Klaas Bruinsma

Klaas Bruinsma (born October 6, 1953 , † June 27, 1991 ) was a Dutch drug dealer and gang boss.

Life

Bruinsma was born as the second child of the Dutchman Anton Bruinsma and the British E. Kelly. After his parents divorced, he moved to the UK with his mother in the late 1950s. In 1964 he moved back to the Netherlands and lived in Blaricum . He began dealing in soft drugs during his youth and school years. He was sentenced for the first time on parole for drug offenses when he was sixteen. He was expelled from school and began trading drugs professionally in 1974. Drug dealer Thea Moear , also known as The Godmother , became his business partner. In 1976 he was sentenced to prison for the first time. After his release he started to build a new organization and employed the kickboxer André Brilleman as his bodyguard.

From 1979 onwards, Bruinsma was convicted again of importing hashish from Pakistan. After his release, he began to expand his organization across Europe and operated in Germany, Belgium, France and Scandinavia. In 1983 a meeting with a business partner named Pieterse escalated. When the latter admitted to having stolen fabric, Bruinsma shot him in the leg. A short time later, Leo Frantzen and two other men sent by Pieterse appeared at Bruinsma's. Bruinsma killed Frantzen and was hit several times in the stomach himself. Then he came to the hospital. With a long term imprisonment for murder, Moear devised a plan to help her longtime friend. She went to Pieterse with a recording device and he told them what had happened. Then Moear went to the notary and Bruinsma could plead for self-defense. Instead of murder, he was sentenced to three years imprisonment for manslaughter in 1984. During this time his father died of cancer. After his release in 1987, he restructured his organization. As he became increasingly brutal, Moear turned away from him and Etienne Urka took the place as the main business partner. He got into the gaming machine business and began business relationships with underworld bosses Sam Klepper and John Mieremet . The Briton Roy Francis Adkins became the main person responsible for the drug business. During this time, Brilleman was tortured and dismembered by several men. His body was later found in the Waal . It was a late act of revenge by Bruinsma, as Brilleman and his partner Marianovic had only faked a Bruinsma-commissioned murder of Moear's ex-husband.

By the late 1980s, Bruinsma had risen to become one of the largest drug traffickers in Europe and was planning to retire after one last major coup. However, the illegal import of 45 tons of hashish failed and the drugs were confiscated by the police. This failure and his cocaine consumption weakened his position in his organization considerably and Urka took over the top management.

Bruinsma and his gang frequented the Yab Yum luxury brothel in Amsterdam . In 1990, he and Adkins got into an argument at the brothel after one of their actions failed. There was a shooting, but nobody was harmed. The police investigations fizzled out because none of the parties involved and eyewitnesses wanted to make a statement. A year later, Adkins was found murdered.

On the night of June 27, 1991, Bruinsma got into an argument with Martin Hoogland , an ex-police officer who was employed by the Yugoslav Mafia at the time, and was shot by him at 4 a.m. in front of the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel. Hoogland was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment for this in 1993; he died in 2004 as a result of an exchange of fire.

Relationship with Mabel Wisse Smit

One of Bruinsma's bodyguards, Charlie da Silva , stated on a broadcast by Dutch political journalist Peter R. de Vries that Mabel Wisse Smit was Bruinsma's girlfriend from 1989 until his violent death in 1991. The future wife of Prince Johan Friso of Orange-Nassau (and himself too) had only admitted Mabel's brief contacts with Bruinsma up to that point. Because of this, the Dutch parliament refused to approve Johan Friso's marriage to Mabel. Johan Friso then renounced his place in the line of succession and his prince title in order to be able to marry Mabel anyway.

Movie and TV

• The eighth episode in the Netflix documentary series called Drug Lords from 2018 is about Klaas Bruinsma.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://www.scribd.com/doc/8437188/De-Godmother
2. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from December 19, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
3. ↑ http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/dutch-boss-john-mieremet
4. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from March 31, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (in Dutch) 
5. ↑ The Guardian , Duncan Campbell, (November 21, 1991), "Shot gang boss wanted robber dead - The man who ordered the killing of the Great Train Robber Charlie Wilson was himself shot dead in an Amsterdam bar, a London inquest was told yesterday. Roy Francis Adkins, a 42-year-old Londoner, was killed in the Nightwatch bar of the American Hotel in Amsterdam on September 28, last year. "

Web links

• Chronology of the Amsterdam Mafia structures

See also

• Cor van Hout