I completely forgot about old timer Faas. Major player of the penoze back in the days
From butter smuggling to Belgium to ecstasy to Australia
Butter, hash and pills
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On the Belgian coast, a legendary smuggler is enjoying his old age. Sjef Faas (84) was smart enough to retire peacefully, something that bigger criminals often fail to do. He did spend a few years indoors. But unlike others, he can tell the story. Even his adventures with Klaas Bruinsma and Sreten Jocic.
In a book by journalist Joost van der Wegen, the long criminal life story of Sjef Faas is recorded: Butter, hash and pills .
Faas had just started as an apprentice to sail with an inland waterway skipper when his parents opened a pub on the Zeeland-Flemish border with Belgium in 1959. That café quickly became a landing place for smugglers where Sjef could get all kinds of lucrative small jobs. More attractive jobs than on the inland waterway.
Driving for butter smugglers to Belgium for example, they were always short of drivers. First driving empty cars back, then also cars with merchandise to Belgium.
Breakneck stunts
It is hard to imagine in these times of the European Union. In the fifties and sixties there was no EU and borders were very important. The Netherlands heavily subsidized dairy farmers on the price of butter and Belgium had therefore imposed a hefty import duty on Dutch butter.
These price differences led to unimaginable scenes on the small roads between the Netherlands and Belgium. The customs officers were shooting with live ammunition and the butter drivers were performing daredevil stunts, strewing crow's feet on the road and driving straight through roadblocks.
Eastern Bloc
Faas became a full-time criminal and developed into a logistics expert. When the European Community equalized butter prices, Faas switched to trading in illegal American cigarettes that had been imported without excise duty.
He bought the cigarettes in the Eastern Bloc, from behind the Iron Curtain, in East Germany and Poland, and picked them up on seagoing vessels. The state companies in those countries fully cooperated in the forgery of the papers.
Bruinsma
After that Faas ended up in Lebanon and became one of the founding fathers of the hash import in the Netherlands, again based on his knowledge of transport. He was one of the major suppliers of Klaas Bruinsma, and later he supplied Heineken kidnapper who had gone into drugs after his release, Cor van Hout.
In hash smuggling, things did not always go well. After a few thousand kilos were seized in England, Faas was wrongly blamed for the failure. The notorious Amsterdam Serb Sreten “Jotsa” Jocic imposed a criminal fine of one million on him and threatened Faas' family members with death. Faas did not flinch.
A meeting of Faas with Jocic and “Sergio” Miranovic ( shot dead in 2006) only resulted in new threats. He can only breathe a sigh of relief when Jocic is arrested in Bulgaria in 2002, and eventually extradited to Serbia.
Eleven million
Faas usually did well with the drug transports, except that he did run into two hefty convictions. In 1997, the Middelburg court sentenced him to
six years in prison for a number of impressive hash transports. And in 2005 he got seven years in a major ecstasy case about transports to Australia. That was reduced to 4.5 years on appeal.
Faas was actually ready for retirement at that time.
In the hashish file in Middelburg, the police had calculated that he had stashed away some eleven million guilders in Switzerland. Faas was unable to access that for a number of years. When he was able to, a few million had grown in the meantime.
And so the old butter smuggler Faas enjoys a luxurious old age in Knokke-Heist.
https://www.crimesite.nl/van-botersmokkel-naar-belgie-tot-xtc-naar-australie/
