This is The Guardian.

The Guardian Archive Longread.

Hi, I'm Jessica Loudis, and I'm the author of the cartel, the journalist, and the gangland killings that rock the Netherlands, which was published in 2022.

I became interested in this piece because I reported on the trial of El Chapo Guzman,

the leader of the Sinaloa cartel in the U.S. prior to this.

And through covering that trial, I became very interested in illicit economies and what they

say about normal societies and normal economies and how they sort of create these parallels

almost that operate out of sight but are sometimes almost as large.

And in the case of the Erdivry's murders, this was a moment of

reckoning for Dutch society in which people realized that this thing that had been sort

of coexisting, that they had been coexisting with actually was able to kind of puncture this

finere that this was a society that was without problems. And while researching, I became

very interested in what ideas

Dutch society held about itself that were being upheld, how whether or not, as the Netherlands

was reckoning with this idea, that it might be in a situation parallel to one that Italy had

been in years before, and whether or not its legal systems, its prisons, it was able to basically

handle the level of organized crime that it was now having to deal with.

Well, the amazing thing about this trials, it's not one trial, it's many trials.

The organized crime group that was responsible for the murder has many people involved with it. And just a

couple months ago, people were being arrested for the murder of Peter Air Javries. The leader of

of the, of Taki, the leader of the organization is appealing his life sentence. And he's still,

he's looking for lawyers. He's cycled through three lawyers who have all gotten

...