As one prosecutor recently explained in court, Wim “can be extremely intimidating.” When Astrid testifies, she sits in an enclosure behind an opaque screen, which guarantees that nobody in the courtroom can see her face, and also insures that she cannot see Wim, who might seek to inhibit her testimony with a menacing glance or a gesture that only she could understand. He is standing trial on five counts of murder, two counts of attempted murder, and “participating in a criminal enterprise.” The proceedings take place in a secure courtroom, on the industrial outskirts of Amsterdam, known as the Bunker. The Nose’s name is Willem (Wim) Holleeder. More to the point, she is his younger sister. If she speaks with unusual conviction about what the Nose might do, it is in part because she used to be his legal adviser: until Holleeder went into hiding, she was a successful criminal-defense attorney. ![]() “Of course he would do it,” Holleeder said. The plot was disrupted when one of the prisoners confessed to officials. In 2016, he allegedly asked gang leaders at the prison to enlist members on the outside to execute Holleeder, along with two other witnesses in the case against him. The Nose is being held at the Netherlands’ only maximum-security prison. “Everyone else who has turned on him ended up dead,” she pointed out. She agreed to testify against the most notorious criminal in the Netherlands, a man known as De Neus-the Nose, a reference to his most prominent facial feature. The threat to Holleeder’s life stems from a decision that she made, in 2013, to become the star witness in a mob trial. Watch “The Backstory”: Patrick Radden Keefe on one of the Netherlands’ most notorious gangsters. Holleeder typically dresses in black, but if she suspects she’s being followed she may duck into a bathroom and emerge in a wig and a red dress. When she moves through Amsterdam, she does so in secret, and sometimes in disguise: she has a collection of fake noses and teeth. Today, she arranges furtive visits with a small circle of friends, but otherwise stays mostly at home. Fortunately for Holleeder (which is pronounced “Hol- lay-der”), she guarded her privacy even before her life became threatened, and no photographs of her as an adult can be found on the Internet. Then the light changes, and she exhales and keeps moving.Īmsterdam, a city of fewer than a million people, is a difficult place to stage your own disappearance, particularly if you grew up there. Whenever she stops at a red light and an unfamiliar vehicle sharks up alongside her, she clutches the wheel, her heart hammering. She thinks a lot about how she might be assassinated, gaming out fatal scenarios. She bought the car used, for fifteen thousand euros. She prefers buildings with basement parking, in order to minimize her exposure during the brief transit to a bulletproof car. For the past two years, she has lived in a series of furnished safe houses. Astrid Holleeder has arresting eyes-they are swimming-pool blue-but that’s all I can reveal about her appearance, because she is in hiding, an exile in her own city, which is Amsterdam.
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