Bolle Jos

… From Fun Party Animal
To Feared Drug Lord

Top criminal Jos Leijdekkers, who turns out to be in Africa , remained under the radar for a long time. From the edition of Wednesday 08-02-2023: who is ‘Bolle Jos’?
The clearly outdated photo that the police initially released of Jos Leijdekkers, combined with his nickname ‘Bolle Jos’, may have initially misled the general public. It created the image of a clumsy-looking boy with a lame nickname. That may have been why the police later had a more recognizable composite photo taken of an older Jos, now 31, complete with beard, in which he also looks a bit more menacing. This also happened in response to a few tips about his appearance.
In any case, it indicates that Joseph Johannes Leijdekkers apparently worked his way up from that shy-looking boy to a leading drug lord in a period of ten years, as the justice department assumes. Bolle Jos also acquired a few other nicknames during his alleged criminal career, such as ‘Josje Breda’ and ‘Kleine Jos’.
Also the Breda lawyer Peter Schouten corrected the original image of Jos a few weeks ago in the talk show Op1. Schouten at the talk show table: “By using the name Bolle Jos, you run the risk of underestimating him. According to the police, he is not an unthreatening man.” Schouten adjusted the image of Bolle Jos after it came to light that a threat to former Minister of Justice Ferd Grapperhaus (CDA) could well have come from him. That was reported in any case by the Amsterdam newspaper Het Parool .
The lawyer of, among others, the crown witness in the case of Ridouan T. has established his law firm in Breda. That is why he sometimes hears something about Leijdekkers, even though he is not his lawyer. “Until he was 14, he was quite an easy-going person, who could party in Breda. But then there was a change. This while he, just like Klaas Bruinsma, for example, comes from a normal, middle-class family. He is really not a boy who came from a youth gang.”
In the regional newspaper, peers from Prinsenbeek remember fellow villager Jos Leijdekkers as a special but certainly not unpleasant young man, at whose home big parties were thrown. “They could never have imagined that this stout Brabant boy would grow up to be one of the most wanted and feared cocaine bosses,” according to the article in BN De Stem .
Father had a brothel
But Bolle Jos’ nest wasn’t all that bourgeois. His father was the owner of a well-known brothel in Breda for a long time. Until at least the year 2000, father Leijdekkers was registered with the municipality as the owner of sex club Reeperbahn, on the Belcrumweg in Breda.
Today it is a sex club that mainly radiates faded glory. In a neglected neighborhood that is gradually starting to consist of new construction and in which the club with an 80s look now seems somewhat inappropriate. Incidentally, it is not the neighborhood in which Bolle Jos grew up, that was mainly in the – much neater – nearby Prinsenbeek. Father Leijdekkers has sold his business at least a decade ago and has reportedly retired to Spain.
According to lawyer Schouten, Bolle Jos must be a clever criminal: “He has a good organizational talent, is someone who can develop a stormy action when things need to be done and who pays attention to the details. He also has a lot of people walking around the ports for him, for the illegal drug trade.”
For a long time, Bolle Jos managed to remain relatively unknown to the general public, until he came under the radar of the police, partly due to the hack of the encrypted message server Sky ECC. This would show that he indeed had people working for him in the port of Antwerp.
Chats intercepted by the police reveal how Bolle Jos pulls the strings there in a fairly direct way. At least, the police believe that he is the one who, using the account name ‘El Presidente’, gives direct instructions to corrupt security guards in the Belgian port area. This is evident from an incident in August 2020 during the ‘removal’ of 476 kilos of cocaine on the ‘fruit quay’ in Antwerp. A non-corrupt security guard stands in the way during the removal of a ‘container’, whereupon a certain ‘El Pres’ asks his man to lure his colleague away from there: “If you can drive up to him later and have a chat and see if you can get him away from there, that would be great. “
But if that doesn’t work, other measures are taken. The so-called ‘fire guard’ is attacked by the five ‘eviscerators’. A plastic bag is pulled over his head and he is hit. He sustains serious injuries to his head. He manages to save his life by jumping off the quay and swimming to the other side.
As a result of this case, the Antwerp justice department later arrests twenty suspects, who come from both Belgium and the Netherlands. They also issue an arrest warrant for a certain Jos Leijdekkers. But he seems to have been operating from abroad for a long time now. He is said to give his violent orders from Dubai.
Cocaine cowboy
It is September 21, 2017, just after nine o’clock in the evening, when thirteen shots are fired in the Lisstraat in Spijkenisse. It is a liquidation. The target is the 55-year-old Belgian Stefaan Bogaerts. According to the Belgian police, he is ‘known to drug offences’. The man, who trades in sea containers in the port of Antwerp, dies behind the wheel of the car he has just parked.
The attack is part of the large Eris trial against members of the motorcycle club Caloh Wagoh. Bogaerts appears to have been shot right across from their former clubhouse café De Mallemolen. The members of Caloh Wagoh are known from the criminal environment. Delano R., who is mainly known as ‘Keylow’, is their leader.
Information from the police’s Criminal Intelligence Team suggests that Ridouan T. ordered the murder of a ‘port employee’. However, additional police investigations show that Bogaerts’ death may also be related to Bolle Jos’ activities. He is said to live in Dubai and to be involved in large-scale cocaine transports, mainly from Brazil.
It is soft police information. But it does lead to Jos Leijdekkers being mentioned in the public eye for the first time. De Telegraaf writes that the name Bolle Jos has been circulating in the criminal circuit for some time. The newspaper calls him the great ‘ mystery man ‘ about whom hardly anything is known. He is seen as ‘very dangerous’ and ‘very wealthy’. The main warnings are: do not joke with Josje Breda. He is a ‘cocaine cowboy’ who is said to have become very wealthy in a short time through the cocaine trade and who is said to command his troops from abroad.
Leijdekkers only really comes into the public eye when the police connect him to the disappearance of Naima Jillal in October 2019. This happens in a broadcast of Opsporing Verzocht , about the disappearance of this ‘Godmother of coke’. She got into a VW Polo with false license plates at her home in the Gustav Mahlerlaan in Amsterdam on Sunday evening, October 20, and was never seen again.
Bolle Jos is considered by the police as ‘probably involved’ in the disappearance of ‘Aunt’ Naima Jillal. The police received six tips about Jillal following the broadcast of Opsporing Verzocht. They also receive a lead when the VW Polo in which she was taken turns up in a Belgian drug investigation into the Liège bigwig Dries L. His gang is said to take orders from Bolle Jos. But the Liège suspects are also silent in this case.
Cut off finger
How big Bolle Jos must have become as a coke baron becomes clear when the police put him at the top of the National Wanted List in May 2022. He is also included in the EU Most Wanted list. A reward of 75,000 euros is offered for the tip that leads to his arrest. The hunt for him is mainly opened because of his alleged violent actions.
The police consider Jos Leijdekkers, now named by his full name, to be one of the main players in the international cocaine trade. He is suspected of ‘laundering the criminal proceeds of his drug trade on a large scale’. Intercepted crypto communication messages from Sky ECC provide insight into his role in the international cocaine trade, the police report. In those messages, Leijdekkers is formally accused of ‘laundering tens of millions of euros and hundreds of kilos of gold’, which according to them ‘were probably earned with the cocaine trade’.
The files concern Leijdekkers’ involvement in the import of large quantities of cocaine via the ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp. In one of the cases, ‘there is talk of the threat and use of violence’, it is said. The message confirms that Leijdekkers played an ‘important role’ in Jillal’s disappearance. According to the police, this is evident from intercepted crypto communication messages. The police are referring to messages on one of the Blackberry phones in the investigation into Ridouan T., which contain photos of Jillal.
One of the photos shows a woman naked, tied to a chair with tape. Another photo zooms in on the woman’s waist, sitting on a chair, with an apparently severed thumb or other finger and possibly a toe on her stomach. A third photo shows the woman lying on her stomach on the floor, completely undressed. Police believe that Jillal is the one in the photo and that she ‘was probably tortured’. They assume she is no longer alive.
Frozen squid
The reason is a police investigation that was carried out in 2021 in a port warehouse in Antwerp. Dutch information would indicate that Jillal’s body was located in a concrete floor in this warehouse. When examining the concrete floor – with a ground radar and sniffer dogs and by sifting the soil underneath – Jillal’s handbag and some clothes were found. But not her remains.
The warehouse was previously the center of attention because it was used to extract 4.2 tons of cocaine, which was hidden in containers with frozen squid. Fourteen young Dutch suspects were arrested for this. But none of them made statements about this. The fear for Little Jos is apparently too great to testify against him.
Bolle Jos would therefore be ‘even crazier than Ridouan T.’ and ‘immediately settle scores’ with people from the environment who betray him, or at least put them on a death list. Panorama hears the latter from a source from the criminal circuit, who would rather not say anything about Bolle Jos. His reason: “That is dangerous.”
Jos Leijdekkers’ lawyer Guy Weski responded earlier to the accusations against his client. He stated that he was not familiar with the Belgian case files about him and that he also had no insight into the Sky ECC messages. The lawyer: “I can therefore not make any statement about the truth of it and I cannot test the claim that my client would be ‘El Pres’.” Bolle Jos does deny any involvement in the case of the disappearance of Aunt Naima. According to Weski, the justice department would not officially suspect him of that either.
Exchange with Turkey?
Breda lawyer Schouten pointed out in Op1 that more clarity is needed about the accusation against Bolle Jos as the threatener of Grapperhaus. Because that could well be intended to be able to charge him with a terrorist crime. That would be necessary to have Bolle Jos extradited in the long term by another country that sets that condition for this.
Because the majority of Dutch drug criminals operate from abroad these days, detection is mainly a matter of diplomatic horse-trading these days. If we investigate a criminal from your country, will you hand over the crook we are looking for?
From within the criminal milieu, there are voices that the Dutch state has constructed the threat to achieve this extradition. On the other hand, it is suggested that criminals mainly want to outbid each other with threats to people who stand in their way. With the main goal of increasing their own dangerous status.
Recently, there have been raids on homes and an office of Bolle Jos’ family in Breda, Prinsenbeek and Rotterdam. His mother (68) and sister (27) have been arrested on suspicion of money laundering. According to the Public Prosecution Service, they accepted expensive jewelry, bags and clothing from Jos that they could have known had been paid for with drug money. During the house searches, expensive watches and other jewelry were seized. And mountains of cash: tens of thousands of euros, Turkish liras, Swiss francs and currency from the United Arab Emirates. The police also seized telephones, USB sticks, computers and photos in the buildings that could contain information about where Bolle Jos is hiding.
The police have no idea where Bolle Jos is, except that he is said to have been in Turkey. In August and December 2022, his parents and sister went to Turkey. According to the judiciary, they had contact with their wanted brother and son there. But for now, the police see Bolle Jos as a suspect ‘without a fixed abode or residence’.
In the meantime, it has emerged that former minister Grapperhaus was already on an official visit to Turkey last year, during which he is said to have discussed Leijdekkers’ arrest. Is the former minister of justice being threatened for this?
President Erdogan of Turkey has already shown that he is sensitive to exchanging suspects in exchange for favors granted to him by foreign countries. Attempts to have Bolle Jos arrested in Turkey have failed so far. Perhaps we will soon see how much it is worth to the Dutch State to get him in a domestic cell. Because it is clear that the net is closing in on the country’s most wanted criminal.
Belgian Minister of Justice also in danger
Is it a coincidence that a few months ago, the Belgian Minister of Justice, Vincent Van Quickenborne, was also threatened by criminals? In the vicinity of the villa of Ferd Grapperhaus’ former Belgian colleague, in Kortrijk, a car was found containing, among other things, AK-47 rifles and two bottles of petrol.
This happened when the police were patrolling near his home, after it became clear that there was a threat towards the minister. Three men in a car with Dutch license plates fled. The car with the weapons remained behind.
Shortly afterwards, three young Dutch men were arrested in connection with this. Later, the person who the authorities believe coordinated the action was also arrested. Afterwards, the suspicion arose that the men had wanted to kidnap Van Quickenborne. The four men have since been extradited to Belgium.
Our southern neighbours suspect that the threat to the minister came from Bolle Jos’ Belgian counterpart, Flor Bressers. A man with at least as violent a reputation, who is also said to collaborate with Jos.
Flor Bressers, however, emphatically denied through his lawyer that he had anything to do with possible kidnapping plans of the Belgian minister.