No Idea if he is still alive, but he is one of the few top guys who survived all those years even LE spoke of him with high regards.

November 1, 2008
9 min.
Entrepreneur Norbert Stok
The entrepreneurship of hash dealer Norbert Stok has been praised more than once by the Justice Department. One of the keys to his success was his complete obscurity.

Economy November December 2008 60 Story
Written by:
Bart Middelburg

If the number of hits on Google is indicative of this, which is highly doubtful, then former Heineken kidnapper and extortionist Willem Holleeder is by far the best-known Dutch (top) criminal. He gets 131,000 hits (reference date 27 August 2008). After Holleeder comes Klaas Bruinsma, who, although dead for seventeen years, gets 36,400. After that, the numbers drop rapidly. Johnny Mieremet gets 16,900 mentions, his former partner Sam Klepper 15,800, Mink Kok 5140, and Johan 'the Hacker' Verhoek 2880. Finally, Norbert Stok gets no further than eleven hits. Norbert who?

For legal entrepreneurs, the widest possible name recognition is of vital importance; the PR budgets of listed companies are higher than ever. For wholesalers of illegal stimulants and other criminal entrepreneurs, the opposite applies: publicity, and the resulting fame, are usually the beginning of the end. It leads to increased vigilance by the investigative apparatus, and banks and business relations become wary.

Good entrepreneurship means something completely different in the underworld than in the upper world. In the legal economy, an entrepreneur is judged on relatively vague concepts such as 'courage', 'perseverance', 'decisiveness' and 'innovation'. With regard to organised crime, we can define successful entrepreneurship much more concretely: making a lot of money with illegal trade without insurmountable problems with government services such as the police, the judiciary and the tax authorities, and without getting involved in bloody conflicts on the monkey rock that is the underworld. The best-known top criminals are therefore extremely bad entrepreneurs: either they end up behind bars or they suffer fatal injuries.

Notorious criminals
Willem Holleeder: has been sentenced to too many long prison sentences in his criminal career to still be able to speak of successful entrepreneurship. In 1987 he was sentenced to eleven years in prison for the Heineken kidnapping, in December 2007 he was sentenced to another nine years in prison for extorting real estate traders.

Klaas Bruinsma: was shot dead in 1991, at the age of 37, during a common drunken brawl at the Amsterdam Hilton. He built a large enterprise from scratch, but the egomaniac mafia boss was also permanently involved in time- and money-consuming intrigues.

Sam Klepper: was liquidated in 2000 at the age of 40 at his penthouse in Buitenveldert. Klepper could initially boast an even career. He started his career with a successful gang of robbers; in the mid-eighties he switched (with Mieremet) to the Bruinsma gang. In the late nineties he focused (again with Mieremet) on extortion, and in doing so dug his own grave.

Johnny Mieremet: cut from the same cloth, with the difference that Mieremet was a warned man after the liquidation of Klepper. Was shot dead in Thailand at the end of 2005 at the age of 45. Complained shortly before his death in wiretapped conversations that he and his wife were being 'fucked' (financially disadvantaged) by everyone.

Mink Kok: was considered virtually elusive in the nineties, and also the intellect of the Amsterdam underworld. Eventually, things went wrong: Kok was in prison from 1999 to the summer of 2007, almost a decade, for a number of spectacular weapons finds.

Entertainment industry
In short, from the perspective of sustainable entrepreneurship, there is general malaise in the higher echelons of the stimulant market. Only a few succeed in limiting the criminal damage in the long term and live much longer than 40 – a forgotten minority to which, among others, Norbertus Rudolphus Antonius Stok (Amsterdam, 1953) can be counted.

Norbert Stok's entrepreneurship (son of a medical specialist) has a number of specific characteristics. Firstly, he is praised to the skies from time to time by competent parties (such as public prosecutors and scientists) for his expertise. The network in which he participated at the time was characterized in 1995 by professor of criminal law Petrus van Duyne, based on information from the Ministry of Justice, to the Van Traa inquiry committee as a smuggling organization "at a fairly high level" and with dizzying turnovers. Where all that money went was also a mystery to Van Duyne. "One of them invested in the entertainment industry." He apparently meant Stok, who was registered in the Trade Register around 1990 as a dealer in CDs.

In 1996, public prosecutor Jules Wortel described Stok to an Amsterdam examining magistrate as one of the most talented and meritorious hash dealers in the Netherlands. “We have always associated Stok with hash from Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Another officer, Martin Witteveen, told the Amsterdam court in 1998 that Stok was part of a “small elite of international hash dealers who are able to permanently operate drug ships across the world’s oceans.” It is unthinkable that the Justice Department would ever have praised criminal entrepreneurs such as Holleeder, Bruinsma, Klepper or Mieremet in such terms.

Low profile
The second characteristic is Stok's proverbial low profile: attracting unwanted attention, from the Justice Department or from criminals, is taboo. Where other criminal entrepreneurs display various degrees of show-off behavior (expensive sports cars, yachts, spending all night with lots of coke in sex clubs, bodyguards, etc.), Stok always watches the pennies. He allegedly forbids employees to spend their money conspicuously in the Netherlands; they can do that abroad. He himself drives old, inconspicuous cars. When the police observed him in the mid-nineties, it turned out that Stok goes swimming in the De Mirandabad for an hour once a week. One of his nicknames is 'Scrooge'.

Third characteristic: Stok is, literally, a survivor. During the war that raged in the Amsterdam underworld for years, dozens of bigwigs and lesser gods were eliminated, but Stok, as far as is known, was not even involved in a brawl during all that time. The fact that he managed to stay out of harm's way for so long probably has to do with the fact that he himself uses little or no violence. Henk Schutten and I once suggested in an article in Het Parool , based on information from the Justice Department, that the organization of Stok and his then partner, a certain Leo, had indeed used extreme violence at one time in the late eighties.

Schutten and I were then summoned to the office of the late Pieter Herman Bakker Schut, Stok's lawyer and his partner. The strongly philosophically inclined partner Leo in particular was furious about the suggestion of serious violence, and handed us a letter with reflections on the phenomena of media and democracy: "As far as I know, a democracy is not automatically the terror of the masses, but also protects the rights of the individual."

And fourthly: Stok has always managed to keep the police and the judiciary at a reasonable distance, except for a few industrial accidents. In 1987 he was arrested for possession of various batches of hash, spread throughout the country. After years of procedural wrangling, Stok was sentenced in January 1992 by the court of appeal in Arnhem to ten months in prison for “participation in a legal entity with the aim of committing crimes.” He did not have to serve that sentence until 1995.

Smuggling network
Around 1990, Italy, Switzerland and the Netherlands launched a joint investigation (codename: Octopus) into drug trafficking and the laundering of huge amounts of money. Among other things, this investigation established that, on Stok's orders, tens of millions of Canadian dollars had been smuggled from Canada to Europe by several couriers. In 1991, the Amsterdam police and the Fiscal Intelligence and Investigation Service (FIOD) drew up a so-called analysis of the smuggling network. At the top of the list of suspects in this analysis were Stok and his partner Leo.

One of Stok cs' money couriers stated to the Amsterdam police in 1992: "At first I didn't know that it was drug money, but later Norbert Stok told me this." Stok was never prosecuted in the Octopus case: the Amsterdam public prosecutor Jo Valente decided to stop the investigation in 1993, because Stok was mainly focused on money laundering, which was not yet an independent criminal offence at the time. Switzerland did confiscate part of the smuggled money (almost nine million Canadian dollars, half a million American dollars, and a consignment of diamonds).

Stok et al. then attempted to get all that money back by claiming that it came from oil trading, outside of OPEC (oil producing and exporting countries). Stok allegedly acted as a money smuggler. “Between 1990 and 1992 I acted as a transporter of money that had been paid for the purchase of oil by a Canadian company,” Stok himself once stated about this. “It involved a total of 10 million Canadian dollars, which had to be transported from Canada to countries in Europe and the Middle East.” For example, the Swiss authorities received a letter from a Nigerian lawyer, who stated that the money had been earned legally via the Lagos-based company Nigus Petroleum Ltd. Switzerland did not believe this at all: upon further investigation, it turned out that the Nigerian lawyer and Nigus Petroleum did not exist at all.

Perjury
In the late nineties, Stok was again given a limited prison sentence. In October 1997, he told an Amsterdam examining magistrate that he had indeed been convicted of drug trafficking: “I have never been convicted of similar activities and am not currently involved in them.”

Strictly speaking, that was perjury. At that time, the Amsterdam Justice Department had been keeping an eye on Stok's large-scale hashish transport for months: in 1997, he smuggled seventeen tons of hashish from Pakistan to Kenya with the ship Asean Explorer, with Australia as the presumed final destination. In February 1998, Stok was arrested in that case; he was eventually sentenced to a year in prison.

What Norbert Stok has done since then is unknown. He also does not wish to provide any clarification; his lawyer, Victor Koppe, initially seemed prepared to comment after consultation with Stok, but then did not respond to any further communication. It cannot be ruled out that Stok has retired. He does turn up very occasionally. In October 2000, for example, shortly after top criminal Sam Klepper had been liquidated, the Amsterdam police noted in tapped telephone conversations that Stok had maintained close contact with Klepper's associate Johnny Mieremet. For example, Stok Mieremet said that on the day Klepper was murdered, "an hour before the liquidation" he had been called by a business associate, telling him that he should "check teletext" later that day. Later, Stok Mieremet reported that he had spoken to the 'man' in question again and that he now knew "a great deal more".

Stok's long-time companion Leo, on the other hand, is certain to have taken a completely different path: he now writes philosophical, spiritual books that are translated into English, French, German and Spanish.

Text: Bart Middelburg
November-December 2008