New Yorker Magazine [jul 30] by calibre

Author:calibre [calibre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: News, New Yorker Magazine
Publisher: calibre
Published: 2018-07-30T10:01:03.922000+00:00

One spring day in 1996, Cor and Sonja drove Richie home from preschool. Before going inside, they lingered in the car: a song by Andrea Bocelli was on the radio, and Richie wanted to sing along. As he did so, Sonja saw a man approaching. He pulled out a gun and started shooting. Sonja frantically clambered out of the car, opened the rear door, and pulled Richie out of the back seat. The shooter ran off. Cor had been hit in his arm and his shoulder, and a bullet had shattered his jaw, but he survived. Astrid met them at the hospital, and noticed a trail of tiny feathers leaking from a hole in Sonja’s down coat. She stuck her finger in and fished out a bullet.

As soon as Cor was released from the hospital, Wim helped to shuttle him, Sonja, and the children to France, where they went into hiding. After some investigation, Wim reported that two Amsterdam gangsters, Sam Klepper and John Mieremet, had apparently authorized the hit. It seemed that Cor and Wim had become too prominent in the Dutch underworld for their own good. According to Wim, the gangsters promised to stop pursuing Cor if he paid them a million Dutch guilders. Wim urged Cor to be pragmatic: pay the money and make the problem go away. Cor indignantly refused. While he recuperated with his family, at a French farmhouse hidden in the woods, Wim returned to Amsterdam to deal with Klepper and Mieremet.

Cor had always been the dominant personality in the criminal partnership; when they were young men, Wim picked up breakfast for him each morning. But by the time of the attempt on Cor’s life their relationship had grown strained. Peter de Vries, who saw both men during this period, told me, “They were arguing quite a lot. Willem didn’t want to play his role anymore.” Whereas Cor was becoming more involved in the drug trade and other criminal activity, Wim maintained that he wanted to go legit. “It was my goal to launder all my money and then quit the underworld,” he later testified, adding, “I am a long-term thinker.”

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