Originally Posted by Hollander
Good overview TKJ! You could add some Polish groups Greeks and there were some Hungarians involved in the past. In the Amsterdam region there's also Israeli OC. The oldest 'foreign groups' are by far the Chinese going back to the early 1900s.


Yes, Chinese organized crime used to be huge in the Netherlands. All of the major Hong Kong Triad groups as well as Hokkien/Teochew gangs from Singapore (mainly Ah Kong) used to have a presence in the Chinatowns of major Dutch cities. Nowadays Chinese organized crime in the Netherlands is extremely low-key, even more so than Serb/Montenegrin organized crime.

Polish are small fish when it comes to OC. Polish gangs mainly conduct some organized theft and some contraband tobacco smuggling. Their activities are highly overshadowed by those of the Lithuanian networks, who are larger, more organized and definitely more feared.

Greeks are very low-key as well, but every Greek enclave has some organized crime activity going on. Lots of illegal gambling and some smuggling. Never really heard about Greek organized crime in the Netherlands though...but there definitely is Greek organized crime going on in some Belgian border towns.

Never heard about Hungarian organized crime...must be a small time thing. You hear some stuff about Romanian organized crime, which is incredibly overrated. Romanian OC mostly concerns criminals from the gypsy community who do some theft, ATM skimming and some pimping... Hungarian OC must be the same kinda thing, but you never really hear about it.

Israeli OC is definitely big in Belgium so there's likely some involvement in the Netherlands as well. In Belgium it mostly concerns the activities of a few Georgian Jewish criminal clans, Jewish criminals with origins in Ukraine and a few traditional networks that are headquartered in Israel have shown up in Belgium as well. A lot of traditional Israel-based criminal families are of Moroccan Jewish origin and in Antwerp they sometimes work with local Moroccan crime families (who are Muslim, but don't care when it comes to money) but they also work with Dutch and Italian groups when it comes to the international ecstasy trade.