When Marylio V was escorted from his cell in Amsterdam’s district court docket on October 31, his alleged confederate in a medicine bust involving 1,363kg (3,005lbs) of cocaine with a road worth estimated at £65million ($82m) was nowhere to be seen.
There was no expectation, nonetheless, that Quincy Promes, a Dutch worldwide footballer with 50 caps, would present up.
He didn’t seem at his earlier legal case both. That was in June 2023, when he was discovered responsible of stabbing his cousin within the knee at a household social gathering the place, the court docket heard, “the Hennessy flowed freely.”
The 18-month sentence for that offence is but to begin as a result of Promes, 31, has remained out of attain of the Dutch justice system, having stayed in Russia all through the trial, enjoying for Spartak Moscow.
Individually, based on the Dutch Public Prosecution Service, Marylio V and Promes had organized to smuggle two shipments of cocaine into the Belgian port of Antwerp by way of the Cap San Nicolas container vessel in January 2020.
The primary batch, hidden in sacks of salt, which concerned 650 blocks of cocaine, has by no means been discovered. The second batch had a emblem of a tiger stamped on it and weighed in at 712kgs after being intercepted by Belgian police.
Forward of the complete case, which is because of begin in January 2024, Marylio V failed in his try to attain bail, having revealed in court docket that he plans, with out implicating Promes, to confess his guilt of a “small position” that the Public Prosecution Service (PPS) claims was, in reality, a lot larger.
Among the many decide’s issues on this enchantment was the defendant’s legal report. Marylio V had already been sentenced to 4 years in jail in Belgium for importing 882kgs of cocaine on Could 27, 2019.
Quincy Promes, proper, enjoying for the Netherlands in 2014 (Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Pictures)
He grew to become the main focus of one other main investigation which took the code identify “Porto” and centred on Promes’ suspected involvement in “the complete cocaine commerce”. It adopted tip-offs in 2018 and 2019 that led officers to analyse encrypted correspondence involving BlackBerry cell phones and EncroChat.
It was throughout this investigation that officers heard Promes discussing stabbing his cousin. “The place did I hit him?” he requested a member of the family shortly after the incident, based on taped conversations.
When he found that he’d hit his cousin within the leg, Promes thought it was fortunate. “I didn’t goal at his leg in any respect, I wished to place it on his neck,” he mentioned, earlier than including: “Subsequent time he’ll get bullets.” And to his father, who intervened, he urged: “You saved his life. In any other case, I’ll kill him. You perceive that, don’t you?”
Although Promes was initially charged with tried homicide, it was downgraded to aggravated assault after the participant’s lawyer argued that the proof was not admissible because the warrant to faucet his telephone was initially issued attributable to an curiosity in his alleged “unrelated” drug offences.
At a separate pre-trial listening to final summer time, the court docket heard how Promes and Marylio V allegedly tried to import the cocaine into Europe in January 2020.
On February 25, 2020, the PPS claimed that Promes knowledgeable different conspirators that “my earlier supply was a half failure. They got here in two trays, one fell, one received jammed, so my entire revenue was halved.”
Promes speaks to media at a Dutch coaching camp in 2014 (Koen van Weel/ANP/AFP by way of Getty Pictures)
Within the subsequent message site visitors, prosecutors say that Promes confirmed he had paid a part of the acquisition worth for the cocaine by writing, “My boys are on their approach to Antwerp,” the place couriers have been directed to a shisha lounge.
What adopted was image proof, allegedly on the door of a warehouse, exhibiting the trailer carrying one of many containers and the cocaine inside. When the cargo was moved by truck to Verrebroek, 20km north west of Antwerp, Promes is alleged to have inspired the boys.
“Hold us knowledgeable,” he’s accused of claiming. “Get to work, boys.”
By no means earlier than has a Dutch footballer with the stature of Promes been charged with such critical offences. But an examination of the court docket hearings involving him is a reminder of the potential for overlap between the worlds of footballers and criminality within the Netherlands, and Amsterdam specifically.
Typically talking, Amsterdam is a protected place. Whereas Catania in Italy tops the European crime index, intently adopted by Marseille in France, Birmingham and Coventry in England and Charleroi in Belgium, Amsterdam sits means down in 94th place.
It additionally suffers from roughly half of the crime registered in New York Metropolis or London, for instance. But the toleration of sure medication, significantly hashish, makes it a vacation spot for suppliers, whereas Schiphol Airport is without doubt one of the largest in Europe, and subsequently a handy assembly level for traffickers.
Within the deal that introduced him to the eye of the regulation, the Dutch justice division believes Promes, who was born and raised in Amsterdam, invested €200,000 into the drug commerce. In that deal, it was alleged that the convicted drug trafficker Piet Wortel and one other well-known trafficker “earned €6million”.
At the beginning of 2023, the PPS claimed Promes had paid a considerable advantageous to Wortel for a batch of medication that was stolen by a rival gang.
In response to the PPS file, Wortel was additionally suspected of being behind the 2019 homicide of former skilled footballer, Kelvin Maynard, who was shot a number of instances in entrance of a hearth station in south-east Amsterdam, allegedly in revenge for the theft of 400kgs of cocaine.
Each Promes and Wortel denied these allegations. Whereas Promes’ lawyer described the suggestion his shopper had paid Wortel as “whole nonsense,” Wortel’s consultant insisted there was little proof in opposition to his shopper over Maynard’s dying, calling the claims “gossip and backbiting.”
The PPS acknowledged in January 2023 that it nonetheless had “no spherical case” in opposition to Wortel, and two months later he was launched from detention over these prices.
It leaves the homicide of Maynard as an unsolved case. In 2019, his dying obtained nationwide consideration, not essentially as a result of he was a footballer however due to the response of firefighters who have been condemned for taking images of paramedics making an attempt, in useless, to resuscitate him. These pictures have been distributed amongst mates earlier than discovering their means onto social media.
Kelvin Maynard, enjoying right here for Burton Albion, was murdered in 2019 (David Rogers/Getty Pictures)
In contrast to Promes, Maynard’s profession was unremarkable. He performed top-flight soccer within the Netherlands however not for any of the main golf equipment, earlier than heading to Royal Antwerp in 2013. There he met Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, the previous Chelsea and Netherlands striker who’s now working with the England nationwide workforce. Hasselbaink took Maynard to English lower-league membership Burton Albion in 2014 when he started the primary of his two spells as supervisor there.
One in all his former team-mates at Burton, who would like to not be named attributable to sensitivities across the method of his dying, remembers Maynard fondly due to his work ethic. He at all times appeared to be on the entrance of the operating periods, was smiley and sociable. He thinks he labored as a DJ in his spare time. Maynard appeared, “a very nice man — you’d by no means think about he’d get himself concerned in something like that.”
In response to reviews on the time of Maynard’s capturing, he spent his final afternoon at a flat within the south east of town. After bringing his spouse and youngest baby house, he returned to Zuidoost earlier than parking his gray Volkswagen Golf close to a metro station, the place he met a bunch of Surinamese males sporting Nike tracksuits, who drove off in a darkish blue Volkswagen Polo.
He was adopted on a black scooter by two males, and when he stopped at a crimson gentle, they approached from the facet earlier than firing a number of rounds at him from shut vary. Although he tried to speed up away, he met his finish within the forecourt of the hearth station earlier than the pictures of that second went viral.
The fireplace station the place Maynard died in 2019 (Sem van der Wal/AFP by way of Getty Pictures)
His household urged that he was a youth employee who had virtually accomplished his faculty schooling. But an in depth report within the Het Parool newspaper a day after the capturing urged Maynard and his mates, which included Genciel ‘Genna’ Feller, who was murdered simply over a fortnight earlier in Curacao, had just lately purchased “loads of very costly issues, together with luxurious automobiles. Maynard posed in a photograph with an outsized wad of banknotes.”
The writer of that article was crime reporter Paul Vugts. In 2013, Vugts coated one other story which helped clarify why the pursuits of footballers and criminals merge. “Sometimes, gamers unintentionally change into concerned in legal points that they’d fairly have stayed out of, however typically they consciously work collectively,” he wrote.
He urged that in Amsterdam, a world-famous former footballer had been noticed a number of instances by town’s police division socialising in an underworld determine’s entourage, particularly at a martial arts gala. In the meantime, criminals from Amsterdam’s diamond district would usually drive across the metropolis within the Porsche sports activities automotive of a Dutch worldwide. It was thought that the footballer and at the very least one of many criminals had collectively invested in a gymnasium in addition to the catering trade.
It’s not at all times the participant’s fault. The mom of Patrick Kluivert’s sons, for instance, began a relationship with an Amsterdam legal and the couple have been convicted in a cash laundering and extortion trial the place particulars about Kluivert’s relationship along with his household have been revealed.
When, in 2013, an argument began between members of two rival gangs at a celebration in Amsterdam’s maritime museum, a safety guard urged he had seen Denny Landzaat, one other former Dutch worldwide whose profession took him to the Premier League with Wigan Athletic, making an attempt to calm the state of affairs.
Landzaat was caught up in an altercation between Amsterdam gangs (Erik van ‘t Woud/AFP by way of Getty Pictures)
Landzaat denied this declare. What’s plain is that, moments later, one of many males was shot useless. It was believed that Dwight Tiendalli – then contracted to Swansea Metropolis – alongside along with his brother, Wensley, was within the firm of the sufferer that night time. Witnesses instructed police that Wensley was seen taking a gold watch from the sufferer’s wrist after the capturing. He was later arrested due to the “great amount of payments” discovered on his individual however the case was dismissed, solely after Wensley had instructed police that he was the “money holder” that night. He denied taking the watch.
Dwight, in the meantime, instructed investigators that he “solely shook arms” with the sufferer of the assault, after which noticed little of him on the desk till Wensley got here to report that somebody had been shot.
It was established he had nothing to do with the underworld feud. One of many males behind the capturing, nonetheless, was considered an in depth confidant of Gwenette Martha, a gangster from the De Pijp space of town, who himself was executed in 2014.
It’s believed that Martha was a junior footballer at an expert membership earlier than he grew to become an expert legal. A yr after his dying, detectives in Amsterdam found that somebody linked to the legal was driving a automotive rented to an Ajax youth participant, who had gotten right into a battle within the centre of Amsterdam. This led to an assault in Zuidoost the place the bullets lodged at the back of the driving force’s seat.
The discovering led to the now-retired detectives, Arno van Leeuwen and Bob Schagen, working with Ajax in an try to teach the membership’s younger gamers concerning the risks of being drawn into criminality.
They nonetheless use the images of the automotive that was shot at in shows to youth gamers, the place they level out that even typically harmless contacts and favours can have unexpected however vital penalties.
Which brings us again to Promes. In 2012, he described himself as “a road rat… if everybody else went left, I went proper”. Although Promes then insisted he was not a legal, he described his childhood in an interview on Ajax’s web site after re-signing for the membership for €17.2million in 2019 as “transferring from neighbourhood to neighbourhood” along with his mom after she divorced from his father, the place he made “new and unhealthy mates and ended up in a form of twister.” His earlier spell at Ajax had ended attributable to behavioural issues.
At Ajax, Promes was warned concerning the firm he saved by Van Leeuwen and Schagen, who sat down to speak to him twice.
On the primary event, it was after he was seen with the rapper JoeyAK, a rapper from the Bijlmer rap group Zone 6, which has been linked with gun crime and the worldwide cocaine commerce.
Promes enjoying for Ajax in opposition to Liverpool in 2020 (Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Pictures)
The second time, it was due to his friendship with a half-brother of the gangster rapper, Jason L, who has since been sentenced in jail for 18 years for homicide.
The pleas to rethink who he was associating with don’t seem to have sunk in, which helps clarify why Promes is a wished man within the Netherlands.
He is protected against justice as he’s dwelling in Moscow, the place he performs for one in all his former golf equipment, Spartak, as Russia doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the Netherlands. His switch was accomplished two months after he was arrested for stabbing his cousin in December 2020.
Although he was chosen by Frank de Boer for the Dutch squad that competed within the European Championships in the summertime of 2021, he misplaced his place beneath the following coach, Louis van Gaal, who didn’t wish to choose “gamers concerned in such issues”.
Promes has since change into the highest-scoring foreigner in Russian soccer historical past, overtaking Brazilian Vagner Love and Iranian Sardar Azmoun.
But this achievement has not earned him a recall to the nationwide workforce beneath present coach Ronald Koeman, who this month secured qualification for subsequent summer time’s European Championship in Germany.
Quincy Promes celebrates profitable the Russian Cup last in 2022 (Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP by way of Getty Pictures)
That’s as a result of the following time Promes units foot within the Netherlands, he’s more likely to be arrested once more.
In his absence, all official communication has come by way of the participant’s lawyer, Robert Malewicz, who has denied his shopper’s involvement within the stabbing and drug trafficking and appealed for the fees for which he has already been convicted overturned.
When The Athletic approached Malewicz for direct remark from the footballer concerning the accusations he’s dealing with, he replied by stating that Promes is not going to discuss to the media, “at the very least, not till we go to court docket within the Netherlands”.
This would possibly recommend that he plans to attempt to clear his identify in individual. He rejected the prospect to supply steering and when he was requested particularly to make clear whether or not Promes would return to the nation the place he was born, Malewicz added: “I can not touch upon that.”
What is understood is that Promes remained in Russia throughout final summer time’s low season, visiting the Sochi area the place he employed a helicopter to fly above a waterfall. He additionally missed Spartak’s 2022 winter coaching camp within the United Arab Emirates, which had just lately signed a brand new extradition treaty with the Netherlands, partly to crack down on these accused of drug offences. On the time, Malewicz urged Promes was “simply not fairly match” and was as a substitute coaching alone again in Moscow.
Inside Russia, Promes has not tried to cover. His social media accounts stay open and he seems to be having fun with himself. Maybe it helps Promes that he’s naturally an expressive kind of individual, who on Instagram, at the very least, has at all times tried to indicate that he’s pleased.
Except for being a footballer, he has enterprise pursuits in a clothes model known as Masks QP, whereas he has additionally carried out as a rapper, releasing a music earlier this yr known as “Liars”, the place he appeared to confer with his innocence. “It began as a lie, folks wish to discuss however I nonetheless have my reminiscence,” he sings.
Promes, whose household’s roots are in Suriname, produces its nationwide flag in one in all his movies, in addition to the Russian one — however not that of the Netherlands, though he sings in Dutch and English.
Whereas some Russians have seen this as his means of exhibiting gratitude to the nation, others have, albeit quietly, requested whether or not he’s manipulating a grave political state of affairs of worldwide significance for his personal ends.
Undoubtedly, the battle in Ukraine, which has led to the ban of Russian groups from European competitors, has helped defend Promes as a result of his standing as a wished man has not been examined past Russia’s borders.
Promes had invested in a Moscow nightclub known as the Black Star Lounge earlier than it was bought. Even earlier than returning to Spartak for a second spell after being spirited out of Ajax, he had seemingly adjusted culturally to a rustic the place overseas gamers typically battle due to the language and the climate.
Being at Spartak, Promes performs for the preferred membership within the nation and this interprets into private recognition, boosted by his public statements that European media claims that racial prejudice is rife in Russia are “sensationalised”.
Regardless of the size of the fees in opposition to him, any focus within the case in opposition to Promes has probably not gathered tempo exterior the Netherlands. That, maybe, is partly as a result of he has performed 233 of his 434 membership profession video games in Russia, which even in a time of peace, is a rustic that lies on the hinterland of wider European soccer curiosity.
It might need been totally different had he left Twente in 2014 for an enormous membership in western Europe. At the moment, he felt pushed out due to the membership’s perilous monetary place. He didn’t wish to go to Moscow or play within the Russian league, however the deal supplied the very best answer for everybody.
Almost a decade later, and in the event you solely adopted Russian protection of the matter, you’d barely know that Promes is even dealing with prices. Since 2020, Spartak have launched only one assertion on the topic, with the membership’s web site suggesting earlier this yr — after he was discovered responsible of aggravated assault — that the court docket resolution was not last till the enchantment course of was completed.
A Russian journalist, who would like to stay nameless attributable to restrictions on press freedoms within the nation, suggests Promes has been allowed to stay as he pleases due to the battle with Ukraine, which has resulted in Russia changing into a pariah within the west.
He describes Promes as “somebody who’s extra linked to us than them”.
Throughout his first spell in Moscow, Promes lived alone on one of many highest flooring of a tower block within the centre of the capital however, this time, he’s supposedly along with his household, residing on the outskirts of town in a compound.
At weekends, when he isn’t scoring objectives for Spartak, he typically watches one in all his sons play for a junior workforce, and the one trouble he will get is the adulation of those that wish to congratulate him for his achievements on the nation’s most well-known membership.
If he’s involved about what he’s being accused of again house, he hides it properly.
(Prime picture: AFP by way of Getty Pictures; design: Eamonn Dalton)
