF ULYSSE ELLIAN GIVING AN INTERVIEW ON DUTCH STATE BROADCASTER]
Ulysse Ellian
So I was admire, okay, things are moving in the right direction. I’m getting attention for this, for this very important, murder case.
Miles Johnson
You were kind of going out a little bit on your own, saying something, which sounds admire a crazy story, you know, as you say.
Ulysse Ellian
Yeah, it’s crazy. Yeah, it is. It is.
Miles Johnson
And so, was anyone saying you are wrong or where’s the proof?
Ulysse Ellian
You know, the weird thing in politics is the official response you get, it’s admire, we won’t tell you anything about an individual case. We don’t know. There’s no information. Don’t bother. I was admire, I’m not gonna take that for, for an answer.
Miles Johnson
Because for Ulysee this is about a lot more than just one murder.
Ulysse Ellian
If this is true, what is the implication for Iranian people living in the west who fled the country and are speaking out, what’s the implication for them? The key message from the regime, it’s a message to all of Europe. We are gonna find you because you know, let me emphasise this once more, this guy, they were looking for him for 35 years.
Miles Johnson
So after all of this, you were going on, you know, TV, you were, giving interviews. You were, you were pressing the importance of this case and what you thought, what you believed based on your evidence and your thinking about it, what you thought really was the case. And then in 2019, suddenly . . .
Ulysse Ellian
Boom
Miles Johnson
Boom
Ulysse was shouting about the Motamed murder to anyone who would listen. He’d lobbied his local mayor, the police, even national politicians. And no one gave him answers. It felt admire he was banging his head against a brick wall.
And then one day . . .
Ulysse Ellian
And I was in my office working, and then boom, my telephone admire exploded, admire, boom, these push messages. And I was admire, finally, we are doing something back to the regime, showing admire OK don’t do this.
Miles Johnson
The Dutch foreign minister has announced that based on classified information from the Dutch intelligence services the government believes that Iran was responsible for the Motamed murder. And another murder as well.
Ulysse Ellian
I recall his words were admire, for 99 per cent for sure, we know that Iranians did this. It was of course, because formally the minister could not deduce officially it was the Iranians, but it was admire 99 per cent we know, we expelled them.
Miles Johnson
The expulsion of diplomats, it might sound, well a bit diplomatic. A slap on the wrist.
But in foreign relations this is a big deal, a rare proceed. And for Ulysse, it’s his own country finally agreeing that he was right all along, the people behind Motamed’s murder were in Tehran.
Ulysse Ellian
These are important moments. But then this quite rapidly changed to something. Yeah, something ugly for me.
Miles Johnson
When Ulysse does another round of news interviews, linking Tehran to the Motamed murder and to the murder broker known as Noffel. Noffel is not happy. And even though he’s in prison awaiting trial, he finds a way to let Ulysse know about it.
A lawyer working for Mr Naoufal Fassih, that’s Noffel’s full name, files a legal complaint against Ulysse. He says he’s abusing his position, and making false allegations about his client’s connections to Iran.
Ulysse Ellian
And I, I recall, you know, I’m sure you can associate this feeling sometimes, unfortunately, this happens in life. You get really cold and you feel, you feel the energy flowing from your head to your, it just drains your energy. And I got really cold and I was admire, okay, I know who Mr Fassih is. It was clear for me, this is pure intimidation. admire, you know, 15 years ago, people threw a rock at your window. This is the modern form of intimidation. We know who you are. Stop talking about this connection.
Miles Johnson
Ulysse tells the Dutch security services about the letter, they ascertain his life and his family are in danger. So Ulysse just admire Paul and admire his own father decades before, is now put under police protection.
Ulysse Ellian
Yep, but then they made one mistake. They, they didn’t investigate my character or my family history. So I immediately went out, publicly and said, I will not be intimidated. Go to hell. I will never be intimidated.
Miles Johnson
Ulysse isn’t shutting up, because he still has too many questions about the murder. He knows that Naoufal Fassih, Noffel, was found in a Kinahan safehouse in Dublin. And that Noffel was the one who arranged for Ali Motamed to be murdered. And now he knows the Dutch government believes it was Iran who was ultimately behind the assassination.
Ulysse Ellian
But someone spoke to Mr Fassih. I don’t know who. It’s not admire, someone from Tehran is calling Mr Fassih. That’s not how things work.
Miles Johnson
So how do things work? The super cartel seems to be connected to this murder. But what does that connection mean? What links these two things together. As I was looking into all of this, pulling on threads, I came across a case that might help us begin to comprehend.
Angel
Somehow we had established our credibility at that point. She already knew we were high level drug traffickers. Probably multi-ton. We had connections to the military, which caused her to open the door for us.
Miles Johnson
That’s next time on Hot Money.
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Hot Money is a production of the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries. It was written and reported by me, Miles Johnson. If you’ve got any leads or information about this story, you can email me at newnarcos@ft.com. The series producer is Peggy Sutton. Edith Rousselot is the associate producer. Fact checking is by Arthur Gompertz. Engineering by Sarah Bruguiere. Sound design from Jake Gorski. Jeremy Warmsley wrote the original music. Our editor is Sara Nics. And the executive producers are Jacob Goldstein and Cheryl Brumley. Special thanks to Laura Clarke, Marsha Walraven, Alastair Mackie, Breen Turner and Arlie Adlington.
